Rush (7 page)

“Are you saying Max is a bad seed? A
psycho?”

“He killed Carter in cold blood. For no
reason, except maybe it was his idea of fun.” Trent’s blue eyes were hard and
cold. Like glacier ice. He really despised Max.

“I’m just so shocked. I can’t believe
it.” How could I have liked someone so horrible? How could Max have done those
things? I couldn’t wrap my mind around the notion that the Max I thought I knew
had deliberately murdered a little boy, his own half-brother.

“You should. And you should be careful.
Stay away from him. You see now why I warned you?”

I nodded slowly. I felt like I had a big
chunk of concrete attached to my heart and it was dragging me down into deep
water. “Yeah. I do.”

“Good. Let’s go eat. I’m starved.”

I, on the other hand, had lost my
appetite.

***

“Don’t you love fall weather here?”
Paige said, kicking at a pile of leaves on the sidewalk as we walked together
to the campus gym.

The air was full of the musty scent of
fallen leaves, the air was bright blue against the gold and red and orange of
the leaves still on the trees, and everything looked as beautiful as I could
imagine. We’d had some wet days; today was a sun break. Soon the rain would
start in earnest and it would all turn gray, but for now it was in autumn
Technicolor.

Max was a murderer.

I couldn’t get that thought out of my
mind. I didn’t even know why it bothered me so much, why it made me feel like
something inside me was collapsing. As if the knowledge broke my heart. I
hardly knew the guy. There was no reason for it to matter so much to me.

There was Trent. But somehow his pain
didn’t seem as real to me as the searing disappointment I felt over Max.

“What’s up?” Paige said as we took a
left along the main street of campus.

“Nothing. Why?”

“You’ve been kind of down lately.”

Should I tell her? But Trent had been so
secretive, I assumed he didn’t want anyone outside the family to know.

“It’s nothing. I’m just tired.”

“Maybe a good workout will perk you up.”

“Yeah, I’m sure it will.”

I glanced across the intersection toward
the student union and saw her. The blonde who’d been in my room the morning
Paige had brought over the doughnuts. She stood at the bottom of the steps leading
into the commons. She wore the same white tunic with blue embroidery over
bell-bottom jeans. Her hair was so long it came all the way down to her butt.
And she was looking at me. Staring.

I grabbed Paige’s wrist. “I’ve seen her
before.”

“Who?”

“That blonde standing under the
light-post.”

Paige wrinkled her brow. “What blonde?”

“Can’t you see her? She’s right there.”
I pointed.

“There’s no-one by the lamp-post,
Caroline.”

“Yeah, there is. Right there.” I pointed
again.

The blonde spun on her platform heel and
dashed up the steps into the student union commons. I bolted after her,
scattering pedestrians and bicyclists in the street. People hollered at me and
I ignored them.

I yanked open the commons doors and ran
right into a wall of man. A warm, muscular, male-scented wall that instantly
made me tremble and ache. Which was weird and completely out of character.

“Hey, are you all right?” It was a
familiar voice. It explained my reaction, too.

I looked up into Max’s concerned eyes. “I’m
fine. Did you see her?”

“See who?”

“A blond girl. She just came this way.”
I leaned around him, trying to see if I could pick her out in the commons.

She seemed to have disappeared. It was
the middle of the afternoon, and the dining area was only sparsely occupied.
The blonde seemed to be nowhere in the room. Where had she gone?

“I didn’t see anyone,” Max said.

“God, that’s so weird,” I muttered. “She
was right here.”

“Caro, are you all right?”

I looked up at him. Max. My conversation
with Trent came back to me and chills broke out all over my body. This was the
murderer I’d almost kissed. And I still reacted to him, still got all
breathless and filled with idiotic butterflies who didn’t know they were
fluttering over a guy who’d killed his own brother.

“Fine,” I said, taking a step away from
him. “I’m fine.”

“Who were you chasing?”

“Just some chick I thought I knew.”

“Hi, Max,” Paige said behind us. “Caroline,
what were you trying to do there?”

“I wanted to talk to her.”

Max looked over my shoulder at my
friend. “Do you know what girl she’s talking about?”

“I didn’t see her,” Paige said.

“She was the same girl who was in my
room,” I muttered to myself.

“What girl? In your room? What are you
talking about?” Paige’s eyes were wide and startled; she was starting to sound
agitated.

“Come and sit down,” Max said. “We’ll
figure it out together.”

I couldn’t meet his eyes. Could he tell
I knew his secret?

“No, I can’t. We don’t have time,” I
said. “Paige and I were on our way to the gym.”

“You seem pretty upset. I think you
should tell me what happened.”

“Yeah,” Paige said. “I want to figure
this out, because you’re starting to scare me.”

I looked back at her, then at Max. They
both looked worried. Did they think I was losing it? Did I care that a murderer
thought I was losing it? No, not really. But if I was scaring Paige, it would
be worth sitting down with
him
in order to reassure her.

“Okay. Fine. But just for a couple of
minutes.”

We chose a nearby table. Somehow, I’m
not sure how it happened, I ended up sitting next to Max instead of Paige. He
turned to me with a serious expression on his face, the kind I imagined a
psychiatrist might use. Which was pretty funny, coming from someone like him.

“Tell me what you saw.”

I made a vague wave gesture. “Just a
girl. Dressed in seventies clothes. She was standing by the lamp-post at the
bottom of the stairs outside there.”

“But you said you saw her in your room,”
Paige said.

