“No, you’re not!” Audrey says, seeming relieved that I have finally said something she can totally endorse. “You’re not, and I don’t know how to deal with you.”
I consider and dismiss many variations of the suggestion that we be friends. Finally I look at her.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“Lila’s not your cousin either, is she?” Audrey asks.
“No,” I say. “I told you that because—”
She holds up her hand, and I gratefully stop talking. “You didn’t tell me that. She did.”
At that I just stare. I honestly don’t remember who started that whole line of lies. We did it just to borrow her shower. Now it seems like the height of callousness.
“I’ve seen the way you look at her,” Audrey says. “I know you, Cassel. So that brings me to asking you again—what are you doing?”
“Screwing up,” I say.
“Good answer.” She smiles a little, almost despite herself, and leans in to pat me on the cheek. “Stop it.”
Then she walks off. I turn to go back to my dorm, but my gaze is caught by Lila, standing across the quad. She sees me and enters the Gilbert Hall dorms, leaving me to wonder how long she was standing there. Leaving me to wonder how in the world she talked her way out of all the trouble.
Sam is tapping away on his laptop when I come in. He looks up and goes back to what he’s doing, for which I’m thankful. I get through my Probability & Statistics homework (possibly my favorite class ever), and start a proposal paper for the semester-long project in physics. Then I settle on my bed to do some of my Madame Bovary reading.
I don’t get too far before Sam closes his computer. “Everything okay? Daneca said you got called to the office.”
“Family stuff,” I say. “My mom.”
He nods sagely. “Get anywhere with those files?”
I shake my head. “There goes my career in law enforcement, I guess.”
Sam snorts and starts hooking up his PlayStation to the tiny portable television he got for his birthday. “When you’re done with that, you want to shoot some bad guys?”
“Evildoers,” I say. “Yeah. Definitely.”
It should bother me to point my controller at the screen and watch pixelated guys fall over. It should remind me of Janssen or Philip and my hand should hesitate or something. I get the high score instead. After all, it’s just a game.
After dinner we have study hall in our rooms. This is the time of night when we’re supposed to do homework. If we actually finish it in the two hours allotted, then we can spend half an hour in the common room. But it also means that once we’re checked on by our hall master to make sure we’re studying, we have almost three hours before we’re likely to be checked on again.
“I think I am going to go out,” I say to Sam.
He frowns at me. “Where?”
“There’s someplace I’ve got to see.” I push open the window. “For the investigation.”
“Okay,” says Sam. “I’ll come too. Let’s go.”
“You know we’re sneaking out of here. We could get busted.” I hold up my hands. “It’s your senior year. You don’t have to do this.”
“Well, you’re our expert on getting away with things. It’s your job to make sure we don’t get caught, right?”
“No pressure. Thanks,” I say. I open iTunes on my laptop and set a file to play. Then I turn up the volume a couple of notches.
“What’s that?” he asks.
“I recorded this last year. Study hall. So things won’t be too quiet. It’s mostly just clicking on laptops and us joking around. I thought it might come in handy someday.”
“That’s creepy, dude,” he says.
I point to my head with both hands. “Expert, remember?”
Then we go out the window and close it behind us. I think of the night before and Lila, her back pressed against the lawn. The smell of crushed grass underfoot is as heady as any perfume.
“Walk casually,” I say.
We get into my car, which stalls twice before it starts, causing Sam to give me the wide-eyed expression of a man who’s looking down the barrel of explaining a suspension to his parents. A moment later, though, we’re pulling out of the lot with the headlights off. I click them on as we turn onto the highway.
Then I head toward the address in the file, the one where Janssen was last seen. Quarter of an hour later we’re parking near Cyprus View apartment complex. I get out.
It’s one of those modern places with a doorman in the lobby and probably a gym up near the penthouse. There are bright lamps burning on the manicured lawn, bushes cut into round balls near the stretch of concrete walkways, and a park across the street. A block over is a supermarket, and a block from that is a gas station, but when you look at it from the right angle, the place is nice. Expensive. Sprinkler system, but no cameras that I can see, and I walk twice around one of the lights to be sure.
“What are we looking at?” Sam asks, leaning against the side of the car. In his uniform jacket, with his tie loose, he could almost be a gangster. So long as you don’t notice the Wallingford logo over his breast pocket.
“Janssen’s mistress’s condo. I wanted to see if it felt—I don’t know—familiar.”
Sam frowns. “Why would it be familiar? You didn’t even know Janssen. Did you?”
I’m slipping up. I shake my head. “I don’t know. I just wanted to see it. Look for clues.”
“Okay,” Sam says skeptically, glancing down at his watch. “But if this is a stakeout, I vote for us getting snacks.”
“Yeah,” I reply, distracted. “Just give me a second.”
I walk across the grass and past the groomed bushes. I don’t remember any of this. I must have stood on this grass and waited for Janssen, but I don’t recall a single thing.
A woman in jogging clothes runs in the direction of the apartment building. She’s got two of those big black standard poodles on a leash. Staring at her, I get a flash of memory, but it feels so distant that I can barely catch it. She looks in my direction, then turns abruptly, jerking the leashes. I get a really good look at her face just before she takes off down the street.
She must be an actress, because the memory I have of her is a scene from a movie. I’m sure it was the jogger, but she was wearing a short black dress, with her hair up, and a necklace with a single sparkling amulet dangling in the valley between her breasts. She had a bruise on her face and she’d been crying. A faceless actor in my brother’s leather jacket took her by the shoulders. A man was lying on the grass, facedown.
I can’t remember anything else. No plot. Not even whether I saw the film in a theater or on television late one night. The memory makes no sense.
