Authors: Gemma Halliday
Sam pulled to a stop across the street.
“Hey, Andi!” I called as we got out.
She paused, putting one hand up to shield her eyes from the afternoon sun as she squinted at me.
“Do I know you?”
“Hartley Featherstone,” I supplied, jogging across the street to meet her. “From Girl Scouts.”
“Oh. Sure.” Though I could tell from the blank look on her face she didn’t really remember me. Or just didn’t care.
“Listen, I’m glad we caught up with you. I wanted to ask you a couple questions.”
Andi tilted her head to the side. “Questions? About makeup?” she asked. “Because we’re running a special right now on moisturizing lip balms. Two for five bucks.”
Hmmm, tempting . . .
“Actually, we were wondering if we could ask you about Courtney Cline.”
Andi’s face did a quick change from friendly saleswoman to PO’ed victim. “Courtney Cline was a total hypocrite, not to mention a complete bitch.”
“I take it you weren’t chummy?” I cleverly deduced.
“Chummy? Ha!” She tossed her hair over one shoulder, narrowly avoiding whipping the cooing baby in the face. “Look, I’m not gonna say anything bad about the dead—”
Too late.
“—but Courtney was definitely no friend of mine.”
“The feeling is mutual,” I said.
“I know. I heard the rumors.”
Fanflippintastic. Did the whole town know?
The baby strapped to her front started to wiggle, causing Andi to rock from foot to foot. I had a feeling the little creature wasn’t one for long conversations, so I got right to the point.
“We saw the text you sent Courtney on the day she died. The one where you threatened her.”
Andi narrowed her eyes at me, sizing up my trustworthiness. Lucky for me, apparently our mutual dislike of all things Courtney did the trick.
“What about it?” she said. “I was offering her a little proposition.”
“It looked like you were blackmailing her,” Sam pointed out.
Andi shrugged it off. “Semantics.”
“Tell me about the proposition,” I said.
“Well . . .” She paused, looking over her shoulder as if the beige stucco might have ears. “I had proof that the chastity queen wasn’t all she pretended to be.”
“What kind of proof?”
“Video. Of her pulling a Paris Hilton, if you know what I mean.”
A sick sensation bubbled up in my stomach, warning me that I shouldn’t ask this next question. But somehow there was a disconnect between my brain and my mouth because it came out anyway.
“With who?”
Andi bit her lip, then gave me a sympathetic head tilt that was an exact duplicate of the grief counselor’s. “Josh DuPont.”
I concentrated very hard on breathing in and out for a full ten seconds before I trusted myself to speak.
“That craptastical, gutless, son-of-a-cactus-humping butt monkey!”
Maybe I should have taken twenty seconds.
“Sorry,” Andi said. And she looked like she meant it. If anyone was acquainted with getting screwed over by a guy, it was her.
“Where did you get this video proof?” Sam asked, sending me a look from the corner of her eye as if she expected me to go postal any second. She knew me so well.
“I took it myself,” Andi answered.
“Where? How?” I wished someone would fix that disconnect. Why did I keep asking questions I clearly did not want to hear the answers to?
The baby wiggled and Andi shifted on her feet again. “Last Friday. I was at the football game, delivering some Very Cherry lip gloss to the cheer squad, when I saw Courtney and Josh head into the band room. I knew neither of them would touch a band geek with a ten-foot pole, so I figured I’d see what they were up to. That’s when I caught them swapping bodily fluids behind the woodwind rack. Pretty sick, really.”
Yep, I was totally going to throw up. “And you recorded it?”
Andi nodded. “I pulled out my phone and caught every filthy second.”
“Let me see it.” God, what was wrong with me?!
Andi bit her lip. “Are you sure that’s a good idea?”
“Let. Me. See. It.”
Andi turned to Sam. “You promise to hold her back if she freaks?”
Sam nodded. “I’ll try.”
“Okay,” Andi agreed, pulling a pink phone from her back pocket. “But just remember—I’m only the videographer. So, like, don’t shoot the messenger, right?”
I didn’t answer, and instead focused on the tiny screen as the three of us crowded in to watch Andi scroll through thumbnails until she found one of the band room. She hit Play and leaned back, letting Sam and I squint at her phone.
