THE LONG GAME (15 page)

Henry snorted. “If you were any other girl, I would think you were joking.”

“If I were any other girl,” I replied, “I would be.”

An expression I couldn’t quite read crossed Henry’s face. “Based on where I picked you up, I take it that Ivy is assisting the First Lady with something?”

“A press conference,” I said. “I’m guessing Georgia wants to send a message.”

Georgia Nolan was honey-sweet, Southern, and formidable in the extreme. I could imagine the kind of message she would want to send to her husband’s attackers.
The United States does not negotiate with terrorists. We do not fear them.
Two days ago, the president’s words had fallen flat, but now my eyes stung just thinking about them.
The war on terror is one we
will
win.

Georgia wasn’t the type
to back down from a fight.

Neither am I
, I thought, and I focused on
my
fight. “I went down to the police station this morning,” I told Henry. “The detectives asked a lot of questions about Asher.”

Henry didn’t need me to spell it out for him. “Asher fought with John Thomas that morning.”

“And apparently, something brought Asher back to campus that afternoon.”

Henry processed that information
in a heartbeat. “There are a lot of people at Hardwicke who might have had reason to want John Thomas dead.”

That was Henry’s way of saying that Asher didn’t do this—but
someone
did.

“Say you had motive,” I told Henry, thinking out loud. “Say that John Thomas had hurt you, say that he was threatening you
or blackmailing you or that he knew something that you didn’t want other people to know
. . .” I thought of John Thomas, claiming that he’d accessed Hardwicke’s medical records. I thought of the way he’d taken pictures of Emilia and Anna Hayden and who knew how many other girls. “If you
knew
that Asher had punched John Thomas, you’d know that the police would consider Asher a major suspect.”

“Especially,” Henry added, “if you could lure him back to the school. I take it you’ve spoken
with Asher?”

“No,” I said, steeling myself for his reaction. “Ivy made me promise I wouldn’t.”

I expected Henry to snap, the way he had the last time Ivy had told me to stay out of something. Instead, he just raised an eyebrow. “Did she make you promise that
I
wouldn’t?” he asked.

“No,” I replied, catching on quickly. “As a matter of fact, she did not.”

I might have been a person who kept
her word—but I was also the type to look for loopholes.

Henry waited until he got to another red light and then he picked up his phone, set it to speaker, and called Asher.

No answer. Instead, we got Asher’s voice mail.
“You’ve reached Asher Rhodes. I’m off being interrogated for crimes I didn’t commit, but if you leave your name and number, I will get back to you as soon as possible.”

“At
least he hasn’t lost his sense of humor,” I said.

Henry wasn’t amused. “Asher would have a sense of humor on the way to the gallows.” Henry dialed another number. This one went to voice mail, too.

“Hello! You have reached the magnificent sister of Asher. She is unavailable at the moment, quite possibly because she has realized I reprogrammed her voice mail and is off planning my imminent—”

A call came in, and Henry answered, cutting off the voice mail. “Emilia. Is Asher—”

“In way, way over his head?” Emilia filled in. “Yes. He’s down at the police station.” Emilia swallowed audibly on the other end of the line, but when she spoke again, her voice was steady. “I accidentally left my phone in the courtyard yesterday. Someone texted Asher, pretending to be me. They said that I needed
him, and because my brother is an idiot who specializes in idiocy that could get him expelled, he came running back.”

Whoever had shot John Thomas had wanted Asher on campus. They’d wanted Asher to take the fall. And they’d known that Asher would literally jump off a cliff for his twin.

“We will find out who did this,” I told Emilia. That was a promise—to Henry, to Emilia, to myself.

There
was a long silence on the other end of the line. When Emilia spoke again, all trace of emotion had been banished from her voice. “You’ll try.”

CHAPTER 34

Hardwicke resumed classes the next day.

“My aunt thought they’d cancel for the rest of the week, at least,” Vivvie told me as the two of us filed into the Hardwicke chapel for an all-school assembly.

I’d thought the same, but apparently the powers that be at Hardwicke had other plans.

“How was the police station?” Vivvie asked, lowering her voice.

