The Healing Power of Sugar: The Ghost Bird Series: #9 (The Academy Ghost Bird Series) (45 page)

Shock buzzed up my spine. “You…”

“If one of you got suspension, the others did, too,” he said. “I needed to make sure you sat still for a long period in the same space. I didn’t want anyone else to get sick.”

“But how?” I asked. “How would sitting in suspension get me sick?”

“You lot sat at the same desks each day,” he said. “I just made sure each desk was covered in the virus. It took this long to incubate; I was worried you all were resistant to the strain. Luckily, it worked.”

My cheeks burned. He could do that? Make us all sick for his own twisted plans? “How did you get me suspended?”

“There is no Vera,” he said. He reached into his pocket again, pulling out my iPhone. He pushed a button, looking at all the pictures and then turned it, showing me the screen.

It was the letter I’d mentioned to the boys, the one I’d seen on Ms. Wright’s desk. They had found out there wasn’t a Vera, but they had suspected perhaps Mr. Hendricks was behind it.

The picture focused on the name at the bottom, Vera O. Lottie. Letters were crossed out over the picture, and then the name rewritten, missing a few letters, to spell out Volto.

“I didn’t do that,” I said. I didn’t take that picture.”

“Luke did. With his phone. His data is on here now, along with everyone else’s. Thanks for that.”

“He knew it was you?” I asked.

“He suspected and started pulling a lot of things together. I had to stop his progress. He was taking credit, too, I know, for things I was doing.”

I swayed on my feet, putting a hand onto the counter, getting a little dizzy. “The masks at the house?”

“I did that. He took credit. So you would ground him. Whatever that means.”

Luke took credit when he hadn’t been behind the mask prank? I couldn’t believe it.

But had Kota phrased it oddly? Had he gone to Luke saying I was going to ground him if he had done it? Would he confess just to be grounded with me?

He had seemed to enjoy it.

Maybe Luke hadn’t even realized he was thwarting Volto trying to get our attention.

“Go,” he said. “Get some rest. You’ll get over your strep soon. Get to the doctor and get some antibiotics. I just wanted to make sure you wouldn’t be there this week.”

I shook my head and stepped forward now, reaching to him. “Volto, you don’t have to do this. Why would you try to make me sick so I wouldn’t show up?”

He chuckled. “I’m liking this name. I think I’ll keep it.”

“But why?” I asked. “Why make me sick? You haven’t told me.”

“Hendricks is desperate, thanks to your Academy team. They’ve been pushing and pushing at him. Do you think he was going to just stand by? He’s not that stupid. So I made sure to stop it. I made some bad things happen, so he’d see what was going on. I started pointing out some of the bad things members of his own team had been up to, so everyone would see just how bad things had gotten.”

It hadn’t been Mr. Hendricks! He wasn’t the one throwing everyone under the bus. Volto had been doing it to show Mr. Hendricks things going on around him? “You can’t do that?” I said, tears at my eyes, disbelieving the mix-up. He didn’t understand what was going on at all. I didn’t even understand what he was up to or his reasons. “Why? Why would you?”

“Do you not see what they do to you?” he asked. “That teacher, the doctor, he should be in jail for forcing himself on you.”

“He’d never!” I spat more syllables, trying to correct him, but I was so overcome with shock and anger, I couldn’t get anything else out.

“They all do,” he said quietly. “It’s not normal. You don’t know it because you’re mentally unstable. You’ve had a rough life. I get that.”

“You don’t know anything.”

“You’re sick, Sang,” he said. “But I’m going to help you, whether you want me to or not.”

“Stop trying to help me!” I cried out.

“Hendricks was going to come after you!” he said, much more powerfully, the voice in his mask catching on high pitch sounds. He dropped his shoulders, his voice returning to normal. “He was looking for McCoy, wanting him to come kidnap you. Do you realize that? He never said it outright, but he kept toying with Mr. McCoy, suggesting but not directly saying.”

I shook my head. “He couldn’t.”

“I know McCoy’s being followed,” he said. “That doesn’t stop someone like Mr. Morris coming to get you, maybe tricking you, and leading you to Mr. McCoy. They almost did it when you were out shopping. They got close, but I showed you they were hunting for you.”

