Wolf in sheep's clothing.
Wolf, indeed, Calla mused, digging out the lockpicks she'd stashed in her nightstand. Time to go hunting.
"I'm heading out," she called, hoping her mother would be able to hear her from the kitchen.
Soft footsteps alerted her to her mother's approach. Calla quickly tucked the small leather kit in the waistband of her shorts. "You just got home," Rosalind Parker protested, appearing in the doorway with a bag of chips in hand.
"I want to stop by Rachel's," Calla murmured, letting her eyes drop to her feet.
Her mother immediately went to her side. "Oh." Calla often frequented her dead best friend's place. Morbid, perhaps. But a grieving teenager needed a ritual, and her mother did not begrudge her this. "Spaghetti for dinner?"
Her favorite. "Sure."
Her mother smiled a bit sadly and then left, returning to the kitchen. The smell of potato chips vanished.
Calla turned back to the nightstand, debating. Better safe than sorry. She snatched a golden key from the drawer and followed in her mother's footsteps. She paused at the threshold of her bedroom, her eyes lingering on the door across the hall.
What's behind that door?
Rachel had asked her that question only once—in life, and in death. Calla's answer had been the same on both occasions.
An empty room.
Calla's hold on the golden key tightened.
The room reminded her of a child's laughter: a little boy with blonde curls and ruddy cheeks. She closed her eyes, trying to hold onto the memory.
But it wasn't the little boy she saw behind her eyelids. Instead, she saw an abandoned hallway.
An abandoned hallway and a dead girl in a ballerina costume.
# # #
The lockpick kit had been a gift for her seventeenth birthday. I'm definitely going to regret this, Cooper had told her as she'd ripped into the bag, a wide grin spreading across her face when she realized what he'd gotten her.
She'd spent the last eight months putting the kit to good use, learning how to pick a variety of locks with meticulous efficiency. Padlocks. Deadbolts. Lever locks. Cooper had once caught her fiddling with a Euro cylinder beneath the oak tree. His reaction had been a snort of laughter.
He hadn't laughed when she broke into his locker the next morning.
Clutching the pins in one hand, Calla slowed as she approached the mansion at the end of the drive. She immediately checked her phone.
Just over twenty-one minutes, she observed. Not bad. She'd dedicated herself to improving her long-distance performance, and had shaved an entire minute off her typical eight-minute-mile since the start of the summer.
Her attention drifted to the mansion looming ahead.
Hello, old friend. Her sneakers made little sound against the marble steps as she ascended, her eyes zeroing in on the knob lock on Rachel Smith's front door. She'd become quite familiar with the model over the last two months. Too familiar, perhaps.
The lock quickly gave way beneath her ministrations. Tucking the toolkit back into the waistband of her shorts, Calla slipped inside.
"I'm back," Calla greeted no one in particular, taking the stairs two at a time. Patricia and Richard Smith had officially flown the coop. I don't imagine we'll be back, Patricia had explained to Calla over the phone, barely a week after her return from the hospital her sophomore year. I'm glad you're alright, sweetheart. Take care of yourself. You're still welcome to visit her anytime you like.
Time had not been kind to this place. The housekeepers had been dismissed. The furniture had been covered. Calla swallowed down a sneeze as she passed Richard Smith's study on the way to Rachel's bedroom—and then she paused.
An overwhelming collection of books lined the walls of the study. Calla stepped into the room, examining the nearby titles. Financial planning. Philosophy. She smirked as her eye caught on Sun Tzu's The Art of War.
The books in my dad's study are nothing compared to my aunt's private collection. Rachel had told her this on multiple occasions. Still, the study was quite impressive. Calla scanned the walls, trying to envision what the room might look like in the dead of night. It would be next to impossible to spot the books in the gloom...
Impossible. Unless you knew where to look.
She frowned, struck by a sudden revelation. As far as she knew, Cory had never been granted an extensive tour of Tracy Smith's mansion. He'd been to a party or two, certainly. He'd seen the gargoyles perched on the balconies, and he'd seen the kitchen. He might have even seen a lavish guest bedroom or two, if his good charm had gotten him lucky enough.
But he couldn't have been very familiar with the library. Not intimately. Which begged the question...
"What are the odds," Calla murmured, tapping the spine of The Art of War, "that Cory Michaels managed to pull a creepy fairytale book off the shelves, and not some boring bullshit on hedge funds?"
He'd either known where to look (unlikely), or he'd been incredibly lucky (also unlikely), given the timeframe he'd been working with. He'd admitted he witnessed the murder from his hiding spot in the guest bedroom—but even if he'd been snooping in the library beforehand, he couldn't have been there long. He'd been seen with many others at that party, social butterfly that he was. If he'd disappeared upstairs, it had been for a short time.
