Poison Most Vial (8 page)

“Mister who?”

“Roman. The day janitor. Didn't you hear those Davenport kids warning us away from him?” Ruby told Rex about the argument she'd overheard. “That was Roman in the apartment arguing with Lydia, I'm sure of it. They're up to something. You know what's next, right?”

“A milkshake for me. Best thing on this planet for mental stress, of which I have a modest case right now.”

“A malt for me. Then we're gonna go swipe ourselves a password.”

“To what?”

“To get into the Toxin Archive.”

It might even be easy
, she thought. Wade probably wrote his password down on the cover of his forensics textbook. Lydia was always borrowing other students' logins; she probably had a half dozen of them written all over her stuff.

The problem was, none of them was in the library that week, at least not during the period that Ruby and Rex had free.

“Forget it,” Ruby said, counting steps along College Avenue on the way to school on Friday. “We're running out of time. I'm just—I'm going down and just grabbing that stupid record book off the archive cabinet.”

“Good luck. That lab is crawling with police,” Rex said. He circled an old car, gaping like it was an alien spacecraft. “Dodge Dart Swinger is what we got right here,” he said.
“Says
Swinger
right on the side, too—that just kills me, I'm sorry.”

Ruby snorted. Old cars. Wig jokes. Fake eyes. She needed one girl conversation, and Lillian sure didn't seem to want to talk anymore. “Would you for once— Rex, watch out!”

A passing car slowed just enough for the kid in the passenger seat to yell out, “Hey, it's Fat Boy and Poison Rosey—the twisted twins!”

Rex chased them for three steps and stopped. He stood there for a while, staring, breathing hard. “Why do I miss my ninja pole right about now?”

“I'll tell you what: If today's class is about ‘Who is a criminal?' I'm going to go get the ninja pole.”

“Money,” Mrs. Patterson said, once the class was settled. “I want you to think about what this author is saying about money as we read. You are all familiar with this story now. Paris, why don't you start?”

Silence. Paris, tall with long red hair and pinprick eyes, never said a word. Everyone in class kept their distance. Mrs. Patterson almost always called on him first, maybe on the off chance he would make a sound.

“He's gonna go off and firebomb the school, you watch,” Rex said. “Only question is when.”

“All right, Paris, we'll come back to you,” Mrs. Patterson said. “Bruce, please begin.”

Ruby gave a silent scream. Bruce, worst out-loud reader on the continent, was breathing heavily as he began: “
My mother—taught me—never to speak about—money—when there was—a shirtful
—what's a
shirtful
, Mrs. Patterson?”

“What do you think it means, Bruce?”

More silence. A rubber band flew by Bruce's head.

“A lot,” said a deep voice. Simon. Suddenly, he was Mr. Participation. “Don't talk about money when you got a lot; it doesn't look good. Reveals your true greedy nature. Much better to be smug about it.”

“High Honors smug?” Ruby said.

Simon actually smiled at that, and now Sharon had her hand up.

“What's wrong with having money?” she said. “You know you'd all rather have it than not.”

“Why, so we can buy eighteen pairs of boots?” someone yelled.

“You wouldn't know how,” said Sharon.

“Now, now, everyone take a breath,” Mrs. Patterson said. “The point of this story—and I want everyone to think about this—is how attitudes about money can drive almost anyone to commit a crime.”

“Anyone?”

“Almost anyone,” she said.

• • •

It was near lunchtime before the class got a break and Ruby and Rex could slip away to the library.

“Oh no,” said Ruby when she saw from across the room that there was no one sitting back in the forensics corner. “Where are they?”

Rex walked over to look more closely and whispered, “Uh, Ruby? Come look at this.”

An abandoned campsite: backpacks on the floor, books stacked in the cubicles, papers everywhere. Even a couple of security ID cards, draped over chairs. The grad students were here, all right, either taking a break together or meeting somewhere else.

“But where?” Ruby said under her breath. “You keep a lookout; I think I know where they are.”

Ruby took her sketchbook and turned into the stacks, threading her way toward the far wall of the library where there was a bank of conference rooms. Sure enough, the light was on in the first one, and Victor's profile was unmistakable through the frosted glass door. She heard voices raised and moved in closer to see if she could hear anything.

Not much; the door was too heavy. Scraps of conversation, but that was all. She scampered back, motioning Rex into the stacks to watch the conference room.
Time to get some real evidence
, Ruby said to herself.
Should've done this a long time ago
.

Where to start?

Wade's cubicle was neat, the books stacked by size, notebooks labeled. Victor's had his boxes of exotic tea, his packs of gum, his index cards full of tiny scrawl.

Take something.

Grace's books and notebooks were busy with doodles, her pens chewed. Lydia's space was by far the messiest, with empty diet soda cans, candy wrappers. Among the debris she found little except two exams stuffed into a textbook, both marked
Unsatisfactory
. One of the exams had a note in green pen—Rama's writing—that said,
Please come see me
.

Ruby noted all this in her sketchbook, feeling like she was sneaking around someone's home.

Lydia's backpack was lying there, practically asking to be unzipped. Ruby reached for it, stopped herself, looked up. She saw Rex circling a finger in the air. “Like
now
,” he whispered. “Hurry up, they're almost done in there.”

She had thirty seconds, maybe twenty. Her heart was doing cartwheels. This was it, surely her last chance at these unattended backpacks and books.

