Prep School Confidential (A Prep School Confidential Novel) (24 page)

I find Peepers, whose real name is Arthur R. Colgate III, according to the leather notebook in front of him, sitting at a study carrel on the first floor. He’s reading a Stephen King book the size of two Bibles mashed together.

“Is that for a class?” I ask, sitting on the opposite side of the carrel.

Peepers peers at me over the top of the book. His glasses swallow half his face and magnify his eyes. It’s mean, but I get how he earned his nickname. “No. I just like to read in here.”

“Noisy roommate?” I ask casually.

“The opposite,” Peepers says. “He barely talks. He’s just
always
there.”

“That’s got to get annoying.” I trace the grooves in the carrel’s wooden surface with my finger. “You live with that guy Lee, right? The valedictorian?”

Peepers nods. “I didn’t want to, but I filled out my housing form late, so…”

I nod, even though I’m pretty sure Peepers got stuck with Lee because neither of them could get a single room. “That’s a bummer. He doesn’t do any clubs or anything after school to give you time alone?”

“Not really,” Peepers says. “But he does go home every Saturday night.”

“Every Saturday?” Isabella was killed on a Saturday night. I was hoping he could tell me if Lee disappeared for a few hours the night of her murder, but if Lee went home that Saturday night, there’s no way I’ll be able to find out if he came back to campus or not.

Peepers nods and my heart sinks.

“Hey,” he says. “You were Isabella Fernandez’s roommate, right?”

I nod. “Did you know her?”

“Just through class and stuff. She was nice.” Peepers shrugs.

“Lee liked her, didn’t he?” I ask.

“Lots of people liked her. Like I said, she was nice.”

I can tell I’m going to need to use fifth-grade language on this kid, so I say, “No, I mean, he
like
-liked her.”

“Oh. Yeah. I mean, she was the only girl who talked to him.” Peepers’s eyes probe mine. He lowers his voice. “Until the thing with the picture, at least.”

“Picture?”

“Isabella didn’t tell you about that?” Peepers’s eyebrows knit together. I shake my head.

“You didn’t hear it from me,” he says. “But Lee painted a picture of Isabella for the spring art show last year. She saw it and freaked out and stopped talking to him. And then Dean Watts wouldn’t let Lee enter the picture in the show.”

My stomach swirls at the thought of Lee holed up in his room, painting a portrait of Isabella without her knowledge. “I can’t believe he did that.”

“I don’t think he meant to freak her out. And he tried to apologize. A bunch of times. She just told him to leave her alone.”

Trying to apologize for something is one thing, but keeping at it after being told to back off qualifies as stalking, in my book. No wonder Isabella switched her schedule around to get away from Lee. Maybe she thought having one class with him wouldn’t be so bad this year—except she shouldn’t have had to think that way. She should have been able to take whatever damn classes she wanted, and the teachers should have done their job to keep that creep away from her.

But what if not everyone let Isabella down? It sounds like Dean Watts tried to help her … at least before she was replaced by that T. rex Tierney.

Everything I know is pointing to this: Lee stalking Isabella was a problem for the administration. And if I can track down Dean Watts, maybe I can prove just how far they were willing to go to make the problem go away.

I say good-bye to Peepers and tell him to enjoy his book. As I turn to leave the study area, he mumbles something.

Something that sounds an awful lot like “Good luck.”

CHAPTER

TWENTY-NINE

I wake up on Valentine’s Day feeling as if there’s a weight on my chest. Maybe it has to do with the package I got yesterday afternoon. The card said
Love, Mom and Dad
but I know my mother made it on her own. My father doesn’t know that those chocolate hearts with marshmallow in the middle are my favorite candy. The package was full of them, along with a note saying my parents are looking forward to seeing me at the end of March for spring break.

Spring break means I get to go home for a week. I get to sleep in my own bed and see my friends and walk Abby to Central Park if the weather is nice enough. All of this should make me happy, but counting the days until the end of March is super depressing. Home is still so far away.

But I’m not one to wallow, so I put on my uniform and curl the ends of my hair and go to breakfast.

