She shook her head. “She never mentioned anything, but you can’t really ignore his reputation, can you? I wouldn’t be surprised if he tried.”
I knew of his reputation from when I was a student, of the handsome twenty-nine-year-old professor with a voracious sexual appetite. Word was he’d slept with a large number of the staff and more than a few students. He cut quite the controversial figure on campus. He had a lot of supporters, was even on the council.* And there were plenty of stories of him going above and beyond for his students, reaching out to colleagues in the field for internships or job placements, hosting networking events, finding scholarships and grants for his students. But he had his critics, too. There were rumors that he engaged in sex Magic (which I had strong doubts even existed), that his preferred spot for trysts was right there in his office. I’d even heard that he could get broody and morose, that if you rejected his advances, he’d fail you. But rumors had a tendency to run wild in a place like this, and I thought it best to not put too much stock in them.
Max appeared to think a little differently. “Yeah, I know about him alright.” He looked at me and pointedly raised his eyebrows as if making sure I was hearing this.Subtle.
“What about Maya’s objects?” I asked Grace.
We learn in Object Study that you can uncover more about a person in the three things they hold most dear than in a decade’s worth of knowing them. People had so many walls they put up, but they couldn’t hide their objects, or what those objects revealed about them.
“One was her phone, but besides that, I’m not sure even she knew. She took the Meditation 101 class,* but you know how tough that sort of stuff is. Especially for someone like Maya, always bouncing off the walls.”
We had Maya’s phone, but with her dead, it hummed dully, the last dregs of Magic fading from it even now.
“There’s this, too,” Grace said, pulling a pink bound notebook from a box next to the bed. “I just found it going through my stuff from the move. They must have packed it by mistake. It’s Maya’s.”
Max and I both perked up.
It seemed to be a planner. Inside were birthdays to remember, Maya’s parents’ anniversary. Meetings with her advisor, and different teachers, Lisa’s 21st!!!!, Homecoming. Then, two days before her death, there was a note:
Mtg with RO. LAST TIME.
“Last time” was underlined three times.
I flipped through the pages, going back several months. There were maybe four or five entries involving RO:Coffee with RO, Drinks with RO.And, once,Dinner with RO.
“Who’s RO?” I asked Grace.
Grace lifted an eyebrow, confused. “No idea.”
“I see,” he said. “Thank you, Grace. This has been really helpful.”
“I hope you …” Her mouth twisted, fingers knotting together. “I hope you find out who did this.”
Afterward, Max and I went to the vending machine in the courtyard behind Ludlow House. He shook up a bag of gummy worms and offered it to me.
“What do you make of all this?” Max asked. “Not exactly something that falls in our usual purview, murder investigation and all.”
I took a handful of worms for myself, but it wasn’t the candy going sour in my mouth. I looked again at the single photo of Dani on Maya’s page. Together for two years, and that was all she got.
“All these people at this school, and not a single one of them liked her, except for the girl she killed. They’re all ready to burn her at the stake, and they didn’t even know her.”
“You can hardly blame them,” he said, throwing a handful of candies into his mouth. “She killed their friend.”
“Yeah, but none of them are even giving her the benefit of the doubt. They’re not even stopping for a second to think maybe none of this was her fault. Especially if she was hexed.”
Maya had been robbed of the rest of her life, and that was a wrong and terrible thing. But no one we spoke to spared a shred of sympathy for Danica. I just couldn’t stop thinking that if Maya was alive, she’d want people to help the girl she loved. Try to figure out where it all went wrong in the first place.
“Or maybe you’re ignoring the possibility that she did kill Maya in cold blood,” Max said quietly.
I whipped my head up. A sheen of sweat covered his throat. “You can’t honestly believe that.”
His eyebrow lifted. “Can’t I?”
“Please tell me your explanation, then, for why she’s speaking in tongues and scaring the crap out of Maritza.”
As I looked at him, his sea-blue eyes burrowing into mine, the realization dropped like a stone in my stomach.
“You think it’s an act?”
