Private 8 - Revelation (11 page)

"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

110 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

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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."

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"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

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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."

"It's a long story, but for now I'll just say she's got about ten strikes against her. I tried to talk to the police about it, but they won't even listen to me," I whispered.

We dropped our bags at the end of a table in the American history section and the freshman students sitting there stared up at us warily. I stared them down until they blushed and went back to their work. Being a scary murder suspect had its own kind of power. It was less pleasant than Billings power, but it was still something.

"Anyway, Ivy's not about to let me interview her, and the Web

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hasn't been much help," I told Marc, tilting my head toward the computers. My station was still empty, thanks to the reserved sign, but the screen had long since switched over to the Easton screen saver--an Easton Academy crest bouncing around from corner to corner. "But my gut tells me she did it."

"Have you tried LexisNexis?" Marc asked, pulling off his hat and gloves as I shed my coat.

"What's that?" I asked. He dumped his own coat on a chair and then motioned me to follow him back to my reserved computer. I stood behind Marc as he sat down and brought up a new Explorer page, typing in the address window.

"It's a subscription-only search engine," he said. "I got a username and password at my summer job at the Miami Herald and it still works. It's, like, a hundred times more powerful and thorough than Google and pretty much anything else. Plus it only searches reputable publications so you don't get any of that gossip or Facebook crap."

"Sounds good to me," I whispered.

I grabbed an empty chair from a nearby table and brought it up to the desk. Once he accessed LexisNexis, Marc typed in "Ivy Slade" and hit enter. Almost instantly a list of articles appeared. Some of them were familiar--the same articles I had been staring at for days, like the one about the horseback riding competition and Olivia Slade's obit. I was just about to groan in frustration when I noticed a link from the local Village of Easton newspaper--a link I had never seen before. Next to it was a thumbnail photo that, even in miniature, looked mighty familiar. My blood ran cold at the sight of it.

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"Open that one," I said, pointing. I felt so jittery that I was amazed at my steady hand.

Marc double clicked. Instantly, the photo filled the screen. Ivy, Cheyenne, Noelle, and Ariana smiled out at us. It was the same photo that hung above Ivy's bed. Marc whistled under his breath.

"That's eerie," he said.

"Seriously." "'Students from Easton Academy help out with last weekend's Coleman Park Cleanup,'" Marc read, squinting at the caption. "I remember this! It was my freshman year. There was this park in downtown Easton that they wanted to renovate and Easton Academy sent all these kids to help. It was supposed to be a volunteer thing, but everyone who was sent was pretty much being punished for some infraction or another. All of Billings and half of Ketlar went."

"What was the date of the picture?" I asked.

"It was taken on... May thirteenth," Marc read.

That freakish tingle of discovery I had been feeling so often lately rushed right through me. May thirteenth. The date was familiar for a reason. That night, Ivy and Cheyenne had broken into Ivy's grandmother's house in Boston and tripped the alarm. That very night Ivy's grandmother had suffered her stroke and Ivy's vendetta against Billings had been born.

This was the picture she chose to keep within sight at almost all times? It had to remind her of the worst day of her life. Why would she keep it so close? Why?

Um, because she's a psycho?116

And then, just like that, it hit me. She'd kept it as a constant reminder of why she hated Billings so much. She'd kept it to motivate her in her mission to bring all of us down. Looking at each of the faces in turn, I got chills for a whole new reason.

One committed. Check

One dead. Check.

Noelle was the only one left. 117

CRYPTIC GIRL

"Well, you've got me convinced," Marc said as we headed out of the library together an hour later. He pulled his hat on and lowered it to his brow line. "I'd say Ivy's a pretty decent suspect."I had just shared the entire Ivy/Boston/grandmother/Billings story with him and he had been riveted throughout the telling.

"Glad we're on the same page," I replied as I pulled my scarf up to my chin. "But we do still have another person on our list."

"Astrid Chou," we said in unison.

All night I had been wanting to ask him why he thought Astrid was a good suspect, but we had been so busy talking about Ivy, I hadn't had the chance. Now he paused at the bottom of the steps, hugging himself against the cold.

"Yeah, she's a weird one," he said as a gust of wind nearly knocked us both off our feet. "Not only do she and Cheyenne have a long history,

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but no matter what I do, I can't get anyone to tell me why she was expelled from Barton last year."

I yanked my hat on as well and concentrated on not letting my teeth chatter. It was beyond bitter out. "What do you mean, no matter what you do?" Marc shrugged. "Well, I've tried talking to at least five people over at Barton and they all tell me her records are sealed. Which means that whatever she did, it was really bad."

There was a sinking feeling in my gut and my knees started to shake in the cold. "Define really bad."

"Like, could-be-violent bad," Marc replied, his tone ominous.

My mind immediately flashed back to a couple of awkward moments I had shared with Astrid recently. Her going through my bag at the last soccer game, her bizarre comment about me trying to take Cheyenne's place. And then there were all those arguments she and Cheyenne had had at the beginning of the year. Plus she had been really paranoid when she found out about the Billings disc....

"Damn," I said under my breath as my heart sank even further.

The Billings disc. Why did I have to break that stupid thing? Why had I never made a copy? I would have bet my life that the information we needed about Astrid's expulsion had been in her file.

"What?" Marc asked, visibly shivering.

"Nothing. I'm just an idiot," I told him, starting to walk. If I didn't move soon I was going to turn into a Reed-shaped ice sculpture. "I had this way I could have found out about Astrid, but... now I don't."

I had already told enough people about the disc's existence, but at

119 least they had all been in Billings and therefore had a vested interest in said disc. Marc didn't need to know about it.

"Okay, cryptic," Marc said, but he didn't push it any further than that. He walked close to my side, blocking the wind. "What about her friends from Barton? Do you know any of them? Maybe they heard something. I mean, they wouldn't be the most reliable sources, but it could be a start."

A realization hit me and I stopped in my tracks so fast Marc tripped forward in surprise. I didn't know anyone at Barton. But I knew someone who did. Josh Hollis.

"What? What is it?" Marc asked, adjusting his backpack.

I looked west toward the outer buildings. Toward the J.A.M. Building in particular. "I have an idea--someone who might be able to help us," I said, breathless.

"Who?" Marc asked.

"I'll let you know if it pans out," I told him.

Then I turned on my heel and started for the J.A.M. Building. Josh had to be in the studio, working on his final project for his painting class. And if he wasn't, I was just going to have to track him down elsewhere. Right then, he was my only hope.

"Okay, Cryptic Girl! You do that!" Marc shouted after me.

I didn't even bother to turn around and respond. I had to focus. Focus on keeping my nervously beating heart inside my chest. I was going to see Josh. And hopefully I was going to clear my friend. That was about all my brain could handle at that moment.

120 BOLLOCKS

A fat drop of rain smacked into my cheek about halfway across the quad. Seconds later, the rain was coming down in earnest, and by the time I slipped into J.A.M.'s well-lit hallway, my hair was soaked through and my teeth were chattering. A couple of girls shot me derisive looks as they opened their Coach umbrellas and ducked out into the rain, but I hardly noticed. My mind was racing at the idea of talking to Josh. But I forced myself to keep moving. I walked over to the studio and opened the door.There were a few students peppered throughout the room, working busily at easels. They all looked up when I entered. Josh was the only one who didn't instantly look away.