The Bride Wore Size 12 (4 page)

“Mom,” Kaileigh says sharply. “I’m fine. What’s the big deal? Ameera partied a little too hard last night, and now she’s—wait.” Kaileigh narrows her eyes at her mother. “Is
that
why you’re in here? You came down to complain about Ameera? Oh my God, I can’t believe you. I happen to like my room, Mom,
and
my roommates. I’m in college now. Why can’t you let me live my own life?”

“Excuse me,” Lisa says, a greenish tint having suddenly overtaken her. She darts back into her office, slamming the door closed behind her. Thanks to the metal grate, we can hear all too clearly why she needed to be excused.

“Poor thing,” Carl comments from the top of his ladder, making a tsk-tsking sound with his tongue. “Lots of people coming down with that stomach flu. My guys had to snake two toilets this morning. Everybody, wash your hands.” Carl wags his drill with grandfatherly emphasis. “That’s the only way to keep it from spreading.”

Everyone looks down at their hands, including the prince’s bodyguards. Even Shiraz looks as if he’s lost some of his self-proclaimed chill.

“Well,” he says, beginning to back out the door, “if I can’t be of any use here, I’d best be going. No offense, but I can’t afford to get sick right now. I’ve got tickets to the U.S. Open this weekend. Not playing, just as a spectator—” Seeing the looks his bodyguards exchange, he adds, in a deeper, mock-serious tone, “Plus with the course load I’m going to be taking, I know Father would want me to stay healthy for my studies . . .”

“We’ll go with you,” Nishi says, reluctantly releasing Tricky and climbing to her feet. “There’s no reason we need to stick around, right? You’ll take care of Ameera if anything is wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong with Ameera,” I assure her, “but of course we’ll take care of her if anything is.”

Is it my (overactive) imagination, or does the prince look as relieved to hear this as the girls?

“Thanks,” Kaileigh says, smiling at me gratefully. The look she throws her mother, however, is the opposite of grateful. “I’ll call you and Daddy later, Mother,” she adds icily.

“Good-bye, Mrs. Harris, Miss Wells, sir,” the prince says, with polite nods to Kaileigh’s mother, me, and even Carl, who salutes back with his drill. “I hope you feel better,” he calls to Lisa through the metal grate. Her only response is a groan.

Whatever else they might say about the heir to the throne of Qalif, he’s unfailingly polite. He and Kaileigh and the rest of their entourage begin to file out of my office, just as a tall, devastatingly handsome man with thick dark hair and piercing blue eyes comes striding in.

Whenever Cooper Cartwright enters a room, I’m always amazed that the sight of him doesn’t cause every other woman in the vicinity to swoon, the way I feel like doing. Maybe they’re just better at hiding the shattering effect his rugged masculinity has on them. Mrs. Harris barely even glances in his direction, which I find completely perplexing, since he seems to emanate testosterone in his nonskinny jeans and unclingy sports coat in a way Prince Rashid never could.

Then again, we all know how Mrs. Harris feels about sex, so I guess it’s no wonder.

Cooper watches the prince and his entourage without comment until, after they’re gone, he asks, “His Royal Highness, the VIR, I take it?”

“He prefers to be called Shiraz,” I correct Cooper. “Because he’s best served chilled.”

“It’s nice to know he’s assimilating,” Cooper says drily, lowering himself onto the visitors’ couch.

Only Tricky greets Cooper the way I believe he should be greeted . . . and would greet him myself if we weren’t surrounded by observers. The dog throws himself onto the couch, lays his paws upon Cooper’s chest, and enthusiastically begins lapping Cooper’s five o’clock shadow (even though it’s lunchtime) with his tongue.

“Whoa,” Cooper says, attempting unsuccessfully to fight off the dog’s advances. “I’m happy to see you too, Trix, but I can tell one of us didn’t brush his teeth this morning, and it wasn’t me.”

Mrs. Harris, still failing to notice my fiancé, says to me, “Kaileigh’s father is on his way over. He says for the money we’re paying—over fifty thousand dollars a year—Kaileigh should have a roommate who is serious about her studies.”

I raise my eyebrows. “Mrs. Harris, I already told you we don’t have any other rooms—”

“That’s why we want to speak to someone in charge.” She nods at Lisa’s closed office door. “Not Miss Wu. Her supervisor. The director of housing.”

