by Sydney Katt
CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TEASER
DEDICATION
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALSO BY SYDNEY KATT
COPYRIGHT
THE CASE OF THE MISSING MASCOT
A SHERLOCK SHAKESPEARE MYSTERY
SYDNEY KATT
RANDOM DISTRACTION BOOKS
CHAPTER ONE
It's always strange to see someone chowing down on gourmet beef jerky at the same table as someone eating vegan cheesecake. But that was the norm for the Karmic Kafe since it opened at the beginning of the summer. Actually, that was about as much sense as anything made in Devils Reach, Texas.
Like the high school's insistence on having a live animal as its mascot, even if it meant changing everything after our llama died because a teacup pig was all they could get on short notice for the right price. I really thought it was a joke when I got the email in August. Considering the number of people wearing green and white Fighting Pigs shirts all during the first week of school, I was obviously wrong.
If they even painted that poor little pig green for the football games...
I caught sight of a long brown skirt in an unseasonably heavy fabric out of the corner of my eye and instinctively kicked my overnight bag farther under my chair. The last thing I needed was to draw attention to myself when someone tripped over my stuff and spilled their soy latte all over a cheerleader a few tables away just hours before the first home game of the season. I wasn't exactly the least popular girl at my high school, but now that my boyfriend was away at college instead of leading our football team to victory, I was basically as invisible as I'd been freshman year before I somehow caught his eye.
And I was okay with that. When your parents saddle you with a name like Sherlock Shakespeare to pay homage to some of their literary faves, fading into the background is a good thing. In fact, I was all about making my senior year as uneventful and boring as possible.
The woman in the long brown skirt was just hovering in my peripheral vision for some reason. I turned, ready to ask her if she needed something, but there was no one there. I pulled off my reading glasses and cleaned the already crystal clear lenses on the inside of my oversized green Devils Reach HS hoodie. Good thing I'd worn it despite the soaring temperatures outside. I was suddenly chilled to the bone.
Maybe my parents were right. Maybe wearing reading glasses even when I wasn't trying to read something really was messing with my eyes. Whatever.
I shoved them back on my face and glanced over at the counter. The massive line was finally down to just a few people, so it was time for me to get my fix. I'd never been a health nut by any means, but a glass of carrot orange juice was officially the best thing that could hit your lips. Basically, it was orange crack and my best friend's aunt was totally my dealer.
I was third in line when Tanya Hamil and one of her groupies shoved the freshman in front of me so hard that his butt hit the glossy crystalline floor.
"Ugh. Outta the way, freshman."
Wearing a cheerleading uniform apparently meant you didn't have to wait in line. It also meant you were allowed to be a total bitch.
"Yeah, I'm in line too," I muttered, extending a hand to help up the guy in front of me.
"Say something, Shakespeare? I know you don't mind. Give Tom a kiss for me when you see him this weekend." And with a flip of her shampoo commercial blonde hair, she turned back to her friend and continued pretending no one else existed.
The sad thing was that I really didn't mind all that much. Irene Holmes always gave me the family discount on my orders, on the days Drew didn't work and just supply my fix for free, and I didn't like to advertise the special treatment.
Another flash of brown out of the corner of my eye. Seriously, was this woman stalking me or something? No one there. I studied the entire cafe again and there wasn't a single person even wearing brown. The brownest thing in the place was probably my hair.
Someone grabbed a bright yellow chair from my table and loudly dragged it over to a table crowded with people I vaguely recognized from school, all reading the table instruction cards to each other. All the chairs were supposed to represent different chakras or something. The whole concept of gravitating toward the color chair of the chakra that needed the most work seemed crazy, even for Drew's eccentric aunt.
But damn that woman could make a mean glass of carrot orange juice. Without the discount, I could've spent every penny I made working that summer at my parents' bookstore on it.
Every. Penny.
Irene smiled warmly when it was finally my turn. "Are you going to surprise me today?"
"Nope."
"You sure? I've got fresh zucchini muffins about to come out of the oven. Carob scones. Cookies to heal your karma. You name it."
"Just the usual."
"I'll convert you one day, my dear. At least I see you're finally embracing the chair concept. The blue one is perfect for you."
She went to get my order juicing and I went back to the table to grab the yearbook paperwork I'd been reading. I'd only joined the staff because I was supposed to be able to hide behind a computer all year working on the layout and filling in pictures and captions as we got them. The reality was getting a list of events that we had to cover over the next few months. I leaned back against the counter and sighed. If I were lucky, I'd only get sucked into doing half of them.
The sun glinted on the glass door when it opened, momentarily blinding me. Francois LePort, a man who was the very picture of the French chef who enjoyed all the food he made for his private clients, swaggered in. He surveyed the room with a look of contemptuous disinterest until he caught sight of Irene and her too-red-to-be-real hair behind the counter. The disinterest faded, but the contempt intensified.
