Sam looked around the room. “I hate to tell you this, Hart, but that doesn’t narrow the field down a whole lot. Pretty much everyone had heard by then.”
I pulled my pride up off the bottom of my shoe. “Thanks. I needed that reminder.”
Sam ignored me, instead tilting her head toward the front of the cafeteria. “Don’t look now, but here comes our ‘partner.’”
Of course I couldn’t help swiveling in my seat to get a better view of the front entrance.
Where Chase was framed in the doorway.
His broad shoulders filled the entryway almost as tightly as anyone on the HHH football team’s would. He was tall, but not in a gangly way, and he had muscles pumped up in all the right places. He was wearing a pair of jeans and was once again doing the black T-shirt thing. He had on a pair of black Docs, a black leather cuff on his right wrist, and his black hair was spiked up from his head in a mussed kind of way. Not crusty straight, but more bedroom tousled.
Not that I had any firsthand knowledge of what bedroom tousled might look like, but I imagined that was it.
Um, wow. Chase was actually kinda hot.
I mean, if you went for that whole bad boy thing. Which I totally didn’t. Bad boys were bad, and I’d had enough bad boyfriend to last me a lifetime, thank you very much.
Chase’s eyes scanned the room and found mine staring back at him.
I blushed. God knows why.
Luckily he didn’t seem to notice and made a beeline toward our table.
“Oh, great. Here he comes,” Sam said, completely oblivious to the heat in my cheeks.
She put her head down, sucking loudly through her straw.
“Hey,” Chase said, planting himself on the bench next to me.
“Hey,” I said back.
“Any luck contacting your boyfriend?” he asked.
“Ex-boyfriend,” I emphasized.
“Whatever.” He waved the technicality off. “So? You talk to him?”
I shrugged. “Sorta.”
Considering Raley was systematically threatening all my friends with criminal charges, admitting outright that I was in contact with a fugitive didn’t seem like all that clever of a plan.
“Sorta? What’s that mean?” Chase asked. He looked down at the uneaten taco on my plate and, without even asking, picked it up and took a huge bite.
Okay, I totally wasn’t planning on eating the beef(ish) taco. (And if you’re not sure why, notice the ish part.) But it was pretty presumptuous of him. And kinda intimate. For some reason it made my cheeks heat even more.
“It means Josh didn’t send the text,” I answered, watching him chew.
“You sure?” Chase cocked an eyebrow at me.
“Positive.”
“He told you that?”
I bit my lip. “Just trust me. He didn’t send it.”
“O-kay.” Though the still-cocked eyebrow clearly didn’t believe me.
“So,” I forged ahead, “either Caitlyn is lying to us about the text, or Courtney lied to her.”
“Or Josh is lying to you,” Chase pointed out. He paused. “Or you’re lying to us.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “And why would I do that?”
“I don’t know. Why would you try to prove the innocence of a guy who cheated on you?”
I bit my lip. I was not dignifying that question with an answer. Especially not while he was eating my taco.
“My relationship with Josh is private,” I told him.
He grinned. “Dude, there’s nothing private about that relationship now. Everyone in school knows your business.”
“My name is not ‘Dude,’” I said. “And all you need to know about Josh is that he’s innocent.”
Chase gave me a long look. “Girls really will believe anything, won’t they?”
I narrowed my eyes at him again. Then moved my plate out of his reach.
“Look, there’s one way to find out for sure who’s telling the truth,” Sam said, clearly trying to play peacemaker before someone took a taco to the head. “Courtney’s phone would have a record of who sent all the texts.”
“Yeah, except that her phone is probably in the hands of the police right now,” I pointed out.
“Right.”
“However,” Chase said, “the phone company would have those records. They keep a copy of every text message sent.”
“Seriously?” Sam said. I could tell she was mentally replaying the series of texts she and Kyle sent each other every night. “Do they read them?” Her cheeks turned a shade of bright crimson.
