Social Suicide (3 page)

I looked around for something to give me a boost. On the ground was a collection of rocks, but none looked big enough to stand on. On the other side of the trail sat a large oak tree, but I’d given up climbing trees about ten years ago. I called out to Sydney one more time.

“Hey? Sydney? It’s me. Hartley.”

No answer.

I looked across the trail again. Fine. Tree it was.

I quickly crossed to it, narrowly missing a biker clad in bright yellow spandex. The tree was thick, tall, and definitely sturdy enough to hold all one hundred pounds of me. The only problem was the lowest branch was a good four feet off the ground. I grabbed on to it and pulled my feet up onto the trunk, but they immediately slipped back down, causing my palms to scrape against the branch and depositing me on my butt on the ground.

Ouch.

I picked myself up, trying not to be embarrassed as another biker went by. (Seriously, he was in neon spandex. I wasn’t the one who had anything to be embarrassed about.) This time I was able to scramble my legs high enough to lock them around the branch above me. I hung there a moment, like a pig on a spit, before I gathered enough strength to pull my torso up and around to the top side of the branch.

I gave myself a two count to catch my breath, then carefully stuck my foot in the fork of the branches and moved a little bit higher. Once I was high enough that I was starting to get a little dizzy, I scooched out onto a limb that was overhanging the trail.

Sydney’s backyard was still a ways away, but from here I could see over the fence. I craned my neck to get my target in view.

What I’d seen through the sliver had been accurate. There was a large pool taking up most of the backyard with a couple of loungers set beside it. I saw a pink beach towel laid out on one, with a glass of iced tea sitting on a table next to it. Signs that someone had been in the yard recently.

I turned my attention to the swimming pool. . . .

And then I saw it.

There, floating in the center of the sparkling blue pool, was Sydney Sanders.

Facedown.

THE FIRST THING I DID WAS RUN. OKAY, ACTUALLY, THE
FIRST
first thing I did was scream, lose my balance, flail my arms in the air like some kind of uncoordinated bird, then slide down the side of the tree and land on my butt.

Then I ran.

I raced down the pathway as fast as I could, blind panic spurring me on until I reached the bridge where the bike trail connected with the main road and logic started to seep into my brain.

I grabbed my cell and dialed 911, trying my best to keep my voice from shaking out of control as I described what I had seen at Sydney’s place. The dispatcher talked to me in annoyingly calm tones (hadn’t she heard the dead body part!?) until a police cruiser pulled up to the side of the road and motioned me inside.

I then told my same shaky story to the uniformed officer as he drove me around the block, circling to the front of Teakwood Court, where Sydney’s house squatted in the center of the cul-de-sac. It was a one-story, stucco building painted in a gray-blue with bright white trim. A picket fence enclosed the yard, and a couple of orange trees overburdened with fruit flanked the front doors.

Already I could see two more cop cars parked at the curb. A wooden gate sat just to the right of the house, leading to the backyard beyond. Another uniformed officer stood sentinel beside it, arms crossed over his chest, eyes scanning the street for anyone daring to mess up his crime scene.

Which was not a good sign.

During the short wait for the police to arrive and the short ride around the block in the cop car, I’d been trying to convince myself I’d overreacted. I mean, it was possible that Sydney was just playing dead—holding her breath underwater for fun. Maybe she was fine and right now freaking out about the cops intruding on her lazy enjoying-my-suspension-to-the-fullest afternoon.

A big guy with thinning red hair and lots of freckles stepped through the gate from the backyard. He was a little thick around the middle, like he was committed to keeping up the donut-eating-cop stereotype, and wore plain beige khakis and a plaid button-down shirt. Lines creased his face at the corners of his eyes and mouth, which were both currently set in grim lines.

I slumped down in my seat to avoid his gaze. Unfortunately, I knew him all too well.

I’d met Detective Raley when Chase and I had been pursuing that first case together. He’d been in charge of the investigation, and at the time, he’d been the thorn in my side. And, honestly, likely vice versa. But as soon as the killer had been caught, we’d formed a sort of truce. Mostly because we didn’t have anything to do with each other anymore.

Until now.

Raley spoke briefly to the cop guarding the back gate, then they both turned toward our police cruiser. Even from across the front lawn, I could see Raley’s thick eyebrows lift.

I did a little one finger wave.

Not surprisingly, he didn’t wave back.

He mumbled a couple more words to the uniformed cop, gesturing at the yard behind him, then stomped across Mr. Sanders’s perfectly mowed lawn toward the police cruiser. I held my breath as he yanked the door open.

“Hartley,” he said. Not a question, not a greeting, just a flat monotone statement of fact.

“Detective Raley,” I said, trying to kick the shakiness out of my voice and match his non-greeting.

“They tell me you found the body.”

