In the Hall with the Knife

by Diana Peterfreund

  “Huh.” Mustard considered this. “So, is this just for patents, or for anything? Like if that Vaughn kid writes a hit song—”

  “I don’t know,” Finn snapped. “And it’s really not relevant to me, anyway. What is relevant is, I’ve got a few more months I need to keep this thing under wraps and then I’m in the clear.”

  “Except you’re not in the clear,” said Mustard. “Not really. You did invent this dye here. According to the honor code, you have an obligation to share the patent with them.”

  “But that’s a stupid rule!”

  Mustard shrugged. “It’s one you agreed to, though.”

  “Two minutes ago, you didn’t even know the school had this rule.”

  “Did you not know it?” Mustard asked. His tone was no more than blandly curious.

  Finn just scowled and looked away. He hadn’t told anyone—not even Scarlett, for just this reason. Not that he worried Scarlett would appeal to his ethical obligations.

  He’d always simply figured she’d want a piece of the action.

  “I suppose you plan to snitch on me?”

  Mustard chuckled, as if it were the stupidest idea in the world.

  But how was Finn supposed to know what Captain America here thought about stuff like that? “It doesn’t matter, anyway. Headmaster Boddy already got wind of it. He called me into his office last week to address a rumor that I’d been doing secret work in the lab.”

  “Ah, yes,” Mustard said. “I heard about all the meetings in Boddy’s office last week. What did he say?”

  “He said I had until the end of this week to come clean. I was hoping maybe this storm might have destroyed any evidence they had against me. Then the worst they could hit me with would be an honor code violation.”

  “You’d get kicked out of school.”

  “Not the end of the world.”

  Mustard made a whistling sound through his teeth and stretched his legs out in front of him, which was when Finn remembered that the story around campus was that Mustard had been kicked out of his last school.

  “Well,” he mumbled. “At least I’d have the dye.” If his dye worked, he’d be set for life anyway.

  “So it’s done?”

  “No . . .”

  “Then you might not have the dye. Or a Blackbrook diploma.”

  “I don’t know if any of us are going to have a Blackbrook diploma after this,” Finn said scornfully. “Headmaster found dead in a dorm? Flood ruins half the buildings on campus? This place might never open again.”

  Mustard was silent for a long moment. “Then you’d really be off the hook, wouldn’t you?”

  Finn wasn’t sure what he ought to say to that.

  Mustard leaned forward. “I gotta ask. You didn’t kill Headmaster Boddy, did you? Because he found your secret?”

  “No!” Finn cried.

  “Yeah,” said Mustard ruefully. “You seem like more of a white-collar criminal. You wouldn’t kill anyone.”

  “Um, thanks?”

  But Mustard wasn’t finished. “You’d hire out.”

  Ouch. Finn didn’t want to reflect on how accurately Mustard had pegged him. “All right. Now I get to ask you a question.”

  “I didn’t kill him, either.”

  “I didn’t ask that,” said Finn. No, he wanted to know why the kid chose to call himself after a hot dog condiment.

  “Why, because you think I look more like a white-collar criminal?”

  “You don’t look like a criminal at all. You look like a cop.”

  Mustard thought about this for a moment. “Fair enough. But I’m afraid in this case I’m no closer to figuring out who is responsible for this murder. It’s not you, and it’s not me. So who does that leave?”

  “Maybe it’s Rusty, and he ran as soon as he got a chance,” Finn suggested.

  “Possibly. Couple of the girls upstairs think it might be Peacock.”

  Finn said nothing.

  “You witnessed her fighting with the headmaster before the storm, didn’t you?”

  “It wasn’t Beth.” Finn studied the floor as if it would have answers.

  “You told Scarlett you saw her throw a candlestick at Headmaster Boddy.”

  “It wasn’t Beth, okay?” Finn pushed himself to his feet and started packing up his things. Mustard’s point about the flood was starting to make him nervous. Besides, now that Mustard knew what he was up to, there was really no point in all this secrecy.

  “How do you know?” Mustard, too, stood up, dusting off his hands.

