by Meg Cabot
Chief of Police Santos was there, along with some other police officers. Oh, God.
I broke into a run.
“What,” I said as I burst into the office. “What happened?”
“Whoa there,” the police chief said. He lowered the cup of coffee he’d been sipping. “Who’s this?”
“Pierce Oliviera, Chief.” Tim was looking paler than usual. His button-down shirt looked rumpled and had come untucked in the back. “She’s the one from the cemetery —”
“Oh, right.” The police chief indicated an office. “Follow me, young lady.”
What was happening? The chief of police wanted to see me? Was I being blamed for the cemetery gate after all?
“Do I need to call my mother?” I demanded, staying where I was.
“I don’t know,” Chief of Police Santos said, raising his gray, bushy eyebrows questioningly. “Do you?”
“No, Pierce,” Tim said. He looked exhausted. “You don’t. It’s all right. The police just want to ask you some questions.”
If it had been anybody else but the person to whom I had surrendered my cell phone the day before — I had forgotten to do it that morning. But then, I had forgotten to bring my cell phone to school, I’d discovered a little while earlier, I’d been so caught up in my happy little love cloud — I probably would have insisted, Zack Oliviera-style, that I needed a lawyer.
But since it was Tim, my mom’s future maybe-boyfriend, I shrugged and followed Police Chief Santos into the office, which happened to be filled with cardboard boxes and pamphlets that said New Pathways: A New Pathway to a New You!
A female police officer was sitting at a conference table inside the office, writing something down in a notebook. She looked up when we came in. She didn’t smile.
“What was your name again?” Police Chief Santos said to me as I followed him. “Pierce what?”
“Oliviera,” Tim answered for me. He’d come in after us. He was holding, I saw, my file. Over the past year and a half, I’d become expert in reading my name upside down.
“Oh.” The police chief pulled out a chair at the conference table. “Have a seat, Ms. Oliviera.” He said it wrong. “This won’t take long.”
Bewildered — but knowing from experience that nothing good was about to happen — I took the seat he offered.
“If this is about the cemetery gate,” I said, “I had nothing to do with it.”
The chief of police regarded me with some surprise over the top of his coffee mug.
“The cemetery gate,” he said, when he’d lowered it again. “And what do you know about the cemetery gate?”
“Nothing,” I said. “That’s what I’m telling you. I don’t know anything about it. I don’t know who did that to it.”
“Did what to it?” I saw the chief of police exchange glances with the female officer, who’d stopped scribbling in her notebook and was looking at me as if I were a perp she was longing to tase.
“Kicked it like that,” I said. “And broke the lock.”
Police Chief Santos exhaled gustily enough to send some of the droplets of coffee left in his mustache hairs scattering into the air. The female police officer sighed and went back to her scribbling. Tim, who’d taken a seat at the end of the conference table, opened my file and pretended to be busy reading it. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought I heard the female officer say D-Wing under her breath. She shook her head in disbelief.
“Ms.…whatever your name is,” Police Chief Santos said. “The force that was applied to that gate the other night in order to inflict that kind of damage to it was equal to the amount of force it takes to launch a small grenade. Therefore, we have already determined that it was not caused by a mere kick.”
I sat there and stared down at my fingernails, now shredded of all traces of polish.
“Oh,” I said.
Who was I to tell the police they were wrong? Again.
“We aren’t here to talk about the gate, anyway,” he said grumpily. “Officer Hernandez?”
The female officer flipped a page in her notebook, then asked in a monotone, “Do you own a blue Sun Cruiser bicycle with a white flowered basket, large purple seat, red combination lock, and the serial number R-dash-one-hundred-dash-seven-fifty-one-eleven-seventy?”
I looked at them in a blind panic. My mind had gone blank. “I don’t know,” I said.
“Pierce,” Tim said gently. “You do. You and your mom registered a bicycle under your name with the police department, in case it was stolen.”
I blinked, my heart beginning to thump harder than ever.
“Oh,” I said. “Well, I do have a blue bike with a purple seat and a flowered basket and a red lock and stuff. And I did register a bike with the police department, in case it got stolen. But I don’t remember the serial number off the top of my head. Who goes around memorizing their bike’s serial number? That’s just — I mean, that’s asking way more than anyone should be required to know —”
“When is the last time you saw this bicycle?” the police chief interrupted, taking a sip of his coffee.
“Last night,” I said. “When I rode it down to see the —”
I stopped. All the blood seemed to have frozen in my veins.
My bike. I’d left it chained to the fence down by the cemetery.
When I’d gone to see Richard Smith.
“Oh, my God.” I stood up, almost knocking over my chair. “What’s happened to him?”
He was dead. I knew it. He was the last person to have touched my necklace.
And now he was dead.
I should have known. I should have known I would never be happy. I should have known I wouldn’t be able to handle him. Why would I be able to handle a death deity? The freaking ruler of an Underworld? Who was I kidding? I hadn’t been able to keep my best friend alive. I couldn’t do long division. I couldn’t even drive.
“Calm down, Pierce,” Tim said, getting up and coming around the table to my side. I’d started to hyperventilate. “It’s all right. It’s going to be all right. That’s what we’re trying to figure out.”
