by Meg Cabot
I’m out of my chair like a shot, without a word to Jordan or anybody. I hear him call after me, but I don’t have any time to waste with explanations. Christopher and Amber are already halfway through the TV lounge. If I don’t act fast, that girl might end up as a stain on the elevator motor room floor.
But then, to my astonishment, instead of turning toward the elevators, Amber and Christopher actually walk out the front doors of the building.
I follow, darting past the groups of kids congregated in the lobby. Nighttime is when the hall really comes alive. Residents I’ve never seen before are leaning against the reception desk, chatting with the student worker on duty. The guard—not Pete, who works days—is harassing a clique of kids who claim to know someone on the fifth floor whose name they couldn’t remember. Why can’t the guard just be a pal and let them in?
I bolt past all of them, throwing open the doors and stumbling out into the warm autumnal evening.
Washington Square Park is crawling with cops at night, cops and tourists and drug dealers and chess players, who sit at the benches in the chess circle until the park closes at midnight, playing by the light of the street lamps. High school kids from Westchester, in their parents’ Volvos, tool down the street, playing their radios too loudly and occasionally having their cars impounded for creating a public nuisance. It’s a wild scene, and one of the reasons why so many kids request rooms overlooking the Square…when there’s nothing on TV, there’s always the park to watch.
Which is precisely what Christopher and Amber are doing. They’re leaning against one of Fischer Hall’s outdoor planters, smoking cigarettes, and watching the NYPD make a bust across the street. Christopher has his arms folded across his chest, and is puffing away like Johnny Depp or someone, while Amber twitters like a little bird, holding her cigarette like someone who isn’t used to holding one at all.
There isn’t a moment to lose, I can see that. I approach them, trying to look casual. I imagine that’s how Cooper would have handled the situation, anyway.
“Hey,” I say amiably to Christopher. “Can I bum a smoke?”
“Sure,” says Christopher. He draws a pack of Camel Lights from his shirt pocket and hands me one.
“Thanks,” I say. I put the cigarette between my lips, then lean down so Christopher can light it with the Zippo he’s brandished.
I’ve never been a smoker. For one thing, if you’re a singer, it messes up your vocal cords. For another, I just don’t get how a cigarette could ever be better than a Butterfinger, so if you’re going to indulge, why not go the way of delicious peanut buttery crisp?
But I stand there and pretend to inhale, wondering what I should do next. What would Nancy Drew do? Jessica Fletcher? That other one, what was her name? On Crossing Jordan? God, I totally suck as a detective. What’s going to happen after Cooper and I get together—you know, after I get my degree and all? How are we going to be all Nick and Nora Charles, when Nora can’t hold up her share of the detecting? This is a very distressing thought. I try to push it from my mind.
Across the street, the cops are busting some drunk who thought it would be amusing to expose himself to the people sitting in the chess circle. I don’t know why some men feel this compulsion to show off their genitalia. It’s invariably the guy with the least interesting appendage, too.
I say as much to Christopher and Amber. You know, to make conversation. She looks startled, though Christopher laughs.
“Yeah,” he says. “There should be a law. Only drunks with at least six inches should be allowed to drop trou.”
I look at him, my eyebrows raised. Trou. He’s kind of funny, Christopher Allington. Did Ted Bundy have a sense of humor? He did when Mark Harmon played him in that movie I saw on Lifetime the other night…
Across the street, the drunk is hurling insults at the cops who’ve cuffed him, and a few people in the chess circle are shouting back at him. Chess players are not anywhere near as mild-mannered as they’ve been made out to be by the media, you know.
“Oh my,” Amber says, when one particularly colorful epithet reaches us. “They sure don’t talk like that to the police back home.”
“And where’s home?” I ask her, nonchalantly flicking my ash on the sidewalk. At least, I hope I look nonchalant.
“Boise, Idaho,” Amber says, as if there’s more than one Boise.
“Boise,” I echo. “Never been there.” Total lie. I’d performed at the Boise Civic Center before five thousand screaming preteens during the Sugar Rush tour. “How about you?” I ask Christopher.
