“Um . . . you’re lonely?” I offered.
In a nanosecond, laid-back-musing-at-the-ceiling Officer Marciano was replaced with scary-finger-in-Hal’s-face Officer Marciano. “Don’t get smart with me, Hal Bennett. A man was nearly killed in that room on Friday night.” He pointed to the door behind me. “Someone smashed the security cameras, entered the building, and attacked the vice principal of the school. I want to know what you know about it.”
“But, sir, why would I know anything about Mr. Thornhill’s attack?” I asked. It was true. I may have known some things about Thornhill that I wasn’t supposed to know. And I’d definitely done some things I wasn’t supposed to have done. But I had no idea who’d attacked him or why.
“Yes, why indeed, Hal Bennett. Why would the three people who created ‘The’”—he looked down again at the sheet in front of him—“‘Amanda Project’ know anything about a mysterious attack on Roger Thornhill.”
I was so surprised I couldn’t not react. “What!?”
I’d expected to be asked about breaking into Thornhill’s car or maybe even the downloaded surveillance footage we took from his computer (could they tell that when they did forensics on his computer? Can they even do forensics at the Orion Police Department?) but what did The Amanda Project website have to do with the vice principal getting clobbered?
Officer Marciano was pleased by my surprise, you could tell. “Oh, now we’re getting somewhere, aren’t we?” His voice was both threatening and sickly sweet, a honey-dipped switchblade. “Yes, Hal”—there was something so creepy about the way he said my name that I wished, suddenly, I’d just let him go on calling me Henry—“you and your friends thought you could put one over on us, didn’t you? You thought—”
“Oh my god, I can’t take it anymore!” The voice that came from the outer office was high-pitched and hysterical, and I immediately recognized it as Callie’s. For a second, I wanted to push Officer Marciano out of the way and run and comfort her, but just as my leg muscles tensed, I realized what was happening.
My diversion.
“You have to relax! It’s going to be okay.” Despite her calming words, Nia’s voice sounded almost as hysterical as Callie’s. “Callie, don’t!”
“Girls! Girls!” the secretary cried.
Officer Marciano was on his feet and out the door in a split second. “What is going on out here, ladies?” The door closed automatically behind him.
All I heard was the first part of Nia’s response, “Callie’s completely—” before I, too, was on my feet and out the door.
Albeit a different one.
Chapter 2
The lights were out in Thornhill’s office, but there was an entire wall of windows that let in enough sun for me to see just fine. Contrary to my CSI-inspired fantasies, the room looked much the way it had when we’d broken into it a little over a week ago. There was no shattered glass, no overturned chairs. The only sign of the crime that had been committed was a dark spot on the rug in front of the desk that I told myself could just as easily be spilled coffee as blood (though it was hard to explain why the police would have put a square of yellow “Crime Scene: Do Not Cross” tape around a coffee splotch).
The need I’d had to get into the office had grown stronger as I crossed the threshold, but looking around me, I started to feel a little insane. What had I hoped to find, anyway? The police had probably been swarming the room all weekend—surely if there was any clue to be found, they’d already unearthed it.
The desk was as pristine as it had been the day he’d called me, Callie, and Nia in to ask us about the graffiti on his car and Amanda’s disappearance—nothing on its surface but the blotter, a phone, a laptop, and a notepad with Endeavor Unified Middle and High School printed at the top. I flipped through the pages, but they were blank. Glancing over at an ancient computer on its stand, I saw an empty coffee cup and a plastic spoon in the metal garbage can beside it. Did they belong to the criminal? To Thornhill? To the police who’d searched the room looking for clues? Maybe I should take them. They were probably dripping with DNA samples.
Oh, yes, Hal, that’s an excellent idea. You can use your DNA-removal kit to separate the genetic material from the plastic and then run the results through your crime lab’s computer.
Not.
Okay, okay, the DNA thing was a little ridiculous.