“But what happened?” I cried. I could feel hysteria beginning to sweep over me. “He was fine when I last saw him. He was fine when he dropped me off at home.”
“Who was fine?” Tim glanced at the police chief, who seemed as confused as Tim did. “Who are you talking about, Pierce?”
“Mr. Smith,” I said. Some of the panic began to ebb as I saw, from their expressions, that they didn’t know what I was talking about. “The cemetery sexton. Why? Wait. Who are you talking about?”
“Jade,” Tim said gently. “We’re looking for any witnesses who might have been in or around the cemetery last night. She never made it home from her shift. This morning she was found inside the cemetery, dead.”
Through me the way is to the city of woe;
Through me the way is to eternal pain;
Through me the way among the people lost.
DANTE ALIGHIERI, Inferno, Canto III
They made the announcement during lunch.
Not that Jade was dead. Why would they do that? Isla Huesos High School didn’t want to “glamorize” a death any more than the Westport Academy for Girls had.
No, the announcement was that the hurricane watch had been upgraded to a warning by the National Hurricane Center. All after-school events were canceled, as were classes the next day. We were being dismissed at two o’clock instead of three fifteen.
“Why don’t they just let us go now?” Kayla complained over her chef’s salad. “I mean, what good is one hour more of class going to do, with everyone freaking out because a gigantic hurricane is coming? It’s not like we’re going to learn anything after this.”
“Yeah,” I said. “And it would give us less time to memorialize her death. Just cancel school now so we can’t even talk about her.”
“What?” Kayla asked.
“Nothing,” I said, lowering my burrito. Who could eat at a time like thi
s, anyway?
“Remember the time she didn’t kill her teacher?” Alex explained to Kayla. “It was over something like this thing with Jade.”
“No, it wasn’t,” I said. “Jade didn’t hit herself over the head with a blunt instrument.”
Tim had told me that as near as the police could figure out, since Jade’s body hadn’t been found for so long and no witnesses had come forward yet, she’d been the victim of what looked like a random mugging. As soon as the EMTs got to her — she was discovered behind a crypt by Richard Smith when he’d gone to the cemetery for work that morning — they had her airlifted to Ryder Trauma Center in Miami.
But even they hadn’t been able to save her. The damage to her skull — though she’d had her bicycle helmet on — was too extensive.
“I’m sorry, Pierce,” Tim had said to me, patting me on the back as I broke down in the conference room and cried. “I’m so sorry.”
Not as sorry as I was.
Nothing bad will happen to her. John will see to that.
That’s what Richard Smith had said to me in the car after Jade rode away into that rain.
But something bad had happened to her. The worst thing that could possibly happen to someone.
Because John hadn’t been in the cemetery to take care of her.
He’d been with me.
That’s what I’d said to him — Mr. Smith — when I stumbled out of the New Pathways office after they let me go. I’d called him in his office immediately from a pay phone.
“It’s all my fault,” I said, sobbing.
“I don’t see how that’s possible,” he replied. “Unless you were the one who struck her from behind with the pipe or shovel or whatever it was that was used to kill her, and then took her wallet — and her bicycle. And her police radio. That’s missing as well, which I find odd. You can hardly pawn a police radio —”
“You know what I mean. John was with me when she died,” I hissed into the phone. The bell had rung by then, and people were filing by, throwing odd looks at me because not only was I on what had to be the last remaining pay phone on Isla Huesos, but I was crying.
“It wasn’t John’s fault, either, Miss Oliviera,” he said with maddening calm. “Although he feels as badly as you do. Who do you think woke me and led me to her?”
“It wasn’t safe,” I wailed. “John said the cemetery wasn’t safe!”
Why hadn’t I told him last night that she was in there? I’d been too distracted by his kisses.…
“For you,” Richard Smith reminded me. “He said it wasn’t safe for you. No one could have predicted this, Miss Oliviera, not even a death deity. It was just her time. It’s unfortunate, of course, and when they find the person responsible, I hope he’s punished to the fullest extent of the law. But you can hardly blame this on John, much less yourself. Jade chose to be out there. She knew the risks of what she was doing. And you saw how much fun she was having. John said she’s moved on to a better place —”
I’d hung up on him, I was so furious. This is what had come from Richard Smith’s suggestion that I “be sweeter.” Someone I’d liked — really liked — was dead.
Check yourself before you wreck yourself.
Yes, I suppose rationally I knew in the back of my mind that Jade’s death wasn’t my fault, or John’s either.…But when something horrible happens, it’s human nature to want to blame it on someone. We want someone to be held accountable, even though sometimes things just happen.
The problem, like my dad said, was that too often, we hold the wrong person accountable. Sometimes even the victim herself. We do this so we can reassure ourselves the bad thing will never happen to us. “Oh, this terrible thing happened to this person because she did such-and-such. All I have to do is never do such-and-such, and then the terrible thing will never happen to me.”
I died trying to rescue a bird. My mom holds my dad accountable for this, since he didn’t get the pool cover fixed, or notice I was drowning. When really it was my own fault for being so clumsy.
