The Complete Private Collection: Private; Invitation Only; Untouchable; Confessions; Inner Circle; Legacy; Ambition; Revelation; Last Christmas; Paradise ... The Book of Spells; Ominous; Vengeance (45 page)

“I wonder if his parents know,” Noelle said, narrowing her eyes as the golden-haired Mrs. Pearson strode into the room to whisper in the ear of the caterer. “They’d have to tell the parents, right?”

No one spoke. It wasn’t as if we knew the inner workings of the justice system.

“Look at them,” Kiran said, lifting her chin toward Mrs. Pearson, who had now been joined by her silver-haired husband. She snapped at a waiter and procured a fresh glass of wine. Ariana rolled her eyes. “They’re just chatting like this is some charity function. When I go, I hope my parents don’t look that poised.”

“Kiran! Oh my God!” Taylor said, her quivering jaw dropping.

“What? I’m just saying,” Kiran replied, rolling her eyes.

“Talk about morbid,” Noelle said.

I watched as Mrs. Pearson chuckled and laid her hand gently on the arm of one of their friends. Mr. Pearson checked his watch and glanced around as if looking to see if there was anyone more interesting to talk to. Suddenly, my heart started to flutter in this insane way. A way that made my breath catch and my skin sear.

They had lost their only son and they didn’t even care.

I looked away and my eyes fell on a tall, broad guy, about my age, who was leaning against the wall alone, staring at me. I looked away quickly, thinking maybe we’d just happened to glance at each other at the exact same moment, but when I looked back, he was still staring. He had a thin face, chalk-white skin, and blue eyes rimmed in red. His black hair was slicked back and he wore a black suit. Add some dark lighting and eerie music and he could have been a vampire lying in wait. I waited for him to look away. And waited. Still he stared.

“Who is that?” I asked Noelle finally.

“That? That’s Blake.”

“Blake who? Why is he staring at me?” I asked, nervous.

“Blake
Pearson
,” Noelle said. “Thomas’s brother?”

The entire building might as well have collapsed beneath my feet. I leaned against the wall, feeling for a moment that I might black out. I wasn’t sure my body could take another shock.

“Thomas’s
what
?”

“He never told you he had an older brother?” Noelle asked. “God, that boy was really down with the secrets.”

“Why would Thomas talk about Blake?” Ariana reached up and scratched the back of her neck. “They hated each other.”

“They did?” I asked, half out of it. I wanted to know more, but my brain was too frazzled to formulate words. Had he talked to Thomas before he died? What did he know? But when I managed to look up again, Blake was gone. A chill raced down my back.

“’Member that huge brawl they had freshman year?” Kiran drawled. “I really thought they were going to kill each other.”

Ariana shot her a silencing glare. Not at all an appropriate comment.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Blake was having an affair with the dean’s secretary, and Thomas threatened to tell their parents. Classic ‘I wanna be the favorite son’ threat,” Noelle said.

“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” I said. “Thomas’s brother had an affair with Ms. Lewis-Hanneman? But she’s . . . old.”

“Yeah, but look at the woman. She’s totally hot. And it’s not like she’s
ancient.
She was still in her twenties a couple years ago,” Kiran said. “Deteriorating, sure, but not quite ready for the junkyard.”

“I think we should change the subject now, ladies,” Ariana said, noticing that some of the older attendees were beginning to stare.

This was totally insane. Thomas had a brother. An older brother
who supposedly couldn’t stand him. Why had Blake been staring at me? Did he know who I was? Had Thomas told him about me? I thought I had known Thomas so well and all along he’d had a brother I had never even heard about. Yet another mystery that would never be explained.

“I have to get out of here,” I said, pushing myself away from the wall.

I walked right through the crowd and over to the far side of the room where Josh stood chatting with some other guys from school. His curly blond hair had been tamed with some kind of gel and he looked even taller and slightly broader than usual in his blue suit. While the rest of us had been whisked to the city in a limousine commissioned by Dash McCafferty’s parents, Josh had driven his own Range Rover down—the one he kept in a garage off campus in case of emergency. He had been prescient enough to realize that either he or someone he cared about might want to bail from this charade early. Boy had a gift.

“Hey,” I said, touching his arm.

