by Meg Cabot
Special Agent Lancaster says, “Her inhaler is over there on the dresser. It seems like it’s plenty close enough for her to grab.”
“And it’s practically full,” I say, then blush, not having meant to let that slip. We weren’t supposed to have touched anything, but the inhaler is something I found after Cooper left and, because his paranoia about Jasmine’s missing cell phone had made me suspicious, I’d lifted it—using Jasmine’s discarded shirt from the day before—and given it a shake.
Eva doesn’t notice. She picks up the inhaler and gives it a shake herself, then drops it into an evidence bag.
“We’ll take a look at it,” she says, marking something down on her clipboard. “You know, people don’t take asthma as seriously as they should. About nine people a day die from it. It’s one of this country’s most common and costly diseases. She could have had an asthma attack brought on by a reaction to an allergen. Speaking of,” she adds, “my mom thinks she’s allergic to gluten. She’s not, of course. But I’m putting up with it to keep the peace. So if you guys could serve some gluten-free stuff at your wedding, that would be great. Not necessarily a whole separate gluten-free cake, but like some fresh fruit, or whatever.”
“Um,” I say. “Okay. I’ll have the wedding planner make sure the caterer knows.”
Not that I mind that Eva and her mother are coming to my wedding, but I wonder again how they got an invitation. I know I didn’t put them on my list. Granted, my list is pretty lame—it has fewer than fifty people on it, most of whom work either for New York College or the NYPD. From my family, there is only my father and his sister. I haven’t spoken to my mother in over a decade. Even if I had her address—which I don’t—no way would I have invited her. Weddings are supposed to be occasions for joy, not psychodrama.
So while the addition of a cool punk medical examiner and her mom at my wedding is definitely a plus, I’d still like to know how it happened. Did Cooper add Eva and her plus one because he felt sorry for me, as there are so many more people (at least three hundred) on his side?
It’s all very baffling, but again, not something I have time to figure out just now.
“And there’s no sign of, um, vomit in her toilet or trash can,” I volunteer. “So I don’t think she had that stomach flu so many people have.”
Eva looks at me like I’m nuts. “What stomach flu?”
“You know,” I say. I’m still sitting on Jasmine’s visitors’ bed, looking at the posters she’d hung on her walls. “That stomach flu that’s going around.” Then I gasp. “Oh God! Casino Night . . . if there’s a virus or whatever going around, won’t they all get it if they’re confined to a small space, like on a boat? I saw on Voyage to Death that that happened on the Queen Mary 2. The entire ship got the norovirus, a thousand passengers or something, even crew members. The toilets got clogged from everyone’s vomit.”
Eva glances at me in amusement. “If I understand it correctly, this cruise your residents are going on is only around the island of Manhattan, not the Caribbean. They’ll be home in a few hours, so I think they’ll be all right. And anyway, I haven’t heard of any stomach flu going around.” She looks over at Special Agent Lancaster. “Have you heard about any stomach flu going around?”
Special Agent Lancaster shakes his head. “None of my people have it.” Then he touches his earpiece. “My people are asking, by the way, how much longer you’re going to be.”
“As long as it takes, 007,” Eva says. “Why, do you have a train to catch and then derail for Her Majesty?”
“I’m not MI6,” Special Agent Lancaster says, flushing a little. “I thought I explained. I’m Diplomatic Security, with the—”
“State Department, yes, yes,” Eva says, impatiently. “So you said. So is that a passport in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me?”
Special Agent Lancaster frowns and turns away, but I see the back of his neck turning red.
“No one has a sense of humor anymore,” Eva mutters. I’m not sure she notices that the agent is blushing.
There’s a loud rattle from the hallway as the doors to the service elevator open.
“Finally,” Eva says. “It’s Ramon.”
Ramon is Eva’s partner from the OCME, finally arriving with the body bag and gurney.
“Hey, Ramon,” Eva calls out as Special Agent Lancaster stops him and demands to see ID. “Check out the guy in the hallway. He’s a real-life James Bond.”
Ramon looks perplexed, but shows his ID. “How are you doing, sir?” he asks Special Agent Lancaster.
