Never Bite a Boy on the First Date (14 page)

Albert’s eyes were sad, too. “Have a good night,” he said, opening the door for me.

I hurried down the driveway to the sidewalk, feeling a shiver run along my spine. When I glanced back, I saw movement in three different windows—three faces peering at me through
the blinds, each from a different room. Donna and Albert dropped the blinds when I saw them, but Rowan stayed put, staring at me with those deep, dark blue eyes as I walked away down the street.

I
needed a strong dose of normalcy when I got home, so I kidnapped the portable phone to call Vivi. She’s the one real friend I’ve made since moving to Massachusetts, mainly because she’s kind of a space cadet and would never notice anything weird about me. I think even if my fangs popped out in front of her, she’d be like, “Dude, something’s wrong with your makeup—oh, and by the way, did you hear who’s going to be on
Dancing with the Stars
this year?”

This is one of the many things I like about her.

Crystal was watching TV by herself when I went into the den to snag the phone. “Where’s Bert?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I thought he went
upstairs with Zach a while ago, but I also heard someone go out the back door, so maybe that was him.”

“Is everything okay?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah,” she said. “He’s just been acting kinda weird lately. Kinda distant, you know? It’s probably just money stuff, though—he gets all wrapped up in that kind of thing.”

Bert always seemed a little weird and distant to me, but I didn’t point this out to her. He’s still a really nice guy, even when he’s odd.

I didn’t run into either of my vampire parents as I headed for my room; possibly they were still asleep, since it was only early evening. I didn’t want to see them anyway. They’d ask if I’d found the murderous vampire yet, and I wasn’t sure that my creepy feelings plus Rowan’s corpse photo would add up to enough evidence for them. But I also wasn’t sure I wanted to keep investigating him, either. Not if there would be any more tongue-kissing involved.

Vivi picked up her phone at once. “Kira!” she squealed. She didn’t exactly sound “shattered” or “overcome.”

“Hey, lady,” I said, lying down on my bed.
“I miss you. School is wicked boring without you.”

“You big liar,” she said. “I hear you’ve been having
way
too much fun in my absence.”

“Me?” I said innocently. “What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about
two
cute boys!” she cried. “First of all, who’s the new mystery guy? Ruby says he looks just like Will Smith.”

I smiled. “I’m not telling you anything. You deserve to suffer for abandoning me all week.”

“
Hello
, I was
recovering
,” Vivi said. “Don’t torture me, Kira! Tell me about him! Is he as hot as everyone says?”

“Who’s everyone?” I asked. “Why are you talking to all these other people instead of to me?”

“I’ve called you like fifty times!” Vivi cried, outraged. “Didn’t Zach tell you?”

“Of course not,” I said. “Big lummox.” On the other hand, I didn’t give him a lot of opportunity to pass along messages, considering that I practically jumped out the window whenever I heard him coming.

“He’s probably all broken up about Tex, too,”
Vivi said melodramatically. I’ve mentioned that she’s an aspiring actress, right? “I bet the heartache distracted him.”

“Oh, yeah, that’s Zach,” I said. “He’s just so sensitive.”

She missed my sarcasm entirely. “You are dodging the question, missy,” she said. “
Tell me
about the hot mystery boy!”

“All right,” I said, laughing. “But there’s not much to tell. His name is Daniel. I met him the day before he started at Luna, so I’ve been showing him around—that’s all.”

“Yeah, sure,” she said. “And what about Milo Sparks?”

“Sheesh, you do know everything, don’t you?” I said. “For someone who’s been lying in bed all week, you’re remarkably well informed.” I was glad she didn’t seem to know about Rowan, though. I unzipped my book bag and pulled out my sketch pad. Just thinking about Milo and Daniel made me smile.

“What did you
do
to him?” Vivi demanded. “He’s famously unapproachable! No one’s ever been able to date him! And now I hear that he’s completely smitten with my best friend and she
hasn’t even told me about it!”

“I don’t know about smitten,” I said, blushing. “And I’m sure he’s had a girlfriend before.”

