White Cat (25 page)

“Lila just showed up out of nowhere,” I say, which is basically true. “I thought she was dead. I haven’t seen her since we were both fourteen. I was just following her lead.”

Zacharov takes a sip from his glass and winces. “Lila, are you going to tell me where you’ve been?”

She shrugs slim shoulders and avoids his gaze.

“You’re protecting someone. Your mother? I always thought she’d taken you away from me. Tell me you got fed up with the old—”

“No!” Lila says.

He’s still lost in the thought. “She practically accused me of having you murdered. She told the FBI that I said you were better off dead than with her. The FBI!”

“I wasn’t with Mom,” Lila says. “Dad, Mom had nothing to do with this.”

He stops and stares at her. “Then what? Did someone do . . .” He leaves the sentence unfinished and turns toward me. “Did you? Did you hurt my daughter?”

I hesitate.

“He didn’t do anything to me,” Lila says.

Zacharov touches a gloved hand to my shoulder. “Your mother’s appeal is coming up, isn’t it, Cassel?”

“Yes, sir,” I say.

“I’d hate to see anything go wrong with that. If I find out—”

“Leave him alone,” says Lila. “Listen to me, Dad. Just listen for a minute. I’m not ready to talk about what happened. Stop trying to find someone to blame. Stop with the interroga
tion. I’m home now. Aren’t you glad I’m home?”

“Of course I’m glad,” he says, clearly stricken.

I touch my sore ribs without thinking. I want another aspirin, but I don’t know where the guy put the bottle.

“I’m trusting you for her sake,” he says to me, and then his voice softens. “My daughter and I need to talk. We need to be alone—you understand that, right?”

I nod my head. Lila is looking out at the black water. She doesn’t turn.

Zacharov takes his wallet from inside his jacket and counts out five hundred dollars. “Here,” he says.

“I can’t take that,” I say.

“I’d feel better if you did,” he says.

I stand up and try not to wince while doing it. I shake my head. “I hope you didn’t have your heart set on feeling better.”

He snorts. “One of the boys will see you home.”

“I can go? Really?”

“Don’t kid yourself. I can pick you up like a dime off the sidewalk anytime I want.”

I want to say something to Lila, but her back is still to me. I can’t guess her thoughts.

“I’m having a little party on Wednesday at a place called Koshchey’s. A fund-raiser. You should come,” Zacharov says. “Do you know why I like Koshchey’s?”

I shake my head.

“Do you know who Koshchey the Deathless is?”

“No,” I say, thinking of the strange mural on the ceiling of the restaurant.

“In Russian folklore Koshchey is a sorcerer who can
become a whirlwind and destroy his enemies.” Zacharov touches the glittering pin on his chest. “He hides away his soul in a duck’s egg so he can’t be killed. Don’t cross me, Cassel. I am not a safe man to make your enemy.”

“I understand,” I say, and open the door. What I understand is that Lila and I are on our own and we don’t even have a plan.

“And, Cassel?”

I turn.

“Thank you for bringing my daughter back.”

I walk out the door. As I wait for the elevator to come, my phone rings. I am so tired that it seems a huge effort to take it out of my pocket.

“Hello?” I say.

“Cassel?” says Dean Wharton. He doesn’t sound happy. “I’m sorry to be calling so late, but we just got the final call from one of our board members on the West Coast. Welcome back to Wallingford. We got the report from your doctor and the whole board voted. We’d like you to remain a day student on a probationary basis, but so long as you don’t get into any more trouble, we may consider letting you return to the dorms for your senior year.”

I smother the ironic laughter that threatens to crawl up my throat. My con worked. I can go back to school. But I can’t go back to being the person I thought I was. “Thank you, sir,” I manage to say.

“We’ll expect to see you tomorrow morning, Mr. Sharpe. Since you’ve paid through the end of the year, please feel free to eat breakfast and dinner in the cafeteria.”

“Monday morning?” I echo.

“Yes, tomorrow, in the morning. Unless you have other plans,” he says dryly.

“No,” I say. “Of course not. See you tomorrow, Dean. Thank you, Dean.”

One of Zacharov’s guys drives me home. His name turns out to be Stanley. He’s from Iowa and doesn’t know practically any Russian. He’s not good with languages, he says.

