by Meg Cabot
I guess I must look really worried or something since the nurse smiles at me and puts her hand on my arm and says, “Don’t worry. I’m sure he’s going to be back to doing dance moves in no time.”
In spite of the nurse’s assertion, I can’t bring myself to leave him there all alone. I can’t believe no one from his family has shown up yet! So when my five minutes of standing there and staring at Jordan are up, I go back to my plastic seat in the waiting room. I’ll stay, I decide, until he’s moved upstairs, or until a member of his family arrives. I’ll just hang out till they get here. And then—
And then I don’t know what I’ll do. I’m convinced—one hundred percent convinced, surer than I’ve ever been about anything, which I realize isn’t saying much, but whatever—that someone has just tried to kill me.
Right? I mean, hadn’t that been what the guy from the chess circle had said? “Good thing you moved, lady, or you’d have been the one it hit,” or something like that?
And the someone who pushed that planter over could only have been Christopher Allington. Who else had access to his parents’ terrace? Who else had reason to knock geranium planters onto my head? It wasn’t a premeditated attempt at murder—it couldn’t have been. How could he have known I’d be on my way back into the building right then?
No, he must have just looked down and decided fate was on his side and given that planter the heave-ho. If I hadn’t ducked, it would have hit me, and not Jordan. And it probably would have killed me, because, you know, my head isn’t anywhere near as hard as an ex-member of Easy Street’s.
But why does Chris want to kill me? Just because I suspect him of being a murderer? Suspecting someone of being a murderer and actually having proof of someone being a murderer are two entirely different things. What possible proof could Chris think I have? I mean, aside from the condom—which only proves he’s randy, not a killer—I have nothing on him. I don’t even have proof that there’ve actually been any murders.
So why is he trying to kill me? Isn’t he putting himself more at risk by trying to kill me than by just laying low? Especially since foul play isn’t suspected in the deaths of Elizabeth and Roberta—
By anyone but me, anyway.
A deep, familiar voice breaks in on my meditations. I look away from the snoring junkie I’ve been staring at unseeingly, and up into Cooper’s calm, smiling face…and suddenly feel like throwing up.
“Heather,” he says, with friendly nonchalance, as he folds himself into the plastic chair beside me.
“Um.” That’s all I can think of to say. Swift, huh? After a lot of mental turmoil, I finally add, “Hi.”
Cooper gazes with mild interest at the snoring junkie. He looks, in his scruffy but form-fitting jeans and black leather jacket, good enough to eat. Better than Ho Hos, even. Cooper, I mean. Not the junkie.
“So,” he says, in the same conversational tone. “What’s new with you?”
I go cold all over, then hot. It’s totally unfair, the hold this guy has over me. And he’s never so much as asked me out! Okay, he asked me to move in with him, but, hello, that was out of pity. And I live on a whole separate floor. With a whole separate set of locks on the door. Which I’ve never actually used, but has he ever bothered to find that out? No!
“Nothing much,” I say to him, hoping he can’t see how my heart is leaping around inside my T-shirt. “Did, um, your dad call you?”
“No,” Cooper says. “Your friend Patty did. When she came to your office to pick you up for lunch, Magda told her what happened. Patty had the baby with her, or she’d have come herself.”
“Oh,” I say. I’d forgotten all about my lunch appointment with Patty. Glancing at the waiting room clock, I see that it’s after two. “Well.”
“What she couldn’t quite explain,” Cooper says, “is what, precisely, happened.”
Which is when it all comes spilling out.
I don’t want for it to. I don’t mean for it to. It’s just…well, I guess that’s why Cooper’s such a good detective. There’s something in his deep voice that just makes you blurt out everything you know…
Well, okay, not everything. I did manage to keep the whole part about what Jordan and I had done on Cooper’s hallway runner under wraps. Wild horses aren’t going to drag that information out of me.
