Be Strong & Curvaceous (18 page)

“It’s his fault you have a brother you never knew about,” I told her. “But it’s not his fault Drifter got all whacked and came to California to do . . . what, exactly?” I read the e-mail again. “This is more than just watching you. I don’t like this stuff about Columbine. Not one bit.”

Something pinged in my memory, but I couldn’t pin it down.

“I’m not very keen about going out in a blaze of glory, either.” She sounded more subdued, as if she regretted the snap.

I looked at her. “I’m only going to say this one more time.”

“I know. I know. But at least we have more to go on now. Like a name. And this.”

She swung the laptop toward herself and opened an attachment I hadn’t seen at the bottom of the e-mail. An image filled the screen.

My mouth fell open.

“That’s him? That’s Drifter? David whatsisname?”

And suddenly everything fell into place, the puzzle pieces all snapping together. The photographer the night we were at TouTou’s. The gray hoodie. Viscount Strathey. The name on the envelope. I jumped off the bed, and Mac made a grab for her computer before it slid to the floor. I snatched the envelope of photographs out of my tote and held them out to her. “It’s that kid who was out at the gate the night we went to TouTou’s. He took that picture he sent you and he took all these. Look at the name he’s using. I think I know what he plans to do.”

She looked through them carefully, one at a time. By the time she got to the photograph of the guy who had picked up his pictures at five minutes past noon, making his macho salute with his gun, her face had gone so white I could see individual freckles standing out across her nose.

“Where did you get these?” she whispered.

“He brought them to the photo shop to be developed. We’re the only developer within a mile or two of the school. Even still, what are the odds?” I took a breath. “Do you think all that stuff belongs to him? Where did he get it?”

She shook her head. “He’s a fast worker, I’ll give him that. He hasn’t been in the country much over a month, and it had to have taken time to make or buy all this.”

The photo in her hand jarred my brain into working again. “Let me see that.” It was a picture of a map tacked to a wall over a narrow bed. “Mac, do you know where this is from?”

She shook her head.

“It’s from the Spencer Web site. It’s a map of the campus.” I remembered studying it when Papa had first proposed the boarding-school idea. Drifter’s map had been marked up with red X’s and circles with “LPG” written inside. There were X’s on two sides of each dorm. Inside the library. In the dining room and reception hall. A big blue circle was marked in the center of the field house, and another in the assembly hall where Design Your Dreams was scheduled next month. And there was a red X on Ms. Curzon’s office.

“Mac, we’ve got to tell someone right now. That’s why he said that thing about Columbine. That’s your blaze of glory.” My lungs felt crushed, suffocating me as the full horror of the situation sank in. “He’s planning to blow up the school.”

“I NEED TO SPEAK to the headmistress immediately.” Lady Lindsay Margaret Eithne MacPhail of Strathcairn looked down her aristocratic nose, and I could practically see the glint of a tiara in her red curls.

The principal’s assistant, who apparently worked weekends, too, glanced behind her into Ms. Curzon’s on-campus apartment, which was on the fourth floor of the administrative wing. “I’m afraid she’s out at the moment.”

“This is urgent. Would you call her, please, and tell her it’s extremely important I see her right away?”

The woman’s face set into stubborn lines. “That’s not possible. She’s having dinner with some members of the board.”

“Doesn’t she have her mobile with her?”

“Yes, but—”

“Then call her.”

“I can’t possibly interrupt her meeting for student concerns.”

“This isn’t a student concern,” Mac hissed, her eyes narrowing. “It’s about a threat to the school.”

“Then you should take it to the director of security.”

We had a director of security?

Then I gave myself a mental smack. With the progeny of California’s movers and shakers going here, not to mention European royalty and movie stars, of course we did. They must be very discreet, though. I’d never seen as much as a hint of a black suit or a pair of Ray-Bans.

“Fine,” Mac said briskly. “Would you call him, please?”

“Mr. Larkin is at home.”

“I assume he has a telephone.”

“Lady Lindsay, it’s Saturday night. The man does take the occasional day off. Would you like to speak to the weekend supervisor?” Was she actually enjoying this?

