Dial Em for Murder

by Bates, Marni;

  He sighed. “And we’re back in our rut.”

  “Whose fault is that?” I exploded. “Isn’t the definition of insanity asking the same question over and over and expecting different results?”

  Sebastian wasn’t smiling anymore. His expression was so intense that he didn’t look capable of laughter. He stalked closer. “No, Emmy. The definition of insanity is angering me.”

  He had a point. Sebastian St. James was not the kind of guy a sane person would alienate. He was too damn rich for his own good. And yet, I wasn’t sure what was crazier: that seeing his eyes flash fire didn’t make me want to run for the hills, or that the whole thing was kinda hot. His disheveled dark hair and arrogant blue eyes created a response that felt coded into my DNA. That I could hold his stony gaze without feeling repulsed left no doubt that I was indeed my mother’s daughter, predestined to be attracted to jerks.

  Except my pulse also picked up speed around Ben, so maybe this was a temporary glitch in my system. Something I should chalk up to raging hormones or whatever the new pamphlet they were handing out in health class said it might be.

  “I, uh—”

  I never got a chance to finish the sentence, which was probably for the best considering that I was at a total loss for words.

  “Sebastian, you’re missing all the fun!” Peyton stepped out into the hallway and wasted no time whatsoever in draping an arm around his waist.

  “Oh look,” I said dryly. “Saved by the bell.”

  There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that I’d had a different “b” word in mind, but saying it aloud would’ve been tacky. So I gave them both a coolly distant smile before I turned and walked away.

  Maybe I’d inherited more of a flair for the dramatic from my mom than I’d thought.

  Chapter 16

  My cell phone battery was completely dead.

  The Slate with the password protection and the life-threatening messages, that I had remembered to charge. But my actual phone—the one I used to stay in touch with my friends—yeah, I had forgotten all about it.

  So I was stuck grabbing the charger from my bag, plugging it into an outlet in a deserted hallway, and then waiting impatiently for my phone to come to life. The short length of the charger made me feel like a tiger prowling around the limits of its cage. Actually, that analogy gave me way too much credit. I was more like a worried labradoodle puppy.

  I winced when my phone informed me it was at zero percent battery life, then became too distracted by unread text messages to feel guilty.

  Audrey: How is it, Em? I want deets.

  Ben: You still alive?

  Audrey: Have you seen any familiar faces there?

  Wow, real subtle, Audrey. You might as well just ask if I’ve seen Nasir. We both know that’s what you really want to hear.

  Ben: Cam wants to know if you’re coming to his game this weekend. Are you?

  I checked my watch and decided to call Ben, on the off-chance that he could duck away from P.E. to talk. It was possible that he’d have left his phone in his locker, but I doubted it. After only the briefest of hesitations, I began pacing a crescent moon around the outlet while I waited for him to answer.

  Ben didn’t waste any time with a greeting. “You okay?”

  It felt so good to hear his voice that I nearly sank to the floor in relief. It was ridiculous. I’d seen him only yesterday. I’d been able to keep it together then. No crying. No trembling bottom lip. If my knees had felt weaker than usual, well, I’d blamed it on the interrogation room grilling with Detective Dumbass. Somehow every shitty moment from the day before had been easier to withstand than Ben’s simple, you okay?

  Because I wasn’t okay. I was stuck at this stupid school without my best friends. An eternity spent facing-off with Peyton and her cronies again and again and again stretched before me. Nobody here—with the possible exception of Kayla—gave a shit about me.

  I’d never felt so lost before. So utterly unmoored. The only ties keeping me in place were the cord attaching my phone to a power outlet and the fear that the outside world would be even crueler than Emptor Academy.

  “I—” my voice cracked and I shut my eyes in embarrassment. I didn’t want to be this girl. Needy. Weak. Desperate to hear the boy she liked insist that everything was going to be okay. “Sure. Fine. I, uh, miss you.”

  The long pause on his end of the line sent me racing toward the worst conclusions.

  I miss you?

