“This isn’t goodbye, kid. I’ll be seeing you around.”
I nodded, fighting down a sudden urge to grab him. To make him promise to keep me safe. To teach me how to fight so that I could never be this afraid again. To ask if he had any regrets over what he’d done—if he secretly wished that our paths hadn’t crossed. Instead, I murmured a goodbye, typed in the building code, and wheeled my suitcase inside. Every step made my shoulder throb. My side ache. My noodle arms pleaded for relief. It had never taken me this long to trudge the short distance, and I struggled not to slump against my suitcase. Not to fall asleep right out in the open where anyone could find me.
Just a little farther.
The metallic scrape of the key sliding into the lock filled me with a strange sense of inevitability. As if I couldn’t possibly have died today because this was where I belonged. I fumbled open the door, navigated my way around the deserted kitchen table, and cautiously wheeled my suitcase around the squeaky patch of flooring. Then I paused to lightly rap on the last door down the short hallway.
Silence.
I tested the handle, relief swamping me when it turned beneath my bandaged palm. Then I tiptoed inside with my suitcase before easing the door shut behind me.
“Ben?” I whispered.
No response.
I could make out the basic outline of his prone body beneath a tangle of sheets and blankets. I froze, staring intently at his silhouette while part of me hoped he would roll over and send the blankets sliding to the floor. Watching him sleep was a complete violation of his privacy, but I couldn’t seem to work up any real guilt over it. Desire felt a hell of a lot better than the cold panic that still gripped me.
He mumbled something incomprehensible into his pillow.
“Ben?”
“LemmealoneCam.” The garbled command took me a moment to unpack. Leave. Me. Alone. Cam.
I’d just been downgraded from platonic best friend to little brother status.
Great.
“It’s not Cam.”
“Notmakingpancakes.”
I toed off my shoes and stilled, uncertain. Nemmy probably would’ve launched a full-blown seduction campaign only hours after a close call with death. Then again, Nemmy wouldn’t sneak into a boy’s bedroom while on the verge of a nervous breakdown and looking like a half-drowned rat. At the very least, she would have finger-combed her wet hair into a vague semblance of order.
I was too exhausted to fake a smile, let alone put on a whole devil-may-care persona.
So I repeated his name, louder this time, as I edged closer to the bed. “Ben.”
Some part of his subconscious must have recognized the urgency in my voice, because he twisted in bed and stared up at me in confusion. “Emmy?”
“Yeah. It’s me.” My teeth resumed their tap dance routine as I inched closer until I was well within his reach. Not that I expected him to pull me against his body or anything.
That was pure fantasy.
“What’s wrong?” Ben rubbed his eyes. “Are you okay?”
“I-I—” I couldn’t seem to find the right words. Hell, I couldn’t seem to find any words. “No. I’m not.”
“What happened?” he demanded. “Did someone hurt you?”
I shook my head. “I don’t . . . I need you.” I sucked in a deep breath before perching on the side of his bed. “C-could you lie to me, Ben?”
He straightened, eyeing me warily, as if I’d asked to borrow his mom’s credit card and passport. “Why do you want that?”
“Because you d-don’t lie to me. Ever. So if you t-tell me that I’m going to be okay, I’ll b-believe you.” My teeth chattered so hard that saying anything else was beyond me. Every part of me shook, and not in the sexy trembling way of a heroine filled with uncontrollable lust, but like a skinny Chihuahua forced outside without a sweater.
“Lie to me,” I whispered, afraid that if I closed my eyes I’d be back in the library, crawling on the glass-strewn floor, with Rachel Pierce’s thin fingers wrapped around my ankle. That I’d relive the mocking jeer in her voice, her high-pitched scream, the horrific crack of broken bones. “Lie to me, please. Lie—”
“Emmy.” Ben’s touch was gentle, hesitant, like he was afraid I’d shatter. “You’re going to be okay.”
I stared blindly at the doorway that I had blocked with my suitcase. Any second now somebody would take me away. Somebody would interrogate me. Accuse me. Mock me.
