Be Strong & Curvaceous (17 page)
The boredom of processing photographs did not help the situation.
Pish. Pish.
I’d left the party around eleven-thirty and walked back to school with a guy and two girls I didn’t know from the senior class. I’d cracked open an eye when Mac tiptoed in and my digital clock had said 3:14. Consequently, she was still rolled up under the covers when I left for work.
Had Brett walked her back to school or called her a cab? I didn’t know, and you know what? It didn’t matter anymore.
I’d still admire him from a distance, because face it, the guy is just yummy—but any hope of being the girl he chose first, of seeing that smile reserved just for me, had evaporated when he’d asked Mac to dance. He’d chosen her instead of me in front of all his friends, so hey, I can pull a clue out of the clue jar and read it.
Pish.
The last of the customer’s pictures settled into the tray and I gathered them up, glancing through them as I fanned them into order in my hands.
Then I blinked. I gazed at the top photo for several seconds while my mind processed what I was seeing.
A close-up of a pipe.
Packing material. A fuse, shot in macro detail.
No biggie. The guy was probably a plumber. People take pictures of the stuff they use for work. They take pictures of food. Of their bathroom cabinets. Vacations, school trips, kids, pets. Shoes. Those are big. Shoes on other people who don’t know they’re being photographed. Body parts, too—especially body parts of people who don’t know anyone is looking. Very popular, those.
Yeah, after nearly a month processing images of the things people thought were important enough to record and keep, I was pretty much jaded to the weirdness factor.
I flipped through a couple more pictures. Firecrackers. Big ones. Tied together with wire. Uh, not a close-up, if the discarded sneakers next to the stack were life-size. I peered at the photo, held it up to the light.
Those were sticks of dynamite. Even I could tell that, and the closest I’ve ever gotten to one was on Gillian’s
CSI
DVDs.
Okay, not a plumber. Construction guy? Demolition specialist? Cop? Were these pictures of some kind of raid? No, police departments had their own developing equipment, didn’t they? They didn’t need to use Piccadilly Photo.
I glanced at the clock. A quarter to noon, and the checkbox on the customer’s envelope said he’d pick them up at noon or later. Philip was a total hardnose about having the pictures processed on time or before, so I had to hurry.
But the weirdness factor here was higher than usual, and a strange, cold anxiety began to coil in my stomach.
A bunch of canisters all taped together, with “LP Gas” lettered on the side.
More pipes, their ends packed neatly, stacked up in neat pyramids like kindling.
Is that what pipe bombs look like?
And guns. Even I could tell a sawed-off shotgun when I saw it. Antony has watched a zillion Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger movies where people shot off guns that looked just like this. The last several pictures showed a guy with brown hair standing in front of a map, and in the last picture in the stack, he held up a handgun in a kind of salute.
I frowned at the picture. The guy was a complete stranger. Wasn’t he?
I glanced at the clock. Five to twelve. I don’t think I even made a conscious decision. I just programmed the developing machine to print another set of pictures.
The bell over the door jingled when there were half a dozen yet to go.
“Can I help you?” I heard Philip ask.
“Yeah, I’m here to pick up my photographs,” said a male voice. He sounded young, and his accent was odd. Not British, like the ones in all my historical DVDs, and not Scottish like Mac. I couldn’t place it. And he said the words slowly, as though he thought Philip couldn’t hear. “The name’s Strathey.”
I stifled a sound. The name on the envelope I’d just processed. Twice.
“Certainly.” Envelopes slapped each other gently as Philip flipped through the drawer that held orders for pickup. I grabbed the first set of pictures and stuffed them into their envelope, and stashed them at the very bottom of my tote. Then I opened another envelope, scribbled “Strathey” and an illegible phone number at the top, and was standing calmly by the finishing tray as Philip stepped through the door.
“Carly, are those the Strathey order?”
Pish.
The last of the photos dropped into the tray and I picked them up. “Yes. Just let me get the negatives.”
“Cutting it a little close, aren’t you?” he asked.
“Sorry,” I mumbled, fishing out negatives and stuffing them into their own envelope. “Lots of orders to process today.”
“And what have I told you about that?”
“To do them in order of pickup.” I handed him the completed order. “I’m sorry, Philip. It won’t happen again.”
He smiled, looking at me closely. I tried to relax my shoulders and not look as panicked as I felt. “It’s all right. I’m not castigating you. Most people don’t come on the tick of the dot to pick up their photographs, anyway, do they?”
Not unless you were a crazed gun-happy psychopath bomber.
I followed Philip through the door and watched him hand the envelope to the guy fidgeting in front of the counter, who paid in cash. It was the guy in the pictures, all right. He looked younger in real life. Skinnier. Less threatening.
The sun shone through the shop windows as he left, falling on a gray hoodie that looked way too warm for an almost-summer day, and lighting his hair so that it turned auburn, almost red. He walked up the hill, passing by the window and out of sight.
A gray hoodie. Photographs.
No, it couldn’t be the same person. It was just some random plumber guy. People didn’t just collect stuff and make bombs in their bedrooms . . . Oh, who was I fooling? Just because I’d never gone to a school that had suffered a shooting or a bombing, didn’t mean it couldn’t happen in a city where I lived.
“Carly? Are you going to stand there all day, or do we have more orders back there?”
“Yes, Philip.”
Like a robot, I turned and went back to work.
Only now, the movie in my head was one hundred percent weird, with explosions and guns and fear—and starred the skinny kid in the gray hoodie.
JUST HOW WEIRD did weirdness have to get before you were morally obligated to do something about it?
I finally understood why Mac felt the way she did about the Drifter problem. No, she wasn’t actually being harmed. No one was hurting her. But you could feel both harmed and hurt without the guy laying a finger on you.
