The Complete Private Collection: Private; Invitation Only; Untouchable; Confessions; Inner Circle; Legacy; Ambition; Revelation; Last Christmas; Paradise ... The Book of Spells; Ominous; Vengeance (135 page)

“I’m out! Let’s go!” Hunter shouted, grabbing my hand.

We raced up the sidewalk, me teetering in my high heels, Hunter leading the way through klatches of moviegoers and couples walking off their dinners. Before long he was opening the door of the restaurant
for me, and with a glance over my shoulder I saw that none of the photographers had followed. Our assault had done the trick.

“That was intense,” Hunter said, catching his breath just inside the door. He looked gorgeous, all ruffled and ruddy-cheeked from the cold. So gorgeous I almost felt unworthy in his presence.

“That may have been the most fun I’ve had all week,” I replied with a grin.

Hunter shrugged out of his coat and looked me up and down with a new admiration in his eyes. “And we’re just getting started.”

Okay. This was going to be the best date ever.

Or not. After five minutes alone at the table with Hunter Braden, I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how anyone had ever lasted more than five minutes alone at a table with Hunter Braden. Every other sentence out of his mouth started with the word
I
. He couldn’t go for more than ten seconds without talking about himself, so if I was in the middle of a sentence, and more than ten seconds had gone by, he would interrupt me mid-syllable to tell me something super fascinating and totally out of context about him, like how he’d gone deep-sea diving last summer or how he’d beaten the world chess champion when he was fifteen.

But of course, no one knew about that, because Hunter didn’t want to ruin the guy’s life. Plus, he wasn’t one to brag.

Yeah, right.

At least he was nice to look at. In a perfectly cut dark blue suit and striped tie, he looked completely at ease and comfortable, like he’d
been born in formal wear. I was feeling quite sophisticated and sexy as well, in all my couture. Not that Hunter had said a word about it or even appeared to notice. He did, however, check himself out in every reflective surface available, including the weathered silver platter that hung on the wall next to our table. No surprise, he always appeared pleased by his own reflection.

I had thought he was so cool when he’d gone for the snow war idea. But clearly that had just been a means to an end to him. I had helped him stay out of the tabloids for another day. And come to think of it, he hadn’t even thanked me for it.

The restaurant was a tiny French bistro with only six tables and twice as many waiters. I tried to orchestrate a short evening by skipping the appetizers and going straight for the entrée, but Hunter—shockingly—didn’t take my cue. He ordered a salad and an appetizer, then sat there and ate it in front of me while my stomach growled audibly and I sipped my ice water.

I was going to have to kill Vienna later. Or, possibly, eat her.

“So I’m definitely getting into Columbia early admission and my father has already put the down payment on the apartment I picked out,” Hunter said as he nibbled on his foie gras. “We start renovations over Christmas break, so it should be exactly the way I want it by fall.”

“Columbia. That’s great,” I said, taking a stab at enthusiasm. “How’s the campus? I’ve always wanted to check it out.”

“Who cares? It’s the only Ivy in New York,” Hunter replied with a shrug. He looked up and snapped his fingers, signaling a waiter to
refill his wineglass. “There’s no point in even looking at the others. I have to be in New York.”

Oookay. “Speaking of New York, I’m going down there next weekend,” I said, attempting to turn the conversation toward myself for a moment. “We’re going to hold the fund-raiser there.”

“What fund-raiser?” he asked, taking a sip of his wine.

“The Billings fund-raiser,” I said, surprised. The whole Billings scandal had been all anyone could talk about for the past week. “You know . . . how Headmaster Cromwell challenged us to raise five million dollars to save the—”

“Five million dollars,” Hunter scoffed. “My apartment will be worth more than that once I’m done with the overhaul.”

My jaw clenched and I found myself clutching my tiny purse under the table. God, I missed Josh. Even though he hated Billings, he would have at least listened to me. If we were still together, he’d be supporting me right now, helping me with ideas, at least letting me finish a damn sentence. What I wouldn’t give to go back in time and give pre-Legacy Reed a good slap across the face. If only I could tell her to take Josh up on his offer in the woods and just stay home that night. If only I could tell her not to go up to the roof at the Legacy. If only I could impress upon her what a nightmare that whole party would be. . . .