Kill me.
“I’m not lying to you.” Ben wrapped an arm around my waist and tugged me against him. Ignoring the tangled blanket between us, I burrowed into the warm wall of his chest. My muscles remained tense, but he didn’t seem to mind. He didn’t loosen his hold even when I shook with hiccuping sobs.
“It’s okay, Em. Whatever happened, we’ll figure it out, okay? It’s going to be okay.”
That was the last thing I heard before sleep claimed me.
Chapter 34
There was a Post-it stuck to the pillow next to mine when I woke up.
Welcome home, was written in Ben’s familiar scrawl. He didn’t sign it Love, Ben or Always, Ben or anything else that I could have spent hours evaluating. There was no secret message hidden inside the two simple words.
It wasn’t code for I love you madly, desperately, eternally.
All it meant was welcome home.
I had enough craziness in my life without blowing a simple sticky note out of proportion.
Especially since I’d barged into his bedroom before dawn—uninvited—and immediately dissolved into a puddle of tears.
Pathetic.
I shoved my hair away from my gritty, red-rimmed eyes. I never should’ve crawled into Ben’s bed like a five-year-old afraid of finding monsters in her closet. I should have made the mature, responsible choice and gone straight home to my mom.
Ben’s parents had to be at work by now, their sons were at school, making me an interloper in an empty apartment. I was still scared witless. Last night my total lack of direction had come as a relief. Force had taken the wheel, and I’d only needed to keep it together long enough to knock on Ben’s bedroom door. Technically, I began my meltdown in the apartment hallway, but whatever. I had shoved away all thoughts of the future. Except the tomorrow I’d envisioned was today and the rest of the world wasn’t going to slow down just because I felt like a white-bellied fish about to be gutted.
I needed a new plan.
A nuanced survival strategy, with bullet points and checklists and a multi-pronged approach aimed at keeping me safe.
Instead, I slid out of the bed and fumbled inside my suitcase for my photo album. Maybe it was self-indulgent to hide in the pages of the past, but I didn’t care. Future Emmy would just have to deal with it. I sat cross-legged on the warm bed, cocooned in blankets, flipping through pictures that I’d examined thousands of times.
My mom grinned back at me from each page, flaunting over-dramatic poses in front of dozens of Los Angeles landmarks. I tried to imagine what it would have been like to visit California as a family. I could almost feel the oppressive heat of the sun, taste the gritty layer of dust that would coat my teeth near the Hollywood sign, feel my cheek muscles tighten into a stilted smile for the camera, hear my dad insist on taking a few more shots of his girls.
It would have felt like heaven.
I flipped to the close-up photo of my dad’s left eye, searching it once more for some trace of emotion—sadness, anxiety, impatience, amusement—I’d accept anything.
Nothing.
Except this time the tingly you-are-missing-something-right-under-your-nose feeling refused to ease. It prickled, growing in intensity, until I sat rooted with an overwhelming sense of certainty.
I was definitely missing something here.
Something important.
My hand automatically slid into my sweatshirt for the Slate that I’d spent the night ignoring. I hadn’t wanted to think about it. I’d been an emotional trainwreck before Force had
slipped the Slate into my pocket, and having it back had only intensified my anxiety. I’d tried. I’d done my best to get my panic under control. To keep a cool head.
Given the way I had sobbed hysterically all over Ben, I couldn’t have failed any harder.
Internally cringing, I turned on the Slate.
It wasn’t password-protected anymore.
Welcome Emmy Danvers looped and curled across the screen in a swirling script, knocking out my breath faster than a sucker punch in the stomach.
It really had been intended for me. Not Sebastian. Not President Gilcrest or Force or anybody else. Me. It was my name plastered across the home screen. I didn’t doubt that Frederick St. James had found the wrong girl, but my fingers couldn’t stop trembling as I clicked the inbox.
You have 438 new text messages.
