In the Hall with the Knife

by Diana Peterfreund

  It could also be the murderer. The one who had already stolen Boddy’s computer and petty cash. The one he worried might have found him in the secret passageway earlier this afternoon. The one who was almost certainly still lurking somewhere on campus. Which was why he couldn’t leave Beth out here alone.

  Though of course she could take care of herself. Look at the way she’d laid out Mustard for daring to try to keep her from walking out a door. No one ever kept Beth Picach from getting what she wanted.

  He’d liked that about her. He thought she’d liked that about him.

  It’s like he could never get a single person on his team. Not really. Even Scarlett had abandoned him in the end.

  If he went into the building and it was the murderer, lying in wait, would anyone be sorry when he, too, got murdered? Would anyone even care? Or would Sherlock Maestor back there decide to take the information Finn had revealed to him in the secret passageway and turn it over to the school? He probably would, and they’d probably name the dye something stupid and obvious like “Brookblack” and have all the fame and money and Finn would be forgotten completely in the annals of science for all time.

  The wind continued to howl.

  But at this point, Finn didn’t even know if he’d survive long enough to make it back to Tudor. At least inside this building, he’d have some protection from the wind. And it was probably Beth in there, anyway.

  Probably.

  Steeling his nerves, he stepped out into the wind again and hurried to where he knew the doors to the admin building were. He yanked them open.

  It was even darker inside.

  His first step onto the carpet in the entrance hall came with a sickening squish and the crunch of ice. So the flood had reached here. Or maybe a pipe had burst, too. He wished he’d thought to bring a flashlight.

  Or a hat.

  It was warmer in here, but not by much. He made his way down the hall mostly by memory, and up the wide, disused marble staircase at the back. The steps were worn in the middle from generations of Blackbrook students pounding up and down them, and the first few on the lower level had frozen puddles in the indentations where other kids’ feet had climbed. He skirted around them and started up. The flood didn’t seem to have risen past a foot or two.

  He spilled out into the third-floor hallway, which was dark and silent and looked untouched, as if the entire administrative staff had just gone home for the night. There were trophies and awards and photos of glories from Blackbrook’s past in glass cases lining the halls. Nothing was broken, the way one might expect if the place were really being looted.

  Every part of Finn’s body hurt, and he was ready to pull down one of the big banners hanging on the wall to wear like a blanket. He was beyond cold. His toes kept catching on the carpet, as if his feet weren’t lifting high enough to clear each step.

  Stumbling. It was called stumbling. Why couldn’t he think straight?

  A few doors down was the headmaster’s office. Where this had all begun. And then he saw it, another flash of light from within. Silently, he passed the threshold and crossed into the antechamber, with its hard wooden chairs, its secretary’s desk, its massive wooden plaque with the Blackbrook crest.

  There was a light coming from the headmaster’s private chambers.

  Finn had never thought about anything less in his life. Maybe his brain was frozen, too. He used to yell at characters in movies who did dumb things like this. But he was already walking in.

  The room was dim, save for a single candle burning in a tall brass candlestick set on the floor next to the fireplace. It was also empty.

  Finn was confused.

  And then a great black shape rose up from behind the desk. Finn cried out.

  Okay, he screamed.

  She screamed, too, and then the air was filled with loud clunks and crashes and it took Finn a few seconds to realize her arms had been filled with firewood and she’d just dropped it all over the floor.

  “What the hell, Finn!” Beth shouted at him.

  “I—”

  “It’s not too late for me to become a murderer, you know.”

  He knew. Believe him. He knew.

  “Get out of here,” she went on.

  “Please, Beth—”

  “I said, get out of here!”

  “I’m freezing,” he said. “I mean it. Like, can’t think straight, possibly losing brain cells to hypothermia, dying freezing. Please. I came after you without a coat, and I fell in the water and lost my glasses, and it’s dark out there, and if you send me outside again, I just might die.”

