The Complete Private Collection: Private; Invitation Only; Untouchable; Confessions; Inner Circle; Legacy; Ambition; Revelation; Last Christmas; Paradise ... The Book of Spells; Ominous; Vengeance (332 page)

I had already placed calls to every important county executive I could find online, not knowing which one might be able to help me, but it wasn’t like it mattered. I’d been screened by each of their assistants and no one had called me back. I wished Mr. Lange were still alive. He would have known exactly the right person to contact, exactly how to smooth things over. But me? I was clueless and utterly lost. And I didn’t like the feeling.

I could have gotten in touch with Chester Worth again, but I tried not to bother him too much. Sometimes I could tell that the tentative phone calls of a naive schoolgirl grated on his nerves, almost as much as the tenth call of the day from Janice Winthrop grated on mine, and just knowing that I might be annoying him made me nervous to call. Somewhere in the back of both our minds, we realized I was not his responsibility, and sooner or later his duty to his deceased business partner was going to wear out.

If only I could get Noelle involved. That girl was definitely her father’s daughter. It was like she instinctively knew how to get things done, and get them done right. She had a way of talking to people that made them snap to attention.

But Noelle was off the project and, deep down, I knew why. She was angry at me because that knife her father had taken in the gut had been meant for me. She had never said it, she probably never would, but I knew she was thinking it. She had to be. Because I was thinking it too. I’d been thinking it every day since it happened, feeling the weight of it, the crushing blame. Our father had died to save me. I spent at least 99 percent of my waking hours trying not to let that fact overwhelm me. Which was another reason that rebuilding Billings was so important to me. Staying focused on every minute detail of such an overwhelming project kept me from obsessing on other, more horrifying thoughts.

I knew Noelle wouldn’t have wanted to lose me, but I often wondered, if it had come down to a choice between me and her father, which one of us would she have chosen to keep alive?

Someone in the room coughed, rousing me from my thoughts. I
looked at the board and quickly jotted down a few notes, but there was no way I could catch up now. I glanced across the two rows of diligent students that separated me from Sawyer and hoped that he was taking good notes, because I was definitely going to need to borrow them.

Suddenly, I saw something flash out by the construction site. Someone was walking quickly away from one of the trailers. It didn’t look like one of the workers, though. He was too slim, too skittish, too young. He wore a black canvas jacket and a baseball cap and was moving so fast and furtively it made my nerves sizzle.

My phone vibrated in the back pocket of my jeans, making me jump. Behind me, Astrid snorted a laugh. I yanked the phone out and held it in both hands under my desk, cursing whichever alumna had decided to scare the crap out of me in the middle of class. The text was from an unknown number. Even though this wasn’t completely out of the ordinary—some of the alums had texted from numbers I didn’t have stored in my phone—my heart still pitter-pattered nervously. I’d had some bad luck with mystery texts in my recent past when Noelle and her grandmother had staged her fake kidnapping and sent me on a series of ridiculous tasks to get her back.

At the board Mr. Cheever droned on. I held my breath and opened the text.

U KNO U’VE GOT POWERFL ALUMS ON UR SIDE W/BILLINGS. U JUST NEED 2 FIND RIGHT ONE. HINT: SHE’S FILED UNDER G.

My throat went dry. I glanced around the classroom, but everyone in sight was focused on the teacher, their pens scratching over their notebooks. No one had a phone out—not Missy, not Lorna, not Diana Waters, not Sawyer or Marc Alberro. Of course, not every student at Easton was in this classroom, but most of them were currently in class somewhere. And technically, texting in class was verboten. But anyone could have sent this message and then stashed their phone away before I even had a chance to pull my cell out of my pocket.

My fingers trembling, I texted back.

WHO R U?

The message came up that it was sending. And sending. And sending. Then the screen lit up with the words:
MSG FAILED
.

Pressing my teeth together in frustration, I tried again.

WHO R U?

MSG FAILED
.

I sat back hard in my chair and turned my phone off, mentally letting out a string of curses that, if spoken aloud, would have landed me in detention for a week.

Then, out in the hallway, I heard a giggle. I glanced up at the open door just as someone darted past. A blond someone in a pink dress. My heart completely seized and I sat up straight, but no one else in the
room seemed to have noticed. It was all I could do to keep myself from sprinting across the room and checking the hall.