I skimmed over half a dozen of them, most of which included the word payment before listing five-digit sums. One client in particular appeared to be growing increasingly desperate for a response judging by the excessive use of exclamation points. The names of the senders were blocked, but half a dozen of them shared Rachel Pierce’s creepy mocking cadence. A chill shuddered through me.
Eeny, meeny, miny, moe.
String up a girl by her toe.
When she hollers, let her go.
Eeny, meeny, miny, moe.
A wave of panic knotted my stomach so tightly I fought back a wave of nausea.
She was dead.
Ms. Pierce had been skilled enough to hide her insanity from her Emptor Academy colleagues, but even she couldn’t cheat death. Not when Force had delivered the final push. There was also one person Ms. Pierce hadn’t been able to trick—not completely—and I clicked on the camera icon to see the world through the eyes of a dead man.
The first image on the screen was me.
It wasn’t the most flattering of photos. My face was scrunched with annoyance, my eyebrows furrowed, as I glared at the screen of a bulky laptop, tuning out the mid-afternoon Starbucks crowd. It was strange seeing myself at the table where it all began. The girl in the photo deserved to have “BEFORE” plastered over her forehead in giant block letters. She looked blissfully ignorant of her own danger. Clueless that in a handful of minutes her world would shatter all around her.
Unprepared to be terrorized, hunted, and nearly shoved out of a third story window.
I zoomed in on my face, wanting to study the girl Frederick St. James had chosen to drag into this mess. My index finger traced the thin lines of frustration that bracketed my eyes, accidentally leaving a trail of bright green dots in my wake. Instead of fading or disappearing when I failed to give the Slate a direct command, a tiny book graphic appeared with moving black squiggles as it flashed: Loading. Loading. Loading.
Loading what, I didn’t know.
The book enlarged until it consumed the whole screen before transforming into a detailed case file. In the top right corner sat my unflattering high school photo, and beneath it was a stalker’s treasure trove of information.
Name: Emmy Violet Danvers
Mother: Vera Lynn Danvers, née Vera Lynn Smith
Father: Daniel Danvers
Spouse: NA
Eyes: Green
Height: 5'7"
I skimmed the rest, which included every crappy apartment building my mom and I had shared and every single report card I’d received in school. My soy allergy. A list of my favorite bands, books, and movies. There was some information that I hadn’t known about myself. Apparently my stern-faced elementary school teacher Mrs. Wolff thought that I displayed great maturity.
I wasn’t sure Mrs. Wolff would stand by those words if she could see me now.
There was more—so much more—but the massive amount of text made the individual sections blur together in my mind. I scrolled down the page, pausing only to read a handful of other teacher evaluations, before I found the statement that Officer McHaffrey had taken from me right outside the Starbucks. Right beneath it was the file Detective Dumbass appeared to be compiling on me, although the Slate had helpfully added the words in-progress on the tab.
Numbly, I scrolled back up to my basic statistics and tried to click on my dad’s name. The Slate refused to link to a new page. My mom’s name required only a brief loading session before it spit out all of her financials, her tax statements, her job recommendations, even the scripts with her lines as Bored Waitress #2 highlighted in yellow. They weren’t even good lines.
Take table four, will ya? I gotta pee.
An unabridged account of her past was spread out before me, and yet the most I could find for Daniel Danvers was a copy of my birth certificate and a name-change form for my mother. She claimed to have taken his name simply because “Danvers” was better for her acting career, far more memorable than Smith. The one time I had pointed out that it made them sound married, she’d merely shrugged and said that the assumptions of strangers weren’t her concern.
I had always thought it might be her way of trying to bring him back.
Not that it had worked, as evidenced by the section inside her file devoted to all her loser boyfriends.
My dry eyes burned as I forced myself to stare at the sweatshirts hanging in Ben’s closet.
It was too much to take in. The names, dates, and figures merged into a tangled mess as I struggled to make sense of the information resting in my hands. To understand the full impact of everything laid out before me.
The Slate had access to information it shouldn’t be capable of discovering.
