“Not this semester,” he says. “I kind of like the homeschooling.”
“I’m screwed. Didn’t finish last semester and missed half of this one.” Courtney shrugs, like it doesn’t bother her, but he knows it does. It would bother him.
“On the upside,” he says, watching her pick up a California roll and pop it into her mouth, “your college admissions essay is going to kick ass.”
“I guess there’s that,” she mumbles.
The TV is on. Whatever was on ends, and it’s followed by the news. It starts with Courtney’s release, and then suddenly Crutcher appears.
“Now here’s more of our exclusive interview with one of Monday’s victims at Belmont Academy.”
Courtney sighs. “I’m so sick of myself.”
“I’m sick of Crutcher,” Zach says.
“At least he’s not your teacher anymore.”
He reaches over and grabs a Twizzler. “You know, the teacher who replaced Mrs. B used to go to Belmont.”
“Yeah?”
“My tutor knows her. Says she hates Crutcher.”
“Why?”
“She was on his shit list,” he says. “It’s weird she was poisoned, too. Both her and Crutcher.”
“That is weird,” she says, finishing off the last of the sushi rolls and washing it down with Coke. “Hey, do you think that since they let me go, they have another suspect already?”
“Maybe. Or maybe the FBI just realized the police here are stupid.”
“I hope they know who did it,” she says, staring off toward the TV. “I hope there’s an arrest soon.”
“As long as it’s not you or me, I hope you’re right,” he says.
“Who do you think did it? I mean, if you had to guess?”
Zach has thought about this a lot. Too much, probably. When he thinks about the people who died—an overbearing mother, a beloved teacher, the headmaster—it doesn’t make any sense. No one person benefits from those three deaths. Not that he can see.
So it must be random. It’s someone who just wants to kill people, regardless of who. And that’s the scariest part.
“I have no idea,” he says. “But I know what they used.”
“No way. They never released it.”
He smiles. “I figured it out.”
“Okay, Encyclopedia Brown,” she says. “What is it?”
“A plant. Well, really it’s a berry.”
She nods. She already knows from her lawyer.
But he doesn’t stop there. He explains about doll’s-eyes: what it is and what it does to the body. The longer he talks, the more upset Courtney becomes. He stops, realizing he’s describing how her mom died. It feels like it happened so long ago that he almost forgot.
Just like he almost forgot about searching through Crutcher’s desk and finding that book about plants.
67
IT’S AFTER EIGHT o’clock at night when Teddy walks into the Fairlane Hotel downtown. A swanky place, the kind his students and their parents would stay in. Or own.
The Fairlane is where Belmont holds a lot of its fundraisers, along with the faculty holiday party, the headmaster’s inauguration, and prom night. Now that Belmont is closed, the hotel is where the board of directors holds its meetings.
Teddy finds the board on the mezzanine, in a room with ugly carpet and ridiculous curtains, but otherwise it’s fine. The chairman sits at the head of the table. He is short, round, and unattractive. But very, very wealthy.
“Thank you for meeting with us,” he says.
Teddy takes the only empty seat. “Of course. Anything I can do.”
“We appreciate that.” The chairman introduces a new face at the table, Grady Lewis. He’s young, with slick hair and a polka-dotted handkerchief in his breast pocket. “Grady is from a PR management firm in New York. Our lawyers suggested we hire them to help with this . . . situation.”
Grady stands up and walks to the front of the room, where a PowerPoint is waiting. Everything about him screams douchebag.
Teddy is okay with that. For now.
“The tragedy of this situation cannot be swept away or ignored,” Grady says. “Everyone is scared, from the faculty to the parents, and now you have students who have been, presumably, poisoned. Your enrollment will drop. That’s a fact.” He pauses, looking around the room. “We estimate that by the time the school reopens, you’ll have lost at least fifty percent of your students.”
No one says a word, but they look very unhappy.
“At this point, you don’t have a lot of options. The investigation is out of your hands—actually, the entire school is out of your hands. But what you can do is keep people informed about what you’re doing to rectify the situation. Your new security system, for example. And a new system for food controls. All these things need to be communicated to the parents. Because, as you know,” Grady says, almost smiling, “they’re the ones who decide everything.”
A clever way of saying they’re the ones who pay the bills.
“Because you have lost your headmaster—a most unfortunate event, in so many ways—our first recommendation is that you designate someone to speak for the school. Give it a face, not just a written statement delivered to the media. You may even want to designate an interim headmaster.”
Grady turns to Teddy, along with everyone else.
If he were an author, he couldn’t have written this story any better.
* * *
MAD SCIENTIST
Zach stares at the text from Lucas, having no idea what he’s referring to. A movie, a cartoon, a video game? A superhero, maybe, or a villain. At this time of night, Lucas could be referring to anything.
It’s almost midnight, and Zach is in his room, working on another assignment from Titus.
Zach replies: Is that your new life goal?
Dude. No. Get online. That’s what they’re calling him. MAD SCIENTIST.
Zach doesn’t have to get online to know that him refers to whoever is poisoning people at Belmont.