“This problem is too big to leave in the hands of second-level management such as him or you,” she snapped. “I want to speak to the headmistress or Mr. Larkin. If you won’t call them, I’ll go see them myself. It’s urgent. The safety of this whole school is at stake.”

The woman—what was her name?—planted her feet in the doorway as though she expected us to rush it. “Before you go interrupting them, how do I know this isn’t some kind of prank?”

“Because it’s not,” I said. “This is real, and it’s urgent, and we need Ms. Curzon’s help.”

“That’s what Brett Loyola’s older brother said, too, three years ago. Bomb threat, he said. We evacuated the school, called out the bomb squad, and for what? So they could get a free half-day during exams!”

Mac closed her eyes as if she were praying for patience. I felt like doing that myself.

“This is not a prank. It’s not exam week. It is serious danger. Now, are you going to help us or not?”

The woman stepped back and swung the door partly shut. “I’ll call Natalie when her dinner is over and let her know you two stopped by.”

“That’s not good enough!” Mac cried. “That’s—”

The door closed in her face.

“What kind of idiot gets information about a bomb threat and treats it like this?” Mac raised a fist and moved to bang on the door. I stopped her.

“The kind that thinks all the students are out to make a fool of her.” I had to admit that wouldn’t be hard to do. “We have to think of something else.”

“Someone must have Curzon’s mobile number,” Mac said. “Or this Larkin man’s home phone.”

But it was Saturday night and most of the administration had gone home for the weekend.

Mac raised her hand again to bang on the door. “I’ll find out what restaurant Curzon’s at and we’ll go down there.”

“She won’t tell you.”

I proved to be right. The conversation was very short and very rude.

We trooped down the stairs and went back to the dorm wing, having gained nothing but an earful and a demerit each. “The problem is, we don’t know when—or even if—this is going to happen,” I said. “We don’t know where Drif—er, David is.”

“But we have proof,” Mac said. “We have the picture he sent me of himself that links me to him and we have the envelope of photos linking him to the bombs. If we could just show them to somebody who will believe us, we could get this solved quietly.”

“I think the time for quiet is long gone.”

“Carly, we are not going to the police. I told you that before. The only reason I agreed to tell Curzon is because she knows how to hush things up.”

“Oh, it’ll be hushed up, all right. That nasty old bat isn’t going to pass on our message and we’ll have gotten a demerit for nothing. You just said we have enough proof. The cops will believe us.”

“Maybe they will. And if they do, the news crews will be the next to know. And then the entire planet will know that my dad has a psychotic illegitimate son who is targeting me. Can’t you just see this on the six o’clock news?”

Consider the alternative: a nice shot of our bodies being loaded into the ambulance in black bags
. “It’s better than being blown up.”

“Easy for you to say. You’re nobody.”

I sucked in a breath and stopped dead in the middle of the marble staircase. After all the times she’d hurt me, you’d think I’d be immune to a slap like that.

But I wasn’t. Every new wound hurt me just as much, every time.

She put a hand on my arm. “I’m sorry. Carly, I didn’t mean that. You’re trying to help me and I’m being horrible.” She sat on the stairs while I hesitated a step above her, trying to decide if it was safe to be anywhere near her. “I can’t seem to help it. It’s like a disease.”

“Who’s got a disease?”

We both looked up to see Lissa, Gillian, and Shani at the top of the stairs, all dressed to go out.

“That’s what I’m talking about,” I breathed. “Here come the cavalry.”

“Don’t dare say a word,” Mac whispered.

“But—” She shot me a warning glare as we stood up, and I shut up.

“
Zao
, guys.” Gillian breezed down the stairs in a cloud of Princess. “What’s going on?”

The question of the day. And the answer? At the moment, nothing. Unless I took matters into my own hands. Mac was as stubborn as my little brother, only I didn’t have the advantages or size or age to get my way. But we needed help. Five brains had to be better than two—especially when one of them was Gillian’s.

Not only that—Lissa has this thing about armies of angels standing at our backs. Well, if ever anyone needed an army, it was me. Right here, right now.
You hear me, angels? Cue formation.

“Well,” I began in a conversational tone, “Mac has a stalker who’s not only her secret half brother, but he’s also threatening to kill her and blow up the school.”

“Carly!” Mac shrieked.