“Peachy,” says the agent, and waves Ramon into the room.
“Have you heard about some flu that’s going around?” Eva asks him.
“It’s too early in the fall for the flu,” Ramon says matter-of-factly. He has a white paper sack balanced on top of the gurney. An extremely pleasant—and familiar—odor enters the room along with him. “Hey, Heather,” he says to me. “Sorry about your loss.” To Eva, he says, “Hey, boss, guess what I stopped for since I had to drive around for so long looking for a parking space, and we got stuck with that crispy critter over on the West Side Highway and didn’t have time for lunch today?”
Eva’s expression brightens as she recognizes the logo on the sack. “Murray’s? Oh, Ramon, you’re too good to me.”
“You know it’s policy never to stop in this neighborhood without getting sandwiches from Murray’s.”
Eva leaps up to look inside the sack while Ramon wheels the gurney to the side of Jasmine’s bed, then goes to look down at the body. I rise to join him.
“So young,” he says sadly, crossing himself. “My wife and I have a girl her age. Seems like such a waste.”
“Yeah.” There doesn’t seem to be much else to say.
“At least there’s no blood this time,” he points out. “You had it bad last year. Remember the girl in the pot?”
“I try not to,” I say.
“Sorry. What’s with the suit?” Ramon whispers, nodding at Special Agent Lancaster.
“VIR,” I say, glancing back down at Jasmine. “Very Important Resident.”
“Her?” he asks, sounding surprised.
“No,” I say. “Upstairs. Son of someone important. There’ve been death threats.”
“She looks like she died in her sleep,” Ramon says. “Not like anyone killed her.”
“I know,” I say. “I guess it’s protocol, or something.”
“Oh,” he says. “Well, I wanted to tell you, thank you very much for the wedding invitation. My wife and I will be very honored to attend.”
I look back at him. I didn’t send Ramon an invitation to my wedding. “Great,” I say. “See you there.”
He nods somberly. “Well. Guess I better get to it. Hey, boss,” he calls to Eva. “Time to tag and bag.”
Eva, who was unable to resist taking a bite of Smokey Joe—I recognize the scent, as I’ve had it many times myself: smoked mozzarella, marinated sun-dried tomatoes, and balsamic vinaigrette and basil on crisply baked focaccia—looks up guiltily.
“Sorry,” she mumbles with her mouth full, then wipes her lips with practiced skill so that the crumbs fall directly into the Murray’s bag and not onto Jasmine’s floor. “Just a sec.”
In the hallway, Special Agent Lancaster rolls his eyes, but otherwise chooses to pretend he hasn’t noticed anything amiss.
I move out of the way so that Eva and Ramon can get to work, admiring as always the tender movements with which they prepare the deceased for transport.
It’s only when they have Jasmine zipped up and on the gurney and I go to her bed to straighten her sheets—even though we’re not supposed to, but it can’t matter anymore; I want her room to look nice for her parents when they come—that I realize that Cooper was right all along:
Jasmine’s smartphone is missing.
8
All Pain and No Gain for the President of the Pansies
Rumors are flying that the faculty and staff of New Yor
k College are set to approve a vote of no confidence in Phillip Allington, the school’s sixteenth president. If such a vote occurs, it will be another embarrassing setback for a man who’s already had a great many in a very short period of time.
“His emphasis on athletics, along with raises and perks for a few top employees, is more appropriate for a state university than a private college,” one staff member is quoted as saying.
Staff and faculty have also criticized Allington’s managerial style, claiming he is motivated by a desire to get the school basketball team’s Division I status reinstated (it was revoked after a decades-old cheating scandal), and not by academic goals.
“Why else would he be accepting money from a known misogynistic, homophobic, anti-Semite like the leader of Qalif, General Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Sultan Faisal?” asked the staff member.
Phone calls to the president’s office asking for a response to this question were still unanswered by press time.
New York College Express,
your daily student news blog
Maybe she loaned it to someone,” Patty says.
“Yes, Patty,” I reply, taking a sip from my glass of white wine. “Because young girls often loan their cell phones to other people.”