“Mrs. Harris,” I say, in a tone I can’t keep from becoming sharp. “I’ll be happy to direct you to the Housing Office, where you can make an appointment with Dr. Stanley Jessup, the director of housing, but before I do, keep in mind that I’ll be calling his office myself to tell him that your daughter stood in front of me just five minutes ago and said she liked her room and her roommates and requested that you allow her to live her own life.”

Mrs. Harris’s face turns pink. I’ve called her bluff, and she knows it. Cooper, meanwhile, is smiling into Tricky’s fur. He loves it when I get bossy with the parents. He says it turns him on. I hope he can control himself until we get outside the building and into a taxi to the Plaza, where we’ll be meeting our extremely hard-to-get-an-appointment-with wedding planner.

“Kaileigh was admitted to New York College,” I go on, “one of the best colleges in the country”—“best” is a leap; but it’s certainly one of the most expensive—“because she’s clearly very intelligent. As a parent, you need to start trusting her to handle her own problems, and let her make her own decisions. I personally think they’ll be great ones, not only because she’s attending a fine school and at eighteen is now a legal adult, but because she was raised by a fantastic mom.
You,
Mrs. Harris. Kaileigh’s going to do great in college because she had
you
as a role model. You gave her the wings she needs to fly. Now, why don’t you let her spread them?”

At the end of this long speech—which, I have to admit, I got out of a greeting card and I’ve delivered approximately four times already this week—I give Mrs. Harris my most dazzling smile, the one that Cooper says knocks his socks off. I’ve noticed that it frequently knocks his pants off as well.

Unfortunately—or fortunately, since we’re in an office setting—this time it does neither. Mrs. Harris keeps both her pants and socks on as well.

But she does look touched.

“Oh,” she says, reaching into her purse and pulling out a tissue with which she dabs at the corners of her eyes. “That’s so nice of you to say. Her father and I have tried so hard with her. She has a younger brother, you know, and let’s just say we won’t be allowing
him
to go to Haiti to build houses for Habitat for Humanity, even though it’s such a worthy cause, because he simply hasn’t shown the same kind of responsibility that Kaileigh has. But then they say boys don’t mature as quickly as—”

Mercifully, my office phone rings before she can go on much longer. I see on the caller ID that it’s Sarah.

“I’m so sorry,” I say apologetically to Mrs. Harris. “I have to get this. Maybe we could talk another time?”

Mrs. Harris nods her understanding and mouths
Thank you so much for everything
as I pick up the receiver and say, “Hello, Fischer Hall director’s office, how may I help you?”

“I know you know it’s me,” Sarah says. Her voice sounds weirdly congested. “Is Kaileigh’s mom still sitting there?”

“Yes, this is Heather Wells,” I say, smiling brightly at Mrs. Harris as she waves from my office door on her way out.

“Oh, crap,” Sarah says. “I can’t believe she’s still there. It’s bad, Heather. Really, really bad.”

I keep the smile plastered on my face, but shift my glance to Cooper now that Mrs. Harris is finally gone. He’s scratching Tricky’s ears, but when he sees my expression, his fingers still, his gaze locking on mine.

“Really?” I ask. Even though Mrs. Harris is gone, I keep my tone businesslike. There are still people milling around outside the door. “How bad?”

“It’s not fair,” Sarah says. She’s crying now. “Classes haven’t even started yet, Heather. Classes haven’t even started yet.”

Behind me, I hear Lisa’s office door open. This time I don’t think it’s because of anything she’s overheard, because I’ve kept my end of the conversation so neutral.

I think my new boss might actually have some kind of extrasensory perception.

“Heather?” Lisa asks in a soft voice. “What is it? Is that Sarah?”

I nod, picking up a pen and lowering my gaze to the At-A-Glance calendar on my desk. Slowly, I begin to cross out
Lunch w/ Coop and Perry
. Lunch with the outrageously exclusive and expensive wedding planner is definitely canceled.

“Sarah,” I say into the phone. “Take a deep breath. Whatever it is, we’ll handle it—”

“I don’t understand it.” Sarah is babbling into the phone. “I just saw her at dinner last night. She was fine. We had falafel. We had freaking falafel together last night in the caf. How can she be dead?”

