Authors: Lynn Barnes
Some were looking at me.
The blood was dry on my hands now, but my clothes were still soaked with it.
My pant legs. The cuffs
of my shirt. The lapels, where John Thomas had grabbed me.
John Thomas had been shot, and someone had tried to assassinate the president, and there was blood on my hands.
“What did you see, Tess?”
The whispered question broke through the whir of my thoughts. In the dark, hushed room, I wasn’t even sure who’d asked it.
“What happened?”
“Whose blood is that?”
More voices, more questions. I
didn’t realize I was shaking until Henry laid a hand on the back of my neck.
The questions were just going to keep coming. They would come and come and come, and the answers would always be the same.
Someone shot John Thomas. Someone shot him, and I found him, and—
The guard at the door received a call. “We’re clear,” he said a moment later. “There’s no evidence of a gunman on campus.”
The
lights came on. The room exploded into conversation, a dull roar that pressed in against my ears. If there wasn’t a gunman, if this wasn’t the start of some kind of shooting spree—then John Thomas had been the only target.
Someone had wanted him dead.
I will bury you.
I remembered saying those words to John Thomas. I remembered meaning them. John Thomas had been making threats—and my gut said
that my friends hadn’t been the only targets.
Nauseous, I began scrubbing at the dried blood on my hands. The door to the room opened. On some level, I was aware of a police officer stepping into the room. I heard him say my name, but I barely recognized the sound of it. All I could think about was getting rid of the blood.
“Hey,” Vivvie said softly, reaching out to grab my wrists. “It’s okay.
You’re okay.”
I jerked back from her grasp. She turned to look at Henry, and he stepped forward.
“Tess, these gentlemen need to speak with you,” the teacher called from the front of the room.
I would talk to the police. I would tell them everything, just as soon as I got the blood off my hands.
Henry caught one of my wrists in each of his hands. His touch was gentle, but when I tried to break
his hold, I couldn’t.
“Water,” Henry told me. He had an uncanny knack for sounding calm and reasonable no matter the circumstances. “You need water.” He guided me over to the emergency shower. He pulled the cord. Water rained down. Slowly, Henry guided my arms into the spray. He ran his hands over mine, gently scrubbing at the blood crusted to my palms, my fingernails.
For a moment, I watched
as if from a great distance, his fingers working their way between mine, his skin brown and smooth, mine paler than usual beneath John Thomas’s blood.
“I’m okay.” If I said the words, I could believe them. I came back to myself, felt Henry’s touch on my skin, felt his body next to mine. He seemed to realize, the same second I did, that this was the closest the two of us had ever been.
We both
froze. Henry stepped back. I stared down at the pools of red washing into the drain.
“Miss,” I heard someone say behind me. “If you’ll just come with me, we need to ask you some questions.”
Vivvie handed me a stack of paper towels. As I dried my hands—mostly, though not entirely, clean now—Henry eyed the police officer.
“Perhaps you could give her a moment?” he said. That wasn’t really a suggestion.
Staring down the police officer, Henry slipped off his Hardwicke blazer and began unbuttoning the white collared shirt underneath. It wasn’t until he stripped the shirt off that I realized his intent.
“You don’t have to,” I started to say.
“Kendrick,” Henry replied firmly. “Do shut up.” He was down to his undershirt now, but he spoke with the polish of someone wearing black tie. Moving efficiently,
he handed me his shirt. All too aware that every set of eyes in the class was on the two of us, I turned to the police officers.
“Can I change?” Like Henry, I aimed for a tone that invalidated the question mark at the end of that sentence. The officer gave a curt nod.
“We’ll need to bag your shirt.”
Bag it. For evidence.
That sent another wave of whispered conjectures through the room. With
one last glance at Henry and Vivvie, I made my exit. In the bathroom, I took off my own shirt and looked at the unblemished skin underneath.
Clean.
My body was clean. My hands were mostly clean, but I could still
feel
the blood.
I could still smell it.
I slipped on Henry’s shirt. It was too big for me. As my fingers struggled with the first button, I breathed in. This time, instead of blood,
I smelled the barest hint of Henry.