When I get to art history, Professor Robinson is distributing rose-grams with a scowl on his face that says he truly believes this whole production is a personal insult to his livelihood. Everyone is too giddy, waiting to see who sent them one, to care about how Robinson will take this out on us once he’s done.

There are already five roses waiting for me when I take my seat. I open the heart-shaped pieces of paper folded around the stems. They’re all from Sebastian. Beside me, Murali is laughing so hard, tears are threatening to spill over his dark lashes.

“You’re just jealous because you didn’t get any,” I tell him. As if to help prove my point, Robinson sets two more roses down in front of me with a grunt.

“Who are
those
from?” Murali cranes his neck as I open one of the cards. The handwriting inside is unfamiliar. It’s not neat and slanted, like Brent’s, but squashed and scratchy.

Anne,

I
’
m not good at figuring out what
’
s supposed to go here. Happy Valentine
’
s Day.

It’s not signed.

“Looks like you have a secret admirer,” Murali croons. On the other side of him, Cole chuckles, and for a minute I wonder if maybe he sent it. Murali snatches the card from me and they examine the handwriting while I open the card on the other rose. This one is written in block lettering, and I have to roll my eyes when I see the message is a poem.

ROSES ARE RED,

VIOLETS ARE BLUE,

YOUR ROOMMATE IS DEAD,

MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS, OR YOU WILL BE, TOO.

The blood rushes from my head. I reread the poem until the words blur together.

“C’mon, let’s see what poor lovesick bastard sent this one.” Murali grabs the card out of my hands, which have gone numb. His forehead creases as he reads the inside. “What the hell is this?”

“A sick joke.” I will myself to grab the card back from Murali. I’m trembling a little, even though I should probably be laughing at the stupid poem. I mean, it’s not even creative.

“Yeah, well, it’s not funny.” Murali’s expression darkens. “You’ve got to show that to Dr. Harrow.”

“He’ll say the same thing: It’s just a sick joke.” I crumple up the card and shove it in my bag. I think of Snaggletooth’s reaction when I told her someone broke in to my room. If she even told Harrow what happened, he probably had the same one.

Those types of things don’t happen at the Wonderful Wheatley School.

Murali looks unconvinced as Robinson shuts the lights off and projects an O’Keeffe painting onto the blackboard.

“Don’t tell anyone about this, okay?” I whisper to Murali. “It’s just some idiot’s way of messing with me.”

Murali nods as if he wants to believe me. I want to believe me, too, because a sick joke is easier to swallow than the alternative.

Isabella’s killer is watching me.

*   *   *

Molly isn’t in Latin class. For some reason, I’m more distracted by this than by the threatening rose-gram sitting at the bottom of my purse. I try to focus on Upton’s lecture, but my eyes keep wandering to Molly’s empty seat.

I wanted to confront her about what Peepers told me. Maybe if she knows I already know about Lee and the picture, she’ll tell me what went down to make Isabella drop out of Upton’s class.

I look over at Lee, not surprised to find him staring at me already. Instead of looking away, I lock eyes with him, as if to say,
Did you write that stupid rose-gram? Because I’ll find out, you creep.
He averts his eyes back to the screen of his laptop. I crane my neck to see if there’s anything on the table in front of him with his handwriting on it.

Sending me a threatening poem seems a little too confrontational for Lee, but there’s always the chance he saw me talking to Peepers and got spooked. Maybe he thought the rose-gram would be enough to get me to back off for a while.

I have two text messages when I get out of class. The first is from Irina, apologizing for taking so long to get back to me. She’s dancing with the Alvin Ailey Company now, and rehearsals for their spring show have been running late. But she translated the words I sent her … and by the way, did I know the girl at my new school who was murdered?

I remind myself to thank Irina later as I check the next message. My heart flip-flops when I see it’s from Anthony.

Got an address for Watts. Call me.

I race back to the dorm and wait until my door clicks behind me before I call him. He picks up right before the call goes to his voice mail.

“Hey,” he says over the sound of a drill.

“Hi. Stuck at work on Valentine’s Day?”

