by Sara Grant
I stopped them right there. I didn’t need any more horrible thoughts in my already overactive brain. “I agree with Berkeley. He would be the prime suspect with his criminal history. Why would he put Lucinda in the bed he constructed? That would be stupid.”
“Prisons are filled with stupid criminals,” Taylor said.
Toby agreed. “I heard that there was this guy a few years ago that took a chainsaw—”
“Enough,” I said. The word chainsaw started a slideshow of gruesome images in my brain. I didn’t want to hear another word.
We heard the sound of an engine and then saw Sven blasting away on one of the snowmobiles. Maybe we should have gone after him, but if he was the killer, I was happy he was leaving and if he was innocent then I didn’t mind that he was getting away either.
“That’s one suspect down,” Toby said.
“Now what?” Taylor asked. The boys bounced up and down. “This is the most excitement we’ve had since we were expelled.”
Expelled? That was news to me.
Toby punched Taylor in the arm. “Idiot,” he muttered.
I gulped. “Didn’t you say you went to Ingenium?”
“Yeah,” Taylor said and received another punch from his brother.
“Can’t you keep your mouth shut?” Toby said to Taylor.
I suddenly realized the only thing we knew about these two was that they went to Ingenium, and one of the only things I believed about this whole bizarre mess was that it was connected to Ingenium somehow.
“What are you two really doing here?” I asked.
Mackenzie stepped next to me. “We know you’re hiding something.”
We do?
“We got kicked out of Ingenium,” Taylor said and received his third punch. “Hey, cut that out. It doesn’t matter if they know.”
“Why?” I asked.
Now Toby spoke. “We played a few too many pranks and our grades weren’t that great anyway.”
“Pranks like a dead body.” I realized my mistake. I’d let slip what I really thought – they were suspects. I tried to recover. “I mean, a fake finger in the ice.”
TnT clutched each other and nearly fell to the ground with their convulsive laughter.
“What’s so funny?” Mackenzie asked.
“You guys think we’re suspects,” Toby said between laughing fits.
“You are always sneaking around and getting into trouble,” I added, a bit annoyed that they were laughing at us.
“We are infamous criminals.” Taylor burst out laughing again.
“I guess it’s better than dropouts,” I said. That shut them up.
“It’s a little strange for you guys to be here with no parents or guardians or supervision,” Mackenzie said.
“We couldn’t hurt anyone,” Toby pleaded.
“Seriously? Us, the killers?” Taylor added.
Mackenzie checked her watch and nudged me. “We need to go,” she whispered.
“Where are you going?” Toby asked.
“None of your business,” I said.
“You might as well tell us or we’ll follow you,” Taylor said.
They could spook Katrina and ruin everything.
Maybe it would be better if we knew where TnT was at all times. I sort of trusted them, but there was more to their story. Were they seeking revenge on people from Ingenium as payback because the school kicked them out? That seemed a little extreme, but as they pointed out, criminals could be stupid. I waved them into a huddle. “Mackenzie and I are meeting someone who may have information about the bad stuff that’s been happening.”
“Cool,” Toby said.
“We’re in,” Taylor added.
Mackenzie was glaring at me in her you’re crazy way.
“We need you two to stand guard,” I explained. “This person can’t see you or it could ruin everything.”
“Got it,” Taylor said.
“We are meeting behind the ice maze,” I told them. “You go through the maze and wait at the back wall.”
“Do we need a signal?” Toby asked.
“How about if we scream for help?” Mackenzie said and rolled her eyes.
“Perfect,” Taylor said. Mackenzie’s sarcasm was wasted on him.
*
“I’m getting out of here,” was the first thing Katrina said when she showed up at the maze as arranged. She checked behind her every few seconds. “I’m leaving here one way or another and you better not do anything to stop me.”
“OK,” I said. This was starting to seem like a very bad idea. She was already threatening us.
