Dying for an Education

by Stacey Alabaster

  22

  Claire

  I sucked in a deep breath. You could practically smell the history, the learning, the words, and I got a little shiver down my spine.

  Libraries were my favorite place in the world.

  Alyson pulled a face. “Oh boy. You’ve lost it.”

  “This place is magnificent, Alyson. No wonder you want to study here.” It was five levels and filled with over ten thousand books. All free to borrow to any student. I was so jealous.

  “Yeah, well, you loving it so much is kinda putting me off it, to be honest.”

  Typical Alyson. Very, very typical.

  She tried to pull out her phone as we reached the second level but groaned when there was no reception. “Well, we are under a ton of sandstone,” I pointed out. It was a dead spot.

  I was so excited when we approached the philosophy section. “Wow, a whole section on Kant!” I exclaimed. “I can’t believe how many books there are here!”

  “Don’t forget, you own a bookshop,” Alyson pointed out.

  True. Well, co-owned. At the moment, co-habited. We were really going to have to find a more permanent solution to the Bianca problem.

  She was out on a date with that Sam kid, though. Who knew, maybe they would hit it off so much that Bianca would fall in love and want to move to Ferguson to be closer to him. She could move into his dorm room. Hey, it would be a higher standard of living than the loft in my bookshop. Barely.

  Alyson was creeping around trying to find someone. “Melissa told me that she’s been spending all her time here since Rick’s death. I just kinda assumed this was where she spent her Saturdays.”

  Alyson had given me an overview of the case and I was doing my best to catch up. To be honest, all I wanted to do was take in the scent of the books and huddle up in the corner with a pile of them for a few hours. But we had a dead man on our hands and we had to get to work. This Melissa girl didn’t sound too bad to me anyway. She sounded studious. Like the sort of person that Alyson should make friends with. I was keen to meet her and try to do a little friendship matchmaking, to make sure that they would get to know each other better. Alyson was going to need a good influence while she was up here away from me.

  Alyson finally spotted her curled up at a corner table, staring into space. She stormed right over to her while I followed at a slower pace. You weren’t supposed to run in a library!

  “Belle told us there is more to the story, Melissa.”

  I didn’t like this tone that Alyson was taking with Melissa, the girl who should be her new best friend. I shot her a look to tell her to take it easy.

  Melissa stared up at the both of us. “Well, I don’t know about that,” she said, and she sounded innocent to me. “I just keep my head down and study. I don’t like to get caught up in the drama.” Yep, she definitely sounded like a good friend for Alyson. I was liking this girl more and more with every word she spoke. “All I know is that she got a bad grade.”

  Alyson looked at me, and there was a strange look in her eyes. Uh oh. I knew that look. She was about to get herself and everyone involved in big trouble. I just didn’t know exactly how, yet.

  “Melissa, can you get us a copy of that assignment?”

  Melissa went even whiter than she already was. She actually stood up and kind of fronted up to Alyson. I had to give her credit for that. “Are you crazy?”

  Alyson, to her credit, remained calm, although I could not believe her gumption. “All you need to do is sneak into Belle’s room. You live right next door to her. It will be easy!”

  Melissa shook her head. “You are asking me to put my place at this university at risk, Alyson.”

  “This is for Rick, Melissa. So, what do you say?”

  23

  Alyson

  They always objected at first, put up a bit of a fight, but people were pretty easy to convince as long as you showed them what was in it for them. Or at least what they could do to help the greater good…even if it went against their own personal morals.

  Claire was still a little bit sullen as we waited outside the towers for Melissa to come downstairs. The morning sun had gone behind the clouds and the chill had set back in.

  I must have offended her delicate moral sensibilities as well.

  But she told me it wasn’t that—or wasn’t just that. “Melissa seems like such a nice girl. I thought the two of you should be friends.”

  I just stared at Claire. Was she really saying that? After everything we had seen? “Claire, it’s the nice ones who are always guilty. And the ones that seem like horrible people are always innocent in the end.” I tapped my index finger against my temple like I had it all figured out now. I knew what to look for. The nicer they were to you at the start, the more likely they were to be a murderer. Well, I wasn’t going to fall for that one again.

  Claire peered at me down her nose. “Hang on… Are you suggesting that Melissa might be the one who actually killed Rick?”

  I shrugged. “What I’m saying is that she is probably not as sweet and innocent as she seems.” I nodded upwards. “Especially if she is willing to do this.”

  Claire opened her mouth to say something, then closed it again. Ha. She must have known I had a point.

  “It’s cold,” she complained. “How are you going to survive up here?”

  Good question. “I’ll have to invest in some heavier jackets.”

  Claire was as much of a beach baby as I was, she just didn’t want to admit to it. But she was shivering.

  “What is taking Melissa so long?” I asked. I was starting to get anxious.

  “She’s probably been caught. She’ll be thrown out of the university and you’ll be next,” Claire replied drolly. But the thing was, she meant it, and maybe she even wanted it to be true. Only in the sense that she would be proven right about the validity of my plan.

