The Oxford Inheritance (20 page)

They'd reached the Raleigh gates. Cassie stared at him, her mind going blank. He was trapped by the presence of family, but she was controlled by the absence of it. In a way, her mother's legacy was just as stifling as the expectations Hugo was dealing with. Cassie felt she had no choice: from the moment she'd found the package pointing to Oxford, her destiny was set. She would chase down the truth until all was revealed to her; it wasn't a choice so much as a calling.

Again, the questions lingered in her mind: Who would she be when this was over? What would she have to hold on to, when there was no more chasing left to do? “I don't know,” she admitted finally. “This is all I've ever been.”

“No,” Hugo corrected her, reaching out. His palm slid against her cheek, cupping her jaw, and he stared down intently into her eyes. “You're so much more than you even know.”

Cassie froze. She felt the shiver of sensation, his hand burning against her skin, but more than that, something in his eyes: dark loneliness she recognized, because she felt it every day. A hunger, drawing her in.

Hugo's eyes darkened, and suddenly he was leaning in, closer, until she could feel the whisper of his breath against her skin. All she had to do was lift her lips to his, but she remained frozen in place, paralyzed, the hesitation strung in the air between them.

What did he want from her?
Cassie lurched back. “Good night,” she blurted, putting three feet of safe distance between them.

Hugo straightened, blinking. “Uh, right.” He swallowed. “You'll be okay—”

“Fine.” Cassie said shortly. She clutched the paper bag of takeout and slipped backward inside the gates.

“Wait,” Hugo called. “I . . . we're having a New Year's party. Down at Gravestone. A whole crowd. Come.”

Cassie swallowed. “I can't,” she lied. “I have plans here. But thanks.” She didn't wait for his response before she turned and walked swiftly away, as fast as she could manage without breaking into a run. But even as she strode through the dark courtyard, the night air frozen on her skin, she felt the burn of his touch on her cheek, felt the shimmer of something dark and alive twisting in her blood.

She'd forced herself to forget their meeting in the courtyard, the sharp unease she'd felt at his presence. After Evie died, it had seemed to fade into the background, drowned with grief and guilt and the way that Hugo seemed to understand what she was going through. But now that panic flared to life again, a thunder of adrenaline in her veins. Fear, mixed with something even more dangerous.

Desire.

CHARLIE CALLED ON CHRISTMAS DAY MORNING. CASSIE HAD
been sitting around with nothing better to do than channel-hop old holiday movies, so she arranged to meet him at a pub on the outskirts of the city. When she arrived, she found him nursing a pint of beer in the cold of the empty garden out back.

“Can't we go inside?” Cassie asked, shivering. She was wrapped in her duffel coat and scarf, but her fingertips were almost numb from the winter cold.

Charlie shook his head, glancing anxiously around. “This, you don't want anyone to hear.”

Cassie's heart clenched. She'd almost given up on hearing from Charlie. After two weeks of silence, she wondered if he'd been avoiding her request, or he was just too busy with his regular life to take the time to check into Rose's death.

“It took me long enough to get to the files,” he began. “I said you were a researcher doing a story on student suicides, and I didn't think it would be a problem; we get requests like that all the time. So I filled in the paperwork like usual.” He paused, his blue eyes searching hers. “The next morning, I get called in to see the inspector. He grills me for half an hour. Wants to know who you are, why those files. He tried to play it off like confidentiality, you know, respect for the families, but he was rattled. So I told him it was no skin off my nose. I dropped it.”

Cassie tried to hide her disappointment. “Thanks all the same,” she said, already wondering how she could get access to those suicide files.

“Wait a minute,” Charlie corrected her. “I'm not done. I told the inspector it was finished, and then I waited. I didn't have a chance to get near the files for a while, everything's kept on-site, you see, in a fancy new storage wing. People all over the place. But this week, it thinned out. Lots of sick days, people phoning it in for the holidays. I was able to get in there and have a good dig around.”

“And?” Cassie's hopes rose. The cold was forgotten, and the discomfort of the wooden bench. All that mattered was the sheaf of photocopied pages Charlie ceremoniously withdrew from his inside coat pocket.

“And you're right. Something's off.” He fanned the pages out on the table, and Cassie grabbed the nearest one. “There wasn't much on your friend Evie. The coroner's report was straightforward. Asphyxiation by hanging, no foul play. But Rose Smith . . .” He sighed. “I read the investigation report back to front, and it just doesn't add up. They said suicide, right? But nobody even saw her by the river that day. They found her coat on the bridge, and a note back in her room, but that's it. Now, suicide is plausible, don't get me wrong. But they didn't even declare her a missing person. Just announced it, case closed. It was too clean.”

“What do you mean?”