I bit my lip. Body. The word choice confirmed that Sydney had not been just lounging in her pool in the unlikely facedown position but was, in fact, dead. A weird range of emotions swam inside my belly. I hadn’t been close enough to Sydney to actually call her a friend, but we’d been going to the same high school for two years, so she wasn’t really a stranger, either. And as unnerving as finding a stranger dead might have been, finding a girl your own age from your own school that you’d actually DMed with just last night dead hit way too close to home.

“You okay, kid? You look kinda pale.”

I gulped down a sudden wave of nausea and nodded. “Uh-huh.”

“You’re not gonna throw up, are you?”

I shook my head. “Nuh-uhn.”

“You sure?” Raley squinted down at me, clearly not convinced.

I did another dry gulp, dragging in a big breath of air with it.

“I think so.”

“Good.” Raley nodded. “You think you could answer a few questions for me, then?”

I nodded. “I’ll try.”

“How did you come upon Sydney?”

I did a repeat of the deep-breath thing, then told Raley that I’d been “strolling” along the bike trail on my way home from school when I’d seen Sydney in the pool, freaked, ran, and called 911.

“Wait—” Raley said, putting up a hand, “you were on your way home from school?”

I nodded.

“But you live that way,” he said, pointing in the opposite direction from the trail.

“It was a nice day. I thought I’d take a little detour.”

Raley stared down at me, leaning in so close I could see right up his nose. I tried not to stare, lest that nausea come back.

“A detour?”

“Yep. I’m . . . a nature lover.”

Yeah, I know. That sounded lame even to my own ears. But I wasn’t sure just yet how much I wanted to share with Raley. He had a habit of interpreting situations his own way, and I figured that me planning to meet a dead girl and spying on her from a tree was not a situation he would interpret in a positive way.

“How did you see Sydney?” Raley asked.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean the back fence is six feet high. How did you manage to see in the yard?”

“Through a crack in the fence?”

“Is that a question?”

I cleared my throat. “No.”

Raley gave me a stare down again, but, thankfully, let it go.

“How well did you know Sydney?” he asked instead.

I shrugged. “Not that well. We go to the same school.”

“Was she there today?”

I shook my head. “No. She’s suspended. She cheated on a test.”

Raley raised an eyebrow. “Suspended. I guess she was pretty upset about that?”

“I guess. Like I said, we weren’t really that close.” I paused. “Why?”

Raley avoided my eyes. “No reason. Just asking.”

Huh.

“How had Sydney seemed before she was suspended?”

I narrowed my eyes. “‘Seemed?’”

He shrugged. “Was she generally a happy person, or did she keep to herself?”

“She was in the running for homecoming queen until two days ago.”

He leaned in. “She lost?”

“She was kicked off the court when she got caught cheating.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Suspended and kicked off the homecoming court. So, I’d guess she was upset.”

I narrowed my eyes at him again, trying to follow his train of thought. “Why does it matter if Sydney was upset? This was an accident.”

Raley looked at me, his face a blank, unreadable cop thing.

“It
was
an accident, right?” I repeated.

He sighed. “It’s too soon to tell. At this point we need to explore all possibilities.”

“Meaning . . . ?”

“Meaning most teenage deaths that we investigate end up being self-inflicted.”

I blinked at him. “Suicide?”

Raley nodded.

“Oh no. You’ve got this all wrong.” I shook my head violently from side to side. “No, that doesn’t make any sense. Sydney wasn’t suicidal.”

“I thought you said you didn’t know her well,” Raley countered.

“Not that well, but trust me, Sydney did not commit suicide.”

“You just said she was suspended for cheating. Maybe the guilt overwhelmed her?”

I let out a laugh, then quickly stifled it as Raley shot me a look.

“Look, Sydney wasn’t the guilty type,” I explained. “For example, Erin Carter was the front-runner for homecoming queen. Until Sydney started a rumor that Erin had lice. Suddenly no one would come within five feet of Erin, and the school nurse even came in to check her head right in the middle of PE. Trust me, guilt was not in Sydney’s repertoire.”

Raley did the deep-sigh thing again, and I looked away to avoid seeing his nose hairs vibrate with the effort. “Look, it’s too early to tell much of anything at this point. All I can say is that it doesn’t look like an accident.”

“What do you mean? She drowned, right? That can happen, can’t it?”

“We have to wait for the ME’s report, but it doesn’t look like she drowned. We found something in the pool with her.”

“Something?”

“Her laptop.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, trying to process the information.

“It was plugged into an outdoor wall outlet. Our best guess is that Sydney jumped into the pool with her laptop and electrocuted herself.”

I blinked at him, letting this sink in. He had a point. That hardly seemed like an accident. Even if Sydney had been online poolside, what were the chances she’d decide to take a dip with her computer? No one was that stupid, not even Sydney Sanders.

