Size 12 Is Not Fat (23 page)

“I do,” Cooper says, with a shrug. “I mean, I did. But I figured it wouldn’t hurt to ask.”

“And?” I lean forward eagerly. “What is it? Drugs? Were they drugged? Because I thought Detective Canavan said no drugs were detected in their systems.”

“None were,” Cooper says. “It wasn’t drugs. It’s burns.”

I stare at him. “Burns? What kind of burns? Like…cigarette burns?”

“No,” Cooper says. “Angie isn’t sure.” Angie? Cooper knows someone in the coroner’s office named
Angie
? Just how had he and Angie met, anyway? Angie didn’t sound like the kind of name a medical examiner would have. An exotic dancer, maybe. But not a doctor…

“And you have to take into account that those bodies,” Cooper goes on. “Well, they’re kind of a mess. But Angie says they did find burn marks on both girls’s backs, marks they can’t explain. It’s not enough for them to change the coroner’s ruling—you know, that the deaths weren’t accidental. But it is…strange.”

“Strange,” I repeat.

“Yeah,” Cooper says. “Strange.”

“So…” I can’t look him in the eye. Because I can’t believe he’s actually taking me seriously.
Me
, Heather Wells, of “Sugar Rush” fame!

And all it had taken were a couple of murders…

“So maybe I’m not just making it all up out of displaced aggression toward my mother?” I ask.

Cooped looks taken aback. “I never said you were.”

Oh, right. That had been Sarah.

“But you believe me now?” I prod him. “I’m not just your little brother’s crazy ex-girlfriend? But maybe, like, a rational human being?”

“I’ve never thought of you as anything but,” Cooper says, a flash of annoyance in his blue eyes. Then, seeing my expression, he says, “Well, crazy, maybe. But I never thought of
you as irrational. Honest, Heather, I don’t know where you get this stuff. I’ve always thought of you as one of the—”

Most beautiful, ravishing creatures you’ve ever met? Most intelligent, stunningly gorgeous women of your acquaintance?

Sadly, before he gets a chance to tell me what he’s always thought of me—or to fall to one knee and ask me to be his bride (I know. Still, a girl can dream), the phone rings.

“Hold that thought,” I say to Cooper, and pick up the receiver. “Fischer Hall, this is Heather.”

“Heather?” It’s Tina, the desk worker on duty. “Hold on, Julio wants to talk to you.”

Julio gets on the line. “Oh, Haythar, I sorry,” he says. “But he’s doing it again.”

“Who’s doing what again?” I ask.

“That boy, Gavin. Ms. Walcott told me—”

“Okay, Julio,” I say, careful not to let Cooper catch on, considering what happened last time. “I’ll meet you at the usual place.” Then I hang up.

Talk about bad timing! Right when Cooper had been about to tell me what he really thinks about me!

Although, come to think of it, I’m not sure I want to know. Because most likely it’s going to be something like “one of the best data-entry typists I’ve ever known.”

“Stay right here,” I say to Cooper.

“Is something wrong?” Cooper asks, looking concerned.

“Nothing I can’t handle in a jiffy,” I say. Oh my God, did I just say jiffy? Well, whatever. “I’ll be right back.”

Before he can say another word, I hightail it from the office, running for the service elevator, where I tell Julio, who meets me there, to take the control lever, and
Go, go, go!

Because the sooner we get back, the sooner I can find out if, you know, there’s a chance for me where Cooper is concerned, or if I should just give up on men already. Maybe
New York College offers a major in being a nun. You know, giving up guys completely, and embracing celibacy. Because that’s seriously starting to look like it might be the way to go for me.

As Julio takes me up to the tenth floor, I climb the elevator walls and slide through the open ceiling panel. Up in the elevator shaft, it’s warm and quiet, as usual.

Except that I can’t actually hear Gavin laughing, though, which is
not
usual. Maybe he’s finally gotten his head cut off by a snapping cable, as Rachel has so often warned him he might. Or maybe he’s fallen. Oh, God please don’t tell me he’s at the bottom of the shaft…

I’m reflecting upon this—what I’m going to do if all I find on top of Elevator 1 is Gavin’s headless corpse—as the service elevator approaches the two other cars, which are both sitting in front of the tenth floor.

