by Lisa Roecker
“Wait. What?” Seth held up five cheese-covered fingers.
“Bethany is missing. The Brotherhood took her. It happened the night of Obsideo.” Taylor sounded exasperated already. I didn’t have the heart to tell her how much patience was usually required when dealing with Seth.
“How do you know?” Liam asked quietly.
“What do you mean?” Taylor smoothed a nonexistent tangle from her hair.
“I mean, how do you know they took her? How do you even know she’s missing?”
“Huh. Liam has a point. Her mom sent in a note about Bethany being out a week to study her chakras. They’re even giving her extra credit in Anthropology.” Seth’s job working in the school office had many redeeming qualities when it came to investigating Pemberly Brown.
Hope flared in my chest. Maybe this was all just some huge misunderstanding. The thought of Beefany in the downward-facing-dog pose on a commune somewhere made me a little giddy. My shoulders sagged when I saw the look on Taylor’s face, and I remembered the mess at Bethany’s house, the police station, and of course the text with her picture.
“She’s gone, okay? I heard her scream.” Taylor’s voice took on a hysterical edge. “How do you explain this?”
She pulled up Bethany’s picture on her phone.
The boys squinted at the phone, and Seth grabbed it out of Taylor’s hands and started manipulating the image with Cheeto-stained fingers. “Do you recognize where she is? Looks like a paneled room of some sort. A basement perhaps. Have you confirmed it’s the Brotherhood and not that serial killer who talks girls into getting into his van to help him with a baby?”
“Pretty sure, Chester the Cheetah,” Taylor snipped, eyeing the orange fingerprints Seth had left behind on her phone. Seth turned bright red.
“Lay off him, T.” Taylor had no idea how lucky we were to have Seth on her side, and I wasn’t going to let her make him feel like a jackass. “Besides, the real reason we’re here is this.” I handed over the paper from the headmaster’s office.
“Who wrote this? How did you get it?” Liam had entered full-on protector mode.
“Ben Montrose. I recognize the handwriting.”
“Chem Ben?” Liam sounded skeptical.
“Yeah. Chem Ben.” Liam and I had nicknames for all the random people at Pemberly Brown. It was our thing, or at least it had been before.
“Well, there’s really only one option then, right?” Seth licked his orange fingers and started walking toward the door.
“And what might that be?” Something told me Taylor was going to regret asking that question.
“Operation Save Bethany launches at nineteen hundred hours.” Seth replied, licking the remaining Cheeto cheese from his fingers. “Now get me Ben’s cell number.”
“You think calling him is a good idea? You must be kidding.” Taylor looked like she was literally going to disembowel Seth, which would have been kind of awesome if Seth wasn’t one of my best friends.
I immediately inserted myself between them. “No way you’re calling Ben. We already have a plan. We’re going to his house, and I’m going to ring the doorbell with some fake lab work for Chemistry, and then Taylor is going to set off his car alarm while I tear through his room looking for evidence.”
“Wow. Great plan, Kate. Just out of curiosity, what exactly are you planning on doing when he comes back to his room to find you knee-deep in his secret Brotherhood bullshit?” Liam spat his words at me like nails.
“Oh, I’m sorry. Do you have a better idea? Ooh, I know. Maybe you could just call your brother and have him light his garage on fire or something.” I knew as soon as I said the words that I’d taken it a step too far, and the hurt on Liam’s face confirmed it. Arson was kind of a hot-button issue for the Gilmour family.
“Enough fighting, you guys.” It was Seth’s turn to step in and play peacemaker. “I’ve already got a plan and it’s genius. I just need his number and a laptop.”
Seth proceeded to pull up an Internet site guaranteed to deliver completely anonymous text messages. He typed in three lines that pretty much made him a poet, in my mind.
Station 10 at 9. Bring the Bethany file..
We all stood there huddled around Taylor’s laptop until Seth submitted the form that would send the text. The second it sent, he snapped the MacBook shut and stood up. “Now, go grab me some bedsheets and some beef jerky. We’ve got a missing girl to find.”
