The Dead Girls Detective Agency (16 page)

Yessss. Where was Nancy going with this?

“My point is that ninety-five percent of murders are committed by someone the victim knew.” Nancy was
way
too knowledgeable on this stuff. “So, seeing as you were killed somewhere you went every day at pretty much the same time, I think we can surmise that whoever did this was someone you were at least on first name terms with.”

Lorna’s eyes were wide. “Or”—she was so about to come up with something classic—“it was an evil stranger who stalked you for weeks and weeks until he knew your routine.”

Eww, not a thought to dwell on.

Nancy wrote
random madman/woman
on the blackboard in round, neat letters.

I visibly shuddered. Nancy shot Lorna one of her pipe-down looks. Tess over-yawned.

“But that is really unlikely,” Nancy reassured me. “There’s much more chance that your murderer was one of your friends or family.” She smiled as if that were a comfort.

Scratch that. A crazed random stalker sounded way better than someone I knew hating me enough to take my life.

“I get your logic, Nancy, really I do,” I said. “It’s just that, well, I can’t think of anyone who’d want me dead.”

Tess snorted loudly behind me. Who did she think she was? I got it: She had something against me for whatever reason, and catching me sitting on Edison didn’t seem to have helped our relationship, but I was getting so bored of the Cruella act.

“Think again, think hard,” Nancy said. “There must have been someone who stands out as not liking you.”

So I thought. But I couldn’t come up with a name. Not one. It wasn’t like I stood out in my high school. Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t one of those weird kids who is so quiet and shy she practically merges into her locker and you only notice her when, one day, your lab partner is ill (or at least pretending to be) and the teacher pairs you up and you think, “Oh, were you here all along?”

I wasn’t invisible. I just wasn’t very … well, anything really. I was into music and photography. I loved art. I wanted to see the world and go to college—who didn’t? High school sucked. Everyone knew that. But if the Tornadoes and the lacrosse team wanted to pretend like it was all some big preparation for the rest of their lives, I knew better. David knew better. Which was why we kept our heads down and waited until graduation called, when we could get the hell out and socialize with people who didn’t think Joan Jett was a kind of airplane.

I was just your average sixteen-year-old. Who would have the time, energy, or inclination to bother killing me?

“Let’s just do the motives test.” Lorna was getting as bored of this as I was.

“Yes, the motives test.” Nancy drew a line down the middle of her blackboard and wrote
Possible Motives
as a header on the right-hand side. Tess pretended to stifle another yawn.

“Okay, motive number one,” she said, writing a large number one. “Revenge—was anyone mad at you?”

Nope, it appeared only mean girls like Tess were mad at me now that I was dead.

“Number two: jealousy. Did you have anything someone else at your school would have wanted?”

“That’s always a good motive,” Lorna said.

Noooo. My grade-point average was so not enough to threaten Massie Jones or any of the nerds. I could paint and take pictures a little, but I hadn’t won one scholastic prize since I was the only member of my class who colored Santa Claus within the lines in first grade. Mom always said I was good at “making stuff,” but no one gets murdered for being able to customize an old shirt. And it wasn’t as if I was up for prom queen.

I shook my head again.

“Motives three, four, and five aren’t really that helpful to us,” Nancy said. “Number three being that there is no motive, just that your murderer was a loony. Number four being that they didn’t mean to do it, they just killed you in the heat of the moment.”

“And five is that it was mistaken identity.” Lorna had obviously sat through this little brainstorm so many times even she knew what was coming. “And while you do look like a lot of other teenage girls, I don’t buy that for one second. If you’re going to commit teenicide, you’re going to get the right girl.”

Duh.

This was going nowhere. At this rate, I was going to be stuck in this stupid hotel, in these stupid boots I could not for the death of me walk in forever. I’d spend my days watching Edison try to smoke himself back to life. While my friends grew up. My parents got old. Ali went to college. David and Kristen fell in love, got married in the church where I’d just been buried, and had a soccer team of perfect little blond-haired babies.

“So we don’t have a suspect or a motive?” I asked.

“What about lover boy?” Tess asked.

We all turned to stare at her in shock.

“What, David?” I eventually managed. “Are you insane?”

