by Diane Hoh
Linda chewed on her lower lip.
“Milo was afraid someone else would find the letters,” Jess continued. “These threatening letters would make people suspicious about Giselle’s death. And Milo finally did find the letters, in the trunk. But there was still the one I’d found.”
Linda frowned. “That trunk was in the cellar a long time. Anyone could have taken those letters.”
“Linda, Milo was the only one who wasn’t at the party when I was attacked. And I know it was someone from Nightingale Hall, because he said he knew I’d lied when I said I had a headache.”
“Oh, everyone was running in and out of that party all night long,” Linda said angrily. “Ian left for a while, and so did Jon. They could have come back here.” Her voice rose. “It wasn’t Milo!”
“What wasn’t Milo?” a voice said from the doorway.
All heads turned to face Milo. He was leaning against the door. And he was wearing a wool, maroon baseball jacket. A large, three-cornered tear was clearly visible on the left shoulder.
Chapter 24
“WHY ARE YOU GUYS holding a convention in my room?” Milo asked, advancing into the room. His thin face was flushed, his eyes angry behind his glasses.
Jess left the bed and went to stand against the wall between Cath and Trucker. “Your jacket is torn, Milo. How did that happen? As if I didn’t know.”
Milo shrugged. “Then you tell me. I haven’t been able to find this jacket for a couple of weeks. Tonight, I was working downstairs at the library and when I went back upstairs to get my books, the jacket was there, hanging on my chair. With a rip in it. Weird.”
“Yeah, weird,” Trucker said cynically.
“Milo,” Linda said hesitantly, “I was at the library tonight, just for a minute. I dropped off some books on my way to the theater. I … I didn’t see you there.”
Another shrug. “I was there. All night.”
“You?” Jess’s laugh was harsh. “At the library? Oh, right. We know where you were, Milo. You were here, sabotaging the furnace and pushing me down the cellar stairs and …”
“What is she talking about?” Milo directed his question toward Ian.
“She thinks you killed Giselle!” Linda burst out, “And that you tried to kill her … Jess … tonight. I told her you didn’t, but she found a piece of material on a nail in the cellar where the gas leak was, and it’s the same as your jacket and now you have that rip …” Linda began crying quietly.
“And so now you agree with Jess,” Milo told Linda softly. “Because of a rip in my jacket that I didn’t put there.”
“And because of the letters,” Cath added. “To Giselle. We found them here, in your room. You got them out of Giselle’s trunk and hid them.”
“I never wrote Giselle any letters. I told you, we weren’t friends anymore.”
“Well, that’s for sure,” Jess cried. “I certainly wouldn’t call these letters friendly. They’re full of threats, which is why you had to find them … before someone else did and guessed what really happened to Giselle.”
“Is my name on those letters?”
“Well … no. They’re signed ‘Your Forever Love.’ But we know you wrote them.”
Milo laughed bitterly. “You think I was Giselle McKendrick’s ‘forever love’? I wasn’t even her forever friend.”
“And that made you really angry, didn’t it, Milo?” Jess said. “Angry enough to kill her …”
And then there was a long, long moment of painful silence. Milo stood with his hands at his sides, looking from one face to the next, something in his eyes …
He’s angry, Jess thought, watching him. He’s furious that we found him out. He thought he’d covered his tracks so well.
Then Milo said, his voice devoid of emotion, “You all agree with Jess?”
No one said they didn’t.
He turned and headed for the closet. Silently, he began stuffing clothes into a blue duffel bag.
“What are you doing?” Jess took a step toward the closet.
The bag full, Milo turned again. “I’m leaving.”
Jess stared at him. “Leave? You can’t leave!”
“Why not? Did you call the police?”
“No, I …”
“And you won’t. You can’t. You have no proof, nothing to show them. My name isn’t on those letters. There are thousands of these jackets. And anyone could have taken those letters from the trunk and put them in my drawer. You’ve got nothing, Jess.”
“Ian?” Jess appealed. But he shrugged. “He’s right, Jess. We don’t have anything concrete.”
