Scare Crow (10 page)

All I knew was that he had been discarded since birth by an alcoholic mother and a
delinquent father. The streets had raised him, and these same streets had raised his
little brother Rocco and the rest of his half-siblings. Products of their mother’s
womb—kids who were destined to stay on the streets and repeat their deadened parents’
cycle of misery. But Cameron had been the exception. He was exceptional in every way.
He had used his adversities, learned from them, and created a position for himself
as the leader of the underworld. He became the worst kind of man. Deceitful. Manipulative.
Premeditated in his every action. His con-artist father, his cold and abusive mother,
the knowledge he gained on the streets and in juvie—these misfortunes had created
the most dangerous criminal in the United St
ates.

These were the things that Cameron had divulged t
o me.

Except that this wasn’t who Cameron had been. It had just been his smokescreen, his
survival mode. The Cameron I knew, the real Cameron, had been gracious and fair. He
had been warm. Tender. When you saw him—when he let you see him—Cameron was exquisite.
He was all my love and my joy. My para
dise.

My paradise
lost.

If I were being honest with myself, what I was really looking for was someone to talk
to, someone to share my pain. When Bill died, I had Maria. She loved Bill, and we
had memories to share as we grieved and healed. But except for Meatball, who never
answered me, I had no such channel to grieve Cameron. As far as the world was concerned,
Cameron was a nameless thug. Nobody knew the t
ruth.

The truth. The truth has so many layers, so many vers
ions.

My deep-down truth was that I was afraid of forgetting him. His face, but most of
all, his voice. How can you remember a voice after it disappears? With Bill, I had
pictures and stories to fill my memories. But the day I realized that I couldn’t remember
what his voice sounded like anymore, it was like getting crushed by a boulder, like
I was losing him all over again. Forgetting his voice was the hardest part about Bill’s
d
eath.

A face at least can stay imprinted on your mind. Right now, if I closed my eyes, I
could still see Cameron, hear his voice. But I had no pictures of him. All I had was
my mind’s version of him. How long did I have before my mind started forgetting details?
I was afraid that if I stopped thinking about him, even for a second, all those parts
that made him would disappear, that he would disappear because I was the only one
who remembered
him.

Someone else had to have loved this beautiful man. Someone else must have seen what
I saw in
him.

For now, the most basic information I needed was locked away in the school informatics
system. At least I hoped it
was.

****

The admissions office was the hub of Callister University. It looked a lot like a
bank, which was appropriate considering the amount of money they stole from students
every year. While the admissions director’s assistant showed me around the office,
I watched as student after student came up to the counter begging for more time to
pay his or her tuition. I suppose it was preparation for what would come later in
life when they couldn’t pay their mortgage ei
ther.

Jeremy wasn’t kidding when he had said that there wouldn’t be much to my new job.
I would spend the few hours I was there every weekday shuffling incoming mail from
one desk to the other, stacking it neatly on people’s desks and grabbing the outgoing
mail. Turn around. Repeat. Mindless was good when my mind was already too cro
wded.

From the minute I walked into the admissions office, I analyzed everything and everyone
I came into contact with. I was changing. I could feel myself changing inside. It
was as if I were growing claws. Like I had grown a second set of teeth, and I was
prowling underwater, hunting bait until I was ready to attack and pull them under.
Roll until I drowned them. I needed information, and I needed it qui
ckly.

While I shook hands with the people I was introduced to, I decided who would be my
easiest target. I found her in the form of an overly friendly woman in her fifties.
I had first spotted her working the front desk, smiling compassionately at the begging
students while she tapped at her keyboard. We hadn’t been introduced yet because she
was too busy trying to help the help
less.

As soon as the assistant released me from orientation, I headed into the staff room,
where I had seen my target head earlier. The staff room had a few tables in the center
and a small kitchenette for the staff to use during mealtimes. Around the edges were
benches and doorless lockers. Each locker was preassigned by management. I knew this
because the assistant had just told me this a few seconds before, and because each
locker had its owner’s name clearly stuck to the first shelf. I also knew that my
preassigned locker was in the corner. I realized now as I spotted my mark at her locker
in the front that this was just too far. So I went to the locker that was next to
the lady and hung my backpack on the hook in
side.

The lady had an extra-large coffee sitting atop her locker, and she was bent over,
recounting her change from her coffee purchase as she put it away in her wallet, one
bill, one coin at a time. She was wearing an obviously self-knitted orange and green
sweater, with a brooch pinned at the breast. The brooch looked like a hangman Mr.
Pumpkin Head. I guessed it was meant as a conversation starter, a need for atten
tion.

“I like your brooch,” I said, keeping my tone
shy.

She glanced up and immediately smiled. “You must be our new rec
ruit.”

“E
mily.”

I tendered my hand over, and she grasped it between both of hers. “Welcome, dear.
I am Betty Devin
port.”

“I’ve been looking everywhere for a sweater like that. Where did you bu
y it?”

She stood a little straighter, almost on her tiptoes. “Thank you so much. You might
not believe me, but I actually made this my
self.”

I was about to guffaw when I was knocked for
ward.

“Is this your
bag?”

I turned around to see a man in desperate need of a haircut who was holding my backpack
by the top loop as though it were filled with dirty dia
pers.

“She’s new, Dave. She didn’t
know.”

Dave gave Betty the stink eye and let my bag fall to the ground. “My name is on my
locker. It’s not hard to see that.” He hung his lumberjack coat, kicked his saddlebag
onto the bottom shelf, and
left.

Betty placed a consoling hand on my shoulder. “Dave is our IT guy. He’s not very good
with pe
ople.”

