“Probably,” I say, and he laughs.
Waiting is hard. It’s boring, and the more bored you get, the more you want to close your eyes and take a catnap. Or pull out your phone and play a game on it. Or talk. Your muscles get stiff. Your skin gets that pins-and-needles warning that your foot is falling asleep. Maybe no one’s coming. Maybe you were spotted. Maybe you made one of a million other miscalculations. All you want is an excuse to leave your post and get a cup of coffee or take a nap in your own bed. Time slows to a jagged crawl, like the passage of an ant along your spine.
Getting through it once makes it easier to believe that it can be gotten through again. Sam shifts uncomfortably. Mina looks pale and anguished, pacing back and forth. I alternate between watching her face for some sign that the blackmailer has arrived, and planning what I will say to Lila.
Daneca won’t believe me. Please just tell her what Barron did.
I get as far as that, and my mind stalls. I can’t picture what she says back. I can’t imagine the expression on her face. I keep thinking of how she wouldn’t look at me after I told her that I loved her. The way she wouldn’t believe me. And then I remember her mouth on mine and the way she looked up at me when we were lying on the same grass I am looking at now, except the grass was warm and she was warm and she said my name like nothing else in the world mattered.
I press the tips of my gloved fingers against my eyes, to force away the images.
Sam jerks next to me, and I take away my hands slowly. Mina’s posture has stiffened, and she’s looking across the grass at someone we can’t quite see. Adrenaline floods my veins, making my heart pound. The risk at this point is that we’ll be too eager. We need to wait until the blackmailer has his back to us, and then we need to move as quietly as we can.
Mina turns slightly as the figure approaches her. She does exactly what I told her, except for a glance in our direction. Our gazes lock, and I try to silently communicate that she needs to never look over here again.
Then the figure comes into view.
I don’t know exactly what I was picturing, but it wasn’t a freshman, tall and gangly and so twitchy that I relax at the sight of him. Maybe he found the camera and decided he’d make some fast cash. Maybe he thinks blackmail is the high school equivalent of shoving a girl you like into a mud puddle. I don’t know. All I do know is that he is playing way out of his league.
It seems cruel to jump him, so instead I pull the lamest trick ever. Making sure his back is to me, I stuff my hand into the pocket of my jacket, point my first and middle fingers so that I’m making the little-kid gun shape.
I cross the lawn quickly, fast enough that by the time he hears me coming, I am pretty close.
“Freeze,” I tell him.
It’s comical, the sound that the kid makes when he sees me. A scream so high pitched, I can’t hear half of it. Even Mina looks rattled.
Sam walks up until he’s looming over the freshman. “That’s Alex DeCarlo,” he says, looking down. “We’re in chess club together. What’s he doing here?”
I raise my fake pocket gun. “Yeah. What exactly did you want with five grand?”
“No,” Alex says, his face gone bright red with misery. “I didn’t want to—” He looks over at Mina and takes a nervous breath. “I don’t know about the five thousand dollars. I was just supposed to bring the envelope that, uh, he gave me. Mina’s my friend, and I would never—”
Lying, lying. Everyone is lying. I can hear it in their voices. I can tell in the way their expressions don’t quite match the words, in a dozen small tells.
Well, I can lie too. “If you don’t tell me the truth, I am going to blow your brains out.”
“I’m sorry,” he squeaks. “I’m sorry. Mina, you didn’t say that he would have a gun.” The kid looks like he’s about to puke on his own shoes.
“Alex,” she says sharply, like a warning.
Sam takes a step closer to her. “Hey, it’s going to be—”
Alex takes a trembling breath. “She said that all I had to do was come here and tell you this story, but I don’t want to die. Please don’t shoot. I won’t tell anyone—”
“Mina?” I say incredulously. Dropping the pretense of the gun, I take my hand out of my pocket and snatch the envelope out of Alex’s hand. “Let me see that.”
“Hey!” says Alex. And then, as I start ripping open the package, he says, “Wait. That wasn’t real? You don’t have a gun?”