The quality was suckish, grainy and really jerky as if Andi couldn’t hold still, and the sound was tinny. But there was no mistaking what was going on. I caught a naked leg, the flash of an iridescent purple Color Guard skirt sliding up a thigh, followed by the back of my boyfriend’s head as he moved in for the kill. A few seconds later we heard moaning and panting.
I closed my eyes, shoving the phone away.
“I’ve seen enough.” It was one thing to know your boyfriend had cheated, but entirely another to actually see it.
God, I felt so stupid.
“You okay?” Sam gently asked.
No. “Yeah.”
“It’s pretty clear what was going on,” Andi said, pointing to the video.
“Crystal.”
“Anyway, after all the crap that Courtney put me through, I couldn’t wait to expose her for the hypocrite she was.”
“But you didn’t expose her,” Sam pointed out.
Andi shook her head. “No. When I got home and saw the footage, I had a better idea. As you can imagine, I’m a little short on cash these days. Do you have any idea how much a baby costs?” she asked.
Sam and I both shook our heads.
“A million dollars.”
I blinked. Then looked down at the seemingly innocent little pink bundle in her pouch.
“I know, right?” Andi said. “But analysts say that a baby born this year will cost its parents more than a million dollars over the course of their lifetime. I don’t have that kind of money. So, I had a better idea than calling Courtney out.”
“You decided to blackmail her.”
She nodded. “I sent her a few choice moments of the footage I shot and told her that if she didn’t buy me diapers for a year, it would end up all over YouTube.”
My stomach roiled again at the thought of proof of my boyfriend’s cheating plastered all over the internet.
“What did she say?” Sam asked.
“She said she’d pay. Only she died before we could discuss specific terms.” Andi did a wistful sigh, looking down at her baby. “Too bad.”
“Where were you when she was killed?” Sam asked.
Andi’s eyes shot up. “What do you mean?”
“Do you have an alibi?”
I rolled my eyes at the term. Diane Dancy was right. We did sound Nancy Drew. But I had to admit I was curious, too.
“Wait—you don’t think I had anything to do with her death, do you?”
Sam shrugged. “Did you?”
“No! God, no. Why would I want her dead?”
“You weren’t exactly her biggest fan,” I pointed out.
“Neither were you.”
Good point.
“You didn’t answer the question,” Sam pressed.
Andi put her hands on her hips. “I was at the doctor’s, okay? Chloe had her six-month checkup. You can ask anyone there if you don’t believe me. She screamed bloody murder when she got her shots. Besides,” she continued, “if anything, I had every reason to want Courtney alive. Check it—I’m out a year’s supply of diapers because some guy offed her before I could get my due. No way I did this.”
Andi had a point. On
Law & Order
it was always the blackmailer not the blackmailee that ended up dead. And it didn’t seem like Andi had much of a motive to kill her.
“Now, unless you’re going to buy something, I have work to do,” Andi said, gesturing to her suitcase.
I paused. “You still have cherry lip gloss left?”
She nodded.
“I’ll take two.”
THE SECOND WE GOT BACK TO THE GREEN MACHINE,
I grabbed Sam’s phone and sent an urgent message to Josh’s MySpace account.
Need to c u. 2nite. Window will b open.
Then I spent the rest of the drive back to my place slowly counting to ten, cursing Josh in the most creative way I knew how, then counting to ten again.
“Wow, you know a lot of swear words,” Sam commented at one point. “And here I thought I had a dirty mouth.”
“What can I say? Apparently candid porn starring my boyfriend brings out the best in me.”
“I always knew he was an effing jerk.”
“Thanks.” I appreciated her show of support, censored as it might be.
By the time Sam dropped me off in front of my place, I had almost gotten my roiling stomach under control.
Almost.
Then I saw Detective Raley’s car sitting at the curb.
I took two deep breaths, counted to twenty this time, then walked up to the driver’s-side window of his sedan. It rolled down to reveal the detective himself.
“Good afternoon, Miss Featherstone,” he said.
“It would be.”
He raised an eyebrow. “If?”
“If you were looking for the real killer instead of staking me out.” A ballsy statement. Apparently pervy videos also brought out my honest side.
Unfortunately Raley was way too much of a cool customer to be jarred by my honesty.