  She glared at him, then swiped up a log or two, and crossed to the fireplace. She tossed them in the hearth, balled up a bit of newspaper, and shoved it in, too. Then she glared at him one more time for good measure, picked up the candlestick and thrust the flame at the newspaper.

  When it caught, Finn thought he might cry. He fell to his knees in front of the little baby fire and held his aching fingers up to the heat.

  “Well,” said Beth as the logs began to glow, as the bark at the edges of the logs caught and curled into little black wisps, as he smelled wood smoke and warmth, and felt the prickle of sensation in his extremities. “I guess I’m not a murderer after all.”

  After a minute, he felt equal to answering. “I never said you were.”

  “You let everyone in Tudor House believe it.”

  Not true. He’d told Mustard it couldn’t have been Beth, and Mustard had been the only one who meant it when he’d asked. “Beth, I—”

  “I don’t want to hear it.” She sat down next to him and held her hands out to the fire. “I hate you, you know.”

  “You never miss an opportunity to make that clear.”

  “Well, I can’t have you forget.”

  “Look who doesn’t forget things,” he snapped. “Or forgive them.”

  Beth gave him an incredulous look. The fire burnished her face bright orange. “What in the world have you done that would make me want to forgive you?”

  “What was I supposed to do?” Finn asked. “You wouldn’t even speak to me for months. Was I supposed to show up at your matches with a poster saying I loved you? Was I supposed to throw pebbles at your window until you gave in and opened up?”

  “Were you supposed to let an entire house of people think I stabbed the head of this school?” she shot back. “No, but you did it anyway.”

  Well. Finn sat back on his heels. After a year or so he’d figured her feelings were set in stone.

  The silence stretched on. He shot her a look out of the corner of his eye. She held her long arms out to the fire and stared into the flames, her icy eyes thawing not the slightest bit.

  “Here’s what you never did, Finn,” she said at last. “You never apologized. Not once. You never said you’d do anything to make it right.”

  “Make it right?” he echoed. But it was right. That’s what Beth didn’t understand. “You said you weren’t even sure you wanted to take honors chemistry. You said it might be too much of a workload with your practice schedule.”

  “Yes, I said all of that.” She didn’t look away from the fire.

  “And it would have been!”

  “Probably.”

  Finn threw up his hands in frustration. She was impossible. He’d been a good boyfriend freshman year. A supportive boyfriend. Tennis had been everything to Beth. He knew that. Everyone knew that.

  She’d only qualified for the chemistry class in the first place because she studied so much with him. He’d been responsible for her fantastic grades in that subject, and she hadn’t even been into it!

  Only three sophomores a year got into junior honors chemistry, and it was just a stroke of bizarre luck that her name had been chosen in the lottery and not his. But Beth didn’t want to be a scientist. Finn did. If she’d taken it, she might have dropped in her tennis rankings. She might even have quit. And then the world would have been deprived of her extraordinary talent.

 
Of both their talents. That was something, at least, that he and Scarlett had always agreed on. They never competed in their classes. She had humanities and he had sciences. That’s how it should have been with him and Beth.

  Beth had been dragging her feet about making a decision that spring, too. Sophomore year class schedules were due. Was he supposed to just turn in his schedule and give up the spot on the honors chemistry waiting list, on the off chance that Beth bafflingly picked science over tennis? The delay might make him miss out on other classes he wanted!

  Turning in Beth’s schedule for her was the easiest answer—for both of them.

  “I don’t get it,” he said.

  “Nope,” Beth replied, her tone clipped. “You don’t.”

  The warmth had started to seep into Finn’s body again, but slowly. He’d heard hypothermia victims were supposed to take off all their clothes and get in a sleeping bag with another person. Somehow, he knew not to suggest that to Beth.

  “So what are we supposed to do now?”

  “I don’t care what you do,” said Beth.

  “I meant about you.” Finn turned, partly to look at her, partly to rotate in front of the fire. “That move with Mustard isn’t going to make the people at Tudor any less suspicious of you.”

