THE LONG GAME (17 page)

By the time Henry and I arrived at the rendezvous point, there was a freshman directing students to the tunnel’s hidden
entrance. Henry and I descended in silence. The tunnel was dark and lit only by hundreds of glow sticks that someone—presumably Di—had scattered artistically throughout.

Henry knelt down and picked up a hot-pink
glow stick. He held it out to me and gave me a dry look. “There is a high level of probability that we will regret this.”

I plucked the proffered glow stick from his hands and smiled. “I don’t believe in regrets.”

When the tunnel forked, signs posted on the wall instructed us to take a right. We followed the instructions—and the sound of music in the distance.

When we finally reached the end
of the line and pushed through a metal grate that had been propped open, it took me a moment to realize where the tunnel had let out.

Is that a swimming pool?

“The Aquatic Complex,” Henry told me.

“Yeah,” I said, glancing around. “I got that.”

Stadium seating surrounded us on all sides. An Olympic-sized training pool was set into the floor. Someone had positioned a trio of kegs along one edge.
And farther down, near the diving pool, I could make out what appeared to be a bowl of punch and a veritable castle of red plastic cups.

“This is not going to end well,” Henry said, eyeing a couple of seniors climbing up to the diving platform, red cups in hand.

As if summoned by the mere thought of something being a bad idea, Di appeared beside us. She had a bottle of champagne in each hand.
With an imperious smile, she set one on the ground
and opened the other. Champagne fizzed to the top, and Di held it over her head in victory.

“You asked for a party,” she told me, over the sound of the music.

“You might want to turn that down,” Henry told her.

“Pshaw!”
Di gestured rather liberally with the champagne bottle. “This building has walls so thick that it is practically soundproof!”

Forty yards away, one of the senior boys came barreling off the high dive, fully clothed.

Di frowned. “This is an American custom?” she asked.

“Not exactly,” I said.

Di eyed the high dive, then smiled. She took a gulp of champagne, handed the bottle to me, and made a beeline for the ladder.

An instant later, I saw a man wearing a suit and an earpiece walk by, muttering something in Icelandic
under his breath.

“How do you think she talked her bodyguard into this?” I asked Henry, tracking Di’s security detail as he grimly pulled her down off the ladder.

“By threatening to do something worse?” Vivvie popped up beside us. She was wearing a half-dozen rainbow-colored leis. In contrast, her expression was almost comically serious. “I think you were right, Tess. People are really letting
loose. Pretty soon, our classmates are going to be feeling
very
chatty.”

Another fully clothed senior came barreling off the diving board.

“Where do we start?” Vivvie asked.

“With anyone John Thomas might have threatened.” I paused. “And with the girls from ISWE. All we need is for one person to open up and admit that John Thomas wasn’t the guy people want to remember. If we can get one, others
will follow.”

If the killer was here, I doubted he or she would volunteer their own motive—but someone else might.

“You talk to the girls,” Henry said. “I have another target in mind.” I followed his gaze to a group of John Thomas’s friends standing near the keg.

“You think they might know who else John Thomas had dirt on and what he was planning to do with it?” I asked.

“I think,” Henry replied,
“that John Thomas liked an audience. Whatever plans he had, he would have shared them with someone.”

With that, Henry made his way across the room. I watched as an easy smile crossed his face. My first impression of Henry Marquette had been that he was a little formal, a little stiff. It had taken me longer to realize that he was a master at putting other people at ease—when he wanted to.

As
I watched Henry disappear into the crowd of John Thomas’s friends, I noticed two of those friends staring at something—or someone.

Emilia Rhodes had arrived at the party.

“Did we know that Emilia was coming?” Vivvie asked me.

“No,” I said. “We did not. Come on.” By the time I arrived at Emilia’s side, there was no doubt in my mind that she’d noticed the whispers and stares. From my place beside
Emilia, I stared back at John Thomas’s friends, my eyes narrowed. One of them flinched.

“Are they scared of you?” Vivvie asked me over the pounding of the music.

“It is possible,” I said, “that I threatened to castrate a couple of John Thomas’s friends my first week at Hardwicke.”