No. I was not going to think about that. I was supposed to be on a mission here. Creating a new Reed. Unfortunately, I was starting to think that the new Reed was too good for the current Hunter.

“I’m definitely going to create my own major,” Hunter was saying.
“Something not boring. Like water-sports marketing. I could definitely be a pioneer there. I know I—”

That was it. I couldn’t take it anymore. If I heard the word
I
one more time, I was going to break something.

“You really like talking about yourself, don’t you?” I said.

Hunter paused, looking at me across the table with interest for the first time all evening. For a moment I thought he was going to backtrack, to apologize, to ask me something about me. But then, he smirked, wiped his mouth with his linen napkin, and leaned his wrists on the table.

“If you were me, wouldn’t you?”

That was when I got up and walked out. I snagged my coat from the coat-check girl, told her to get her tip from the jackass with the permanent smirk, and headed into the cold night.

As soon as I was outside on the quaint Easton sidewalk, I tipped my head back and let out a groan, watching the cloud of steam from my breath disappear against the stars. I glanced around for lurking photographers, thinking I might tell them exactly where Hunter was and that I had just ditched him, but they were nowhere to be found. Oh, well. One thing was clear, however—it was time to take the search for the next boyfriend of the Billings president in a new direction. This particular president was not a Hunter Braden type of girl. I shoved my hands in my pockets and started walking through town toward school. It was a long trek, but that was fine by me. It was a clear, cool night and I wanted to delay my return to my room anyway. With nothing better
to do, I knew I’d start obsessing about the black marbles and the pink clothing and who might have thought it would be fun to freak me out. All things I didn’t want to consider.

It occurred to me somewhere in the middle of block two that Hunter might come looking for me in his Bentley, but I doubted it. He probably had yet to notice I was gone. And if he had, I was sure he didn’t care.

At the edge of town I spotted the old-fashioned light posts with their big, round lamps that marked off the front of the Easton police station. Not my favorite place in the world. I approached it, my heart starting to beat erratically as I remembered the last time I had been there, the awful things that had occurred. I ducked my head and speed-walked past, feeling conspicuous. I wondered if Detective Hauer was inside. Wondered what that look had been about on Thursday night. My heartbeat didn’t return to normal until I was well past the bright lights of the building and had turned onto the relatively dark Hamilton Parkway, which would take me back to the Easton Academy gate.

I kept a good distance into the shoulder, knowing I was barely visible to motorists in my black coat. Cars whizzed by, tossing my hair into my face with their back drafts. The speed limit on Hamilton was forty-five, but people routinely broke it. I was just starting to wonder if this walk was the worst idea ever when a slow-moving car approached me from behind. I turned around, expecting to see Hunter and his newly discovered conscience, but instead of the Bentley, I found myself staring into the headlights of a modest, late-model Ford. The
car pulled up alongside me and Detective Hauer leaned away from the steering wheel toward the passenger-side window.

You have to be kidding me.

“Need a ride?” he asked.

“No. Thanks. I’m fine.”

I started walking again, shakily. He inched forward.

“I think you need a ride,” he said.

“No, really. I’m—”

“Reed, there’s something I need to talk to you about.” He reached over and popped the door open so that it almost hit me in the legs. “Get in the car.”

I sat stiffly in the cold, hard chair, my bag placed on the cracked wooden table in front of me. My coat was still on. It felt colder in the interrogation room than it was outside. And besides, I wasn’t planning on being here long. No need to get comfortable.

Detective Hauer walked in through the door behind me, but didn’t shut it. He took a seat opposite me, placed a thick brown folder on the table, and folded his beefy hands on top of it. As unkempt as ever, he wore a green sweater with some kind of food stain near the hem, and one point of his white shirt collar stuck out while the other was still tucked in. His brown eyes looked heavier than I remembered. Behind me, the station was fairly quiet, aside from the occasional ringing phone. Nothing like the last time I was here, with the police force bustling around, trying to handle Thomas’s murder and failing miserably, routinely arresting the wrong people. Including Josh.