I knit my brows. Sarah isn’t making any sense. “You ate dinner with Kaileigh’s roommate Ameera last night in the cafeteria?”

“No!” Sarah cries with a sob. “Not Ameera! Ameera is fine, we checked on her, she’s fine, just hungover or something. I’m talking about Jasmine, the fourteenth-floor RA. You told me to look in on her, so when we knocked and she didn’t answer her door, we keyed into her room to make sure she was all right, because I could hear music playing. Why would she have left her music on if she wasn’t in the room? Well, she’s here, but she isn’t all right. She’s dead, Heather. She’s dead!”

5

L
isa insisted she come upstairs and sit with Jasmine’s body, but I had my doubts this was the wisest course of action.

“You’re sick, Lise,” I say when I call downstairs to report my findings. Sarah is a mess when I arrive, and the RA on duty, Howard Chen, is nowhere to be seen. That’s because—I soon discover—he’s in the trash chute room down the hall, throwing up.

Howard isn’t vomiting because of the sight that met him and Sarah in room 1416, though. Jasmine looks perfectly peaceful in her white tank top and green terry shorts, her tawny-colored hair fanned out prettily against the pillow beneath her head, her eyes closed. She could have been sleeping . . . except for the fact that she isn’t breathing, and her skin is as cold as ice.

Howard’s apparently vomiting for the same reason as Lisa: the stomach flu really does seem to be making the rounds.

I send Howard back to his room to recover, then send Sarah downstairs to the front desk to wait for the police before calling Lisa.

“I don’t think you’re going to be any help up here,” I go on, trying to be as tactful as possible. “In fact, you may be more of a hindrance. I don’t think Jasmine was murdered, but you never know.”

“Just say it, Heather,” Lisa says bitterly. “You don’t want me barfing all over the crime scene.”

“Well, you said it, not me. What I think you should do is go home and get in bed. I’ll call the Housing Office and tell Dr. Jessup what’s happened. Although he’s probably going to want you to call Jasmine’s parents.”

Lisa’s voice cracks. “Oh God, Heather.”

“I know. But you knew Jasmine better than anyone, since she went through RA training with you. The news will be best coming from you. I know it’s going to suck, but . . .”

Jasmine has framed photos by the side of her bed. She has her arms around a happy-looking older couple—no doubt Mom and Dad—and a panting golden retriever. They appear to be camping.

I have to look away. I have no such photos of myself with my parents. We never had pets when I was growing up. My mom said it was too hard to take them on the road when I was touring.

Then Mom left. So.

“I understand. It’s just . . .” Lisa’s voice cracks again. “She was so young.”

“I know,” I say again, looking around Jasmine’s room, anywhere but at the family photo and Jasmine’s pretty face. She
had
been young . . . and so full of promise.

Jasmine had painted the walls of her room a cheerful powder blue—painting your room is a housing violation, unless you paint the walls white again before you move out—and covered them with cutouts of white clouds and photos of women she’d admired . . . mostly TV journalists like Diane Sawyer and Katie Couric.

That’s when I remember what Gavin had asked over the phone a little earlier:

Is she the hot white Jasmine who’s studying communications?

She was.

Only now her dream of being the next Diane Sawyer is never going to come true.Something pricks at the corners of my eyes—tears, I realize. I turn my back on Jasmine and her room and lift the blinds. We aren’t supposed to touch anything in the deceased’s room, since it could be a crime scene, but I have to look at
something
that isn’t going to make me cry.

I can’t believe the only real contact I ever had with Jasmine was her snarky comment about my emergency phone list. I’d kind of disliked her for it.

Now I’ll never have a chance for another interaction with her, because she’s dead. The least I can do is try to figure out why, even though that isn’t part of my job description.

It isn’t
not
part of my job description, though, which is to assist the hall director in all matters pertaining to the smooth functioning of the building. Certainly figuring out how Jasmine died would fall under that category.

I concentrate on Jasmine’s view—which is spectacular—of the busy streets and rooftops of the West Village. Between the treetops I occasionally catch a glimpse of the Hudson River.

So many of the kids who come to New York College arrive with dreams of making it big in Manhattan, having spent their youth watching
Sex and the City
reruns or reading
The
Amazing Spider-Man
. Something had happened to cut Jasmine down dead before she ever had a chance of living out her dream, however.