“We can’t just let him walk out of here. He killed that girl and he tried to kill me!”
“Well, until you can prove that cockamamie story,” Milo said, “I’m out of here. I’ll pick up the rest of my stuff later. Don’t anyone touch my stuff, or you’ll be sorry.”
“That’s what you told Giselle in one of the letters,” Jess said, tears of frustration beginning to pool in her eyes. “You said she’d be sorry. And I’m sure she was … sorry that she ever met you.”
Milo turned on his heel and was gone. They heard his soft footsteps padding down the hall, down the stairs … and then the front door slammed.
Jess ran to the open window and shouted at him, “You won’t get away with this, Milo! We’ll find proof and you’ll be punished!” Then, exhausted and frustrated, she began to sob.
Ian was at her side, wrapping her in his arms, soothing her. “It’s okay, it’s okay. We’ll find something … there’s time. He won’t go far, not right away. His things are still here.”
“Right,” Cath agreed. “He’d never leave his precious notebooks here. He’ll be back. Maybe we’ll find something …”
Jess did find something, one week later, the day of the Fall Ball. It took her that long to steel herself to go into Milo’s room and pack up his things. She wanted to come back after the ball to a house free of any traces of Milo Keith. With Mrs. Coates still hospitalized, Jess had to do it. Trucker and, to Jess’s surprise, Linda, offered to help.
Jess found the typewriter on the floor of Milo’s closet, under a pile of discarded clothing. “There’s a typewriter in here!” she called out when she had unearthed the old machine. “An ancient one. I never heard Milo using a typewriter.”
“That’s because he didn’t know how,” Linda said. “The few papers he actually finished were scrawled in those awful hieroglyphics of his. I don’t know how anyone could even read them.”
“But the letters were typed,” Jess pointed out. She picked up the paper-clipped letters. “I … I want to try something. Hand me a clean sheet of paper.”
She inserted the blank paper into the old machine and began typing away furiously, copying the first two paragraphs of one of Giselle’s letters. That done, she yanked the paper free.
“There,” she declared triumphantly, “see?” She pointed. “See the ‘O’? It’s all filled in with ink. The ‘O’ is the same on Giselle’s letters and on the paper I just typed in this machine. And look at the ‘G’ in Giselle. It’s broken. It looks like a ‘C’. This is the machine that typed those letters to Giselle, and this machine was in Milo’s closet.” She locked Linda’s eyes with her own. “He lied to you about not being able to type. Now do you believe we were right about him?”
One of the saddest things Jess had ever seen was the look on Linda’s face when the truth sank in. She looked like an abandoned child. “He never really cared about me, anyway,” she said quietly. “I tried to pretend he did, but he didn’t.”
“You wouldn’t really want him to, would you? I mean, he ‘cared’ about Giselle, and look what happened to her.”
Linda nodded miserably, and hurried out of the room.
Jess was disappointed that Ian didn’t jump at the chance to take the typewriter and the letters to the police. “All we’ve got,” he said when she went to him, “is proof that this typewriter was used in those threatening letters to Giselle. But we
can’t prove that it’s Milo’s machine or that he typed the letters.”
She knew he was right. But it was so wrong for Milo to get off scot-free.
“Look,” Ian said, seeing her disappointment, “on Monday, we’ll take the typewriter and the letters and anything else we have and go talk to someone at the police station. Maybe they’ll laugh at us. But it’s worth a try. But tonight,” he added firmly, “we’ve got a dance to go to. And I don’t want to hear the names Milo Keith or Giselle McKendrick mentioned, okay?”
Knowing that they were going to take action on Monday cleared the way for Jess to relax and get ready for the dance.
The three girls got dressed in Cath’s room. Jess had borrowed a very simple black velvet dress from a classmate. Cath’s dress was like a pale blue cloud. Linda, fighting hard to be cheerful, wore a very short, pretty dress of pale pink.
“I just wish I were going with someone I was crazy about,” Cath moaned. She had piled her hair on top of her head, with little dark ringlets clustered around her ears. “All this effort, just for boring old Peter Oakes. Seems kind of wasted.”