He took one look at me and his blue eyes widened. “You okay?”

Just being near him made me feel slightly better. Solid, comforting, levelheaded Josh. He would take care of everything.

“Fine,” I said flatly. “I just need to go. Can we go?”

“Yeah. Definitely. Let’s go,” he said.

He placed his water glass on a table nearby, said a few words to the guys, and placed his hand against the small of my back as we
turned. He walked me back to my friends near the fireplace, all of whom were already gathering their purses.

“You guys wanna bail?” he asked.

“My hero,” Noelle said wryly.

“In
your
car?” Taylor asked, her eyes still wet.

“Yes, in
his
car. What do you think, he’s gonna hijack a helicopter?” Noelle snapped.

Taylor looked at Kiran, who rolled her eyes and finished the wine she’d grabbed back from the mantel. “Just what I need,” she muttered.

What the hell was wrong with these girls? Were they really that put out by the fact that they’d have to spend a couple of hours in a car that wasn’t a limo? Five minutes living my life at home and they’d probably all break out in hives.

“Where are Dash and Gage?” Josh asked.

“Who cares?” Noelle said, abandoning Dash, who was her boyfriend, with two words. “They’re big boys. They’ll live without us. Let’s just get the hell out of here.”

“Constance?” I said, turning to her. “Wanna come?”

Constance looked warily at the four girls surrounding me—the four most powerful girls in all of Easton. Apparently the idea was too intimidating for her to handle.

“Actually, I’m supposed to have dinner with my parents and the Whittakers tonight,” she said finally. “They’re bringing me back.”

“Really?”

Under any other circumstances, this news would have made me smile. Constance blushed. “It was our parents’ idea.”

Later, when I had the energy and the motivation, I would have to grill her about this. But for now, she was off the hook. The good news was that I could tell that all the Whittaker-related tension between us was gone for good.

“Okay. I’ll see you back there,” I told her.

Then I did something I hade never done before. I voluntarily hugged a person.

Suddenly, I couldn’t wait to get out of this place. I could practically taste freedom. On our way out, Ariana veered off course, away from the door.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“Reed, we have to pay our respects,” she said over her shoulder. “We’re not heathens.”

Great. Exactly what I wanted to do. As we approached the family, Mrs. Pearson chatted with a horse-faced woman with capped teeth and a widow’s peak.

“Well, yes, of course. This is the only time of year to be in Paris. Any other season it’s just
overrun
with tourists,” Mrs. Pearson was saying.

“Trina hasn’t considered herself a tourist in any part of Europe since the day she bought her first couture,” Thomas’s father added, sharing a chuckle with his friend.

“We’d be there now, if it wasn’t for this,” Thomas’s mother said, gesturing blithely at the room.

My heart was in a vise. There was no way. There was no way these people were standing there joking about their travel habits and dismissing Thomas’s wake as an inconvenience. Suddenly, I couldn’t breathe.

“Screw them. Just get it over with,” Noelle said in my ear as Ariana politely shook the Hands of Evil.

When I stepped before the Pearsons, I must have been red with rage. Still, part of me expected them to recognize me as the person who had been with them when we had first realized that Thomas was missing. The person who had meant enough to their son that he had invited me to brunch with them. But when his mother’s cold, hard eyes fell on me there was no spark of anything. Except, perhaps, mild displeasure. Apparently my simple black dress and unhighlighted brown hair didn’t meet her exacting standards. These were the things that were on her mind today of all days. Well, these things and Paris.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” I told her through my teeth.

Then I somehow refrained from grinding my heel into her toe on my way out the door.

Josh adjusted his seat and checked the mirror for the tenth time. Behind us, the line of cars waiting to get out of the Eighty-first Street garage started to grow.

“Any day now, Hollis,” Noelle said through a sigh. She leaned her arm on the front windowsill. Of course she had taken the front, no questions asked.

“Sorry. When I picked up the car back at Easton the seat was all pushed forward for some reason, and I still haven’t gotten it back where I like it,” he said.

Kiran glanced around at everyone as if this news made her feel unsafe somehow. Ariana caught her eye for a long moment and then Kiran relaxed again. That penetrating stare of Ariana’s had multiple purposes.