“Nope,” he says. “Never been to Boise. Hey, don’t I know you from somewhere?”
“Me?” I try to look surprised. “I don’t think so.”
“Yeah,” he says. “I do. Hey, you in law school?”
“No,” I say, flicking more ash. They may give you cancer and everything, but cigarettes really do make great props if you’re trying to look casual. For instance, while catching a possible murderer.
“Really?” Christopher blows pale smoke from his nostrils. No fair! He knows smoke tricks! “ ’Cause I swear I’ve seen you somewhere before.”
“Probably right around here. I’ve seen you lots. You’re President Allington’s son, Christopher, aren’t you?”
You’d have thought I’d smacked him in the face with a sack full of Gummi Bears, he looks so surprised. For a second I think he’s going to swallow his cigarette.
But he recovers himself pretty quickly.
“Uh, yeah,” he says. His eyes are gray, and at the moment, still friendly. “How’d you know?”
“Someone pointed you out,” I say. “Do you live here? With your folks?”
That stings. He says quickly, “Oh no. Well, I mean, I have my own place, but it’s in the law school dorm, over there—”
“You’re not an undergrad?” Amber asks. She clearly isn’t very swift on the uptake. “You’re a law student?”
“Yeah,” Christopher said. He doesn’t look quite as comfortable as he had before I’d mosied over and dropped my little bomb. Poor guy. He doesn’t know I have even more ammunition up my (capped) sleeve.
“I didn’t know you were President Allington’s son,” Amber says, with something like reproachfulness in her little Minnie Mouse voice.
“Well, it’s not something I like to advertise,” Christopher mutters.
“And I thought you said your name was Dave.”
“Did I?” Christopher finishes his cigarette, drops the butt on the sidewalk, and stamps it out. “You must not have heard me right. It was kind of loud in there. I’m sure I said my name’s Chris.”
Across the street, the cops haul the pantless drunk into a squad car. Now they’re all standing around, filling out forms attached to clipboards and drinking coffee somebody’s bought from the deli around the corner. The drunk bangs on the car window, wanting some coffee, too.
Everyone ignores him.
Okay, this sucks. I’m turning out to be world’s worst detective. I’m definitely going to have to take some courses in criminal justice. You know, when I pass my six months’ probation and can start taking classes free.
“It’s so sad, isn’t it?” I ask, in a voice even I think sounds way too chipper—sort of like Less Than Zero’s voice from the jean store the other day. “All the losers there are in this city, I mean. Like that pants-dropping drunk getting hauled away right across the street. Oh, and those stupid girls here in the buildings. The ones that died—what was it, again? Oh, yeah. Elevator surfing. Can you believe anyone would do anything that dumb?”
I glance at Chris to see how he’s taking this direct reference to his victims. But he doesn’t look disturbed at all…
…unless you can call pulling out another cigarette and lighting it disturbed.
Which, uh, I guess it is. In a way. But not in the way I meant.
“Oh,” gasps Amber, in a valiant attempt to hold up her end of the conversation. “I know! That was so sad. I knew that last gi
rl, sort of. One time I got stuck in the elevator with her. It was only for about a minute, but she was freaking out, because she hated heights. When I heard how she’d died, I was like, ‘What?’ ’Cause why would somebody that scared of heights do something so dangerous?”
“Roberta Pace, you mean?” I slide my gaze toward Chris, to see how he reacts to the name.
But he’s busy checking his watch—a Rolex. A real one, too, not one of those ones you can buy on the street for forty bucks, either.
“Yeah, that was her name. God, wasn’t that sad? She was so nice.”
“I know,” I nod gravely. “And what’s even weirder than her being afraid of heights, but elevator surfing anyway, is that I heard just the day before she died, she’d met some guy—”
I don’t get to finish my sentence, though. Because just then iron fingers close around my upper arm, and I suddenly find myself yanked from behind, hard.