As we rise above them, I see no sign of Gavin—not even his headless corpse. No empty beer bottles, no chortling laughter, nothing. It’s almost as if Gavin had never been there…

The next thing I know, a thunderclap shakes the shaft, leaving a roaring in my ears, like the sound of ocean waves, only magnified a thousand times.

I’ve stood up—a little unsteadily—to get a better look at the roofs of the cabs below, and when I feel the explosion rip beneath my feet, I grab instinctively—but blindly—for something—anything—to hold on to.

Something that feels like a thousand razor blades slices my hands, and I realize I’m holding a metal rope that’s vibrating crazily from the force of the explosion. Still, I hold on to the bucking steel cable, because it’s the only thing that separates me from the oblivion of the dark shaft below. Because there’s nothing else beneath my feet. One minute I’m standing on
the roof of the service cab, and the next, the roof has caved in beneath my feet, crumpling like a can of Pringles.

Hmmm. Pringles.

It’s funny what you end up thinking about right before you die.

I avoid getting hit by the rain of steel from above by sheer luck alone. The cable I’ve grabbed hold of continues to buck wildly, but I cling to it with both my hands and legs, wrapping one foot around the other.

Something strikes me hard enough on the shoulder as it plunges past to make me loosen my grip on the cable, stunned breathless by the impact.

That’s when I look down, wild-eyed, and see that the service car is gone.

Well, not gone, exactly. It’s free-falling below me like a soda can someone has thrown down a trash chute, the loosened cables—all but the one I’m holding—trailing behind it like ribbons on a bridal veil.

It can’t crash, is all I could think to myself. I’d asked the elevator repairmen once if what had happened in the movie
Speed
could ever happen in real life. And they’d said no. Because even if all the cables connected to an elevator car snap at the same time (something they asserted could never, ever happen. But, um, hello), there’s a counterweight built into the wall that would never let the car crash to the ground below.

I feel the deafening impact of that counterweight as it slams into place, saving the elevator car from colliding with the basement floor.

But when the broken cables rain down onto the cab’s roof, the noise is unbelievable. Impact after impact shakes the shaft. I struggle to retain my grip on the one remaining cable, thinking only that with all that noise, I haven’t heard a peep
out of Julio. Not a single sound. I know he’s still inside that car. While he’d been saved by the counterweight from being crushed, accordion style, against the cement floor of the basement, those cables have literally flattened the cab’s roof. He’s under that tangle of steel…

But God only knows if he’s still alive.

The silence that follows the crash of the falling elevator cab is even more frightening than the shuddering impact of the split cables. I’ve always loved the elevator shafts because they’re the only parts of the dorm—I mean, residence hall—that are ever totally quiet. Now, that quiet is like an impenetrable canopy between me and the ground. The quieter it gets, the higher this little bubble of hysteria rises in my throat. I hadn’t had a chance to be frightened before.

But now, hanging more than ten stories with my feet dangling above nothing, I’m seized with terror.

That’s when the bubble turns into a fountain, and I start to scream.

Though it seems like hours, I think I’m only screaming for like a minute or so before I hear a distant, masculine voice shouting my name from far below.

“Here!” I shriek. “I’m up here! Tenth floor!”

The voice says something, and then, below me to my left, the two remaining elevator cabs both start moving down.

If I’d had any presence of mind, I’d have jumped for it, leaping to the roof of the nearest cab.

But it’s a distance of more than five feet—the same distance Elizabeth and Roberta would have jumped, and missed,
if we were to believe they really had died elevator surfing—and I’m pretty much paralyzed with fear.

I realize, though, that I can’t hold on for much longer. Whatever struck my shoulder has left it numb with pain, and my palms are raw from clinging to rusty metal cable—not to mention slippery with blood.