I glanced around the desks again, and my eyes met Missy’s. She was glaring at me from across two rows of desks, her mouth set in an angry red line.

“Reed,” Astrid whispered from behind me. “Are you all right?”

“Yeah. I’m fine,” I whispered back hoarsely, tearing my gaze away from Missy’s to face forward again.

My hands trembled beneath my desk, holding tight to my phone. I felt vulnerable and small, as if at any moment someone or something was about to attack. But the hallway was silent now, and the construction site was still, nothing moving other than the flag atop the crane, flapping in the breeze.

“You’ve been stalked more this year than half the starlets in Hollywood combined. I’m not sure whether to be proud, jealous, or just seriously disturbed.”

Ivy Slade handed my phone back to me after reading my mystery text and arched one perfectly plucked eyebrow. She stood in the center of my single dorm room in Pemberly Hall with her slim arms crossed over her chest. Her dark hair hung loose over the shoulders of her white cardigan, and she looked as if she’d been spray-painted into her dark-wash skinny jeans.

“Believe me, it’s not something I’m proud of,” I told her, tossing my phone onto my bed. I glanced out the window toward the construction site, checking for dark-jacketed creepers or random girls with blond hair. “So what do I do now?”

“How much time do you have before Josh comes to pick you up?” she asked, sliding past me to sit at my desk. She opened my laptop and
the screen instantly filled with at least ten open documents—outlines of my plans for the cocktail party and brunch; contact numbers for caterers, car services, florists, and hotels; guest lists; meal preferences; and arrival times. Just looking it was giving me a migraine.

“About ten minutes,” I replied, checking my watch. Josh had been busy most of the day, but we’d had a standing predinner coffee date for weeks now. So standard that all my friends knew I basically planned my day around it. It was the best and most chill part of my day. “What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking we start by checking to see if this stalker’s info is any good,” Ivy said, tossing her hair over her shoulder as she looked back at me. I was already staring out the window again. “Hello? Can I have your attention, please?”

With a sigh I yanked the curtain over the window and then sat down on the edge of my bed. “Can we
not
call it a stalker? Just hearing the word gives me the heebs.”

Ivy’s red lips twisted into a smirk. “Fine. Mystery texter it is. MT for short.”

I smiled as Ivy opened the most valuable folder on my computer—the one containing all the information there was to know about every last Billings alum and all the current Billings Girls as well. There were several files, each with the information organized in different ways—by class, by initiation date, by last name. Ivy opened the alphabetical file and went right for the G’s.

“So. What are we looking for?” Ivy asked.

“I have no idea.” I wiped my sweaty palms on my thighs and
scooted forward a bit. “Someone in county government? Or state?”

Ivy clicked on the first
G
name, Lacey Galvin, but apparently Lacey was a world-class yachtswoman living in Florida. She closed the file and opened the next.

“Or maybe someone in construction?” she said. “Green living?”

The next woman owned five hotels in France. The next was listed as a life coach in Los Angeles. There was an Olympic equestrian, a CEO of a gourmet food corporation, and several philanthropists, but no one working on environmental causes. By the time we got to the last woman in the
G
section, Cori Gulberg, I was starting to think that this MT person was either out of their minds, or so bored they were making stuff up for fun.

“Here’s something,” Ivy said, snagging my attention. “Cori Gulberg is president of Glace Cosmetics.”

I turned up my palms. “So?”

“It says they’re leaders in green initiatives in their field,” Ivy said, though even she sounded skeptical.

“They make organic blush and primer. That’s gonna be really helpful,” I groused, pushing myself up. I shooed her out of my chair. “Get up. Go!”

“Why? We’re done with the G’s. What do you think you’re going to find that I didn’t?” Ivy complained. She finally stood up when she saw that I was about to sit down on her lap.

“I don’t know,” I said. “There has to be something.”

I started scrolling through the entire alphabetical list, as if I was going to find some
G
name misfiled under
M
.

“No, actually there doesn’t,” Ivy said, hovering over me. “It looks like our little MT just felt like sending you on a pointless mission.”