Chapter 24
“Pull your hood tighter. I still see blue.” Taylor yanked the hood of my makeshift black robe closer around my face.
“Last time I checked, the Brotherhood doesn’t have any blue-haired members,” Seth chortled. His hood was hiding his face, but I would have bet my imaginary trust fund that his lips were pursed into his ridiculous I’m-the-red-headed-Jerry-Seinfeld smile.
“Really? Last time I checked they also don’t have any members under 5-foot-1 either.”
“Whoa. Uncalled for, Kate. Totally uncalled for. Not to mention the fact that I was 5-foot-4 at my annual checkup last week.”
Liam inserted himself between Seth and me and grabbed my shoulders. “You—put the hair in a ponytail. Now.” After my earlier comment, I wasn’t exactly in a position to argue with him, and before I had a chance to say something that might make things okay between us, he’d turned to Seth. “And you—there’s no way you’re 5-foot-4. If you’re going to round up, at least go for something realistic, like 5-foot-2.” Seth sagged a little in his robe, and Liam quickly added, “But the robe totally lengthens you, man. You should think about wearing one more often.”
“I hate to break up whatever it is you are doing over there, but I think I heard someone,” Taylor hissed from behind her hood.
Sure enough, Ben was getting out of his BMW and heading toward Farrow’s Arches. Operation Save Bethany was clearly a success. Cheesy code names aside, a couple things seemed clear:
1. The Brotherhood was involved, and
2. Ben was doing their dirty work.
The only thing we couldn’t quite determine was a motive.
And that was exactly what we were going to figure out tonight. Oh, and get the information on Bethany. In my imagination, Ben handed over a detailed map to her whereabouts so we could go about bringing her home. Case closed.
“So, Kate. You know the plan?” Seth began, and I felt Liam stiffen next to me.
“She’s just standing there, Seth. There is no plan,” Liam said.
“We’ve been over this a million times already. It’s going to be fine. I’m just going to be there as backup in case Taylor drops the file…or something.”
Liam grunted, and without seeing his face, it was impossible to tell if it was an I’ve-got-your-back grunt or an I-hate-my-dumb-ass-soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend grunt.
“I am not going to drop the file.” I knew from the tone of her voice that Taylor was rolling her eyes. “The Brotherhood always travels in groups. It is more believable if there are four of us there. Liam does all the talking.” She turned to him. “You remember the Latin?”
“Of course. Vir prudens non contra ventum mingit.” I couldn’t see his face because of the hood, but I could tell by the tone of his voice that he was completely serious. Or at least trying to be. I wrinkled my forehead as I attempted to translate.
“Wait a second,” Seth said, pulling back his hood to demonstrate his utter confusion. “I thought their greeting was Non ducor, duco. ‘I am not led, I lead.’”
Liam’s shoulders began shaking just as I finished my rough translation. “A wise man does not urinate against the wind?” I pulled down my hood and looked at Liam. He winked at me, and it was pretty much the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen in my life. Normally, I’m very anti-wink when it comes to guys, but in this case it was a wink of absolution. It was a wink that meant Liam and I were actually going to be okay.
“You’ve been planning that all night, haven’t you?” I reached over and squeezed his arm. It was the first time
I’d touched him in at least twenty-four hours, and his strong forearm felt so good beneath my fingertips. When he grabbed my hand and quickly brought my palm to his lips, I felt all the air leave my body. As much as I hated to admit it, for fear of sounding like a ridiculous, boy-crazy damsel in distress, it felt good to have my boyfriend back.
Taylor whipped back her hood, her blue eyes icy. “I’m glad this is such a joke to you,” she spat, clearly not in the mood for games.
Liam dropped my hand and sat up a little straighter. “Sorry, T., I’ve got it. Non ducor, duco. Don’t worry.”
She replaced her hood, gently tucking back a stray piece of her blond hair, while the rest of us followed suit. I couldn’t resist shooting Liam a smile before I covered my face, though. With the way Taylor had had him practicing the simple Latin for the past two hours, it was pretty funny.
