In the Hall with the Knife

by Diana Peterfreund

  Scarlett cleared her throat to get the room’s attention. “I think we should search the house.”

  A chorus of murmured gasps went around the table. They mostly came from the side where Karlee and Kayla were sitting.

  “Okay,” said Mustard, putting down his fork, as if he were ready to leave that minute.

  “Wait,” said Finn. “No. Why?”

  “To make sure there’s nobody here.”

  “But there is a body here,” said Kayla. “In the conservatory.”

  Scarlett rolled her eyes.

  Vaughn, who had been shoveling down cake as if he hadn’t already eaten half the provisions yesterday, sat back in his seat and crossed his arms over his chest.

  Scarlett went on. “With the state the campus is in, there’s a reasonable possibility that whoever attacked Headmaster Boddy is still here.”

  Another set of gasps.

  “A murderer?” asked Karlee. “In the house with us?”

  “Look,” said Finn. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. There are a dozen buildings on this campus that the looter could be hiding out in.”

  “So don’t we owe it to ourselves to make sure there’s not a killer in this one?” Mustard replied.

  “Would you stick around here after you stabbed someone?” Finn asked.

  “Having never stabbed anyone, I couldn’t tell you,” said Mustard.

  Vaughn shrugged. “It makes sense. Of course the killer would want to leave the scene of the crime—if they could. But with the storm . . . that may not have been an option.”

  Finn frowned. “Rusty left.”

  “True,” said Vaughn, his tone even. “Maybe it was Rusty, and he purposefully sunk our boat so he could escape to the mainland.” He leaned forward, and his voice dropped a register. “Or maybe Rusty never made it to the village alive at all.”

  “Eww,” said Scarlett. Was he about to start in with his dreadful murder ballads again? “Don’t joke about that when we have an actual dead body in the conservatory.”

  “That’s what I said.” Kayla pouted.

  “I’m not joking.” Vaughn looked affronted. “I nearly froze on my way back to the house, and I’m not an old man like Rusty. You Blackbrook kids can’t imagine how bad it’s gotten out there. Anything could have happened to him before he reached safety.”

  Number four: Someone here did it. Vaughn was right. Anything could have happened, including that he was the killer and had murdered the janitor, too. Scarlett couldn’t rule it out.

  Though, of course, it was unlikely that he’d be bragging about it now, macabre taste in music or not.

  “Can we please stop talking about this?” Karlee asked.

  “No,” said Orchid. “If there’s a chance that there’s a murderer in this house, we need to know about it.” She turned to Scarlett and nodded. At least for once, she was planning on being helpful.

  Finn shook his head. “No—it was a looter, like Mrs. White said. They took the headmaster’s valuables and ran.”

  “Swam, you mean,” said Mustard.

  “In which case, they’re drowned under all those flood-waters,” Finn insisted, his voice rising. “There’s no one in the house! There’s no need to search.”

  “I don’t want to take that chance!” Scarlett cried. “I’m shocked that you would be willing to risk it.”

  “I agree,” said Orchid. “I’ll sleep a lot better knowing there’s no one else here.”

  “But that does leave another possibility,” said Vaughn ominously. “If there’s no one else in the house, then maybe it wasn’t some looter at all. One of us did it.”

  Exactly what Scarlett was afraid of, no matter how Mrs. White had scolded her for considering it. Maybe she should start a suspect list, counting down from least likely to most. She already had a pretty good idea of how it would go.

  6. Kayla Gould: Uh, no.

  5. Karlee Silverman: Ditto.

  4. Mustard: Seemed to have the skinny on military fighting knives, but from all evidence barely knew the headmaster. Although, no one knew why he’d left that

  military academy . . .

  3. Orchid: Wimp, though she had gone to that mysterious meeting in the headmaster’s office last week . . .

  2. Vaughn: Goth AF. Quite possibly a secret serial killer who writes songs about his victims.

  1. Beth: By Finn’s account, had actually tried to kill the headmaster in her mysterious meeting in his office last week.

  That was everyone. Oh, wait. Finn. Scarlett looked at her friend. Nah. He’d liked the headmaster as much as she had. He’d been so upset all morning.