16
* * *
Get up at ten
Hit the beach, and then
The mall, a matinee
That’s it for the day
Then we go out
Hit the strip and shout
As stars fill the sky
Someone tell me why
Every day can’t be summer
Every day can’t be summer
Every day can’t be summer
And I can’t spend it with you?
“Summer”
Performed by Heather Wells
Composed by Dietz/Ryder
From the album Summer
Cartwright Records
* * *
Stumbling, I put out a hand to steady myself, and feel the unmistakable ripple of rock-hard—and gym-formed—abdominal muscles beneath my fingers.
Is there any part of Jordan Cartwright that isn’t hard?
Including, apparently, his head?
He drags me a few feet away from Chris and Amber.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Jordan demands, ripping the cigarette from my fingers and stomping on it. “You’re smoking now? A few months of living with that degenerate Cooper, and you’re smoking? Do you have any idea what that stuff will do to your vocal cords?”
“Jordan.” I can’t believe this is happening. And in front of my prime suspect!
I try to keep my voice down, so Chris won’t overhear me.
“I wasn’t inhaling,” I whisper. “And I don’t live with Cooper, all right? I mean, I do, but on a separate floor.” Then I stop whispering, because suddenly I’m furious. I mean, who does he think he is, anyway? “And what business is it of yours? Do I need to remind you that you’re engaged? And not to me?”
“I may be engaged to someone else, Heather,” Jordan says, “but that doesn’t mean I don’t still care—deeply—about you. You know, Dad said you’d hit rock bottom, but I had no idea. A guy like that, Heather? Really? I mean, he has about as much fashion sense as”—he throws a glance at Chris’s khakis, and shudders—“Cooper!”
“It’s not like that, Jordan.” I look over my shoulder. Chris and Amber are still there, far enough away that—fortunately—they can’t hear our raised voices. Chris looks relatively unaffected by my conversation with him, but I do notice that every now and then, his gray-eyed gaze strays toward us. Is he afraid? Afraid that the jig is up at last?
Or is he just wondering where Jordan bought his puffy shirt?
“Don’t look,” I say softly to Jordan. “But that guy I was talking to? I think he might be a murderer.”
Jordan looks over at Chris. “Who? That guy?”
“I said don’t look!”
Jordan tears his gaze from Chris and stares down at me instead. Then he reaches out and crushes me to his chest.
“Oh, you poor, sweet girl,” he says. “What’s Cooper done to you?”
I struggle to break free of his smothering embrace—or at least to speak without getting chest hair in my mouth.
“This doesn’t have anything to do with Cooper,” I say, conscious that the student worker at the desk is trying to hide a smirk as she watches us through the window. “Girls are dying in this building, and I think—”
“So this is where you two disappeared to!”
We both spin around and stare wide-eyed at Rachel, who’d slipped outside unnoticed by either of us.
“You missed the awards ceremony,” Rachel chastises us, jokingly. “Marnie was so thrilled to win that she cried.”
“Wow,” I say, without the slightest enthusiasm. “Neat.”
“I came looking for you two,” Rachel says, “because I thought you might want to join me for a drink in my place…”
Jordan and I exchange glances. There is a desperate glint in his. I don’t know what he sees in mine. Probably confusion. Rachel had invited me up to her place only once before, for a glass of wine after the first freshmen check-in of the semester, and I’d been totally uncomfortable not only because, well, she’s my boss, and I was desperate to do whatever I had to do to make sure I passed my six months’ probation, but also because…
Well, Rachel’s apartment is really clean. Not that I’m messy, or anything, but…
Okay, I’m a little messy. I will admit there’s a lot of stuff jammed in my closets and under my bed and sort of, well, all over the place.
But at Rachel’s, everything had been put neatly away. There were no stray copies of Us Weekly next to the toilet, like at my place, or bras hanging off any doorknobs, or wadded-up Ho Ho wrappers on the nightstand. It was like she’d been expecting company.
Either that, or she keeps her place that clean all the time…
But no. That can’t possibly be true. That just isn’t even human.
