by Meg Cabot
Then again, it was probably annoying to Cheryl’s roommate that Cheryl’s side of the room was decorated with so many pansies, the New York College mascot.
“I guess,” Ann says, looking wan.
“She does,” Cheryl assures me brightly. “Don’t you, Ann?”
Ann shrugs. “I guess,” she says again.
I begin to sense Ann might have been coerced into agreeing to this room change.
“Ann,” I say. “Have you met Cheryl’s roommate, Karly? You know she, er… likes the color black?”
“Oh,” Ann says. “Yeah. The Goth thing. I know. It’s okay.”
“And… ” I hesitate to bring it up, because, ew. “The snake?”
“Whatever. I mean”—she looks at Cheryl—“no offense, or anything. But I’d rather live with a snake than a cheerleader.”
Cheryl, far from being offended, beams at me.
“See?” she says. “So can we do the paperwork for our swap now? Because my dad is here to help me move, and he wants to get back to New Jersey before this big blizzard hits.”
I pull out the forms, finding myself shrugging, just like Ann—it’s sort of catching.
“Okay,” I say, and hand them the papers they have to fill out to make the switch. When the girls—Cheryl giddy with excitement, Ann decidedly more calm—finish filling out their forms and leave, I look over last night’s briefing forms. Fischer Hall is staffed round-the-clock by a security guard, student front desk receptionists, and resident assistants, students who, in exchange for free room and board, act as sort of house mothers on each of the hall’s twenty floors. They all have to fill out reports at the end of their shifts, and my job is to read and follow up on these briefings. This always makes for an interesting morning.
The reports range from the ludicrous to the banal. Last night, for instance, six forty-ounce bottles of beer were hurled from an upper-story window onto the roof of a cab passing on the street below. Ten cops from the Sixth Precinct arrived and ran up and down the stairs a few times, unsuccessfully trying to figure out who the pitcher had been.
On the other end of the spectrum, the front desk apparently lost someone’s Columbia House CD of the Month, causing much consternation. One of the RAs somberly reports that a resident slammed her door several times, crying, “I hate it here.” The RA wishes to refer the student to Counseling Services.
Another report states that a small riot occurred when a cafeteria worker chastised a student for attempting to make an English muffin pizza in the toaster oven.
When my phone jangles, I pounce on it, grateful for something to do. I do love my job—really. But I have to admit it doesn’t tax my intellect overly much.
“Fischer Hall, this is Heather, how may I help you?” My last boss, Rachel, had been very strict about how I answered the phone. Even though Rachel’s not around anymore, old habits die hard.
“Heather?” I can hear an ambulance in the background. “Heather, it’s Tom.”
“Oh, hi, Tom.” I glance at the clock. Nine-twenty. Yes! I was in when he’d called! If not on time, then at least before ten! “Where are you?”
“St. Vincent’s.” Tom sounds exhausted. Being the residence hall director of a New York College dormitory is a very demanding job. You have to look out for about seven hundred undergraduates, most of whom, with the exception of summer camp or maybe a stint in boarding school, have never been away from home for an extended period of time before in their lives—let alone have ever shared a bathroom with another human being. Residents come to Tom with all of their problems—roommate conflicts, academic issues, financial concerns, sexual identity crises—you name it, Tom has heard it.
And if a resident gets hurt or sick, it’s the residence hall director’s job to make sure he or she is okay. Needless to say, Tom spends a lot of time in emergency rooms, particularly on weekends, which is when most of the underage drinking goes on. And he does all this—is on duty twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and forty-three days a year (all New York College administrators get twenty-two vacation days)—for not much more than I make, plus free room and board.
Hey, is it any wonder my last boss only lasted a few months?
Tom seems pretty stable, though. I mean, as stable as a six-foot-three, two-hundred-pound former Texas A&M linebacker whose favorite movie isLittle Women and who moved to New York City so he could finally come out of the closet can be.