  “Are you calling us suspects?” Finn shouted across the table at Vaughn.

  See? Wild with grief.

  Vaughn raised his hands in defense. “I’m just discussing possibilities. Playing ‘what if?’ You’re the scientist, Plum. Isn’t that how you come up with theories?”

  “That is so different,” Finn said.

  “Maybe,” Vaughn said, “we should ask ourselves who in this house might have a reason to want the headmaster dead?” His eyes slid in Peacock’s direction, and it was as if everyone at the table suddenly seemed to remember the gossip about what had happened in Boddy’s office before the storm.

  Mustard broke in. “Okay, let’s not jump down each other’s throats. Remember, we’re all on the same team here.”

  “The murderer isn’t,” Vaughn pointed out, smirking. Wow, he was insufferable. She wished Mrs. White were here to see how he behaved when she wasn’t around. She watched him take yet another brownie from the plate and swallow it in two bites. All this talk of murder certainly wasn’t having an effect on his sweet tooth.

  Mustard, too, was unamused. “Let’s just concentrate on making sure there’s no one else in the house.”

  “By searching in groups of two?” asked Orchid, her tone that soft, light kind that somehow still managed to make everyone in the room stop and pay attention. Scarlett didn’t know how Orchid managed it. She herself had never been able to get people’s attention except by volume. “After we’ve just raised the question of whether or not someone sitting at this table killed the headmaster?”

  “Very good point, Orchid,” Vaughn said. “I for one would not want to be left alone with a psychopath.”

  Judging from the nervous glances shooting across the table, no one else did, either.

  Karlee looked at Kayla. “Dibs on Kayla as my partner.”

  “What?” said Kayla, staring at her friend. “Why?”

  “Because, dummy,” said Karlee, “I know neither of us did it.”

  “Yeah,” said Kayla, “but if we’re together and we come upon the killer, hiding somewhere, how are we going to stop him from getting us, too? I want to be with Mustard.” She turned to the new kid. “You have, like, military training and stuff, right?”

  “Well,” said Mustard haltingly. “I . . .”

  Looked like Mustard didn’t want to be on the hook for single-handedly taking down a murderer with only those two for backup.

  “Okay,” Scarlett said, slicing her hand across the table. “Maybe splitting up isn’t such a great idea.”

  “Or maybe we could split into teams,” Orchid suggested. “Three-person teams. There are nine of us, if you include Mrs. White, and three floors to search—this one, upstairs, and the attic.”

  “Dibs on not the attic,” said Karlee.

  “That sounds like a fair compromise,” said Mustard.

  “Do you really want to disturb Mrs. White?” Finn asked. “In her fragile condition?”

  “To catch a murderer?” asked Orchid. “Yes. I think she’d be fine with that.”

  “She’s hardly fragile,” Scarlett pointed out. She’d just been through a lot that morning. Finding a corpse in your house wasn’t exactly a stress-free event. And Tudor House was her house, more than it belonged to any of the students who lived here.

  Finn considered this. “Okay, then I volunteer that you and I take the ground
floor with Mrs. White. That way, we won’t have to disturb her too much while we look around.”

  “Thank you,” said Scarlett.

  “Of course, dummy,” he replied. “I know neither of us did it.”

  Scarlett bit her lip to hide her smile. “That leaves . . . Orchid, Vaughn, and Beth for the attic.”

  Beth looked up from her notebook, possibly for the first time during the entire conversation. “What?”

  How very odd. The obvious suspect, if it was someone in this house, was the only person anyone had witnessed threatening the headmaster.

  Could the tennis star be a killer off the courts?

  “We’re teaming up to search the attic,” Vaughn explained to Peacock, as if to a child. “Hopefully none of us is a murderer.”

  Orchid shot Vaughn an incredulous, disapproving look, and he returned what Scarlett guessed was supposed to be a reassuring smile, but seemed, somehow, more like a baring of teeth.

  At least it would be Orchid dealing with Vaughn and Peacock, and not Scarlett or Finn. She didn’t envy her housemate, heading off to search some dank, dreary attic with the two people on the top of Scarlett’s suspect list.