  After a total of what? Twelve hours apart? That was way too clingy. Ben would know that something was up for sure. He’d figure out that I had a crush on him and then everything would change. He’d start being too careful around me so that he didn’t accidentally lead me on. Every time we saw each other he would arrange for there to be some kind of buffer. Ben would worry that without Audrey or Cameron around I’d squeeze him to death with my emotional tentacles.

  “I miss you and Audrey,” I quickly amended, before he could launch into the I-think-we-work-best-as-friends talk. “The kids here are worse than you can imagine.”

  “So they’ve all got forked tongues and breathe fire?”

  I laughed as my shoulder muscles finally began to loosen. “Pretty much. There’s this one girl named Peyton who wears thousands of dollars worth of diamonds in her ears while she slices people to ribbons with her eyes. If I wrote her into one of my books, I’d be accused of exaggerating. She’s that kind of evil.”

  I could hear the smile in Ben’s voice when he said, “I’d still put my money on you in a fight, Em.”

  I was oddly touched. “Really?”

  “Absolutely. That imagination of yours doesn’t work the same way everyone else’s does, which makes it ten times more dangerous.”

  The grin that spread across my face was pure mischief. “So does that mean I scare you, Ben?”

  “Constantly,” he drawled. “And now look what’s happened? You’ve been abducted by a preppy gang of rich kids. Any day now you’ll be wearing argyle vests and playing lacrosse.”

  I laughed. “You could come visit me here. Make sure that nobody comes too close with a pink sweater set and pearls.” I tried to keep the desperation out of my voice. “I’m sure I could get you a guest pass or something. There’s this driver named Force who might have killed the president of Chile, but if you can overlook that, he’s really not too scary.”

  “Em.” There was a note of something in Ben’s voice that made me catch my breath. It felt like a warning. As if he was trying really hard not to interfere—fighting the urge to say yes and race over here and take control—and my suggestion was only making everything harder for him. Making everything worse.

  “You and Audrey, of course.” I felt like an idiot constantly making it an outing for two when what I craved was some alone time with him. “You could both visit. In fact, I bet you could both enroll here. My scholarship could include the two of you.”

  Ben laughed, but not as if he saw much humor in the situation. “I seriously doubt your scholarship is a one-size-fits-all-of-Emmy-and-her-friends type deal.”

  “Well, since I don’t think the scholarship really exists, I don’t see why I couldn’t negotiate something with President Gilcrest,” I said, warming to the idea. “I’ll just tell him that I need you and Audrey to help with the dead guy and—”

  “You told the president of your new school about the dead guy?” Ben demanded.

  “He brought it up. Apparently the two of them were friends. Sort of.” I tried to mentally replay the conversation, but it was hard to concentrate with Ben grumbling in my ear.

  “You shouldn’t be there, Emmy. Not if the president of the academy is somehow involved in this mess. You need to hand the Slate over to the cops!”

  “I—”

  “I’ll go with you,” Ben said steamrolling over any objection. “It’ll take ten minutes. We’ll walk into the precinct, ask to see the cops you spoke to before, and say that you were still in shock during your first questioning.”


  “Ben, I—”

  “Then you can spend the night at my place. You don’t even have to go back to your apartment, okay? My parents have missed you, and Cam wants to show you his new curveball. You can come home, Em.”

  Home.

  It was funny, I’d called Ben’s place my home-away-from-home hundreds of times, without realizing that I had it all wrong. Home was sleeping on the spare mattress that he kept ready for me underneath his bed. Home was scrambling eggs in the kitchen with his parents while Cam waged war with his plastic Transformers against his unsuspecting dinosaurs. It was knowing that I didn’t have to walk on tiptoe to avoid waking the asshole du jour.

  Home was with Ben.

  “I got a message last night, Ben,” I lowered my voice instinctively. “It said, ‘I won’t stop until I find you.’”

  “All the more reason for you to hand it over to the police and let them stop it for you!”

  I rubbed my forehead as a wave of exhaustion hit hard. It was so tempting to walk right out the door, disconnecting the phone cord in the process so I wouldn’t be tied down to anything—not even this conversation with Ben.