Dimly, I think back to my PE days in elementary school. I had never excelled at rope climbing—or any physical activity, actually—but I did remember that the key to hanging suspended from a rope was to wrap one’s foot in a loop in the slack end.

Getting a steel cable to wrap around my foot proved more difficult than it had ever been back in fifth grade, but I finally get a semblance of a foothold. I know that I’m still not going to last more than a few minutes. My shoulder and especially my hands are aching so badly—and my threshold for physical discomfort has always been low, given that I’m a huge baby—that I know I’ll let go and fall to my death rather than endure much more.

And it isn’t as if I haven’t had a nice life up until now. Okay, maybe parts of it have been rockier than others. But hey, I had an okay childhood; at least my parents had seen to it that I’d never gone to bed hungry.

And I was never abused or molested. I had had a successful career—granted, it had peaked at age eighteen or so.

But still, I’ve gotten to eat in a lot of awfully good restaurants.

And I know that Lucy will be well taken care of. Cooper will look after her if anything happens to me.

But thinking of Cooper reminds me that I don’t really want to die, not now, when things were just getting interesting. I’m never going to know what it is he really thinks of me! He’d been about to tell me, and now I’m going to die, and miss it!

Unless, of course, when you die you attain all the knowledge in the universe.

But what if you don’t? What if you just die?

Well, then I guess it won’t matter.

But what about those repairmen? They’d assured me elevator cables don’t just snap. Okay, maybe one of them snaps, but not all of them, all at once. Those cables hadn’t broken accidentally. Someone had deliberately booby-trapped them. Judging from the ball of flame that had erupted beneath my feet, I’m thinking bomb.

That’s right, bomb.

Someone’s trying to kill me.

Again.

Reflecting on who could possibly want to kill me takes my mind off my aching shoulder and throbbing hands—and even Cooper and the what-he-thinks-of-me thing—for a minute or so. Well, of course there’s Christopher Allington, who may or may not have already tried to shove a geranium planter on my head because I suspect him of murder. He’d better have a really good alibi for this one.

But how would Christopher Allington have known that I’d be on that elevator? I rarely ride the service elevator. In fact, the only time I ever ride it is when I’m chasing elevator surfers.

Could Gavin McGoren somehow be involved in the deaths of Beth Kellogg and Bobby Pace? This seems far-fetched, but what other explanation could there be? Julio can’t be the murderer. For all I know, he’s dead down there. Why would he want to kill himself
and
me?

Suddenly, the elevator closest to me returns, and this time, there’s somebody on the roof. But it isn’t Gavin McGoren. Blinking—the shaft is filled with smoke—I see through the mist that a grim-faced Cooper is coming to my rescue.

Which must mean he likes me. At least a little. I mean, if he’s willing to risk his own life to save mine…

“Heather,” Cooper says. He sounds as cool and authoritative as ever. “Don’t move, all right?”

“Like I’m going anywhere,” I say. Or that’s what I try I say. What I hear is actually a string of hysterical blubbering. But surely it isn’t coming from me.

“Listen to me, Heather,” Cooper says. He’s climbed onto the roof of Elevator 1, and is hanging on to one of its cables. His face, I can see through the smoke, is pale beneath his tan. Now why is that? I wonder. “I want you to do something for me.”

“Okay,” I say. Or I try to, anyway.

“I want you to swing over here. It’s okay, I’ll catch you.”

“Um,” I say. And make the mistake of looking down. “No.”

Well, that came out definitively enough.

“Don’t look down,” Cooper says. “Come on, Heather. You can do it. It’s just a few feet—”

“I’m not swinging anywhere,” I say, clinging more tightly to my cable. “I’m waiting right here until the NYFD arrives.”

“Heather,” Cooper says, and some of the old familiar impatience with me is back in his voice. “Push off from the wall and swing over here. Let go of the cable when I say so. I swear I will catch you.”

“Boy, you have really lost it.” I shake my head. My voice sounds funny. It’s kind of high-pitched. “No wonder your family cut you off without a cent.”

