They Never Learn, page 9
“I don’t blame you, the boy is gorgeous.” Rafael takes a sip of wine. “Although I’d be a little afraid he was going to murder me in my sleep.”
I laugh. “That’s why I never let him sleep over. If you’ll excuse me just a moment…”
As much as I enjoy spending time with them—and they’re just about the only men in the world I’d say that of—it’s not why I’m here. With a quick glance back to make sure Drew and Rafael aren’t watching me, I slip down the darkened hallway toward the master suite.
I’ve got a solid idea of the layout from my previous surveillance, but this is my one opportunity to inspect Kinnear’s home from the inside before I finalize my plan.
His house is the only modern one in the neighborhood, all glass and concrete and harsh angles. It’s almost as abrasive and ostentatious as Kinnear is, sticking out like a serrated knife blade amid the turn-of-the-century cottages and carefully maintained craftsmans—including Drew and Rafael’s place, one street over.
Kinnear’s king-size bed is piled high with coats, but the room itself is relatively spare: a minimalist headboard made of wooden slats, a bedside table holding a stack of novels, a sleek midcentury modern dresser on the opposite wall. I peek in the walk-in closet, then duck into the master bathroom to look over the sundry medications and toiletries sitting on the counter.
Back in the bedroom, I peer through the slate linen curtains into the backyard. The heat of the bonfire is palpable even through the windowpane. Kinnear stands right beside the pyre, the sparks snapping off the flames making the auburn tones in his hair gleam. He’s dressed head to toe in crimson Gorman Sharks paraphernalia like he’s trying to add School Mascot to his CV.
Dr. Stright is beside him, wearing a Gorman hoodie that makes him look even more like a student than he usually does, and they’re surrounded by football players. From here I can’t tell what they’re saying, but I’m sure it’s some variation of That was a great game we played today, wasn’t it? Kinnear and Stright always talk about Gorman football victories with a sense of ownership, like they took to the field and sacked the quarterback themselves.
Stright guffaws and claps the boy next to him on the back. Devin Caldwell, with the scratches on his arms that the police were so quick to dismiss. I can only hope Tyler’s death scared Devin and his teammates into keeping their hands off unwilling girls for a while. I know it won’t last—if it’s made any difference at all. I can’t kill them now—not so soon after Tyler, or with Kinnear finally sitting at the top of my list, and certainly not while Samina Pierce is scrutinizing every death on campus. But that doesn’t mean they’re off the hook forever.
My fingers fist the curtain. I force myself to drop it, smooth out the fabric.
Stright’s time will come too. Unless the sudden death of his mentor scares him into a newfound morality. Unlikely. If men like that could learn the error of their ways, I wouldn’t have to teach so many of them a lesson.
I slip back into the shadowed hall, heading toward the glow of the living room. Then something blocks out the light—another person entering the hallway. Walking right toward me.
The overhead light flicks on, and I’m standing face-to-face with Mina.
“Hey!” she says. “What are you doing back here?”
I don’t know whether I’m more surprised that Kinnear invited her or that she actually showed up. She must have just arrived. She’s still wearing her buttoned-up coat, the same tweed one she had on when she ran into me outside the bar. No Gorman team colors in sight.
“Just looking for the bathroom.” The lie comes out smoothly; I prepared it in advance, along with several other backup explanations in case I was caught skulking through Kinnear’s private space.
She gestures confidently down the hall. “Oh, it’s right there.”
“Did you live…” I start to ask. “I mean when you and Kinnear were—”
“Yeah.” Mina glares disgustedly at the industrial light fixture hanging above us. “He bought this place right after we got married. Isn’t it hideous?”
Even in this stark light, she looks stunning, her dark brown ringlets shining, lips stained berry red. Before I can stop myself, I’m picturing her in my own warmly lit house, bare feet curled up underneath her on the worn leather sofa, a cup of tea in her hands. In my bed, curls splayed over the pillow, skin looking burnished against the plain white sheets.
“I was just heading outside.” I need fresh air, even if it’s heavy with bonfire smoke. “Did you—”
She raises an eyebrow. “I thought you were looking for the bathroom.”
“Oh, I—” Shit. I can’t seem to keep my thoughts—and my lies—straight around her. “I’m fine for now. What I need is a drink.”
