Shadow Hills

by Anastasia Hopcus

  Apparently, even Corinne couldn’t be detached and indifferent all the time. My anger drained away. Slowly, I backed out of the bathroom and made my way back to the ICU.

  “I’m here to see Zach Redford,” I told the nurse behind the front desk.

  “Good timing.” She stood up. “You caught him right before his next dose of meds. He’s still awake.” She smiled and led me over to the same room I’d been in last night.

  He’s awake. My lungs and heart and everything else in my chest loosened. Zach was awake. Corinne hadn’t been crying because she’d been given horrible news. She was just stretched to the breaking point. Which I certainly understood.

  “Phe.” Zach smiled foggily at me as the nurse left.

  “Hey, you.” I bent down to kiss his forehead. “I was so worried. What happened?”

  “I don’t know.” Zach’s thinking frown was adorable. I scooted a chair closer to the bed so I could sit down. “I couldn’t find anything in my mother’s office at home. Then Corinne said she had to come to school for … something.” Zach seemed confused. “I caught a ride with her. I figured I might find a file here.”

  “Didn’t Corinne wonder why you wanted to come to the hospital?”

  “I told her …” He frowned. “I’m not sure … My brain’s not working very well. Oh, yeah. I told her I couldn’t find my advanced calculus homework, and I thought I must have left it in Mom’s office when I was with her this afternoon—I mean, yesterday afternoon. And then …” Zach was obviously having trouble remembering things. “Corinne let me off in front of the hospital and … it all sort of goes black.” His frown deepened. “I can’t remember what happened after that.”

  “You called me and said you’d found something,” I prompted. “You were going to come over to tell me what. I was so worried when you didn’t show up.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  I squeezed his hand. “Being hit on the head is an adequate excuse, I think.”

  “I wasn’t hit on the head,” he said. “The doctors say there’s no sign of trauma, no lump or bruise.”

  Icy prickles of dread crept into my chest even though I had already half expected this to be the case. “So you were knocked out with what? Some kind of Vulcan mind meld?”

  “I don’t know. Corinne said she came down to the office when she got through and found me lying on the floor on top of a folder.”

  I couldn’t suppress an even stronger shudder of fear. Had Zach’s assailant knocked him out? Had he intended to do worse but been frightened off by the sound of Corinne’s arrival? If Corinne had been later in coming to check on Zach … The images flashing through my mind made my breath feel like a knife in my lungs.

  But Zach was going on, “Do you know about the folder?”

  “Yeah, Corinne showed it to me,” I fibbed. I wasn’t about to embroil him in the ongoing emotional battle between his sister and me. He was obviously too tired to be discussing anything, much less such upsetting topics. “Let’s talk about it later, okay?”

  But Zach was not so easily diverted. “I’m really weirded out by all this. I think you should lie low for a while.” He looked up into my eyes. “I don’t want anything to happen to you.”

  “Same here.” I pushed a stray lock of hair back from his forehead. “You just need to concentrate on getting better, okay?”

  “Only if you promise to wait this out. Not to go off and do something rash.”

  I figured middle-of-the-night graveyard rituals might be misconstrued as rash, so I decided to keep last night’s excursion to myself for the time being.

  “I’ll be careful if you are.” I can be careful while figuring out what’s going on.

  “Deal.” Zach stuck out his hand, and I shook it, feeling only a little guilty.

  I had to figure this out—for Zach, for Brody, for Mr. Carr. I couldn’t stand by and let someone else get hurt.

  “Sorry, sweetie, but I’m going to have to kick you out now.” The nurse was back, holding a small clear cup with several pills in it.

  “I’ll come by after school today.” I bent down to kiss Zach on the forehead again, but he pulled me toward him, to meet his lips. I sank into his soft kiss until the throat clearing of the nurse behind me broke through my Zach-induced haze.