Oh, and the part about me wanting to, you know, peel off Cooper’s clothes with my teeth, of course.
But the rest of it just comes out in this giant gush, the way the hot chocolate in the dorm cafeteria does sometimes, right after Magda’s poured the mix in but before anybody’s stirred it…
I tell him, starting with the lip-synch the night before, when I’d first begun to suspect that Christopher Allington was Elizabeth and Roberta’s killer, and ending with the geraniums cracking Jordan’s head open, skipping over the part in between where his brother and I made the beast with two backs in his foyer.
I’ve overheard Cooper in action with his clients a couple of times. The washer/dryer is on the same floor as his office, just off the kitchen, and I’ve been in there washing my control top underwear (I only wear it on special occasions, like customer service training seminars or cultural diversity awareness workshops) when he’s met with people who’ve hired him. He talks to them in this totally calm, careful voice…
…a completely different voice, it turns out, than he uses on his nonpaying clientele.
“Heather, are you insane?” He looks really mad. He sounds really mad. “You went and talked to the guy?”
It would be nice to think that the reason he’s so angry with me is because my near brush with death has finally made him realize his true feelings for me.
But I think all it did was reinforce his suspicions that I’m a complete and total whacko.
“Why are you yelling at me?” I demand. “I’m the victim here!”
“No, you’re not. Jordan is. And if you’d just listened to me—”
“But if I’d listened to you, I wouldn’t know that Chris Allington is the dangerous psychopath we’ve been looking for!”
“A fact of which you still don’t have any proof.” Cooper shakes his head. He has dark, thick hair that he hardly ever gets cut and that is always growing past his collar, giving him a distinctly nonconformist air, even without the whole private eye thing. “That planter could have been knocked over by anyone. How do you know the Allingtons’ gardener wasn’t watering the plants and accidentally knocked the thing over?”
“Directly onto me? Isn’t that just a bit of a coincidence? Considering the fact that I was just questioning Chris Allington the night before?”
I swear I see the corners of Cooper’s mouth twitch at this.
“I’m sorry, Heather, but I doubt your interrogation skills are such as to goad Chris Allington into a murderous frenzy.”
Okay, Miss Marple I may not be. But he doesn’t have to rub it in.
“I’m telling you, he tried to kill me. Why don’t you believe me?” I hear myself cry, before I can shut my mouth. “Can’t you see that I’m not a stupid little teen pop star anymore, and that I might just know what I’m talking about?”
Even as the words are coming out, I’m wishing them unsaid. What am I doing? What am I doing? This is the guy who, without my even asking, offered me a place to live when I had nowhere to go…well, okay, except the guest room in Patty and Frank’s loft.
But, you know. Besides that. How ungrateful can I be?
“I’m so sorry,” I say, feeling dry-mouthed with panic. “I didn’t mean it. I don’t know where that came from. I’m just—I think maybe I’m just upset. You know. From the stress.”
Cooper is just sitting there, looking at me with a totally unreadable expression.
“I don’t think of you as a stupid little teen pop star” is all he says, in a tone suggesting mild surprise.
“I know,” I say quickly. Oh God, why can’t I ever seem to keep my mouth shut? WHY?
“I just worry about you sometimes,�
�� Cooper goes on, before I can say anything else. “I mean, you get yourself into things…. That whole thing with my brother—”
What whole thing? Did he mean…my relationship with his brother? Or last night? Oh please, don’t let him have seen the Post….
“And it’s not like you have anyone.” He shakes his head again. “Any family, or anyone to look after you.”
“But neither do you,” I remind him.
“That’s different,” he says.
“I don’t see how,” I say. “I mean, except that I’m younger than you.” But what’s seven years, really? Prince Charles and Lady Diana were twelve years apart…and okay, that didn’t turn out so well, but how likely are we to repeat their mistakes as a couple? If Cooper and I ever were to become one, I mean. Neither of us even likes polo.