“Trust me, Miss Featherstone, our department is using every resource to locate Courtney’s killer. We will find him.” The way he stared straight at me as he said it made it sound more like a threat than a reassurance.
“Which reminds me,” he went on. “Seen Josh today?”
I shook my head. “Nope.”
“Well, I guess I’ll just wait here for a bit and see if he shows up.”
“Great. Have fun with that,” I said with the most sarcasm I could muster. Which was a lot.
While I wasn’t thrilled with the idea of Raley basically cop stalking me at any time, today it was especially annoying. Because as soon as Josh arrived, I planned on killing him. And I didn’t particularly want Raley as a witness.
The minute I walked in the door the aroma of homemade lasagna greeted me, signaling that instead of going to her usual water aerobics class, Mom had opted to work out her anxiety through comfort food again. I had to admit, it did smell kind of good. And I could use a little comfort. Even if it was made of gluten-free noodles and seasoned ground tofu.
Once I’d devoured two big slices, I escaped the grasp of the SMother and headed to my room. I immediately opened my window, checking outside to make sure Josh had a clear path. The last thing I wanted was for him to get hurt on his way to me killing him.
Once I was sure he could arrive for his death unharmed, I halfheartedly did my homework, then flipped on the TV and watched
American Idol
while keeping one eye on the window. Then watched an episode of
Castle
On Demand. Then the late news, where Diane showed my clip (wow, I
really
wish she’d let me pause for lip gloss) and told the Bay Area that while there was still no break in the case of the “Herbert Hoover High killer,” the other members of the Chastity Club were starting a Courtney Cline Memorial Fund to help spread the message of teen abstinence.
I was just slipping on a pair of sweats and crawling into bed, resigned to the idea that Josh had somehow been tipped off to his ultimate doom and chickened out, when I heard a sound outside. Like a squirrel. A really big one.
I ran to the window and saw Josh shimmying up the tree outside. He braced himself on the trunk with his Converses, then swung onto a low-hanging branch like Tarzan. He spotted me, gave a little wave, then scooted out along the branch until he was flush with my windowsill. I stepped back as he lifted one foot, then the other over the sill and fell with a grunt onto my floor.
“Hey,” he said, standing up. He brushed his palms on the seat of his jeans. “Sorry it took me awhile. There’s a car parked in front of your house.”
I crossed to the window on the other side of the room, looking out over the roof toward the street beyond. I could just make out the front fender of Raley’s nondescript sedan.
“That’s Raley.”
“Who?”
“The detective who wants to ‘question’ you.”
“Oh.” Josh’s face paled a shade.
“He didn’t see you, did he?” I asked, taking another glance at the unmarked car.
Josh shook his head. “I cut through the neighbor’s yard at the back.”
“That’s the first smart thing you’ve done,” I said.
Josh’s eyes immediately registered hurt.
I expected to feel satisfied or vindicated by hurting him. But I didn’t. I just felt worse. How come he could be a jerk, but when I was a jerk, stupid guilt took all the fun out of it?
“I deserve that,” he admitted. “And I’m sorry for dragging you into this, Hartley,” he said, taking a step toward me.
I took one back.
The last thing I wanted Josh DuPont to be was sorry. I wanted him to be a creep, a jerk, the cheating turd that I now knew without a doubt he was. If he felt sorry, it meant he had a conscience, had feelings. Possibly even for me. Possibly ones I would be tempted to return. And I didn’t want to return them. Last spring my grandma Betty had passed away. It had been really sudden. One day she was fine, the next she went to the doctor for what we thought was a routine checkup and came out with a diagnosis of stage four stomach cancer. Two weeks later she passed away in her sleep. I’d been devastated.
Josh and I had only just started dating at that point, but he had been my rock. He’d held my hand, passed me the tissues, and even gone with me to her funeral. Not once had he flashed that slightly pained look most guys get when the tears come out. Instead, he’d said, “It’s going to be okay,” and gave me the same soft, understanding, compassionate pair of blue eyes he was currently sending me. Ones that said he understood how I felt and wished he could make it better.
Only this time, there was no making it better.
I took a deep breath, conjured up the mental image of that band room video, and reminded myself why I had asked Josh here.