“Maybe sometime. I guess we should go find my friends.”
“Yes.”
But neither of us moved. We stood there, staring at each other. He smelled like pizza and the ocean all rolled together.
“You are not like anyone I have ever met before, Jasmine,” he told me. “And I do not just mean because you can do the moonwalking.”
“You’re not like anyone I’ve ever met before, either.”
“Bene, then we have something in common!”
I laughed.
He reached out with the hand that had been drying my tears and touched the side of my face. “You are very lovely.”
His thumb grazed my lips.
My heart started to pound.
His eyes went to my mouth.
I bit my lower lip.
He bent closer. I bent closer. Jack had kissed another girl. Our mouths hovered over each other.
There were footsteps in the calle behind us and my pals arrived.
We jumped apart like we had super-magnets repelling us. “Oh, hello,” I said, trying for the casual, light tone as I disentangled myself from my tail.
“Where is he?” Polly asked.
“He? Who?”
She frowned at me. “The killer.”
Right. That’s what we’d been doing. Trying to catch a killer. Not trying to make out with gondoliers we’d just met two days earlier because we’d seen compromising photos of our boyfriends.
“He disappeared,” I said. I’m not sure I said it with the right amount of gravity, though, because Polly looked suspicious. “We were just—”
“Looking for the clues,” Max said. “But we find nothing. There is no evidence of a murderer. He has gone poof.”
We spent a few more minutes scouring the ground for any sign of the murderer, but found nothing.
“He must have gone another way,” Tom said.
“Unless he’s a ghost,” Veronique interrupted her chanting (!!!!) to say. “There are a lot of vibrations here.”
“These two are sane, you are sure?” Davos asked Roxy, pointing at Alyson and Veronique. “I do not see it.”
Finally, we all gave up and headed back toward the ball to pick up our equipment. As we walked, Max reached out and held my paw. It felt nice. Different from being with Jack, but nice, and for a moment I felt like maybe I wasn’t doomed to a life of living atop Misery Mountain.
“I will see you tomorrow, perhaps?” Max asked as we got to his gondola.
“Yeah. Okay.”
He took his notebook out and wrote on it. “Here is my number. I work on the gondola until four, but you may call anytime if Max can be of service.”
“Thanks.”
I turned to go.
“He’s very lucky.”
“Who?” I asked, turning back.
“This man you love.”
“What? How did you—”
“Max knows. How else could you be immune to my charms?” He said it in the regular Max way, joking, but there was something else under it.
“I’m not completely immune,” the monkeys told him. THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR THAT, MONKEYS!
He smiled at me, but it was a little sad. “Have golden dreams, Jasmine Noelle.”
“I will,” I said. But as I walked back to the hotel, reality seeped back through my costume. We’d been within inches of catching the killer and he’d vanished. And every minute that ticked by was a minute of the life of one of my friends.
Stepping into my room, I found a phone message that had been slid under the door. It was in Camilla’s writing, and the time stamp said eleven minutes earlier.
FROM: A friend
TO: Jasmine Callihan room 549
MESSAGE: Better Luck next time. Remember, tomorrow at 4:15. Don’t be Late. I won’t be.
Chapter Twenty-nine
I stayed up most of the night arranging and rearranging clues, and not getting anywhere. I must have drifted off at some point, though, because the next thing I knew it was ten thirty in the morning and I’d missed Italian, and Polly was standing in front of me holding the magazine with Jack’s kissy face picture on it. Only now it was open to the story inside. I hadn’t even known there was a story (Yes, okay, I never opened the magazine. I didn’t need to see more.) but apparently there was. With the title “NASCAR Dad Revs His Engine?” And the same picture as on the cover only now in a larger Hungry-Man-dinner-sized portion.
“Is this why you were so weird yesterday?” she demanded.
“Where did you find it?”
“Under your laundry where you hid it. I was looking for something.”
“You’re confiscating my last Wonderbra too? Is nothing sacred? Can’t you see this is a difficult time for me?”
“No. You’re not seriously upset about this, are you?”
“That old thing? Why, what would possibly upset me about a HALF PAGE PHOTO OF MY BOYFRIEND SUCKING LIPS WITH ANOTHER GIRL? I am not upset at all.”
“Jack would never wear Seven jeans.”
“Yes, that is clearly the crime in this photo.” It is so sad when Good Friends Go Mad.
“Don’t you see, Jas? Jack would never wear these jeans and he isn’t wearing them.”
“Of course he’s not, lovie. He’s actually naked. Those jeans are just a figment—hey, why are you pointing the BeDazzler at me?”
“To make you stop talking. Look at this photo,” she said, holding the magazine open and standing right in front of my face so I got a good long whiff of My-Boyfriend-Is-Making-Out-with-Another-Girl Poofume. “It’s not Jack.”
“Really? Has he been cloned? It has his unbelievably cute scar next to his lip that I used to, in happier times, so enjoy kissing.”
“The head is him, but it’s been Photoshopped onto someone else’s body. It must be a promo thing their label’s PR department did.”
I was suddenly interested. “I am suddenly interested,” I told her.
