“You know,” Dagny put in, her dark brow creasing as she pulled one leg up underneath her on the sofa, “Phoebe Chung on the third floor was saying she had a ring go missing the other day. I wonder if there’s, like—”
“A Hemlock House bandit?” Margot asked with a laugh. “Creeping through the suites in a striped shirt and skullcap like the Hamburglar?”
“I mean, it kind of feels that way, doesn’t it?” Dagny asked. “It seems weird that like, all of you guys would suddenly lose your shit at the same time.”
Greer caught my eye across the common room. “Remember the underwear thief back at Bartley?” she asked with a grin.
“Woe unto you who leaves his dryer unattended, et cetera,” I said, but the truth is, I wasn’t really listening. My mind was racing—the possibilities unfurling in a million different directions, the threads unspooling too quickly for me to gather them up and stitch them back together into anything resembling a workingtheory. It had seemed plausible to me—likely, even—that Hunter might have taken Greer’s watch as some kind of fucked-up trophy. But why would he have risked stealing from anyone else in Hemlock? Or were the thefts an entirely separate thing?
I ducked into the bathroom as the girls passed around the box of cookies, dug my phone out of my pocket.Two more pieces of jewelry missing at Hemlock,I texted Holiday quickly.Celine in the suite and some girl on the third floor.
Holiday texted back right away, a long string of exclamation points. Okay,she told me.Well. A lot to think about THERE, clearly. But the good news is I think I might have an idea for how to get a look at that security footage.
You do?I straightened up, a little thrill skittering through me.How?
Just walking into rehearsal,she wrote back.More soon.
10
Monday, 11/18/24
Soonturned out to take more than a week, Holiday and I both busy with projects and papers, neither one of us with much time or energy to spare. Back on the Vineyard we’d had endless hours to devote to our amateur sleuthing, the days stretching out in front of us luxuriously empty. This time, we had to fit any investigative work into the margins of our actual lives: classes and practices, another reminder email from Professor McMorrow urging me tersely to make my advising appointment. Hunter returned to lacrosse workouts. The trees lost the rest of their leaves. The whole thing made me feel anxious and jangly, like with every passing day our case was growing colder. Like the longer we waited, the more time Hunter had to get away with whatever he’d done.
We finally managed to meet up the following Monday, Holiday taking the Red Line over to campus with the caveat that she had to get back for a rehearsal later that night. “Any luck with the suitemates?” she asked, checking the time on her phone before setting it down on the table between us. We were sitting in thecoffee shop at the Smith Center, all white subway tile and marble-topped bistro tables. Jaunty, French-sounding jazz piped through a speaker overhead.
I shook my head. “Not really,” I admitted. I’d given it my best shot at last week’s Richard Gere pregame, waiting until Greer was in the bathroom and turning to Margot as casually as I could. “Can I ask you something?” I ventured, reaching for some popcorn in a way I hoped look natural and low-key. “I know Greer said Hunter gave her kind of a hard time when she broke up with him last year. He never made any, like, threats, did he?”
Margot looked at me a little strangely. Celine set down her phone. “No, notthreats,” Margot said. “Not really.”
“Okay.” I nodded, slinging an arm over the back of the sofa. “Do you have any reason to think Hunter would want to, like…hurt her?”
Oh, none of them liked that. Dagny’s eyes widened; Keiko’s mouth curled with distaste. “What the fuck, Linden?” Celine crossed her arms, leaning back away from me like whatever I had was catching. “That’s a creepy fucking question to ask.”
“No, I know,” I said quickly. “I didn’t mean it like—”
“What other ways are there to mean it?” Margot shook her head. “No. And also, from what Greer said, you werealsokind of a little bitch when she ended things with you back at your boarding school. Didyouwant to hurt her?”
The toilet flushed just then, the bathroom door opening and Greer padding out into the common room. “Everything okay?” she asked.
“Well!” Holiday said now, her expression conveying a barely contained amusement. “I might have handled that a little bit differently, but I do as always admire your investigative chutzpah.” She glanced at her phone one more time. “Anything they told you would have been circumstantial anyway, at least without hard evidence that Hunter was in Hemlock the night Bri died.”
I nodded. “Speaking of which,” I said, “what’s the play for that, exactly? Just waltz into HUPD headquarters and bat your eyelashes until they agree to hand over the footage from the security cameras outside the building?”
“First of all, you say it like that exact technique hasn’t worked extremely well for us before,” Holiday reminded me archly. “Second of all, no. I’ve got a plan.” She looked at her phone one more time, then popped the last bite of a chocolate croissant into her mouth, balling up her wax-paper bag and sliding down off her stool. “Come on,” she said. “It’s time.”
I followed Holiday back through campus, jogging a little to keep up. “If I did this right,” she told me as we rounded the corner toward the rear of Hemlock House, “we should be able to catch these guys right…about…Yup.”
I followed her gaze into the alley: sure enough, there were the same two security guards we’d seen the last time we’d been back here, a haze of smoke surrounding them like a cocoon.
“Hey!” Holiday called. They looked up in unison, twin joints held in their outstretched hands. “I really am sorry about this,” she said, then held up her phone and snapped a picture.
“What the—” The taller one blanched. “Delete that!”
“I would love to,” Holiday said sincerely, “and I will. I just need one quick favor from you guys first.”
The guard’s eyes narrowed. “What kind of favor?” he asked, suspicion written all over his pasty face.
Holiday grinned.
