Up at the counter, Amberly let out a tinkling laugh and I cringed.
Amazing how the list of people I couldn’t stand was growing exponentially, even as my list of suspects dwindled. The only people left on it now were Astrid, Marc Alberro, S.O., and Ivy.
Speak of the devil
. . . . At that moment, Ivy walked through the door, clutching Josh’s hand, their heads bent close together as they whispered to each other. The sight of them was a cattle prod to my ass and I immediately stood up to gather my things. There was no way I was going to sit here and watch the two of them get all touchy-feely over lattes. No way in hell.
My sudden movement caught Ivy’s attention and she smiled at me triumphantly, reaching up to kiss Josh’s cheek as they continued on their way. Josh, luckily, was oblivious to my presence. I wasn’t sure if I could deal with the humiliation of him seeing the look on my face right then.
I shoved my notebook into my bag and headed for the door, but my scarf got snagged on an empty chair. I struggled to free it, and when I finally did, I stumbled back a couple of steps. Right into Amberly Carmichael.
There was a sputter and a splash and suddenly my sneakers were covered in light brown liquid.
“Ugh! You bitch! Look what you did!” Amberly blurted.
Her white coat was covered in what appeared to be chai latte, and some had splattered on her white sweater as well. She held the almost empty cup out as the liquid dripped from the hem of her coat to the floor. I pressed my lips together to keep from laughing and glanced over at Rose and Kiki, who along with Missy, Lorna, and Portia were
hovering around Amberly. Rose and Kiki both glanced away. Of course.
“Sorry,” I said with a shrug.
“You are
so
paying for the dry cleaning,” Amberly said, slapping the cup down on a nearby table and grabbing some napkins. “This coat is one-of-a-kind.”
She wasn’t yelling, just fuming. Fuming and trembling. As I watched her long, pale fingers work at dabbing the stain, I felt this eerie sense of déjà vu, but try as I might, I couldn’t place where it was coming from.
“I’m not paying for anything,” I told her, shouldering my bag. “It was an accident.”
“Oh, you
so
are,” Amberly said, glaring at me. Her blue eyes pierced right through me like ice picks. Clearly just a few days in Billings had taught her how to intimidate and awe. “And it’s not going to be cheap,” she said, looking me up and down with a sneer. “Better start saving your pennies now.”
Forget queen bee. Try queen bitch.
Missy, Lorna, and Portia laughed and my skin burned. I even saw a smile playing on Rose’s lips for the briefest second and felt as if I had just been stabbed through the gut Caesar-style, betrayed by the people who were supposed to have my back. Kiki was the only one who didn’t react, but maybe her iPod was turned up so loud she couldn’t hear what was going on.
“Don’t hold your breath,” I said through my teeth.
“I’ll be wanting the Carma Card back,” Amberly replied. “And I
will
get my money.”
“Yeah. Good luck with that,” I said with a scoff.
Then I shot my former friends a scathing look before striding out.
I spent Saturday afternoon in the library. Everyone around me was studying. Pencils scratched in notebooks. Whispered debates were being held on everything from the feminist movement of the early 1900s to the history of space travel to the merits of Monet and Manet. At the other computers, coffees were sipped as fingers tapped away crazily at keyboards. I could practically smell the anticipation and tension in the air. Final exams. Final papers. Final oral reports. It was all upon us.
And I was spending my Saturday surfing the Web for a gift for Josh Hollis. Well, that and Googling what was left of my suspect list. I hadn’t done one full minute of studying since Sabine had left me an hour ago to go hook up with her bio study group. I was so screwing myself, but I couldn’t bring myself to care. I had bigger things on my mind. Like murder. Like first love. Like not letting the murderer—if it
was
Ivy—murder my former best friend.
Sigh.
On the first-love front, it was impossible to find something good for Josh. Nothing said what I wanted it to say. Namely, “I love you. Doesn’t this gift remind you of how much you love me?” I had been at it for hours, scouring every shopping site from L.L. Bean to art.com to eBay, but had come up with nothing good. The Holiday Dinner was less than a week away. It was time to admit defeat—especially since I definitely didn’t have the money for overnight shipping. I couldn’t pay for an Internet gift with what little money I had left from the Billings fund, since it was in the form of cash. All I had was the only-in-emergencies credit card my dad had given me over the summer, and the less I spent on that, the quicker he would be to forgive me. I went back to art.com, selected the Gauguin print I had been halfheartedly eyeing, and just ordered the damn thing.
