“Ethan, would you mind getting me a scone for the road?” I ask. “I’ll text you a screenshot of my Starbucks card.” If Ethan thinks it’s strange I’m using him as my lackey, he doesn’t say anything. Dutifully he joins the end of the line, which is ten people deep, so it’ll take him a bit. By design.
Kaila leans in, a knowing smile plucking at her lips. “Something you want to ask me privately?”
“Are you really saying that the reason Emma did all that to you is because she wanted Tyler for herself? It wasn’t about getting Avery that ASB spot?”
“I think the ASB spot was likely cover. Gravy. It wasn’t about Tyler per se….” Kaila sips her coffee, I think as an excuse to go no further.
“Why can’t you tell me?”
Kaila’s expression turns grim. “You don’t want to get any more involved in it than you already are, trust me. Emma was a complicated girl. She had secrets. Don’t let her take you down with her. I’m glad I escaped with little more than an expulsion no one will care about in ten years.”
“Emma’s dead. What can she do?”
“You’re thinking too small. You’re caught in a web and don’t even know it.” Kaila finishes her zucchini bread and crumples the waxy paper bag into a ball. Then she downs the rest of her coffee, finishing with a wet smack. “Back off, Olivia. That’s my advice. But if you don’t want to…I’ve given you everything you need.” And with a pitying look and a small salute, she bids me farewell.
The words back off echo in my ear. Quit Meddling’s first email came before I ever contacted Kaila, so she can’t be the secret emailer. There’s no way. But she’s saying the exact same thing.
Stop digging.
“Did she leave?” Ethan looms over the table, a bag with my scone in hand.
“Yeah, let’s go.” I push back to leave, and immediately a hipster dude with a laptop appears to take the table. Vultures.
Ethan and I walk back to the train station in uneasy silence. I suspect he knows I sent him on an errand to give me time alone with Kaila. He doesn’t pry into what we discussed, but his jaw keeps flexing, gloved fingers ticking against his thighs. He wants to ask. My wheels are turning. Emma had secrets upon secrets, but they’re like wisps of smoke dancing away from my fingers as I try to grab hold.
We wait on an empty platform for the 11:15 train back, frigid wind cutting through the station and through our coats. There’s a shelter down the platform, but neither Ethan nor I make a break for it. I think we both need to feel the burn of the cold.
“What do you think?” Ethan asks finally. All that silence, and he opens with such a widely fielded question.
“I think if Kaila got the worst that Emma did and she didn’t want to kill her, then the revenge motive is thin. Unless Jason Wang was willing to kill over some abdominal distress.” I stare at a point across the platform, eyes trained on a tattered two-sheet ad for a concert that took place three months ago.
“My guess, it’s all about Beau,” Ethan says.
I unconsciously thumb Emma’s phone in my bag. “The candlelight memorial tonight—you’re going?”
“We have to, lest we look like heartless assholes.”
“Right, which means Beau will be there, even if he killed her,” I reason. “I have the phone, so I have his number. So we set a trap at the memorial. I’ll text him, and you scan the crowd to see who is on their phone.”
“Why would he answer a text if he knows she’s dead? He’ll know it’s a trap.”
I begin to pace, an improvement on leaning forward every twenty seconds to check if the train is coming. “We don’t need him to text back. Just look at his phone. React. It’ll give him the fright of his life, even if logically he knows she’s gone. We’ll get him.”
A two-toned wail signals the approaching train, cutting off any protest Ethan might make. We move to the end of the platform, ready to board. “Meet me there. It’ll work,” I say, trying hard to convince myself.
I’m crossing the quad with Ethan when Cataldo calls my name. We stop, Ethan asking with an apologetic look to leave me to it. I let him go with a wave and paste on a smile as I turn to find the detective jogging toward me. A laptop bag is slung over her shoulder and looks to be bumping painfully against her hip.
“Hey, how are you?”
“Uh, fine.”
“Are you going to Austen again? Can I walk you?”
I eye Austen, then the laptop bag. Emma’s laptop bag. I wasn’t heading to the admin building, but I nod. If there’s anywhere I can find out the depths of Emma’s secrets, it’s in her personal files. This might be my only chance with her laptop.
“Isn’t that breaking the chain of custody?” I indicate the bag.
“So you were listening?”
“Couldn’t help it.”
“Yes, but no. Claflin’s lawyer was happy to explain it to me this morning. I am merely dropping off the laptop into Claflin’s custody until tomorrow, when an FBI tech, who is assisting with the investigation—not taking over!—will help us crack the password.”
I try my luck. “I can take it in for you if you want.”
“I have to deliver it myself to a secure location.”
“Of course.”
“I’m glad I ran into you. I’m piecing together the timeline for the night Emma died, and I have some questions.”
I let her go on.
“What was Emma wearing at the party?”
“Blue dress, red sweater, black leggings, her black boots, and a navy-blue peacoat.”
Cataldo stops. We’re outside Austen again. Déjà vu. “So that’s why you felt she had returned to your dorm room, correct? Because of the sweater.”
“It was on her desk chair when I woke up. And the door was open, remember.”
“Can you think of why she’d return to your room only to drop off her sweater and not otherwise change her clothes? That’s odd. What time would that have been? That she came back? If she did?”
“I don’t know. I was asleep. Could have been anytime after eleven-thirty but before two-fifteen.”
“The missing time between the party and her death.” Cataldo releases a long breath, which blows like smoke between us. “So the sweater indicates that she did go home after the party. What I’m stuck on is what made her leave the dorm, if she did go back to your room. There were no texts on her phone from anyone arranging a meeting.”