A scream, the sound of something (a cell phone?) hitting linoleum. “What if the person comes back? What if we’re being targeted?!” Despite my terror, I couldn’t help smiling at Callie’s performance and loving her for it. Amanda may have gotten cast as Rosalind in As You Like It and Heidi may have taken the role when Amanda turned it down, but clearly Callie was a girl with her own hidden talents.
Still, as good an actress as Callie was, how much longer could she hold Officer Marciano out there? Sooner or later—probably sooner—he’d calm her down or send her home. I’d been in Thornhill’s office for almost a minute and I’d discovered nothing.
As my eyes swept the desktop for a second time, the tiny glow of the laptop’s power light caught my eye.
Wait a minute—since when did Thornhill have a laptop? Endeavor wasn’t exactly on the cutting edge of the technological revolution—my little sister, Cornelia, who’s basically a computer genius, had recently been home sick with strep, and my mother had called to ask her history teacher if Cornelia could scan and email him the homework she’d been doing while she was absent. His response had been, and I quote, That is not what computers are for, Mrs. Bennett.
Gotta love an institution with both feet firmly in the twentieth century.
Casually, as if someone was watching me and I had to make it look accidental, I made my way around the desk, then flipped open Thornhill’s laptop, keeping the sleeve of my rugby shirt between my fingertips and the computer. Maybe I didn’t know how to dust for fingerprints, but surely the Orion Police Department did.
The screen immediately hummed to life, a document opening up before my eyes. But it was just a memo to the teachers about a new system for getting classroom supplies for next year: . . . will be available as of April and can be retrieved either by filing a request with Mrs. Leong in the main office or by . . .
What was I doing? I probably had about ten seconds before Officer Marciano burst through the door with his gun drawn, and I was reading a memo about Post-its.
My T-shirt-covered finger couldn’t move the arrow up to the task bar, so I used the edge of my pinkie to get there and click on FILE. Did the sides of your fingers leave prints? No doubt. My eyes raced down the list of files Thornhill had recently opened. Cell phone policy changes; Letter of Rec. Dr. Thomas; Minutes, March Board Meeting; Cast list—Much Ado About Nothing; Spring events—tentative (no athletics); Spring events—definite (athletics).
Well, what had I expected—Thornhill’s possible attackers (definite)? I scanned the list one more time, the pointlessness of the whole enterprise overwhelming. There was nothing here. There was nothing anywhere. How many times had we checked the website for clues about Amanda’s disappearance, only to discover everyone who knew her was as mystified (and misled) as we were?
Why should Thornhill’s attack be any different?
I stood up and put my hand on the computer to shut it when my eyes caught the name of a file one last time.
Cast list—Much Ado About Nothing.
Much Ado About Nothing.
But Much Ado About Nothing wasn’t the play being put on at Endeavor this year. The play being put on at Endeavor this year was As You Like It.
Could Thornhill have made a mistake? Or could he have the cast list from a previous year’s play? For a second I tried to remember what play the high school had put on last year, and then I was sliding the arrow back up to the file menu and clicking open the cast list (misnamed or otherwise) for Much Ado About Nothing.
The document that opened before my eyes was nothing like any cast list I’d ever seen. It looked more like the files my dad some
times brings home from his work as an accounting consultant, columns of data that made absolutely no sense—words that seemed to morph into numbers, numbers that stretched on forever. C-33528, F-514, M-229, beta file-4421(a). Dem_94. At first, I was so overwhelmed by the meaningless information that swam in front of me I could barely make sense of the rows and columns, much less the data they contained. And then the senseless mass began to make sense.
The font was tiny, so small I had to squint to read it, but the left-hand column of the chart was definitely a list of names in no particular order that I could discern. At first, they meant nothing. There was a Reeve, Cecile and Hayes, Gracie. But as my eyes slid down the column, they landed on a name that did mean something to me. In fact, it meant a great deal to me.
Because it was mine.