Sigh, sigh.
The sophomore guy next to me vacated his computer and even before the scent of his raspberry bubble gum had faded into the ether, Marc Alberro had taken his place. He sat down on the chair sideways so that he could face me, the bulk of his winter coat wedged between desk and chair back, his book bag on his lap. Instantly, my heart stopped beating and a tingle of fear shot through me.
“Sorry I haven’t returned your message. It’s been crazy,” he said. “So, what’s up?”
I’d been avoiding him since James showed me that video, and glancing over at him now, I found I couldn’t even look him in the eye.
Could he be the killer? Had he sneaked into Billings while we were all asleep and force-fed those pills to Cheyenne? Suddenly I felt like I was about to retch.
“What? What’s the matter?” Marc asked, tilting his head.
“I have to go.”
I grabbed up my things, leaving the
RESERVED
card on my computer so I wouldn’t have to stop to return it to the front desk, and rushed awkwardly for the door. I tried to shove my arms into my coat while semi-sprinting, my bag strap all twisted around my wrist. I attempted to untwist it as I exited the building, but in the process my bag turned upside down, sending all my books and notebooks tumbling down the library stairs.
“Perfect,” I said under my breath, crouching to retrieve them. The sky overhead was a threatening gray and wind whistled around the buildings. Any second the clouds were going to open up and pour freezing rain on my head. I could feel it.
“Reed!” Marc was there in a flash. He stooped to help gather my things. “Are you okay? What’s wrong?”
As we stood up, our arms full of books, I forced myself to look at him. His brow was creased with concern and his light brown eyes were open and honest. For a second I couldn’t imagine that he could have hurt Cheyenne. But after what she had done to him . . .
“You were Fourteen-in-Fourteen Flower Boy!” I blurted, rather more loudly than I intended.
All the color drained from Marc’s face. He handed my notebooks to me.
“Well, I prefer to go by Marc,” he said, taking a step back and shoving his hands under his sleeves.
My cheeks were flushed with heat. “Marc, this isn’t funny. How could you have never mentioned that you and Cheyenne had a thing? Were you hiding it for a reason?”
A group of freshman girls scurried up the stairs between us and I realized it was a good thing this conversation was taking place in such a populated area of campus. If Marc
was
capable of violence, he couldn’t get away with hurting me right here, out in the open like this.
“Well, yeah. I had a couple reasons,” Marc replied, his eyes wide. “One, it was the most humiliating experience of my life, and two, I don’t really relish the idea of getting pounded on by Trey Prescott. Cheyenne
was
his girlfriend last year during the, uh, fourteen-in-fourteen incident. Although I swear I had no idea they were together at the time.”
“And that’s it. That’s the only reason this hasn’t come up,” I said flatly, thinking of all the times we’d talked about Billings and Cheyenne’s death.
Marc stared at me for a moment. “Wait . . . you think I killed her.”
“No!” I lied automatically. “No, of course not.”
Was there any other way to answer that question? If he had, I didn’t want him to know I suspected him. If he hadn’t . . . well, same deal. Besides, flat-out accusing him with no evidence to back it up was no better than what everyone was doing to me.
“Yes, you do!” Marc leaned back against the metal bar railing in the center of the stairs. He stared at me for a second longer, then laughed.
Laughed. Somehow, that seemed inappropriate given the circumstances. “Well, I guess it would be hypocritical of me to be mad.”
“Why’s that?” I asked. What was up with this guy?
Marc opened his bag and pulled out a yellow legal pad. He sighed before handing it over to me. Scrawled across the top were the words
Potential Suspects
. My heart skipped a beat.
“You’re investigating Cheyenne’s murder?” I asked.
“Yeah. I figured it might make a good story,” Marc said, his expression apologetic. He shrugged. “I might even be able to sell it to a real paper.”
I scanned the list quickly, hungrily, to see if he’d drawn any conclusions different from my own. Unfortunately his list echoed mine. Even Astrid had made his suspect roster. But there were two major differences between Marc’s list and mine. My name and Noelle’s name were written at the bottom of the page. Noelle’s name had been crossed out, but mine had not.