“Not clinically. But let’s look at the evidence, shall we?” She swung her legs off the desk, narrowly missing pushing the case files onto the floor. Not that she cared. “Ever since you checked in here, who has been having the time of his life? Blondie.” I cringed. Tess stood up, looking down at me. “Maybe that little speech he made to the cheerleader wasn’t so far off the mark, Charlotte. Maybe he felt suffocated, so he found a way to get himself some breathing space—forever?”

Right. After everything that had happened on the subway platform, I was already at my enough limit, and now she’d tipped me clear over.

“Tess, I don’t know what you have against me—maybe you’re like this with every newbie who comes through the door—but you’ve been a grade-A bitch ever since I checked in here,” I said. “As far as I know, I’ve been nothing but nice to you. But for some reason that doesn’t seem to be enough. Whatever. I’m tired of trying to work it out. Because believe it or not, I don’t want to be here spending time with you, any more than you want to be spending time with me. But guess what? There’s not much I can do about it.”

Lorna tried to hide behind Nancy’s back.

“You might have these two convinced that the Big Red Door is the worst idea since exorcism, but I am not as easily fooled,” I continued. “If you hadn’t been scaring them with all this mumbo jumbo about the ‘bad things’ on the Other Side, maybe they’d have tried to find their Keys and gone through it by now. Instead of staying here with you just because you don’t want to be lonely. Because that’s the real problem, isn’t it? You know you’re stuck here forever so you don’t want to be left alone. And you don’t like anyone new coming around who might convince your friends that they need to leave you behind—for their own sakes.”

I stopped. From the look on Nancy’s face I could tell I was about one sentence away from saying something I’d really regret.

“There. I’m done,” I said. “Sorry for the outburst, but at least I feel like now I’ve given you a concrete reason to have a beef with me.”

Instead of fighting back, Tess stared at the floor.

Lorna was the first to speak. She came out from behind Nancy and patted my arm. “Charlotte, no one is making anyone stay here. It’s really nice that you’re looking out for us, but really, you don’t have to.”

She turned to Tess. “And Tess, you’re not funny. Charlotte might be new, but anyone can see that she really loved David. I may not be the sharpest ghost in the box, but I know people, and I can see Charlotte was not the kind of girlfriend a boy would want to murder.”

That made one of them. I smiled a thank-you at her. Just as Nancy wrote
David
on the Suspects side of her board. Right under madman/woman.

“What?” She shrugged. “I don’t think he did either, but we can’t cross off suspects without investigating all the leads first.”

“What about your friend? Ali, was it?” Lorna asked, desperately trying to change the subject. “Didn’t you say you weren’t getting along as well with her as you had been recently?”

“Yes, she could feel like you dumped her for David and wanted revenge.” Nancy wrote Ali’s name below David’s. “So there, we have two suspects. I’m ignoring madman/woman for the moment, because those kind of random psychos are notoriously hard to find.”

Excellent. “Two suspects who I am one hundred and one percent sure are innocent,” I said.

“There is no such thing as one hundred and one percent,” Nancy said. “Let’s check Ali out first, then David next.” She looked at the clock. “Nine a.m. They’ll be in school now. Let’s make a move.”

My (sort of ex) best friend and my (sort of ex) boyfriend? No way. But even if we just crossed them off the list at least it was better than sitting here. Watching Tess come up with stupid theories when she knew zero about my life.

Nancy looked out of the hotel window, onto Washington Square. “Charlotte, we have to get a move on. Because somewhere out there is the person who killed you—a person who thinks he or she is getting away with murder. And I, for one, am going to make sure that is not the case.”

Chapter 15

“
WHO CAN TELL ME WHAT THE ATOMIC NUMBER
of oxygen is?” Mr. Millington asked, briefly taking off his horn-rimmed glasses, cleaning them on his dull-as-gray sweater, then repositioning them neatly on his thin face.

Able to see the class again clearly, he smiled encouragingly. “Anyone?”

His question was met with complete and utter silence. Only broken by the sound of Alanna Acland accidentally knocking her pink gel pen off her desk and it bouncing twice on the tiled floor.

“Nobody?” More silence.

“Okay, then let’s take things back a step—recap on the ground we covered last week to refresh your memories.” Mr. Millington looked around the class.