“Look, Heather,” Tom says tiredly. “I’m gonna be stuck here for a few more hours at least. We had a twenty-first birthday last night.”
“Uh-oh.” Twenty-first birthday celebrations are the worst. Inevitably, the hapless birthday boy or girl is urged to slam back twenty-one shots by his or her party guests. Since the human body cannot process that much alcohol in such a short period of time, most of the time the resident ends up celebrating his or her big day in one of our local emergency rooms. Nice, huh?
“Yeah,” Tom says. “I hate to ask, but would you mind going through my appointment books and rescheduling all my judicial hearings this morning? I don’t know if they’re gonna admit this kid or not, and he won’t let us call his parents—”
“No problem,” I say. “How long you been there?”
Tom exhales gustily. “He only got up to seven before he passed out. So since midnight, or thereabouts. I’ve lost all track of time.”
“I’ll come spell you if you want.” When a student is in the emergency room but hasn’t been admitted, it’s policy that a New York College representative stay with him or her at all times. You can’t even go home to take a lousy shower unless there’s someone there to take your place. New York College does not leave its students alone in the ER. Even though the students themselves will frequently check out without even bothering to tell you, so you’re sitting there watching Spanish soaps for an hour before you find out the kid isn’t even there anymore. “Then at least you can get some breakfast.”
“You know, Heather,” Tom says, “I think I’ll take you up on that offer, if you really don’t mind.”
I say I don’t and am taking money out of petty cash for cab fare before I’ve even hung up. I love petty cash. It’s like having your own bank, right in the office. Unfortunately, Justine, the girl who’d had my position before me, had felt the same way, and had spent all of Fischer Hall’s petty cash on ceramic heaters for her friends and family. The Budget Office still scrutinizes our petty cash vouchers with an eagle eye every time I take them over for reimbursement, even though each and every one of them is completely legit.
And I still haven’t figured out what a ceramic heater is.
I finish rescheduling all of Tom’s appointments, then polish off my café mocha in a gulp.If you were thinner. You know what, Barista Boy? With those long nails you won’t trim because you’re too poor to afford a new guitar pick, you look like a girl. Yeah, that’s right. A girl. How do you like that, Barista Boy?
Quick stop at the cafeteria to grab a bagel to eat on the way to the hospital, and I’ll be ready to go. I mean, café mochas are all well and good, but they don’t supply lasting energy… not like a bagel does. Particularly a bagel smothered in cream cheese (dairy) over which several layers of bacon (protein) have been added.
I’ve grabbed my coat and am getting up to get my bagel when I notice Magda, my best work bud and the cafeteria’s head cashier, standing in my office doorway, looking very unlike her usual self.
“Morning, Magda,” I say to her. “You will never believe what Barista Boy said to me.”
But Magda, normally a very inquisitive person, and a big fan of Barista Boy, doesn’t look interested.
“Heather,” she says. “I have something I have to show you.”
“If it’s the front page of the Post, ” I say, “Reggie already beat you to it. And really, Mags, it’s okay.I’m okay. I can’t believe she took him back after that whole thing at the Pussycat Dolls with Paris. But, hey, his dad owns her record label. What else is she going to do?”
Magda shakes her head.
“No,” she says. “Not the Post. Just come, Heather. Come.”
Curious—more because she still hasn’t cracked a smile than because I actually think she has something so earth-shattering to show me—I follow Magda down the hall, past the student government office—closed this early in the morning—and Magda’s boss’s office, which, oddly, is empty. Normally, the dining office is filled with kvetching cafeteria workers and cigarette smoke, Gerald Eckhardt, the dining hall director, being an unapologetic smoker. He’s only supposed to light up outside, but invariably I catch him puffing away at his desk, then blowing the smoke out the open window, like he doesn’t think anyone is going to catch on.
But not today. Today the office is empty—and smoke-free.
“Magda,” I say, as her pink smock disappears through the swinging doors to the cafeteria’s loud, steaming kitchen, “what is going on?”