She collected anything with numbers on it: a sheet of Grace's doodles, the numbers from two ID cards (she wrote them down), several Post-its; Rex mumbled, “Time's up,” and Ruby's hand reflexively reached out and grabbed one more thing before she darted into the stacks.

She found Rex on all fours, peering through the books at the grad students' legs now headed toward the cubicle area.

“That was too close. Here they are,” he said. “I hope you got something good.”

Ruby peered through the books back at the cubicles. “You know, I got pretty much nothing. The problem is—
aaaagh!
”

A face pushed through the space between the books: Lydia!

Ruby fell backward, hitting her head against the shelves behind her, and Lydia's big face now loomed above her. “What you doing in here?” asked the older girl. Lydia shot a disgusted glance at Rex, who was still struggling to his knees, and looked back at Ruby. “Answer to me. I saw you near to the desks. I'm asking you now.”

“OK, right,” said Ruby, light-headed, reaching for her backpack to retrieve the things she'd pilfered. “It wasn't hardly anything.”

Rex stood and moved between the two girls, his face close to Lydia's. “We're in the library. This is our library, too—what are
you
doing here?” he asked.

“This is the forensics section,” Lydia said. “This is for the graduate forensics students—”

“So you're the owner?” Rex said, his shoulders rising and falling, and now Ruby had a hand on his shoulder, talking in his ear: “Rex, Rex, Rex . . . ” She had to calm him, or he'd end
up sitting on Lydia and bringing down a pile of books. That would be the end of their library privileges.

“How much you pay for this shack?” Rex continued, same tone, a little quieter.

“Rex, third period—c'mon, third period,” Ruby said. “Let's get back. She's done bothering us.”

And she was. Lydia, pointing at Ruby, in retreat now, her face colored with—what? Fear. Not just of Rex's anger, either. Lydia had to be involved somehow. If not, why would she care so much about their snooping?

Ruby had no chance to talk it over with Rex. The two had to hustle back to class to beat the bell between periods.

“Now, now, no running in the hallways, please,” came a voice from behind. “Oh, it's Miss Rose. And her friend.”

Ruby turned to see Dean Touhy. The dean; he'd been there that night, too. Another suspect. He looked terrible, Ruby thought, haggard and even heavier than usual. The entire forensics department had been shut down by the murder investigation, and no one knew when it was coming back.

“Ruby,” Dean Touhy said, “I do hope you are holding up, and I am sorry for everything.”

“It's OK,” said Ruby. “We're just trying to get back to class.”

“Please tell your father that when all this is settled and he is cleared—and I fully expect that to happen—he is welcome back here in his old position,” the man said. “He must be in a state. Please pass on my best to him, would you?”

“He'll be cleared?” Ruby asked. The dean, now walking them toward class, nodded distractedly and said, “I have reason to believe so, and soon.”

Ruby's head swirled. “What? Why? Then who did it?”

But that was all she got. Dean Touhy, arriving at the door of the Regular class, signaled to Mrs. Patterson—and with a wink to Ruby, he was gone, down the hall.

Cleared?
She peeked at Rex, who shook his head in confusion. How could she possibly tell her dad that without knowing more?

“All right, Theodore, please continue reading where we left off,” Mrs. Patterson said.

Relief. Rex was a smooth reader, and the story was getting kind of interesting. It was about a man living in a nice house with a pool who needed money so badly that he sneaked into the house next door—his friend's house—and took money from his neighbor's wallet.

Rex was reading:
“In the dimness I could see the bed and a pair of pants and a jacket hung over the back of a chair. Moving swiftly I stepped into the room and took a big billfold from the inside of the coat and started back to the hall.”

Half listening, Ruby slipped from under her arm the last thing she'd grabbed from the cubicles, the lining of a garbage can under Lydia's desk. She almost laughed out loud when she saw what it contained. Victor's tea bags. Pages with Grace's doodles. Gum wrappers, two empty energy-drink cans, tissues (disgusting). Garbage. She thought of passing it all to Rex with a meaningful look on her face, just to see him claw through it.

She found a Post-it note stuck in the folds of the plastic bag.
Come see me about this exam at your earliest convenience. Bring your ID
. Rama's writing, his signature in green pen.

Bring your ID
. Ruby had a feeling about what that meant. Her dad had told her that Rama's students did not last long if they couldn't master the material. The scores of Lydia's two tests were 62/100 and 49/100. Not so good, those. Now he was asking for her ID?

Rex stopped reading. “Now, why do you want to be taking cash money from your friends?” he said. “For real, now. Creeping around in their house, while they're in there sleeping? The man lives next door. You can't ask for a loan? I'm sorry, that's just desperate.”

Desperate. Lydia Tretiak seemed to be failing out. She was broke, Ruby's dad said. All those late nights, working on the weekends—only to be failing. Was that really enough to make
you want to kill someone? Lydia was crazy, in her way (they all were, Ruby thought). But was she really so desperate?

Ruby had no way to know. The other grad students had motives, too. Victor clearly saw himself as capable of running the lab, and Rama never really let him. Grace was so anxious, maybe there was a drug problem. And Wade—he despised Rama's rules, his coldness, the way he demanded that the students come in even on weekends.

Too many possibilities. She let it go. The ID numbers she'd copied down—hmm, nothing much there.

Now she sensed something else, not related to the evidence.

What? A chill.

She was being watched.

Ruby looked around.

Sharon. Sharon Hughes, the laces artist. The girl was watching her intently. Openly.

Uh-oh. What's
her
problem?