The first person he thinks of is Courtney. She’s going to get online and see that’s what everyone is calling the person who killed her mother. When she was in jail, she didn’t see all the social media. She didn’t know anything about #HomicideHigh or read what everyone was saying. Maybe it was better that way.
That’s messed up, he says to Lucas.
So is poisoning people.
Can’t argue with that.
Again, he thinks of Crutcher. Of that book in his desk, of his interview on TV. It reminds him of those true crime shows and podcasts. Sometimes, killers can’t help but put themselves in the spotlight. It makes them relive the crime over and over again.
But Crutcher?
All of this floats around in Zach’s mind as he tries to come up with an answer that never comes. The only thing it does is distract him, and now he can’t think about his assignment at all.
Sneaking out has never been a problem—he’s been doing it since he was fourteen. The house is more than big enough that it’s easy not to wake anyone up.
At first, when he gets in his car, he doesn’t know where he’s going. No plan, no destination. At least that’s what he tells himself. When he ends up on the other side of town, near the Grove, he knows he’s been headed here the whole time.
Crutcher’s house is set back from the street like all the old houses in this area. Most have been redone, but his is a wreck. Not in that cool old haunted-house kind of way, either. From the outside, his house looks like a teardown.
Except the yard. There isn’t one.
Even in winter, the houses around here have gardens and plants. No flowers or fruit, but the plants are there, dormant until spring.
Crutcher doesn’t have anything. It looks like the front yard has been bulldozed.
Zach pulls ov
er and turns off his car. The street is quiet, and all the lights at Crutcher’s house are off. Not surprising. He seems like an early-to-bed-and-early-to-rise kind of guy.
Out of the corner of his eye, a movement makes Zach turn. Across the street, a car is parked parallel to his. It’s old and a bit run-down, and it’s not empty. The woman in the driver’s seat looks as surprised to see him as he is to see her.
He waves, like it isn’t weird at all to see Mrs. B’s replacement sitting outside Crutcher’s house.
68
FALLON WATCHES ZACH Ward drive away, her attention now on the taillights of his car instead of on downloading video from the mailbox camera.
Her first thought is that she’s been caught. Up until this minute, she’s never seen anyone she knows at Teddy’s house, but now she’s been recognized. In the middle of the night, no less. It makes her wonder if Zach has seen her out here before. Maybe he even knows her car.
She looks him up online, searching for his address.
He doesn’t live near Teddy. Not even close.
So maybe he has friends or a girlfriend around here. Impossible to tell, especially since she barely knows him in the first place. Never even spoken to him.
She finishes downloading the video, resets the camera, and drives back to her place. At this point, she’s not even sure how useful the mailbox footage is. All it shows is Teddy coming and going. No one visits. No one approaches his door except delivery drivers.
Ruining his life would be a lot easier if he had a constant stream of sex workers and drugs dealers stopping by.
Of course, he’d probably make them use the back door.
The guys at Belmont used to describe girls like that. You were either a house cat or an alley cat. Some girls would be introduced to parents; others wouldn’t be.
Fallon was always a house cat.
Her first boyfriend was Jeremy Locke, a rich kid with a background similar to hers. Same pushy parents, too. They talked about that a lot, talked about the pressure to get into a good school. The pressure to succeed. At Belmont, it was a way of life.
She loved Jeremy, as much as any high school girl could love a boy, and everything was perfect until her parents found out.
“He’s a distraction,” her father had said.
“He’s not,” she’d argued. “I swear he’s not.”
They didn’t believe her, didn’t care. One phone call from her mother to Jeremy’s ended everything.
“Plenty of time for boyfriends later,” her mom said.
Wrong. Her mother was so wrong about that. Nobody wanted a loser like her now.
Fallon arrives at her apartment building, her mind shifting from Jeremy back to Teddy. Three people are dead, Belmont is still shut down, and yet it feels like she is no closer to getting him fired. Far from it, in fact. He’s practically a media darling now.
With a sigh, she pulls into the parking lot of her building. A car passes by behind her.
The taillights look just like Zach’s.
* * *
THE NEXT MORNING, Titus shows up at 9 a.m. sharp. He’s so punctual that Zach is convinced he watches the seconds count down on his phone so that he can knock at exactly nine o’clock.
“You know I cut you some slack last week,” Titus says, walking past Zach and into the kitchen. “But only because of that thing at Belmont. I’m not going to do it again.”
Zach smiles, his face turned so Titus doesn’t see it. Sure he won’t do it again. Not the first time he’s heard that.
“Thanks,” Zach says. “I really appreciate you taking it easy on me.” No sarcasm. He prefers to stay on Titus’s good side.
“Cool. Now let’s talk about the Peloponnesian War.”
Zach has already finished his assignments. He can talk about the war all day if he has to.
Ninety minutes later, they take a break. Zach uses the opportunity to talk about the recent Belmont events, eventually getting to what he really wants to talk about.
Fallon Knight.