“I thought you might be. It’s actually easier to see at a distance. Step back and look at how the color of his neck changes where it meets the shir—”
“Oh. My. God.”
“I know, it’s actually amazing they’re allowed to do it. It should be illegal. Anyway, I hope—”
“No,” I said. “That’s not what I’m looking at.” I pointed at the page facing the Jack page.
Polly leaned her head over it, then looked more closely. “Isn’t that Arabella in the photo?” she asked.
I nodded mutely.
“And isn’t that—is that Max with her?”
I knew why she thought that, because I’d thought it, too. It looked a lot like him. Then I saw the caption. It read, ARABELLA NEAL LAST YEAR WITH FIANCÉ GEORGE MANZONI. MANZONI WAS FOUND DEAD IN HER DINING ROOM TWO MONTHS LATER.
I couldn’t take my eyes off of it. The first thing I thought was, Max hadn’t been lying when he said his uncle was the chief of police. And that was the last happy thought I had. Because suddenly my brain went to BoNkErToWn.
Max was Arabella’s fiancé’s brother. The brother who had harassed and threatened the Neals after George’s death. The brother who still harbored enough hatred to kill them?
No. It wasn’t possible. I didn’t want to believe it was possible.
But it was. The more I thought about it, the more possible it became. Little things started to click into place. Him talking about how hard it was to accept the suicide of someone you cared about. And—
“He recognized Bobby Neal.”
“So?”
“He made it sound like it was from gossip magazines or something. But the Evil Henches, who we know are certified experts on the men of Gossipshire, didn’t know who Bobby was. They had to consult their Ouija board to figure out his name, remember?”
“Yeah. So you’re thinking—”
“It shows Max was lying. He didn’t know Bobby from photos, but because he’d been studying the Neals.”
“Your Prada mystery caller said that Arabella’s ‘boyfriend’ spo
ke Italian. That could totally be Max.”
“And he was on the spot both times I was attacked. Only he came toward me rather than running away.”
Like he was daring me to make the connection. Bold. Clever. Like the killer the night before.
The killer he’d claimed to see run into a dead end. The killer who had disappeared.
And yet, even as the puzzle began to fill out, fill out perfectly part of me didn’t want to believe it.
“This is all circumstantial,” I told Polly.48 “We need to test this before we do anything.”
“How?”
I looked around at all the evidence we had. Fingerprints, the pen, the invitation from the night before—
“Do you have nail polish remover and a pair of nail scissors?”
Polly looked at me like I was crazy. “Of course I do.”
“We need those, and a glass from the bathroom.”
“What are we going to do?”
“We can assume that the killer sent the invitation to the ball, right?” Polly nodded. “We’re going to see if it was written by Max.”
“Like, match the handwriting? Do you have a note from him?”
“Only his phone number, no words. But that would just tell us that someone wanted it to look like it was from Max. We’re going to do better. We’re going to match the ink.”
Roxy and Tom came in then. “We wanted to see if—ooh, what’s going on?”
“Max is the killer, Jas is in denial, and we’re doing science.”
“I’m not in denial.” I carefully cut a thin strip of paper with writing on it off of the invitation from the killer, and another the same size, with the same amount of writing on it, from the note with Max’s phone number. On each piece, I left a little bit of blank paper on the bottom, which I trimmed into a point. Then I poured about a pinkie’s width of nail polish remover into the bottom of the glass, and stood the two strips in it.
“What happens now?” Roxy asked.
“We wait. The nail polish remover separates out the different chemicals in the ink. This will tell us if they were written with the same pen.” I set the timer on Polly’s phone fifteen minutes.
Which was just enough time for me to call Jack, say something absurd about how I hoped he was having a nice bath-I-meant-night, hang up, explore the far corners of the Continent of Self-Loathing, and get dressed.
“So if Max’s phone number doesn’t match the ink on the note the murderer sent, what does it mean?” Roxy asked right before the timer went off.
“It means they weren’t written with the same pen. So it’s inconclusive, but we’ve still got circumstantial evidence.”
“And if they do match?”
“It means Max is the killer.”
It matched. Both inks separated exactly the same way, with a golden hue below, bleeding up into a darker gray. Both notes had been written by the same pen. I stood there staring at them, not wanting to believe it. Looking from the part of the killer’s note that read, “at 10:15,” to the strip of paper with Max’s phone number—
I grabbed Arabella’s phone and scrolled through the call log. My heart fell. I could have maybe come up with some explanation of how Max could have accidentally used the killer’s pen if I’d tried really hard. But there was no way around the fact that Max’s number was the other Venice number that had called Arabella. The one I’d tried and gotten no answer on. After all, what killer would take a call from his victim’s phone?
I dialed it again, this time from the hotel phone. He answered on the second ring.
I hung up and dialed Beatrice’s number.
“Beatrice? It’s Jasmine. I was wondering, can you tell me the name of Arabella’s fiancé’s brother? The one who threatened the Neals?”
“George’s brother? Let me think. It was something that began with an M. Maybe Max. Why?”
“I think he might be the killer.”