“I know how to read a report. The subtext, the stuff between the lines, and this . . . They wanted it tied up with a fucking ribbon, quick too. They dredged the river, found her things, and that was it. Usually an investigation will go on for months if they don't have a body, but they closed this in a couple of days. And that wasn't all.” Charlie took a breath. “It got me thinking, the reason they were all so quick to jump to conclusions about the suicide was there had been a whole rash of them that year. Five deaths in the previous couple of months. Stands to reason, right? If all those other kids topped themselves from stress and whatever, this girl must have done the same. So I looked into them, the other deaths.” Charlie reached out and pushed the other papers
toward Cassie, a thick wedge. “They were just the beginning. In the years nineteen ninety to ninety-five, there were sixteen suicides reported at the university.”

“Is that a lot?” Cassie asked, trying to understand this new direction.

Charlie gave a grim nod. “Double the national average.”

“But Oxford is a stressful environment,” Cassie said slowly, repeating what Thessaly had told her in their counseling session.

“Sure, but then you'd expect the rates to stay steady,” Charlie argued. “Instead, look.” He pulled a piece of paper from his coat pocket, neatly folded. It was a rough timeline with Xs marked along the years. “You get clusters. And going back too—I searched the records for all mentions of suicide going back as far as I could. It's the same. The rate is steady, a few people every year, then every twenty-five years or so, a big new cluster. In the midsixties, they had ten bodies show up in the space of five months.”

“Why didn't anyone notice?” Cassie asked, her mind racing.

Charlie shrugged. “Who's going to connect the dots?” he asked. “The deaths don't get investigated on our end: once it's a suicide, that pretty much wraps it up. The families are too focused on their own grief. Occasionally, you'd get a researcher or someone talking about the epidemic of tragedy, so the colleges would launch a mental health campaign, or some kind of help line, but that's it. People move on, you see: students, staff—nobody stays in the same place here for long. They leave, a new crop of students arrives, and everyone forgets what happened before.”

Cassie stared at the diagram, the tiny crosses marking so many lost lives. “These are all students?”

“Mostly.” Charlie nodded. “Some locals too. But they didn't get such a fuss. Not so high profile.”

“And you're sure it's not just a coincidence,” Cassie tried. This wasn't just two deaths that didn't add up, but dozens, stretching back
half a century at least. This was way over her head. “College attracts brilliant, unstable people. They get fixated on the work; any kind of failure can set them over the edge.”

“Look at it,” Charlie said, tapping the paper. “Does that look like a coincidence to you?”

The timeline was impossible to ignore. Cassie traced the line, trying to imagine all those unexplained deaths, how anyone could turn his head and look the other way for so long. “What do you think it is?” she asked. “A serial killer? More than one?”

Charlie shook his head slowly. “The timeline is too spread out. Most killers will strike within ten or twenty years. This goes back to the nineteenth century, at least.”

“So it's bigger than just one person.” She shivered. “What do we do next?”

Charlie pulled his coat closed. “Well, I don't know about you, but I need to get home. My mum's got a Christmas roast in the oven, and if I'm not back to peel the spuds, there'll be hell to pay.”

Cassie blinked in disbelief. He'd delivered her proof that there were dozens of unexplained deaths at Oxford, and now he was talking about holiday meals? He must have caught her anxious expression because he sighed. “Look, there's something here. I believe you. We need to figure out what's been going on. But there's nothing we can do today. It's Christmas. Go home, relax, we'll pick this up next week.”

“Home,” Cassie echoed. As if she could simply put this aside now, when it was so much bigger than she'd ever imagined. “Sure. Right.”

She got up to leave, but Charlie paused. “Where are you celebrating, anyway?”

Cassie was still thinking about the cluster of Xs and stumbled out her response. “Um, nowhere. I don't really do the holidays.”

“You don't do . . . ? Right, come on.” Charlie beckoned. “My mum would string me up if she knew there was a stray wandering around.”

“I'm not a stray!” Cassie protested. “And I'm fine, really. I'll get takeout and watch
It's a Wonderful Life
. Fine, see?” She forced a smile, but Charlie just rolled his eyes.

“You'll sit around obsessing over this lot, you mean. Come on,” he said again, softer this time. “What's the harm? We're a loud, obnoxious bunch, but it's Christmas. Everyone should be with family, even if it's not your own.”

Cassie felt a pang. Her last Christmas with her mother had been a good year, her mom stable enough to remember presents and a tree. She'd baked cinnamon cookies and played Christmas songs while Cassie watched from the kitchen counter and tried desperately to remember this: the safety, the comfort and joy. She'd known she might not get another Christmas like that; she just hadn't known she would never get another at all.

Something in her twisted with a lonely ache. She found herself nodding. “Okay,” she told Charlie, self-conscious. “Thank you. I'll come.”

