Wiping the worry from my mind, I started to face forward again, but before I could I caught a glimpse of Josh on the other side of the aisle, sitting on the end of the last pew. He wasn’t paying attention to Cromwell either. Instead, he was sketching like crazy in a small sketch pad, his brow knit in intense concentration. As I watched him, he pressed his lips together, then pursed them, then went back
to normal and started the process all over again. I smiled, my eyes stinging with nostalgia.
He always did that when he was really in the zone, though he never believed me when I told him about it. I wished I could take a picture right then and prove it to him, but it wasn’t my place anymore. And besides, Cromwell’s henchman Mr. White would see the flash and swoop down on me like a vulture.
But I couldn’t tear my eyes away from Josh. The weak sunlight streaming through the colorful stained-glass windows danced against the right side of his face. There was a tiny fray in the hem of his turtleneck sweater and his corduroys were partially rolled up on one side, revealing the tiniest bit of pale skin. I drank in every detail of him while I could. If only he knew how much I missed every inch of him, inside and out. If only he knew how much I regretted everything.
Cromwell dismissed us just as the second brilliant idea of the past twenty-four hours hit me like a brick to the head. The perfect gift for Josh. What might be the perfect gift for both of us.
I jumped up and raced down the rapidly filling aisle, headed for the heavy, arched door. If I was going to pull this off, I was going to need as much time as I could make for myself.
“Gotta throw up again, Brennan?” Ivy shouted after me. “They have clinics for that kind of thing!”
A few people laughed, but I ignored them all. I would deal with Ivy later. I shoved the door open and the cold air hit me like a slap to the face. I paused for a second to button up and pull my hat on. Big, big mistake.
“So, Glass-Licker,” Amberly said, sidling up next to me. “You missed your deadline.”
I clenched my jaw and started speed-walking down the cobbled path. Unfortunately, Amberly had no trouble keeping up.
“You owe me a disc, remember?” she said. “I hope you have it with you this morning. I’m really too busy to keep following you around.”
I stopped in my tracks and looked at her, letting out a fed-up sigh.
“You don’t have it, do you?” Amberly laughed and shook her head. “Don’t you realize I can make things very difficult for you?”
I threw up my hands and let them slap down at my sides. “Do you even hear how ridiculous you sound? What did you do last summer, take some course called Soap Opera Villainy 101?”
Amberly’s blue eyes narrowed. She tugged her fur-lined gloves on slowly. “Okay, then. Difficult it is.”
I shook my head mirthfully. “Yes. Difficult it is. Bring on the difficult. I can’t
wait
to see what your tiny little brain comes up with.”
Then I turned and strolled off casually, letting her see just how very unaffected I was by her threats. There was a lot that could get to me, especially lately, but I was not going to be intimidated by some poser freshman. Especially not Amberly.
I spent the next twenty-four hours on edge. Not only was I now looking forward to the Holiday Dinner as the potential setting for my reconciliation with both Noelle
and
Josh, but I was dying to get back into Ivy’s room and do some more snooping. I had to find some real evidence that she was my stalker and that she was plotting against Noelle. I had to put an end to her plans before I lost my mind. Before Noelle lost her life.
In the meantime, a thousand questions plagued me. Did Ivy really kill Cheyenne? And if so, did Rose know about it, or was she only helping Ivy mess with me? Why would Rose want to hurt Cheyenne? They had been such good friends. And why would she want to hurt Noelle?
Too many questions. None of which would be answered by Rose, apparently, since I had left about twenty messages on her voice mail and heard nothing back.
But no matter. I could take care of this without her explaining—or, even better, admitting her guilt. If I was on my own, I was on my own.
Friday morning I stood next to my door inside my room and waited for Ivy and Jillian to get their stuff together and get out. The general noise in the hallways was convivial and excited. The Crom had shortened all our classes for the day, so that they would all be crammed in before lunch, giving us time to get ready for the Holiday Dinner that afternoon. The atmosphere in Pemberly was not unlike the last day at Croton High before Christmas break. I could just tell no one was going to be paying attention in class. We would all be too busy looking forward to the festivities.
But first, I had a mission.