“But why?” I asked, tearing my eyes from the screen as random names flew by faster and faster and faster. “Why bother? Just so that we’d waste a few minutes on my laptop?”

Suddenly, Ivy’s eyes widened at the computer screen. “Wait! Stop! Go back.”

I lifted my fingers from the touchpad. “Go back where?”

“To the
S
section,” she said, shaking her finger at the screen in frustration. “Did I just see the name Carolina Slavowski?”

“Um . . . maybe.” I scrolled back. What someone with the initials
CS
had to do with
G
was beyond me, but Ivy was acting like a puppy dog that had just spotted its first cat. I found the name Carolina Slavowski and hovered the arrow over it.

“And we’re interested in this person why?”

“Carolina Slavowski is the real name of Carolina Grant.”

I stared at Ivy blankly. “Who the hell is Carolina Grant?”

“From Renovate TV?” Ivy prodded me. She rolled her eyes at my continued dumb stare. “She does all these green renovations, overhauling houses to reduce their carbon footprint, helping businesses get up to code . . . ” She clucked her tongue and nudged me aside with her shoulder, angling for the keyboard. “Here.”

It took two seconds for her to bring up the Renovate TV website and toggle to a show called
Go Green!
Suddenly a video popped up on the screen, featuring a bright-eyed, curly-haired woman who was spunk personified.

“Hi! I’m Carolina Grant!” she said as she walked along a pristine beach in jeans, a T-shirt, and a tool belt. “Do you want to have the greenest, most cost-efficient, most Earth-friendly home on
your
block? We’re looking for new homes to renovate for next season’s episodes of
Go Green!
Simply click on the link to my left and fill out the entry form. You could be the next person to join the Go Green revolution!”

The video stopped and I gaped at Ivy. “She went to Easton?”

“That just makes her so much more awesome,” Ivy said reverently.

I leaned back, narrowing my eyes at her. “You watch Renovate TV?”

Ivy crossed her arms over her chest and stood up straight. “Sex addicts need sex. Drug addicts need drugs. I need to watch people demolish their homes and rebuild them again. Got a problem with that?”

I laughed. “Just seeing a whole new side of you, that’s all.”

“You do realize what this means, right?” Ivy said, grabbing my phone up off my bed. “It means that your MT is on the up and up.”

I turned around and stared at Carolina Grant’s frozen made-for-TV smile. “And it also means that we may have just found somebody who could help us fast-track Billings.”

Suddenly, I felt as if a huge weight was being lifted off my heart, and I found myself sitting up a little straighter. Maybe this project didn’t have to be shelved after all. Maybe there was something I could do to fix it. Who needed Noelle when I could have Carolina Grant?

“Thank you, MT,” I said under my breath.

“Should we call her?” Ivy asked, practically hyperventilating as she clutched my cell. Clearly the idea of talking to Carolina was making her dizzy.

“Definitely,” I said.

And then my stomach grumbled. My eyes darted to the clock on my desk and I frowned. Embroiled in our research, I’d lost track of time, and Josh was over twenty minutes late.

“Can I have my phone? I just need to call Josh real quick.”

Ivy’s smile drooped, but she handed the phone over. “Sure.”

It took four rings for Josh to pick up. “Reed, hey,” he whispered.

“Hey,” I said. “I just wanted to make sure you were all right. We still on for coffee?”

I was kind of dying to see him, especially now. I wanted to tell him about MT and the helpful info he or she had helped us dig up. Although, knowing Josh, he’d probably tell me to block MT’s number and never think about it again. He was decidedly anti-intrigue. And for good reason, considering our track record.

“You can’t go out now! What about calling Carolina?” Ivy hissed, nudging my arm. I batted her hand away.

“Crap, I’m so sorry,” Josh said. His voice got gradually louder until he was speaking normally. “I totally spaced. Trey got us passes to go off campus for pizza, so I’m not gonna be back for a while.”

My heart thumped extra hard. He’d spaced on our standing date? That was very not like him.

“Um, okay,” I said, trying to sound upbeat. “It’s no big deal. I’ve got a lot to do anyway.”

“You sure?” Josh asked. I heard a horn honk in the background and assumed he was standing outside the pizza place now. But why couldn’t he talk to me in front of Trey? Why had he been whispering when he’d picked up?