Scarlett rolled her eyes. “So would we all.” She turned to the girls. “Look—there’s safety in numbers. And, you know, in having a roof over your head.”
“It wasn’t safe for Boddy,” Karlee pointed out.
Kayla nodded her head in vigorous agreement. “We just want to get to the village. The police can help us.”
“We’re sitting ducks in here.”
Orchid also joined them in the hall. She’d been helping Mrs. White get Mustard settled on the sofa in the study. They’d given him some painkillers, but he was still groggy. Vaughn supposed painkillers wouldn’t really help with blood loss. “What’s all this?” she asked.
“We’re leaving!” Karlee insisted. “Or at least we’re trying to, but Vaughn is blocking us.”
“Again,” he clarified, “not blocking . . .”
“And we’re going to punch him!” Kayla added.
Orchid broke in. “Hasn’t there been enough violence in this house today?”
Exactly Vaughn’s point. “I was also trying to point out that maybe they’d be safer inside than wandering out there. We still don’t know who was responsible for killing Headmaster Boddy.”
“Yeah,” said Karlee, “but we know where he was killed—the conservatory—and excuse me if I don’t want to stick around for that.”
“Besides,” said Kayla. “We’re bringing protection!”
Both girls brandished their makeshift weapons. Karlee had a large wrench, and Kayla, a length of pipe.
Vaughn sighed. “Okay, fine. Suit yourselves. But keep clear of slick ice. And try to find a classroom or something to bunk down in. Don’t attempt to cross the ravine. You will die. The currents are strong, and it’s dark, and it’s cold.”
Scarlett rushed forward. “Are you kidding? You can’t let them go!”
“I’m not actually their keeper,” said Vaughn. “I’m in no position of authority over anyone in this house. If they want to go out wandering the campus in the dark like two idiots in a horror movie, what right do I have to stop them?” He shrugged. “People can have death wishes if they want to.”
“But we have weapons!” Kayla insisted, waving the pipe.
“How are your grades in advanced hand-to-hand combat?” Orchid asked, crossing her arms. “Think you can take on some killer who knows enough about the topic to be carrying around some vintage fighting knife?”
“A what?” Vaughn asked.
“Didn’t you hear what Mustard said this afternoon?” she asked. “Before we all started searching the house? The murder weapon used to kill Headmaster Boddy wasn’t just some kitchen carving knife. It’s a special military dagger.”
“No,” said Vaughn flatly. “I didn’t.” He felt very dizzy.
The statement also seemed to have a chilling effect on the two girls trying to leave. The hands holding their wrench and their pipe drifted toward the floor.
“I never thought of that,” said Kayla.
“You know,” said Karlee, “now that you mention it, I can’t imagine why Peacock would have an antique military dagger.”
“Precisely,” said Scarlett. “Because it probably wasn’t her. Now, why don’t you go help move bedrolls into the ballroom, or clean up after dinner, or something useful?” She shooed them off.
Vaughn watched them go, unable to say anything. Unable to offer to help with the ballroom setup, or dishwashing. He was not useful here. He’d never been useful here.
He needed to go into the conservatory and take a look at that knife.
“Hey.” Scarlett’s hand was on his arm. “I’m glad that’s defused. We can’t have them wandering around campus all night.”
“Yeah.”
“But I am going to need you to go and find Finn and Peacock.”
“What?” He stared at her in disbelief.
Scarlett looked back at Orchid, as if asking for backup.
Orchid seemed torn, which Vaughn supposed he should be somewhat grateful for. “We don’t know who else is out there, just like you said. That—that looter, who killed Headmaster Boddy. He’s probably still wandering around the campus.”
Not if he knew what was good for him.
“You said it yourself!” Scarlett exclaimed. “It’s dangerous out there! And Finn went out without a coat. He could die of exposure!”
“We don’t even know where Finn went,” Vaughn argued.
“Of course we do! He went after Peacock!”