“Don’t be negative,” Jess scolded. “You never know who you might meet there. Someone could see you from across a crowded room and, like the song says, fall madly in love with you.”
“You mean like you and Ian. Don’t I wish?” Cath grimaced into her mirror, showing perfect small, white teeth. “I don’t have time to be in love, anyway. It’s not on my parents’ schedule.”
Jess laughed. “Cath, I don’t think your parents are half as bad as you make them sound. I think you’re the one who drives you crazy, not them.”
Cath laughed, too. “You could be right. I can’t seem to shake twelve years of goal-orienting, that’s all.”
It was wonderful to hear her laugh. Jess couldn’t remember the last time she’d heard Cath laugh like that.
There was a lot of laughter that night. The huge room had been transformed, softly lit with theater lights of scarlet and orange and rust and violet hidden behind floor-to-ceiling panels of pale, wispy gauze, giving the entire room a dreamy, romantic quality. The music was alternately fast, hot, and upbeat, then slow and sweet.
Jess and Ian moved together as if they had always danced with each other, their bodies completely in tune.
Cath surprised them by dancing by, more than once, in the arms of Jon, who grinned at them triumphantly.
“Poor Peter,” Jess murmured even as she returned Jon’s grin.
“Who’s Peter?” Ian asked.
“Nobody.”
Trucker came to the dance stag. Cath let out a soft, “Wow,” when she saw him standing in the doorway, and Linda said, “I just realized who Trucker looks like. Tom Selleck, only shorter. Every girl in this place is staring at him.”
It was true.
Jess danced with him twice. He was a very good dancer. “Is there anything you don’t know how to do?” she asked him.
Trucker grinned. “Yep. Get rich.”
She danced the last dance with Ian. This is the way it should have been since school started, she thought, smiling into Ian’s chest. If it hadn’t been for Milo …
She shivered involuntarily. Ian tightened his arms around her. “You okay?” he asked into her hair.
“Oh, yes,” she murmured, “I am definitely okay.”
The sweet, lovely hours had raced by and suddenly it was time to go home.
And for the first time in a long time, the thought of returning to Nightingale Hall didn’t make Jess sick with anxiety.
Chapter 25
AFTER THE DANCE, JESS and Ian decided against “going for eats,” as Jon put it. They weren’t hungry. And a leisurely walk home on a clear, moonlit night seemed like a perfect opportunity for some time alone.
When they reached Nightingale Hall, it seemed to Jess, for the first time, welcoming. They had left the parlor and library lights blazing, and a nearly full moon overhead bathed the hill in a soft, silvery glow. The wind had gone to sleep, allowing the oak branches overhead to form a peaceful, protective canopy. Nothing about the place seemed frightening.
If I could paint, Jess thought as they made their way up the hill, I would paint what I’m looking at now. I’d make it all silver and black and gold and I’d make it romantic, like this night.
“Feel like sitting outside for a while?” Ian asked. “Till the rest of the crew gets home?”
“Great idea, but I’ll have to run in and get a jacket. It’s cold out here.”
“I’ll get it. Tell me where.”
Jess sat down on the top porch step. “In my room, on the floor. The blue denim jacket.” She grinned. “It’ll look smashing with this black velvet dress and heels.”
“Gotcha! Be right back.” Ian turned and hurried into the house. She could hear his footsteps thudding up the stairs.
Jess sighed happily. They would have precious moments alone until the others got back. What a great way to end a great night!
Maybe their housemates would eat and eat and they’d all be gone for hours.
A car pulled up in front of the house. A girl jumped out and began hurrying up the driveway.
Jess stood up. It wasn’t Cath or Linda or anyone else she knew. Jess moved down the steps to greet the girl. Maybe she was looking for directions.
“Hi!” the small, dark-haired girl said as she arrived, breathless, at the top of the hill. “Is Milo home?”
Jess drew in her breath. “Milo?”
