The Dead Girls Detective Agency (28 page)

“Honestly, I’m fine,” I said, and for the first time since I’d seen Kristen and David together, I wasn’t totally lying. “As fine as a dead girl can be.”

I grabbed the note out of Lorna’s hand and smoothed it out. See, I was
fine
. I could read it. It was only a stupid piece of paper that proved David and Kristen were going together tonight. Nothing I didn’t know already. Nothing I hadn’t heard them set up the other day, outside the locker room. It wasn’t as bad as the-thing-I-saw-at-my-funeral. It wasn—

“Hang on,” I said. “Kristen didn’t write this.”

Nancy and Lorna peered at the note over my shoulder.

“She didn’t? What do you mean? How do you know?” Nancy asked.

I took the note and sat in one of HHQ’s spinny chairs. “Last semester, Mr. Millington decided to ‘mix things up’ in chem class, so he split up everyone who usually worked together and made me and Kristen lab partners,” I said. Six eyes watched me intently, hanging on my every word. “It was a total disaster. You know I’m useless at chem, right? Well, on top of that, Kristen played the diva and refused to mix any of the experiments in case the chemicals got on her hands and ruined her cuticles and—”

“I do see her point,” Lorna said. “That’s simply vigilant hand care.”

“So I got her to do the report part instead, while I handled all the practicals.” I ignored Lorna, Nancy-style. “But Kristen’s handwriting is heinous—we failed one test just because Mr. M couldn’t even read her notes. After that, I had to do all the writing
and
the mixing. I’d know Kristen’s messy scrawl anywhere. And this is one trillion percent not it.”

Lorna and Nancy looked at me in shocked silence. Even Tess didn’t butt in. For once.

“But if that note’s not from Kristen, who wrote it?” Nancy said eventually. “Why would somebody fake a note to David? If they wanted to meet up with him that bad, why not ask him outright?”

“Uh-oh.” Lorna quietly sat down on HHQ’s other spinny chair. “I think I’ve got it.”

We all turned to stare at her expectantly.

“We’re so stupid,” she said, flipping her blond hair over her left shoulder. “I think we’ve been on the wrong track all along. Investigating the Tornadoes.”

“What do you mean?” I desperately hoped we were finally on to something here. And Lorna wasn’t about to send us down another dead end.

Lorna perched on the edge of the seat. Her eyes began to sparkle.

“You know Dolce and Gabbana did underwear as outerwear for Spring/Summer ’10, right?” she said.

“No, and even if I did, soo?”

“Underwear as outerwear,” Lorna continued. “It’s when you wear your lingerie like it’s regular clothes.” She flipped her hair again.

“What does that have to do with my murder and who wrote this note—you’re not making any sense,” I said.

“I am!” Lorna promised. “It’s a fashion amalogy.”

“You mean
analogy
?” Nancy asked.

“That’s what I said, a fashion
amalogy
.” Lorna sighed in frustration. “D and G, they needed a new direction, some inspiration, so they turned an idea they’d been working on on its head. Instead of looking at the obvious stuff—like skirts and shirts—they focused on what you don’t normally see instead, like bras and panties.”

“And again, sooo?” I said.

“Sooo, you’re not listening: What I mean is that maybe, just maybe, because we’ve been looking at this investigation in such a straightforward, obvious way, we’ve actually been missing out what’s staring us in the face. Like, instead of looking at the skirts, we need to look at the bra tops.”

“Pardon?”

“Instead of investigating the girls who
are
hanging around David, maybe we should be looking at the ones who
aren’t
. Stop looking at the obvious suspects.”

Tess, Nancy, and I gawked at her.

“You know Lorna may be on to something here,” Nancy said eventually.

“Oh no, not you too.” Tess rolled her eyes and walked over to the window wall.

“No, listen, all along we’ve thought that the motivation for Charlotte’s murder could be that Charlotte had something her killer wanted—like David,” Nancy said. “But then it became obvious that none of the Tornadoes would kill Charlotte to get to him.”

“Exactly! See!” Could Lorna
be
any more pleased with herself?

“If Charlotte’s murderer is that unhinged, then she’s not going to lose her chance with David after everything she’s been through to make him single.”

“Carry on,” I said. Nancy was starting to make sense. Not much. But enough.