If she’s some actress, how come she started running when she saw me?
And how come one of the actors was wearing my brother’s leather jacket?
Only one way to find out. I chase after her, my Walling-ford dress shoes clacking like beetles on the pavement.
She veers off across the street, and I follow. A car’s high beams catch me, and the grill of a Toyota nearly slams into me. I hit my hand against his hood and keep going.
She’s almost made it to a small park. There are a couple of other people, walking under flickering streetlights, but she doesn’t call out to them and they don’t seem to want to involve themselves.
I pump my legs faster, pounding my feet against the dirt. I’m gaining on her now. One of the dogs barks as I reach out and catch the hood of the woman’s pink velour top.
She stumbles, and the dogs go crazy. I had no idea enormous poodles were so protective, but these things look like they want to rip my arms off.
“Wait,” I say. “Please. I’m not going to hurt you.”
She turns back toward me, the barking dogs between us. I hold up my hands in surrender. The park is quiet and dim, but if she starts running again, she could make it to the buildings beyond it, businesses that would probably not see my chasing her in a favorable light.
“What do you want?” she says, studying my face. “Our business is over. Done. I told Philip I didn’t want to see any of you.”
The creeping realization that there was no movie comes over me. Of course. Barron must have taken my memory and changed one small detail—the part where it happened in real life. That must have been easier for him than erasing the memory completely. And I’d forget it the same way I forget every other late-night cop show.
“I already paid you,” she’s saying, and I focus on memorizing her, shaking off all other thoughts. Her dark hair is pulled back into a ponytail, and her artificially plumped lips are painted a bubble-gum pink. Her eyes are tilted up at the corners, her eyebrows high enough to give her a perpetual expression of mild surprise. Between that and her wrinkled neck, I guess she’s had some work done. She’s beautiful and unreal; I can see why Barron changed her into a movie star in my head. “I’m not giving you anything else. You can’t blackmail me.”
I have no idea what she’s talking about.
“He strung me along, you know. Told me he was going to marry me. Then, bam, starts knocking me around when I find out he’s already married. But what do you care about that? Nothing. You probably have a girl back home that you treat no better. Get out of here, you piece of trash.”
When I look at her, I still see the woman I mistook her for. I wonder what she sees when she looks at me. A drip of sweat runs over the curve of her cheek. Her breathing is rapid and shallow. She’s scared.
An assassin, that’s what she sees.
“You’re the one who wanted the hit,” I say, untangling what she’s saying. “You paid Anton to take out Janssen.”
“What are you, wearing a wire?” she asks, raising her voice and talking into my chest. “I never killed nobody. I never had nobody killed.” She looks back toward her apartment building, like she’s thinking about bolting.
“Okay,” I say, holding up my hands again. “Okay. That was stupid.”
“Yeah,” she says. “Are we done?”
I nod my head, and then suddenly think of another question. “Where were you on Tuesday night?”
“Home with the dogs,” she says. “I had a headache. Why?”
“My brother got shot.”
She frowns. “Do I look like a killer?”
I don’t point out that she hired a team of hit men to kill her lover. My silence must make her feel like she scored a point, because with a final triumphant glare she takes off, dogs sprinting alongside her.
I walk back to my car, feeling each step. A blister has risen on my big toe. These shoes were never made for chase scenes.
The door of the Benz opens. “Cassel?” Sam calls from the driver’s side. “She tell you anything good?”
“Yeah,” I say. “That she was going to mace me.”
“I was ready to fire up the getaway car.” Sam grins. “Doesn’t she know that muggers don’t wear ties?”
I straighten my collar. “I’m a better class of criminal. A gentleman thief, if you will.”
I let Sam drive. We head back to Wallingford, stopping for drive-through coffee and fries along the way. When we hop back through the dorm window, the smell of take-out clings to our clothes so strongly that it takes half a bottle of air freshener to disguise it.
“Stop smoking in your room,” the hall master says at lights-out. “Don’t think I can’t tell what you’ve been doing in here.”
We laugh so hard that, for a moment, it seems like we’re never going to be able to stop.
The next morning I am walking to Developing World Ethics when Kevin Ford runs up to me. He stuffs an envelope into my hand.
“What are the odds that Greg Harmsford nailed Lila Zacharov?” he asks, breathless.
“What?” I say.
“Am I the first one to put down money? Dude!”
“Kevin, what are you talking about?” I resist grabbing his shoulders and shaking him, but I don’t think I manage to keep the edge out of my voice. “I can’t calculate odds on something when I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Last night I heard that they went into the sitting room and did it. Greg was bragging about it. His roommate, Kyle, had to totally distract their hall master.”
“Okay,” I say, nodding. My mouth feels dry. “I’ll keep the money, but if no one else bets or no one bets against, I’m going to have to give it back.” That’s my standard line for things like this and I say it automatically.
He nods and races off. I stagger into class.
Greg Harmsford is sitting in his usual desk by the windows. I take a seat on the other side, staring at the back of his head, flexing my gloved hands.
While Mr. Lewis rattles on and on about trade agreements, I think about what it would be like to shove a sharpened pencil into Greg’s ear. This is the kind of rumor that people start about new girls, I remind myself. They’re never based on anything but wishful thinking.
Once we’re dismissed, I head toward the door, passing Greg. He smirks, raising his eyebrows like he’s daring me to start something.
Okay, that’s weird.
“Hey, Cassel,” he says, his smile getting wider.
I bite the inside of my cheek and continue into the hallway. The copper taste of blood fills my mouth. I keep walking.
As I stalk toward Probability & Statistics, I see Daneca, her arms full of books.