“Great. So you’re too cheap to spring for memory seats and we’re the ones who have to suffer,” Noelle griped.

“Back off, Noelle,” Josh said through his teeth. “I wanna get out of here as much as you do.”

My fingers curled into tense fists and I tried to breathe. All I got was a lungful of noxious fumes. I just wanted to go, to put this all behind me. My leg started to bounce up and down. Sitting still was not an option. When I was sitting, it felt like something was gnawing on my heart.

My heart pounded harder and harder.
Breathe, breathe, breathe.

“There’s no air in here,” Ariana stated.

Amen, sister.

“It’s the long pedal on the right, Hollis,” Noelle said.

“Do you always have to be such a bitch, Noelle?” Josh snapped.

Whoa. That was uncharacteristic.

“Do you always have to be such a Boy Scout, Josh?” she snapped back.

Breathe, breathe, breathe.

A horn honked from one of the cars behind us, echoing throughout the garage.

“Josh?” I half-whined, at the end of my rope.

“Fine! Fine, we’re going,” Josh said. “Remind me never to get in a car with five women again.”

As he eased out onto the street, Josh caught my eye in the rearview mirror. I could tell he was wondering if I was okay. Already I was breathing easier, so I attempted to smile reassuringly. Unfortunately, somewhere between the elevator and the parking garage I had finally let a few tears loose and now they were drying on the skin under my eyes, making it feel tight and itchy, which made it hard to smile.

“What the hell am I sitting on?” Kiran yanked a dirty white batting glove out from under her perfect little butt. She groaned and threw it over her shoulder, where it narrowly missed the side of Taylor’s face. It fell over the second row of seats into the back, where it joined the rest of Josh’s baseball equipment. “God, do you
ever
clean out your car?”

Josh ignored her comment and Ariana sighed. Finally, we all fell into an exhausted silence. As Josh whisked us northward I stared out the window at Yankee Stadium on the other side of the East River and tried to silently name every professional baseball team I could think of. Anything to keep from actually thinking.

Thinking that I was never going to see Thomas again. For the rest of my life. We had spoken our last words to each other. Had our last kiss. God, I wished I had known that then.

“Well, at least
that’s
over,” Kiran said finally, hugging herself rather tightly, as if she was trying not to touch anything she didn’t have to touch. I could smell her breath from three feet away.

“It’s not over,” Josh said flatly. “Thomas is still dead.”

I tried to ignore the squeezing in my heart. Ariana stared at the back of Josh’s head as if he’d just said something totally inappropriate. He did, however, have a point. This misery would never be over. Thomas was dead. Forever.

“I wish the police would tell us what the hell is going on,” Noelle said, staring out the window. “I bet they don’t know a thing.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time the cops effed things up,” Josh put in.

Noelle turned to Josh suddenly, as if a thought had just occurred to her. “Do you think one of his drug buddies had something to do with this?”

No one moved. I saw Josh’s grip on the steering wheel tighten. Noelle had just voiced a suspicion that had been lurking in the back of my mind ever since I’d heard that Thomas was dead. For days I had been forcing myself not to think about it. Because whenever I did, my imagination conjured horrible things. Things that made my stomach clench and caused serious sweat issues. Hundreds of gruesome grudge murders and torture scenes I had seen in the movies or on those endless stupid cop dramas—they all came flooding back. And I couldn’t handle the idea that Thomas might have died in some twisted, excruciating way at the hands of some red-eyed druggie psycho.

But all Noelle was doing was pointing out the obvious. Thomas
had
been dealing drugs. And when a drug dealer turns up dead, there are logical conclusions that can be easily drawn.

“I’d say it’s a definite possibility,” Ariana said coolly.

Josh glanced in the side mirror, flipped his blinker on, and changed lanes. He cleared his throat.

“You know, no one has said that Thomas was mur—that his death was, you know . . .”

I met Kiran’s eye and knew she was thinking the same thing I was. There was just something so horrifying about the word
murder
that no one wanted to say it.

Noelle exhaled loudly. “Come on, Hollis. Like he what, died of
natural causes? A perfectly healthy seventeen-year-old guy? I mean, I know you of all people don’t want to open that particular can of worms, but come on.”