Veronica Mars

A VINTAGE ORIGINAL, MARCH 2014

Copyright © 2014 by Rob Thomas
,
Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc., and Alloy Entertainment LLC

All rights reserved. Published by Vintage Books, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies.

Produced by Alloy Entertainment
1700 Broadway, New York, NY 10019
www.alloyentertainment.com

Based on characters from the series
Veronica Mars
, by Rob Thomas.

Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data
Thomas, Rob.
Veronica Mars. The Thousand-Dollar Tan Line /
Rob Thomas, Jennifer Graham. pages cm.
1. Women private investigators—Fiction. I. Graham, Jennifer. II. Veronica Mars (Television program)
III. Title. IV. Title: Thousand-dollar tan line.
PS3620.H639V47 2014
813′.6—dc23
2014001174

Vintage Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8041-7070-3
eBook ISBN: 978-0-8041-7071-0

Thomas author photograph © Eric Doggett
Graham author photograph © Jennifer Gandin Le

www.vintagebooks.com

Cover design by Mark Abrams
Cover photographs: house and sky © Jamie Kripke/Corbis; fireworks © Mohamad Ramadan Photography/Flickr/Getty Images

v3.1

First off, thanks to Rob Thomas, for imagining a world with Veronica in it and for giving the rest of us a chance to play there.

Enormous thanks to Lanie Davis. I could not have pulled this off without your expertise and your support. Thanks as well to Bob Dearden and Deirdre Mangan, who provided invaluable help in developing this story, and to the gang at Random House—particularly Andrea Robinson, Beth Lamb, and Anne Messitte—for all their hard work.

Thanks to Matt Donaldson and Cara Hallowell for their fight choreography, to John Preston Brown for his knowledge of the criminal element, and to Jack, Donna, and Zac Graham for their years of encouragement and care. I also had a ton of cheerleaders on this project and owe particular thanks to Alec Austin, Sarah Cornwell, Izetta Irwin, Jennifer Gandin Le, Patrick Ryan Frank, and Kyle John Schmidt, all of whom kept me going at various points of the process.

—JENNIFER GRAHAM

The buses began to roll into Neptune, California, late Friday afternoon and didn’t slow up until Monday. They arrived dusty, windshields speckled with dead insects and fractures from stray flying stones, the chaos of the interstate. They pulled in along the boardwalk, trembling with pent-up noise, shivering like dogs waiting for a command.

Their routes mapped out an arterial network, connecting the little seaside town to all the university cities in the western United States. To L.A. and San Diego; to the Bay Area and the Inland Empire. To Phoenix, Tucson, Reno; to Portland and Seattle, to Boulder, to Boise, even to Provo. Bright, excited faces peered from every window, pressed to the glass.

One after another the buses’ folding doors clattered open, and students poured out into the streets. They looked around at the sand and the surf, the carnival rides lit up along the boardwalk, the foot-tall drinks. Some had just finished term papers the night before; others had stayed up all night studying for tests. Now, suddenly, they’d awakened in a fairyland that had popped into existence, just for their pleasure. Screaming with laughter, they flooded the town. They stumbled through the streets, blind drunk, trusting that
the magic that had brought them here would keep them from falling.

And for exactly three nights, it did.

By Wednesday morning, the coastal town that sparkled at night looked … mundane. Not just mundane.
Dirty
. Pools of spilled beer collected in the seams of the sidewalk, and the rank tang of overfilled Dumpsters wafted out from the alleys. The ghostly forms of used condoms littered doorways and bushes, and shattered glass covered the street.

The Sea Nymph Motel was eerily silent when eighteen-year-old Bri Lafond stumbled in. Almost all of the guests were spring breakers, and the party didn’t get started until early afternoon. She had been at a rave on the inland edge of town, and by the time the party had wound down at 4:00 a.m. she hadn’t been able to get a cab. She’d still been high enough that the idea of walking back to the motel had seemed feasible. Now, bone tired, she trudged through the sandy courtyard to the room she and her three best friends from UC Berkeley had rented. It was one of the cheapest available, facing the Dumpster in the parking lot. Now she didn’t care, fumbling with the lock and wanting only to fall into one of the two doubles they’d been sharing all week.