“Liam greets, I get the file, and then we all get out of there,” Taylor finished.
“He’s punching in the code.” Seth’s voice cracked with excitement and we all froze, knowing that if we missed our window into the tunnels, all of our plans would disintegrate.
Ben crouched underneath the arches in some sort of velour sweatsuit, enough product in his hair to style the entire Jersey Shore cast, and flung open the door to the tunnels. He took a quick look around the gardens and stepped into the hole in the ground and finally disappeared, closing the hatch behind him.
Taylor counted underneath her breath. “Five, four, three, two…now!”
We all ran for the hatch, but Liam got there first and swung it open just before the lock clicked.
He motioned for all of us to remain completely silent as we filed down the stairs, led by flickering gas lamps affixed to the walls. As usual, the walls seemed to inch together the lower we descended, my lungs constricting right along with them. The only thing worse than being underground was being underground alone, I reminded myself. I had my friends. I had backup. I needed to focus.
Ben stood alone at the bottom of the steps, clutching a thick manila folder to his chest. I lowered my chin, hopeful that the black sheet was effectively concealing my identity.
“Non ducor, duco,” Liam said, the Latin sounding strange on his lips.
Ben just bowed his head and cowered in response.
“Is that the file?” Liam wasn’t wasting any time.
Ben nodded his overly gelled head and held out the folder, his hand shaking. The folder was thick and heavy, and his nerves forced the contents to the edge. Taylor must have noticed, because her hand shot out to grab the folder, but it was too late. Ben dropped the folder, and suddenly hundreds of photographs, folded notes, and even some personal items like lip gloss and pressed flowers littered the damp bricks of the tunnel floor.
I dove to the ground and started grabbing whatever I could get my hands on. I didn’t think about anything except the photographs of Bethany. We finally had all the evidence we needed to find her. I could practically taste it.
I could also feel the frigid air on my bare cheeks. I heard the gust of cool air as Taylor swished past me in her robes. My hand flew to my head a second too late.
I looked up to see Ben staring at me, his normally squinty eyes as big as quarters. “Kate? What the hell are you doing here?”
Chapter 25
“WTF?” Ben yanked back Liam’s hood, then Seth’s, and finally Taylor’s.
We all dove for the closest picture at the same time, but I got there first. I picked up the snapshot of Bethany, blurry headstones set behind her in the background, and flipped it over. It was embossed with a miniature wax version of the Brotherhood’s crest. The lion. The key. Fortes et liber, “strong and free.” It was all there.
Ben ripped the picture out of my hands. “I’m so frickin’ screwed. Give me that folder. Now.” His tone surprised me. I’d never heard him sound so authoritative.
“Where is she?” Taylor stepped in front of me, blocking Ben from making a grab for the folder.
He just shook his head. “Kate, you have to give that back.” He lunged past Taylor and made a grab for me, but Liam was too fast for him. He grabbed Ben by his jacket and shoved him back against the wall.
“How’d you even get in, Ben?” I asked as he rubbed the shoulder that had slammed into the brick wall. There was a story here; I could smell it. Or maybe that was just some type of toxic black mold growing in the tunnels. Regardless, the Brotherhood was extremely exclusive. Only the most distinguished and the most popular students were tapped to join. And Ben was neither.
“Legacy,” he whispered in a monotone voice, like he’d heard the question a million times before. “My dad was Class of ’87.”
“Where. Is. She?” Taylor’s words were laced with acid. She inched forward in a way that barely counted as moving, and by the time the last word left her lips, she was practically on top of him.
“Who? Oh, you mean Bethany? I have no idea. She totally disappeared.”
“Liar!” Taylor lost control and screamed the word like a curse.
If Ben’s skin hadn’t been tanned Oompa Loompa orange by however many minutes a week in his personal tanning bed or whatever man tanner he slathered on every morning, he would have gone completely white. Instead he turned the color of a melted Creamsicle.
