I gripped this week’s Scribe, my fingers trembling. Why was I so jumpy? I’d never let the guy get to me before.
Freddy, holding out his steel-gloved hand under the streetlight, flashed in my mind. I shivered. Jill was a prick, but he wasn’t Freddy.
I straightened, and opened the magazine to my article. People were laughing at this? But this was quality.
“Come on, Jill,” Jack said, shrugging my presence off like I didn’t matter, like there were better things to do with the day. “Maybe his next one will be better. Even I found switching to politics articles tough.”
“Yours was actually pretty good,” I said. Jack and Jill might get off on making me feel like a failure, but I considered myself above that. A true journalist would look at Jack’s article objectively. And objectively, it was good. I liked how his article explored the corruption of the prison system. “The details you gave about life in prison were horrifying and gripping.”
Jack grew quiet, and Jill glared at me.
“Gripping?” Jill said. “Insensitive prick. His brother is in there!”
I raised my hands. “I didn’t know. My comment was not meant to disregard—”
“Just shut it, and make the next party page better,” Jill said evenly, as if it cost him a lot to control himself. “Don’t want to have lost all my readers when I take the page back.” He stalked out of the room, with Jack following him.
I slumped against the table, pushing more old Scribe magazines to the floor.
Jack’s voice tunneled down the hall. “Scribe’s not the place to get aggressive, man.”
“Well . . . but . . . he shouldn’t have been so dismissive about—and anyway, the party page. It’s my thing. I worked my ass off for it. It’s hard for me to see anyone else with it. And it’s true. The guy doesn’t know what it means to cut loose . . .”
Turning to my column in this week’s Scribe, I re-read it. It was a good column. It offered insight. Had depth.
I shook my head. Jill was wrong.
Dropping the magazine onto the desk, I bent over to clear up the floor. Tonight I’d attend another party and write my next piece. Something that would inspire more than cheap laughs, but conversation and—
My hand stilled on a Scribe from two years back, which lay open to the middle. A picture of a hooded figure’s blurry silhouette stared back at me. I frowned, and my pulse pumped faster as I snatched the magazine closer.
“The Raven Saves Again,” I read.
I scanned the familiar article. I’ve read this before.
Last weekend after partying with friends at Rigg House’s Swalloween party, Nick O’Connor did what he did after every party, and walked back across campus to his dorm. Only the short walk didn’t turn out like it usually did. A few blocks from Rigg House, he was hit from behind. “I was caught off guard . . . didn’t see him coming. I lost my balance and fell.” As the attacker went to strike again, a hooded figure leaped out from the shadows and dragged the attacker off, allowing O’Connor to run back to his dorm. . . . “This guy just came out of nowhere. It was like he appeared from the sky, dark like a raven . . . [He was] wearing this navy hood, like a jacket or something. Couldn’t see his face.”
Same rescuer as mine. Large hood, vague outline, no face.
Police arrested the suspect and have charged him with assault.
I scanned further down.
This was not the first report of a hooded man coming to a student’s aid. There are rumors the man is a campus vigilante, and he has been the reason for two prior arrests of students . . . He is mentioned on Scribe’s opinions page on more than a handful of occasions.
I photocopied the article and searched through all the magazines of the past two years for more reports on The Raven. I found three more mentions of him, including one cartoon strip asking the same questions I was: Who was The Raven? And why did he care?
I skimmed over one of the letters from last year’s opinions page. One student wrote a short note to the vigilante, demanding that he “hang up his hood . . . [as] committing one crime to solve another, does not a hero make.”
Not everyone was a fan of The Raven.
I filed the photocopies—along with the meager bits of information I’d found Googling him—into the flap of my notebook, and put the stack of magazines the chief had given me—and the new stack I’d collected—into their proper place.
Click. Click. Click.
My finger worked the pen in my pocket.
Yes, that was an idea.
I could use my time at these parties not only to write my reports, but also to ask questions. Maybe others had stories about The Raven? Maybe I could discover his identity and get answers to my questions.