“What? Do you have proof?”
“Yes.”
I looked at the last line of the note Arabella had written in lemon juice. FIND M.
I had.
“We need to go to the police,” I said.
Chapter Thirty
Little Life Lesson 57: If you have once run into the police, announcing that a gondolier is an assassin, and another time saying you yourself are a killer, returning to the first theme is not the best way to gain their trust and admiration.
I guess I should have known based on the way Officer Allegrini put his hands on his head and groaned when I walked into the police station. Still, I was sure that he’d see things clearly once I’d laid my facts before him in Italian.
I said: “But, man, this is a real, live serious killer.”
He said: “Get out of here.”
Me: “For truth, man. It’s heavy. And he threatens my friends.”
Him: “Out.”
Me: “He did in both Ned Neal and his little girl.”
That got his attention. He went, “You want me to reopen two closed cases?” and when he said it he looked like someone had lit a firecracker under him. And not in a good way. If there is a good way to look like that.
“I have proof. Look at the ink on these notes.”
“Get out or I will have you removed.”
After ten minutes like this I hadn’t managed to convince him that there really was a killer, but he’d convinced me—largely by rattling his handcuffs—that I had two choices: leave, or get thrown in jail. Since I couldn’t catch a murderer in jail, I left.
“That went well,” Polly said when we were outside. “What does ‘rompicoglioni’ mean, anyway? He kept muttering it.”
“You don’t want to know.”
“What do we do now?” Roxy asked. “It’s twelve thirty. That gives us less than four hours until the deadline.”
“Tom, did you bring your tools?” I asked.
“Always.”
“No,” Polly said. “We are not breaking into the house of a murderer.”
“He’s at work until four,” I told her. “Besides, what choice do we have? We’re going to have to drag solid pieces of evidence—and possibly a dead body—back here before the police will do anything. It’s the only chance we have of saving one of our lives.”
“How are we going to find out where he lives?”
“We could ask the Ouija board,” Veronique offered.
“We could look in the phone book,” Tom suggested.
We went with Tom’s idea. There were two M. Manzonis in the phone book, so in the interest of time we decided to split up. Roxy and I took the farther one, along with Polly’s manicure kit, and Tom and Polly the closer one. I tried not to cry salty tears when the Evil Henches announced they were going with Tom and Polly because that was the address that the spirits told Alyson was right.
Although Tom is the actual pro lock-picker in the family, Roxy isn’t bad at it. Still, breaking and entering a house, especially if you don’t know it’s the right house, is not without its nervous moments. There were two sets of doors, an outer lock, which Roxy got through in forty-three seconds, and then one on the door of M. Manzoni’s apartment. That one took her almost three minutes, three of the longest minutes of my life.
Finally the door opened and we stepped inside. And gaped.
“I think this is the place,” I said.
One whole wall was covered with magazine photos, articles, and Xeroxes. Some of the photos had the faces scratched out. But even like that it was clear that all of them, every one, was about the Neal family.
“This should be enough to convince the police,” Roxy said.
I nodded. “Do you remember the way back to the station?” It was a stupid question; Roxy has a perfect sense of direction. “I want to stay here and look around, but you should go get Officer Allegrini.”
“Polly will kill me if I leave you here alone.”
“Max is at work for another three hours. I’ll be perfectly safe.”
Little Life Lesson 58: Never sa
y “I’ll be perfectly safe” unless you’re prepared to lose a limb. Or your life.
“The place could be booby-trapped.”
“Then it’s a good thing I have my weaponized water wings.”
“Take these too.” She handed me a pair of tweezers with a battery pack connected to them. “It’s like a Taser. Just hold it against his neck and push the button on the battery pack. It’ll take him totally by surprise because he’ll think you just want to do some grooming.”
“Ingenious.”
“It works great too. I made the whole left side of my body numb yesterday when I sat on them.”
I slipped the Taser-Tweezers into my back pocket and made a mental note not to sit down. “Thanks. Go. The sooner you go, the sooner we can get this finished.”
Roxy gave me a last, concerned look from the door and took off. Alone, I started studying the wall. The first thing I noticed was that many of the photos had small holes in the faces, like they’d been used for dart practice. Cozy!
I was peering closer at one article that had a picture of a young Ned Neal and a young Lucien Wilder on crutches standing on either side of a dark-haired woman on the dock of The House that Kills, when the door opened behind me.
“Roxy, that was fast. Does this woman remind you of anyo—” I said without taking my eyes off of it.
“You,” a voice said from the door, and my hair danced up-ended on my neck. It wasn’t Roxy at all. It was Max. “What are you doing here, Jasmine?”
His tone was like ice and so sharp you could have cut pizza with it.
“I was looking for you,” I said. I turned to face him. He was standing in a tense pose, like he was ready to leap. I suddenly wondered how much he’d learned in his six months of special forces training. Like, did they teach you to kill with a single blow? Or merely to disable?
“I see,” he said, moving carefully into the room. He shut the door behind him and locked it. “And you come looking for me why?”
I decided to keep things light and breezy. “To say hello!”
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