With Malice (9 page)

I'd passed the pool on my way to see Dr. Weeks. I remembered the smell of chlorine wafting down the hall. I chewed on the inside of my cheek. I glanced up and down the hall to see if there might be another clue. Last year my favorite teacher, Mr. Landis, picked me to mentor the incoming freshmen on the debate club. He said I was one of the best problem solvers he'd seen since he started teaching.

I couldn't remember how to get back to my room, but other useless information kept flooding into my brain. If you're lost in the woods, you can follow drainage or a stream downhill. Keep the sun over your right shoulder so you can be sure you're walking in a straightish direction. Moss tends to grow on the north side of a tree. I'd never even been camping, and yet all this knowledge flew into my head unbidden. Now if there were only a few streams or trees, I'd be all set. That's when I noticed the lines.

Down the center of the floor, there were painted stripes. They reminded me of the mazes I'd just talked about with Dr. Weeks. Buried deep in my brain, something reached out. The lines were there to help people find their way around.

Follow the yellow brick road.

I pumped my fist in the air. I remembered Anna telling me about the color-coding. The yellow line would lead me back to the patient wards. I wanted to announce at the top of my lungs that I'd figured it out, but I was pretty sure no one else was going to be impressed. I'd tell Anna later; maybe I'd start calling her my own personal Glinda the Good Witch. I pulled out my phone and clicked on the recorder. “The yellow line leads to the wards. I'm in room 511.” I switched it back off. Done. Now if that detail disappeared from my brain, I'd have a way to recall it.

The thrill of victory passed quickly. If I could barely find my way around the hospital, how was I going to figure out what happened with Simone in Italy? I rolled into the elevator and punched the number for my floor.

I closed my eyes. I needed a nap. Between taking the tests and talking about everything, I was worn out. The doctors had warned me that fatigue was normal with a brain injury, but there was being tired and then there was this. I was so exhausted my bones ached. There was a ping as we passed another floor on the way up. Suddenly my mind flashed and I saw Simone. Her mouth was opened in a howl, and her eyes were wide. I reached for her and realized I was screaming. There was a sickening crunch of metal.

“You coming out?”

My eyes flew open. I was still in the elevator. There were two people standing in front of the now-open doors staring at me. I blinked.

“Are you okay?” A girl asked.

I nodded and rolled forward. The group moved past me, already talking about something else, and the doors drifted shut with a soft
thunk
.

I closed my eyes to see if the image would come back, but it was just black.

Let's Travel!
Guidebook

Rome: The city spans centuries and—from the ancient Roman Forum, to the sprawling halls of the Vatican, to the upscale shopping near the Spanish Steps—has something for every traveler. Be sure to toss a coin in the Trevi Fountain so you can wish to return, because it will take more than one trip to see all that this beautiful city has to offer!

EXCERPT FROM POLICE INTERVIEW ABIGAIL JOHNSON, FELLOW STUDENT IN THE ADVENTURES ABROAD PROGRAM

Date: 4 May  Time: 10:30

Present: Abigail Johnson, Christopher Johnson (Abigail's father), Detective Leon Smith

Transcript to be provided to Italian police

ABIGAIL: Everyone met for the first time in February. The program had a meeting for our parents and us so we could go over all the rules, the paperwork we needed to have filled out, and the itinerary. That's when I met Jill. She seemed okay, kinda quiet. I remember she talked about how she really wanted to see the statue of David in Florence. We laughed about it because David is hot. You know, for a stone statue. She made a big deal about how excited she was to travel on her own. It seemed like it was important to her. That's why it was weird to me that Simone ended up coming too.

Simone wasn't at the meeting in February—she applied late. I thought that was sorta bullshit, because the rest of us applied forever ago, and you had to do all this stuff like write an essay and get letters of recommendation from your teachers and stuff, and I don't know how she would have gotten that together so late, but whatever.

I didn't meet Simone until the whole group gathered at the airport in Detroit for our flight. Simone was laughing and joking around like it was a party instead of a departure gate. I could tell she was one of those people who always ended up the center of attention and it made Jill mad that she sorta disappeared when Simone was around.

DETECTIVE SMITH: Was this anger something that Jill expressed to you, or was it just your feeling?

ABIGAIL: I could just tell.

DETECTIVE SMITH: If you could, try to keep focused on things that you saw or heard.

Abigail: Fine. Jill and Simone were the only two people who were friends before we left. The rest of us all came from different schools. It was weird that they were already best friends; it made the rest of us feel sorta left out. I mean, we all made friends eventually. The two of them seemed happy together at the start. They buddied up right away to sit together on the flight and everything. I was crying because I had to say goodbye to my boyfriend, Trevor. He and I have gone out forever, like, since September. I caught the two of them looking at each other, and I could tell they thought it was stupid that I was crying, but maybe that's because neither of them had a boyfriend, so they didn't get it. Saying goodbye to someone you love sucks.

EXCERPT FROM POLICE STATEMENT GIVEN BY LIZ OCHOA, PROGRAM DIRECTOR FOR ADVENTURES ABROAD

Transcript to be provided to Italian police

I've been doing this for eleven years, and I've never had anything remotely this awful happen. I hadn't even imagined it in my worst nightmares, and trust me, I can have some real doozies. I've had a kid fall down a stairwell and break an arm. Every year I lose at least one of them for an hour or two. Food poisoning, homesickness, fights. One kid tried to steal one of those cheap Carnival masks from a store. You name it, I've pretty much seen it happen. But this . . . I just don't even know what to say.