  On the flip side, if Orchid wound up dead, at least they’d be able to narrow their list down.

  Outside, the wind buffeted the house, and the windows rattled in their panes. Scarlett was quite glad to be staying on the ground floor. Though, of course, that was the only floor where someone had actually died.

  Scarlett shut the door to the study behind her and held her finger up to her lips. “Mrs. White is still asleep,” she said softly to the other students. “I say we get started on the rest of the house.”

  Everyone else agreed and headed up the stairs to the other floors. She turned to Finn. “Where do you want to get started?”

  “Well, there’s obviously no one but Mrs. White in the study,” he said, “and we were just in the dining room and kitchen, so no one is likely to be in there . . .”

  “Whatever we do,” Scarlett said, “one of us should stay near the door at all times, to make sure a killer isn’t sneaking around from room to room ahead of us while we search.”

  “Good idea,” said Finn. “With our back to one side of the doorjamb, so no one can sneak up on us.”

  Scarlett nodded. In the long term of their friendship, they’d been involved in many schemes, but none had been quite so physically dangerous. Together, they headed down the hall toward the library.

  This was where Vaughn had spent the night, and indeed, his bedroll lay mussed on the floor, with the guitar he’d used yesterday, his backpack, and what must have been yesterday’s clothes piled in a neat stack nearby. She nodded at the belongings. “He looks like he plans to stay for a week with that pack,” she said. “I wonder what’s inside.”

  Finn, who had entered the room while Scarlett manned the doorway, toed the backpack. “We’ll probably never get another chance to check it out.”

  They looked at each other for a long moment, each waiting to see who would be the first to decide that their noble aims trumped any claim Vaughn Green might have to privacy.

  As usual, Finn blinked first. He knelt and opened the flaps on the pack. Scarlett forgot to keep an eye on the hall as she watched him excavate Vaughn’s things.

  There were boxers, and socks, and a few extra shirts. Gross and boring. Everything that boy wore was some variation on the color drab. She would swear one of the sweaters in there was an identical duplicate of the one he was already wearing. Next, Finn took out packages of batteries and little plastic bags of what looked like homemade trail mix.

  “No wonder he’s been eating like he does here,” said Scarlett.

  “Hey.” Finn glanced up at her. “Are you watching the hall, or analyzing his stuff?”

  She shrugged. “Can’t I do both?”

  Finn sat back on his heels. “There’s no school stuff in here. No planner, no textbooks or folders.”

  “Oh well,” said Scarlett. “It was worth a try. Don’t worry, we’ll get him somehow. Look on the bright side. Maybe he’s the killer and they’ll have to kick him out of school.”

  “That’s the bright side?” Finn asked incredulously. “That he stabbed Headmaster Boddy?”

  “Someone stabbed him,” Scarlett pointed out.

  “Yeah, but why would it be Vaughn?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe Headmaster Boddy threatened to pull his scholarship for singing songs about sex and murder.”

  Finn laughed.

  “Don’t worry,” Scarlett said. “He’s a distant second on my list.”

  Finn eyed her with an intent gaze. “Who is first?”

  “Um, who do you think?” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “Peacock, of course. Trying to finish the job she started in his office last week.”

  “Oh.” Finn frowned.

  “Or, you know, a looter.” She shrugged.

  Finn stood and brushed Vaughn’s townie grime off his hands. “Well, there’s no one here.”

  “Did you check behind the curtains?” She pointed at the long velvet curtains framing the window at the far end of the room. They hung perfectly still in thick, deep, cranberry folds. “That’s where they always hide in movies.”

  “Well, that’s pretty clichéd, then.” But Finn rattled the curtains, just to make sure. No murderers fell out.

  Bored, Scarlett surveyed the hallway. No movement there. The wind rustled the tarp tacked up over the broken window. She could hear the murmured voices and footfalls of the other teams upstairs.

  It was probably a looter, right? A looter who was long gone, no matter what Vaughn said about conditions outside.