He
had
been there. He’d wanted me to chase him, so I’d know they were there.

He continued, “Today, he was going to try it again. Get you alone in his office, make sure the right people would keep your friends away, and have Mr. Morris drive off with you, telling Mr. Morris to do it or he’d get fired. Mr. Hendricks told him to take you to the school board building, and drop you off for a trial because you had to be escorted. Only he would drop you off with McCoy waiting nearby. Mr. Hendricks was going to wait until Mr. Morris was back, and then call the police on Mr. McCoy.” He touched his chest. “I stopped it.”

I shook my head over and over again. Would Mr. Hendricks really have done that? Was he that desperate to get away? “The boys were working on a plan,” I said. “They were trying…this weekend…”

“They didn’t know what he was planning,” Volto said. “They gave him access to some decoy information, but Hendricks doesn’t work from information he’s not sure about, not after they tried to trick him this last time with someone else pretending to be you. Anything that comes from an Academy source, he doesn’t trust anymore. He was going to get you and give you to McCoy to hang on to, and watch them scramble to find you. You’ve been pushing him too far. He’s getting orders from someone else to get out, and he’s trying.”

I slumped where I stood, leaning into a wall, overwhelmed both by the illness and what he was telling me. He had thwarted what could have been enough of a reason for Mr. Hendricks to slip away, leaving me with Mr. McCoy. If the police were searching for me for a kidnapping charge, and Mr. Hendricks slipped away…how could he during such a time? Wouldn’t Mr. Morris rat him out? Wouldn’t Mr. McCoy?

And who was giving Mr. Hendricks orders? It might be the third man, the one Mr. Blackbourne and the others had been hoping to find.

Volto might know much more than we did. If that’s true, maybe we should be working with him.

If it hadn’t been for Volto, would Mr. Hendricks’s plan have worked? “How long has he been planning this?”

“Mr. McCoy had been begging him to do this for months,” he said. “Just last week, I was feeding him reports that looked like they were from Mr. Hendricks. I think he suspected you and your team were behind it. He was already angry at you. He was going to get revenge.”

I stood there, trying to grasp what he was saying. Mr. McCoy might have been mad at me when I’d defended myself the last time we faced off. Then he’d been on the run since, and trying to get at us with the help of Mr. Hendricks. Except Mr. McCoy seemed to have his own devious plans. There wasn’t much proof, from what Kota told me, to arrest him, not without me being put on trial.

If Mr. Hendricks couldn’t have me kidnapped like he wanted, were the others still in danger at school?

Volto was quiet for a while, watching me. “You should get some sleep.” He turned from me toward the door.

I was about to beg him again, walking toward him with outstretched hands. “Don’t leave,” I pleaded.

He paused, but then, before he could turn back to me, something flew into him and there was a thud as Volto met with the wall. The house shook from the force of it.

I froze, confused, my sick brain trying to register what was happening.

Luke was on top of Volto, reaching for his mask. “Where do you think you’re going?” Luke shouted, trying to hold him down.

Volto struggled underneath him, waving his arms wildly. “Stop,” he said, the high pitch of the voice hurting my ears. “Get off!”

Luke reached over, grabbing the mask right at the nose hole and tugged.

The mask snapped.

Underneath it, Volto wore a ski mask, along with some sort of mesh material that covered his eyes, his identity still hidden.

Luke reached for the fabric when Volto swung a clenched fist, meeting Luke’s nose with a sickening crunch.

Luke backed up, blood spurting from his face.

Volto took the opportunity, scrambling to stand up.

I went after him, but to get at him, I had to jump over Luke, and tripped over his body, crashing to my hands and knees. I got up, but Volto moved quickly and had already disappeared through the side door.

I raced to the side door, but Volto was faster. He was out of view of the garage as I ran. Out on the driveway, I scanned to find him bolting across the back yard. I tried running after him, but I ran out of breath quickly. He disappeared beyond the trees behind the house.

“Sang!” Luke called.

Breathing heavily, I stopped and turned, disappointed he’d gotten away. My lungs felt thick and I was sweating all over.

Luke walked out of the garage, holding Volto’s mask in his hand, his other holding his nose, the blood spilling out on his lip. He got a look at me and then stopped and dropped to his knees, breathing heavily through his mouth.