  “I don’t care.” Beth said, but he could tell by the way she was holding her mouth that it was a lie. “As long as I don’t have to sit there and listen to their accusations, they can say whatever they want. It’s warm up here, and there’s a couch in the corner, and I have the rest of my protein bars in my bag, so we can all just wait for the cops to get here and sort it all out.”

  “Aren’t you afraid they’ll suspect you, too?”

  Beth was silent for a moment. “But . . . I didn’t do it. Yeah, I yelled at him last week, but I didn’t do it. That’s all you’ve got.”

  “That’s all anyone’s got.” He looked around. “And of all the rooms on campus you could have chosen, you picked his office?”

  “It’s close, and I knew there was a fireplace in here.”

  “Beth . . .”

  She stared into the flames for a long moment, then sighed. “It wasn’t about the Grand Slam.”

  “What?”

  “Why he called the meeting. It wasn’t about the Grand Slam. He got a complaint in from my last tournament that I was hooking.”

  Finn’s jaw dropped. “You were what?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Cheating, Finn. That I was cheating. Get your mind out of the gutter.” She shrugged and turned back to the fire. “The rules of junior tennis say that players have an obligation to accept their opponents’ call, no matter how unreasonable. If a ball is in or out, that kind of thing. There aren’t always refs.”

  “Wow, really?” Finn whistled. “How does that not get abused?”

  “It is abused,” said Beth. “All the time. And everyone just kind of looks the other way.”

  “But they caught you?”

  Beth groaned. “How come everyone always thinks the worst of me? Okay, maybe I got aggressive in my calls in a few close games. But I’m not a cheater. Only, apparently, twelve opponents from ‘a variety of teams at area schools’”—she made quote marks in the air with her hands—“got together and wrote Headmaster Boddy a letter claiming that this is a long-term pattern of behavior they’ve noticed.”

  Sabotage. They had banded together to eliminate a common threat. That was a tactic Finn understood intimately. “Oh no, Beth. I’m so sorry. What does that mean?”

  “Well, it meant that Boddy was going to open an investigation and see if there was any truth to the claim.” Her eyes welled up with tears. “Because if there was, it would be an honor code violation. I’d get suspended from the team next spring.”

  Right during the peak of college recruitment. She’d be ruined.

  “I told Headmaster Boddy it was a smear job!” she cried. “But he said he was under an ethical obligation to investigate. But it’s such crap. What does that even mean? He’s going to ask the people who wrote that letter if they thought I cheated? Of course they’re going to say they think it! Why else would they write the letter? They’re not going to back down if they think it’s about to work.”

  Finn shook his head. Yeah, he wouldn’t back down, either. Nor Scarlett. “I’m so sorry.”

  “And he wouldn’t show me the letter. He wouldn’t even tell me who was accusing me. That’s why I yelled at him. And, um, you know, knocked over that candlestick.” She pointed at the object sitting innocently on the floor. “And that’s why I came up here. I thought maybe, if I could see who was accusing me, if I could get my hands on the letter . . .”

  “Bull,” said Finn. Never try to scam a scammer. “You thought maybe, with the headmaster dead, if you could get rid of the letter before anyone else saw it, the whole issue might die.”

  Beth looked at him, lips pursed.

  “I thought the same thing,” Finn confessed. “Boddy caught me with some work I’ve been doing on the sly. He wanted a full report. That’s why I was in here last week.”

  “Oh,” said Beth.

  “And when the storm started I thought if I could hide every record, every bit of data I had, I’d be in the clear. They wouldn’t be able to pin anything on me. Not with everything they’d have to deal with after the storm. That’s what I was doing in the lab when you saw me yesterday on the way to Tudor.”

  The fire crackled and popped, and all of a sudden Finn felt a whole lot less like he was about to die.

  “Well.” Beth seemed at a loss for words.

  Funny. He might not be able to save himself, but he could still save her.

  “Well.” Finn pushed himself to his feet and held out his hand. “Let’s go find that letter, shall we?”