“What
is
an atomic number?” Even though he’d suffered eighteen years teaching high school science, he had still not lost the optimism that maybe, someday, he would ask a question like this and one—just one—of the kids in his class would stop daydreaming about last night’s TV, the opposite sex, or what they were going to eat for lunch and actually answer.

The class kept their eyes firmly on the floor. The eleventh grade chem students may not know what oxygen’s atomic number was, but they did know that if they made eye contact with Mr. Millington, he’d take that as a sign of
intelligence
and they’d be asked the question directly.

“No one remembers? It’s on page seventeen of your textbooks. How about we all get them out?”

Eighteen books were slowly and very begrudgingly pulled out of backpacks and messenger bags.

“Everyone there? Great. Now as it says so succinctly on page seventeen, ‘Every single element has its own unique number that tells how many protons are in one atom of that element. The atomic number is the number of protons in the nucleus of an atom of a particular element.’ Is everyone remembering this? Yes? No questions? Okay then, so if an oxygen atom has eight protons—can anyone tell me what the atomic number of oxygen is now?”

Eugh. Was it possible to die of boredom when you’d already had your funeral, like, yesterday? It sure felt like it, if the numbness spreading through my brain was anything to go by.

I wiggled around in my seat and shuddered. Chem class. I never thought I’d be back here again. Sitting in my old seat. Leaning on my old desk. Listening to poor Mr. Millington.

But seeing as Dead Girls’ Chief Detective Nancy had decided that I needed to cross Ali and David off my most-likely-to-have-murdered-me list before we could investigate anyone else, I had to be here. Chem class was where they were both supposed to be.

Supposed
being the operative word.

When I ported in, I’d found my chair empty. Which I totally got. I mean, it was pretty much still warm from when my body last sat on it. Nobody was going to be going there anytime soon in case it was cursed, or the kid caught a case of the Charlotte clumsys and accidentally fell under the nearest fast-moving mode of transportation too.

But what I didn’t get was where David was. He should have been sitting next to me in his usual seat. As he had every Wednesday.

Though, just in case I hadn’t noticed the absence of my dirty, cheating, no-longer boyfriend, I kept being reminded of it by Kristen—who was sitting three rows in front—turning around to stare at the empty chair every couple of minutes. Like, just by doing that, she was going to will David to appear.

Well, everything else in life went her way, so I guessed she couldn’t understand why David wasn’t there holding her hand, stroking her hair, feeding her grapes or something—seeing as she’d deigned to kiss him and all.

Even though Nancy and Lorna had done their best to make me feel better about things, I still couldn’t get the image of David and Kristen kissing out of my head. I could only hope David wasn’t showing his sorry ass around Saint Bart’s today because he was beyond ashamed about sucking face with
that
yesterday.

Hopefully he was somewhere far away—like the Bronx—in an inner ring of tortured mental hell, wishing he had access to a time machine so he could honor my memory properly instead of stomping all over it in his size 11s, like good boyfriends are meant to do.

Or maybe he’d just slept in.

Whatever. He was so not worth another second of my time.

“All hydrogen atoms contain one proton and have an atomic number of one, and all other atoms’ atomic number is also determined by …” Mr. Millington was still droning on.

Enough. I clicked my fingers, activating the Lifesaver trick Edison had taught me. Mr. Millington’s blah instantly went on mute. His mouth still popped open and closed, open and closed, like a possessed puppet’s—which was kinda eerie to watch, but way better than what I’d previously had to listen to.

I stood up from my seat. Even though I knew, as a ghost, I was invisible, I kinda expected the M-man to shout and tell me to sit down and concentrate. But he didn’t. I walked between the desks and to the front of the class.

Next to the board, Mr. Millington had pinned up a picture of Rachel McAdams and Ryan Gosling in
The Notebook
. Underneath he’d written, “They have chemistry, so can you!”

I stood in front of Mr. Millington’s face as he talked silently on and wrote about isotopes and potassium and positions in the periodic table on the whiteboard. Since I wasn’t getting any leads on who’d killed me here, would a little light haunting to stop the monotony be wrong? It was hardly Jimmy territory. What Nancy didn’t see, she’d never know about. And couldn’t take off my Nine Times.