Very Bad Things (10 page)

Katie scrolled down to find a brief mention in the
Gazette
dated a week later:

So Dr. Arnold had been the medical examiner at the time of the fire. Katie realized now that was how he’d known to call Tessa “Miss Lupinski” when she’d stepped up to the corpse at the cadaver lab. No wonder he’d looked surprised that she had volunteered.

There were photographs alongside both articles, one of the charred remains of a house and another of the Lupinski family. That one looked like a picture from a Christmas card with everyone in turtlenecks and Mom and Dad smiling uncomfortably. Tessa looked like a smaller version of herself. She and Peter had the same fair hair and skin, the same stoic expression.

Katie’s mind raced. Why was Tessa reading old articles about the fire? Was she thinking about it more lately because of The Box and the missing girl?

“Snoop much?”

Katie’s cheeks warmed. She slowly turned to see Tessa standing in the doorway holding a half-eaten apple. “I wasn’t snooping,” she said. “I bumped your Mac and the stuff about the fire came up. I was curious.”

“You know what can happen to curious cats. It usually doesn’t end well.” Tessa tossed the apple in the trash bin and brushed past her. “So are you done prying?” She shut down the laptop and gave Katie an icy-blue stare. “Or do you want to read my diary next?”

“I’ll pass.”

Tessa plopped down on her bed, tucking her legs up to her chest and hugging them. She looked like she was making herself as small as possible.

“C’mon, Tessa, don’t be like that. You’re my best friend. I’m worried about you,” Katie said. “If you’ve started thinking about the fire again—”

“I’m always thinking about the fire!” Tessa snapped, and her cheeks flushed. “I have to live with what happened every day of my life. It never goes away.”

“It must suck keeping it all in,” Katie said, and reached for Tessa, but Tessa jerked away. “Why won’t you let me help?”

“How?”

“Really talk about it for once.” Katie gingerly sat on the edge of the bed. It broke her heart to see tough-as-nails Tessa looking like a scared little girl. “Get it out. You keep everything so bottled up. Someday you’re going to pop.”

“What do you want me to say?” Tessa asked. “That it was terrifying, watching the house burn? That I would have turned to ashes, too, if no one had heard me screaming?”

“But you did survive! You had a guardian angel that night,” Katie said, repeating the words from the article. “Did you ever find out who it was?”

Tessa tucked her chin against her knees, so Katie could barely hear her. “I think it was a ghost,” she whispered. “Sometimes I wish he’d left me there.…”

“No!” Katie reached out again. This time, Tessa didn’t recoil. “Don’t ever say that. If you’d died that night, who would have shown me the ropes when I was a newbie? Who else would have put up with me bawling night after night when I first arrived? I was so messed up, but you kept me going.” Katie slid her fingers through Tessa’s and squeezed. “You saved
my
life.”

“You
were
a disaster.” Tessa sniffed. “Someone had to look out for you.”

“Well, I’m glad it was you.” Katie looked into Tessa’s face and saw her tough-girl mask soften. “Tell me something about your mom and dad, just something small that you remember. My dad loved doing stupid jigsaw puzzles. He’d have a new one every weekend for us to put together. It used to drive me crazy.” Katie let out a breath. “Now I miss it.”

Tessa didn’t raise her eyes. At first, Katie wasn’t sure she was going to answer.

“It was a long time ago, and I was little,” Tessa said, very softly. “But I remember our mom smelled like flowers, and it wasn’t perfume. She had a garden. She let Peter and me help her sometimes. We planted seedlings and cut flowers to put on the table. It was the only time when we were together that I thought she was happy.” A light flickered in Tessa’s eyes before it went out again. “Our dad was tough. He worked a lot, so he wasn’t around much. He’d bring Peter with him to campus on the weekends. I always wanted to go.” She bit her bottom lip. “But Peter said it wasn’t fun, that he made him do all sorts of work. He used to run off when our dad wasn’t looking. He found a lot of places to hide.”

“What was Peter like?” Katie asked, feeling good that Tessa was opening up. In the four years they’d roomed together, she’d never gotten Tessa to say much of anything about her family.

Tessa closed her eyes, and Katie wondered if she’d pushed too much.

“I’m sorry, I don’t want to make you sad,” she said, holding on tighter to Tessa’s hand. “Are you okay? Are
we
okay?”

Tessa opened her eyes and raised her chin from her knees. “Yeah, Dr. Phil, we’re okay.” She let go of Katie’s hand. “But I’m beat. So if you don’t mind …”

“Sure.”

Katie got up, and Tessa crawled into bed without changing out of her clothes. She turned toward the wall and sighed. Clearly, she didn’t want to talk anymore.

Katie undressed quietly and pulled on a soft tee and old sweats. Then she climbed into bed with her phone. Before she shut it off for the night, she texted her mom to say
I’m OK. Luv u
. Then she read a few texts from friends like Bea Lively, asking if she was doing all right. And there were four new messages from Mark.

i miss u

i need u

i love u

can i c u 2 nite?

Katie stared at the screen. She wanted so badly to be with Mark again, but she wasn’t sure the time was right. Even his dad wanted them to keep their distance until Rose Tatum reappeared and this mess was cleared up, along with Mark’s reputation.