“Yeah.” He laughs. It’s a nice sound. He should do it more often. “Not like I had anything better to do tonight, though.” I flush, not sure how to fill the awkward pause that follows. Luckily, Anthony does. “You have a pen? I’ve got that address for you.”

Anthony tells me Margaret Watts lives in Wayland, which is about thirty minutes from Wheatley. She recently changed her phone number to an unlisted one.

“So who is this woman?” Anthony asks, after I repeat the address back to him.

“She was a dean at the school,” I say. “I think she got fired for … trying to help your sister.”

“With what?”

I don’t want to tell him Lee was stalking his sister, because I don’t know how he’ll react. But at least if he flips out, I’m safe on the other side of the phone. I draw in a breath and tell him about Lee, leaving out as many details as possible.

Surprisingly, Anthony sounds calm when he says, “She never said anything about this guy. Are you going to talk to Watts?”

“I want to, yeah. I was hoping to do it in person so she can’t hang up on me.” I twirl a lock of hair around my finger. “If only I knew someone who could give me a ride.”

“I have work at four tomorrow. We could go around ten in the morning if you want.”

I tell him I’ll be ready, and just as I think he’s not going to acknowledge that anything has happened between us, he says, “I hope you liked that rose thing.”

Then he hangs up.

So Anthony sent me the other rose-gram. He must have stopped and bought one from the girls in the student center before we went to the police precinct. Which means he sent me the rose before we even kissed.

Maybe I’m wrong about why he kissed me, and it wasn’t just adrenaline after all.

My cheeks burn as I remember how Anthony’s rough lips felt on mine. Suddenly, it’s not just my face that’s on fire, but I command myself to stop thinking about him as I reopen Irina’s text message.

There is only one English word in the translated passwords—BIRCHWOOD—but the others look like names of Russian towns or streets. I pull up the locked document from Sebastian’s computer and type in the first password. Just as I’m afraid one more wrong attempt will send my computer into lockdown mode, the password PRAVDY1245 causes the entry box to disappear.

The document loads, and all I can think is
Holy crap. I did it.
Well, technically, Irina did it. But still.

As I expected, I don’t understand anything that’s in the document. In fact, I don’t see how anyone can make sense of the jumbled letters and numbers on the screen. It’s like a secret code or something.

I scroll through the entire eighteen pages of the document until I see that someone has inserted comments next to some of the sequences of numbers.

Letters. Each sequence of numbers corresponds to a letter.

Oh my God. This really could be a code.

I instinctively close the document, my head spinning. So this is what Andreev’s “research position” involves: code breaking.

I replay Andreev’s conversation with Sebastian in my head. Sebastian had said Isabella made more progress than he did. Does that mean Isabella was close to cracking the code before she quit the internship? It would make sense, why Andreev wanted her back so desperately. But that doesn’t answer why Isabella quit in the first place.

Sebastian, you are aware of my life’s work, correct?

My fingers race across my keyboard, typing in Andreev’s name. There’s nothing on the school’s Web site about what he did before he was a teacher, but I’m surprised to see he’s only been teaching here for the past three years.

I revisit the abstracts for the journal articles the search engine turned up. Although I can’t access the full text, I can read a preview of Andreev’s bio. And what I find makes me nauseous.

He worked at Sandia National Laboratories. A nuclear-technology research facility.

CHAPTER

THIRTY

There are men in black masks in my room. One tells me he wants the flash drive and jams a gun in my face. It’s so dark I can’t see how many of them there are, but they’re pulling me out of bed, and Isabella is telling me to run, and I’m screaming …

I wake up, paralyzed by terror. I’m sitting up, my legs swung over the bed, ready to run as if the whole nightmare were real.

The part of my brain that’s making my heart slam against my chest isn’t convinced the dream
wasn’t
real. Maybe there are no masked men in my room, but Isabella’s scream is still splitting through my head. And it sounds so real it hurts.

Still shaking, I get out of bed and throw on every light in the room. Then I turn on my computer and delete the files I stole from Sebastian. It was stupid of me to hack them in the first place. Obviously, whatever Andreev has Sebastian doing is illegal and dangerous—maybe even dangerous enough to have gotten Isabella killed. Either way, I don’t want anything to connect me to them on my computer.