  “Sorry.” I couldn’t keep from smiling as the nurse slid the door closed behind me. Zach was going to be fine. I would make sure of it.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Breakfast was less quiet than it had been the last few days, but Brody still didn’t say much. And I couldn’t think about anything but Zach being in the hospital. I wondered if Brody had heard about Zach already, if that was part of the reason he looked so tired and drawn.

  Before the first bell, a woman’s voice came over the cafeteria’s loudspeaker to announce that there would be an assembly in the chapel when the day students arrived. Several people cheered when she added that our first-period classes would be canceled again today. Brody and I were the only ones who seemed unexcited by the news.

  “I wanted to talk to you, if that’s cool,” Brody told me as everyone dispersed.

  “Sure.” This came as a surprise, being that he was especially reticent today.

  “Mr. Redford called me super early this morning to tell me about Zach. And when I went to visit, Zach said that you didn’t believe Mr. Carr had an aneurysm either.”

  “Did he tell you about the handprints?” I had a million questions, but first I needed to find out what all Brody knew.

  “Zach told me about that the day we went skating.” Brody scraped his fork along his plate like a rake, eliciting a low metallic screech. “He also gave me his song and dance about it being self-inflicted.” Brody dropped the fork, and it clattered loudly against the ceramic dish. “Mr. Carr had been acting strange ever since this school year started.”

  “What was he doing?” I leaned in closer.

  “He was acting paranoid and suspicious all the time.” Brody lowered his voice. “He even claimed that someone broke into the house.”

  “What did they steal?” I thought about the file back in my room. Maybe I wasn’t the only person who wanted it.

  “That was what was so weird: he said they’d left something in the house. Nothing was missing at all. No locks or windows were broken.”

  “So what did they leave?” I was pretty sure Mrs. Carr had bitched about Mystery Man dropping something upstairs.

  “I think it was a necklace or a bracelet. I don’t know; he found some woman’s jewelry, and Mrs. Carr claimed it wasn’t hers.” Brody sounded like he trusted Mrs. Carr about as much as I did.

  “But you don’t believe that?” I supplied.

  “Truth?”

  I nodded yes.

  “I think Mrs. Carr is having an affair,” Brody clarified. “I think it was a present from some other guy.”

  I had to spill about my spying. I tried to think of an easy way to tell him, but there was no good lead-in for this. “I sort of broke into your house when you were at the skate park with Zach.”

  “Are you trying to say it was your jewelry? ’Cause that was a while ago.” Brody was oddly unperturbed by my confession.

  “No.” I shook my head. Though I did wonder if it was somehow my bracelet. I couldn’t imagine why Mystery Man would have had it, but Mr. Carr must have found it somewhere.

  “Actually, Mr. Carr called my cell phone the night of the dance. He asked me to meet him outside—that’s when I found him.” The look on Brody’s face made my chest hurt.

  “Don’t worry about me,” he said, seeing my hesitation. “I have Zach for that.”

  “Okay.” I agreed. “Anyway, I needed to figure out why he called me, and since I knew everyone was going to be out of the house that day, I went to see what I could find.”

  “I can’t say I’ve never done any breaking and entering.” Brody shrugged.

  I would have to remember to ask about this some other time. “So I ended up in Mr. Carr’s study, and
there was a file in his desk about the Banished. And on one of the pages, Mr. Carr had scribbled my name down. Then yesterday when I showed Zach the file, it spooked him, and he volunteered to search his mom’s office for more information about the Banished and Damon Gates.”

  “Good old Damon Gates.” Brody smirked. “The BVs’ version of Satan. He’ll make your brain drip out of your ears if you’re not careful. The Council’s big on scare tactics.”

  “Since we’re on the subject—” Maybe Brody could help me get this Council stuff straight. “Obviously the Council enforces the Code of Ethics and keeps an eye on the BVs.” I thought of the spy-type pictures they’d had of the Banished. “But what happens if someone breaks a rule?”

  “Let me give you a little background,” Brody said. “The Council is a group of twelve BVs who run for election every ten years. They’re judge and executioner. But in addition to them, the Council selects a board—which Mr. Carr was on—that takes care of misdemeanor charges and keeps track of BVs who are on probation. The Board also acts as a jury for people being brought up on grievous offenses. They hear the facts and can give input, but the Council is the final word.”