But Vaughn simply sidestepped her, heading for the back of the house. There were bigger issues to deal with than whether or not Scarlett’s boyfriend was going to freeze based on his own rotten decisions. The girls trailed behind him until he stopped and faced them. “How is this my problem? I promise you, Scarlett, when his body is found, me and the rest of the janitorial staff will get right to work cleaning it up.”
She let out a sob, then quickly clapped her hand over her mouth.
Vaughn instantly regretted his words. “I didn’t mean it like that. Look, Finn’s smart enough to know when to find shelter.”
Scarlett spent a second getting control of her emotions, then glared at him furiously, her eyes basically sparking fire. “Are you kidding? That kid is a complete moron about anything that doesn’t come in a test tube. Believe me, I know him way better than you do.”
“Then why don’t you go find him yourself?” he shouted at her. “Why do I have to be the expendable one around here? Because I work for the school? Because I don’t have money like the rest of you?”
Scarlett’s mouth snapped shut.
“Don’t forget, I already almost died once today trying to save all your butts. And we haven’t talked about it that much, but I’d like to point out that there’s a non-zero chance that Rusty didn’t make it to the village alive.”
“Wait, what?” cried Orchid. “You said you saw him on the other side! Wasn’t he okay?”
“Oh, he was okay,” said Vaughn. “But he was soaking wet, just like me, and he had a farther hike back into the village. Don’t forget, I already made that hike once, yesterday, and it was a disaster then. Whole houses knocked down into the ravine. And a fall into freezing water like that can put a major strain on your cardiovascular system. Rusty’s not a young guy. Do you know he takes medication for his heart?”
“You mean,” Scarlett said, “that he might have had a heart attack on his way into the village?”
Orchid looked stricken. “I never thought of that. Oh no!”
“I don’t know, okay?” Vaughn cried. He didn’t like playing devil’s advocate. He usually left that to Oliver. “He might be fine. He might have managed to find some police with some free boats and they might even now be on their way to save us.”
“Or his body might be lying in the woods,” Scarlett finished.
“I’m just trying to impress upon you how actually dangerous it is out there.”
“But that’s exactly it!” Scarlett said. “Finn is actually out there.”
That couldn’t be Vaughn’s problem right now.
“With a murderer,” she added.
“With any luck, the cold will get him before the looter can.”
“But what if it’s not a looter?” Orchid said. Her hands were clasped in front of her, as if she were pleading, but not to him. “What if it was never a looter at all?”
Yeah. That’s what he was afraid of. He turned, grabbed the battery-powered lantern lighting the hall from a nearby end table, and headed toward the conservatory.
Through the tall, curving glass panels, Vaughn could just make out the ghostly outlines of trees outside. Snow and ice covered the panes in patches, and the few plants in the room sat hunched in corners, like grouchy sentinels. A line of spindly orchids graced the far table.
The body lay in the middle of the floor, still covered with a tarp.
Vaughn couldn’t believe he was about to do this. He knelt as near as he could bear to get, but still beyond the edge of the dark, sticky circle where the headmaster’s blood ha
d stopped flowing, and set the lantern at his side. The light cast a broad, angled beam along the floor.
“Vaughn, no.” He looked up to see Orchid standing in the doorway, holding her own lantern.
But he had no choice. He reached gingerly for the man’s shoulder and tugged on it, trying to get a better view of the knife.
“It’s evidence!” She came closer.
It sure was. But evidence of what? Vaughn gritted his teeth and looked. Boddy’s dead face would haunt his dreams forever. He angled his gaze downward, toward the chest, and the hands—oh God, those gray, swollen hands!—and the brass hilt of the dagger sticking out of his flesh.
Abruptly, he dropped the body and reeled back as bile rose in his throat, and he coughed to keep from retching.
Orchid knelt at his side. “Are you okay? Vaughn, what is it? Are you okay?”
He knew that knife. He knew that knife. He knew that knife.
“Vaughn!” Her hands were on his shoulders. And then her eyes, boring into his. Those stunning, deep blue, long-lashed eyes.
“Breathe,” she told him, like he had once told her. This morning. A lifetime ago.