  “We used to be really close, freshman year.”

  “But you aren’t anymore.”

  Finn shook his head. “But I still know. She’s a nice girl.” As per usual, he’d been the one to screw everything up.

  “You weren’t the only one who saw them fighting,” said Mustard.

  Orchid. Of course. Well, he could just go ahead and interview everyone, then. Finn started shoving his things into his bag, but he was clumsy and hurried, and the edges of his laptop got caught. Wordlessly, Mustard held the flaps of the bag open for him.

  “I never should have spread that rumor when I saw her in the office,” Finn admitted. “I don’t know what happened with the candlestick, to be honest. And, I mean, I probably yelled at the headmaster, too.” He hadn’t, but that was beside the point.

  “The headmaster threatened to expel you, Poindexter,” Mustard said. “When I asked Beth what Boddy wanted her for, she said it was an argument over attending a tennis match. As a spectator.”

  “See?” Finn exclaimed. “That’s not remotely a motive for murder.”

  “Right,” Mustard agreed. “But it was also a pretty transparent lie. I can’t imagine candlesticks getting involved in that disagreement.”

  Finn snorted and pulled the strap of his messenger bag crossways over his head. “You don’t know how much Beth likes tennis.” He turned to head up the stairs in the back of the chamber. “Hey, how’d you get in here, anyway?”

  Mustard looked confused. “What do you mean? How did you get in?”

  “Through the trapdoor in the conservatory.” Finn pointed at the opening a few feet away.

  Mustard looked behind him, and then up at the door before them. “I came in from the secret door behind the fireplace in the lounge.”

  “There’s a door down there? It looked all bricked up to me.” Then a horrible thought occurred to him. The passage went from the lounge, where Boddy had been sleeping, to the conservatory, where his corpse had been found the next day.

  Strange.

  But he shook off the chill and began climbing through the trapdoor’s entrance. He’d leave the detective work to Mustard. He had plenty of things to worry about.

  Mustard followed Finn out the door. “Clever,” he said as he watched Finn depress the switch hidden in the brick wall that closed it off from sight once more. “If a bit less decorative than the one in the fireplace.”

  “Whatever, dude.” Finn had no idea what Mustard was talking about, and he didn’t want to spend a second more in this room than he needed to. He wondered how long it took for corpses to begin to smell. Shouldering his bag once more, he headed out.

  Mustard followed him into the hall. “I think we need to get to the bottom of what Peacock and Boddy were really fighting about.”

  “Who’s we in this scenario?”

  “You and me.”

  Finn stopped short and spun around. “You’re joking, right?”

  Mustard stuck his hands in his pockets, looking smug. Smug and huge. “Not really. So far, you have the most likely motive for killing the headmaster that I’ve managed to uncover. He’d threatened to expel you. You told me yourself.”

  “Yeah, well, I also told you I didn’t do it.”

  “I wonder which one of us the cops will find more convincing.”

  Finn clenched his jaw. “So you are a snitch.”

  Mustard looked offended. “Or,” he proposed, “you could help me.”
r />   “And a blackmailer.”

  “Come on. You said you and Peacock were close.”

  Finn let out a burst of laughter. They reached the door to the billiards room. “Yeah, but I’m the last person Beth will talk to.” Maybe Mustard should try Scarlett. She and Beth seemed to be getting along great.

  He’d expected Mustard to follow him inside. After all, it was their room. But instead the other boy lingered on the threshold, running his fingers over the glossy wood of the doorframe. “It’s so funny. You’re the only one who calls her Beth.”

  “I’m not into dumb nicknames,” Finn shot back. “Mustard.”

  He’d expected a defense of some sort. An argument for the validity of that preposterous name, or an emotional explanation of why he insisted on using it. But Mustard didn’t react in any way, and as the silence stretched on, Finn began to feel more vulnerable than ever. He’d told Mustard all kinds of things in the last half hour, and Mustard had told him . . .

  Well, practically nothing. It was possible Finn hadn’t played it as smoothly as he’d thought.