  Beth blinked up at him. “Really? You want to help me now?”

  He sighed. “All I’ve ever wanted to do is help you.”

  She considered this. “Play tennis, you mean. Help me play tennis.”

  “Sure, Beth.” Whatever worked.

  Together they went over to the headmaster’s desk. He kept it relatively neat, with only a few file folders in his inbox and—

  That was weird. “It’s a laptop,” said Finn.

  “So?”

  “Well, I thought he had his laptop with him when he evacuated.”

  Beth frowned. “How do you know what he had with him?”

  “Remember? Mrs. White told us the looter had stolen his laptop and the lockbox with the petty cash.”

  “Oh.” Beth frowned, too. “Well, maybe that was his personal laptop and this is his work computer.”

  “Could be.” Finn opened the case and pressed the power button. “Might be some juice left, if he hasn’t been here since the power went out.” As the machine booted up, a thought occurred to him. “Hey, how did you get in here, anyway? I can’t imagine they left the office unlocked.”

  Beth bit her lip. “Um, I picked the lock. I figured, in an emergency, if I was trying to get warm, you know . . . firewood. That I wouldn’t get in any real trouble. I wasn’t going to break anything or steal anything . . . valuable.”

  “You picked the lock?” Finn stared at her in wonder.

  “It’s an old lock,” she said defensively. “I do have a couple of secret skills, Finn.”

  Apparently. Finn could hardly imagine what Scarlett would do with information like that. She’d recruit Beth in a hot minute. He turned back to the computer. Still had some battery life left. A password-protected screen popped up. Finn checked inside the drawers and under the leather blotter. Aha. A note card.

  Old people were so reliable. He typed in the first password and was taken into the system.

  “We’ll search his email cache for your name,” he said to Beth. “First we’ll find out if the letter was emailed, or if he told anyone else about it. If we can find the digital record, we can delete it. If we don’t find anything, we might have to resort to the filing cabinets.”

  “You just
break into other people’s computers all the time?” she asked.

  “I also have a couple of secret skills,” he replied, and opened up the email, ready to type Picach into the search box.

  But the subject heading of the first email caught his eye. Demolition Schedule.

  24

  Green

  “Out of our way, or we’ll punch you, just like Peacock!” Kayla yelled at him.

  Vaughn didn’t believe that for a second. He knew what people looked like before they threw punches. But he also knew what it felt like to be locked in. “I’m not trying to block you. I’m trying to convince you what a bad idea this is.”

  “We’re not staying another night in the murder house.” Karlee crossed her arms over her backpack straps. They were both wearing their backpacks over their puffy winter coats. Their boots were laced up tight. Their hats had sparkly pom-poms on top.

  None of that would help them survive the ravine. Or whatever else waited for them out there. Vaughn couldn’t get the image of the houses at the bottom of the ravine out of his head. The whole campus had been flooded. There might be structural damage to the buildings, sheets of black ice covering the pathways . . .

  Murderers lurking in the shadows. No matter what, they were safer sticking together.

  “If the person you’re worried about is Peacock, why do you imagine you’d be safer out there, alone, in the dark, rather than in here with the rest of us?”

  “Are you kidding?” asked Karlee. “Look what Peacock did to Mustard, and he was huge.”

  “Yeah,” said Kayla. “If you’re the only protection we’ve got left, I’ll take my chances on the ravine.”

  “Excuse me?” Vaughn frowned.

  “Yeah,” said Scarlett behind them. “Excuse us? Vaughn isn’t the only protection we’ve got, just because he’s a dude. That’s super sexist.”

  Maybe he shouldn’t wade into this. “Okay, Scarlett, I see your point, but . . . just to be clear, do I have some kind of reputation as a wimp? I promise you, I can hold my own.”

  Scarlett raised her hand. “Calm down, John Mayer, I’m sure you’re splendid.”

  “John Mayer?” Vaughn made a face. “Really? I’d prefer John Legend.”