  Melissa came running out with a flushed face and shoved the document in my hands. “That was so scary,” she said, her whole face wobbly. “I am never doing anything like that again.”

  Later on in the quad, Claire made a point of repeating that back to me and added: “If she was that scared to just steal a piece of paper, then she’s hardly likely to have committed murder, is she?”

  I was on my fourth iced coffee for the day. I took a sip and thought about that. Well, for one, she could be a really good actress. And two: “It’s relatively easy to push a person out of a window. She has a flighty manner about her. She could have just pushed Rick in a moment of passionate madness.”

  Claire wasn’t convinced. “But do you have any evidence that she and Rick were actually having an affair?”

  “Gee, you really want this girl to be innocent, don’t you?” I pushed the document across the table to her. “Come on, Princess, this is where you can be useful for once. Take a look at this assignment and tell me what you think of it.”

  The first thing we both noticed was that the assignment did not actually get a bad mark at all. At least, not at first.

  Claire peered at the top where Rick’s comments and grade were written in red pen. The essay had originally gotten a High Distinction—enough to keep Belle’s average up, as that was the highest mark you could get.

  But that had been crossed out and changed. So the assignment had been marked down to a Credit only. But that didn’t make much sense. Actually, it didn’t make any sense. There were no notes made on the assignment explaining why the mark had been changed.

  Claire was silent as she read the whole thing. “Huh,” she said, sitting back.

  “What?” I asked.

  “There was something fishy about the way that assignment was written, but I can’t quite put my finger on it,” she said, musing, staring off into the distance.

  Well, that was helpful. “Well, I am going to need you to be a bit more specific than that,” I said.

  “Using my skills of literary analysis,” she said in a haughty voice. Oh gosh, here we go. “I think that assignment wa
s written by someone else. Not Belle. But I am going to need more proof.” She made an apologetic face. “We are going to have to get our hands on another assignment.”

  Oh, this was just rich. Just rich indeed.

  24

  Claire

  “How did it go with Fireman Sam?” I asked Bianca as I took my shoes off. It had been a long, hard first day in Ferguson. Not the boring, relaxing getaway I had assumed. Not by a long shot.

  She stared longingly at the bed, at the real-life mattress that wasn’t just a futon on the floor of a shop. Must have been quite a novelty for her.

  “He’s kinda intense,” Bianca said and sat down. She mused on it. “He is cute in a weird way. And I always go for the weird ones.”

  I had actually noticed that about her. She liked the wonky-looking ones with curly hair and big noses and strange personalities.

  “So do you think you will see him again?” I asked casually.

  She turned her head over her shoulder to look at me. “Depends. How long are we staying here?”

  “Good question,” I answered, folding a sweater and setting it in a drawer. “We can’t leave until the mystery of Rick Niemer’s death is solved.” And I had no idea how long that would take.

  “What about the shop?” Bianca asked, looking slightly concerned. “We need to open on Monday.”

  That was true. Hmm. “Well, let’s try to get this wrapped up by the end of the weekend then, hey? You can go on another date with Sam tomorrow and try to…”

  But she was already asleep.

  I jumped when I heard something outside. Alyson was tapping on the window.

  “Well, that wasn’t completely terrifying or anything,” I said, pulling on my robe as I stepped outside the front door. “Don’t forget that I have been haunted by a ghost for the past week.”

  “Yeah, that’s sleeping in the bed beside you,” Alyson said, nodding into the room.

  I sighed. “What is it?”

  “I got another assignment of Belle’s. Melissa is all in now. She’s got a taste of the heist and she’s addicted.”

  I snatched the essay off her. It was dark and impossible to read without turning a light on.

  Alyson told me there was a lounge in the motel if I didn’t want to wake Bianca, so we snuck down there to take a better look at it.

  Another High Distinction. This Belle was one smart cookie. Maybe this was who Alyson should be friends with…if she didn’t get herself expelled before she had even enrolled. Which was seeming more and more likely the more she convinced students to sneak into other students’ rooms and steal their assignments.

  We still had the other assignment.

  I studied the two side by side.

  Something was becoming clear. But I didn’t want to jump the gun just yet. This was my area of expertise, literary analysis, definitely not Alyson’s. Every writer had a voice, and that came across even in something as dry as a university essay. Certain turns of phrase, certain syntax. And there are certain telltale signs between the genders sometimes as well.

  “I didn’t want to say for sure, but when I read this first assignment,” I said, picking up the one that had been downgraded from a High Distinction to a Credit. “I just had this feeling that it was written by a male.”

  Alyson frowned. “How could you tell that?”

  “Well, I couldn’t tell it for certain, but there was this one bit that was very strange. Whoever wrote it used the plural ‘mankind’ in place of ‘humankind,’ and that’s a throwback. Not something people use in these days of gender neutrality. Especially not a woman. But a man might still do it without thinking. I doubt someone like Belle would.”

  Alyson frowned, but she looked quite impressed. “See, this is what I needed you to come up here for.”

  I didn’t want to point out that she hadn’t actually asked me to come to Ferguson and so it looked as though she didn’t need me at all.