He tells me all that when he lets me out in front of my house. Even though he made me sit in the back of the town car with the tinted privacy divider up, I guess he could see more than I thought. I guess he watched me unbutton my shirt and brush my fingers over the bruises purpling the skin over my ribs, testing each bone for give. I’m not guessing that just because he was so friendly when we got to the house—he also gave me his entire bottle of aspirin.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

MY GRANDFATHER’S NOT at home when I get there, but there’s a note scratched in pen on the back of a receipt and stuck to the fridge with an
I ♥ CHIHUAHUAS
magnet.

Gone to Carney for a few days.
Call me when you get in.

I stare at the note, trying to decipher what it means, but I can’t quite think beyond the fact that there won’t be a car for me to borrow tomorrow. I stumble upstairs, set the alarm
on my phone, push a chair up against the door, and chew up another handful of aspirin. I don’t even bother kicking off my shoes or getting under the covers; I just smother my face in the pillow and drop down into sleep like a dead man finally returning to his grave.

For a moment after my alarm goes off and I’m jolted awake, I don’t know where I am. I look around the bedroom that I slept in when I was a kid and it seems that it must have belonged to someone else.

I lean over and switch off my phone, blink a few times.

My head feels clearer than it has in days.

The pain has abated some—maybe because I finally got some sleep—but the reality of what’s happened and what’s about to happen seems to finally be sinking in. I don’t have a lot of time—three days—to plan.

And I need to stay away from my brothers long enough to do it. Wallingford will be good for that. They don’t know I’ve been let back in, and even if they figure it out, at least being at school isn’t obviously hiding. At least I can continue to act like I’m a killer robot waiting for them to utter a command word.

I fumble in my closet for my scratchy shirt and uniform pants. I didn’t bring my jacket or shoes with me when I packed up the stuff in my dorm, but I have a bigger problem than that. I don’t have a ride to school.

I put on sneakers and call Sam.

“Do you have any idea what time it is?” he says groggily.

“I need you to pick me up,” I tell him.

“Dude, where are you?”

I give him the address and he hangs up. I hope he doesn’t just roll over and go back to sleep.

In the bathroom, as I brush my teeth, I see that my cheek is purpled with bruising above the thin beard that’s grown in. My hair was getting too long before and it’s even shaggier now, but I wet it down and try to comb it into shape.

I don’t shave, even though it’s against the rules to be anything but as smooth as a baby’s bottom, because I can just guess how bad that bruise would look if they could see the rest of it.

Downstairs, as I brew the coffee and watch the black liquid drip down, I think of Lila looking out at the sea. I think of her with her back to me as I’m walking out the door.

Mom says that when you’re scamming someone, there needs to be something at stake, something so big that they’re not going to walk away, even if things get sketchy. They have to go all in. Once they’re all in, you win.

Lila’s at stake. She’s not walking away, which means I can’t walk away either.

I’m all in.

They’re winning.

All the teachers are really nice to me. They mostly—with the exception of Dr. Stewart, who gives me a whole bunch of zeros, enunciating the numbers carefully as he puts each one in the grade book—understand that I failed to keep up with the homework, even though they emailed me assignments daily. They tell me they’re happy I’m back. Ms. Noyes even hugs me.

My fellow students look at me like I’m a dangerous lunatic
with two heads and a nasty communicable disease. I keep my head down, eat my Tater Tots at lunch, and try to look interested in my classes.

All the while I’m daydreaming schemes.

Daneca sits down next to me in the lunchroom and pushes her civics notebook in my direction. “You want to copy my notes?”

“Copy your notes?” I say slowly, looking at the book.

She rolls her eyes. Her hair is in two braids, each one tied with rough string. “You don’t have to if you don’t want to.”

“No,” I say. “I do. I definitely do.” I look at the notebook in front of me, flipping the pages, seeing her looping handwriting. I outline the marks with my gloved finger, an idea starting to form in my mind.

I start to grin.

Sam sets down a tray on the other side. It’s piled with a gooey lump of delicious-smelling mac-n-cheese.

“Hey,” he says. “Prepare to be very happy.”

That’s the last thing I expect him to say. “What?” I ask. My fingers are tracing new words in the margin of Daneca’s notebook. Plans. I’m writing in a familiar style, but not my own.

“Nobody thought you were coming back. Nobody. Noooooobody.”