“Wait.” Patty, one of my oldest and dearest friends, frowns. “Are you being sarcastic?”
“Of course she is.” Cooper lowers his wineglass. “That’s why they’re called personal mobile devices. Unless Jasmine lost it—which seems like it would be an odd coincidence—someone took it. The question is, who? And why?”
We’re gathered around a well-used wooden table in the middle of Cooper’s—and soon to be mine—back deck, enjoying the remnants of a late supper Cooper has prepared (lemon-and-herb chicken, roasted new potatoes, and a Boston lettuce salad tossed in a mustard vinaigrette). Our friends Patty and Frank brought the wine, and gelato for dessert.
Even though the surprise dinner party is supposed to get my mind off the grim day I’d had at work, it’s hard to think of anything else, especially since no one seems to be able to talk about anything else.
Or maybe because the brownstone (left to Cooper by his eccentric grandfather Arthur Cartwright) is just a block or two from Fischer Hall. I can actually see the back of the building from the wrought-iron chair in which I’m sitting.
I’m trying not to look up. I’m trying to enjoy the company of my friends, allowing the wine and conversation to wash away the unpleasantness of the day, basking in the glow of the flickering flames of the citronella candles, the twinkling of the party globe string lights Cooper’s hung across the deck’s arbor.
But I can’t help it. I look up.
“We all know what happened to her phone,” Patty’s husband, Frank, is saying. He drops his voice to a mock-dramatic tone. “The murderer took it. Because the victim took a photo of him as he was choking the life from her, recording her own death, and he had to get rid of the evidence.”
“Okay,” I say. “First, never do that voice again. You’re scaring your child.” I point at Frank and Patty’s son, Indiana, sitting on the deck floor, noisily bashing one of his metal Tonka trucks into another. “And second, there’s no evidence she was murdered. Eva, the MLI, thinks it was probably asthma.”
Patty snorts. “That kid isn’t scared of anything. And who dies of asthma?”
“Nine people a day,” I say knowingly, taking another sip of my white wine and trying not to notice that I can see Lisa Wu’s husband, Cory—identifiable to me by the white blob of his shirt and thin stripe of his tie—moving rapidly from their kitchen through their living room to their bedroom, way up in their apartment on Fischer Hall’s sixteenth floor. He’s probably bringing Lisa tea to settle her stomach. “It’s one of this country’s most common and costly diseases.”
Patty stares at me. “Whoa. And to think, I knew you when you didn’t even have your GED. Look at you now, all ‘one of this country’s most common and costly diseases.’ ”
“I’m taking Critical Thinking this semester,” I inform her. “It’s a four-credit course required by everyone going for their bachelor’s degree at the New York College School of Continuing Education.”
“I would think New York College would just give you the damn degree already,” Patty says, “considering you’ve caught like ten murderers on their campus since you started working for them.”
“Ten’s an exaggeration,” I say modestly, dropping my gaze from Lisa’s apartment. There’s Gavin at his desk in his window a few floors below. I can tell by the blue glow that he’s at his computer, probably working on his screenplay. This latest one is about zombies. “And I had a little help.”
I smile sweetly at Cooper, but he doesn’t notice since he’s busy frowning down at Indy, who is now attempting to ram one of his trucks into my dog Lucy’s paws. Lucy, looking frightened, gets up and moves to the safety provided by the wrought-iron legs of Cooper’s chair. Neither Frank nor Patty notices their son’s behavior.
Frank and Patty’s little boy, Indiana, can be pretty sweet when he wants to be, but he’s at that age when he can also be a handful. Like now, as the doorbell rings shrilly. Indy jumps up, shrieking “I’ll get it!” and tears into the house.
“Frank,” Patty says calmly. She’s too far advanced in her second pregnancy to leap after her first child, although even when not pregnant, Patty has never been much of a leaper. A dancer by profession—which is how we met, when she performed backup for me onstage during my Sugar Rush tour—she’s graceful, but has always been more sinuous than energetic. “Get him before he destroys something.”