Chapter 3
Bennett, Henry.
Bennett, Cornelia.
Bennett, Katharine.
Bennett, Edmund.
Cornelia? What did my sister have to do with this? And my parents? What were my parents doing on Thornhill’s list?
My heart began to pound so fast I almost couldn’t breathe. There was Callie’s name and Nia’s, Callie’s mom’s and Nia’s parents’ names. I made my way down the list, my eyes moving too fast to read more than a few of the names I was racing through. Was Amanda’s name there? I scrolled to the bottom, but there seemed to be no bottom, just hundreds and hundreds of names. I needed to write them all down. I needed to print out the list. I needed—
“For the last time, get a hold of yourself, Callista!”
Print. I needed to print. Hands shaking, I hit Apple, P, and as I did, the computer gave a strange sound, almost a sigh, and the screen went blank. A second later, the computer turned itself off.
“What?” Forgetting the need to be silent, forgetting everything except that I had to get that list, I hit the power key. Nothing happened.
“No,” I whispered, frantically hitting the key again and again.
Nothing.
“. . . so when I come back out, I want you gone. I want you on your way to the nurse. Do you understand me, young lady?”
And as surely as I’d known I had to get into Thornhill’s office, I knew now that I had to get out.
Officer Marciano opened the door to the conference room less than a second after I had literally jumped into my seat, the metal watch in my pocket digging into my leg hard enough to make me wince. Instead of taking my leg’s being slung over one arm of the chair as an indication that I’d been on the move, he interpreted it as more evidence of my bad attitude.
Luckily, he didn’t seem to notice that I was panting as hard as if I’d just run the fifty-yard dash—which, basically, I had.
“I’ll thank you to sit respectably when you’re in the presence of the law, young man,” he said. Despite the bark in his voice, he looked a little less sure of himself than he had before he’d confronted Callie’s hysteria. I remembered the time about a month ago when my mom had cooked this big dinner to welcome my dad back from a weeklong business trip. My mom’s not exactly Martha Stewart, and she must have overcooked the roast, which we learned when smoke began pouring out of the oven and all the smoke detectors on the first floor started going off at once. She’s usually pretty calm, but as soon as she realized the dinner she’d been planning and preparing for days had just caught on fire, she completely lost it.
Right about now, Officer Marciano looked kind of like my dad had on the way to the restaurant we went to that night, and when the cop’s phone rang, he answered it with an enthusiasm that made me think he wanted nothing more than for it to be the news that some other violent crime had occurred and required his presence far, far from the world of hysterical high school girls.
“Marciano here,” he barked. “Oh, hey, Jack . . . No, I’m talking to the Bennett kid now.”
I tried not to visibly shudder. Why was Chief Jack Bragg, Heidi’s father, asking about my interrogation?
“You sure? We only . . . right. Sorry, Jack. Will do.” He snapped his phone shut and gave me a look of intense irritation. “We’ll have to pick up this little conversation later.”
I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to it. “So, I’m free to go then?”
Officer Marciano gave me a long look. “You’re free,” he acknowledged. “But not to go. Not far anyway.”
He stood up and so did I. But when he went over to the door, he just stood there. I looked at him, and he looked at me, and I realized he wanted me to know that he didn’t have to open that door.
“Have a good day, Henry.” Still he stood there, like he was just daring me to ask him to move.
What I needed was to get somewhere quiet, somewhere I could sit and try to remember the names that had been on that list. What I didn’t need was to spend the rest of the afternoon trying to explain to my mother why I’d been arrested by the Orion police.
“Thank you. You too, sir.” And with that, I slid around Officer Marciano and opened the door, slightly disappointed but not surprised to find that neither Callie nor Nia was waiting for me when I came out.
If there had been a quiz in either of my last two classes, I’d have failed it. For the ninety minutes between the end of my interview with Officer Marciano and the end of the school day, all I did was try and re-create the list I’d found on Thornhill’s computer.