On the other hand, I was having a hard time wrapping my brain around the idea of Sydney ending her life. Sure, she’d been tweeting some pretty unhappy stuff lately, but there was a huge gulf between saying your life sucked and actually ending it. And if you were going to end it, wouldn’t you want to wait until after you had unburdened yourself to the reporter you were supposed to meet?

“That just doesn’t make any sense. I mean, why would she kill herself before she—”

I stopped myself just in time.

Raley leaned in, his bushy eyebrows moving north. “Before she what?”

I shut my mouth with a click.

“Before . . . the homecoming dance,” I finished lamely.

That seemed to satisfy Raley as he just shrugged. “It’s hard to say what goes through a suicidal person’s mind.”

I bit my lip. I was pretty sure this person wasn’t suicidal. Which left only one alternative.

Sydney Sanders’s death was a homicide.

“It was a homicide,” I told Sam two hours later as I sat cross-legged on my bed.

“No fluffin’ way!”

I paused. “Wait—‘fluffin’’?”

Sam shrugged. “I was getting tired of ‘effing.’ It was too obvious, you know? I’m experimenting with some alternatives.”

“Well, fluffin’ is . . . creative.” I shook my head. “But, more important, yes way, Sydney was totally murdered.”

As soon as I’d arrived home in a police cruiser, Mom had jumped into total SMother mode, wigging out that I was with the police (again), hugging me to within an inch of my life when she heard the cop say one of my classmates had been killed (which, honestly, was a little comforting), then totally freaking that I’d been the one to find a dead body. (Again. Which, I had to admit, was totally freaky.) She’d immediately gone into the kitchen and made her version of comfort food, while I’d immediately called Sam and told her she had to come over ASAP. Both Sam and the rice cakes with flaxseed butter had arrived at the same time, and I’d used the comfort fuel to spill the whole story.

“So,” Sam said, grabbing a rice cake. She held it up to her nose, sniffed, then thought better of it, and placed it back on the plate. “Raley told you Sydney was murdered?”

“Well, not exactly,” I hedged. “He thinks she committed suicide.”

While I’d expected Sam to have the same shocked reaction I’d had at the idea, she just slowly nodded. “I can see that.”

I stared at her. “You’re kidding, right? I mean, we’re talking about a girl who incorporated cheats into her nail-polish design. She was scheming. Underhanded. Remorseless. Not the type to give it all up.”

“But she was depressed,” Sam pointed out. “She tweeted four times this afternoon alone talking about how miserable she was.”

“You follow Sydney on Twitter?” I asked.

Sam nodded. “She was captain of the lacrosse team. We all followed her.”

“What did she say?” I asked as Sam pulled out her phone. I leaned in to read the screen over her shoulder.

“Well, the first one was about how it sucks that her homecoming dress is going to waste. The second was about how it sucks that no one is around to call until lunch. One was about how it sucks that we can’t sunbathe anymore ‘’cause of sucky skin cancer,’” she said, scrolling through the tweets. “And the last one was about how much it sucks being alone by the pool on a sunny beautiful day.”

“That last one,” I said, stabbing a finger at her phone. “When did she write that?”

“Um . . .” Sam squinted at the readout. “Three-oh-five.”

I felt a sudden chill run up my spine. “I was outside her place just a couple minutes later. She must have sent that tweet right before . . .”

Sam’s eyes got all big and round. “She went in the pool,” she finished for me. “Ohmigod. She was killed while tweeting. It was Twittercide!”

Again that too-close-for-comfort ball of nausea flared up in my stomach. I grabbed a rice cake, chewing quickly to wash down the sensation.

“Honestly, I think that’s one more point against Sydney having killed herself,” I decided. “If she was tweeting when she died, wouldn’t she have left some sort of message? Tweeted why she was doing it? A ‘good-bye cruel world’ kind of thing?”

Sam nodded. “Totally. That would have been classic Sydney.” She paused. “But why would anyone want to kill her?”

“I can think of one reason,” I answered. “She was about to talk to me. Maybe whatever she was going to tell me was something that someone didn’t want to get out.”

Sam’s eyes went big again. “Whoa. You killed Sydney!”

I shifted uncomfortably on my patchwork comforter. “No I didn’t! I mean, not exactly. But the point is that the cops all think it was suicide, and we’re the only ones who know it was actually homicide.”

“Meaning?”

I bit my lip. “Meaning,” I said, the realization sinking in, “it’s up to us to figure out who really killed Sydney.”

Which, I realized the next morning, was easier said than done. As I’d mentioned to Raley, you didn’t get to be the homecoming queen front-runner by being a wallflower. Sydney had been visible, active in everything at school, and not afraid to do whatever she needed to in order to get ahead. Needless to say, Sydney had as many enemies as she did friends. However, there was one person who would qualify at the moment as both Sydney’s best friend and worst enemy: Quinn Leslie, the former BFF who Sydney had ratted out to the principal when she’d been caught cheating.