Chapter 23
I was in the library, trying to get some work done when my phone went off. At first I thought it was the alarm letting me know yet another of my searches were done, but it wasn’t. (I was down to about sixty-eight decillion planets. I had great hopes of being into the millions by Christmas.)
It was my “Meredith has left her home” alarm. For the past day and a half, I’d been watching her. Other than going to her classes, she’d been staying in her attic more often than normal, thus seriously impacting my ability to search her place.
But now it looked like luck was on my side. I followed her blinking dot and saw she was leaving campus. Perfect. If I hurried over there, I should be able to do a thorough search before she got home.
I rushed out of the library, jumped on one of the cross campus trolleys and kept one eye on my phone to make sure she didn’t change course and return to her attic while I was en route.
She was still moving farther away from home by the time I got to her dorm. I did the whole fake searching for my key thing and got in as easily as before. You know, for someone supposedly so smart and deep into the illegal trade, you’d think she’d have installed a better lock on her door. Maybe she just dabbled, I speculated, as I closed the door behind me.
I looked around the room I’d just entered and saw nothing had changed from my last visit. Also, nothing really screamed “hiding place,” though with no personal touches or signs of someone living here I wouldn’t have expected a noticeable place to hide objects, so I’d have to do this the hard way.
For the size of the dorm and lack of furnishings except for the second hand school provided furniture, it took me a surprisingly long time to search every nook and cranny. Just as I’d think I’d looked everywhere, my imaginative mind would come up with someplace else to look and no amount of reassurance and denial would stop my mind from telling me that I had to look. It could be inside the couch, or under the cushions, or inside the oven, or shoved on top of the cabinets, or between the mattress and box spring, or…my mind had endless possibilities. But I finally looked in all them, finding nothing.
I made one more check on her location before pulling down the attic ladder and climbing up into her hidden space. Again, the room looked exactly as it’d been when I’d been there days before, but I knew at least one thing had changed: there shouldn’t be any money in the pillowcase. She should have spent it all on the jewels, of which I was in possession of half.
But how do you know if you don’t look, the voice in my head whispered to me. I didn’t. So I went to the pillowcase and looked. To my surprise, there was still money there. Not as much as before, but at least a couple thousand dollars.
“I have to leave it here,” I told myself even as my fingers itched to grab the money left so carelessly. “If I take it, she’ll know someone was here. Then she could take off. If she takes off, then I will never get rid of her. And if I don’t get rid of her properly, I’ll spend all my free time searching for her until the job is completed.” I shuttered at the thought of this nightmare coming true. At all the time wasted because I was greedy and couldn’t wait until she was gone to take what I wanted.
That fear more than anything made me put the money back and walk away from it. I searched the rest of the room, but found nothing. No sign of the jewels or anything else in fact, and this made me sit back and think.
This couldn’t have been her first deal, could it? Even as I thought this, I dismissed it for where had she gotten all the money to pay for the jewels, not to mention the connections to deal with Atrox, a gangster with a lot of contacts and friends in high places, if this were her first deal? No, she must have done jobs in the past. This was definitely not her first rodeo, but from what I could see of her behavior, she hadn’t done this more than a handful of times.
But if that were the case, where was the evidence?
The same thing could be said about yourself, a little voice in the back of my mind said. Nothing in your apartment points to your extracurricular activities. Maybe she has a hidden vault of her treasures.
The voice was right, I realized. If someone was to look at my place, they’d never imagine I’d ever done anything wrong because everything I’d acquired over the years was hidden. My furniture was nice, but not too nice and fit in well with the image of a student who’d saved their money from their stipend and a job to buy something which would last. My clothes weren’t designer made, but not thrift store bought. The only luxury items you might say I had were my shoes, but this too would be keeping in line with my image of a woman who liked to shoe shop. Nothing about my life, from the outside, told anyone that I wasn’t exactly what I appeared to be: a student.
Meredith’s lack of possessions, other than her necessities, would have normally not been surprising for a poor college student…if she’d actually been living in a dorm. But she wasn’t. She was living in this attic space, hiding her home from all who might be looking for her. If I hadn’t been suspicious enough before by not finding the jewels, now I was certain.
Meredith must have someplace to hide her items. But how was I going to find it? I’d gone over her movements and she hadn’t gone anywhere she shouldn’t have.
“I’ll have to follow her,” I muttered, even as I began to leave the attic. “It’ll be a nightmare, but that’s what I’ve got to do.”
My phone began to vibrate as I exited the dorm. She was back. In fact, she was very close. Hell, we were right on top of each other. Why hadn’t I been alerted sooner? I should have known the second she placed a foot back onto campus.
I began running down the stairs. I knew that anyone passing by to their own dorm would see my panicked actions, but I couldn’t worry about them, or the possibility of appearing panicked. Hell, this was a dorm. Students were always running because they had slept in and were now late for class. Me appearing panicked and harried would fit in perfectly with my persona. However, I still needed to get as far as possible from this place before she saw me. My cover would give me some leeway in the public eye, but none with Meredith.
But I didn’t have time. I’d just passed the second floor door when I saw her at the foot of the stairs. She stopped briefly to clean her shoes on the grass next to the path before she started toward me.
There was nowhere for me to hide. I couldn’t dive off the side of the stairs, landing in the grass surrounding them, because she’d see me and question my weird actions. No, what I had to do would take every inch of backbone I possessed.
I boldly walked down the stairs, coming face to face with Meredith halfway down. “What are you doing here?” she asked harshly. It was as if she owned the staircase.
“What are you doing here?” I asked her back, trying to put the burden of being in the wrong place on her.
“I’m…I’m…visiting a friend,” she answered. Bingo, it worked just as I wanted.
“Well good for you. Now if you’ll excuse me.” I made to walk around her, but she grabbed my arm.
“Where do you think you’re going? You haven’t answered my question!” she almost screeched.
“I don’t have to do a damn thing for you except work on a project with you. I certainly don’t have to answer your questions.” I pushed past her and walked off with my head held high, as if I were the moral victor of our encounter.
I was, to a point. She really had no right to question why I was somewhere. I’d only asked her what she was doing there because she’d asked me, but I’d never had any intentions of answering her questions. Who did she think she was? She was a toad. No she was the wart on a toad. No she was –
Whoa there, that little voice said. Don’t go getting all melodramatic. I was getting myself into a huff over nothing. I really needed to calm down and think clearly.
But was there anything really to think about? I shook my head even as I walked away from the person who filled my thoughts. There wasn’t. I hadn’t found my treasure by my own searches, so I had only one recourse left: follo
wing Meredith’s every move.
Planet Secrets Page 24