My fingers made quick work of the rest of the buttons. I didn’t even stop at the sink on my way out of the bathroom. I handed my shirt to the police officer.
And then came the questions.
“I was coming back from the playing fields. I entered through the south entrance. I was walking past the library when I heard something. I turned around and saw blood coming out from under the library door. Then the—”
The body. It’s just a body now.
“Then John Thomas fell out into the hallway.”
I’d been through this a half-dozen times. The detectives kept saying that any information,
even the tiniest detail, might help, so we kept walking through it again and again. The officers and I were sequestered in the headmaster’s office. Headmaster Raleigh stood in the doorway, presiding over the interview.
“Mr. Wilcox was still alive at this point?” the detective prompted.
I nodded. “He was bleeding. I didn’t know at first that he’d been shot, but there was so much blood.” I swallowed.
I’d been in shock. I wasn’t going back down that road. “I knelt next to him
and tried to stop the bleeding. He—John Thomas—he said he’d been shot.”
“He actually said the words
I’ve been shot
?”
“No,” I said through gritted teeth. “He just said
shot.
”
And then he’d said
tell
and then
didn’t
and then
tell
again. We’d been over this. And over it. And over it.
“I yelled for help, but no one came.”
“As I’ve mentioned,” the headmaster interjected, “news of the assassination attempt on the president had commanded the staff’s attention, not to mention that of the other students. There was quite a bit of chaos. Under normal circumstances, I assure you our campus security would have been alerted within seconds.”
The police had already sent someone to talk to campus security. There were closed-circuit
cameras everywhere at this school. The hope was that the cameras might be able to tell the police what I couldn’t—who had shot John Thomas Wilcox.
How did someone even get a gun into the school?
That was one of a half-dozen questions echoing through my mind each time I walked through what had happened.
“What were you doing out at the playing fields?” This was the first time one of the detectives
had steered the questioning toward what I’d been doing
before
I’d discovered the body.
“Thinking.” One word was all I needed to answer the question, so one word was all I used.
The two detectives exchanged a look.
“You said you headed back at about ten to,” the one on the left said, looking through his notes. “You discovered John Thomas’s body. The 911 call came in at three after the hour.”
Thirteen minutes from the time I’d started walking toward the building until I’d dialed 911. Ten minutes of walking, three of yelling for help—and yelling and yelling, and no response.
“Tess, dear.” Mrs. Perkins stuck her head into the office. “I talked to Ivy. She’s on her way.”
The headmaster paled slightly and stepped forward. “Gentlemen, I believe this interview has gone on long enough. The
girl has told you what she remembers. I can attest to the fact that the playing fields are a good jaunt from the main building, and Hardwicke has no policy against students walking the campus to think during lunch.”
The headmaster came to stand behind me, placing a hand on the back of my chair. “If you have any additional questions,” he told my interrogators, “I’m afraid they will have to be
asked in the presence of a parent and whatever legal counsel they may choose to employ.”
I was a minor. The police hadn’t had any qualms about taking my statement about finding John Thomas—but the headmaster’s words served as a reminder that they couldn’t really question me without Ivy present.
Not about my own whereabouts prior to the murder.
Not about my relationship with John Thomas Wilcox.
Ivy arrived fifteen minutes later. “Are you all right?” she asked, her voice quiet.
I nodded. She recognized that nod as a lie.
I wasn’t okay. Standing there, in Henry’s oversized shirt, the bottoms of my pants still stained with John Thomas’s blood, I
wanted nothing more than to hand the reins over to Ivy, to let her
fix
this.
Fix me.
“Ms. Kendrick.” One of the officers stood and introduced
himself to Ivy. “If you and Tess could bear with us for just a bit longer, we have a few more questions we’d like to ask.”
“Tomorrow.” Ivy also had a fondness for one-word answers.
That wasn’t what the officers wanted to hear.
