Shade Me (8 page)

“No, not that. You said Peyton moved out of the mansion, right?”

He paused. “The mansion? What, are we royalty?”

Just about, but I let it slide. “Sorry. But you said she moved out, right?”

“Yeah, why?”

“And you don't know where she went?” I felt a trickle of sweat run down the side of my face into the raised collar of my robe. I realized I'd been clutching the phone so tightly my fingers ached. I took a breath and eased up.

“No.” His voice took on that wary tone again. “What are you getting at, Nikki?”

“I think I might know where she went.”

There was another pause. “Where?” he asked.

“I don't know if I'm right,” I said. “Do you have her keys?”

“I think so,” he said. “The hospital gave them to me that night. They were the only thing she had on her, besides that phone. So I have them, I just don't know what they unlock.”

I stood, shook off my robe, and let it drop to the floor. I raced across my room and grabbed clothes out of the closet
without even paying attention to what I was grabbing. Not that my closet offered a lot of variety—worn jeans, concert T-shirts, a couple of Jones's button-downs. “Meet me at Fountain View Apartments in twenty minutes.”

“What about school?”

“I just decided I'm skipping.”

“How do you know it's the right place?”

I hopped on one foot, trying to get a sock on the other, almost dropping the phone in the process.
I'll explain later,
I opened my mouth to say, but I knew that wasn't true. I wasn't in the habit of telling anyone about my dolphin blue, or any other color, and I wasn't going to start today. “I just know,” I said, which turned out to be as close of an explanation to my synesthesia as there was anyway.

I heard the murmur of voices. Maybe nurses. And more beeping, getting closer, as if he were walking toward Peyton again. I closed my eyes and practically saw it on the insides of my eyelids—
crimson, crimson, crimson,
pounding with my pulse.
It's in your head, Nik. It's all in your head.

“So are you going to meet me?” I asked, realizing how husky and desperate my voice sounded.

“Okay. I'll be there in twenty.”

T
HE FOUNTAIN VIEW
Apartments were a squat cluster of straight lines and brown stucco with cream-colored balconies tacked on like teeth. Sandwiched between bone-rattling railroad tracks and a drugstore, and surrounded by what seemed like miles of storage sheds and a grocery, they felt worlds away from Hollis Mansion. Hell, they felt worlds away from where I lived, too. Dad and I weren't rich, by any means, but we had enough. My neighborhood was a place where families settled down—new carpet in the living room, a wet bar in an alcove off the kitchen, a flat-screen wall-mounted in the den. Fountain View Apartments was a place where people lived by necessity rather than by luxury. The type of place a Hollis wouldn't even know existed.

Yet Peyton did. I was sure of it. I couldn't explain how exactly—and I wasn't even sure I was right—but the photo had told me that this was where I'd find clues to Peyton's attack.

I waited for Dru in the parking lot, fiddling with the radio dial until I finally became frustrated and antsy and turned it off. I watched as a man came out of an apartment, carrying a hard-shell lunch cooler in one hand, and got into his truck and rumbled away, leaving a polluting cloud of old country tunes in his wake. A few minutes later, a woman in a pair of shorts and a T-shirt with a ratty knee-length robe tossed over it came outside and loosed a tiny dog onto the ground. I thought about Chris Martinez barging in on me in my robe and felt a pang of embarrassment again. The little dog scampered, picked a spot, and squatted. The woman watched on as she smoked. My fingers itched to hold a cigarette.

Just when I'd almost convinced myself to get out and bum a smoke from the lady in the robe, a silver Spyder crept into the parking lot—all chrome and shiny paint and wheel-waxed tires, dubstep thumping angrily through its speakers—and pulled up next to my car.

I sucked in my breath. My God, you could smell the posh. Dru must have really felt like he was slumming it here.

Not that I was caught up in money, but there was something seriously sexy about seeing him behind the wheel, his
hair ruffled from the top being down, his sunglasses hiding identity and emotion, the glint of midmorning sun reflecting on his watch. He stepped out and headed toward me, his button-down tucked loosely into his jeans. I felt myself flush but rolled down my window with shaky fingers.

“Nice car.”

“Birthday present,” he said, glancing at the Spyder.

“Wow, happy birthday, huh? I got a laptop.”

He shrugged. “I guess. If you're into that sort of thing.” Again, he glanced at the car, and I could have sworn the look on his face said that he kind of wasn't into that sort of thing, which went against every rumor that ever floated about every Hollis. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a set of keys. He held them up, jangled them. “You ready?”

I nodded, rolled up my window, and got out, walking toward the buildings, trying to ignore the violet feeling of being pulled toward Dru. I was almost tempted to trade exploring Peyton's apartment for exploring each other instead.