"You!"
Everyone in the cafe glanced in the fat man's direction, but they quickly went back to their conversations or their phones, totally re-engrossed before he could make it to the counter. For my part, I slid off to the side and suddenly became fascinated by the icing and crumbs around a sliced cake in the case.
"Hello, Mr. LePort. Can I get you a gluten-free, dairy-free, soy-free brownie today?"
"That you call anything you make here a brownie is an insult to food, Miss Holmes."
I always thought it was funny that he spoke in an exaggerated French accent. Seriously. It wasn't as if we didn't all know he was born and raised in Frisco, the closest Dallas suburb to our smallish town.
"I'd say you could stand to lay off the grains and dairy for a while." Never one to shy away from anything considered inappropriate, Irene poked a finger into his protruding gut. "You can't hear it under all this padding, but your heart is screaming for help in there."
He smacked her hand away. "I didn't object when you bought this bakery from one of the finest pastry chefs I've ever known. I didn't complain when you converted it to this celebration of New Age obscenity. I didn't even say a single word when you decided to cater to the lowest common denominator of foodie fads."
"Yet you're here using a whole lot of words to say basically nothing right now."
>
I knew their conversation was none of my business, but I couldn't stop myself from watching the chef's reflection in the glass case. When LePort spoke, his face jiggled and shook in a way that was strangely reminiscent of all the billowing smoke that came out of a space shuttle at launch. The angrier he got, the more he looked like a cartoon character on the verge of combustion.
"Look, fruit bat. I don't know what you did this time, but one of my premium suppliers won't come near me now."
I loved how his French accent somehow managed to take on the hint of his true Texas drawl when he was angry.
"Oh. Do you mean the barbarians who made their animals live in filth? Fruit bats know how to use phones these days. I reported the unsanitary and inhumane conditions."
"Do you have any idea what you've done? You're not from around here, so you don't realize that the governor comes back to his alma mater every year for Homecoming and then hosts a dinner for the important people in this town. But you wouldn't know that because no one of substance would come in here." He cast a withering glance in my direction when he realized I was looking at him and I went back to studying icing. "That dinner is in just over a week and none of the other meat suppliers are able to get me what I need in time. My menu is in tatters. All ruined because you want filthy animals to live like royalty before slaughter." He leaned in close and even I had to strain my ears to hear what he said next. "I will destroy you for this."
Irene smiled and reached under the counter, pulling out a small lit sage bundle. "Such negativity." She waved it under his face until he sputtered and coughed from the smoke, recoiling.
She'd done that to me once. It wasn't a pleasant experience when you didn't know it was coming. At least it covered the stench of alcohol coming off him.
"You're insane."
She shrugged. "I have pity for your next life. Such unpleasant karma."
He stormed out in a combustible jiggling huff. Irene watched him go before turning her attention back to me. "I believe your juice is ready." She took my money and handed me a giant cup of carrot orange, smiling as though the town blowhard hadn't just made a scene. "People really shouldn't treat animals as afterthoughts. Your school included."
Irene looked as though she had more to say on the subject of our shiny new mascot, but someone walked up behind me and stole her attention away.
Back at the table, I allowed myself to enjoy half of the orangey goodness before I glanced at my phone. Where was Jamie? If she really wanted to get all the way to Austin before we stopped for the night, we needed to leave soon. As it was, we were going to hit Friday rush hour traffic. It would probably take two hours to get south of Dallas.
I picked up my phone to text her, but lost focus when I heard someone loudly dragging a bright orange chair over to my table.
"What up, Willy Shakes!"
Great. This guy.
"That would be my little brother. I'm a girl."
"Naw, babe. I'd never mix you up with Wats. He's cool as shit."
Couldn't hear that enough. Especially from the class stoner.
"What do you want, Ricardo?"
"You looked lonely."
He leaned back in his chair and stretched his lanky legs out in front of him, suddenly invading every inch of legroom I had under the table. I folded my legs up into my chair to get away from him. "I'm really not."
Ricardo Montague just grinned at me and looked me over with that out-of-focus gaze of his. "With your man away, you've got to be getting lonely. I can help with that."
Did that tired line actually work on anyone? If I didn't despise him on a cellular level, I might've been able to appreciate his slim body, tanned Puerto Rican skin—or was he Cuban?—and wavy black hair that fell nearly to his collar. But he perved on me every time he saw me, so any charm or good looks other people might see were totally lost on me.
"I'll be sure to let him know when I see him this weekend."
"Going to get your Charlie Brown fix, huh."
"You know his name is Tom."
"Right."
A typewriter sound from my phone distracted me from the wolfish way he was looking at me. "As fun as these little chats always are for me, my ride's here." I gathered my paperwork hastily, gulped down the rest of my drink and grabbed my bag from under my chair.
Before I could make my escape, he had a hand on my elbow. "You should know I love when you play hard to get, Shakes."
