Home » Archives » February 2004 » David Parker's Journal: 12

02/27/2004: "David Parker's Journal: 12"

The mansion was built in the early 1920s on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi. The design was a combination of architectural influences best described as Pre-1929 Stock Market Crash Millionaire. The long, rambling, three-story brick building was far too large for one family, even one employing a corps of servants. The house was, however, perfectly suited for its present purpose: a private school that primarily served the sons and daughters of local doctors and executives.

I parked between a blue minivan and a red Mercedes roadster in the lot off the circular drive and headed for the back door. The formal entry was on the opposite of the building, seldom used but visible to the commoners driving by below the overlook. The back door was only slightly less imposing.

Hillcrest Collegiate had formerly been an Episcopal boarding school for girls. The school went coed in the 1970s, shortly before it ditched its digs in a part of town that became unfashionable once the mansions built in the 1880s by wealthy German-immigrant merchants were divided up into apartments. The school severed an inconvenient relationship with the Episcopal Church in the 1990s, not long after moving to its present locale in the house William Benton built.

(History is one of my interests, and I knew all this from reading locally published accounts of the area’s past.)

In 2002, the school changed its name from St. Anne’s to Hillcrest. It abandoned the school motto, “By Pureness, By Knowledge,” which if I remember correctly was drawn from the letters of the Apostle Paul. In its place, a suitably up-to-date and spiritually vacuous slogan was adopted: “Students Striving for Excellence.”

The foyer was immense. I stood there a moment, listening to the murmur from a lit class being held in the parlor, marveling at the luxury of an earlier age. The floor was covered in a faux-Roman mosaic leading up to marble borders. The walls were richly paneled in dark walnut, and the ceiling plasterwork was ornate as a Baroque palace in Vienna.

The school secretary appeared quickly, cued by the security camera trained on the door. Nobody can be too careful these days, especially when children are involved.

I told the woman my wife and I were moving to town and looking for a suitable private school in which to enroll our daughter, Lizabeth. I lied easily and convincingly. Though begetting and bearing children are among the few things vampires cannot do, there was no way for the secretary to know the truth about me, that I look like a man but am a different creature entirely.

The headmaster, a fawning transplant with a Bostonian accent he was careful to maintain to cow the insecure Midwesterners, gave me the cook’s tour, from the ballroom on the third floor – now the school library – to the new, freestanding gymnasium and theater built a two years earlier after a fundraiser Hillcrest Collegiate was fortunate to conclude just before the stock market bubble burst after 9/11.

Signs of William Benton’s involvement in Freemasonry were abundantly evident throughout the old part of the mansion. Pyramids, compasses and other symbology were crafted into the fireplaces, moldings and carvings in the richly appointed house. Still, I was disappointed in my hope to find anything beyond that which existed on the mundane physical plane. There was no sign of anything like the Masonic symbols weirdly glowing beneath generations of paint in the old Irish social hall downtown.

The headmaster chatted idly about the man who built the mansion as he showed me around, also managing to work in a series of clever questions intended to gage my financial and social status, as well as my family and my fictional wife’s family backgrounds. He was especially impressed by the fact that I met my wife when we were both undergraduates at Yale.

I caught myself frowning as I drove away from Hillcrest Collegiate. The book I had taken from the antique store, the one containing Benton’s bookplate, was beside me in one the passenger seat. Maybe Benton was a red herring, and the secret message Tatiana had sent me to discover instead had something to do with “Pilgrim’s Progress,” not the man who once owned the old leather-bound book.

At a stoplight I flipped open the cover, looking again the familiar Masonic images that had been significant enough to Benton that he had them worked into the architecture of the mansion he built on the bluff as well as the plates he pasted into the books in his library.

Benton had to be the key, but if he was, the lock the Illuminati were trying to get me to open was not to be found back in his house.

Bereft of ideas, I turned toward the cemetery where the headmaster had said I would find the mausoleum where Benton’s body was laid to rest. It was a long shot, but maybe the thing I was supposed to find awaited me in his crypt.

* * *