  “Okay,” Finn said at last. “I’ll help you figure out the Beth thing. But then I want to know your secrets.”

  “What makes you think I have any?”

  Finn chuckled. “Buddy, you’re a Blackbrook kid now. It’s our stock-in-trade.”

  19

  Orchid

  Orchid sat on the window seat in the study as the light of the day drained away and looked out over the frozen, muddy ground stretching as far as she could see. The beautiful Blackbrook campus, which had only a few short weeks earlier been a riot of fiery colors, now looked like the set of a postapocalyptic movie. Gray, ashen, dead.

  For years, it had been her sanctuary, and, to judge from the photo album Mrs. White had showed her, she now knew she was not alone in thinking of it that way. It was funny—she’d always known that Mrs. White had been a student here, back in the olden days, but she’d never really considered what that meant. The students all joked about juvenile delinquents and reform school girls, but she’d never given much thought to what might have gotten a girl sent to reform school in the last century. Hadn’t reflected on how little the mansion looked like a place a girl would go to atone for her sins.

  Tudor House hadn’t been a punishment. Its stately carvings and marble floors might have seemed more like a palace to scared girls arriving from who knows where, with who knows what kind of trauma in their pasts. They’d found this place, and they’d found one another.

  No wonder she’d always felt at home here. Well, it would have been nice if she’d found trusted friends like Mrs. White had.

  Orchid looked up to see Scarlett entering.

  “There you are.”

  Or, you know, people who weren’t complete monsters.

  Then again, it wasn’t entirely the fault of kids like Scarlett that Orchid had never made close friends. It was kind of hard to get close to someone if you couldn’t share with them any facet of who you were. When all the other freshmen had been bonding over their lives in their old schools or their hometowns, Orchid had been busy concocting her very personality. Who was Orchid McKee? What did she like? What did she want out of Blackbrook? What did she want, period?

  It had been easy to figure it out in her classes. The school’s rigorous academic standards slotted Orchid into a pattern of quiet studiousness. She never made waves like Finn or Scarlett, but she held her own and liked it. But the same could not be said of the social spheres in the school. She had no athletic skills to speak of, and drama club or music was right out—she could not risk revealing her background. So while the other Blackbrook kids made friends in their activities, or bonded over shared pasts, Orchid had kind of missed the boat. Even living here, in the intimate surroundings of Tudor House, she’d never gotten close to the other girls. Nisha and Atherton had been best friends from childhood, Faith and Cadence were on the swim team together, and Scarlett . . .

  Scarlett had just always rubbed Orchid precisely the wrong way. Always needing to be the center of attention, always ready to step on your neck if it meant getting another foot up the ladder.

  She reminded Orchid of everyone and everything she’d hated in Hollywood.

  Now Scarlett came and joined her on the window seat. Orchid pulled her knees up farther toward her chest. “I checked for you in your room.”

  That was new. “I don’t really want to be upstairs alone.” At least here, she could hear the voices of Karlee and Kayla floating down the hall, and even the dim echoes of pots and pans in the kitchen as Mrs. White worked on dinner. Vaughn, she knew, was napping in the library, and Beth was doing another round of stair reps. Finn and Mustard she hadn’t seen for a bit, but maybe they were still playing detective.

  “Me neither,” said Scarlett in a voice low enough to be a confession. She looked out the window. “Do you think Rusty will be back with the cops soon?”

  “No.”

  Scarlett’s gaze shot in her direction. “No?”

  Orchid shrugged. “This isn’t Manhattan. There’s one deputy in the village, probably five or six more in the first town on the mainland, and they’ve all been flooded, too. They’re probably busy rescuing people out of attics. Or they are stuck in an attic somewhere themselves.”

  “But . . . a homicide!”

  Orchid fixed Scarlett with a look. “When Rusty left, you were pretty firmly in the suicide camp.”

  Scarlett ignored her. “And they must know this place will be a target for looters . . .”

  Did Scarlett realize how many straws she was grasping at? “That won’t magically change the number of police boats they have.”