“Besides,” I say, remembering what I’d seen out of the ambulance window. “I do have a family. Sort of. I mean, there’s Rachel and Magda and Pete and Patty and you—”
I didn’t mean to add that last word. But there it is, floating in the air between us. You. You’re part of my family, Cooper. My new family, now that my real family members are all incarcerated or on the lam. Congratulations!
Cooper just looks at me like I’m crazy (how unusual). So I add lamely, “And Lucy, too.”
Cooper exhales slowly.
“If you really feel strongly that what happened wasn’t an accident,” he says at last, pointedly ignoring the We Are Family speech (don’t think I don’t notice), “and you really think someone is trying to kill you, then I suggest we go to the police.”
“I tried that,” I remind him. “Remember?”
“Yes. But this time I’m going with you, and I’m going to make sure—”
His voice trails off as a petite, attractive brunette comes rushing up to the waiting room desk, all breathless and leather-skirted, her left hand weighted down by a massive diamond ring.
Okay, so I can’t actually see the ring from where I’m sitting. I still know who she is. I’ve seen her with her mouth around my ex’s you-know-what. Her image will be forever burned onto my retina.
“Excuse me,” she breathes to the stony-faced receptionist. “But I believe my fiancé is here. Jordan Cartwright. When can I see him?”
Tania Trace, the woman who’d taken my place in Jordan’s heart and penthouse—not to mention my position on the music charts.
“Funny,” Cooper observes. “She looks as if she’s handling the pain quite well.”
I glance at him curiously, then remember that he’s referring to something I’d told him some time ago, after I’d first moved in.
“Oh sure,” I say. “Because she’s strung out on painkillers. But I’m telling you, Coop, you can’t have that much plastic surgery and expect to live a pain-free life. I mean, she’s been almost completely reconstructed. In reality, she’s a size eighteen.”
“Right,” Cooper says. “Looks like my brother’s in good hands now. Shall we go?”
We go.
And none too soon, if you ask me.
19
* * *
Shout out to my
Homegirls
Shout out to my
Friends
Shout out to the
Ones who love me
On those I can depend
Shout out to the
Girls out there
Who buy their own
Damned diamond rings
Shout out to you sisters
I’m with you to the end
“Shout Out”
Performed by Heather Wells
Composed by Dietz/Ryder
From the album Summer
Cartwright Records
* * *
The first person at the Sixth Precinct I tell my story to is a pretty but tired-looking woman at the front desk. She has her long black hair in a bun, which I assume is regulation hairstyle for policewomen.
I make a mental note not to major in criminal justice.
The woman directs us to a pudgy guy at a desk, to whom I repeat my story. Like the receptionist, he looks bored…
…until I get to the part about Jordan. Everybody perks up at the mention of Easy Street.
The pudgy guy has us wait a few minutes, and then we’re ushered into someone’s extremely tidy office. We sit across from a very neat desk for a minute or two before the owner of the office walks in, and I see that he is none other than cigar-chomping Detective Canavan.
“You!” I nearly shout at him.
“You!” he nearly shouts back. He’s holding a Styrofoam cup of coffee and—what else?—a doughnut. Krispy Kreme glazed, from the look of it. Lucky duck.
“To what do I owe the pleasure this time, Miss Wells?” he asks. “Wait, don’t tell me. This wouldn’t happen to be about somebody crowning a Backstreet Boy, would it?”
“Easy Street member,” I correct him. “And yes, it would.”
Detective Canavan sits down at his desk, removes the unlit cigar from his mouth, tears off a piece of his doughnut, and dunks it in his coffee. He then puts the coffee-soaked piece of doughnut in his mouth, chews, swallows, and says, “Pray enlighten me.”
I glance at Cooper, who had remained silent at my side through two recitations of my tale. Seeing that he isn’t going to be any help this time, either, I launch into it for a third time, wondering, not for the first time, what it is I find so attractive about Cooper anyway, since he can be so uncommunicative sometimes. Then I remember the whole being-so-hot-and-kind-and-generous-to-me-without-asking-anything-in-return thing, and I know why.
