Love & hugs!!!
Bellamy!!!!
64
The news of an off-campus murder made only minor ripples at Helshire.
There was general agreement that the Motorway Inn was cursed—Shuriken had to move his Adderall sales to an all-night diner. A few students recalled a pink-haired woman skulking around campus, but not why she was here. If my hallmates made any connection between our mysterious visitor and the dead girl at the Motorway, they said nothing, though I felt an extra layer of protectiveness at Lavernick for the next few weeks.
Crystal was an outsider, after all. She didn’t belong in the Helshire pantheon with Laney Maxwell, Anthony Sandino, and Peter Morton. Much bigger events in town—the high school fire, the county clerk’s arrest—had slipped past unnoticed on campus.
The death was being treated as suspicious, though not officially a homicide. The forensics had to be tantalizing. Rigor and algor mortis didn’t match, the body had been moved, and Sebastian had finished her off with his bare hands. But, as Orrin often told us, a good rain washes away a multitude of sins.
We had erased Crystal without consequence to ourselves or Faraday. It was too easy—the world so awash with random violence that ours, in all its purposes, remained invisible.
When Sebastian and I filed our report, my family were pleased. Crystal had shown up looking for Hiromi’s lost girlfriend, and we’d snipped the thread. Nothing about her death pointed back toward the city and Lyon’s cult, which Garrett and Arabella were still incorporating.
As an unexpected bonus, Faraday’s punishment for Oscar Junior’s wrack was delayed—Cyrus and Orrin preferred not to commit assault with a homicide investigation underway in town. They’d probably wait until she was back in Boston for Thanksgiving, which meant less drama for me and Sebastian.
Faraday remained blasé about her transgressions, born and bred to go off the rails. She was busy piling on new ones, turning up at the Banner storm party in Crystal’s Helshire sweatshirt, wearing it to afternoon tea.
“No bloodstains. Who cares?”
A new motto for the Wilbert-Lees.
I returnedto the task of keeping myself hidden.
As the older caretakers had warned us, it was difficult. Being a true Morton came with daily rituals, ways of dressing and speaking. Secret caches in the library, the best rooms on campus. A lofty indifference to ordinaries.
Care was an absence. No training sessions, no special classes. Just the faintest signals hidden in a conversation: glancing words to remind one another we were all hiding the same secret.
Caregiver, scarecrow.
The others seemed nervous around me. Regina and Leopold were friendly, but guarded. Kumar hardly talked to me at all.
Was it because I was an unlikely recruit—the aunties’ pet turned traitor? Or was it my too-frequent tears? No one else had cried at our initiation. The steady, impervious Jessica Morton was gone. This new me reeked of self-doubt.
Whoever was in charge of our rebellion was wary of me too. No assignment came. No details about our long-term plans. All I had to go on was what Sebastian told me, which was never enough. But my mind was always working, trying to solve the equation of the legacies.
The strongest move I could imagine—the only way to make evil take a year off—was to ruin every incorporated family in the world, all at once.
ACH transfers were limited to a million dollars a day, but SWIFTs were infinite. For families whose wealth was physical, like gold mines and land, we could forge a dozen contradictory last wills and testaments. Whatever we hadn’t disappeared would be tied up in probate for decades.
Of course, issues with inheritance would require killing people.
What about an arson attack on the freeports? All those cars, Picassos, bottles of wine, simply gone. Jewels and ancient coins, melted into slag. I started reworking my paper for Ms. Delicato, looking at how loans were leveraged against physical assets, at how insurance companies went bankrupt.
The Belmonts, but on a vaster scale.
When Frankie got a new computer, I borrowed her old one and began to devise the specifics of my plan. If Care ever came to trust me, I wanted to show them what an accountant could do.
One afternoon, a month after Crystal’s death, I was reading on the lawn in front of Ogden. The lacrosse team was running drills, the odd loose ball bouncing past me. The smoke and heat of the semester’s start were a distant memory. The storm had wiped everything away.
Xavier Lindqvist came striding across the grass, looking pleased to see me. He shimmered with unusual intensity.
“We have something to discuss.” He glanced at the ordinaries across the lawn.
My skin tightened. Bianca might be my ally now, but that didn’t mean the other Lindqvists had forgiven me for Halcyon Hall.