“Oh, he has a gun all right,” Sam says.
“Don’t!” Mina says. She reaches out to snatch the package from me. “Please.”
I give her a dark look. There are printed-out pictures inside the envelope, not negatives or a SIM card or a missing camera.
But it’s too late. I’m already looking.
There are three pictures, Mina standing in profile in all of the shots, her long black wig spilling over her shoulders. She’s not naked. In fact, she’s wearing her Wallingford uniform. The only thing naked about her is her right hand.
Her bare fingers touch the collarbone of the man beside her, Dean Wharton. His white dress shirt is open at the neck. His eyes are closed, perhaps with dread or with pleasure.
I let the photos fall. They scatter on the ground like dead leaves.
“You’re ruining everything,” Mina says, her voice almost feral. “I did this to make you believe me. I had to convince you.”
Sam reaches down and picks up one of the photos. He stares at it, probably, like me, puzzling through what it could mean.
I roll my eyes. “Let me get this straight. You lied to us so that we’d believe you?”
“If you knew what was happening from the start, if you knew a dean was involved, you wouldn’t have agreed to help me.” Mina looks from me to Sam to Alex, like she’s trying to figure out which one of us might still be vulnerable to her pleading. Her eyes are welling with tears.
“I guess we’ll never know,” I tell her.
“Please,” she says. “You can see why I didn’t want to—you can see why I was afraid.”
“I have no idea,” I say. “You’ve lied so much that I have no goddamn idea why you would be afraid.”
“Please,” she says tragically. Despite myself there is a part of me that really feels bad for her. I’ve been where she is, trying to manipulate people because I was too afraid to do anything else. Too convinced that they would never help me if I didn’t con that help out of them.
“Liars don’t get the benefit of being trusted twice,” I tell her, trying to keep my voice firm.
She covers her face with one slender gloved hand. “You hate me now, I bet. You hate me.”
“No,” I say, relenting with a sigh. “Of course not. Just, this time, let’s have the whole story okay?”
She nods quickly, wiping her eyes. “I promise. I’ll tell you everything.”
“You can start with your hair,” I say.
She touches it self-consciously, gloved fingers threading through the black mass. “What?”
I lean forward and give a lock of it a hard tug. Her whole hairline slips to one side, and she gasps, her hands flying to try to correct it.
Alex gasps too.
“That’s a wig?” Sam says, not really asking, but in that way when you haven’t gotten your head around something yet.
She stumbles away from me, her face red. “I asked you to help me. All I wanted was your help!” Her voice is ragged and guttural. She sobs suddenly, and this time I am sure her reaction is entirely real. Her nose starts to run. “I just wanted—”
She turns and legs it back toward the dorms.
“Mina!” I call after her, but she doesn’t turn.
Sam suggests that we should go off campus for breakfast, rather than standing in the middle of the baseball diamond, freezing our asses off discussing what information we got out of Alex after Mina ran. It’s only a little after six in the morning, and we have until eight before classes start. I could do with pancakes.
I get into the passenger side of Sam’s hearse. I lean back against the headrest and close my eyes. It’s just for a moment, but the next thing I know Sam is shaking me awake. We’re parked in back of the Bluebird Diner.
“Get up,” Sam says. “No one gets to sleep in my car unless they’re already dead.”
I yawn and scramble out. “Sorry.”
I wonder if this morning was any kind of useful training for being a federal agent. After I graduate from Wallingford in the spring and enroll in the official training program with Yulikova, I’ll learn how to catch real blackmailers. Blackmailers who aren’t like Alex DeCarlo and don’t believe I’m holding a real gun when I push two fingers against my jacket pocket.
Blackmailers who are actually blackmailing someone.
We go inside. A waitress who has got to be at least seventy, her cheeks rouged like a doll’s, seats us and passes out menus. Sam orders us a round of coffee.