“You want to explain how you know this is where Peyton lived?” Dru called after me.

I scanned the numbers on the doors, kept moving. “Nope.”

“Don't you think it might be important information for her family to know?” Emphasis on the word
family.

I stopped, and he nearly walked into me. “Not really,” I
said. “I found it—isn't that the important part? Besides, it's just a hunch.”

“You brought me out here on a hunch?”

I rolled my eyes. “It's an apartment complex, not Siberia, for God's sake. And it's . . . well, it's more than a hunch, but I can't explain it. Or more like I won't. And this is the one,” I said, pointing to the door we stood in front of, stickers misaligned so that the 412 looked like it was riding a wave.
Silver, brown, pink
—just as it had been in the photo, of course. But seeing them here gave me confidence that maybe I was right.

He looked at the door, then at me, skeptically. “This is where Peyton moved to? My spoiled sister? You're sure?”

“Well, I won't know for sure until we open it. But that's your job. Unless you want me to kick it in?” Doubt settled into the pit of my stomach. All my life, I'd been intuitive. I never lost things. I had a pretty good memory. And I could get a feel for a room or a person or a mood pretty much the moment I was near. I'd never tried it with a photo before, but why couldn't it work?

His mouth dropped open, and he slid his sunglasses down the bridge of his nose to look over them at me. “You mean we could open this and someone else could be in there?”

Yes. It was possible—if Jones was right—that Gibson Talley could be in there. And I hadn't really thought through
that part until just now. He seemed like just the kind of guy who waited around for opportunities to shoot people who came trespassing into his space. But Peyton's family had every right to go into her apartment, no matter who she shared it with. Especially if she were to die, they would need to pack up her . . . I shook my head, remembering the cleaning ladies Dad had hired to box up Mom's things, how vulture-like they'd seemed to me. I didn't want to go there. “If it's not hers, the key won't work,” I said, evading the subject.

A grin pushed up one corner of Dru's mouth. “You are a little mystery, aren't you, Nikki Kill?”

I felt myself blush down what felt like the entire length of my body, which pissed me off. I hated when I blushed. Made me feel like a little kid. I pressed my chin down toward my chest to hide my face. “Just open the door before I grow old and die waiting,” I said.

Dru stepped around me and stuck a key in the door. Nothing.

“Try another one,” I said. He did. Still nothing.

My heart pounded, waiting for angry footsteps on the other side of the door, waiting for Gibson Talley to whip it open and rearrange Dru's half grin permanently. “Try another one,” I said again.

“This one's a car key,” he said. “There's only one more.”

He stuck the last key into the lock. At first it stuck, and
I felt my shoulders sag with disappointment. I'd been so sure. Well, not
sure
sure. But it would have been cool for me to have figured out where Peyton lived based on that photo alone.
Serves me right,
I thought.
I stop fighting my synesthesia for the first time ever and it lets me dow—

But Dru jiggled the key a little and it sank all the way in, giving a crunching sound that the others hadn't. It was the sound of key teeth meeting home. We glanced at each other, and then he turned the key and grasped the doorknob.

It turned.

We were in.

“Holy shit,” I said, pushing past Dru and stepping through the doorway. “I was right. Hello?” I called out tentatively.

“Who's going to answer you? Peyton's in the hospital, remember?”

Dru had followed me in and shut the door behind us. I found myself fumbling for a light switch. “Just a precaution,” I muttered, though inside I was thanking God that nobody had answered. There was a difference between being able to defend yourself if you had to, and wanting to actually have to. “Find a light, would you?”

Instead, Dru whipped back the curtains that had been pulled tight across the front window, letting in a flood of morning sun. I held my breath. Then looked around and let it out.

Other than the heavy gray linen curtains, the apartment was stark. A plain beige sofa sat across from a small television, which was perched atop a nondescript side table. There were no decorations on the walls, no photos on the mantel, and, most importantly, nothing that looked like a heavy-duty rocker slash hard-core drug dealer lived there.

I walked down the hall toward the one bedroom in the back, half bracing myself to find a passed-out Gibson Talley sprawled across the bed, or waiting for me behind a door with a baseball bat decorated with Peyton's dried blood.

But the bedroom was as bare as the living room. The bed was unmade, a white sheet set and plain gray blanket tousled across the mattress. The closet door stood open, showing off an impressive array of designer jeans, silk shirts, purses—the only nod to Peyton's former lifestyle. I pawed through the clothes, recognizing a few pieces. The white J. Mendel sleeveless V-neck dress she wore on the first day of school, everyone losing their freaking minds over how tan her legs looked against the fabric (
A month in the Dominican,
I'd overheard her purr countless times that day). The Isabel Marant leather top with the lace-up sleeves that she told everyone she got at Barney's during spring break. The rows and rows of Blahniks on the floor—what Jones, with not a little bit of disgusting awe, used to call her screw-me heels.