“Sorry. I couldn’t play favorites.” He grabbed a brown wool hat out of his bag and pulled it low over his ears.
My eyes stung with heat and part of me felt like shoving the pad down his throat. But then I realized he was right. That would have been totally hypocritical, considering I suspected
him
.
“It’s fine,” I forced myself to say, handing the legal pad back. “Actually, I’ve been kind of poking around myself.”
Marc’s eyebrows shot up. “Really? Do you have a list?”
I dug in my bag until I found the folded piece of paper with my suspects on it. Marc looked it over and smirked. “Look at that. You’re
on mine and I’m on yours. Twice, actually.”
I had added Marc’s name to the suspect list after seeing James’s video, but Marc was now pointing to the initials S.O.
“So
you’re
S.O.,” I said, stunned.
“Yep.” Marc handed the list back to me.
I was at a loss for words. I knew Trey suspected someone by the initials S.O. had been seeing Cheyenne, and I knew that Marc had pursued Cheyenne and lost. How could the two be one and the same?
“I don’t get it,” I said finally. “Why S.O.?”
“It’s a common code when you want to cover up your identity,” Marc said with a shrug, pulling a pair of worn leather gloves from his pockets and tugging them on. “Last letter of your first name and last letter of your last name.”
S.O. Marcellus Alberro. It was so obvious now I could have screamed. Was all my paranoia and desperation affecting the logical side of my brain?
“Just FYI, I didn’t do it,” Marc said. “I wasn’t even on campus that night. My brother came up from Miami and we went clubbing in New York. He ended up passed out on a bar stool and I had to drag him by his armpits to a cab and take him to the hospital. It was way fun,” he added sarcastically. “The cops know all this and have checked it out, by the way.”
Apparently the police had been more thorough than I realized.
“Well, I didn’t do it either,” I told him. “But I have nothing like that for an alibi.”
“It’s okay. I kind of doubt you’d be investigating her death if you
had done it,” Marc told me, shoving his legal pad back in his bag. “Wanna go back inside now that you know you’re not in mortal peril?” he joked. “It’s freezing out here.”
“Definitely,” I replied, feeling chagrined.
Suddenly I couldn’t believe that I had been running from him just moments ago. This whole ordeal was really making me paranoid, and I didn’t like the feeling. Marc started walking up the stairs, back toward the library, and I fell into step with him. I took a deep breath of the cold air, letting it whisk away the last of my suspicion.
“I just have one more question,” I said. “How the hell did you afford all those roses?”
“Summer job money,” Marc said with a grimace. “I thought my mother was going to fly up here just to throttle me when she found out how much I’d taken out of my savings account.”
I whistled under my breath as Marc held the door open for me. He must have really liked Cheyenne to risk his mom’s wrath like that. Suddenly I hated Cheyenne for the way she had treated him. Why did she always have to make everything such a big, dramatic scene?
“So what have you found out?” Marc asked me.
“You first,” I said. “You’ve decided Noelle is innocent?”
Of course, I already knew this in my heart, but I was curious as to how he had come to the same conclusion.
“Yeah. She was on a boat all night that night. Some charity event on a cruiser that went around Manhattan,” he said as he unzipped his coat on our way across the lobby. “There’re pictures and everything,
so there’s no way she did it.”
Interesting. I wished Ivy had been around to hear that one.
“Honestly, though? She was my number one suspect until I found that out,” Marc whispered, sounding disappointed.
Then, off my offended and baffled look, he continued.
“I mean, after everything that happened last year with Ariana and Thomas Pearson, Noelle just seemed shifty to me. And the fact that she moved right back in after Cheyenne was gone, took over her room, took over your dorm . . .”
“Yeah, yeah. I’ve heard it all before,” I whispered, shaking my head. “God, your best friend goes mentally AWOL and suddenly you’re public enemy number one,” I joked lamely.
Marc smirked. “So who do you think did it?”
“Ivy Slade,” I whispered back.
Marc nodded, unsurprised. “Yeah. She’s high on my list too. I know she kind of hated Cheyenne, but I never knew why.”