What was it?

Lisa is wondering the same thing.

“How could something like this happen, Heather? Our first week, before classes have even started?”

“I don’t know,” I say, relieved my tears aren’t affecting my voice. “If it helps, whatever happened to her”—brain aneurysm? drugs? poisoned apple?—“I don’t see any signs that she suffered.”

“It doesn’t help,” Lisa says gloomily into the phone.

“Yeah,” I say. It never does. “Look, Lisa, this is bad, but it isn’t as bad as it could be. You could say something to her parents like that Jasmine died during the happiest, most exciting time of her life. She got the RA job . . . she was a role model to so many people—”

Lisa makes a gagging noise, and I realize I’ve made her throw up. Literally.

“Yeah,” I say. “I know. Cheesy. Look, you sound like you’re getting worse. Go to bed. I’ll call Dr. Jessup.”

“No,” Lisa says weakly. “I’ll do it. Then I’m coming up there. The police are going to want to talk to me—”

“Lisa, don’t be ridiculous. The police aren’t even here yet. I mean it. Go home. Get in bed. This is a horrible tragedy, but it’s going to be all right.” I steal a glance at Jasmine, then look back out the window at the river and lower my voice—which is ridiculous, since Jasmine can’t hear me—and say, “Jasmine was an RA, but she was new to the building, and she didn’t work here for very long. None of us really knew her.”

“Heather!” Lisa cries. “How can you—?”

“Because it’s true. She didn’t really know us either, or most of her residents, since the majority of the students on her floor are upperclassmen, so most of them haven’t even checked in yet. They won’t get here until next weekend. Classes don’t start until after Labor Day.”

Jasmine’s floor is one of the highest in the building, which means it’s one of the most desirable (this is why the prince was assigned to a suite just above it).

“Most of the rooms on the upper floors were chosen in last year’s room selection lottery by upperclassmen before you—or Jasmine—ever even got here,” I go on, “which means only a few of the rooms on Jasmine’s floor were left to assign to incoming freshmen and transfer students. Since orientation week is only for new students, first year and transfer, most of the upperclassmen don’t choose to arrive until the weekend before classes begin.”

“True,” Lisa says hesitantly.

“So this is sad, but not as sad as if it happened in the middle of the year. The only people on her floor right now, really, are Kaileigh and Ameera and those other girls. You’ll pull someone in off the RA wait list to replace Jasmine, and the majority of kids won’t even know there was a death in the building, because it happened before they got here.”

“Heather!” Lisa says with a gasp.

“I said it was sad. I didn’t say it was fair. We have to be practical about it.”

“This job has hardened you,” Lisa says, not unkindly. “What if Jasmine died of what
I
have? What if I gave it to her? What if it’s some kind of deadly—”

“She didn’t,” I say flatly. “I already checked her trash can and toilet. There’s no vomit. And Howard Chen has what you have too, and he’s not dead.”

“Oh, great.” This is Lisa’s first student death—although we’d come close before—and the stress in her voice is almost palpable. “Wait. I just thought of something. The prince. You don’t think there’s a connection, do you, between Jasmine dying and the prince?”

“I don’t see how there could be,” I say.

“He clearly knows her residents.”

“I know, but no one said anything about Jasmine not answering her door to go to Nobu, just Ameera.”

But the coincidence—a VIR about whom there’d been death threats, and then a death in the room on the floor below his? It was going to be too big for some people (particularly the media) to ignore, and Lisa knew it.

“Okay,” Lisa says firmly. “That’s it. I’m coming up there right now.”

That’s when I hear a deep voice—familiar and resonant—through Lisa’s phone.

“You aren’t going anywhere except where Heather said, home, to bed.”

“Cooper?” Lisa sounds startled. “Oh my God, you’re still here?”

My thought, exactly.

“Of course I’m still here,” he says. “I’m supposed to be having lunch with my bride-to-be, remember?”

“Oh, Cooper,” Lisa cries. “Of course. I’m so sorry—”

“You’re going to be sorrier,” I hear him say, “if you don’t take care of yourself now, and get sicker later.”

“But,” I hear Lisa protest weakly.