  “It said ‘I won’t stop until I find you,’ Ben. Not ‘I won’t stop until I find it.’ Whatever is going on, it’s personal. It’s me. Handing the Slate over to the cops won’t make that go away.”

  The momentary silence that hung between us felt saturated with the weight of his exasperation. “You know that imagination of yours, Em? This is the kind of trouble it makes for you. You think there’s something special about you, but there isn’t. You’re not the princess in a fairytale. You’re just a girl who was in the wrong place at the wrong time and for some stupid reason has decided that she needs to stay in the wrongness instead of fixing it!”

  I couldn’t think of a single thing to say in response. Not a damn thing.

  You think there’s something special about you, but there isn’t.

  That summed up the situation between us pretty concisely.

  No need for the let’s-just-stay-friends talk or the it’s-not-you-it’s-me excuse. Ben didn’t need to make his position any clearer. I’d gotten the message and it was humiliating enough to last a lifetime. I stood frozen in horror as it finally sank in that we were never, ever getting together. That after careful consideration, he’d reached the conclusion that I was nothing special.

  “I’ve got to go,” I lied.

  “Emmy—”

  I hung up and leaned against the wall as my whole body shook with tremors of self-loathing.

  It wasn’t rejection, I told myself numbly. It couldn’t count as rejection if I hadn’t officially put the offer out on the table. We had merely reached an understanding.

  He wanted me to come home because we were friends. Buddies. Pals. Not because I was anyone special to him. My chest felt excruciatingly tight, as if I’d been sentenced to die beneath great slabs of stone during the Salem witch trials.

  My phone beeped to signal that I had a new text message.

  Ben: We need to talk.

  Sure. Absolutely. Just as soon as the idea of pretending that everything was normal between us didn’t make me want to vomit. I’d give him a call the instant I figured out how not to be in love with him. Considering that I’d been trying to move past this stupid one-sided crush for years, I didn’t think that would be happening anytime soon.

  My pride still required that I respond to his text. Otherwise he might think I was sulking or pouting or throwing a hissy fit. Or worse, he might stumble across the truth. I quickly dashed off a response and hit send before I could reconsider it.

  Emmy: Later. Tell Cam that I probably won’t make it.

  I tried to imagine how a plucky heroine would handle this kind of rejection. Would she drown her sorrows in a pint of ice cream? Maybe. The idea definitely held appeal, but rocky road wasn’t going to fix any of my problems.

  I needed to hack into the Slate.

  Luckily for me, I knew just who to call.

  Chapter 17

  “You want me to hack into a dead man’s tablet?”

  It sounded incredibly morbid when Audrey put it that way, although I couldn’t dispute the facts. All I could do was try to put a more appealing spin on it.

  “You love hacking!” I reminded her. “Trying to figure out an algorithm you can run and—” my mind drew a total blank, “doing all those other hack-y things.”

  “Hack-y things?” Audrey laughed. “Are you sure you want to be a writer? Words are not your friends, Emmy.”

  I shrugged, brushing that aside. “That’s what keeps editors in business. Focus, Audrey. I am offering you an incredible opportunity here. A chance of a lifetime. You can have the first crack at hacking into a beautiful piece of state-of-the-art technology. There’s no way you can pass that up!”

  I didn’t need to see Audrey’s face to know that she was tempted. “How intricate of a password are we talking about here?”

  “Six digits.”

  “I might have to write a program,” she said thoughtfully, and I knew that I had her. Audrey attacked technological puzzles with the same enthusiasm Ben’s dad reserved for the New York Times Crossword. For Audrey, computer hacking was self-expression, defiance, and art all wrapped together.

  “No promises.”

  “Just give it a shot. Work your magic.”

  That was a mistake. Audrey was a tech wizard; Nasir, on the other hand, was an actual magician. Not even kidding. My best friend was torn up over a guy who pulled rabbits out of his hat for fun. They had met at an underground geek event where Audrey’s appreciation for a good card trick had brought them together. Ever since they’d broken up, I had steered clear of anything even remotely connected to magic around her.