Charlie's family lived on the outskirts of the city, in a residential cul-de-sac
full of redbrick houses and overgrown front yards. Several of the houses were strewn with gaudy Christmas lights, but none were as elaborate as the plastic Santa and snowmen propped on the roof of Charlie's house, flashing a rainbow of lights even in the bright of midday. “Now, you might want to brace yourself,” he warned her, slamming the car door of his beat-up blue Honda. “They were just breaking into the Baileys when I left, so it's probably bedlam by now.”

Cassie followed him up the walk, curious. Even from here she could hear noise from inside the house, and when he unlocked the front door, it burst out in a chorus of chaos.

“Mum! Kirsty took my new skirt from Topshop and you know she'll stretch it out!” A teenage girl was thundering down the stairs, closely followed by another girl around sixteen dressed in a tight vest and red miniskirt.

“Will not, you're the one who needs to stop eating all my Ferrero Rocher!” They pushed past Charlie and Cassie without slowing for breath, racing to the back of the house.

Charlie gave Cassie a grin. “Welcome to the madness.”

Another girl backed out of the living room, juggling a baby on her hip. “Liam! Liam, put that plug down! What have I told you, sockets aren't toys!” She turned, seeing them in the hallway. “Charlie, there you are. Can you keep your nephew from electrocuting the cat? If he blows the fuse, we'll never get dinner cooked.”

“Cassie, my sister Rhiannon,” Charlie introduced.

Rhiannon gave Cassie a brief look. “Can you take her?” she asked, thrusting the baby at her.

“I, what?” Cassie didn't have time to argue; the infant was already in her arms.

“Just for a sec, I've got to go give her dad a bollocking. Charlie, the plug!” she ordered, before marching outside.

“Duty calls,” Charlie grinned, heading into the living room.

Cassie caught her breath, alone for a moment in the hallway with a baby in her arms. When Charlie had said his family was a handful, she hadn't realized what he meant. For a second, she thought about making her excuses and a quick exit, but then Charlie poked his head back around the door with a friendly grin. “Well, don't just stand there.”

“Sure. Sorry.” Cassie followed him into the living room, crammed with old faded sofas, a big-screen TV, and a huge, gaudily decorated tree. Charlie was on his knees, tickling a toddler who shrieked in delight. He looked up. “Sorry about Rhiannon. These are her brats.”

“Oh.” Cassie blinked, wondering how old she was. Not more than eighteen, at most.

Charlie caught her look and chuckled. “Yeah, that about sums it up. You should have seen Mum's face when she came home from school and told us she was pregnant with this one.” He attacked the toddler again. “Should've known he'd turn out to be a terror. That one's Daisy,” he
added, nodding to the baby Cassie was holding awkwardly. “And those two whining girls you saw tearing through here before are my youngest sisters, Kirsty and Laura.”

“Wow.” Cassie swallowed. “Big family.”

“Yup.” Charlie swung Liam over his head to sit on his shoulders. “And Uncle Fred and Aunt Trudy are here too. Don't worry,” he added. “They're too busy not speaking to each other to pay any attention to you.”

Charlie was right. As the various members of the Day clan wandered in and out of the room, Cassie found she could sit unnoticed in the corner, bouncing the placid baby on her lap as the noise continued around her, Charlie and his sisters bickering over half a dozen different things. She found it hard to keep up, but Cassie didn't mind: it was relaxing to simply watch the madness whirl around her, the loud, affectionate hustle of family life. Nobody asked her about her own family or plans, they just set her to work peeling potatoes in the overpacked kitchen, while Charlie's mother kept a watchful eye on five different pans of food and his sisters flipped through gossip magazines and texted their friends.

“So how long have you known our Charlie?” his mother, Maureen, asked when Charlie had been sent up on the roof to adjust the TV aerial. She was a loud, blousy women in her fifties with a feathery cut of dyed blond hair and the kind of sharp gaze that left nothing unnoticed.

“A couple of months,” Cassie replied. “But I don't know him all that well.”

“So you're not his girlfriend?” one of the sisters, Laura, Cassie thought, piped up.

“No, it's not her,” the other teenage girl answered for Cassie. “He dumped her the other week, remember? She was getting too clingy.”

“They always get too clingy. He's such a man-whore.” Laura rolled her eyes.

“Don't talk like that about your brother,” Maureen scolded. “He's just looking for the right girl, that's all.” She turned back to Cassie with
a worrying gleam in her eye. “And you're a student at one of the colleges, are you? Clever girl.”

“Just for the year,” Cassie explained quickly, lest Maureen get the impression that Cassie was that right girl Charlie needed. “Then I go back to America.”

“Hmm.” Maureen paused. “Well, shame.” She turned back to stirring the gravy. “It's hard for him to meet a nice girl; all he does is work.”

“And get drunk down at the pub,” Kirsty muttered.

“I don't suppose you have any friends . . . ?” Maureen was asking when Charlie came back in.

“What did I miss?” He looked around.

“I was hearing all about your love life,” Cassie told him, with a teasing grin.