  “These two assignments were not written by the same person,” I said, sitting back on the soggy couch.

  Alyson’s eyes were wide. “Well, who wrote them?”

  “If I had to guess, I would say one was written by the real Belle, and one was written by an imposter. Someone else entirely.”

  And that would likely be the answer to the mystery as to why it was downgraded from a High Distinction to a Credit. But would it also solve the mystery of Rick Niemer’s untimely death?

  25

  Alyson

  Sunday morning lazily rolled in, and I rolled out of bed with it.

  There was something I didn’t understand. Well, there were a lot of things I didn’t understand, but that was what I was going to university for, right?

  I kinda couldn’t wait for the next academic week to kick off the following day. I didn’t want to leave. I heard Mondays were a slow day on campus and I didn’t have any lectures to attend, but I’d still be able to hang out on campus. I didn’t feel like almost a week had passed since I’d arrived on campus. It had flown by.

  “Are you suggesting that Belle plagiarized the assignment?” I asked that following morning as Claire and I met again in the empty campus as soon as the gates opened. We’d been thrown out of the lobby lounge the night before when it had hit 1:00 am. I’d snuck in and out of my room before Troy even knew what was up. We were so close to solving this now, and I didn’t want any negativity from him about “going home now that the car was fixed,” which it most likely would be by the next day.

  There wasn’t much open on campus on a Sunday, but we found a relatively sunny patch in the courtyard and took the assignments out again

  “Yes, I think she did,” Claire said as she looked over both assignments again for the dozenth time.

  “Right.” That was the bit I was trying to get my head around. “You told me over the phone how bad that is, though?”

  Claire nodded. “It’s just about the worst thing you can do as a student. Well, besides kill someone of course.”

  Of course.

  “So, if it’s such a bad crime, why did Rick only mark Belle down from a High Distinction to a Credit? Why didn’t he fail her or get her kicked out of the university?” Geez, if Adrian could threaten to have me kicked out just because he’d thought I’d recycled a poem at an off-campus poetry reading, I couldn’t understand how Belle could get away with this far worse crime.

  Claire shrugged. “He probably did want to do just that. Maybe she had something over him. Maybe they came to some sort of dirty compromise, so he gave her a Credit. Enough to destroy her average, but not enough to get her kicked out.”

  I nodded. It was all starting to make sense to me as well now. “Maybe he was threatening to tell Rex Lewis about it, about the deal they had done. Maybe his conscience just wanted to come clean… Oh my gosh.” I gasped. “Maybe Rex Lewis already knew.”

  Claire nodded. “Yeah, I mean, I don’t know who Rex Lewis is, but yes. Belle had a lot at stake here. Maybe she could deal with the low grade, but not with being expelled.”

  I stood up and paced the courtyard. Bianca had been on a breakfast date with Sam, but that had clearly come to an abrupt end.

  “What is it?” Claire asked, straining her neck to see what I was looking at.

  Bianca was storming toward us. “Okay, there is weird and then there is just plain nuts,” she said.

  “What has Sam done?” I asked, stopping my pacing.

  Bianca rolled her eyes. “Not only does he talk down to me and correct everything I say, but he refuses to eat any food that hasn’t fallen straight from a tree. Do you know how difficult it was to order with him at a cafe? Oh, and he recited me a poem he wrote about me last night. Get me away from this guy!”

  We all looked at each other.

  “What is it?” Bianca asked. To her, it was just a bad date that she wanted to forget with a drink at the student bar—which was closed on Sundays—but to Claire and I, it was something far more serious. Something that was basically a matter of life or death. Or at le
ast death.

  “Bianca,” Claire said, standing up. From what she said next, I knew that we were both on the same page. Now that we were back together, we were like a joint mind. “You need to go on another date with Sam.”

  “Oh, no way,” she said, making a low scoffing sound. “In fact, I want to get back to Eden Bay right now. I’ll sleep in the shop if I have to.”

  Gosh. She really was desperate to get away from Sam. Not that I blamed her.

  Claire was firm. “We need you to steal something from him. An assignment.”

  Bianca rolled her eyes and stared first at Claire and then at me with this annoyed look in her eyes. “Why don’t you two try doing your own dirty work for once?” she asked. “I overheard you last night, you made that poor girl steal some paper or something, and now you’re trying to get me to as well?”

  Hmm. I did guiltily concede that she had a point. Claire and I stepped aside and talked it over for a second before we came up with a solution.

  “Fine. We will steal the assignment. If you can at least distract Sam for us.” Claire made one final offer to sweeten the deal. She was learning from me. “And then you can live rent-free at my apartment. For one month.”

  Bianca rolled her eyes, but she agreed. “Fine. But I knew nothing about this, okay?” And she had one more thing to add. “And you’ve got to be as quick as possible. Right in and right out. I don’t want to have to spend a minute longer with Sam than I have to.”

  26

  Claire

  The accommodation towers were even more impressive than the library, if that was even possible. There were trees everywhere. I spotted butterflies. The whole place smelled like flowers and vaguely of snow in the air. If Alyson didn’t enroll, I would.