  So, of course, I stepped right into it now.

  “Uh, sure.” Audrey obviously wasn’t thinking about the Slate anymore. “So how is it going at Emptor Academy? Make any new friends?”

  “I have, actually,” I said, more than a little surprised by my own answer. “My roommate. Kayla. She’s very upbeat and sparkly. You’ll like her, though.”

  “Sounds like you’re having no trouble fitting in. New school. New friends. Next you’ll have a new boyfriend and no time for your old life anymore.”

  There was something unsettling about her tone that I couldn’t pinpoint until I’d mentally replayed her words. Then it hit me: Audrey was only half-joking.

  “You caught me, Audrey.” I released an overly dramatic love-struck sigh. “I admit it. I’ve been sneaking around with Sebastian on the sly. What can I say? There’s something about the way he says ‘financial quarter’ that makes me melt.”

  “I knew it!”

  I spun around to see a triumphant Kayla thrusting her fist in the air. “I knew you had a thing for Sebastian!”

  “Sarcasm, Kayla. That was sarcasm.”

  “You’re with her now?” Audrey sounded startled. “I didn’t realize she was right there. I’ll let you go then.”

  “She snuck up on me.” I narrowed my eyes at Kayla as I tried to do some immediate damage control. “Did I happen to mention that Kayla is part ninja, part unicorn, and completely immune to sarcasm?”

  Kayla nodded. “I’m fine with that description. Although I think we both know that—”

  There was no way I could maintain two conversations at once. “I’ve got to go, Audrey. I’ll call you again soon, okay? Thanks for helping me.”

  “Sure. No problem,” Audrey said stiffly. “Later, Em.”

  She disconnected first, leaving a tight knot in the pit of my stomach. In the space of twenty minutes I’d managed to strain my relationship with the two most important people in my life. I half-expected Sebastian to announce over the school intercom system that students at Emptor Academy were expected—even encouraged—to alienate people from their past. That this was another one of my lessons. Right up there with accepting lifelines and avoiding adults. I could hear the rough scrape of Sebastian’s voice i
n my head. Here’s your third lesson, Emmy. Ditch anyone who holds you back from greatness.

  “You ready to go?” Kayla asked uncertainly. “I thought you might need help finding our Negotiation and Diplomacy class. Mrs. Chin is strict on tardiness, so move it or lose it.”

  I unplugged the charger and my cell phone beeped at me in disgust. Five percent battery life. Great. Maybe I could send one last text before it conked out on me. Then again, who was really left for me to irritate?

  “Ready.”

  Kayla tucked her arm through mine and began leading me down the hallway like a perky guide dog. “Ex-cellent. So tell me more about your crush on Sebastian. Financial quarter, huh? Interesting. That’s not how it works for most of the girls.”

  I couldn’t pass up such a golden opportunity to do a little digging of my own.

  “Really?” I said, casually. “What about Peyton?”

  Kayla ground to a halt, her eyes widening into a stricken expression. “I totally forgot about Peyton. Trust me, you do not want to get on her bad side.”

  I decided against telling Kayla that her warning was delivered about three hours too late. “Is she part of Sebastian’s harem then?”

  Kayla snorted at the description. “Peyton doesn’t share. She’s bad news. Rumor has it her dad is a foreign ambassador and her mom is a stripper turned trophy wife. Then again, I’ve also heard that she’s an amateur drag racer who made a fortune in Monaco. When it comes to Peyton avoidance is the best policy.” She pursed her lips thoughtfully. “Although if you’re serious about this thing with Sebastian—”

  “I’m not!”

  Kayla shook her head as if she didn’t know why I bothered denying it. “Uh-huh. Well hypothetically if you were interested—”

  “Like if a tragic car accident left my brain scrambled?” That didn’t sound like a half bad movie premise. “If Sebastian showed up and . . . I’m sorry, Kayla. I’m still not buying it. He wouldn’t visit a hospital unless it was part of a scheme to rob the terminally ill.”