“Curzon and the head security guy are gone and the person we told doesn’t believe us,” I went on. “We have proof, but Mac refuses to call the cops.”

“Carly! Shut up!”

“So basically we’re out of ideas.” I gave them all a sunny smile while Mac’s face went from dough pale to burning red in seconds. “And how was your day?”

Have you ever seen a redhead lose her temper? Yeah? How about a Scottish redhead? Uh-huh. There’s nothing like it. Now I know how William Wallace won all those battles back in the fourteenth century. All that was missing, there on the staircase, was the woad.

It took all four of us to get Mac into our room before Ms. Tobin heard the screaming and dished out more demerits for rowdy behavior. Knowing her, even if we told her what was going on, she’d want to discipline first and ask questions later. In between really amazing Scottish curse words and a few Anglo-Saxon ones I’d heard before, I locked the door and sketched out the rest of the story for the others while they looked through the envelope of photographs and Mac sulked on her bed.

“You took these to Curzon’s assistant and she didn’t believe you?” Shani asked incredulously. “Are you kidding?”

“She didn’t even give us a chance to show them,” I said. “Just shunted us off to a guy who isn’t here and shut the door in our faces.”

“It’s nice to know where the students stand,” Gillian said. “She’d probably be happy to run a school without all of us underfoot.”

“I hope she’s
sacked
,” Mac said with vicious intensity from behind her seventh or eighth tissue. “Totally irresponsible.”

“But what are we going to do?” Lissa said for the fifth time. “We can’t just sit here and wait for some lunatic to start planting bombs in the shrubbery.”

“There’s only one thing
to
do,” Gillian replied. “We have to stake out the faculty lot and wait for Curzon to get back. Unless any of you have this Larkin guy’s unlisted number.”

Of course we didn’t.

“Anyone know how to get into the admin offices to find his file? Or hack the employee records in the server?”

I shook my head. “That’s your department.”

“This is where we could use Lucas Hayes,” Lissa said. “At least he would have been good for something.”

“I’ll take the pipe bombs and the lunatic, thanks,” Gillian retorted, and Mac smiled, just a little.

I reached over to touch her hand. “I’m sorry I dished your secret, Mac. But we couldn’t do this alone.”

“She’s right,” Shani told her. “No way could you handle this. I’m not even sure we all can handle this.”

“We have to do something else.” Lissa took one of Mac’s hands. “Join hands.” Mac looked a little confused as I took the other.

“Father,” Lissa began, and I closed my eyes gratefully. “This is an ugly situation and we really need You right now. Please work in David Nelson’s heart and make him think twice about hurting anyone. But if he doesn’t listen, we pray You’ll help us do what’s best. Open up people’s ears so they’ll listen, and lead us to people who will help.”

“Amen,” I thought I heard Mac say, but I wasn’t sure. Gillian said it again, anyway, and we all opened our eyes and took a breath.

And then the phone rang like a fire alarm in the silence.

Chapter 16

M
AYBE IT’S CURZON.” After closing the door in our faces, it was hard to believe her assistant would have given the headmistress our message, but, hey, miracles could happen.

“Or the security guy.” Shani walked over to the small table between our beds, where the digital phone sat, but Mac beat her to it.

“Or it’s David,” she whispered.

“Put it on speaker, whoever it is,” I hissed. “And hit the record button to save it to the voice-mail system. All of you, don’t make a sound.”

Mac activated the recording feature and then pressed the speaker button. If it was Brett calling up from the common room, I was going to be massively embarrassed.

“Yes?” Her tone was lazy and unconcerned, but her face betrayed how stressed she felt.

“Lindsay MacPhail, please,” a male voice said. Too young to be the security guy. Too Scots to be anyone at school.

Mac turned white, but her voice stayed level. “This is she.”

“Lindsay. Sis. It’s David.” When she didn’t respond, he went on, “Are you alone?”

“Yes.”

“No cute little flatmate?”

“She’s down in the library, studying.”

“On a Saturday night? Poor thing.”

“Quite the work ethic,” Mac agreed. “But what else can you do when you don’t have a date?” She glanced at me and bent her mouth in apology. “But I’m sure you didn’t call to talk about my roommate’s social life.”

“No, I didn’t. Take me off the speaker. I want some privacy.”