I heard Ivy and Jillian’s door close and they strode by my room, chatting about what they might wear that night. Taking Sabine’s advice to heart, I slid my iPhone into the back pocket of my jeans and waited until their voices faded to nothing. Then I slipped out of my room and into theirs. This time I went right for Ivy’s dresser, yanking open the top drawer. All her things were folded and lined up in perfect little rows, the black underwear separated from the white, separated from the colorful. Crap. If I was going to search this stuff, I was going to have to do it carefully, meticulously. Not good, considering how badly my hands were shaking.
Taking a deep breath, I pushed a row of tiny undies aside, cringing at the very idea that I was touching Ivy Slade’s intimates. I quickly uncovered birth control pills and a box of condoms, both of which
made me think of her and Josh and how far they might have already gone, which made me want to vomit, but there was nothing else there.
The second drawer was all T-shirts, again perfectly folded and arranged in rows. I lifted out a stack and there was nothing underneath. Same with the next: 0 for 2.
The third drawer contained about twenty black and white sweaters. Ivy’s staples. I lifted up the first pile, holding the sweaters toward my shoulder, and froze. Sitting in the bottom of the drawer was a very familiar silver box. A box with the letters
VMS
etched into the lid. The very box Ivy had been sent into her grandmother’s house to steal. The very box I had seen in Cheyenne’s room the night before her parents had come to pack up all her things.
Clutching the sweaters in the crook of my arm, I reached down with my free hand and flipped open the lid of the box. Sure enough, sitting inside on the velvet lining was Cheyenne’s diamond
B
necklace—which was slightly bigger than everyone else’s—the chain broken a few inches away from the clasp.
Ivy must have sneaked into Billings that night—the night before Cheyenne’s things were carted away. It was the only explanation. She was still so angry that Cheyenne had taken the box, she must have sneaked in to steal it back. That was how much this little token meant to her.
Suddenly, my skin tingled with excitement. This was it. This was the key. The heirloom box gave Ivy a very concrete motive. She had never forgiven Cheyenne for her role in her grandmother’s stroke and
for leaving her there to take the blame. She had never forgiven her for taking the family heirloom with her. So she had killed Cheyenne and, once she knew the police had inventoried everything, she had sneaked back to the scene of the crime to reclaim what was hers. The fact that the
B
necklace was inside was even better. Maybe Ivy had ripped it off of Cheyenne during some kind of struggle. I would have bet my life that the
B
had Ivy’s fingerprints all over it.
This was it. I finally had her.
Fingers trembling, I whipped out my iPhone and snapped a picture of the open box with the
B
necklace inside, sitting right where it was. Then I covered my hand with the end of my sleeve to keep from leaving more fingerprints, closed the box, and snapped another picture. Finally, I took a step back and got the wider scene—the open drawer with the box inside and some of Ivy’s things in the background, so that the police would have no question as to where I was.
I placed the sweaters back in the drawer and closed it carefully. My heart was racing with unbridled excitement. Ivy was going down. It was almost over. I almost couldn’t believe it.
I was about to grab the doorknob and hightail it out of there, when I heard determined footsteps coming down the hall.
“So stupid,” someone said to herself.
My heart stopped. It wasn’t just someone. It was Ivy. She was about two seconds away from opening her door and finding me standing in the middle of her room with my iPhone out.
I wheeled around. The door to Jillian’s closet was open. I flung myself inside, tripping on her shoes and banging into a dozen
hangers, and yanked the door closed.
Ivy shoved the door to the room open and stormed inside. I was breathing so hard she was sure to hear me. I grasped the sleeve of one of Jillian’s sweaters and held it over my mouth, forcing myself to breathe in and out slowly, quietly. Through the tiny space between door and wall, I could see Ivy moving about.
“Where the hell did I put it?” she said to herself, shoving some papers aside on her desk.
She groaned and opened a drawer, then slammed it. Shuffled a few more things around. The whole time I had to clutch myself to keep from trembling and losing my balance atop the sea of pumps and boots and sneakers. If I moved, my ankle might turn and I might tumble right out onto the floor.
That would be very not good.
“Ah! Thank God,” Ivy said finally.