“Like, if I’d killed you to get to your boyfriend, the last thing I’d do on the day of your funeral is let your family or the cops see me with my tongue down his throat,” Nancy said. “I’d be clever about it; play the long game. I’d sit back for a while, and—just in case anyone was suspicious that you didn’t slip under the F train because you’re clumsy as—I’d wait, then
bam!
when the heat was off and I knew it was safe, that’s when I’d make my move. That’s when I’d go after David for myself.”

“So what you’re essentially saying is that my real killer is out there somewhere, biding her time?”

“
YES
!” Lorna and Nancy chorused.

“And you think that this fake Kristen note is from my murderer and she’s sent it because she’s decided tonight’s the moment to let David know how she feels?”

“
YES
!”

“It makes total sense.” Nancy took out her spiral notebook and scanned back over the pages like she couldn’t believe we’d been so shortsighted. “It must have been so hard for her—all that planning, figuring out how to kill you, then as soon as you were gone, David got involved with the first girl who walked by.”

“The first
three
girls,” Tess said.

Did she ever miss a chance to be hideous?

“If she did kill you to get to him, your murderer must be mad at David—I would be,” Nancy said putting her notebook away. “She must think it’s now or never for them. She has to tell David how she feels before he gets serious with one of the Tornadoes—if that’s possible—or she’ll be back to square one. With the guy she wants, dating a girl who’s not her. Again.”

“And then we could have another murder on our hands,” I said. “But who is
she
?” How could someone have liked David
that
much from afar? And, seriously, how had I not noticed he had a stalker on the loose?

“Nancy, much as I cannot believe I am about to say this, we need a Plan.” Lorna jumped off the chair and put her hands on her hips.

“Yes. We need to work out who wrote this note,” Nancy said, pacing back and forth. “We could go to the high school and find some test papers—they might have samples of the students’ handwriting on them or we could—”

We didn’t have time for that. My murderer was meeting David tonight. We had to figure out who she was before then. We needed to know what we were dealing with—and now.

Something was bothering me. There were two things in my head—two memories swirling—but I couldn’t make them go together. What was the link? The note, the handwriting—I’d seen something somewhere before, I’d—

“Ohmigod,” I groaned, feeling sick to my core. I looked at “Kristen’s” note again. Crap, there they were—five of them, five totally obvious clues, staring me in the face like Lorna said.

“The letter,” I said. “I think I know who wrote the fake-Kristen letter. We need to get back to the high school quickly, we’ve missed something
massive
.”

Nancy paled.

“If the person I think wrote that letter did, then I’m not sure what she’s going to do to David up on the roof. We better get going—before it’s too late.”

Chapter 26

I PORTED BACK TO THE HIGH SCHOOL AS
quickly as my energy would carry me. David’s locker was bolted shut. Damn. We had to get into it. We had to see what they said. If I was right, well, I didn’t know what to think.

“Nancy, I need you to open this.” I pointed at the locker as she materialized next to me with a small
pop!
Lorna and Tess appeared to my left a beat later. It was Saturday and the school was completely deserted. The seniors were probably at home putting the final touches to their costumes for the Halloween party right now. We didn’t have much time before David went to meet “Kristen” on the Sedgwick roof.

“The combo is seven-seven-nine-one,” I said. “I can move Living objects a few centimeters if I really try, but I don’t have the know-how to do anything as complex as punch a code into a lock. You need to help, please. Quickly.”

Nancy didn’t ask me to explain what I’d just admitted—that I knew a trick she had never taught me. Instead she went to work on the lock. I watched, fascinated, as she concentrated, pushing her power down to her fingers, then carefully moving the dials on the lock into place. After just a few seconds, there was a small click and the lock sprung open. Nancy looked beat. Lorna took over, pulling the bolt off and dragging the metal door open.

“Promise you’ll teach me how to do that if I end up sticking around?” I said.

“Deal.” Nancy stood back, waiting further instruction from me.

“What are we looking for, Charlotte?” Tess asked. I looked over my shoulder, expecting her to be pulling a snarky face, but she looked genuinely concerned. Maybe it was the idea that she might be getting rid of me soon, but Tess hadn’t been mean to me for at least thirty seconds. Weird.