Callie, Nia, and I had definitely been on it. I was pretty sure there had been a Zoe on it, and the approaching end of the school day—with its promise of after-school munchies to feed my hunger—made me think of pasta, which made me think Zoe had an Italian last name . . . Costello? Wasn’t there a Zoe in our grade? I was pretty sure there was, but I couldn’t think of her last name.
Trying to remember even a dozen of the names on the list was giving me a colossal headache. Had Amanda’s name been there? I’d been so sure I hadn’t seen it. But could I have missed it? That seemed impossible—all I’d been doing lately was looking for clues as to where Amanda Valentino had disappeared. There was no way I could have missed seeing her name in black and white right in front of me. Still, there had been so many names. Could I have skipped it somehow?
And what was my name doing there? And my sister’s? And my parents’? Mrs. Kimble wrote beatitude on the board and as I stared at the word it morphed and became something else. Bea. Beatrice. Had Beatrice Rossiter’s name been on the list? Picturing her lying in a Johns Hopkins hospital bed and recovering from her plastic surgery, I wrote her name down, then crossed it out, then wrote it down again. While Mrs. Kimble droned on and on, I put my hands over my ears and hummed quietly to myself, trying to create a bubble of white noise to sound my memory.
When the bell rang at the end of the day, I literally sprinted to the door of the building, like Mr. Richards was standing there with his stopwatch. I needed to text Callie and Nia, to find out where they were and to tell them what I’d seen. I couldn’t afford to get my phone confiscated, not now, so I made sure I had at least one foot out the door before I flipped open my cell. To my surprise, there was a text from Callie waiting for me.
CALL ME NOW.
I’d barely started dialing her number when there was a hand on my shoulder. I spun around and found myself looking into her green eyes, so wide it seemed there was nothing they couldn’t see.
“I was just calling you.” I held my phone out toward her as if to prove what I was saying.
“Nia’s at Play It Again, Sam.” Callie’s voice was thick, like she was having trouble speaking. “She has bio last period and it was canceled and she got a text or something and she skipped last period and ran over there.”
Play It Again, Sam was the vintage clothing store we’d gone to last week when we were looking for Amanda. I didn’t mean to sound annoyed, but was this really the time for a shopping spree? “Nia went to buy clothes?”
“Hal, she found . . .” Callie swallowed hard, then pulled me over to the lawn, away from the throngs of people who were spilling out the fro
nt door into the freedom of afternoon. “She found everything there.”
My brain was full of lists and names and numbers, and it was hard for me to focus on what Callie was saying. “She found what ‘everything’?”
Callie put her hands on my shoulders, whether to steady me or herself, I wasn’t sure. “Amanda’s stuff. All of it. Her clothes, her costumes, her wigs—it’s all there, at Play It Again, Sam.”
Chapter 4
Callie and I didn’t speak as we rode our bikes, single file, to Play It Again, Sam. We didn’t need to. The look on her face made it clear that our thoughts were the same: There were only two reasons Amanda’s stuff would have suddenly appeared somewhere without Amanda. One: She’d left Orion and was on the run. Two: She couldn’t run anymore because she was . . .
I forced myself not to even consider the latter possibility. There was no way something terrible could have happened to Amanda without my knowing.
Oh, yeah? a voice in my head asked. You’d “know”?
Like how you “know” about the watch?
Thinking about the watch made me wince internally. The day Amanda disappeared, while I’d been washing her graffiti off Thornhill’s car, she’d somehow gotten into my house and managed to hide an antique pocket watch in the leather jacket I bought with her weeks before on our “independent field trip” (as she put it) to visit an artist she knew in Baltimore.
It was a beautiful pocket watch, really old school with black Roman numerals on a white background and works that had to be wound about five thousand times a day if you wanted the watch to run at all. On the back was an engraved message: I know you (x2) know me.
I know you (x2) know me.
I know you. x2. Know me.
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