“I’m not lying, I swear.” His voice squeaked a little, and my gut told me he was telling the truth.
Guess Liam’s gut must have told him the same thing, because he said, “But then what’s with all the pictures?”
“It’s some stupid initiation thing. Viglio. I think it means ‘watching’ in Latin or something.” Ben ran his hand through his hair, which was actually kind of an impressive feat, given the amount of product on his head. “I had to follow her 24/7 for weeks. It’s supposed to be their way of keeping track of the Sisterhood. They make the new guys do it because it’s boring and if you get caught you look like a sex offender.”
Something popped, the sound reverberating off the brick walls surrounding us, and we all spun around to find the source. The last thing we needed was company. Seth’s cheeks were flaming, his jaw working slowly, an empty peanut shell near his feet.
“Low blood sugar,” he said, holding out a fistful of nuts. “I keep ’em in my pocket, you know…just in case.” Of course he did. But I was thankful for the distraction.
I had to get out of there with the file. I could see the stairs out of the corner of my eye, and even if Ben knew nothing about Bethany’s whereabouts, there was bound to be something useful in here somewhere. There was no way I was going to risk Ben making a grab for it. Plus, I got the feeling that we were running out of time.
“How long did you watch her?” Taylor asked. Her carefully modulated voice was so dramatically changed that it verged on creepy.
“Months. Until all of a sudden she just disappeared. That’s when they made me start watching Kate.” He gestured vaguely at me.
“When was the last time you saw Bethany?” Taylor completely ignored the fact that I was being targeted by the Brotherhood. I inched farther up the stairs. A little closer to freedom.
“It was the night of Obsideo. Wait, I think…” Ben shoved past Taylor and Liam and came straight for me and his damn folder. I stood up and made a run for it, out the top of the hatch and into the night. I picked up speed, the cold fingers of the wind combing through my hair, and then slipped on a patch of ice. As I slammed to the ground, the folder bounced out of my hands, flinging hundreds of pictures of Bethany all over the wet snow. I made a pathetic attempt to start gathering the evidence, but everything in my body hurt at the same time.
Ben’s patent leather loafers crunched past my head, and I watched as he grabbed a picture that lay a few feet away from me. Instead of taking off, he bent down next to me.
“They’d kill me if they knew I had this.”
Bethany’s dark hair was loose around her shoulders. Her scarf was wrapped in one of those twisty knot things that all the popular girls seemed to know how to do by d
efault. The tiny hairs on my arms stood on end as I pulled the picture closer to my face to get a better look at her. An odd little smile lit her face. Like she had a secret.
“That’s the last picture I got of her.” He stared at it a little too long and finally looked at me, urging me to examine it closer without using any words at all. As much as Ben always seemed to trigger my d-bag radar, at this moment he couldn’t have seemed further from it.
“Do you have any idea where she went?”
He shrugged. “I asked around at school, and everyone said she was on some retreat.”
I plucked the picture from his hands to get a closer look. There was a shadow behind Bethany that I’d missed the first time I looked at the picture. I had been so focused on her that I never noticed there was someone standing behind her.
I lifted the picture up to the streetlight to get a closer look. Not just one figure, two. The second person was a few steps behind the first and dressed entirely in black, a ski mask obscuring his face. But the other figure hadn’t put his mask on yet. In fact, if I looked closely enough I could see it dangling from his long fingertips just underneath his chin. If the camera had flashed just an instant later, I was sure his face would have been obscured.
I turned to Ben, who raised his eyebrows knowingly and then looked away. Apparently we both saw what was there. In the dim shadow behind Bethany’s right shoulder I could just make out Bradley Farrow’s face.
Chapter 26
“Bradley Farrow.” Taylor had barely uttered the name before she headed back down into the tunnels. We had no choice but to file down after her. “Bethany! Bethany!” She screamed the name as she ran, and Ben kept muttering things about getting his ass kicked as we chased after her. I knew exactly where she was going, and I was terrified at what we might find there.