She shoved whatever she was looking for into her bag and strode past me toward the door. She got so close to the closet I could see the fur lining on her coat and smell her musky perfume. It was all I could do to keep from gagging. Then she walked out and slammed the door behind her.
I let out a breath but didn’t move. Glancing at my Nike watch, I forced myself to wait. And wait. And wait. Until five full minutes had passed. Then I finally emerged from the closet and took a real breath.
“That was way too close,” I said to myself.
I was about to flee the scene when something caught my eye and I
paused. It was the picture—the photo of Cheyenne, Noelle, Ariana, and Ivy. It still hung above Ivy’s bed, but something about it had changed. As I took a tentative step toward it, I realized what it was. Every single face had been X’d out with black marker except for Ivy’s. Just like the photo of me and Cheyenne.
My whole body trembled. What did these defaced photos actually mean? Was she close to getting rid of Noelle? And if so, how did she intend to do it? Hands quaking, I lifted my phone and snapped a photo of the photo. Then I took a step back and snapped the wider scene once again.
This was all I needed. I was going to the police. And this time, they were going to have to listen to me. Noelle’s life—and maybe even my own—depended on it.
“I’m sorry, Reed. I don’t really know what you think this proves,” Detective Hauer said, sliding my iPhone across the table to me. He pushed up the sleeves of his drab, tan sweater and folded his arms on the table in front of his notebook.
I felt as if every muscle in my body had just atrophied all at once. He had to be kidding me. First, the two officers at Hell Hall had told me that Detective Hauer wouldn’t be on campus today. So then I had been forced to skip an entire morning of classes, sneak off campus, walk all the way over here in the freezing cold, and suffer on that cracked plastic chair in their saunalike waiting room for over an hour. All of that for him to just dismiss me?
“I already told you,” I said, sitting forward until my upper body was pressed against the edge of the table, my hands clasped in my lap. “Ivy herself explained to me how much this silver box meant to her. To her, it’s the reason her grandmother died. Cheyenne not only left her
alone at her grandmother’s that night to potentially watch the woman die, but she took the box with her. Ivy hated her for that.”
“So she killed Cheyenne over a jewelry box,” the detective said skeptically, leaning his elbow on the table and his chin on his hand. “That’s not much of a motive.”
“No! She killed Cheyenne over her grandmother’s death!” I said, frustrated. “Look at the photos of Cheyenne’s room from the morning we found her. That box is sitting on her desk. Now it’s hidden in Ivy’s room. She must have gone back and taken it. To her that box is a symbol of everything that happened that night. Maybe she thought that if you guys found it you might figure it all out. I mean, isn’t that what guilty people do? Return to the scene of the crime to cover their tracks?”
The detective took a deep breath and glanced toward the open doorway behind me, toward the hustle and bustle of the office, as if he was wishing he was out there rather than in here. Why did he refuse to take me seriously?
“Listen, Reed, we’ve already talked to Ivy and she has an alibi for the night Cheyenne was murdered.” He pulled his notebook toward him and flipped through it. “She was with Gage Coolidge all night and he corroborated her story.”
“So? Gage is totally in love with Ivy,” I protested. “He’d say anything she asked him to say.”
Hauer looked at me with the expression of a man who was starting to get fed up with pandering to a whiny kindergartner. I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to cry or smack him across his tired, old face. Instead, I whipped out my next weapon.
“Look,” I said, pulling the destroyed photo of Cheyenne and me out of my bag and slapping it down in front of him. “I found this in my room the other day.”
Detective Hauer picked up the two halves of the photo by their edges and looked them over. I grabbed my iPhone and scrolled to the pic of Ivy’s photo, then turned it to him.
“Now look at this,” I said. “Me, Cheyenne, Ariana, Noelle. All of us X’d out in the exact same way. The girl has already taken care of Cheyenne, and Ariana took care of herself. That leaves me and Noelle,” I said, my voice trembling. “She’s coming after us next, I swear.”
For the first time all morning, Detective Hauer looked slightly interested. Even concerned. I was glad that the fact that I was afraid for my own life had actually gotten through to him. He had a heart after all. He placed the phone and the photo in front of him and studied them. I seized my moment.