  Scarlett’s expression was growing frantic. “What if the looter comes back? Or what if Vaughn was right, and it was someone here?”

  Orchid rolled her eyes. “Like who, Scarlett? You want to come in here and bring up Peacock and her meeting with the headmaster again? Believe me, I’ve already gone over it, with the new kid Mustard, and with Peacock. She’s well aware we all think she killed someone.”

  “Well, I don’t think that,” said Scarlett, folding her arms.

  Now Orchid was surprised. “What?”

  “I spent the last half hour talking to Peacock. You’re right. She is well aware that we’ve all been talking about her.” Scarlett stopped. “What?”

  For Orchid was staring at her, flabbergasted. “Sorry, did you just say I was right about something?” Man, take away the girl’s phone for a day and all kinds of crazy things might happen.

  “Shut up.” Scarlett continued, though not cruelly. “She wants to hike out of here. Says she won’t spend another night in a house where everyone thinks she’s a murderer.”

  “She can’t do that!”

  “Don’t worry, I talked her down,” said Scarlett. “I explained that leaving now would only make people more suspicious.”

  “No,” Orchid replied, frustrated. “I mean, it’s dangerous. Look at what happened to Vaughn and Rusty.”

  “Oh.” Scarlett considered this, looking out over the mottled, debris-strewn yard of Tudor House. “That, too, I guess.”

  She guessed? Orchid raised her eyebrows in disbelief.

  “Well, I want us all to be safe!” Scarlett exclaimed. “Trust me, I’ve been spending all day wondering how soon my parents might be able to get a helicopter up here and get us all out. I’m sure they are thinking about it, in New York. The news must be awful. I can’t imagine. I’ve gotten nothing at all since my backup batteries went dead. They’re probably freaking out. I know you’re above such things, but I’ve got friends and family who occasionally like to hear from me.”

  Trust me, thought Orchid. Sometimes you’re better off if no one cares. Every time Scarlett brought up the media, she started feeling twitchy. And it would only get worse, once the truth of the headmaster’s death became known. If a suicide was newsworthy, a murder would be a real scandal. Orchid hugged her knees and gently rocked back and forth.


  Could she handle news? Real news? There hadn’t been any news of her for years. But she could picture the click-bait headlines. They would start innocently enough.

  Hotel Heiress Details Agonizing 48 Hours in the Blackbrook Murder House

  Here Are the Kids Who Survived the Blackbrook Murder House (#6 Will Surprise You!)

  This Blackbrook Murder House Witness Looks Exactly Like Missing Child Star Emily Pryce and Twitter Is SHOOK!

  And then her sanctuary would be gone. Forever.

  “You know,” said Scarlett, “you should wear contacts. You look really nice without your glasses.”

  “I didn’t ask for your input.”

  “Touchy much?”

  Orchid groaned. “Why is it touchy if a woman doesn’t appreciate unsolicited takes on her appearance? I didn’t want Karlee and Kayla’s makeover last night, and I don’t want your opinion on my glasses today.”

  Scarlett pursed her lips and sat back. “Yeah, that’s a good point.”

  You’re right and good point, all in one conversation? Wow, this was progress, indeed.

  “I guess it’s hard to imagine that someone doesn’t want my opinion on a subject,” Scarlett said. “My opinions are so good.”

  Orchid burst out laughing. “Maybe you should be satisfied with eighty percent of the school as your minions and stop trying to recruit the rest of us.”

  “Is it only eighty?” Scarlett replied. “Crap, I thought I was doing better.”

  Orchid laughed again, though she was also only eighty percent sure that Scarlett was joking.

  “Okay,” the other girl conceded. “You look like that on purpose. This no-glasses moment is an aberration. Soon you’ll have them fixed and your bangs will be back in your face and we can all go back to ignoring your killer cheekbones and movie star eyes.”

  Orchid tensed. “My what?”

  Scarlett waved her hand at Orchid. “You know, like Elizabeth Taylor or something. It’s indecent.” She cocked her head. “Actually, you know who you look like?”

  “No.” Yes. The blood rushed in her ears.