“Don’t you need my parents here or, like, someone from school if you’re going to interrogate me?” I asked, wanting to show him how very un-intimidated I was, even though I was shaking in my borrowed-from-Tiffany Jimmy Choos. “I am a minor, you know.”

His bushy eyebrows shot up. “I’m not going to interrogate you. I’m just on a fact-finding mission. I want to chat.”

“About what?” I spat.

“Cheyenne Martin.”

If I was shaking before, I was trembling now. What could he possibly want to ask me about Cheyenne after all this time? She had been dead for more than a month.

“I understand that you and Cheyenne had quite the contentious relationship,” he began.

My heart was in my throat. “So?”

He blew out a sigh and leaned back in his chair, adjusting his semi-twisted sweater over his belly before lacing his fingers together over its widest point.

“Reed, I’m going to be straight with you here,” he said. “Cheyenne’s parents have had some time to go through her things, and they’ve asked us to look into the possibility that Cheyenne’s death was not a suicide.”

All the oxygen was sucked right out of the room with those few words. Was not a suicide. Was, therefore, a murder. I knew they had checked into this in the very beginning, but I thought they had come up with nothing. They had cremated Cheyenne’s body, for God’s sake—the most important piece of evidence according to any of the
ten billion police procedural dramas on TV. How could they even begin to investigate something like this now?

“So you think Cheyenne was murdered,” I heard myself say.

“Personally? No,” he replied, sitting forward. “But I believe we owe it to the family to check out every lead.”

Okay. Okay. So he
didn’t
think it was a murder. Only her parents did. That was better, right? If the detective was unconvinced?

Hauer flipped open his folder and slid a piece of paper toward him. “That said, I wanted to talk to you in particular because we’ve just finished going through Cheyenne’s computer files.”

Oh, shit. Oh, crap; oh, crap; oh, crap. The room was no longer cold. Quite the opposite, actually. Was that the devil breathing down my neck?

“And we found something interesting in her e-mail outbox,” he said, looking over the top of the page. “Any idea what that might be?”

He had the e-mail. He knew. He knew that Cheyenne had blamed me for her death. My worst nightmare was coming true, right here and right now. Under the table, my hands gripped the wool of Shelby’s coat and my feet slipped out of Tiffany’s shoes, too wet to hold them on any longer.

“Do I need a lawyer?” I asked,

Up went the eyebrows again. “Do you feel you need one?”

“I didn’t do anything, if that’s what you mean,” I replied quickly.

“Okay then.” He placed the page on the table, turned it to face me, and slid it across with his fingertips. “Why don’t you tell me what this is all about?”

It was a printout of the e-mail. Her address, my address, the time sent, the subject line empty. Then the lines that had become so excruciatingly familiar over the past few weeks.

Ignore the note. You did this to me. You ruined my life.

My empty stomach clenched at the sight of them and a dry heave rose up in my throat. But I swallowed it back. As terrified as I felt—what did Hauer
think
this meant?—I also felt a slight sense of relief. Someone else had read the e-mail. It was real. It was right in front of us. Both of us. Part of me had started to wonder if I had imagined all the Cheyenne-related oddity that had been swirling around me lately. But not this. This was real. I wasn’t going insane.

I took a deep breath and released Shelby’s coat from my sweaty palms. “You already know Cheyenne and I were fighting.” I knew this because my friends had told me the cops had been asking about us when I’d returned from a weekend in New York with Josh. They had told me that the cops knew about Cheyenne’s and my screaming argument over Josh. “I got this the day after she died.”

“Why didn’t you report it?” Detective Hauer asked, sitting up straight again.

“I didn’t think it was important,” I replied automatically.

He gave me an incredulous look. “A girl blames you for her death and you don’t think it’s important?”

“No! Not like that,” I blurted, suddenly frustrated. “Obviously I think it’s important. It’s practically all I think about, that she might
have killed herself over something she thought I’d done to her. I mean, I don’t know if she blamed me because she wanted my boyfriend and she couldn’t have him, or if she blamed me because she thinks I somehow got her expelled or what, and I’m never going to know. And believe me, that
is
important to me. But is it really important to you? I mean, doesn’t this e-mail sort of prove that she killed herself?” I asked, holding it up. “This was just her last-ditch effort to get to me.”