Vaughn breathed, a pathetic, stuttering, broken sort of breath. “I— My grandmother had a knife like that.”
Her beautiful eyes narrowed. “Your grandmother?”
“Yes,” he forced out. He might still vomit. Oh no, he might still vomit all over Orchid.
“Okay,” said Orchid. “It’s not like they’re rare or anything. Mustard said they were given to combat soldiers in wars all through the last century. Was it her husband’s?”
“She didn’t have a husband,” Vaughn managed. Yeah, he was definitely going to throw up. He pushed her away, turned, and ralphed up all that lovely ham onto the tile floor.
He wished someone would come by and kill him.
After a moment, he spit into the mess, then turned to Orchid. “Sorry about that.”
She was biting her lip, and then she turned and grabbed a box of tissues off a shelf and held it out to him. “Feel any better?”
No. “Yes.” He took the tissues and wiped his mouth.
“Don’t worry about it. Dead bodies—they’re always so much worse than you expect.”
“I’ve seen a dead body before.” He covered the mess he’d made with a few more tissues and wiped it away. He tossed everything in the trash, then plopped back down on the floor near the lantern. “I found my grandmother in her house.”
“The same one who owns”—she gestured vaguely to the corpse—“the knife like that?”
“Yes.” The knife just like that. But it couldn’t be, could it? Every time Vaughn got close to considering it, he felt like throwing up again. Maybe Orchid was right, and every soldier in the last century had a knife just like that one.
“I’m sorry,” Orchid said. “That must have been so hard.”
It had been nearly impossible. Vaughn still didn’t know how he’d survived it. Those months had been such a blur. Gemma dead, and then the whirlwind that followed, and the next thing he knew, he was a freshman at Blackbrook, with hardly any memory of how they’d managed to arrange it while the world was falling apart.
And then, miraculously, Orchid sat down beside him, as if it didn’t matter a bit to her that he’d just puked on the floor. “I’ve seen a dead body, too,” she admitted. “My . . . uncle. He was hit by a car right in front of me. It was speeding toward me, and he pushed me out of the way.”
“I’m so sorry,” Vaughn said.
“It’s okay. It was a long time ago. Nearly five years. And not only did I throw up, I fainted. And then I had what my mother insisted on calling a nervous breakdown . . .” She laughed mirthlessly.
“Your mother said that to you?” Orchid must have been little more than a child! “It was probably the stress. People say crazy things in grief, and if her brother had just been killed—”
“Oh, it wasn’t her brother,” Orchid said quickly. “It was . . . complicated. My mother isn’t the nicest person in the world. Families are . . . complicated.”
“Yeah, I get that,” said Vaughn. He cast another glance at the corpse.
Orchid was quiet for a moment. “I changed everything about my life after that. I was so scared of putting anyone I cared about in danger ever again. But sometimes it feels like danger is following you.”
Yeah, well, there was nothing he could do about that. Never had been. “I should wash the floor.”
“That mop’s never seen so much use!” Orchid said, cracking a smile. “Especially in here. I love Mrs. White, but she has this whole theory that a garden’s not a garden without a little dirt. Too much of a hippie, I guess.” She lifted a hand to show a smear of dust on the heel of her palm. “Look at all this. I don’t think she’s mopped in here for ages.”
Vaughn lifted his own hands. Spotless. He looked at the floor where he sat, glowing under the arching beam of the lantern. The floor looked freshly scrubbed all around him, and the lantern illuminated a clean swath of tiles all the way from the door to—he turned—the corpse.
What a small puddle of blood it was, underneath Headmaster Boddy. What an insignificant amount, for a man to have died here, on the spot. It had been a while since Vaughn studied biology, but he seemed to remember that the human body held more than a gallon of blood.
This didn’t look like a gallon.
He thought back to this morning, when the tarp covering the window had blown down and the whole hall had been flooded with water.
He thought of Scarlett, cleaning the floor after Mustard’s minor injury and claiming she’d found his blood halfway down the hall, by the library.