In Jade’s case, as soon as the details of her death hit the caf — which they seemed to as soon as I walked into the Quad — everyone was saying, “Well, what was she doing riding her bike so late at night, and in the cemetery, of all places? She should never have been doing that. No wonder she died.”
Like it was Jade’s own fault.
There was just one small problem with this theory:
Jade had been killed by someone. The police wanted to find that person or at least a witness who could say they’d seen him.
By the time the first of the day’s big gray storm clouds started to roll in, the pieces all began to come together. Later, I couldn’t believe how long it took me to see them.
But it was all so horrible. Who could even begin to imagine something so horrible?
And the thing is, people die. Sometimes they trip and fall, then they hit their heads and roll into the pool and drown.
Other times they get seduced by their basketball coach and then dumped, and they go home and swallow a bottle of prescription pills.
Other times they get mugged while riding their bikes and don’t get found in time and then they die.
It’s just the way things are. It doesn’t have anything to do with you, necessarily.
“Aunt Deb?” Alex said, answering his phone when it rang as we were dropping off our empty lunch trays. “I know. Pierce forgot her phone again, didn’t she?”
But then again, other times, it does have something to do with you.
Alex’s face drained of its normal color as my mother spoke. Evidently, she didn’t want to talk to me.
Other people did, though.
“Hey, Pierce,” Farah said, smiling and waving as she and Seth walked by, arms around each other’s waists.
“Oh,” I said to them. I couldn’t quite summon a smile back. But I waved. “Hey.”
The storm clouds overhead rumbled. It was so weird that they made everyone at this school eat lunch outside. What were we supposed to do, I wondered, when it rained? Like it was about to do right now, for instance?
“Pierce,” Bryce yelled at me, as he walked by on his way to the trash cans with what looked like about twelve burrito wrappers. Cody was with him. “Pierce, Pierce, Pierce, Pierce!” They yelled it like it was a chant. Like it was the Mueller Shout-Out.
“God,” Kayla said to me. “What did you have with them yesterday, ice cream or sex?”
I made a face at her. “Ew. Shut up.”
Alex hung up his phone.
“Hey,” I said to him. “What did my mom want?”
“She was calling from the police station. They just took my dad there for questioning,” he said. He looked sick, as if someone had punched him in the gut. “For Jade’s murder.”
I felt the ground shift beneath my feet. At first I thought it was thunder.
But there hadn’t been any thunder. Not then.
“What?” I said, my mind whirling. “But how is that even —”
“A witness phoned in an anonymous tip,” Alex said. “They said they saw Dad driving around near the cemetery last night, in Grandma’s car. They just came over and impounded it. They’re testing it for trace evidence.” He let out a laugh that sounded nothing like his normal one. “Grandma’s car. They just took Grandma’s car. I wonder what they’ll find in it. A lot of yarn, that’s for sure.”
“Alex,” I said uneasily.
This couldn’t be happening. Not so many terrible things at once. How could they?
Something was wrong. Not just wrong but planets-out-of-alignment wrong.
Check yourself before you wreck yourself.
As soon as I thought it, a gust of wind swept through the courtyard, so strong everyone still sitting at the many lunch tables had to grab their food wrappers to keep them from blowing away. Farah and Nicole let out good-natured shrieks and clung to their skirts. Every guy in the Quad but Alex noticed.
“He didn’t even go out last nigh
t,” he was saying angrily about Uncle Chris. “You know him. He never goes out, except for his meetings with his parole officer. He just sits in front of that TV, watching the Weather Channel, drinking —”
“Mountain Dew,” I finished for him. “I know.”
I looked around. Lightning was beginning to flash out at sea.
No. This could not be happening.
But at the same time, the sinking feeling I’d been experiencing since I’d seen the police in the New Pathways office told me that it most definitely was happening.
No. Not ever since I’d seen the police in the New Pathways office. Ever since I’d come back from the dead.
If I really wanted to be honest with myself, though, I had to admit it had all started long before that:
“Did you like him?” Grandma had asked.
“I don’t know,” I’d replied.
Grandma had smiled.
“You will,” she’d said.
And tucked a scarf around my neck. A scarf she’d knitted herself, just for me.
A red one. With tassels.
Wait. That wasn’t how it had happened. What was I thinking? Grandma was right: I really did have an overactive imagination.
“Is this just a case of rounding up the usual suspects?” Kayla asked. “I saw that in a movie once. Maybe just because your dad went to jail once, they’re questioning everyone who —”
“No,” Alex said bitterly, looking as if he wanted to punch something. But there was nothing nearby soft enough to hit without injuring himself, except possibly some A-Wingers who were scattering because it was about to pour and the warning bell had just rung for class. “I told you. Someone says they saw him. A witness. Some witness, if he managed to see my dad somewhere he wasn’t, driving a car he was never in.”
“Oh, Alex,” Kayla said, and put her hand on his shoulder. Her expression was softer than I’d ever seen it. “I’m so, so sorry.”
My mind flashed back to Uncle Chris from the day before, when he’d urged me never to let anyone tell me I couldn’t do something I’d set my mind to.
That wasn’t going to be a problem anymore, I didn’t think.