“I don’t think he likes me,” I said as I picked up my bag and turned ar
ound.

“Don’t take it personally. He doesn’t like anyone. And no one likes him.” Betty’s
cheeks had all of a sudden colored. I had picked up on
this.

I gave her another shy smile before walking away to put my bag in my designated lo
cker.

****

My first shift ended shortly before lunchtime. I headed back to the staff room, straight
for Betty’s locker. I quickly grabbed her wallet from her purse, glanced over the
cat photos, and took the ten-dollar bill she had so neatly placed there earlier and
stuffed it in Dave’s saddlebag, letting a small corner of the bill stick out. Then
I left for the
day.

The next morning, I was back in for day two of my mechanical shift. I arrived a bit
early, hoping to catch Betty before work. I was glad to catch her reading alone at
one of the staff-room tables, with another extra-large coffee cup in front of her.
I dropped my bag in my designated locker and went to sit with
her.

“Hi, Betty,” I said softly, enough to rouse her from her severely used Harry Potter
book.

“How was your first day yeste
rday?”

“Okay,” I started, slumping my shoulders. “Most people have been really nice t
o me.”

“Most pe
ople?”

“The IT guy. Dave, I think you said his name was? He definitely doesn’t lik
e me.”

“Oh? Why do you say
that?”

“When I came back to the staff room yesterday to fetch my bag, he bolted as soon as
I came in the room. Almost ran me over trying to l
eave.”

Her eyes veered to her locker, then to Dave’s. She glanced down to the bottom shelf,
where Dave’s bag would have been, where she would have seen her ten-dollar bill sticking
out after she found it missing from her wallet yesterday. When she returned her attention
to me, she forced a smile. “I’m sure it’s nothing,
dear.”

With a common enemy, Betty and I became fast friends, magically finding each other
in the staff room at her every break. She told me about her three cats and her hopes
for grand-kittens someday; I made up stories about my endearing parents. This wasn’t
much of a stretch for me—I had been making up stories about my parents my whole life,
though I usually reserved these for myself. As far as Betty was concerned, I was an
all-American homesick schoolgirl just looking for a surrogate mom while I was away
from
home.

After graduating from Callister University some thirty years earlier, Betty had never
left, turning a part-time gig as an admissions clerk into a full-time prison sentence.
This was when I manufactured an interest in following in her footsteps one day and
becoming an admissions clerk. This made her gleefully happy, as happy as my mother
was whenever someone commented on her timeless beauty (usually after one of her nip-tuck
vacat
ions).

With so many years under her belt, Betty had built solid contacts. On my third shift,
I happened to mention to her that my fabricated cat, Mr. Voldermort, had a cold, but
I couldn’t afford to take him to the vet until I got paid. By the end of the day,
the admissions director’s assistant came over to let me know that the director had
approved an advance on my paycheck and that I would be getting it by Fr
iday.

On my fourth shift, Dave walked into the staff room as Betty and I were sitting together
during our break. He dumped his bag, gave his overgrown hair a toss back, and left
without the slightest glance in our direc
tion.

“Late as usual,” Betty whispered t
o me.

I leaned in, feeling opportunity knock. “You know what he said to me yeste
rday?”

“No.
What?”

“When I told him that I couldn’t wait to graduate and become an admissions clerk,
he said that the admissions clerks were useless. He said that his computer system
does everything nowadays and that Callister University doesn’t even need frontline
staff anymore. Actually, I think he used the term
arc
haic
.”

I shook my head as I remembered my imaginary conversation with Dave, the meanie IT
guy. Betty’s kitten demeanor turned tig
ress.

Before I knew it, she was showing me how the system worked, how valuable her job was,
and how Dave’s computer system badly buried student information. From this, I learned
two things. One, I needed a student’s ID card to get into the system. I had initially
assumed that the university was attempting to protect its students’ personal information,
but Betty clarified that the university had changed the system when clerks were caught
using it to search porn on the Inte
rnet.

Now, the system would shut down as soon as the inquiring student left and wouldn’t
turn back on until a new card was handed over. This meant no more porn for the faculty,
but it also meant that I needed to get someone’s card to get any information from
the system. If I used my own card, I risked getting caught, because Betty told me
that management kept track of all the ID numbers that were entered into the system—a
good way to know which students came begging and which suffered in sil
ence.

The second thing I learned was that I absolutely needed access to Betty’s computer
because she was a stickler for rules. I knew there was no way I could sway her to
search the system for Cameron. And even risking asking for something like this would
have lost me my all-American-girl t
itle.

I had to be sneaky and q
uick.

On Friday morning, the day of my fifth shift, I slipped a couple of laxatives in Betty’s
extra-large morning coffee when her head was bent down to grab and show off her latest
knitting p
iece.

When our shift started, I stuck close to my adopted mother. This was a big day. After
weeks of dodging the landlord and Hunter’s not-so-subtle inquiries, I had just cashed
my advance on my paycheck so that I could finally pay for my rent and buy decent groceries.
And now I was about to break into the system to get what I ne
eded.

After an hour or so, I was starting to lose confidence that my plan would work. But
all of a sudden, I noticed Betty start to fidget on her stool. She was in the midst
of a conversation with a student, crossing and uncrossing her legs, swaying from one
cheek to the other. Then a look of sheer panic came across her face. Her skin started
blotching, her hands clenched the edge of the counter, and her lips disappeared inside
her m
outh.

The student she was supposed to be helping had kept on talking as if nothing were
w
rong.

I ran to Betty’s re
scue.