“We know you went to Ingenium International College,” Mackenzie blurted. Why did Mackenzie pick now to become the interrogator? “We know you went there with Alexia. We heard you fighting with her not long before her accident.”
Katrina’s expression shifted from anger to fright. She was hiding something.
“You would be smart to stop asking questions about Ingenium.” Katrina poked me in the chest. I stood my ground. I wasn’t about to let her see how scared I was. “Some things are better left in the past.”
“Like what?” Mackenzie asked.
“It’s all going to come out eventually,” I said as if I knew more than I did. “Lucinda, Alexia, Blake and you are connected to Ingenium. When the police arrive, they are going to figure it out.”
“I’m going to be long gone before the police show up,” she said. “I’m not going to be next.”
“Next?” I echoed. Was she being clever? Did she want us to believe she might be the next victim? She wasn’t acting like a victim.
“You lured me here,” she said, but the way she said it made me think she wasn’t talking about our meeting. “You’re probably mixed up in it.” She backed away. “Just leave me alone. I didn’t do it. I didn’t do any of it.”
“Then stay and help us find who did,” I said.
“Help us,” Mackenzie repeated.
Two screaming figures leaped down from the wall of the ice maze. We shrieked and kicked and punched and…
“Stop it!” the boys yelled.
While Mackenzie and I had lunged at the attacking figures, Katrina had taken the chance to run away.
“Why did you do that?” I shouted at them.
“You said help,” Toby explained.
“But we didn’t mean help,” Mackenzie said.
“How were we supposed to know?” Taylor asked.
“She’s getting away,” I pointed out. “She’s the key to figuring this out.”
“She might be the killer,” Mackenzie said.
“Leave it to us,” Toby said.
“We’ll catch her,” Taylor added.
TnT bolted after Katrina. She was headed towards the forest, leaving snowy tracks as she ran. She was fast, but the boys were faster. I hoped we hadn’t put the boys or Katrina in danger.
“What in the hell do you think you are doing?” Grandma’s voice shot through the cold like an ice dagger. She stormed through the courtyard from the ice hotel.
We’d almost made it to the lodge. We froze in our tracks.
“This is not a game,” she shouted when she reached us. “People are dead. Do you understand that? Dead.”
Mackenzie and I bowed our heads and listened to the rest of her lecture. We were reckless and had disrespected her. Her face was glowing with anger. “And what if…” Her voice trailed off.
There were a lot of pretty awful what ifs.
“Sorry,” Mackenzie said.
“Yeah, sorry,” I echoed.
She marched us through the lobby continuing her lecture. “You are just like your mother,” she blurted.
Was that an insult or compliment? I felt this weird combination of annoyance and pride. “How?” I asked.
“Bea couldn’t let anything go.” It was as if Grandma’s anger had flipped off the sensor that usually stopped her from talking about my mom. “Once she got the bit in her teeth there was no stopping her. She always thou
ght she could fix things. If there was a wrong to be righted, Bea thought she could do it. Her problem was she didn’t care about the law. She thought good people should have justice. Bad people should get what they deserve.”
“Is that why she’s in prison?” I asked. “Was she some sort of avenger?”
“Oh, no you don’t, young lady.” Grandma stopped right in front of the elevators. “You will not aggrandize what she did. She’s not a hero.” Then Grandma looked me in the eyes for the first time since she caught us. “It started…”
“We know about Elizabeth,” I said. I could see that time had not eased her grief.
“That’s how Bea dealt with the death of her sister.” Grandma’s voice wobbled with sadness.
The elevator dinged and the doors slid open, slamming shut any further discussion about my mom. Grandma stepped inside. “Come with me.”
“Um, Gran, our room is on the ground floor,” Mackenzie said, sort of apologizing for being right.
“I know that.” Grandma waved us inside. “That’s how you escaped last time. This time you are going to my room on the top floor.” She punched the button for her floor.
Mackenzie and I groaned. There’d be no way out. Mackenzie was probably thinking that she’d be without her precious computer.
