Deadly Little Sins (10 page)

I can’t fall asleep, because my alarm will inevitably wake Remy up. So I lay in bed and read for World Lit. At around one thirty, I put on my jacket and most comfortable shoes.

I have to sneak out of a window in the first floor lounge to avoid the RA at the front desk. To avoid the security camera in front of the administration building, I head for the back door.

The security guards don’t watch the video feed from the cameras on campus. They’re only there in case something happens, so they can go back and rewind the feed.

In any event, I don’t want to be on it.

I have my phone ready with the photo of Mr. Buckley’s ID. I zoom in on the barcode.
Please, please work.

I tap my phone screen to the sensor pad outside the door. The light remains red. Shit. I zoom in so the barcode takes up the whole screen and try again.

The sensor pad beeps. The light turns green.

I make a mental note never to doubt Dan Crowley again.

I head for the second floor, where Tierney’s, Buckley’s, and Goddard’s offices are.

Well, Goddard’s old office.

I tap my phone screen to the sensor pad on Tierney’s door. The light stays red.

Damn it.
I should have figured the barcode would only allow Buckley access to the campus buildings and his office. What the hell am I supposed to do now?

Well, I’m here, so I may as well see if there are any files related to Dr. Muller or Ms. Cross in Buckley’s office. I think I remember hearing last year that the vice principal is in charge of employee personnel. Since Dr. Harrow was arrested, Tierney took over his duties. Which means she would have hired both Ms. C and Dr. Muller.

Once I’m inside Buckley’s office, I turn on my flashlight. I can’t risk putting his office light on and having someone see from the outside.

It doesn’t take long to find the filing cabinet marked E
MPLOYEE PERSONNEL FILES
. I flip to the divider labeled
C.

C
ROSS,
J
ESSICA.

It’s a thin file. The first page is a cover letter. I do a double take at the date—it’s from two years ago. That can’t be right; Ms. C got Upton’s job last February. I read the letter.

Dear Ms. Watts:

I am interested in the open teaching position at the Wheatley School. I believe that I am the ideal candidate for the role of English teacher.

English teacher? I scan the rest of the letter, coming to a rest at the bottom of the page. It’s signed Jessica L. Cross.

There’s another cover letter behind it. It’s nearly identical to the first, but dated last February.

Dear Ms. Tierney:

I am interested in the open teaching position at the Wheatley School. I believe that I am the ideal candidate for the role of Latin teacher.

I think back to Ms. Cross’s class; I didn’t think it was weird at the time that she never really spoke in Latin. She made
us
speak the words, and she gave us assignments, and she graded them—but did she really even know the language?

Attached to the cover letter is a completed teaching application and a resume. The educational background Ms. C—Natalie—has listed looks like it was lifted right from the real Jessica Cross’s obituary. Douglasville High School, advanced honors diploma. A bachelor’s in comparative languages from UNC Chapel Hill.

Under work and internship experience, she’s listed a seafood restaurant in North Carolina. Apparently she was there from 2007–2009—when the real Jessica Cross was already dead.

I scan the half a dozen jobs Natalie has listed—a tutoring center in Boston, a page at the Cambridge Library, babysitting. I wonder how much of this is made up.

I boot up Mr. Buckley’s copier and put the resume facedown on the tray. The machine spits out a fresh copy for me.

And that’s when I hear a door slam down the hall.

A whimper catches in my throat.
Crap. CRAP.
How the hell did someone see me? I triple-checked that I was alone on the walk here, and that I avoided the security cameras on my way inside the building.

I glance out the windowpane on Buckley’s door. A dark figure—medium height, definitely a man—walks down the hall. I turn off my light and hide behind the couch. A beam of light passes over the windowpane. Then it’s gone.

I stand up, wincing at the cracking in my knees, even though there’s no way my friend out there could have heard it. I peek out the glass—the man is at the end of the hall.

Outside Goddard’s office.

He shines his light inside, his back to me.

He’s looking for something inside of Goddard’s office. Looking for me?

I stuff the copy of Ms. C’s files back in my bag and press my ear to the door.
Go inside. Go inside Goddard’s office.