I went to him. He was sick and hurt. He needed me more than I needed to try to chase Volto. “Luke,” I said.

“This hurts,” he said, pouting, his eyes watering. “Is it broken? I’ve never broken it before.”

I wasn’t sure. His nose appeared bent, but it was hard to tell because he was holding it tightly. “He got away.”

“Let him,” he said, groaning. He stood up. “Go get your marshmallows. He won’t be back.”

“Your nose…”

“I can walk,” he said. He looked toward where Volto had taken off, and then at the mask in his hand. It had the mouth piece intact, what I suspected distorted his voice when he spoke.

“How long had you been there?” I asked.

“Since you left,” he said. He picked up his head. “I followed you. I was right behind you the whole time.”

I smiled at this. “You were listening?”

“I only jumped in when he was trying to run off. I didn’t want to interrupt if he was doing a confession. Sometimes, it’s good to wait quietly and listen.”

Maybe we did learn a few new things, at least how Volto was thinking. “We were so close to figuring out who he was.”

“We’ll get him next time,” Luke said, urging me on into the house.

WHERE LUKE GOES

I
used paper towels to wipe up as much blood as I could off the floor at my old house. I made sure to bag them up and put them in the outside trash so Marie wouldn’t be too scared finding them.

When the bleeding didn’t stop, Luke held some to his face when we walked back over.

“North is going to yell,” I said, trying to hide the fact that I was really worried about his nose and everything that had happened with Volto. At least now I knew for sure he wasn’t Luke.

“He was going to anyway,” Luke said.

We walked toward Kota’s house. The cool air felt good on my feverish skin. We were quiet along the way.

I carried the Volto mask back, a minor victory, after all the destruction he’d caused. I pondered why he’d told me all those things now. Why had he bothered to come explain it all to me? He said he cared, but he didn’t seem to understand at all.

I gathered he was trying to make me see his side. I was overwhelmed with knowing he knew as much as he did, and in his own way, was trying to protect me from Mr. Hendricks.

Why did he have to make us sick, though? Why couldn’t he have told us? Did he think we wouldn’t have believed him? There were more questions than answers.

Luke stopped in Kota’s driveway, looking at the upstairs bedroom windows. The curtains were drawn. Likely Gabriel and North were sleeping up there, oblivious to what had happened.

“I’m sorry I lied about putting up the masks,” he said, his voice muffled with his nose covered. He turned to me, looking over the crumpled paper towels his dark eyes meeting my gaze. “I just wanted to get grounded with you.”

I smiled softly. “You were scaring me a little when you said you did it,” I said, feeling free to make this confession now. “With everything going on, I was starting to wonder if you were Volto.”

“I’ve been trying to follow him,” he said.

“You?” I asked. “How?”

“We had nothing to do for a few weeks,” he said. “So I spent some time just…doing some tracking. It helped when he started leaving those masks.”

“So you saw them?”

“Of course I did,” he said. “It’s why I didn’t go to the diner, even after I’d promised North.”

“Where did you go?”

“I circled Kota’s house,” he said. “I checked the yard and Max. I found footprints. Volto’s.”

I couldn’t believe it. We’d been chasing Luke, when on his own initiative, he was chasing Volto. “You found his shoe prints?”

“I took pictures of them. Too bad they’re still on my phone. I took the photos to a shoe shop, trying to find a match so I knew which shoes they were. I’ve still been looking for a matching print. Plus, I found the masks.”

“We did,” I said. “We collected them.”

“No, I mean, I found out where he was getting them. Or at least what type. You know how there was always eight?”

I nodded. “Did it mean anything?”

“That’s how many are sold in the package,” he said. He sighed. “I had a photo of a shop that sold a set of eight in the package of the exact kind. He’s got the picture now, though, since he has my phone. And the footprints are gone.” He looked back at my old house. “Maybe he left a few in your yard, but the ground is dry. I doubt it.”

The wind swept up around us and I shivered, no longer hot. Luke ushered me to get into the garage.

I turned, then, looking at his face. “You couldn’t tell anyone?”

“I wanted to tell you,” he said. “Except it was better if I didn’t. I was getting close.”

“He said if we put our phones together, we would have figured it out.”