But Magda doesn’t say anything until she’s standing beside the massive industrial stove, on which a single pot has been set to boil. Gerald is standing there as well, looking out of place in his business suit among his pink-smocked employees, dwarfing everyone else with his massive frame—a result of sampling his own recipe for chicken parm a little too often.
Gerald looks—well, there’s only one word for it: frightened. So does Saundra, the salad bar attendant, and Jimmy, the hotline server. Magda is pale beneath her bright makeup. And Pete—what’s Pete doing here? — looks like he wants to hurl.
“Okay, you guys,” I say. I am convinced whatever is going on has to be a joke. Because Gerald, being in food services, is a prankster from way back, a master of the rubber rat in the desk drawer, and plastic spider in the soup. “What gives? April Fool’s isn’t for another three months. Pete, what are you doing back here?”
Which is when Pete—who’s wearing, for some reason, an oven mitt—reaches out and lifts the lid from the merrily boiling pot, and I get a good look at what’s inside.
2
What are these panties
Doing in my couch?
They’re not mine
No, there’s no doubt.
You won’t catch me
In a size S thong.
So who’s been doing who
Here, all night long?
“Thong Song”
Written by Heather Wells
The Fischer Hall cafeteria is crowded, but not with students. We told the residents there was a gas leak—not one big enough to evacuate the whole building, but one that necessitated closing down the café.
The sad thing is, they were all so bleary-eyed from partying the night before, the residents actually seemed to believe us. At least, no one protested—once I started handing out the free-meal voucher cards, so they could go eat in the student union.
Now the dining hall is still packed—but with college presidents, administrators, cafeteria workers, police officers, and homicide detectives, instead of hungry eighteen-year-olds.
Even so, the room is strangely hushed, so that the energy-saving bulbs in the chandeliers above our heads—casting reflections in the stained-glass windows near the edges of the high ceiling—seem to be humming more noisily than usual. Above the humming, I can hear Magda sniffling. She’s sitting on one side of the cafeteria with the rest of her fellow workers, in their hairnets and pink uniforms and French manicures. A city police officer is speaking to them in a gentle tone.
“We’ll let you go home soon as we get your fingerprints,” he says.
“What do you need our fingerprints for?” Magda’s chin is trembling with fear—or maybe indignation. “We didn’t do anything. None of us killed that girl!”
The other cafeteria workers murmur in agreement. None of them killed that girl, either.
The police officer’s tone stays gentle. “We need all your fingerprints so we can ascertain which prints in the kitchen are yours, ma’am, and which are the killer’s. If he left any.”
“Ascertain away,” Gerald says, coming to the defense of his employees. “But I’m tellin’ you right now, none of my folks is a murderer. Am I right, people?”
Everyone in a pink smock nods solemnly. Their eyes, however, are shining with something a little more than just tears. I suspect it might be excitement: Not only had they found a murder victim in their kitchen, right there amid the corn dogs and peanut-butter-and-jelly bars, but now they are valuable witnesses to a crime, and as such are being treated not as cafeteria workers—untouchables, as far as the students they serve are concerned—but as actual thinking human beings.
For a few of them, this might actually be a first.
I spot the head of the Housing Department, Dr. Jessup, at a table with several other administrators, all looking dazed. The discovery of a corpse’s head on campus has worked as an expedient in getting the administrative staff to work before ten, despite the impending blizzard. Even the college president, Phillip Allington, is there, seated next to Steven Andrews, the new head basketball coach, who looks worried. He has good reason to: The entire New York College varsity basketball team—not to mention the varsity cheerleading squad—is housed in Fischer Hall, thanks to the building’s close proximity to Winer Complex, the college sports center.
After the two student deaths in this building during the first semester—winning Fischer Hall the nickname Death Dorm—all the university employees (including sport coaches) seem to be feeling a little jumpy. And who can blame them? Especially President Allington. His tenure hasn’t been an easy one. No one knows that better than me, assistant director of Death Dorm.