  When she glanced back in the room, it was to see Finn tilting out the spines of the books on the shelves, one by one. “What are you doing?”

  “Checking for secret passages.”

  She rolled her eyes. There’d always been rumors at Blackbrook that Tudor House was chock-full of secret passages that had once been used for liquor running from Canada during prohibition, and then later, when the house had served as a reform school, to let boys sneak in and out to see the girls who lived there.

  But they were nothing more than that: rumors. She’d asked Mrs. White about these secret passages the week they’d all moved in.

  Mrs. White had merely laughed. “Are you kidding?” she’d said. “I’ve lived here for fifty years, and I’ve never seen anything like what you are describing.”

  “Well, Mrs. White would know best,” said Finn. But he kept pulling at book spines.

  “If there were more rooms in the house, Blackbrook would probably find a way to turn them into student dorms,” Scarlett said. “Or, you know, more lab space.”

  Finn shoved a book back into place. “This is probably futile, right? Let’s try the next room.”

  The next room was the billiards room, where Finn and Mustard had slept the previous night.

  “This is a room they should have turned into lab space,” Scarlett said. “Who plays billiards anymore?”

  Finn checked behind the curtains, underneath the table, and in the narrow gaming cabinets. All empty, of course. “I bet the people searching the attic are going to be done any minute,” he said. “That is, if they didn’t all murder each other first. If it’s not a looter, my money’s on Beth. We should figure out what went down with her and Boddy.”

  Scarlett smiled and shook her head. “Wait . . . Where’s all your stuff?”

  “My stuff?” Finn glanced at his bedroll and small pile of belongings. “It’s all here.”

  “Didn’t you have a bunch of bags yesterday?” She took two steps into the room. “I saw them when I was helping you change your clothes.”

  “No . . . Just the one backpack.”

  “Uh, no,” she replied. “You had that leather satchel. The one I got you for your birthday that you keep your lab notes and that precious digital scale in. And your computer bag, too.”

  And then, as if catching himself, he no
dded furiously. “Yes. Yes, I did. You’re right.”

  Of course she was right. Finn wouldn’t have evacuated without his laptop, or that stupid scale of his. He loved his work more than life itself.

  “Oh no,” he said, his pretty eyes wide, his pretty eyelashes fluttering. She knew that look. They’d practiced that look together. “My stuff has been stolen, too! Just like Headmaster Boddy. It must have been the looter!”

  Scarlett stared at him, confused. No, baffled. Because she knew that Finn leaned hard into the whole absentminded professor act. She joked about him not caring about anything that didn’t fit into a test tube.

  But she knew also that it meant he would notice if he woke up and his work was gone. Which meant . . .

  Phineas Plum was lying. To her.

  14

  Plum

  She bought it. Of course she bought it.

  She probably bought it.

  Right?

  Finn stood for two full seconds in utter agony before Scarlett said, “We should report this to the others. It’s not like finding the actual killer, but at least if more things are going missing, it corroborates the theory that there was a looter in here.”

  Yeah, she bought it.

  “When do you think your stuff went missing?” she asked him. “Maybe when we were at lunch?”

  “Um . . .”

  “I mean, obviously you would have noticed if it was gone when you got up this morning,” said Scarlett. Her stare never wavered from his face.

  “Yes.” He was nodding again. Agreeing with Scarlett was never a bad strategy. “I think it must have been while we were at lunch.”

  Her eyes went wide. “Oh my God. That means the looter must still be in the house!”

  Should he act terrified? Should he act relieved he wasn’t murdered, too? Finn wasn’t sure.

  This was almost as bad as his meeting with Headmaster Boddy, back before the storm. Finn had never been able to perform on his feet. If he was given time to prepare, he’d do fine. To study, as if for a test. But he hadn’t had time to make up a story. Not then, and not now. Scarlett was so much better at this kind of thing than he was.

  Already he could see his error. It was like she always told him—the best lies were served up with pieces of the truth. He should have told her that he’d hidden his valuables. She’d understand that. With all these strangers in the house, with no ability to lock his door—it would have made perfect sense to her. Why hadn’t he said that?