“Yeah, I did. When you were pounding on
my door that morning. I opened my eyes and there she was, standing by my bed and
looking at me. When I blinked, she was gone. I thought it was just a dream. And
then I saw her here, and I didn’t know what to think.” Now I thought about it,
the blonde was so much like a ghost it gave me a case of the chills all over
again. But I didn’t believe in ghosts. I refused to believe. There was no way I
was going down the Aunt Jo Highway to Hell. That was not an option.

“God, that’s bizarre,” Paige said in
hushed tones.

“Sounds like a ghost to me,” Max said.

I looked at him warily. “A ghost? I don’t
believe in that crap.” And I never would. Unlike Jo, I didn’t want to. All that
woo-woo stuff was just too silly for me.

“I’m not saying it’s for sure or
anything,” he said evenly. “But it does sound like a classic ghost encounter.
How else would you explain it?”

Paige leaned across the table, seemingly
fascinated. I just raised my eyebrows.

“Coincidence,” I said. “She just
happened to look like the girl in my dream. I had no idea you believed in
ghosts.”

“I believe in all kinds of things,” he
said.

Very evasive. Did he believe in murder?

“I’ve never seen a ghost.” Paige sounded
jealous.

“It wasn’t a ghost,” I said. “Come on,
guys. It had to be a coincidence.”

“Then why did you run after her that
way?” Paige said. “If you really thought it was just coincidence, you wouldn’t
have tried so hard to catch up with her.”

I shrugged. “It was just a momentary
impulse. It didn’t mean anything.”

The only person I’d ever met—until Max—who
really believed in ghosts was Jo, and she wasn’t a person I wanted to emulate
in any way. She lived in some hazy, drug-addled underworld where her
imagination mixed freely with reality and gave her visions, not just of ghosts,
but of angels and demons and who knew what else. I didn’t want to go where Aunt
Jo lived. Ever.

I rubbed my arms, trying to calm the
shivers that had inexplicably taken over my body. “I’m not going to worry about
this. It doesn’t mean anything.”

“You might be right,” Max said.

I raised my brows at him. “Why do you
say that? I thought you believed.”

“Ghosts aren’t normally hostile. Most of
them are just hanging around. She might not want anything with you in
particular. Maybe she’s just going through some kind of routine.”

“Really? How do you know all that?” Not
that I was giving his nonsense any credence.

He shrugged, looking modest. “I’ve done
a lot of study on the subject.”

“You’re just full of surprises.” There
was too much bitterness in my voice. “I never expected you to be a ghost
hunter.”

“Oh, I don’t hunt them. I let them come
to me.”

Paige laughed. I merely looked at him.
Maybe he could tell that I knew what he’d done; I wasn’t doing enough to hide
my anger and confusion from him if I didn’t want him to guess.

Max met my gaze steadily for a moment
before looking to Paige. He knew. He had that look in his eyes, as if he knew
exactly what was going on in my head. I dropped my gaze and stared at the table
top, hoping he’d decide he was wrong. I should have smiled or said something
lighthearted. That would have cast more doubt than me being unable to even look
at him. By acting uptight around him, I was only confirming his suspicions.

Why did I even care whether or not he
realized I knew? He was the guilty party, not me. There was absolutely nothing
for me to be ashamed of, yet here I was, trying to hide my thoughts from him.
It made no sense, even to me.

He turned back to me, his jaw tense. “You
know, don’t you?”

I met his gaze head-on instead of
flinching away like I wanted to. “Yes.”

It seemed to be his turn to look down,
to avoid contact. “So.”

“Is it true?”

“Every word.” His voice had a flippant
tone that made me want to smack him.

Paige was looking back and forth from me
to him. I could see in her expression that she knew something was going on but
she couldn’t guess what it was.

“Do you mind cluing me in?” she said.

“I can’t,” I said. “It has to do with
Trent.”

“Oh.” She looked back and forth between
us again. “Okay, then.”

“Sorry,” I said. “We didn’t mean to be
rude. I’d much rather talk about ghosts anyway.” Right now, a root canal
sounded better than yet more elliptical conversation about Max’s past misdeeds.

“Okay, then what if the ghost comes
back?” Paige said. “What should she do then?”

“Like I said, they usually don’t mean
any harm,” Max said, carrying on as if he hadn’t just confessed to murder. “But
if she does anything that seems threatening, Caro, don’t hesitate to call me. I’ll
be happy to help.”

I refrained, just barely, from rolling
my eyes. “How would you do that?”

“There are a number of things I could
do. I can try to communicate with her and find out what she wants; I can banish
her and I can put a protective seal on your dorm room to keep her from coming
back. It all depends on the circumstances and what you want.”

“I want to forget all about it.” I
picked up my gym bag. “Come on, Paige. We should get to the gym before it gets
crowded.”

He frowned slightly, watching me as I
stood. I could see that he was trying to figure me out, trying to make sense of
my curt behavior. It should be obvious to him. I’d found out about him and I
couldn’t stand to be near him anymore. There was nothing ambiguous about it.

I made myself smile at him. “Thanks for
the advice, Max. We’ll see you around, okay?”

“Sure. Have a good time at the gym.”

“Will do,” Paige said with a broad
smile.

I turned and stalked toward the door. I
was being rude and bitchy and I knew it, but at the moment I didn’t care. Ever
since Trent had told me what Max had done, I couldn’t look at or think of him
the same way.

He’d only been ten years old when it
happened. Maybe I should have had more compassion for him. It was the
no-remorse part of it that bothered me the most. Accidents happen, sometimes
tragic accidents, but to have no remorse and no sense of responsibility, that
was unforgivable.

“Are you mad at me?” Paige said as we
left the commons for the sunshine of the outdoors.

“No. Why?”

“You seem mad.”

“I told you; I’m tired today. It’s
making me cranky.”