“Of course you did.” Emilia looked from me to Vivvie, then back again. “I don’t suppose it will do any good whatsoever
to tell you that I don’t need you glaring at anyone on my behalf?”

I shrugged.

“Or,” Emilia continued, “to suggest that the two of you go on your merry way, and I go on mine?”

“Tess is the patron saint of misfits,” Vivvie said brightly. “And I’m a barnacle. Pretty sure you’re stuck with us.”

“Pretty sure you’re here to find a way to help my brother,” Emilia countered. “So go. Fix. I don’t
need a babysitter, let alone two.”

Something about the way that Emilia had said that we were here to help Asher told me that she was as well. As she strolled into the fray, I tracked her gaze to a boy sitting up on the bleachers. Unlike most of the guys around him, he didn’t look particularly inebriated. Or particularly inclined to chat.

“Who’s that?” I asked Vivvie, nodding toward the boy.

“Matt Benning,” Vivvie supplied promptly. She had an almost encyclopedic knowledge of everyone at Hardwicke, from the students down to the janitor. “He has a little sister. Lizzie. She’s a freshman. Their dad works in Hardwicke security.”

Apparently, while I’d been thinking about who had motive to kill John Thomas Wilcox, Emilia had been coming up with some questions of her own.

I caught up to
her just as she reached the bottom of the bleachers. “What do you want with Matt Benning?” I asked her.

“What do you think?” Emilia said, her eyes still on her target. “I want to know why anyone suspects my brother of murder when the whole thing—including the real killer—should have been captured on video.”

Vivvie popped around to stand directly in front of Emilia. “I know you’re not going to
want to hear this,” she said, “but you should let Tess talk to Matt.”

“Why?” Emilia returned. “Because my twin is the one the police are desperate to pin this on, or because people don’t like me the way they like Tess?”

“Neither,” Vivvie said softly. “Because if John Thomas was threatening someone, if he hurt someone or blackmailed them or made them do something they didn’t want to do, they’ll
talk to you. Not Tess, Emilia.
You
.”

Emilia took a single step back from Vivvie. I could see her wanting to tell Vivvie that wasn’t true.

The words dried up on her lips.

“I’ll talk to Matt,” I told Emilia.
You can do this
, I continued silently. I knew better than to say those words to her out loud.

“Fine.” Emilia turned her back on me. She didn’t want to do this, but she would—for Asher.

Matt Benning didn’t so much as glance my way when I took a seat behind him on the bleachers. He was sitting on the edge of a group of guys, close enough to give the appearance that he was part of their conversation, but making no move to actually join
it. He gave off an air of being present but not really a part of things.

I’d been that person, back in Montana.

“Not in the mood for a drink?”
I asked him.

He didn’t turn around. “Not much of a drinker.”

I managed a small smile. “Me neither.”

I settled into silence then. I rested my forearms on my legs and waited. Before moving to DC, I’d spent my entire life on my grandpa’s ranch. I had a sixth sense for knowing when to approach and when to let a tetchy horse approach me.

Minutes crept by as Matt and I sat on the edge of the crowd,
neither one of us saying a word.

“They’re going to catch us, you know.” Matt’s voice was naturally deep and even-keeled. My gut said that he would have been good with horses, too. “There are cameras everywhere on this campus.”

I slid down to sit beside him but kept my gaze focused straight ahead. “Not everywhere, apparently,” I said.

If there were footage of John Thomas’s murder, the police
would have already made an arrest.
I didn’t bother putting that into words. “Were you and John Thomas friends?” I asked Matt instead.

For several seconds, Matt said nothing. “I have a little sister,” he said finally. “Freshman. She asked me to take her picture the other day.”

It took me a moment to catch the implication—his little sister had been one of the girls to join the ISWE project.

“Did you take the picture?” I asked. If he’d agreed to help his sister with our protest, that told me something about the kind of guy he was.

“I did.”

I turned that over in my head for a second or two before I took a risk. “Do you know Asher Rhodes?” I asked. “Because if you know Asher at all, that means that you
know
he didn’t kill John Thomas.”