I hear the faint beep of the keypad, then the sound of Goddard’s door opening. He’s in.

Then I make a run for it.

Buckley’s door slams behind me. No doubt the man heard it, but I have a decent head start. I’m at the end of the hall when the beam of his flashlight comes up behind me.

Don’t look. Don’t let him see your face.

He takes off running behind me.

CHAPTER

FOURTEEN

I take the stairs two at a time, nearly falling on my face at the bottom. The man is far behind—at the top of the stairs, judging from the position of his light.
Older. Possibly out of shape.

Goddard? It can’t be.

I do a 180 at the bottom of the stairs and run out the back door. Instead of cutting across the quad, I dart behind the classroom buildings, taking the long way back to Amherst.

When I get to the open lounge window, I let myself double over, gasping for breath. I lost him.

Or he stayed behind.

What I was able to observe about the man in the admin building, in order of increasing relevance:

1. He was somewhat bulky and slow.

2. He passed over Tierney’s office and went right for Goddard’s, which he seemed particularly interested in—why?

3. He must have had a key to get into the building.

Is he a teacher? Administrator? He was too tall to be Mr. Buckley. Too … male to be Tierney. But how else could he have gotten in, without a key?

And more importantly—
how did he know I was there
?

There’s a chance the man left or entered through the front door of the building, which means he would have been caught on the security camera.

It’s a place to start.

There’s only one person capable of hacking into the campus security feed. He’s planning ultimate Frisbee on the quad during lunch. I grab a chicken Caesar wrap and eat it on the bench, waiting for the game to break.

“Anne!”

I turn around to see Farrah coming toward me, wobbling on her crutches. I groan inwardly, because her timing couldn’t be any worse. But I haven’t seen her since the last day of orientation, when she got hurt at the annex, so I’m relieved to see her smiling.

“Hey.” I grab her bag from her shoulder so she can sit. “How are you holding up?”

“Fine, I guess. It’s a little hard to get around.” She’s panting. I keep one eye on Dan, who dives for the Frisbee Zach Walton throws him.

“You know you can come find me if you need anything, right?” I say. “Even if it’s to punch Banks in the nuts.”

Farrah smiles.

When the game breaks, I turn to Farrah. “I’ll be right back. I have to talk to this guy, quick.”

“It’s okay,” Farrah says. “I just wanted to say hi. And thanks. For being so nice to me.”

I motion to help her up, but she says she’s fine, and waves a crutch in the air. “It’s my last day that I really need these things anyway.”

My chest is heavy as I leave her. How pathetic is it that she actually has to thank me for being nice to her?

When Dan Crowley heads for the sidelines to chug his Gatorade, I call his name. He wipes his brow and trots over to me.

“Yo.”

“Yo,” I say. “Got a question.”

“I figured.”

I raise an eyebrow at him.

“When do you ever find me to discuss current events?” He sips his Gatorade. There’s a red ring around his lips.

“Point taken. So. The security cameras outside each building.”

“What about ’em?”

“They’re on a wireless server, right?”

“Mm-hmm.” Dan glances back at the Frisbee game.

“I need to get on it so I can see a video,” I say.

Dan’s brow creases. “How far back?”

“Last night.”

“Yeah, it’ll be on the server still.”

“So … can you get me on?”

Dan shifts onto his other foot. Sticks a hand in his back pocket. “I don’t know. I’ve never tried.”

“Do you think it would be hard?” I ask.

“I mean, it would probably be really easy to bypass the password for the remote log-in page, but I don’t know if I should.”

“Why not? You always do that stuff.”

Dad’s face turns pink. “That’s the problem. Know that camera I installed in the Aldridge common room to see who was stealing my food from the fridge?”

I nod. Dan shared his footage with me to show me how he caught a crew team hazing ritual on tape.

“Well, after you got suspended or whatever, one of the RAs found my camera and reported me to Tierney,” Dan says. “She called it a serious invasion of my peers’ privacy. Which is such bullshit, when you consider that the NSA reads our emails and listens in on—”

“So you can’t hack the feed for me,” I say.

Dan shakes his head. “Sorry. You know I would, but I’m kind of on probation. Hey, aren’t you, too?”