What are the odds, she mused once more.
Calla contemplated those odds as she escaped the study and retreated to the bedroom at the end of the hall. She'd spent hours in this room. Laughing. Gossiping. But time had warped her memory. She could no longer remember what had been real—and what had been an act.
Another layer to her mask.
Calla stared at the bed in the center of the room. The entire space had been left untouched. A film of dust covered everything, a testament to the passage of time.
This place is a tomb.
Calla had found more joy in the cemetery. Frowning, she moved to the closet. The power had long been shut off, so she made do with the light filtering in from the windows at her back and the flashlight on her phone.
The closet was just as she remembered it to be: impeccably organized. Calla ran her free hand along the garments hanging to her left. Her fingertips snagged on a sparkly number. It was the backup dress Rachel had purchased for the winter gala.
Calla stared at it, expressionless.
Why are you here, Calla?
She closed her eyes. She knew that if she turned around, she would see her there—Rachel, leaning against the open doorway, her eyes dark and sad.
"Why are you here?" Calla muttered, pressing the heel of her palm against the sudden ache at her temple. "You're dead."
You promised, Rachel whispered. And then she was silent.
Calla turned. There was no one there.
She was alone.
She swore. Her eyes swept the length of the closet, determined to pry loose its secrets. At the time, she'd assumed Cory had tidied up the closet as a tip-off. He'd wanted to get her attention, and he had. Once Calla had put the pieces together, she'd found Alicia Smith's dearly-departed fairytale book in the coat of Rachel's jacket—the very jacket she'd worn the night of her murder.
Cory had already taken the pages he needed. Returning the book was his way of playing with her—of rubbing her best friend's murder in her face. Or so she'd thought.
But Cory had loved her. Cory had killed for her. First Jacob, for putting his hands on her in the parking lot. And then Jessica, for sneering at her at the movie theater. And he would have killed the others, too. Cooper, for daring to know her secret.
Vincent, for daring to want her.
Cory would have done anything to make her happy. Hadn't he said as much that awful, terrible night? Rachel's death...it was a piece of the puzzle that didn't quite fit.
"What if he didn't come here to mock me?" Calla posed the question aloud, half-hoping the figment of her best friend might reappear. Not good. Not good at all, for her to be hoping for such things. "What if it wasn't a ploy? What if it was an apology?"
She tried to envision Cory then. Those baby blue eyes. And that dashing smile, marred by guilt as he snuck into the mansion, into this very room.
I'm sorry, he'd mutter, slipping the book into Rachel's coat pocket. Killing her was a mistake. I'm sorry.
She immediately dismissed the thought. If it had been guilt that drove him to return the book, he would not have done this—this elaborate setting of the stage. After all, why go to such lengths? Why leave the book here, specifically? Because he'd known she would eventually return? That seemed like quite the gamble. He could have left the book at her doorstep. Or in her locker.
Preferably with a note that said I'm sorry for accidentally killing your best friend.
No. He'd specifically returned the book to this house, to this closet—and stuffed the book in the pocket of a dead girl's coat. But why taunt her like that? Why?
Calla sat on the ottoman at the center of the closet. She turned off her flashlight, plunging the room into semidarkness.
"It doesn't make sense," she repeated. "Unless..."
Unless he didn't kill her.
The thought came to her, unbidden. Because that was the crux of the matter—what it all came down to. Did Cory Michaels murder Rachel Smith?
The evidence told her he had. But the missing pieces of the puzzle and her own gut told her he had not.
But if it wasn't him...who, then? She grimaced, rubbing her aching temple. Astrid had motive. She knew the Smith mansion like the back of her hand. And those texts...
Calla huffed out a frustrated sigh. But this house has a stellar security system. Well, it used to, anyway. There's no way Astrid could have gotten in to plant the book without a spare key.
Calla had been convinced Cory was the one who'd slipped the key from her pocket, back when she'd dropped by his place to cajole information out of him. Had she been wrong about that, too?
Even if that's the case, none of this explains how the hell Astrid got her hands on the book in the first place.
Calla scowled as she ran through the possibilities. Had Astrid been working with Cory from the start? Had it been her idea to leave behind a page from that book of fairytales? Or had she stolen the book later, without his knowledge? She could have killed Rachel in the heat of the moment—and used the previous murders as a cover-up.
"But why return the book at all?" she muttered darkly, rubbing her temple. "What does it mean?"
She kept coming back to it—to the book. Why it had been chosen among so many others. Why the killer had left it for her to find. That nagging question lingered at the back of her mind, waiting to be answered.
Her phone buzzed, the sound like an avalanche in the silence of the house. She glared at the name on the screen. Perfect timing. As usual. "What do you want?"
Cooper wasted no time on pleasantries. "Are you inside?"