And now it looks as if things have just gotten immeasurably worse, not just for the president, but for my boss’s boss, the head of Housing… and he knows it. The show-hanky tucked into his breast pocket is crumpled, as if someone—exercising my superlative investigative skills, I surmise that someone was Dr. Jessup himself—has actually been using it. Sitting slumped in a chair at a sticky cafeteria table for the past half hour hasn’t done much for the creases in Dr. Jessup’s suit, either.
“Heather,” Dr. Jessup says to me, a little too heartily, as I come toward his table, having been summoned away from my desk—where I went directly after Pete’s revelation to begin calling everyone I could think of, including Dr. Jessup and my boss, Tom—by one of the police officers. “Detective Canavan wants to talk to you. You remember Detective Canavan from the Sixth Precinct, don’t you?”
Like I could forget.
“Detective,” I say, extending my right hand toward the slightly rumpled-looking middle-aged man with the graying mustache, who stands with one foot resting on the seat of an empty cafeteria chair.
Detective Canavan looks up from the cup of coffee he’s holding. His eyes are the color of slate, and the skin around them is wrinkled from overexposure to the elements. It’s no joke, being a New York City homicide detective. Sadly, not all of them look like Chris Noth. In fact, none of them do, that I’ve noticed.
“Nice to see you again, Heather,” the detective says. His grasp is as formidable as ever. “I understand you’ve seen it. So. Any ideas?”
I look from the detective to the head honcho of my department and back again.
“Um,” I say, not sure what’s going on. Wait—do Dr. Jessup and Detective Canavan actually want my help in solving this heinous crime? Because this is so the opposite of how they were about my helping them out last time… . “Where’s the rest of her?”
“That isn’t what Detective Canavan meant, Heather,” Dr. Jessup says, with a forced smile. “He meant, do you recognize… it?”
Carol Ann Evans, dean of students—yeah, the same one who won’t admit me into her college until I show her I can multiply fractions—happens to be seated nearby, and makes a kind of gagging noise and covers her mouth with a wadded-up tissue when she hears the word it.
And, to my certain knowledge, she hasn’t even taken a peek at what’s inside that pot.
Oh. They don’t really want my help. Not THAT wa
y.
I say, “Well, it’s kinda hard to tell.” No way am I going to announce, in front of all these people, that Lindsay Combs, homecoming queen and (now no longer) future roommate of her best friend Cheryl Haebig, had apparently been decapitated by person or persons unknown, and her head left in a pot on the stove in the Fischer Hall cafeteria.
I know. Ew.
“Come, now, Heather,” Dr. Jessup says, with a smile that doesn’t quite reach his eyes. To Detective Canavan he says, loudly enough for everyone in the café to hear, apparently in an effort to impress President Allington, who wouldn’t know me from Adam—though his wife and I were once nearly murdered by the same person—“Heather here knows every single one of Fischer Hall’s seven hundred residents by name. Don’t you, Heather?”
“Well, generally speaking,” I say uncomfortably. “When they haven’t been set on simmer for a few hours.”
Did that sound flip? I guess it did. Dean Evans is gagging again. I didn’t mean to be flip. It’s just that… come on.
I hope the dean isn’t going to hold this against me. You know, admission-to-the-College-of-Arts-and-Sciences-wise.
“So who is she? The girl.” The detective seems unconscious of the fact that nearly everyone in the cafeteria is eavesdropping on our conversation. “A name would be nice.”
I feel my stomach roll a little, like it had back in the kitchen when Pete had lifted the lid and I’d found myself staring into those unseeing eyes.
I take a deep breath. The air in the cafeteria is pungent with ordinary breakfast smells… eggs and sausage and maple syrup. You can’t smell her.
At least, I don’t think so.
Still, I’m thankful that I haven’t had time this morning for my customary cream-cheese-and-bacon bagel breakfast. The café mocha has—so far—been more than enough. The parquet of the dining hall floor is swimming a little before my eyes.
I clear my throat. There. That feels a little better.