“Vaughn?” Orchid asked. She waved her hand in front of his face.
What possible reason would the killer have to make it seem like the headmaster had been killed in the conservatory instead of—
“The hall,” he blurted.
“What?”
He shook his head. “Headmaster Boddy was stabbed in the hall. He bled all over the floor. He bled down the hall and into the conservatory.”
“What?”
He swallowed thickly, hoping not to vomit again. “And someone cleaned it all up.”
Orchid considered this. “That doesn’t sound like a looter.”
“No,” said Vaughn softly. It sounded like someone who was trying to hide the fact that anyone had been stabbed at all. No one was going to go hanging out in the cold conservatory in this storm. They might not have found the body for hours yet. Maybe even days.
Maybe even at all.
The murderer would have had ample time to return to the scene of the crime and hide his evidence. Maybe he’d already tried to do that this morning, and instead found a house filled with people who already knew his secret. And if the people in the house knew, they, too, were a liability.
“Where’s Scarlett?” Vaughn asked as he pushed himself to his feet.
“I don’t know,” said Orchid. “That’s weird she didn’t follow us back here . . .” She jumped up, too. “You don’t think she went after Finn all on her own, do you?”
“Are you kidding?” Vaughn said darkly. “That’s exactly what I think.” Stupid geniuses like Scarlett and Finn. They always thought they knew best. He hurried from the room and down the hall toward the library, shining his lantern at the walls and floor.
How had they not seen it before, when everyone was supposed to be searching the ground floor? There was a smudge of blood on the wall by the billiards room. A smear on the floor near the baseboards. Of course, they’d been looking for an intruder, not for clues.
Headmaster Boddy had stumbled by all of them while they slept, fighting for his life.
He burst into the library and grabbed his coat.
“What are you doing?”
“Going after them, of course.” He zipped himself in and pulled his hat down over his ears. “Stay here. Find Karlee and Kayla and Mrs. White. Stay with Mrs. White!” At least that was a level of safety h
e could promise.
“You just said it wasn’t worth the danger for you to look for him!” She grabbed his arm.
“Things have changed.” If Vaughn was there, he might be able to mitigate the damage. At the very least, he would prevent too many questions.
Orchid gasped. “So you think the looter is still a danger?”
The looter! Scarlett hadn’t realized how close her theory was to the truth! Sure. “Yes. I think they’re in a lot of danger.” He hurried to the front door. “Do you have a key to this door?”
“Of course I do.” She dug in her pocket and held it up.
“Here.”
He grabbed it and yanked open the door. “Lock this behind me, and don’t open it up for anyone who isn’t Finn, Peacock, or Scarlett.”
“Or you?” she added.
“You know what? Don’t open it for anyone,” he ordered. “Promise me.”
“Why?”
“Because I think I know who the killer is,” Vaughn said. “And he hates Blackbrook kids.”
25
Scarlett
Okay, it was a lot darker out here than Scarlett originally thought. And maybe her eyesight wasn’t as good as she expected, carrots or no. She’d bundled up as well as she could, and brought a flashlight, a backup flashlight, and a lantern, but still couldn’t see much beyond the paltry circle of light they cast.
Had she ever been in darkness? Real darkness? It never got remotely dark in Manhattan, which was why her parents had invested in top-of-the-line blackout curtains in all their apartments. There was that time, on the transatlantic cruise, when the ship had briefly turned off all the lights so the people standing on the deck could see the Milky Way. And once, she’d gone to float in a sensory deprivation tank—for about five minutes, until she’d freaked out and pounded on the lid to be released.
Darkness, she decided, was as inconvenient as weather.
“Finn!” she screamed for the fiftieth time, but the wind caught her voice and carried it up into the sky. This wasn’t getting her anywhere. She hefted Finn’s winter coat under her arm and hoisted the lantern higher. “Phineas Plum!”
If she found him alive, she was going to kill him herself. How dare he scare her like this! Just because they’d had some little fight didn’t mean she didn’t still want to take care of him.
In the Hall with the Knife Page 18