"Be more specific."
He sighed. "I'm sitting outside Rachel's house."
Calla blinked, momentarily stunned. What? "Why?"
"I..." She heard the sound of his engine guttering to a halt. "I figured you'd be here."
The boy who sees too much, indeed.
Calla sighed. "The door's unlocked." And then she hung up the phone.
She waited there in the darkness, trying to make sense of her jumbled thoughts. She'd been following a promising thread of thought, but she'd lost it. Like sand falling through her fingers.
The sound of footsteps on the staircase told her that she was not alone. Cooper appeared in her line of sight less than a minute later. His eyes darted around the room, soaking in the dust and details. He'd never been here, she realized. Any hope he'd had of a future with Rachel Smith had been snuffed as surely as her life had been.
"Hey," Calla greeted dully.
Cooper—who'd been preoccupied by the vanity over by the window, his fingers trailing along a discarded necklace—swore, his voice an octave too high. His head lashed back and forth, searching for her. She watched him with dark amusement.
Finally, he stared into the mouth of the closet with wide, horrified eyes. "Calla," he breathed, putting a hand over his throat.
"Who did you think it was?" She stood and emerged from the closet.
He considered this. "A psychotic killer?"
"Correct. Twenty points to Hufflepuff."
Cooper gave her an exasperated look. "We need to talk."
"Yes," she murmured, perching on the edge of the bed. "We do." Her eyes traveled from his ratty sneakers to his green hoodie. A hoodie, in this weather. Hopeless. "I've realized something."
He sat beside her, looking supremely uncomfortable. Whatever was on his mind, it couldn't be anything good. "What?" he asked, cautious.
"Well. I've realized a few things, actually. About Cory."
He didn't bother to interrupt. His eyes were dark, guarded.
Calla continued. "Cory was hiding in the guest bedroom that night. He watched me kill her." Silence grew between them. "Tracy, I mean," she clarified.
"Oh." He nodded in an exaggerated manner. "Right. Tracy. I thought you were talking about the other person you killed."
"My point," she pressed, ignoring his snide interruption, "is that the timeline isn't adding up."
His brow furrowed. "What timeline?"
She held up a finger. "He was already in the bedroom when Tracy and I went upstairs." She lifted a second finger. "I killed her. And I left." A third finger. "And then you showed up."
He stared at her. "Okay? And?"
"He'd already left a note behind by the time you found Tracy. Remember?" Her tone changed to one of dark amusement. "You vomited all over it."
Cooper flushed and folded his arms. "Okay. Yeah. The note." His frown deepened. "But...hold on..."
"Which means," she pushed, "that in the time it took me to go downstairs and for you to bumble over the dead body, he managed to sneak into the library, steal the book, and place the note."
"I did not bumble—"
"Can we focus? Please?" She snapped a finger in his face. "How did he have the time? How did he find just the right book? And just the right page?"
"I don't know," Cooper admitted, holding up his hands in surrender. He didn't seem to fully understand her insistence on this point. "Maybe it was luck of the draw?"
"No, Cooper." She stared into the closet. Stared and stared. "I don't believe in luck." She turned back to him. "We're missing something."
He searched her eyes for that something—a hint of madness, maybe. But he just pursed his lips and kept his silence.
She sighed. They were getting nowhere with this. And it was no wonder. Calla could barely understand her own suspicions. "Why are you here?"
Cooper seemed both relieved and disturbed by the sudden shift in subject. He rubbed his hands against his kneecaps. "Well...it can, uh, wait."
She shot him an incredulous look. "No. It can't. Spit it out."
"You have a lot on your mind," he said in a rush, standing. "We can talk later—"
Calla grabbed his hood and yanked him down on the bed. He choked, sputtering, as she released him. "Talk. Now."
"Fine. Fine." He rubbed his neck, wincing. "But you're not going to like it."
Calla sighed. Cooper really didn't need his pinky finger to live, did he? She could make one little snip-snip with a pair of hedge cutters—
"Aht, aht." He scooted away from her. "You have that look on your face. Stop it."
She raised an eyebrow. "Stop what?"
He waved in her general direction, still apprehensive. "That I'm thinking about skinned cats look."
That drew her up short. She'd always relied upon her mask to keep her dark thoughts off her face. But Cooper could see through her. Right to the bone.
To the ugly thing squirming around inside.
She frowned, but did not deny it. "Fine. Spill."
He blew out a breath, unbothered by her admission that she had, in fact, been thinking about dark, deadly fantasies. "It's about Tom Sahein."
Calla felt herself go stiff as a board. Beside her, Cooper did the same—mirroring her reaction. As if they were two sides of the same coin. "What about Tom Sahein?"
Cooper gave her a desperate look. "We've got a problem."