Hell, he looked bored right now, staring at me.
“What?” I asked. “Do you have a problem with me sitting here today?” I sounded weirdly confrontational, which was so not how I wanted to sound. Maybe it was the way those dark eyes pinned me to my seat, how much I wanted to squirm when I saw his lips thin and a slight frown cross his face.
I’d gotten him to smile yesterday; what was with the switch? Was I some bore now?
“Not at all,” Vaughn said. “Don’t let the face fool you. I might look murderous, but that doesn’t mean I always am.” He pushed around the food on his tray—today was chicken nuggets and fries.
They…they actually looked kind of good.
And then my mind snapped back to reality, at what he just said. “So you’re only sometimes murderous?” With what I’d found out about Celeste Chambers, I kind of had murder on the brain. Not actually going out and killing someone, but…what would it take for someone to snap and dismember someone else?
I just…no. God no. Ugh. A shiver crept up my spine as I pictured what the crime scene must’ve looked like, and I fought to not let it show.
“Occasionally,” Vaughn spoke, giving me a slow, seductive smile. “I think we all are, depending on the day.” The way he spoke about it, as if he had first-hand experience being murderous…
Or maybe that was just my mind being paranoid.
Snap out of it, Jaz, I told myself. Be cool, be normal. Basically, be anything but yourself.
Easy.
Easier said than done, that was.
“Well, personally I’ve never been murderous,” I said, shrugging as I unrolled my lunch.
“Then you haven’t been pushed enough.” Vaughn cocked his head, giving me the side-eye.
“Not to change the subject, but what do you know about Celeste Chambers?” When I spoke her name, I lowered my voice, not wanting everyone else to overhear. Then again, if that blonde chick knew I’d gotten out of Ollie’s car yesterday—thank God he didn’t offer to drive me today—the whole school might know.
Vaughn’s dark brows furrowed. “Aren’t you new here? Why are you so interested in something that happened years ago? Celeste is old news now. You, Jaz, are the new news.” He actually picked up a fry and ate it—the first time I’d seen him eat. He didn’t seem overly muscular, but he was lean. He had to work out, and eating the stuff the kitchen put out wasn’t exactly a healthy choice.
Not that I sat there ogling his arms. Which I didn’t…much.
“I am,” I relented, “but I’ve heard some things and I just want to know the truth. She escaped her kidnapper and came back?”
“Yeah,” Vaughn spoke, flattening his hands on the table, allowing me to see the tattoos on them. The guy actually had hate and pain written across his knuckles, along with some kind of thick black tribal design on the rest of them. Hmm. No wonder everyone else steered clear of him. Didn’t notice those particular tattoos yesterday. “And then she was gone like two months later.”
In two months she was gone again? As in disappeared? Surely the news would’ve been all over that, so there had to be more to it.
“She disappeared again, or she left Midpark?” I asked, slowly lifting a cracker to my mouth. I really wanted to snatch one of his chicken nuggets, but that would’ve been going a little too far, doing too much, too soon. Vaughn and I weren’t BFFs.
His lips curled into a smile. “She just vanished. She stopped coming to school, and that was the last anyone has heard of her. Everyone assumed she needed to start fresh, especially with what happened to some of the other kids here.”
Bobbi had mentioned some incidents, but at the time, I hadn’t sought to clarify. Now I needed to know, so I asked, “What happened to the other kids?”
“There was a guy, Axel Redmand, who got his hands cut off. They say his hands were never found, meaning whoever did it probably kept them,” Vaughn spoke, still somehow keeping the smile, even though his tale was making me queasy.
Someone cut a kid’s hands off and kept them? Just…what? How was that even something that could cross someone’s mind?
“And then, of course, there was Alice,” he spoke her name lightly. “Her car hit a tree, and afterward…she was never the same. People pointed fingers at Celeste, blaming her for everything. Both Alice and Axel had gotten into some confrontations with her. I was a freshman at the time, so I didn’t pay much attention, but everyone around here knew the rumors.”
So these terrible things happened, and everyone blamed Celeste? Why? Because she was an outsider, because she’d been away for years?
What if she did do them? Leaving after things like that…it kind of painted her in a bad light.
And then another idea came to me—what if Celeste didn’t do them, but she had them orchestrated? What if she had help?
I was so lost in my own head that I couldn’t say anything; Vaughn however said, “Why are you so curious about what happened years ago?”
How could I explain it all without sounding absolutely nuts? Normally I wasn’t paranoid, but there was something about Ollie and the story of Celeste that set me on edge, something I didn’t like. I didn’t know what that was, but it made me uneasy all the same.
“It’s a long story,” I said, fiddling with another cracker. “I wish I could find out the truth about what happened to her.” If she’d left, great. Her and her mom were incognito somewhere else. If she and her mom were buried in the backyard, then my mom and I would skedaddle ourselves the fuck out of here.
Vaughn studied me, and I wasn’t sure I liked the way his black eyes zeroed in on my face, how they seemed to look over every curvature there, how his gaze dropped to my chin. Or was it my mouth? Was Vaughn staring at my mouth? I honestly couldn’t tell.
If he was…bad boys weren’t necessarily my thing, but it kind of gave me a certain thrill.
“I’ll let you in on a little secret around here,” he said, leaning forward and resting his forearms on the table before his tray of nuggets. “The rich don’t go digging for dirt themselves. They have someone else do it.”
“Like a spy?” was what my brilliant mouth said.
Vaughn actually chuckled at that—and I almost hated how dark and low the sound was. It was a chuckle that I might just hear in my dreams. “I suppose, if you want to be fancy, but there are lots of ways. Theoretically, you could get anyone to do anything, as long as you have some blackmail.”
This guy was talking about blackmail so nonchalantly, as if he dealt in this shit all the time. What had I gotten myself into? Who the hell was I sitting with? How could he say half of the stuff he said seriously?
“Or, if you have enough money, you can always hire someone else to do the digging,” Vaughn added, giving me a sly grin, as if he knew how much he’d unsettled me by bringing up blackmail.
Did he have blackmail on other people? Did he use it?
I forced myself to swallow, trying to sound as normal as possible as I asked, “Like a private investigator?”
“As long as you have the money, you can pay someone to do anything.”
That also sounded ominous…or maybe that was simply because my mind was running a mile a minute with everything he’d told me. It wasn’t like I had the money to hire a PI, but…that was more likely than blackmail.