“What was so important that you had to disobey me and risk your lives?” Grandma asked as we exited the elevator.
Mackenzie told her everything we’d learned, well almost everything. She managed to omit the really stupid parts about meeting with a would-be killer. My thoughts kept pinging back to my mom.
Grandma listened, but she gritted her teeth in frustration. She let us in her room and stood in the doorway. “You girls are to wait here, and I mean it this time. If I catch you outside this room, I promise that I will send the pair of you to the most isolated boarding school I can find. I’ll make sure there will be no technology or athletics.”
“We promise,” Mackenzie jumped in.
“Aren’t you going to stay with us?” I asked.
“I’m going to put an end to this once and for all,” she said.
“I don’t want you to go.” I had that feeling again, the one that warns me when something bad might happen. “It’s not safe for you to be out there on your own.”
“I’m not going to let anyone else get hurt.” The way that Grandma said it made me believe that she knew more than she was telling. “Do not open this door for anyone except me. Do you understand?”
Mackenzie and I nodded.
I hugged her. “I’m sorry,” I whispered and really meant it this time. “Please be careful.”
“I’ll see you in a bit,” she said, and shut the door behind her. The door handle jiggled as she tested to make sure it was locked tight, which it was.
“Now what?” I flopped on the leather couch. Her room was three times the size of ours. She had a living room, a bedroom with a king-sized bed, a little kitchen area and a bathroom with a Jacuzzi tub.
“Oh, no you don’t,” Mackenzie said. “I am not being banished to another boarding school. We are not leaving this room – neither one of us.”
“I wasn’t—”
“I know you, Chase. Ariadne is right. You can’t leave it alone. How many near-death experiences do you need before you realize that sometimes doing nothing is the best course of action?” Her rant was almost as bad as Grandma’s. “I’m going to use the Jacuzzi and clean up.” She stormed off before I could utter another syllable.
With Mackenzie out of the way, I finally had some time to investigate, but for the first time in twenty-four hours I wasn’t thinking about bodies in ice or motives or suspects. I pulled out my phone and typed in my mom’s name. After some Mackenzie-like investigating, I’d found my mom’s prison. I read almost every word on the prison’s website. I tried to imagine her locked up. Because I’d never met her, I had a hard time picturing her. Grandma said I looked like her so I imagined myself behind bars. I didn’t like how that felt. Being trapped in this deluxe suite was bad enough.
Mackenzie would have been proud of me. I’d learned a few things about hacking from her. I was eventually able to find an email address for the prison. It wouldn’t go directly to my mom but maybe my message would reach her.
I clicked open my email as the low battery message flashed on my phone. My charger was in my room, and there was no way I was risking peeking outside the door. Message for Beatrice Archer, I typed in the subject line. I watched the cursor flash. I had no idea what I wanted to say. What do you say to the mother you’ve never met who is in prison for multiple homicides? I’m pretty sure there’s not a web page for that and there’s a web page for almost everything.
I typed Hi Mom and then deleted it. Do I call her mom? The little battery symbol on my phone switched to red. My heart started thumping. If I was going to send a message, I needed to do it quickly before I lost power. I didn’t know when I’d have another chance to do this without Mackenzie looking over my shoulder. I felt my courage slipping away. What would Dad or Grandma say if they knew I was trying to contact my mom?
I decided to make the message short and direct. She might not even get it, and I didn’t want the warden or whoever would read this message first to know too much about me.
I would be grateful if you would give this message to Beatrice Archer.
Hi! I bet you weren’t expecting to hear from me since I’ve never heard from you.
Was that too mean? I left it for now.
This is Charlotte, but everyone calls me Chase. I’m your daughter.
Maybe she knew other Charlottes.
I would like to hear from you. Please email me back if you want to hear from me.
I thought about a million other things I could write, but I decided that this was enough for now.