I stuck my head into the locker. It was seven p.m.—dark at this time of year—and there were no lights on in the hallways.

“If I could see what I was doing, I’d be looking for those envelopes—the sky-blue ones we found the other day,” I said. “There was a stack of them. Nancy held them up. Then we got distracted by Lorna finding the hair straighteners and …”

Nancy clicked her fingers and the lightbulb above our heads flashed on, flooding the space around us with light. I looked at her in disbelief.

“Oh, come on, Charlotte, you can’t have been dead for as long as me and not have learned a few neat tricks,” she said. “How do you think poltergeists do it?”

Cool. Maybe I should have studied my copy of the Rules after all.

Tess was rustling around in David’s locker now, turning over pieces of garbage, paper, books … “Where are they?” she asked. “Nancy so had them. I saw her and … Aha! Here you go.”

Tess pulled the handful of blue envelopes out of a pile of mess and held them up. “Are these what you mean?” she asked.

“Yes!” They were exactly what we were looking for. The key to my Key.

“I recognize those—they’re the reminder letters sent to David from the library.” Nancy’s expression was confused. “Charlotte, you said they would be about his overdue books. What have they got to do with this?”

“Everything,” I said. “Look at the writing on the front.” Nancy and Lorna stared at the letters in Tess’s hands.
For the attention of David Maher
was formally scribbled in that swirly girlie writing with circles above the i’s.

“Now look at the letter from ‘Kristen’ again,” I said.

Nancy took the two pieces of paper from Tess and kneeled on the floor. She smoothed them out to compare. I sat down on the tiles next to her.

“Oh,” she said suddenly. There we go. Nancy had spotted them too. “The circles—whoever wrote the Kristen note puts circles above their i’s too.”

“Exactly,” I said. “And, unless I’m mistaken, the handwriting is totally the same, right?”

Nancy nodded. “Whoever wrote the fake Kristen letter wrote all these,” I said, pointing at the pile. “And the only person in this school who sends out book reminders is Library Girl.”

“What? That little sandy-haired sophomore from the other day?” Tess asked. “She looks so …
dull
. Could she really be a killer?”

There was a ripping sound. Lorna concentrated hard as she used her energy to open the first of the envelopes. She pulled out a single piece of light-blue paper, her eyes rounding under the yellow bulb as she started to read.

“What? What does it say?” Nancy asked impatiently.

“‘
How I wish you could see the potential, the potential of you and me
,’” Lorna read.

“Wait there’s more.” Lorna concentrated on the letter.

“I will possess your heart.’”

“Weird, it sounds sort of like—”

“Lyrics from a song,” I said, finishing Nancy’s sentence. I recognized them right away. I’d played them a million times before—walking down Fifth to the subway, as I ran through the park on my way to school, at night when my brain was buzzing and I couldn’t sleep.

“She’s a fan of Death Cab for Cutie,” I said. “Those are the words to their song ‘I Will Possess Your Heart.’”

“‘I Will Possess Your Heart’?” Lorna said. “If she only knew.”

“Let’s see the next one.” Nancy ripped open the next letter in the library-stamped pile. “We need a little more evidence than just some dotted i’s and smitten song lyrics.”

She began to read.

“I wish I was special,

You’re so very special.”

“That’s ‘Creep’ by Radiohead,” Tess said. “I’d know it anywhere. They’re one of Edison’s favorite bands.”

“And David’s,” I said, our eyes clashing. Had Library Girl been following him to know that?

“I’ve sooo never heard of them, but I can still figure out what those words mean,” Lorna said. “Imagine if you’d tried to, like, bare your soul in verse and the guy you made a fool out of yourself for didn’t even get it—or acknowledge you. I’d be upset.”

“You know what? It’s actually kind of a shame that David was too lazy to open her love letters, because he would have gotten a total kick out of playing guess-the-tune,” I said. “So these notes, do you think they were written before I … died?”

“There are, like, fifteen in here,” Nancy said, counting them up. “I think it’s fair to assume she must have sent those over a time span longer than the last week. She could have been sending them for months. Getting angrier and angrier the longer David didn’t talk to her about them.”

What? Like angrier and angrier until she decided enough was enough and she had to push me under the nearest subway train? Awesome. So my boyfriend’s laziness could be partly to blame for getting me killed.