“With all due respect, Ms. Kendrick, we really need to—”
“You really need to think about the fact that, according to my sources, you’ve had my minor daughter in questioning
for almost an hour—without my permission or a child advocate present. Whatever questions you haven’t asked in that time can wait.” Ivy looked from one officer to the other, her expression deadly. “She’s a child. She’s traumatized, she’s exhausted, and she’s still wearing a dead boy’s blood.”
Ivy’s words had their intended impact: the officers looked distinctly wary
and
they remembered that there
was blood on my clothing.
“We’ll need those pants,” one of the officers said. From the expression on his face, he half expected Ivy to bite his head off for even asking. Instead, Ivy turned to me and nodded. “Bodie’s in the hallway. He’ll have a change of clothes.”
I didn’t spend even a second wondering how Bodie had known to bring a change of clothes, or how it was that Ivy’s read on the situation
was so precise. She’d gotten me out of the room.
After I surrendered the bloodied pants, she took me home.
“Drink this.” Ivy handed me a mug filled with warm liquid. My fingers encircled the mug, but I didn’t lift it to my lips.
Ivy hadn’t asked me to tell her about finding John Thomas. She hadn’t cross-examined me. She hadn’t called a lawyer or started acting like one herself. She’d sat in the backseat next to me on the car ride home. She’d put an arm around me when we’d arrived at the
house and climbed out. She’d made this drink and slid it across the kitchen counter to me.
“Hot chocolate with a splash of coffee.” Ivy met my eyes over the mug. “Nora Kendrick’s cure for all ills.”
I’d spent most of my life thinking that Nora Kendrick was my mother. Swallowing back the rush of emotion that accompanied that thought, I lifted the mug to my lips and let the drink warm me from
the inside out.
“Have you heard anything?” I asked Ivy once I’d found my voice. “About President Nolan?”
Ivy turned and began making herself a mug of hot chocolate, too. “I spoke to Georgia.” A slight hitch in her voice contradicted her outward calm. “The president is still in surgery. We won’t know how extensive the damage is until he gets out.”
People died in surgery. They died in surgery
all the time.
I could see awareness of that fact in Ivy’s eyes. She’d worked on President Nolan’s campaign. Whenever he or the First Lady had problems, Ivy was their first call. Georgia treated her like a daughter.
“You haven’t asked me,” I said, offering her an out from thinking about it, from talking about it, “what I saw.”
Ivy turned back to face me, her own coffee mug held between two hands.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
Did I want to talk about John Thomas’s last gasping moments? About pressing my hands to his chest, trying to staunch the flow of blood? About the moment when his eyes went empty, and his head lolled to the side?
“I hated him.” I stared down at my hot chocolate. “The boy who got killed, John Thomas Wilcox—I hated him.”
Ivy knew when to keep quiet. I filled the
silence, unable to stop talking now that I’d started.
“He was a horrible person. The day I arrived at Hardwicke, he was showing off pictures of the vice president’s daughter.” I paused and let that pause do the talking about the
type
of photos John Thomas had taken. “She’s fourteen. He told her he liked her. He told her she was special, and then he
laughed
at her while he flashed those pictures
around.
“This morning, he baited Asher into a fight. He told the entire school that Henry’s father was in and out of rehab before he
died.” The more I talked, the faster the words came. “He texted these pictures of Emilia where she’s totally out of it to the whole school. A video, too.” I swallowed, remembering the words John Thomas had used to taunt Asher. “He said things about that night. I
don’t know how much Emilia remembers. I don’t know if John Thomas assaulted her, but he enjoyed making her think that he did.”
Ivy held her expression carefully constant, but I caught a surge of anger in her eyes.
I closed mine. “An hour before he died, John Thomas told me that he’d accessed Hardwicke’s confidential medical files, that he knew who’d been treated for eating disorders and depression
and—” I swallowed back the fury that still wanted to come, thinking about the way he’d singled out Vivvie. “He threatened to tell everyone the details.”
“What you’re saying,” Bodie commented from behind me, “is that the kid had enemies.”
I wondered how long he’d been standing there, how much he’d heard. I twisted in my seat.
“I’m saying that I’m one of them.” I turned back to Ivy. “I threatened
him in class this morning. I told him that I would bury him.”