  It didn’t sound totally fair, but keeping a secret governing body a secret was probably hard enough without attempting to have full-scale trials.

  “So what kind of punishments do they give?” I pressed.

  “Like I said, most of the stuff is misdemeanors, and you’re put on probation for a while.”

  I didn’t find it too surprising that he knew about the court system.

  “Supposedly, if you do something really awful, they operate on your brain.” Brody went on, “Like a lobotomy for our powers. But I doubt it’s true. Just another horror story to keep the BVs in line.”

  “I saw something in the Council’s files today that certainly scared me.” I pulled the ID bracelet out of my purse for the second time this morning. “There was a picture of a bracelet in the folder, and even though it was a different style it had this same infinity symbol on it. The file said the bracelets were ionized and then the Banished used them on”—I thought back to exactly how it had been worded—“victims of energy consumption.”

  “Exclusive Donors.” Brody frowned. “That’s a major Damon Gates rumor. Back in the 1700s, it was accepted, like indentured servitude, but by the time the Council wrote the Canon of Ethics, it had been outlawed.”

  Now, that’s something I wouldn’t have expected Brody to know. “Anyway, these BVs in the sixties took it up again. They’d latch onto people and use them over and over, and they called them Exclusive Donors. I think the bracelets helped to keep them from poaching on one another’s EDs. But ionized metal also makes it easier to transfer our energy to stuff, and I guess it probably works the other way, too, if you’re trying to absorb energy.”

  I raised my eyebrows at him.

  “You have to work hard to not learn things when you have a photographic memory,” Brody said by way of explanation. He had his dumb stoner-act down pat—to the point that I sometimes forgot he came from a long line of mutant geniuses.

  “Do you think the Banished had something to do with Mr. Carr?” he asked after a pause.

  “I don’t know what to think. I lost the bracelet about a week and a half after school started, and then I found it the night of the dance, lying in the grass right next to Mr. Carr’s hand. I don’t know how or where he got it.”

  “Maybe that was what he found that day.” Brody leaned forward. “He did ask me once if I knew you, if you had ever been over to our house.”

  A shiver traveled up my spine.

  “Which I guess means I’m wrong about Mrs. Carr and the whole affair thing.” Brody looked faintly disappointed. He seemed to like Mrs. Carr about as well as she liked him. “Do you know how your bracelet could have gotten there? Did you break in before?”

  “Monday was the first time I’d ever been in your house. But I did see something else that day.” I chewed on my thumbnail. “Actually, I mostly overheard it—and I think it might partially explain the bracelet thing.”

  “Yeah?” His eyebrows quirked up inquiringly.

  “You were right. About Mrs. Carr. She was there, kissing someone.”

  Brody was tapping his foot so hard the whole table rattled.

  “You mean, after Mr….” He trailed off.

  “Sorry.”

  “It’s not your fault. You’re not the slut cheating on your dead husband.” Brody took a deep breath. “Sorry. I shouldn’t be talking like that to you. I just … Mr. Carr was always nice to me, you know?” I could tell Brody was struggling to keep his voice steady. “Who was the guy with her?”

  “I didn’t see his face. All I could tell in the dim light was that he was slender and had light brown hair.” I paused. “But Mrs. Carr did accuse him of dropping something on the floor that Mr. Carr found.”

  “Do you know why some guy would be carrying your bracelet around?”

  “I really have no idea.” My brain felt like a big mess of deadend information. “Do you think Mrs. Carr might have killed …”

  “No. I would, except I saw her that night. She was at the punch table the whole time. She didn’t even leave to go to the bathroom.” Brody snorted. “Keeping us children safe from the horrors of alcohol while outside her hus—”

  The sound of the chapel bell cut through the stillness of the cafeteria. We were about to be late for the assembly.