“Heather,” Cooper says. “The janitor told me that that cable you’re holding on to probably isn’t stable. It could break at any minute, like all the others—”

“Oh,” I say. Well, that’s different.

“Now do what I say.” Cooper has leaned out as far from his elevator car as he can, and still have something to hold on to.
“Push off the wall with your foot and swing over here. I’ll catch you, don’t worry.”

From the top of the service shaft comes a groaning sound. I’m almost sure it didn’t come from me. More likely from the cable I’m holding on to.

Great.

Closing my eyes, I heave on the cable, forcing it to swing toward the wall on the far side of the shaft. I unwrap my foot from the dangling end and shove, as hard as I can, at the crumbling brick. Like a stone from a slingshot, I’m propelled in the direction of Cooper’s waiting arms…

…but not close enough for my liking.

Still, he shouts, “Let go! Heather, let go now!”

That’s it, I think. I’m dead. Maybe they’ll do a
Behind the Music
on me
now
…

I let go.

And know, for a second, how Elizabeth and Roberta must have felt—the sheer terror of careening through the air with no net or body of water below me to break my fall…

Only instead of plummeting to my death, as they had, I feel hard fingers close around both my wrists. My arms are practically yanked out of their sockets as the rest of my body slams against the side of the elevator cab. I have my eyes screwed shut, but I feel myself being lifted, slowly…

I don’t stop scrambling for a foothold until the seat of my jeans finally rest on something solid.

It’s only then that I open my eyes and see that Cooper has managed to pull me to safety. We’re both panting from mingled exertion and fear. Well, me from fear, anyway.

But we’re alive.
I’m
alive.

Above our heads comes the groaning sound again. Next thing I know, the cable I’d been holding on to—along with
the pulley it had been connected to—rips loose from its supports and plummets down the shaft, to crash into the roof of the cab below.

When I’m able to lift my gaze from the wreckage at the bottom of the shaft, I see that I’m clinging to Cooper’s shirtfront, and that his arms are around me protectively. His face has gone the color of the smoke around us. There are streaks of blood and rust all over his shirt from where I’d grabbed at him with my cut hands.

“Oh,” I say, releasing the now crumpled and greasy cotton. “Sorry.”

Cooper’s arms drop away from me at once.

“No problem,” he says.

His voice, like my own, is steady enough. But there’s something in his blue eyes I’ve never seen before…

But before I have a chance to put my finger on just what, exactly, it is, a familiar voice from inside the cab we’re sitting on demands, “So is she okay or what?”

I look down through the open panel in the cab’s ceiling and see relief wash over Pete’s face.

“You had us shittin’ our pants back there, Heather,” he says. And indeed, his burly Brooklynese has a tremor in it. “You okay?”

“I’m fine,” I say, and prove it by climbing shakily down from the roof of the cab virtually unaided. My shoulder twinges a painful warning at one point, but Pete’s steadying hand on one elbow, and Cooper’s careful grip on my belt, keep me from losing my balance. I find, once I’m safely inside the elevator car, that it’s difficult to stand without leaning against something since my knees are shaking pretty badly.

But I manage all right, by sagging against the wall.

“What about Julio?” I ask.

Cooper and Pete exchange looks.

“He’s alive,” Cooper says, but his jaw is strangely clenched.

“Leastways, he was a minute ago.” Pete yanks around the key he’d inserted in the override switch. “But as to whether he’ll still be alive by the time they get him out—”

I feel dizzy. “Get him out?”

“They’re gonna hafta to use cutters.”

I look to Cooper for a more detailed explanation, but he isn’t forthcoming with one.

Suddenly, I’m not so sure I want to know.

For the second time in two days, I end up in St. Vincent’s emergency room.

Only this time, I’m the patient.

I’m lying on a gurney, waiting to get my shoulder X-rayed. Cooper has gone in search of a tuna salad sandwich for me, since fear has made me famished.

While I wait, I gaze mournfully at my ragged fingers and palms, wrapped in gauze and smarting from numerous stitches. It will be weeks, an irritatingly young attending physician has informed me, before I have normal use of them again. Forget guitar playing. I can barely hold a pencil.