“I’ll do it,” Cooper says, carefully scooting back his chair so as not to injure Lucy. “I have to see who it is anyway.”
“My child.” Frank lays his napkin on the table with a sigh and follows Cooper. “My responsibility.” Though I know the truth, that Frank is fascinated by Cooper’s career, and is really following him to see if he can learn some new trick of the private detection trade.
I don’t ask anything stupid like Who could that be at this hour? because I’m used to Cooper having late-night visitors, most of whom are what Cooper describes as work “colleagues.” They all have nicknames like “Sammy the Schnozz” or “Virgin Hal.” I’ve stopped asking what these names mean (in the case of the Sammy the Schnozz, it’s obvious. His nose is extremely large and has been broken and badly reset many times. In the case of Virgin Hal, I’m not sure I want to know).
I’ve noticed that many of them are on Cooper’s invitation list. “I owe them” is all Cooper will mutter when I ask about it, and I’m pretty sure he isn’t referring to the poker night he sometimes hosts. I mentioned that I look forward to his introducing one nicknamed “The Real Bum Farto” to his mother, and Cooper only smiled mysteriously.
“So,” I say to Patty when the guys are gone, hoping to steer the conversation away from Jasmine’s death, though this will be difficult, since Patty’s sitting directly opposite and below the window of 1416, Jasmine’s room. The window is dark.
As soon as Jasmine’s parents come to get her things—which I, and probably Sarah, will help them pack up—a new RA, chosen by Lisa from the waiting list, will move in. Only then will I be able to see a light in room 1416’s window again when I look up.
“Have you found out yet if the new baby is a boy or a girl?”
“Hell no,” Patty says, breaking off a piece of dark chocolate from the bar she and Frank brought to go with the gelato. “If I find out it’s another boy, I won’t push, I swear to God.”
“Aw, come on, Patty,” I say. “You don’t mean that.”
Patty makes owl eyes at me. “Oh, yes I do. Just wait until you have a baby, then you’ll know. You need all the energy you’ve got to push the little bugger out. And why would I push if I know at the end all I’m going to get is another little hell demon like Indy, whose only goal in life is to flush all my jewelry down the toilet? Don’t get me wrong, I love my son, and there’s nothing I wouldn
’t do for him, but this next one better be a little girl.”
“Here, Patty,” I say, passing her a plate left over from the appetizer course. “Have a little cheese to go with your whine.”
Patty laughs, then stops abruptly and looks at me with wide, guilt-stricken eyes.
“Oh God, Heather,” she says, biting her lower lip. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—when I said that just now, about wait until you have a baby, I completely forgot about your, uh . . .”
“Inability to get pregnant due to severe uterine scarring thanks to endometriosis?” I lower the cheese platter I’m still holding. “It’s okay, Patty. I guess Cooper and I will have to experience the wonders of parenthood through your children. And of course all the kids in the dorm where I work.”
Patty doesn’t look comforted. “Oh, Heather, you’re making light of it, but I know it really hurt when you found out. Isn’t there anything the doctors can do?”
“Of course there is,” I say, “and if we wanted a child that desperately, we’d be exploring those options, and others, like adoption or foster care. But neither of us feels an overwhelming urge right now to reproduce or be a parent. We’re happy with the way things are. Why? Do we seem sad to you?”
Patty shakes her head until her long crystal earrings sway.
“No,” she says. She lifts her napkin to dab at the corners of her eyes, which have gone shiny in the light from the candle flames. “No, not at all. You seem happier than I’ve ever seen you—and we’ve known each other since we were kids, or close enough. And obviously Cooper’s over the moon—well, he’s always been crazy about you. I knew he was in love with you from the moment you two met—”
“Oh, come on,” I interrupt, thrilled by her words but certain she’s only saying them to please me.
“I’m serious! He could never look at anyone but you if you were in the room, and that hasn’t changed. The other girls and I used to laugh about it. I mean, you were going out with his little brother, so it wasn’t like he could make a move or anything. But the minute you and Jordan broke up, none of us were surprised that Cooper was there to the rescue, offering you a place to live—”