“The good news is that they don’t
suspect me.” I’d never been the type to mince words. “The bad news is that they suspect Asher.”

“Asher wouldn’t hurt anyone,” Vivvie said fiercely. “I mean, he repeatedly face-punched John Thomas, obviously—but other than that, he would
never
hurt someone.”

“I know,” I said. And I did. I knew that Asher hadn’t gone home and gotten a gun. I knew that he hadn’t put a bullet in John Thomas’s chest.

“Settle, please. Everyone, settle down.” Headmaster Raleigh’s voice was strong, but his face was morose. For once, the room quieted almost instantaneously. “Here at Hardwicke, we’ve had a difficult couple of days,” the headmaster said. “Many of us are just now coming to understand the enormity of our loss.”

In the pew behind me, I heard a couple of girls take jagged breaths. On the opposite side
of the room, one or two of John Thomas’s friends were bent over, hollow-eyed and ready to punch something.

“John Thomas Wilcox was a bright young man with his whole future in front of him,” the headmaster continued. “When he transferred here as a freshman, he immediately began leaving his mark on this school and on each of us. He was a model student, a natural leader, and a wonderful friend.”

Already, I could feel the collective memory shifting, as people remembered the good times and forgot everything else. This was the John Thomas most of our classmates would remember: a well-liked guy who knew how to take a joke and how to deliver one. An athlete. An honors student. A life full of potential, cut down too soon.

Across the room, Emilia sat between Maya and Di. As the headmaster spoke,
she stared straight ahead, never blinking, her hands gripping each other tightly in her lap.

“In the coming days,” Headmaster Raleigh continued, “there will be some changes at Hardwicke. We will be doubling our on-campus security and reviewing all protocols to ensure student safety. Until further notice, students are asked to remain in the main building at all times. If you have information that
might be of help to the police, I urge you to speak with your parents and come forward as soon as possible.”

• • •

I caught up with Emilia in the girls’ bathroom. Her hands were wrapped around the edge of the sink. Her head was bowed, her knuckles white.

“Sitting through that couldn’t have been easy,” I told her. I leaned back against the bathroom door, making sure no one else could come in
and catch Emilia with her armor off.

“Sitting through what?” Emilia shot back. “The beatification of John Thomas Wilcox, or the stares from people I’ve gone to school with my whole life who think that my brother might have done this?”

I sensed that was a rhetorical question.

Emilia turned to look at me. “If I told you to go away, is there even the least chance you’d listen?”

I let my arms
dangle next to my side. “Unlikely.”

Emilia forced herself to stand up straight. She turned to face me head-on. “I tried to figure out who took my phone,” she said, banishing all hint of vulnerability. “I left it in the courtyard Monday morning.” Clearly, Emilia didn’t want to talk about her
feelings
. “Someone turned it into the office that afternoon, but no one in the office could remember who.”

I couldn’t force Emilia to let me in, so I followed her lead and focused on the facts. “John Thomas told me he’d gotten ahold of Hardwicke student files,” I said. “The kind of files that contained confidential medical information.”

“And this is the boy people are mourning,” Emilia said, her voice going hollow. “A model student. A natural leader. A wonderful friend.”

The look in Emilia’s eyes
when she repeated the headmaster’s words from that morning reminded me that John Thomas hadn’t just enjoyed power. He’d enjoyed making other people feel powerless.

“We need to figure out who at this school had reason to want John Thomas dead,” I said quietly.

“Besides me, you mean?”

“Emilia—”

“Don’t handle me with kid gloves, Tess.” Emilia’s fingers curled, driving her nails into her palms.
“Say what you mean.” Emilia stared at me so hard I could feel the weight of her stare on the surface of my skin.

“You weren’t the only one he took pictures of.” That much I could say without betraying any confidences—or forcing anything out of her that she wasn’t ready to give.

Emilia was silent for four or five seconds before she spoke. “If I were going to guess where one might look for people
who knew John Thomas Wilcox for who and what he was,” she said quietly, “that social media experiment of yours wouldn’t be a bad place to start.”

I Stand With Emilia.