I’m glumly considering how I’m going to do my job properly when I have little or no use of my hands—undoubtedly Justine would have found a way—when Detective Canavan shows up, the unlit cigar still clenched between his teeth. I’m not sure it’s the same cigar. But it sure looks like it.

“Hey there, Ms. Wells,” he says, as casually as if we’d just bumped into one another at Macy’s or something. “Heard you had quite an eventful morning.”

“Oh,” I say. “You mean the part where somebody tried to kill me? Again?”

“That’d be the one,” Detective Canavan says, removing the cigar. “So. You sore at me?”

I am, a little. But then again, it hadn’t been his fault, really. I mean, that planter could have fallen over accidentally. And Elizabeth and Roberta really could have died while elevator surfing.

Except that it hadn’t. And they hadn’t, either.

“Can’t say as I blame you,” Detective Canavan says, before I have a chance to reply. “Now we got a Backstreet Boy with a busted head and a janitor in intensive care.”

“And two dead girls,” I remind him. “Don’t forget the two dead girls.”

Detective Canavan sits down on an orange plastic chair that’s bolted to the wall outside the X-ray lab.

“Oh, yeah,” he says. “And two dead girls. Not to mention a certain administrative assistant who should, by rights, be dead as well.” He puts the cigar back in his mouth. “We think it was a pipe bomb.”

“What?” I yell.

“A pipe bomb. Not particularly sophisticated, but effective. In an enclosed space, like the brick elevator shaft, it did a lot more harm than it would have if it had been in a suitcase or a car or something.” Detective Canavan chews on the cigar. “Somebody seems to want you dead in a big way, honey.”

I stare at him, feeling cold again. Cooper had thrown his leather jacket over my shoulders as soon as we’d gotten down into the lobby, because I’d started shivering for some reason. And then when the paramedics had arrived, they’d added a blanket.

But I’d been freezing ever since seeing the wreckage that had once been the service elevator, crumpled at the bottom of that shaft. Firefighters had tried to pry the doors open with massive pliers—the jaws of life, they called them—but the twisted metal just shrieked in protest. Lying in that
wreckage was Julio, who I later learned had suffered multiple broken bones, but was expected to survive. I had started shivering just looking at the mangled cab, and my hands have felt like ice ever since.

“A pipe bomb?” I echo. “How would somebody—”

“Slipped it on top of the elevator car. Easy to make, if you have the know-how. All you need is a steel pipe, threaded on both ends so you can cap it. Drill a couple holes in the side for twin fuses, slip a couple firecrackers through the holes, epoxy them in place, tack on some cigarettes, then fill the thing with gunpowder. Easy as pie.”

Easy as pie? That sounds worse than the SATs!

Noting my raised eyebrows, Canavan removes the cigar and says, “Excuse me. Easy as pie if you know how to do it. Anyway, somebody lit that thing a few minutes before you and—what’s his name?” He refers to his notebook. “Oh yeah, Mr. Guzman—went for the ride. Now, if you don’t mind my asking, what the hell were you doing on top of that thing?”

Confused, I think back. A pipe bomb, with twin cigarette fuses? I have no idea what such a thing would look like, but I certainly hadn’t noticed anything like it when I’d been up on the elevator car’s roof.

Then again, with all the gears and machinery up there, a small bomb would be easy to hide.

But a pipe bomb? A pipe bomb, in Fischer Hall?

Behind the double doors to the waiting room, a nurse is calling, “Sir, you can’t go in there! Sir, wait—”

Cooper bursts through the swinging doors, his arms full of paper bags. A pretty nurse trails after him, looking mad.

“Sir, you can’t be barging back here,” she insists. “I don’t want to have to call security—”

“It’s all right, nurse,” Detective Canavan says, flipping open his wallet and showing her his badge. “He’s with me.”

“I don’t care if he’s with the Royal Academy of Medicine,” the nurse snaps. “He can’t be barging back here.”