He knows a lot more about her now, starting with that run-down apartment building she lives in. And where her parents live. Everybody knows the big house at the end of Canary Lane.
So what went wrong there?
And why did a rich Belmont girl go to State?
It wasn’t hard to find the basics on the internet, but what he couldn’t find is what happened next. She moved away, went to college, and dropped off the radar until she showed up here, as Mrs. B’s replacement.
Something wasn’t right.
Does he have too much time on his hands? Yes. Zach knows he does. Ever since he switched to homeschooling, he’s had a lot more time. And, yes, he did feel a little bit stalkery when he followed Fallon home last night. But it was just so weird seeing her sitting outside Crutcher’s house. Like she was stalking him.
“Did you hear Fallon Knight was one of the victims at Belmont?” Zach says to Titus.
“Seriously? I had no idea.”
“Oh, I thought you kept in touch with her or something.”
“Nah. For a while, our class had an online group, but eventually people dropped off,” Titus says. “I haven’t really talked to her in a couple of years. She went off to State.”
“State? I didn’t know anyone from Belmont went to a state school.”
“Yeah, that was weird. She didn’t get in anywhere she applied. That happened when we were still at Belmont. Later on, she blamed Crutcher for it.”
Zach nods and keeps his mouth shut, hoping Titus will keep talking. Sometimes shutting up is all it takes. He learned that from his mom, not his dad. It was a tactic she used with witnesses.
“I never really understood it,” Titus says, picking up another veggie chip. “Something to do with getting into college, but I didn’t get the whole story.”
Again, Zach waits. But Titus digs into the veggie chips and shrugs, saying nothing further.
“Weird. Don’t colleges need three reference letters?” Zach says.
“Yep.”
“Must be more to it.” Zach grabs a veggie chip, trying to act casual. “What was she like? In school, I mean?”
“High-strung. Ambitious.”
“So, normal?” Zach says.
“Basically.” Titus starts to pick up another chip but stops. “I remember some saying she Roarked, but I don’t know.”
Roarked is prep-school slang for “cracked under pressure.” Zach knows the term. Everyone at Belmont does.
So maybe that was it. She cracked, and now it’s led to her sitting outside Crutcher’s house in the middle of the night.
69
AT TIMES, TEDDY wonders why he even bothers. His entire life is built around his students—whom he would, and has, killed for—yet they still find ways to upset him. It’s like they go out of their way to do it.
The evening news is on. All day, he expected the headmaster announcement to dominate the local coverage. It should have, given that his predecessor had died in the most recent poisoning at Belmont.
Was it so wrong to do what Teddy did? Wrong to kill someone, sure. In general. But when it was for the greater good—like saving his students, Courtney and Zach, from a life of hard times—then maybe it wasn’t “wrong” in the bigger sense of the word.
And was it so wrong to want something for himself? It’s not like he could tell anyone what he was doing; he couldn’t claim credit. Teddy had never had any ambition about becoming the headmaster. Headmasters were always former Belmont students. He’d never thought it was possible until suddenly it was.
They should talk about that on the news. The new headmaster at Belmont is the first one who isn’t one of the alumni. Because he’s that good.
Instead, he’s staring at Veronica.
She’s a nice girl. Veronica was in his class when she was a sophomore. A good st
udent—not a great one, but good enough. She’s a senior and one of the most popular students at Belmont. The prettiest, too, some would say. Teddy wouldn’t.
Veronica was also one of the students poisoned last Monday. Now she’s on TV, telling her story.
“It was about an hour after lunch, and I started feeling sort of light-headed, like I hadn’t eaten in a while. But my stomach was still full from lunch.”
“What did you eat for lunch?”
“A soft-wrap taco and a small carton of milk. Two percent milk. I got both of them in the dining hall. When I got up to leave after fifth period, I felt dizzy. It was like . . . It was like looking through a tunnel, where everything just gets smaller and smaller. That’s the last thing I remember.”
Teddy rolls his eyes. Looking through a tunnel. She should have paid more attention in class. If she had, she would’ve used a better metaphor.
The interview goes on forever, like they have nothing else to talk about on the news. Not the statement from the board of directors about the new headmaster, not his press conference, not his announcement about the memorial.
The idea for it had come to him all at once, like a siren going off in his head. Due to the death of Ingrid Ross and Courtney’s arrest, the school had never held its annual memorial for the first headmaster who died. The statue was never dedicated, and Teddy never got a chance to give his speech.
Now, a memorial is the perfect way to honor all of the Belmont victims, and to move on with a new headmaster.
It will be held just outside the school—they still can’t go inside, but the front steps and the parking lot have been approved. Teddy already has it all planned out. The top of the stairs will serve as the stage, with the school itself as the backdrop.
Perfect.
Except no one is talking about it. Everybody is listening to Veronica.
He turns off the TV and goes into his office. It’s been a few days since he checked social media to see what the students are saying. While he hopes they’re talking about the new headmaster—good or bad, as long as they’re talking about him—he bets they’re talking about Veronica.
For Your Own Good Page 23