This year we had a group of twenty. We've done smaller groups, but we've found they don't work as well. Twenty is large enough to have some interesting energy from different perspectives. More than twenty becomes a logistical problem. Keeping track of a group of teens is like herding cats. If they see something that catches their eye, they wander off before you know it. The program has two leaders on the trip, myself and Tim Wright. We travel with the group and provide supervision. We hire a university student in the home country to act as a guide. These are typically majors in the history or art departments. They get school credit, and we get a local expert of sorts.

For this trip we brought on Niccolo Landini. He's a college student at Sapienza—Università di Roma, where he's studying Italian history. I suspected when I saw him we might have trouble. Of course you shouldn't discriminate against people because they're good-looking, but teens are already basically a big bag of walking hormones, so having him around felt like chumming shark-infested water. The day he was introduced, you could see almost every girl in the program get that dreamy, someday-my-prince-will-come look. And you could tell he loved the attention, soaked it up like a sponge and just oozed back out the charm. I thought he and one of the girls might end up together. What can you do? At that age romance is practically a biological need and they're all predisposed to expecting some kind of magical experience on their trip abroad. I blame all those teen romance novels.

I have to admit, I'd never have suspected Nico would be attracted to Jill. Don't get me wrong, she's quite pretty. Not in the way kids today seem to want to be, all skinny and hard-looking. Jill reminds me of a starlet from Hollywood's golden era, a brainy young Sophia Loren or Elizabeth Taylor. I didn't see her as his type. She was quiet and clearly very focused. One of those few people who doesn't talk if she has nothing to say. My mother used to call them old souls. Jill felt older to me than her actual age in some ways, and in others, she seemed a little naïve. I had the sense she was going to be one of those people who really blossomed in college. You know, Jill actually emailed me as soon as she got her acceptance and asked for suggested readings for the trip. And she read them too.

At first I don't think Jill knew what to do with Nico's attention. My guess is that she wasn't super experienced with boys. Her friend Simone egged her on, for sure. Simone would make a big show of suddenly wanting to change seats on the bus so that Nico and Jill sat together—that kind of thing.

I didn't think much of it, to be honest. The kids in the program are all seniors in high school. They're old enough to run their own love lives without me poking my nose in. I had no idea things would go so badly. At least not at first.

I looked up to try to gauge how far we were from the hospital entrance. Less than a hundred feet. It might as well have been in Kathmandu. I was too exhausted to make it.

“You can do it,” Sam said. He was trailing behind me with my chair while I tried to lurch along on my crutches.

Physiotherapy should be declared torture. Screw waterboarding. If you want terrorists to confess, lock them up in a physio gym. They'd be begging for mercy in less than an hour. When I met Sam, my therapist, I wasn't sure why Anna had made him sound so scary. He was a slight Indian guy who looked like he still bought his Dockers in the kids' department of Sears. His front right tooth was crooked and overlapped the left tooth. He bounced as he walked across the gym to introduce himself. He had the perkiness of an elementary school teacher.

Sam was a sadist.

My arms were shaking. In addition to his other abuse, Sam got me up on crutches. He said I'd spent enough time in the wheelchair. It seemed like a good idea until my shoulders and arms began screaming for me to sit back down. My leg, in an effort to not be left out, was a pulsing dance music remix of agony. Even my skull felt too tight, like someone was cranking a vise around my brain. I would have cried, except it would have taken more energy than I had left. The only good thing about the day was that I was too tired to think about Simone. The pain had blunted the nonstop loop of
why?
that normally ran through my head.

“Make it to the door, and I'll buy you some ice cream in the cafeteria,” Sam offered.

I hated this guy. “The ice cream is free,” I pointed out.

Sam laughed like I was starring in a one-woman show on the Comedy Network. “This is true—you got me,” he said.

“I'm too tired,” I insisted. It had sounded fun to go outside, but now I was sweating like I'd run a marathon, and all I wanted was to go back to my room.

“You can do this. Take ten more steps.”

I gritted my teeth and swung the crutches, counting each step.

“Good,” Sam said. “Now ten more.”

Was he kidding?
I turned to face him. “You said I could quit after ten.”

Sam shook his head. “No, I didn't. I just suggested you start with ten. You know what they say, a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step.” He raised his finger up in the air like he was a politician making a point. “Same thing with getting to the front door.”

“Screw you,” I said.

Sam didn't seem remotely angry or upset to be cursed at. I suspected it happened to him a lot. A person got out of the car parked right next to us on the sidewalk.

“Jill Charron?”

I flushed. I was embarrassed to be caught acting like a snot. I wanted to be the kind of patient who was noble and kind, like the Kate Middleton of rehab, but my mood sometimes spilled out hot and nasty. The person whipped out a camera, its huge lens almost hitting me in the chin before he began snapping pictures. I swung my hand up to cover my face.

“Do you have anything to say about the death of Simone McIvory?”

I wanted to run, but I couldn't. Adrenaline flooded my system like molten silver in my veins, and I took a few more steps with my crutches, but I was unsteady.

“Did you kill her because of Nico?” The camera continued to click. “Was it a broken heart that led you to do it?”

Sam shoved the wheelchair into the back of my good leg and tugged the tail of my shirt so that I fell into the seat. “Hang on,” he said in my ear, and began bolting for the door. The stranger kept pace. I bent in half, trying to bury my face in my lap. We bounced along the cracked sidewalk. Each bump sent a hot jab of pain down my leg.

“Did your family pay off the Italian authorities to sneak you out of the country?”

A security guard from the hospital must have seen what was going on and was jogging out the front door toward us. Someone else was holding the door open. My wheelchair hit the edge of the doorjamb, and I nearly flew out of the seat. I had to grab the armrests to keep from being tossed onto the lobby floor.

The security guard had his hand on the chest of the photographer and was pushing him back. I couldn't make out his last screamed question. Once we were away from the door, Sam leaned down so he was even with my face.