“Thanks. Yeah, I can see how you’d think I’d find that thrilling.”

“Dude,” he says. “A lot of people just lost a lot of money. We made up for that bad bet. We’re kings of finance!”

I shake my head in amazement. “I always said you were a
genius.”

We punch each other in the shoulder and punch fists and just keep smiling like morons.

Daneca wrinkles her brow, and Sam stops. “Uh,” Sam says. “There were some other things we wanted to talk to you about.”

“Less fun things, I’m guessing,” I say.

“I’m sorry about losing your cat,” she says to me after a few moments.

“Oh,” I say, looking up. “No. The cat’s fine. The cat’s back where she belongs.”

“What do you mean?”

I shake my head. “Too complicated.”

“Are you in some kind of trouble?” Sam asks. “Because if you were in some kind of trouble, maybe you could tell us. Dude, no offense, but you seem like you’re losing it.”

Daneca clears her throat. “He told me what you told him when he found you in bed with that girl. About being a—”

I look around the cafeteria, but no one seems close enough to hear. “You told her I was a worker?”

Sam looks down quickly. “We’ve been hanging out a lot, what with the play and all. I’m sorry. Sorry. I know that wasn’t cool.”

Of course. Normal people gossip. Normal people tell each other things, especially when they’re trying to impress each other. I guess I should feel betrayed, but all I feel is relief.

I’m tired of pretending.

“Are you guys a thing?” I ask. “A boyfriendly-girlfriendly thing?”

“Yeah,” Daneca says, her expression some combination of pleasure and embarrassment.

Sam looks like he’s going to pass out.

“That’s great,” I say. “I didn’t mean to lie to your mother, Daneca. I didn’t know.” But I know I wouldn’t have told her. I would have lied; I just didn’t get a chance.

“Are you going out with that girl?” she asks. “The one you were sleeping with?”

That startles a laugh out of me. “No.”

“So, what, you were just—”

“We weren’t,” I say quickly. “Believe me, we weren’t. For one thing, she’s probably insane. And for another, she hates me.”

“Okay, so who is she?” Daneca asks.

“I thought you’d want to know what I am.”

“I want you to believe you can trust me. And Sam. You can trust us.” She pauses. “You have to trust somebody.”

I bow my head. She’s right that if I want any plan to succeed, I’ll need help. “Her name is Lila Zacharov.”

Daneca gapes at me. “The girl that disappeared back, like, when we were in middle school?”

“You heard of her?”

“Sure,” Daneca says, picking up one of my Tater Tots. Oil soaks her glove. “Everyone heard about it. A crime family princess. Her case was on the news a lot. My mom got weird about letting me go anywhere by myself after it happened.” She puts the tot into her mouth. “So, what really happened to her?”

I hesitate, but it’s all or nothing now. “She was turned into a cat,” I say. I can feel my face twisting into an awkward gri
mace. It feels so unnatural to tell the truth.

Daneca chokes, spitting the food into her hand.

“A transformation worker?” Daneca says. Then, after a moment, she whispers. “
The
cat?”

“That’s
crazy
,” says Sam.

“I know you think that I’m making this up,” I say, rubbing my face.

“We don’t,” she says, and she shifts a little.

Sam winces. I think she kicked him under the table. “I didn’t mean crazy like ‘You’re crazy,’” he says. “I meant it like ‘Whoa.’”

“Sure. Okay.” I’m not sure if they believe me, but I feel a dizzy sense of hope.

It occurs to me that I’ve done exactly what I need to in order to set up Daneca and Sam for a con job. They’re already invested. They trust me. They’ve seen me pull a scam before. This is bigger stakes; I just have to promise them a bigger score.

My phone buzzes and I look down. It’s a number I don’t know. I flip it open and bring it to my ear.

“Hello?”

“This is what I want you to do,” says Lila. “You’re going to go to the party on Wednesday and pretend to work my dad—the same way you were supposed to. I’m trusting you to fake it. I think Dad’s smart enough to go along with you.”

“That’s the plan?”

“That’s your part. I can’t talk for long, so you have to listen. A few minutes later I’m going to come through the door with a gun, shoot Anton and save Dad. My part. Simple.”

There is so much that can go wrong with that plan that I don’t even know where to start. “Lila—”

“I even got your brother Philip out of it—just like you wanted,” she says.