Chase shrugged. “Well, there isn’t a guy sitting there going through every one, but they’re stored. Usually for up to a week or two, until they need room to store the new ones.”
“How do you know this?” I asked.
“The paper did a story on sexting a couple months back,” he said. “Very illuminating.” He winked at Sam.
She blanched.
“Okay, so assuming that the phone company does have a record of this text somewhere, what are the chances that they’ll just hand it over to us?” I asked.
Chase reached across me and popped the rest of my entree in his mouth. “They won’t. You need a warrant and probable cause to read someone’s private texts.”
Sam looked immensely relieved.
“Unless,” Chase added.
“Unless?” Sam squeaked out.
“Unless you’re one hell of a hacker.” He grinned. A big toothy thing.
“I take that smug look to mean you know one hell of a hacker?” I asked.
“You’re looking at him.”
“Shut up,” Sam said. “You can break into the phone company’s computer?”
He shrugged. “Piece of cake. How do you think I got all those sexting messages?”
“You read them?” Sam asked.
He nodded. Then leaned in close. “You would not believe the filthy stuff some of our classmates are doing.” He gave her another wink.
Sam looked like she was going to pass out from embarrassment.
“Let’s go hack, then,” I said.
“But I haven’t had any lunch yet,” Chase protested. Then he looked down at my salad. “You gonna eat that?”
Once Chase finished inhaling my lunch, we left the cafeteria and headed to the school library.
But we only got as far as the main wing when a frizzy-haired woman in a muumuu and Crocs stepped around the corner and almost slammed into me.
“Hartley!” she exclaimed. “I’m so glad I ran into you.” She paused. “Literally,” she added, then laughed at her own joke.
I gave her a blank look, racking my brain for who she might be and why she might want to run into me, literally or otherwise.
“Mary Bessie,” she helpfully supplied. “I’m the grief counselor.”
Ah. Right. No wonder I didn’t recognize her. I’d been avoiding her like the plague. The last thing I needed was to dissect the jumble of feelings I’d been doing a bang-up job of ignoring.
“Fab to meet you,” I lied. “Unfortunately, I’m late for—”
But she didn’t let me finish. “Listen, I’d love to schedule a time for us to talk.” She punctuated this request by cocking her head to the right and doing an eyebrows-down, forehead-wrinkled, lips-pursed frown thing that was probably intended to be very sympathetic but mostly just made her look like she needed a Botox refresher.
“Oh, gee. That sounds like fun, Ms. Bessie—”
“Mary. Please.” She did a big friendly grin at me. From the beige color of her teeth I pegged her as a coffee addict. Who didn’t believe in Whitestrips.
“Okay. Mary. That’s such a nice offer, but I’m good.”
“Oh, honey.” She tilted her head further. “I know you probably want to just pretend this whole thing didn’t happen.”
Boy, did I ever.
“But it’s not healthy for you to bottle feelings up in here,” she said, gesturing to her torso. “You can’t feel better unles
s you’re willing to feel.”
I felt Chase snort behind me.
“No, really. I’m fine. Nothing bottled.”
“Okay.” She put her hands up in a surrender motion. “It’s not my place to push. Just know that I’m here”—she tilted her head even further, almost looking at me upside down—“when you’re ready to let it out.”
“Thanks. Yep. I’ll definitely do that.”
When hell froze over.
“Room twenty-five!” she called as I scuttled around her.
“Great!”
I made a mental note to find a route to trig that did not pass room twenty-five.
Five minutes later we were in the school library, staring at a row of state-of-the-art Macs. No matter how deeply the funding was cut, the computers in our school were always top-of-the-line and loaded with all the latest programs. And always Macs, courtesy of Wozniak’s (the Apple cofounder) legacy as a philanthropist to our local education system. Philanthropy or clever advertisement, creating an entire generation of Mac users? Either way, I wasn’t complaining as Chase sat down behind a screen and began typing in lines of code.