I ripped my arm away from his light touch and left without stopping to say goodbye to Irene. I just wanted as much space between me and the perv as possible.
Jamie, as usual, was a gloomy cloud of doom when I got into her spotless black coupe. "Today has been the worst day of my life, Sherlock. The. Worst."
"Oh, did you just get harassed by a skeezy pervert too?"
But she didn't hear me. She rarely did. She was already giving me the play-by-play of this morning's National Honor Society meeting. It was going to be such a long drive to Austin.
CHAPTER TWO
It was late when we finally got to the campus in Austin, but not as late as I thought it would be. I was looking forward to vegging out in front of the TV in our room for a little while before bed. Since my parents had never quite understood the allure of television, I tended to binge-watch anything I could whenever I was out of the house.
Jamie had other ideas.
Instead of walking out of the bathroom in her pajamas, she looked like she was ready for a night on the town. Okay, she looked like she was ready for a night on the town if it involved heading to a job interview at the campus library. Her long black hair was pulled back into one of those flawless ponytails that always reminded me of what a disaster my thick brown hair was and she was dressed in brown slacks and a muted beige blouse that would probably look more at home on my grandmother than the lithe Asian teen in front of me.
Actually, Nana wouldn't be caught dead in anything so age appropriate.
"Why aren't you dressed yet, Sherlock? We've got places to be."
I loved Jamie—self-absorption and all—but I couldn't stand the way she over-pronounced her 'WH' words. Why was hu-why and when was hu-when. It would be even worse if she chose now to hu-whine at me about being social for a hu-while.
"Frat party?"
Her eyes narrowed in a way that usually only occurred in poorly acted martial arts movies, not real life. "We've got to make the most of our time this weekend. I need to start checking out the layout of all the buildings tonight so that I'm ready for tomorrow."
It didn't surprise me in the least that she wanted to study for tomorrow's campus tour as though it were a test. When we were little, she'd made me walk our trick-or-treating route with her every day for a week so that we could beat all the other kids in town to the best candy.
I shut off the TV and reached for my sneakers. "As much as I'd love to take a pre-tour tour of the college with you, I think I'm going to head over to see Tom."
Her face contorted as though someone had just served her a baby's used diaper for dinner. "You're kidding, right? How do you expect to get into this school if you can't answer any of the tour guide's questions tomorrow?"
Simple. I didn't expect to get into this school. My SAT scores were good enough to get me into the local college in Angels Grasp because my parents both taught literature there, but that was about it. I wasn't Jamie. I didn't have my pick of big name schools.
Besides, Longhorn orange would never look as good on me as it would on Jamie and Tom. I was more of a Llama green girl. Wait, I guess make that Pig green now.
"I'm only here this weekend because you signed me up for the tour and told me I had to come with you."
"I was trying to be helpful." She removed her ID and some cash from her purse and slid them into her pocket. "I thought you weren't supposed to see Tom until tomorrow night."
"Wanted to surprise him."
"Ugh. Your hormones run you, don't they? I can't believe we haven't even been here an hour and you're already runni
ng off after some jock."
Her accusation was insulting, but I didn't bother to respond. It was probably better for her to think I was some kind of sex-crazed tramp than to know the truth. Walking around the campus with her would just let her start talking about how much she wished that a driven Asian couple had adopted her. Damn those easygoing white folks who didn't even care enough about her overachieving tendencies to enroll her into some kind of special weekend school from the time she was a toddler. Why, oh why, hadn't they forced her to take cello and violin lessons after morning kindergarten let out?
Blah, blah, blah-bity blah. I'd heard the rant so often that I sometimes had to stop myself from lip-syncing it while she complained. Seriously, I wasn't completely sure whether this was how she naturally was or if she'd just decided to act this way so that she could take the driven Asian stereotype to the next level.
When she didn't get the response she wanted from me, Jamie flounced out of our room in a huff. I spent the next ten minutes studying a map of the campus so that I wouldn't have to carry it with me to Tom's dorm. I may be terrible at standardized tests and small talk, but I had a great memory and a decent sense of direction. After a quick peek out the door to make sure Jamie wasn't still waiting for the elevator, I left the room.
September nights in Texas were pleasant sometimes and this was one of those times. The sky was cloudless and the stars were bright and beautiful overhead. Lots of people were hanging out in green spaces, so I didn't feel the least bit nervous about walking around by myself on a strange college campus late at night.
This whole thing was actually sort of exciting. Getting to see my boyfriend for the first time in just over a month almost made dealing with Jamie's craziness worthwhile. Sure, I'd be seeing him next Friday when he came back for the Homecoming game and dance, but this was different.
Tonight, I'd have Tom Brown all to myself. No sharing with the million friends he had waiting to see him back home. Instead of having to be perfect for everyone else, we could just be ourselves for once.