Emilia stared at me for a second longer, then turned back to the sink. “This case is going to get national attention. My parents hired a lawyer, but the kind of lawyer we can afford isn’t going to be enough.” She pressed her lips
together. “He was the whip’s son, Tess, and Asher is nobody.”

I knew, in that moment, that Emilia wasn’t just talking about Asher.

“I’ll get Asher a lawyer,” I promised her. “I’ll do whatever it takes.” Emilia rinsed her hands methodically and then lifted her gaze to the mirror. At first I thought she was checking her makeup, but then I realized that she was studying her own expression—removing
all hints of weakness.

“You don’t have to be okay right now,” I told her. “Whatever you’re feeling—it’s okay to feel that way.”

Emilia pushed past me. She reached for the door, then paused. “What is it you even think that I’m feeling?” she said, her voice quiet but cutting. “Am I supposed to be sad? Or maybe in shock? Maybe I’m supposed to be spiraling downward. But I’m not. I’m not sad, and
I’m not in shock, and I’m not spiraling.” She glanced back at me. “You worry about my brother and finding out who wanted John Thomas dead,” she ordered. “Because I’m
fine
.”

In between second and third period, I called Ivy.
No answer.

In between third and fourth period, I called Ivy.
No answer.

At lunch, I called William Keyes. He answered. I asked him what it would take to get someone from
Tyson Brewer’s firm to represent Asher. There was a pause on the other end of the line as my grandfather processed the fact that I was asking for a favor.

“Just say the word, Tess,” Keyes told me. “All you have to do is ask, and I can get your friend an entire team of defense lawyers, the best in the country, free of charge.”

Free of charge to Asher, maybe
, I thought. Accepting this favor would
undoubtedly cost me.

“Do it.”

CHAPTER 35

As it turned out, pinpointing which of my fellow students might have wanted John Thomas dead was significantly harder than putting the best defense lawyers in the country on retainer. Even my reputation as a fixer couldn’t loosen lips, not when it came to speaking ill of the dead.

“There’s a term that psychologists use to describe our memory of moments that surprise and shock us,
the ones where we hear news that rocks us to our core.” Dr. Clark stood at the front of my last-period class, looking at us one by one.

“
Flashbulb memories
,” Dr. Clark said. “That’s what they call memories for large-scale, emotionally significant events. Most Americans who were in elementary school or older on November 22, 1963, can tell you exactly where they were when they heard that President
Kennedy had been assassinated.” Dr. Clark let those words sink in. “The day the space shuttle
Challenger
exploded,” she continued, listing off another flashbulb-memory-provoking event. She swallowed. “September 11, 2001.”

These were the dates that lived forever in people’s memories—bright and detailed, forever memorialized with a kind of visceral horror. I couldn’t remember 9/11, let alone the
Challenger
or the day Kennedy was shot.

Monday, November 6
, I thought.
President Nolan. John Thomas. November 6.

“After the events of the past couple of days,” Dr. Clark said, “I’ve been asking myself what people will remember about this week, this tragedy.” She took her time with the words, each hard-won—and even harder to listen to. “Will they remember where they were when President Nolan was
shot? Will they remember refreshing news pages, desperately waiting for an update on his condition? Will they remember going to the polls in record numbers, because voting was the only thing they could do? Will they remember the First Lady telling them that her husband had been put in a medically induced coma? Will they remember the look on her face as she
swore
on live television that President
Nolan would make it through this, that he was a survivor?”

The room was quiet, silent but for our teacher’s voice.

“Will people remember the president’s sons standing behind the First Lady at that press conference? Will they recall anything at all about the week leading up to the shooting?”

Dr. Clark shook her head. “I don’t have any answers for you. I can tell you,” she said, looking out at
us—and
through
us, “that I was on an airplane on September 11th. It was a transatlantic flight, my senior year in college. I was studying abroad. I remember landing and getting off the plane. I remember people turning on their phones. I remember the news spreading, slowly, from person to person—and the airport . . .” She closed her eyes. “I remember
they had the news on. I remember watching. And
I remember thinking that I’d almost flown through New York.”