“No ‘buts,’ ” Cooper says. “You’re going back to bed even if I have to carry you there.”

“You can’t lift me,” I hear Lisa say, but there’s uncertainty in her voice.

“What are you talking about?” Cooper sounds offended. “I carry Heather to bed every night. How do you think I maintain this buff physique?”

Lisa probably would have laughed if the situation hadn’t been so bleak.

I, on the other hand, frown. Cooper does have a buff physique, but he doesn’t carry me to bed
every
night. There’d just been that one night when I’d had a few too many grapefruit and vodkas and we’d started horsing around—

“Okay, okay,” I hear Lisa say. “I’m going. But first let me—”

“Oh my God, go home before my fiancé has to sling you over his shoulder King Kong style,” I practically shout into the phone.

Lisa gives in, says good-bye, and hangs up. I hang up too, but only to go and sit on the bed opposite Jasmine’s to make another phone call, careful not to touch anything, or shed any of my DNA, or look in the direction of the dead girl lying opposite me.

All RAs are assigned a single room, but these contain enough furniture for a double, since Fischer Hall lacks storage space. What the RA chooses to do with his or her extra furniture isn’t any of our concern, so long as it’s back in the room by the time he or she has moved out.

Jasmine had chosen to use both of her beds, one as a couch for visitors to lounge on, and the other for sleeping. I’m sitting on the one she’d reserved for visitors. The other bed is the one on which Jasmine lies, very, very dead.

“Gavin?” I say, when the person on the other end of the phone picks up.

“Hey, Heather,” he says. He sounds a lot more subdued than when we’d spoken earlier. “Sarah told me. Bummer.”

Only Gavin would call a girl dying in the prime of her life a “bummer.”

“Yes,” I say. “It is, indeed, a bummer. Have the police shown up yet?”

“No. I heard there’s a subway fire over at the Christopher Street station. You know they never show up for a dead body if there are live people they have a chance of saving. You guys shouldn’t have said Jasmine’s dead. You should have said she’s dying. Then they’d come faster.”

I sigh at the truth of this. “Is Sarah there?”

“She’s here,” he says, not sounding too thrilled about it. “She’s, like, crying all over the magazines I was saving to read later.”

“Gavin,” I say. “You’re not supposed to read other people’s magazines. You’re supposed to put them in the mailboxes of the people to whom they are addressed.”

“I know,” Gavin says. “But there’s been another death in the building, and the new issue of
Entertainment Weekly
just arrived. I need something to calm my nerves.”

I look at the fluffy white clouds Jasmine painted on the ceiling. “Fine. Listen, Gavin. Can you do me a favor?”

“For you? Anything.”

“Good. I need you to get out the emergency phone list—”

It’s his turn to sigh.

“—and text all RAs that there’s going to be an emergency staff meeting today at six in the second-floor library. Oh, and then can you put a sign on the door of the second-floor library that it’s going to be closed for a meeting at six? We’re going to have to break the news to them about Jasmine.”

Gavin says, “Intense. I’ll do it, but if you’d let me set up a group text on your phone, you could do it yourself next time.”

“I sincerely hope there isn’t going to be a next time, Gavin. And I don’t think my phone knows how to do that.”

“Your phone knows how to do it,” Gavin says, sounding amused. “
You
don’t. Look, I get a break in an hour. Why don’t you let me take you to lunch in the caf, and I’ll set up the group text for you.”

“Gavin,” I say, with practiced patience. “I’m engaged. You got an invitation to my wedding, remember? You RSVP’d that you’re coming . . . with your girlfriend.”

“Yeah, but you’re not married yet. There’s still a chance for me. I’m pretty sure I can win you over with my advanced technological know-how, which is vastly superior to your fiancé’s, or he’d have shown you how to group text, or even text, period, something I’ve noticed you seem to have a little trouble with. Not that it bothers me. It only makes you even more adorable.”

“Gavin,” I say, with a glance at Jasmine. “This is a highly inappropriate time for you to be hitting on me. Not that there’s ever an appropriate time to hit on your boss. Besides, what about Jamie? She’s a lovely girl, who is also
your age
.”

“I know,” he says. “But I met you first. Anyway, Jamie knows how I feel about you. We have an arrangement. You’re my freebie.”