Things that only law enforcement should be able to see after going through all the proper channels to obtain a warrant. Otherwise it was a total invasion of privacy that couldn’t possibly be legal. It definitely wasn’t ethical for me to be prying into other people’s secrets this way.
So why had the old man given it to me?
For that matter, how had he even come to own it in the first place?
“Not good. Not good. Not good,” I mumbled to myself as I paced from the closet back to the bed. “You can’t use this, Emmy. You need to make Ben’s bed, grab your stuff, and resume your life as a normal, sane member of society. That means no checking into your mom’s credit card history to satisfy your own curiosity.”
My fingers yanked on a corner of the bedspread, sending the photo album toppling onto the floor with a muffled thump. Every muscle in my body stiffened.
There must be something important that you’re not telling me.
I’d turned over Sebastian’s comment so many times in my head that it felt as smooth as sea glass. It had sounded absurd when he’d first said it and nothing that had happened in the interval had changed my mind. If anything, the files on the tablet made it even more painfully obvious how little I knew about anything.
I curled into a ball on the floor, reliving those panic-fueled moments before Ms. Pierce had kicked down the door as an excruciatingly detailed set of flashbacks. The glow of the Slate’s screen as I’d keyed in my Hail Mary of a password. The blinding flash that had spots of color spinning before my eyes. The extreme disorientation I’d felt right before the door exploded.
I’d assumed the Slate had been programmed to incapacitate me as revenge for all my failed attempts, but the Slate hadn’t triggered any other emergency protocols. It hadn’t instantly shut down in the library like it had in the computer lab for Audrey. The screen never blackened.
Instead, it had identified me with a retinal scan in an unlit room.
The blinding flash must have been part of the design, specifically created to compensate for the darkness of the room. A feature that had completely backfired last night. Although there was no way any tech engineers could have foreseen that particular flaw in the design, since most people went their entire lives without being stalked by homicidal private school teachers.
There must be something important that you’re not telling me.
I could relate to the frustration behind those cold words. There was a hell of a lo
t that I still couldn’t piece together. The Slate had identified me from the retinal scan. Okay, fine. Big deal. Welcome Emmy Danvers sprawled across the home screen had sort of spoken for itself.
There had to be a whole lot more to the story.
Instead of thumbing through over four hundred text messages clogging up my inbox, I clicked on the Sent folder.
Help.
I stared at the simple message, time-stamped for 3:17 A.M. with a location listed at the bottom of the message: Emptor Academy, Library. 302L.
I dimly remembered screaming, pleading, begging, as I scrambled away from a killer with a pixie cut. Nobody had heard me. I’d been certain at the time that my fate rested in the hands of whichever security guard happened to be making the rounds that night.
I hadn’t considered the possibility that my Slate called in for backup.
My mind reeled. Why had it chosen Force? Surely he couldn’t be the only person Frederick St. James trusted to watch his back in a brawl. Was the bodyguard/driver simply the closest preapproved person within a certain radius? What if Force had decided to put on his favorite tuxedo and catch a concert at the Kennedy Center? Whose name would the Slate have pulled out of its database then?
The closer I came to getting answers the more questions began stacking up.
The Slate buzzed softly in my lap as the inbox rose to 439 unread messages. Probably another frantic request from yet another mysterious texter. Another mystery to be unraveled. I was damn near drowning in them.
And none of it was pointing me in the direction of my dad. In fact, I was starting to think that the old man had given me the Slate as part of an exercise in futility. Judging by the lack of information in my dad’s file, Frederick St. James had made zero progress tracking him down.
There must be something important that you’re not telling me.
I reached for the photo album. Maybe it wasn’t something that I knew. Maybe it was something that I had.
Carefully, I tugged the photo of my dad’s left eye out of the protective plastic cover, trying not to leave any smudges on the edges. If the Slate could perform a retinal scan in a near pitch-black room, then there was a fighting chance it could handle this.
Dial Em for Murder Page 24