“Refills are free,” the waitress tells us with a frown, like she’s hoping we’re not the kind of people who ask for endless refills. I am already pretty sure we are exactly those people.
With a sigh Sam opens his menu and starts ordering food.
A few minutes later I am drinking my third cup of coffee and poking at a stack of silver dollar pancakes. Sam spreads cream cheese on half a bagel and tops it with salmon and capers.
“I should have spotted that wig,” he says, pointing the dull knife toward his chest. “I’m the special effects guy. I should have noticed.”
I shake my head. “Nah. I don’t even know how I noticed. And besides, I have no idea what it means. Why do girls wear wigs, Sam?”
He shrugs and finishes off another cup of coffee. “My gran wears them to keep her head warm. Think it’s that?”
I grin. “Maybe. Who knows, right? I mean, you’d think we could find out if she was being treated for a serious illness. She’d miss class.”
“Doesn’t hair fall out from stress? Maybe all this lying has really gotten to Mina. She’s not the pro that you are.”
I smirk. “Or sometimes people have a condition where they pull out all their hair. I saw it on some late-night reality TV show. They eat their follicles too. And they can get this giant deadly hair ball called a bezoar.”
“Trichotillomania,” he says, clearly smugly proud of himself for summoning that word from somewhere. Then he pauses. “Or it could be blowback.”
I nod, conceding the point. I guess we were both thinking it. “You mean you think those are photos of Mina working Dean Wharton? I think so too. The first question is, who took them? And then the other question is, why give them to us? And the third question is, if she’s working him, what’s she doing to him?”
“‘Why give them to us?’ But she didn’t. You grabbed them out of Alex’s hands,” Sam says, raising his cup, signaling to the waitress that we need another round of free refills. “There’s no way she wanted us to see the photos.”
“Nah. She must have,” I say. “Or why even send Alex with them? And why take them in the first place? I think she got upset because we saw the pictures without hearing what she wanted us to hear.”
“Wait. You think she took the pictures of herself? So there’s no blackmailer?” Sam is staring at me like he’s waiting for me to tell him that Mina is a robot from the future come to doom our world.
“I think she’s the blackmailer,” I say.
After Mina left, we got Alex to explain the story he was supposed to give. Mina told him to say that the blackmailer was Dr. Stewart and that Stewart wanted five grand or he was going to ruin Wharton’s career and Mina’s reputation. Dr. Stewart was sending word through Alex for Mina to get the money and bring it to him. Or else.
I had Stewart last year. He’s a hard-ass. The kind of teacher who seems delighted when you fail a quiz. I always figured him as a guy who loved rules—and who thought that if you didn’t stick to the rules, then you deserved what you got.
Not exactly the criminal type.
There are several other problems with the story, besides the unlikely villain. One, involving Alex is just stupid. If Stewart was actually trying to cover his tracks by using Mina as a buffer between his identity and Wharton, then there’s no way that he would be stupid enough to enlist a student with nothing to lose by telling everyone.
“I don’t get it,” Sam says.
“Neither do I,” I say. “Not really. Is she a scholarship student?”
He shrugs. “Could be.”
“We need to know if she’s doing something to Wharton or for Wharton. Is he paying her, or is she making him—I don’t know—do something that benefits her?”
“He’s paying her,” Sam says. “Because if he wasn’t the one who was paying, then she wouldn’t want there to be any documentation of what’s going on, right? She wouldn’t let us see the photos. Wouldn’t have given them to Alex. Wouldn’t rock the boat. If you’re right about that part, then Wharton’s hiring Mina.”
I take out one of the photos and set it down in the center of the table. Sam moves mugs and plates so there’s room.
We stare at Mina’s bare fingers and the way that Wharton’s head is turned away, like he’s ashamed of what he’s doing. We stare at the composition—the figures not centered, like maybe the photos were taken without anyone to aim. There’s ways to do that, even with a cell phone. It can be programmed to take pictures every couple of minutes. The only hard part for Mina would be making sure that Wharton was standing in the right spot.