The girl handed Jess a blue windbreaker. “I’m Daisy Lindgren. Milo and I were studying at the library last week. It rained and I didn’t have a jacket, so he loaned me this windbreaker.” She laughed. “It was weird … we left our stuff upstairs to work down in the computer room and when we came back up, there was another jacket on Milo’s chair. He said it was his, but he’d lost it. Had no idea how it got there. And boy, was he ticked off when he saw a big tear on one shoulder. Said it hadn’t been there before. Anyway, since he had two jackets and I didn’t have any, he loaned me this windbreaker. Could you see that he gets it, please?”
Jess took the windbreaker. A sudden sense of dread came over her. Milo had said he was at the library that terrible Friday night. And he had said his jacket was missing. “When … when were you at the library with Milo?” she asked, her voice sounding hoarse and ragged. “What night last week exactly?” Don’t say Friday, she prayed, do not say Friday.
“When?” Daisy Lindgren frowned. “Well, let’s see, I had chorus practice on Wednesday, and I went shopping for shoes on Thursday, so it was … Friday. I was at the library with Milo on Friday night.”
Chapter 26
“HOW LONG WERE YOU in the library with Milo?” Jess asked, forcing the words out. The girl would say she had been with Milo only for a few minutes Friday evening. Maybe half an hour. After that, Jess told herself, he came back to Nightingale Hall to sabotage the furnace valve, push me down the cellar stairs, and wait for me outside the window. Because that is what Milo did.
“How long? All night. We got there about eight, I think, and stayed until midnight, when the library closed.” The pretty face screwed up into a frown. “Why?”
“You couldn’t have been there all that time,” Jess said desperately, wishing Ian would return. “Linda—my housemate—was there. If Milo had been there, Linda would have seen him.”
“We were downstairs. At the computers.”
Jess’s stomach was doing somersaults. Milo had been downstairs at the library last Friday night for four hours? No …
“Our world history professor told Milo he wouldn’t accept one more handwritten paper from Milo. Said he couldn’t read his hen-scratching. Milo can’t type and he doesn’t have a typewriter. I couldn’t read his handwriting, either, so he had to dictate his paper to me while I typed it into the computer.”
Milo didn’t have a typewriter? He couldn’t type? Of course he could. He had typed those letters to Giselle …
Hadn’t he?
Th
ere was a pause as Jess struggled for the right questions to ask, questions that would give her the answers she wanted to hear.
“Where is Milo?” the girl asked again.
“He’s … he’s not here.” There weren’t any “right” questions. She had already asked the questions, and Daisy had given her the answers. And Daisy had told the truth, Jess was sure of that. Sickeningly sure.
Why hadn’t Milo told them he couldn’t type? Why hadn’t he said he couldn’t have written the letters because he couldn’t type? Why hadn’t he told them he wasn’t alone at the library, that a girl from school could provide an ironclad alibi for him?
Jess knew the answer. Because no one would have believed him. They had already made up their minds.
“Thanks for bringing Milo’s jacket,” Jess told the girl. Her whole body felt numb. “I’ll see that he gets it.”
But, of course, she couldn’t do that. She had no idea where Milo had gone.
His thin, bearded face danced before her eyes. And she realized then that what she had seen in his face that Friday night hadn’t been anger, after all. It had been pain. Simple pain. Because the people he lived with had judged and convicted him unjustly.
A car horn sounded at the bottom of the hill.
“Gotta go,” Daisy said. “Listen, tell Milo I’m sorry I didn’t get the jacket to him sooner, okay?” She gave Jess a quizzical look. “You never did say where Milo is, exactly. Oh, well, see you.”
As she turned and ran down the hill, the short, full skirt of her dress whipping out behind her, Jess thought, I want to go with her. I want to run down the hill, too, and up the road for miles and miles until I’m so far away from here that I will be able to forget Nightingale Hall and what we did to Milo Keith.
But she knew there was no place far enough away for that.
“Jess!”
A voice, calling her name. It sounded like it was coming from behind the house.
It came again, her name shouted with urgency. And it was coming from behind the house. It had to be Ian calling her. No one else was home. She hadn’t seen him come outside, but he could have taken the fire escape. What was he doing out back?