Detective Canavan clasps his hands behind his head as he listens, tipping his chair back as far as it will go. Either he has forgotten his Mitchum for Men or he is just a very profuse sweater, because he has large perspiration stains underneath his arms. Not that this seems to bother him.
“So,” Detective Canavan says, to the water-stained ceiling panels, when I’m through talking. “Now you think the president of New York College’s kid is a murderer.”
“Well,” I say, hesitantly. Because when he puts it that way, it sounds so…dumb. “Yes. I guess I do.”
“But you got no proof. Sure, this guy here’s got a condom. A condom we could probably prove is his. But which wouldn’t be admissible in court. But you got no proof any crime has actually been committed, with the exception of this planter over the side of the terrace, which could have been accidental—”
“But those planters have been up there for years,” I interrupt. “And none of them ever fell down until today—”
“Coroner’s report on both dead girls states cause of death was accidental.” Detective Canavan quits gazing at the ceiling and looks at me. “Listen, miss—is it still miss?”
Unaccountably, I feel myself blushing. Maybe because if it hadn’t been for Tania Trace, by now it would have been Mrs. Although I sort of doubt it would have remained that way for long.
“It’s Ms.,” I say firmly.
Detective Canavan nods. “My wife’s a Ms. now, too. Anyway, listen, Ms. Wells. Kids that age? They’re dopes. Accidents are the leading cause of death for people ages seventeen to twenty-five. Kids are trying to find themselves, taking stupid risks—”
“Not those girls,” I say, firmly.
“Maybe not. The point is, Ms. Wells, you got nothing on this guy. You don’t even have a definite murder to pin on him. If the Backstreet Boy dies, then maybe we’ll have something. Maybe. But the coroner could just as easily rule that one as accidental as well.”
“Well,” I say. I have to admit, I feel very let down. Detective Canavan hadn’t laughed outright in my face this time, I’ll admit, but he hadn’t taken a single note, either. I pick up my backpack.
“Sorry to have wasted your time. Again.” I get up, and Detective Canavan looks at me like I was nuts.
“Where do you think you’re going?” he demands. “Sit down. I’m not through with you yet.”
I sit back down, perplexed.
> “What’s the point?” I ask Detective Canavan, with more asperity than is, perhaps, necessary. “You obviously think I’m some kind of nutcase. What do I need to stick around here for? I can get laughed at by my own friends”—I keep my gaze averted from Cooper’s face. “I don’t need to go to the police for that.”
Detective Canavan finishes the rest of his doughnut, then picks up his cigar. He looks at Cooper.
“She’s a fiery one,” he comments, nodding at me.
“Oh, she’s that,” Cooper agrees, gravely.
“Wait.” I glance from one man to the other, suspicion dawning. “You two know each other?”
Cooper shrugs. “I’ve seen him around the neighborhood,” he says, referring to Detective Canavan.
“Can’t swing a dead cat without running into this guy behind a parked car or mailbox, shooting film of some poor schmuck whose wife is leaving him,” says Detective Canavan, referring to Cooper.
“Great,” I say, feeling more inadequate than ever. “That’s just great. Well, I hope you two are enjoying your little laugh at my expense—”
“Do I look like I’m laughing?” Detective Canavan demands. “Do you see so much as a smile upon my face? Your boyfriend over there, I don’t see him laughing, either.”
“I see absolutely nothing amusing about the situation,” Cooper says.
I look at him. He isn’t smiling. And he hasn’t, I noticed, objected to being called my boyfriend. I look back at Detective Canavan.
“He’s not my boyfriend,” I point out loudly—to what purpose, I cannot imagine. But I’m sure my cheeks are crimson.
Detective Canavan nods at me as if I’d said something along the lines of The sky is blue.