The room’s blinds gaped open, letting in a ray of pallid light. Leah was sprawled across the bed with her head shoved under a pillow, still wearing a sequined dress from the night before. Her legs were bruised and smudged with dirt. Melanie sat with her back to the headboard, sipping from a paper Starbucks cup. She wore board shorts and
a bikini top, her long blond hair tousled and smears of makeup caking her eyes. She looked up when she heard the door open.

“I have a surf lesson in, like, half an hour, and I’m still drunk,” she said. She looked at Bri, her eyes focusing with difficulty. “Where’ve you been? You look like shit.”

“Thanks a lot.” Bri leaned down to unzip her boots, her feet throbbing. “Where’s Hayley? Is she surfing too?”

“Haven’t seen her.” Melanie closed her eyes and rested her head back against the wall. Bri froze, one boot off, the other still pinching her toes. She looked up.

“Since when?”

“Since … since the party on Monday, I guess.” Melanie opened her eyes. “Shit.”

Bri blinked, then tugged the other boot off her foot. She sank to the bed and gently pushed Leah’s shoulder. “Hey, Leah. Wake up. Did you see Hayley yesterday?”

Leah gave a low moan from under the pillow. For a moment she curled into a tight ball, her arm circled protectively over her head. It took them a few more minutes of prodding and cooing her name before she finally pulled away the pillow and looked blearily up at them. “Hayley? Not since the … the party on Monday.”

A bleak, empty feeling expanded into every corner of Bri’s body. She scrolled back through her messages. There was nothing from Hayley since Monday afternoon.

They’d spent three hours getting ready, Hayley wearing an uncharacteristically low-cut tight dress that showed miles of smooth, tan leg. She kept insisting they look their best; she’d been invited by some guy who bought her a mai tai in the Cabo Cantina and told her to bring her hottest friends.

They’d all gone, walking up a winding private road where a pair of burly security guards waved them in. The house was sprawling and modern, a boxy, sculptural structure. Every room burned with light and luxury. Melanie melted into the crowd instantly, gyrating her hips to the music. In the kitchen, Leah caught sight of a guy from her biology class and beelined toward him. Hayley and Bri pushed through the house to the back patio to get their bearings. An enormous pool glowed aquamarine below them, and out beyond that the beach stretched black in the moonlight.

Hayley’s eyes shone, reflecting the bright colored lights of the patio. All weekend, she had alternated between sadness and outraged defiance. She’d be in tears one minute; the next, she’d spin on her heel to face one of her friends and snap, “Chad can’t tell me what to do. Who does he think he is?” She and her boyfriend had broken up for the hundredth time, but that night Hayley looked excited. It was almost as if all the heartbreak had sloughed off her body, like some kind of heavy cocoon, leaving her raw and fresh and new. She and Bri had thrown themselves into the mass of dancing bodies, and for a while, the thrumming bass cleared all thoughts from Bri’s head. She lost track of time, the number of drinks she threw back—and her friends.

Now Bri remembered seeing Leah doing lines of coke off an antique coffee table, holding her long honey-colored hair
off her neck as she bent over. She remembered hands running up her hips, a slurring male voice telling her she’d be really hot if she grew her hair out. She remembered seeing flashes of Hayley, leaning up to whisper in the ear of a boy in a perfectly cut white suit, his eyes long lashed and sultry, his lips pouting playfully.

Beyond that everything was a blur. She’d woken up the next morning in a lawn chair by the motel pool, shivering in the early morning chill, her purse tucked under her head. She had no idea how she’d gotten home.

“Did you see her leave the party with someone?” Bri looked at her friends. Both shook their heads slowly.

“I’m sure she’s fine,” Melanie said hesitantly. “She’s probably with some guy she met at the party. She’ll come up for air sooner or later.”