Someone taps my shoulder at dinner, almost making me drop my tray.

“Sorry,” Farrah says.

“It’s okay.” I will every muscle in my body to unclench. Lately, I can’t deal with people sneaking up on me, but I’m not about to tell Farrah off.

“Can I talk to you about something?” She has a curious look on her face. I look at my table; Remy keeps glancing over at us, like she’s waiting for me to run off and ditch everyone again.

“Now’s kind of a bad time,” I tell Farrah.

“It’s about what you asked that boy earlier,” she says. “That punk kid.”

I’m waffling between annoyance that she eavesdropped and amusement that she called Dan Crowley
that punk kid.

“You listened to us?”

“I didn’t mean to, but he’s kind of loud.” Farrah isn’t being too discreet herself. I tap her shoulder and motion for her to follow me behind the soda machine.

“About what you heard—”

“I don’t want to tell on you.” Farrah holds her hands up. “I want to help you.”

Her face is so sweet, so earnest, I can’t even laugh at her.
Farrah
 … a hacker?

“You think you can get on the security feed?”

“I don’t know.” She’s smiling, almost as if I’m not in on the joke. “But I got onto Banks’s iCampus account and requested he get switched from water polo to modern dance…”

Now Farrah’s wearing a full-blown grin. I can’t help but match it.

“Farrah. You’re
badass.
”

She flushes, but doesn’t say anything.

“You’d really do that for me?” I whisper.

Farrah nods. “When I get back to my dorm I’ll check the model of the security camera and try to access the remote log-in site. I’ll let you know if it works.”

We trade phone numbers, and I can barely contain my anticipation as I bounce over to my table. If I can identify the man who was in the administration building last night, I may have a real lead.

As soon as I sit down, I get a text message. I ignore it, because Remy is insisting I play Apocalypse with everyone. It’s this game Murali invented where we pretend we have to buckle down for the end of the world on campus and we can only pick two other survivors to help us.

“Peter Wu,” Kelsey says. “He’s one of the smartest, so obviously.”

“Why would you pick someone so boring?” Cole asks.

“Who cares about boring?” Remy says. “It’s the
apocalypse
.”

Brent snorts. “What Phil left in the toilet this morning has more personality than Peter Wu.”

“Come on, man,” Phil mutters as Remy squeals
ew.

Brent shrugs and drinks his chocolate milk. “Shoulda flushed.”

I catch his gaze as Remy mutters
I hate boys
. Brent smiles and looks down into his milk.

“Your turn, Anne,” Kelsey says.

My phone buzzes again. “One sec.”

Meet me in the alumni garden.

NOW.

When I see who it is, I realize I have no choice in the matter.

I make up a panicked excuse about forgetting to email an extra-credit assignment to Professor Matthews and ditch the dining hall.

When I get to the alumni garden, Alexis is sitting on a bench. I stay standing. “What are you doing here?”

“Discussing our mutual enemy,” she says. “Hopefully.”

I sit, tentatively. “Caroline?”

Alexis’s shoulders stiffen. “Caroline Cormier-Frey is the worst person I have ever met.”

Pretty high praise coming from Bitchface herself. But Alexis hasn’t tried to get me expelled, arrested, or otherwise ruin my life in months, so I decide to hear her out. “What’d Caroline do to you?”

“She’s hated me since I was a kid. Totally out of her mind jealous of my father. Hers died when she was eleven. Ferry crash.” Alexis’s voice is devoid of sympathy. “Caroline’s mother, Amanda—my stepmom’s sister—slammed the city with a wrongful death lawsuit before his body was even cold. She hired a
professional photographer
to make sure Caroline’s sad little face was all over the news. They became filthy rich and stopped speaking to my family. Until they burned the settlement money out and my father won his election.”

Alexis’s expression darkens. “Caroline’s grown up to become an even worse version of Amanda. If my stepmom goes to jail for trying to cover up what my dad did—” Alexis’s voice cracks. She breathes in, composes herself. “Then Amanda will be appointed my little brother’s guardian. I can’t let that happen. Not when Caroline already has her eye on his trust fund. I can’t let him
live
there, knowing what she’s really like.”