  “We’ll talk about this after, okay?” Brody threw his backpack over his shoulder, and I grabbed my purse.

  As soon as everyone was seated, Headmaster Grimsby told us all of our morning classes had been canceled for police interviews.

  “To fill you in on how we will proceed, I have Police Chief Bradbury here.” Grimsby motioned to the uniformed officer at the back of the stage.

  The police chief stepped up to the podium. “We will be bringing you in twenty at a time to the in-school suspension room for semiprivate interviews.” The cop cleared his throat, making the mic pop loudly. Several jittery students—including myself—jumped at the sound. “The Shadow Hills police force would like to thank you in advance for your patience and cooperation.”

  As much as the school was pushing their line that Mr. Carr’s death was a natural one, I had a feeling the cops were leaning more toward my point of view. Why else would they waste time interviewing students? I wondered if Mrs. Carr had already been questioned. Brody said she hadn’t left the dance, but she could have arranged for someone else to kill her husband. Maybe someone she was sleeping with.

  “To make this as orderly as possible, we are going to call students by advisor. The first group will be Mr. Sherwood’s advisees, Ms. Cardinal’s advisees, Mr. Strobe’s advisees, and Ms. Brooks’s advisees.”

  As we filed out of the building, I saw that Brody was with Ms. Brooks’s students.

  Seeing me at the end of the line, Brody dropped back.

  “Did Zach tell you about the cops?” he muttered out of the side of his mouth.

  “What about the cops?” My chest started tightening up.

  “They’re BVs who are extremely skilled at getting into people’s minds. They’re taught techniques to help them decode your thoughts without even touching you.”

  “B-But they can’t maintain that kind of thing for any length of time, right?” I spurted, clinging to what Zach had told me.

  “The Council is in charge of hiring the cops in Shadow Hills, and they make sure only the ones with the best mind-control abilities and concentration get put through the training. And if they don’t perform to the Council’s liking, they assign them to desk jobs and traffic patrol.”

  “Really?” My voice came out squeaky.

  “Yes.” Brody assured me. “And the higher the emotions of the people they’re talking to, the easier they are to read, so if there’s stuff you don’t want them to know …”

  I thought of Zach and the trouble he could get into with the Council for telling me their
secrets.

  “How do you keep from being found out?” I had a feeling that with his pot habit, Brody was pretty skilled at hiding his thoughts.

  “It’s easier to do if you’re a BV. More complicated neural pathways and all that.”

  I nodded like I understood.

  “But just for insurance, I keep an image that is connected to a sound right at the forefront of my mind.” Brody grinned mischievously. “I use the music video for Jane’s Addiction’s ‘Been Caught Stealing.’”

  “How does that help?”

  “The noise and pictures generated in your mind cause a sort of feedback that makes everything else hard to get at. It’s like a radio that’s half on a station, half not; you can hear that a DJ is talking, but you can’t make out the words.” Brody sped up his lecture as we reached the entrance to the building. “Also, you want to keep your emotions as calm and level as you can, so try to relax and take some deep breaths.” Yeah, ’cause it’s really easy to relax when you’re lying to a cop.

  Getting the song running through my head was simple—I decided on “Skeleton Boy,” a Friendly Fires song I knew all the words to, so I wouldn’t get tripped up—but picturing the video was proving to be harder than I expected. My brain was obviously not wired in the same visual way Brody’s BV mind was.

  I concentrated on taking long slow gulps of air as I walked over to the desk that Chief Bradbury was sitting behind. I gave him a shaky smile and sank into the chair across from him.

  “You’re Persephone Archer, correct?” He wrote something down on a pad of paper in front of him.

  “Yes.” I did my best to pull up images from the “Skeleton Boy” video.

  “And you are the one who found Mr. Carr?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What were you doing outside while the dance was going on?”

  “I was hot from dancing. I needed to get out in the cool air.” I pictured the band dressed in black with the bright white snow falling all around them.

  “Did you see anyone else while you were outside? Before or after you found Mr. Carr?”