Silicon Valley is known as the technology hub of the world, spawning such companies as Apple, Google, and eBay, just to hit the biggies. Most kids who grow up here start using laptops as soon as they can hold their heads up. By three they’re into online role-playing games. At ten they’re writing their own programs, and by sixteen they’re starting the beginnings of the next Apples and Googles. Or, in Chase’s case, hacking into companies like Apple or Google.
Or Silicon Valley Wireless.
I watched as he pulled up the cell company’s main website, clicking to the client log-in page.
“What’s Courtney’s phone number?” he asked.
I scrolled through my own phone until I hit her name in my address book. Not that I actually called Courtney Cline, but as any suspicious girlfriend knows, the first thing you do is check your boyfriend’s phone for incoming calls from the other woman. The second I’d heard the rumors, I’d asked around for Courtney’s number and branded it into my own phone for future snooping.
I rattled off the digits to Chase and watched him punch them into the web page. Then, instead of typing in Courtney’s PIN, he opened another screen, typing a line of numbers and letters that meant nothing to me but must have meant something to the computer as it started spitting back its own lines of numbers and letters in response.
Ten minutes later I was starting to go cross-eyed from watching the little blinking cursor cruise across the screen.
“Are we there yet?” I whined.
“Almost” Chase said, never taking his eyes off the screen. “Patience, grasshopper.”
Two agonizingly impatient minutes later, the screen changed, and Chase did a “yes” under his breath.
“You got it?” Sam asked.
He nodded. “We’re in.”
I knew I shouldn’t be impressed by his criminal actions, but as the screen welcomed Courtney back to the site, I kinda was.
“So who sent her the text?” I asked.
“Hang on,” Chase said, scrolling through a line of dates. He clicked on the day Courtney had died. A list of calls showed up.
A very long list.
“Holy shnikies, she was popular,” Sam said.
I spun around.
“‘Shnikies?’” I asked. “Someone catch a Scooby-Doo marathon lately?”
She stuck her tongue out at me. “Hey, you try censoring all the swear words out of your vocab and see how creative you get.”
“She got exactly one hundred and fifty texts that day,” Chase cut in.
Dude. Suddenly I felt unloved.
I turned back to the screen as Chase scrolled through the numbers, honing in on the ones time-stamped between when school got out and when we found her at Josh’s place. Only fifteen fit the time frame.
And one fairly leaped out at me.
“There!” I stabbed my finger at the number on the screen next to the name J. DuPont. “That’s Josh.”
Chase clicked on it. The screen changed, the text of the message displayed. It was a one-liner:
my place. asap. c u there.
“So, he was lying.” Chase sat back in his seat. I could swear I saw satisfaction glowing in his eyes.
But I shook my head. “Or he was telling the truth about someone setting him up. Isn’t it possible someone borrowed his phone without him knowing?”
Chase shrugged. “You know him better than I do.”
I bit my lip. Ninety percent of the time it took an act of God to pry Josh’s cell from his person. But I knew of one time when he was most definitely phone free.
“Cross-country practice. Cody said he was there for a few minutes before he went home. He would have left his cell in his gym bag.”
“Bingo,” Sam said. “Someone could have totally grabbed his phone from his bag and sent the text. All it would take is a couple seconds.”
“So, who had access to his gym bag?” Chase asked.
I shrugged. “The team leaves them next to the field while they practice. Anyone could have slipped it out for a minute and sent the text with no one being the wiser.”
“Then we’re back to square one,” Sam said. She let out a sigh.
I leaned my chin on my elbow as I looked at the list of texts Courtney had received that day. Several came in from the usual suspects—Caitlyn, Kaylee, and various other Color Guard girls. A few were from names that I recognized as members of the football team. One from a T. Cline who I guessed was her mom. Some from people whose names sounded vaguely familiar.
And one that didn’t seem to belong there at all.
“Check that out,” I said, pointing to a text halfway through lunch period that day. It was from A. Brackenridge.