That, I realized suddenly, was what had happened to Gillian last term. Lucas Hayes had systematically torn her down on the inside before he got started on her outside by throwing her into a soda machine (among other things).
This was how guys like Drifter and Lucas worked. They messed you up in your mind until you were almost expecting things to get worse. And when they finally did, you were left going, “Yep, I was right,” and wondering if somehow you’d brought this on yourself. Or if you deserved it.
Mac wound up feeling hunted, and I felt scared and threatened. Well, neither Mac nor I deserved to feel this way. She’d done nothing to warrant getting those creepy, threatening e-mail messages, and I’d found these pictures by accident. There’d been a fifty-fifty chance that Philip might have developed them, after all.
The question was, what could I do?
Are you brain-dead? Go to the cops, of course.
And say what? That I’d massively invaded someone’s privacy by looking through their pictures and making a second copy for myself?
Ouch.
I needed to talk to someone. Philip was the obvious place to start, but for all I knew, he’d fire me for the aforementioned invasion of privacy. I could tell my father, but he wasn’t over my having a job yet. He’d probably get so into lecturing me that I’d never get his attention on the actual problem. I needed a neutral party.
I needed my friends.
What I got was Mac.
I pushed open the door of our room, intending to drop off my tote bag and run up to Shani’s room. Instead, I found Mac curled up almost the way I’d left her, except dressed and on top of the covers. Her laptop sat on one end of the bed.
She shivered, and in the silence I heard a muffled sob.
“Mac? Are you okay?”
“No-o-o,” she wailed into the blanket.
I forgot that she’d spent the whole previous evening in the arms of the guy I wanted. I forgot that I’d invited her along with us to be nice and she’d stabbed me in the back. I forgot that she’d come in at three o’clock after doing who knows what with him.
I put my arms around her. “Mac.
Chica
, what is it? What’s happened? Did somebody hurt you? Tell me.”
In answer, she sobbed harder, her face flushed red and her cheeks slick with tears. A horrible thought struck me.
“Is everything okay at home? Did something happen to your mom? Or your dad?”
“No.” Gasp. “No.” Smaller gasp. She sat up and pushed her hair out of her face. Her lips trembled and she could hardly breathe.
I got a handful of tissues and she blew her nose. “Thanks.”
“Please tell me. Whatever it is, you can’t go through it alone.”
That set her off again, and it was a few minutes before she calmed down enough to be coherent. She pulled the laptop over and opened it. “It’s him.”
I didn’t need to ask.
From: [email protected]
Date: May 2, 2009
Re: Long lost
I hope you enjoyed your party last night. You stayed out pretty late, bad girl. Do that lad and your pretty brunette friend know what kind of family you come from?
Maybe I should explain. I told you once that you don’t know me, but I’ve known about you for a while. I followed you to America to fix this. I could have done it while you were in London, but looking at it now, this is much better. America has such a good rep for this stuff. And as people here would say, Columbine is so yesterday. They need something new to talk about.
Where was I? Oh, yeah. Introducing myself. Have you asked your father what he was up to twenty years ago? Probably not, or I would have heard. Basically, he was a very bad boy, and I’m the result.
Surprised? So was I. Wow—the illegitimate son of the Earl of Strathcairn. No expensive private school for me—just the local comp. No designer clothes, only what we could dig out of the bin at the church jumble sale. No restaurant meals—unless you count the fish and chips at the pub in Newcastle where my mum works. Has worked since our dad dumped her and took up with Her Ladyship.
So instead of me being Viscount Strathey and the heir to Strathcairn, there’s you and your meaningless title, since Debrett’s says the old pile is entailed to some cousin when Papa kicks off. I don’t see the point in either of us.
I want us to do something really amazing together. To go out in a blaze of glory. People will talk about us for years to come. That’s way better than what you have to look forward to: a sad little life full of meaningless cocktail parties and relationships that fizzle out like leftover champagne. Isn’t it?
Your brother,
David Nelson aka Drifter
N
EVER IN A MILLION years could I have anticipated
this
.
In the few seconds it had taken me to read the e-mail, Mac had gotten a grip on herself. She blew her nose again, and when she’d tossed the tissue in the trash, she took a deep breath that somehow said, “There. That’s over with.”
“Of course I called my dad,” she said. “Everything he—Drifter—says is, apparently, true.”
“I’d kind of hoped he was just delusional,” I said softly. “Misguided and weird and OCD.”
“Oh, I think he’s all that. But he’s also quite right. Daddy had an affair with a woman called Lisbet Nelson in 1987, when he was plain Graham MacPhail and fresh out of university. She was married; he was young. At least, that’s how he excuses it. I’m not feeling very charitable about boyish mistakes at the moment.”
“Was he ever planning to tell you?”
“No,” she said grimly. “Even though Drifter’s mother apparently clued him in a couple of years ago. I don’t know why she bothered. But at least I know now why my parents split up. I just wish they’d thought enough of me to share it.”
“They were probably just trying to protect you. This David . . . He seems to think he’s entitled to your life. Or at least what you’ve got,” I said thoughtfully, reading the e-mail again.
“He’s welcome to it.”
“You don’t mean that, Mac.” I thought of the Balenciagas and the Chanel Couture dress. “Your folks obviously wanted the best for you, and they could afford it. Where’s the harm?”
She shot a meaningful glance at the laptop, and I got the message.
“You’re not responsible for him being a jealous psycho,” I said. “If you’re feeling that way, get over it right now.”
“What I’m
feeling
is furious at my father,” she snapped, moving away from me a little. “This is
his
fault, the irresponsible git.”