Plus, I’d noticed that the few CDs she did have—neatly stacked, in alphabetical order—were by artists such as Phil Collins and Faith Hill.
PHIL COLLINS. AND FAITH HILL.
Not that there’s anything wrong them. They’re actually very talented artists. I totally loved that “Circle of Life” song the first fifty times I heard it…
“Actually, Rachel,” I say carefully, “I’m kinda tired.”
“Me, too,” Jordan chimes in quickly. “It’s been a really long day.”
“Oh,” Rachel says, looking distinctly disappointed. “Maybe another time, then.”
“Sure,” I say, not looking at Jordan—because really, this whole thing is all his fault. Rachel would never have invited me up for drinks if it hadn’t been for Jordan. She had pretended not to recognize him, but I’d overheard one of the RAs tipping her off. Tomorrow she’ll probably be all over me with questions about his eligibility.
Because he’s worth WAY more than a hundred grand.
“Well,” I say. “See you in the morning.”
“Right. Good night!” Rachel smiles. To Jordan, she says, “Nice meeting you, Jordan!”
“Likewise,” says Jordan, almost as if he means it.
Then, taking Jordan’s arm, I steer him back toward Waverly Place, before the conversation can get any more awkward, and he can embarrass me any more in front of the people I work with.
“Oh my God,” I say to him, as we walk. “What do you think I should do? About Amber, I mean? What if she turns out to be his next victim? I’ll never forgive myself…although I totally busted him in front of her, with the whole ‘Dave’ thing. Don’t you think I busted him? Don’t you think she’ll be a little wary of him now? Oh God. Do you think I should go to the police? I don’t have any proof it’s him, though. Except…except Cooper probably still has the condom! I could use it as some kind of leverage—like, ‘Confess or I’ll take it to the cops.’ Or something.”
Jordan, beside me, sounds horrified.
“Condom? Heather, what are you—”
“I told you,” I say, stomping a foot. “I’m trying to catch a killer. Or at least I think he’s a killer. I can’t be sure. Your brother thinks I’ve got an overactive imagination. But you think it’s weird, don’t you, Jordan? Two girls dead in
as many weeks, neither of them with a reputation for elevator surfing, and both of them just having a boyfriend for the first time? I mean, doesn’t that sound suspicious to you?”
We turn the corner onto Waverly Place, and one of the Rastafarians approaches, hoping, I guess, that I’d change my mind at last and would take him up on his offer of “Smoke? Smoke?”
Instead of ignoring him and answering my question, Jordan snarls, “Back off!” at the drug dealer, who really isn’t a very threatening presence. I mean, I’m way taller and probably twenty pounds heavier than he is. No wonder the poor guy looks so surprised at Jordan’s outburst.
Which is when I realize who’s really standing in front of me. Not a friend. Not even an acquaintance. But my ex-boyfriend.
“Oh, just forget it,” I say, and drop his arm before heading home.
The only problem is, Jordan follows me.
“What’d I do?” he wants to know. “Heather, just tell me. I’m sorry. It’s just that I don’t know how you expect me to react. Dead girls and condoms and drug dealers. And you smoke now. What kind of life is this, Heather? What kind of life?”
I start up the steps to Cooper’s brownstone, fumbling for my keys in the light from the street lamp.
“Look,” I say. I’m working the locks as fast as I can, conscious that Jordan has come up the stairs behind me, and is blocking all the light from the street lamp with his big, puffy shirt. “It’s my life, okay? Sorry it’s such a mess. But you know, Jordan, you had a hand in making it that way—”
“I know,” Jordan cries. “But you wouldn’t go to counseling with me, remember? I begged you—”
Both of his heavy hands land on my shoulders, this time not to shake me, but to turn me around to face him. I blink up at him, unable to see his features because the street lamp behind him has made a halo around his head, casting everything within it into dark shadows.
“Heather,” Jordan goes on, “every couple has problems. But if they don’t work through them together, they won’t last.”