If Courtney had a polar opposite, Andi Brackenridge was it. For starters, she was a cheerleader, the natural antithesis of a Color Guard girl. And for another, Andi had gotten pregnant and missed spring semester last year when her baby girl was born. She was the embodiment of everything the Chastity Club stood against—an unwed teen mom who had worn her proof of sexual activity as a huge pregnant belly barely contained beneath her cheer uniform. The fact that she hadn’t slunk off to be homeschooled or quietly obtained a GED with her tail between her legs had made her a prime target of the chastity crowd. After her boyfriend had dumped her in her third trimester, the Chastity Club had made Andi their virtual poster child for what happened to you if you didn’t sign their Wait to Date pledge. Thanks in part to their merciless campaigning against her, Andi hadn’t returned to school this year.
Which made her the last person I would expect to be sending chummy texts to Courtney.
“Click on this one,” I directed, pointing at the screen.
Chase complied, the text displaying on the next screen.
i saw u. pay up bitch.
“Wow,” Sam said. “Sounds like she was as much a fan of Courtney’s as you were.”
I elbowed her in the ribs.
“What did she see?” I wondered out loud.
And more important, had it gotten Courtney killed?
NINE
CHASE CLOSED THE BROWSER WINDOWS AND DELETED any evidence of our illegal snooping just as the warning bell rang, signaling the end of lunch. Sam hiked her backpack on her shoulder and took off for her lit class. I followed suit, enthusiastically heading to chemistry. And, no, the enthusiasm was not because I got off on memorizing the periodic table or anything. It was because both Kaylee and Caitlyn were in my class.
And I intended to grill them on all they knew about Courtney and Andi. They’d been quick to point the finger at Josh yesterday, but I wondered if there were other skeletons lurking in Courtney’s closet they’d failed to mention.
I pushed through the doors to Mrs. Perry’s class just as the final bell sounded, taking my usual place at a lab station in the third row. Caitlyn and Kaylee sat two stations up, front and center.
&
nbsp; It wasn’t until we’d all handed in our homework, Mrs. Perry had explained the day’s experiment, and kids had split up into groups of two and three to try to follow the directions on the whiteboard while not blowing anything up that I got a chance to approach the perky pair.
Thing One and Thing Two had, predictably, partnered up for the experiment. Grabbing my book, I quickly made my way to the front of the room.
“Mind if I join your group?” I asked.
The look they shot me said they clearly did mind, but, lucky for me, good girls did not exclude other students. At least not within earshot of the teacher.
“Sure,” Caitlyn said, loudly enough for Mrs. Perry to hear. “Happy to help you catch up.”
She shot me a sugar-coated smile.
I matched it calorie for calorie.
“So,” I said, pulling on a pair of rubber gloves and grabbing a test tube of bluish stuff. (Okay, I hadn’t really been paying attention when Mrs. Perry explained what it was. I’d been too busy rehearsing how I’d casually bring up the subject of Courtney being threatened by Andi. A rehearsal I carefully put into practice . . .)
“I noticed a lot of people wearing those armbands,” I said, pointing to the sparkly black accessory they each sported around their upper arms.
“Courtney was very popular,” Caitlyn informed me.
Kaylee nodded solemnly. “Very.”
“She had a lot of friends?”
Again, two blond heads bobbed in agreement. “Yes, tons,” Kaylee said. “Though we were her best friends.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “What about Andi Brackenridge? Was she a friend?”
Caitlyn scrunched up her nose like she’d smelled something foul. “Andi? God, what a loser. Andi was definitely not a friend of Courtney’s,” she told me, taking the bluish stuff from me and setting it ever so carefully in a wire holder.
“Huh. Well, that’s odd.”
“What?” Caitlyn asked. “What’s odd?”
“That they weren’t friends. Because Andi texted Courtney right before she died,” I said, carefully watching their reactions.
But all I got was the I-just-smelled-rotten-meat nose scrunch.
“Who told you that?” Caitlyn demanded.
Excellent question.
“Uh . . . a friend. I’d tell you, but I can’t divulge my sources.” Nice. That sounded official.
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