“Not in this town, he hasn’t,” she said. “Ruby’s been trying to get his attention for two years with no luck.”

Bet she never tried falling in a pool
, I thought. “I’m just lucky, I guess.”

“Lucky and hot,” Vivi said. “At this rate, you’re going to have all the girls in school dyeing their hair green. Whatever it takes to get your luck with boys.”

I found the page Milo had been doodling on. He’d written
Kira loves Milo
and
Mrs. Kira Sparks
and his phone number with a heart around it, as if I were a sixth-grader with a crush and had written all that myself. I laughed.

“So which one do you like better?” Vivi demanded.

“Well, Daniel is smoldering-sexy-hot,” I said. “He has that whole ‘man of mystery’ thing happening. But Milo is cute,
and
he’s really funny.”

“Can I have whichever one you don’t want?” she asked wistfully.

“Aw, what about Alejandro?” Her boyfriend
wasn’t exactly terrible-looking himself.

“Oh, he’s in a mood because he doesn’t understand why I needed to take three days off to mourn Tex. It’s like he has no idea how sensitive and delicate I am. Hey, are you going to the memorial service tomorrow?”

“Memorial service?” I echoed. “Didn’t they do that at school?”

“Well, this is the real one,” she said. “It’s tomorrow night at seven, at the football field. I think practically the whole town is going to be there. I heard his mom and dad are going to dedicate something to him, like a tree or a trophy case or something. And then the whole town is invited back to their house for a wake on Sunday.”

I perked up. “The whole town?”
That would seem to encompass any vampires in town, wouldn’t it?

“Yeah, it’s in the paper,” she said. “Open invitation. So you want to go?”

“Oh,” I said. “No, I think I probably won’t—I mean, I didn’t really know him, and it’s kind of weird, you know?”
Plus if everyone will be at the football field…and I suddenly have an open invitation to their house…then that would be the perfect time to
sneak into Tex’s room and search for clues
.

“Oh, man,” Vivi said. “Are you sure? We could go out for milkshakes afterward or something. I mean, like, sad, appropriately somber milkshakes. Oooh, maybe you could bring Zach.”

I made a face. “I’m sorry. I can’t,” I said. “I kind of…have a date.”

“I knew it!” she shrieked. “I leave you alone for two days and suddenly you have this crazy love life! It’s not fair! Okay, who’s it with? Where are you going? And most important, what are you going to wear?”

See, that’s why I like Vivi. She can take a date with a possible bloodthirsty vampire and focus on what’s really important. We spent the next two hours talking about outfits and boys, and by the time I hung up, all the spooky emotional cobwebs left over from my encounter with Rowan’s family had been swept away.

Not only that, but now I had a plan. While the town was busy at Tex’s memorial service, I’d be climbing into his bedroom window and snooping around for clues. I figured two hours before my date with Daniel was plenty of time.

Just to be safe, though, I dressed for the date ahead of time. Which is how I found myself standing in Tex’s backyard at seven thirty on Saturday night, trying to figure out how to get through a prickly hedge thicket without ripping my tights. Enormous hemlocks blocked the windows all the way around the house, which if you asked me was downright unfriendly. Although perhaps I should have known that breaking into a house in a dark green crushed velvet minidress wasn’t exactly the best idea.

I put my hands on my hips and glared at the windows. There must be another way in. I’d checked the garage door, but it had a number touch pad to open it, so that didn’t help me.

I lifted the mat under the back door. Nothing. I jumped up and ran my hand along the top of the door frame, which was both fruitless and dirty. Wiping off the dirt, I checked any might-be-fake-looking rocks around the door, but none of them had keys hidden inside. Of course, I could pull the door open with my vampire strength, but I didn’t want to be all obvious about it. Wilhelm would definitely not be pleased about any more suspiciously vampire-like criminal scenes.

I studied the door again and finally spotted the cat flap.

Oh, universe. Why do you make me do these things?