Sincerely,
Chase
I hit send before I could change my mind. My phone screen went black. “Nooooooooooo!” I shouted. Had the message sent? Maybe it was a good thing that my ridiculous message was lost. What was I thinking? What a stupid message! I hoped it hadn’t sent but a second later I wished it had. There was nothing I could do about it now either way. I slipped the phone into my pocket.
I clicked on the TV and flicked through the channels. I found an American cop show that they’d dubbed in Swedish. It was weird to see the actors’ lips moving out of sync with the words being spoken. Mackenzie and I had tried to learn a few Swedish words from watching dubbed American shows. But so far all we learned was ‘have you seen my dog’ and ‘you look beautiful’. I couldn’t concentrate. I flicked off the TV. I was imaging the sixteen gazillion ways my mom could respond to my message. That is, if she even received it.
The worst thing would be if she didn’t respond. Nothing. That was worse. If she wrote back and said that I should leave her alone, OK. Well, not OK, but at least I’d know. If she wanted to email me and find out more about me, I could decide if I really wanted to talk to her. I needed to stop thinking about it and imagining what could happen next, from visiting her in prison to her taking a hit out on me. Yeah, it wasn’t logical but that sometimes happened with my overactive imagination. Overactive didn’t mean smart or helpful, it just meant lots and lots of thoughts crashed around in my brain.
I was so wrapped up in my thoughts that I almost didn’t hear it.
Click.
I sat bolt upright. That was the sound of the door unlocking. I waited for Grandma to bound into the room, but instead the door slowly edged open. That wasn’t Grandma. She wouldn’t sneak into her own room, not with everything that had happened.
I searched for something to use to defend myself. The first thing I spotted was a big blue and purple vase. I snatched it off the coffee table and tiptoed behind the door. I raised the vase above my head and watched as the door slid open one millimetre at a time.
A hooded head peeked through the open door. The vase dropped from my hands, missing the intruder by centimetres. It shattered into a million pieces
with a thunderous boom.
I screamed.
Mackenzie screamed from the bathroom.
And TnT shrieked as they tumbled into the room.
“What are you doing?” I yelled at the pair and slammed the door behind them.
“Chase! Chase!” Mackenzie shouted from the bathroom. “Are you OK? What’s happening?”
“Yes,” I called through the bathroom door. “I’m fine. Toby and Taylor have stopped by.”
They were brushing glass from their snowsuits and picking it off each other like a couple of monkeys.
Mackenzie emerged from the bathroom in a steamy cloud. In her hurry to dress, her shirt was turned inside out and backwards with the tag sticking out.
“Why did you let them in?” Mackenzie planted her hands on her hips and launched into a lecture. “What are you thinking? Ariadne said not to open the door to anyone, and—”
“I didn’t open the door,” I interrupted. I wasn’t to blame for this.
“We used a key,” Taylor said.
“How do you have a key?” I swept Mackenzie behind me.
“We found the passkey at reception,” Toby said. “You aren’t the only two who can snoop and spy on people.”
“What happened to Katrina?” Mackenzie asked. I gestured to the tag on her shirt. She tucked her arms in and spun the shirt around. It was still inside out but for once, she didn’t seem to care what she looked like.
“We lost her in the forest,” Toby said.
“She’s got to come back eventually,” Taylor added. “There’s nothing around here. She’ll get hungry or cold or—”
“Or dead,” Toby said with a laugh, but no one else thought it was the least bit funny.
Taylor gave his brother a punch. “Idiot.”
“You guys should leave.” Mackenzie shooed them away like flies on potato salad.
“Don’t you want to hear our great idea?” Taylor said with a mischievous grin.
I glanced at Mackenzie with raised eyebrows, asking what she wanted to do.
“Argh.” She groaned. “OK, but you can’t stay long. If Ariadne catches us, Chase and I are de… in big trouble.”
She’d thought better of saying dead. It was strange that in our present situation dead wasn’t a joke.