She switched off her phone and pressed her cheek into her pillow. Drawing in a deep breath, she closed her eyes, hoping
sleep would come fast. Only when it did, it brought the same vivid nightmare. The floor sighed, gently creaking as footsteps crossed the room. A shadow hovered over her bed, and she breathed in the smell of roses and something dank and musty.

Kay-tee
. She heard her name in that weird, strangled whisper. Then she heard another whisper.
Get out
, it said.
This has to stop
.

Wake up, wake up, wake up
, Katie told herself, fighting to surface.

She opened her eyes in time to glimpse pale skin and pale hair through the dark.

“Tessa?” she said groggily, hearing hushed footsteps and then the click of the door being opened and shut.
“Tessa?”

Katie switched on the light but saw no one, just Tessa’s empty bed and a dark red spot on the floor.
Is it blood?
she thought, and went closer. No, not blood, she realized, but a bloodred rose petal. She picked it up and rubbed it between her fingers, her pulse thumping. It was real.

Was her dream not a dream at all? Had someone been standing by her bed? Was it Tessa? What was going on?

Katie shoved on shoes, grabbed her phone, and ran into the empty hallway.

The door to the rear steps sat ajar, a strip of light shining through. Katie pushed it wide and entered the back stairwell. The soft tap of footsteps drifted up from below. Tessa was going down to the basement.

Without thinking, Katie followed, descending to the
bottom of the stairwell. She found herself standing in the laundry room in total darkness. She stood still a moment, letting her eyes grow accustomed to the pitch-black. Then she caught the faint beam of a penlight at the door to the machine room, past the laundry.

“Tessa?” she said, her voice rising. But no one answered.

And the beam of light disappeared.

Tessa hadn’t come down to watch TV, had she? Katie had a sinking feeling she knew where her roommate was going.

Nerves tingling, she turned on her phone and used it as a flashlight. Ignoring the Do Not Enter sign, she pushed open the door to the machine room and eased her way around the furnace and hot-water tanks.

She didn’t see Tessa, but she did find the metal grate shoved aside. It was in pretty much the same place as the one Mark had taken her through in the headmaster’s basement. She knew it led into the underground tunnels. Tessa’s dad had been head groundskeeper at Whitney when she was a kid. Had she learned about the tunnels then? Did she use them to escape when things got bad, the same way Mark did?

Maybe it was stupid—maybe Katie should let Tessa go and head back to bed—but she couldn’t, not after seeing those articles about the fire and seeing Tessa’s face when she’d mentioned her brother. Katie was worried about her.

So she held out the light from her phone, took a deep breath, and stepped through the opening.

Like Alice in Wonderland, down the rabbit hole she went.

K
atie followed what looked like a firefly bouncing yards ahead as she fumbled her way through the steam tunnels. She touched damp walls and stumbled over loose mortar and stone, trying hard to keep her footing and not fall too far behind.

“Tessa!” she called out, but the light just kept moving.

Why was Tessa roaming underground in the dead of night? And why didn’t she wait when Katie hollered? Why had she run? Was she all right?

Katie breathed in the dank smell of the earth and wished she were anywhere else. She had no idea where she was beneath the campus. When she’d been in the tunnels before, she’d had Mark to guide her. She just hoped that if she didn’t catch Tessa, she could find her way back to the basement of Amelia House alone.

It wasn’t long before she realized she wasn’t following anyone. She’d lost the flickering penlight completely. The only thing she had to show her the way was the glow of her phone, and it was hardly very bright.

Katie stood still, hearing nothing but her ragged breaths, a soft scurrying—rats?—and the
drip drip
of water down the crumbling stone.
It’s okay
, she told herself.
You didn’t go far. Just backtrack and you’ll be fine
. Only she hadn’t been paying attention to anything but the darting light. So she didn’t know which way to go when the tunnel abruptly forked.

Had she come from the left or the right?

Oh, crap
.

She swallowed hard. Her heartbeat raced.

What had possessed her, following Tessa down here? No one knew where she was. If she got lost, who would even think to look for her in the tunnels?

In a panic, she hit speed dial for Mark, but the call failed. She tried Tessa’s phone and then Bea Lively’s with the same result. And then the screen went from dim to dark. Damn. She hadn’t remembered to charge her battery in days.

A drop of water plopped onto her face, and she wiped it away.

She just had to keep walking, right? She’d find a way out sooner or later, wouldn’t she? Or else she’d end up like the lost boy she’d heard about her freshman year. A student had gotten hopelessly lost in the tunnels years and years ago, or so the story went, and his ghost still wandered the maze beneath the school. If you listened hard, some said, you could hear his moans through the vents.

Katie found it hard to breathe. She felt claustrophobic and trapped.
Come on, keep going
, she told herself, moving faster, but the loose rock beneath her shoes made her slip. With a cry, she went down on hands and knees. The rough ground bit into her palms. Her knees felt scraped through her old sweatpants.

Her skin stung and her eyes blurred with tears, but she got up, reaching out for the wall to steady herself. Stone and loose mortar crumbled beneath her touch as she stood.