Matt neither agreed nor disagreed with that statement.

“If I asked you who on this campus could get around the security feeds,” I ventured, “would you tell me?”

Matt turned from me to direct his stare back out at the makeshift pool party going on below us. He picked a stray lei up off the bleachers and held it taut between his hands. “You’re assuming I know the answer to that question.”

Yes. I am.
I let my silence speak for me.

“You’re also assuming,”
Matt continued quietly, “that I’m the kind of guy who likes to talk.”

“You’re not?” I said.

He rubbed his thumb over one of the flowers on his lei. “I’m the kind of guy who likes to keep his head down.”

That was why he was here, sitting on the edge of things, just close enough to blend.

“If you were really the kind of guy who kept his head down,” I pointed out, “you wouldn’t be here.”

At
a completely illegal party, where you know we’re going to get caught.

Matt responded to my comment by turning to look at a cluster of girls by the punch. It took me a moment to realize that one of them was his little sister, that he was probably here for the sole purpose of keeping an eye on her.

My gut said that Matt was a good guy. But it also said that he wasn’t going to make waves. There
was a good chance he and
his sister attended Hardwicke on scholarship—scholarships they received because their father worked for the school.

He wasn’t going to tell me anything his father had said.

He was going to keep his head down and keep watch.

Luckily, I had other options. I leaned back against the row of seats behind me, watching the group of freshman girls Matt had been keeping watch
over. They were young—excited to be here and playing it cool.

Something tells me Matt’s little sister isn’t so into keeping her head down.

I texted Vivvie. And then I waited.

CHAPTER 39

“Here’s the deal,” Vivvie told me as we walked along the edge of the pool, dodging partygoers as we went. “Lizzie’s father is really stressed out right now because there are some major questions about how, exactly, someone managed to black out the library security cameras the day John Thomas was murdered. The police have been all over it. The headmaster has brought in a dozen new security
specialists, and long story short—”

Vivvie’s version of
short
was somewhat different from mine.

“—the only way it could have been a student is if that student were a
really
good hacker working from the campus’s wireless network. Otherwise it would have had to be someone in security or high up in the Hardwicke administration.” Vivvie paused. “Very high up,” she emphasized.

Before I could reply,
a partygoer bopped into view, dancing between Vivvie and me. It took me a second to realize it was Asher.

“Am I the only one who hears ‘high up in the Hardwicke administration’ and thinks that Headmaster Raleigh definitely
has his shadypants moments?” he asked, still bopping around. When neither Vivvie nor I replied, he stopped dancing and lifted his hand in a solemn greeting. “Hello, friends
of Asher!”

“Asher!” I said, taking him by the elbow and pulling him toward the side of the room. “What are you doing here?”

I hadn’t been lying when I’d told Ivy that I couldn’t imagine Asher coming tonight. Given everything that had happened—and the fact that at least one of John Thomas’s friends was probably spoiling for a fight—this could go very badly.

“Welllllllll,” Asher hedged, dragging
out the word. “I may have hitched a ride in the back of Emilia’s car. She may not know I’m here.”

Nearby, Emilia was talking to a trio of sophomore girls. She glanced at me, then at Asher. Her eyes widened as she registered his presence, then narrowed.

“Emilia may now know I am here,” Asher modified.

I sensed the shift in the room the moment John Thomas’s friends noticed Asher.

Henry made
it to us before they did. “We need to get you out of here,” he told Asher.

“I’ve gone to school with these people my entire life.” Asher glanced from Henry to me, bewildered. “If they think I might be capable of murder, I have clearly been doing this lovable-pacifist thing all wrong.”

One second Asher was standing beside me, and the next, one of John Thomas’s friends had him by the lapels.

“I’ve very recently sworn off fisticuffs,” Asher told him. “Quite undignified, the sign of a lesser man, gets you almost immediately accused of murder . . . w
hich I did not commit
,” he added hastily.

“Let him go,” Henry said. Gone was the easy smile he’d used to infiltrate this group earlier. There was nothing even remotely easygoing about this Henry.

All around us, the party fell silent. All
conversation died off. The only sound was the constant beat of the bass line.