Yes, I actually am that small, luckily—although for the sake of my dress and tights, it would have been nice to be a few inches smaller in every direction. I wriggled and shoved and squeezed and held my breath, and finally I popped out the other side and sprawled onto the Harrisons’ cold kitchen floor.

The house was really still. I could hear a grandfather clock
tick-tocking
in the hall. Dishes were sitting in the sink like nobody had the energy to even stack them in the dishwasher. I crawled to my feet and headed for the stairs, peeking into each room as I went by. A spacious white living room, tasteful and austere in comparison to ours. An elegant dining room that looked like it was rarely used. A small room with brown leather couches arranged around a TV—no doubt this was where Tex and his dad were exiled to watch football, while his mom and older sister genteelly ruled over the clean living room. I’d read about his sister, Caprice,
in the paper; she’d come home from college for the funeral.

I padded up the stairs and opened doors until I found the bedroom that was unmistakably Tex’s. Everything screamed sports: cheerleader calendars, Patriots bedsheets, Red Sox banners and lampshades and rug. I stepped in and closed the door behind me with a quiet
snick
.

It was obvious that his parents hadn’t touched anything in here since the day he died. His bedsheets were thrown back like he’d just gotten up; a basketball lay discarded on the floor next to a pair of sneakers. A screensaver of Angelina Jolie pictures kept shifting across his desktop computer monitor. Classy.

A thought struck me: Why hadn’t the police been here yet? Or if they had, they’d been very careful not to move anything. Maybe they were waiting until after the funeral to disturb the family.
I
don’t know; I’m not the police. I was just doing their job for them.

In case you’re wondering, by the way, I wasn’t being a total idiot. I had on elbow-length black gloves and my hair was clipped back, so I was at least making some effort not to leave any stray
DNA lying around. Although if they did find anything to put in their system, the result would come back as a dead girl named Phoebe Tanaka, so my guess is they’d figure there was a glitch in their technology and throw it out anyway.

I sat down at Tex’s desk and moved the mouse on the Red Sox mouse pad. His email inbox popped onto the screen. It was creepy to see a couple of new messages at the top, clearly from people who hadn’t heard the news yet. There was also one from Ruby, Vivi’s friend. I didn’t open it, but I could see the message in the preview box:
I miss you, Tex
. I didn’t open any of the new emails; I figured that would be pretty suspicious, too.

At the bottom of the screen I saw a couple of other tabs: an English essay and the beginning of a blog entry. Curious, I clicked on the blog.

It was dated the evening of the murder, around seven thirty, but had not yet been posted. I guess he’d started it, and then the call from whoever was at the school had interrupted him. Although I could also see from his email that he’d last checked his messages
at around eleven o’clock, so he hadn’t left for the school until late at night, which fit with the official report in the paper that he’d died around midnight.

I scanned the unposted blog, and my blood ran cold.

He knew. Tex knew
.

The blog entry said:

I was glad I was sitting down. Now
here
was a motive for murder. Forget getting shoved into
a locker; if a vampire thought Tex was about to expose him, it wasn’t entirely surprising he’d throw the guy out a window. Not that that made it okay, of course.

So who was it? It must have been someone Tex saw on Tuesday. Did that mean I could cross Daniel off the suspect list? But it was possible they’d met somehow…. I couldn’t exactly take Daniel’s word on the matter. On the other hand, Rowan had mentioned that he had gym class with Tex; maybe Tex had noticed his lack of a reflection in the locker room.

Far be it from me to tamper with a police investigation under normal circumstances, but in this case, tampering was a case of life or death (at least, I was pretty sure Wilhelm would think so). I deleted the blog entry, and then I went into the computer’s history and deleted any traces of it I could find. Probably not the most foolproof method, but hopefully if it wasn’t sitting there staring the police in the face when they checked the computer, then they wouldn’t pay much attention to it if they ever did find it.

I was about to go back through Tex’s emails again when suddenly I heard a noise.

It wasn’t a loud noise—human hearing wouldn’t have picked it up at all. But to my vampire ears, it was crystal clear.

Footsteps were coming up the stairs.

Someone else was in the house.