But not one stitch of men's clothes.

Not one hint of Gibson Talley at all.

Peyton had moved out, but she clearly lived alone. Why? And, more importantly, this was obviously a temporary place for her. She planned to set up house—real house—somewhere else.

Dru had joined me in the bedroom and was leaning against the door watching me. “You planning on raiding my sister's closet?”

I let out a derisive snort. “Please,” I said. I held up a lace baby-doll top—pink, of course. “Like I would be caught dead in this.” I twirled my finger through my hair. “Have the maid bring me up a cosmo, Dru. With the imported vodka, of course.”

His face darkened. “That's not what it's like, you know.”

I hung the shirt back on the rack and knelt in front of a suitcase on the floor. “What?” I unzipped the front pocket of the suitcase. There was a small stash of photos inside. Peyton clearly liked her photography. Underneath them was a pocket-sized notebook filled with what looked like poetry. At the bottom of some of the poems, she'd written©Hollis/Talley. Song lyrics. I dropped the notebook back into the suitcase.

“We're not all ordering our maids around and living lives of luxury all the time,” Dru said. “Rich people have problems, too.”

“I'm not exactly poor,” I snapped. “There's a long distance
between rich and Hollis-rich. What problems could the Hollises possibly have?”

But as I stood and turned, looked at him, it hit me how insensitive I'd just sounded. Peyton lay in a bath of crimson monitor readouts a couple of miles away right at that moment. The biggest problem I'd ever had—seeing someone I loved die from random, avoidable violence—was exactly what Dru was going through right at that moment.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “Of course you have problems. I didn't mean that.”

He ducked his head, crossed one foot over the other. “It's okay. Most people think we have the perfect family. People don't understand the pressure of being lorded over by someone as powerful as my dad. Someone as rich. In a way, I don't blame Peyton for wanting out.” Again, I heard that same derision in his voice that I'd heard earlier when he'd told me that Luna was his
half
sister. The words felt a confusing mix of putrid brown and rust. “This place is so empty,” he said, pushing away from the door frame and walking over to the squat dresser that sat near the window. He ran his fingers over its sleek surface. Nothing on it but a small jewelry box and a single bottle of perfume. “I know she's only been here a couple of weeks, but it's like she didn't really move in. You should have seen her bedroom at the house. She had so much shit in it, you could barely walk through it, you know? She left most of it there. It was like she left, but only part
of her left.” He raised his head but seemed to be looking at something beyond me. A memory, maybe, or a thought. “Seeing this place, I can see how unhappy she was. Seems so desperate here. I don't know.” He pushed a thumb against each eye. His jaw had a bitter set to it, one I recognized in my own face sometimes. “I'm probably overthinking it.”

I went to him, put my hand on his arm. His skin felt clammy, his muscles tight under my fingers. I thought I could almost detect a tremor running through them. Fear, or grief, or both. Maybe it had been a mistake to bring him here. Maybe I should have just called Detective Martinez and told him my suspicions that Gibson was somehow involved in what happened to Peyton, no matter how unbelievable he might have thought them. Maybe it was colossally shitty of me to put Dru through this, just because of my own distrust of the police.

“Hey,” I said. “We'll figure out who did this to her.”
And hopefully we will figure out why I'm involved,
I added internally, even if I recognized that my need to know made me selfish.

His eyes met mine, bright with wetness and deep with gratitude, and in that instant, every defense I'd placed around myself regarding Dru Hollis dropped, whether I wanted it to or not. Even sitting next to Peyton's bedside, he'd been so guarded, so distant. Still, the only things I knew about Dru Hollis really revolved around his reputation. But now I could
see something else in him. Tenderness, maybe. Perhaps even a little bit of awe.

As soon as his hand settled over mine, I was overcome by the connection I'd been trying so hard to deny. I could smell him—not the cheap aftershave that Jones used to slap on, but something luxurious and exotic. Something probably brought back from one of his family vacations in Saint-Tropez or Hvar or wherever the hell the Hollis family jetted off to when they wanted a break. Every time I inhaled, the purple in my mind glowed brighter and brighter, blocking out the mystifying brown he'd filled the room with and curling into a violet I knew well.

I started to pull my hand away, sensing what might happen next if I didn't get a handle on the charge between us. But the moment I lifted it off his arm, he grabbed it and pulled me in.

I didn't fight. It was so wrong to be doing this in Peyton's apartment. So wrong to be doing it at all, but I didn't fight. I didn't have any fight in me. The pull was too powerful. I wanted him too much.