Thankfully, Mina doesn’t point out the clear contradiction in that statement; she just follows me out the back door onto Kinnear’s multilevel deck. My coat is still inside, piled on the bed with the others, but with the fire roaring, it hardly feels like an October night. Someone’s tossed on a few fresh pieces of wood, and the flames flare up toward the black sky.
Mina shakes her head. “I’ll never understand lighting shit on fire as a form of celebration.”
Profanity sounds so pretty in that refined accent of hers. “Don’t they have a whole bonfire-based holiday where you’re from?”
Mina smiles. “Indeed. Fireworks are involved too. Makes it look like London is under siege.”
“Do you miss it?” I ask.
“What, Guy Fawkes Day?”
“No, I meant—”
“Sometimes. I thought about moving back, after.” She falls silent, letting me fill in the blanks. “But I planned my career around that wanker for long enough, no way was I giving up a tenure-track position just to get away from him.”
She takes two bottles of imported beer out of the cooler at the edge of the deck and hands me one, then twists the cap off hers and takes a long pull. We’re both looking Kinnear’s way now. The football players have moved on, but he’s still huddled close to Stright. They look so alike they could pass for father and son.
A girl in a short skirt bends over the cooler to fish a soda can out of the slush, and the two men don’t even try to disguise their wolfish leers at her leggings. When she straightens up, I see that it’s my student Ashleigh Lawrence, the golden hair she usually braids down her back tied into a high ponytail instead.
“Have you had a chance to look at that file I sent you?” Mina asks. “On Richard Callaghan?”
“Yes, I read it.” There was nothing in there I didn’t already know—including the fact that, before he came to Gorman, Callaghan used to work at an ice rink in Scranton, and he was fired in the face of similar complaints about his perversions. “Seems like the guilt just got to be too much for him. Same as Tyler Elkin.”
“Maybe,” Mina says. “But there’s something about it that’s sticking in my brain, you know? It doesn’t add up.”
My body goes cold all over, despite the heat of the flames. “What do you mean?”
“I’m not sure yet,” Mina says. “It’s just an instinct, I suppose. There’s another case also, from a couple of years back. It wasn’t in the original suicide data, actually. A graduate student who—”
“Good evening, ladies.”
I never thought I’d be so happy to hear Kinnear’s smug voice.
He sweeps his hand over the yard like a nobleman showing off his ancestral lands. “How are you enjoying the party?”
“It’s quite the spectacle,” Mina says. She nods toward the burning lion. “Wherever did you get that thing?”
“Stright helped me set it up.” Kinnear nods toward him.
Stright has escalated from ogling Ashleigh to chatting her up. I can only hear snippets of their conversation—just the names of several Beat poets and the phrase “change your life.”
Kinnear launches into a long-winded explanation about the Pittsburgh artisan who constructed our rival team’s mascot to his exact specifications. I tune him out, instead devoting my mental energy to figuring out to which dead graduate student Mina might have been referring. Perhaps the history postdoc who had a heart attack in the rare books room after I tampered with his Adderall? Though there was also the theater student whose hanging I staged. One had been a rapist like Tyler; the other had emotionally abused his girlfriend until she attempted suicide herself. Like Callaghan, they both got exactly what was coming to them.
Stright is still subjecting poor Ashleigh Lawrence to his Kerouac spiel. She isn’t even trying to get a word in edgewise, just nodding along as he speaks, ponytail bouncing, a polite smile plastered on her lips. Her gaze keeps flitting over Stright’s shoulder toward the shadowed trees, like she’d rather flee into the wilderness than talk to him.
He’s clearly a few beers in, swaying a little on his feet, and he uses it as an excuse to keep angling farther into her personal space. The side of his beer bottle brushes her wrist, and she flinches away from him, tugging her sleeves down. No one else seems to notice how uncomfortable she is—not even Mina, who’s putting in her own performance of polite interest as Kinnear points out the finer points of the lion’s wireframe skeleton.
Stright leans in even closer, splaying his hand on her shoulder. I can’t stay quiet anymore.
“Dr. Stright.”
He looks at me, and I smile like a razor blade buried in a candy apple.
“Where’s your wife tonight?”
20 CARLY
Samantha sees Allison passed out on the bed and scowls. “Let me guess. Someone had a little too much fun tonight.”
“She seems really out of it,” I say. “Maybe we should take her to the hospital, or—”
Samantha rolls her eyes and pushes past Wes and me. She seems more annoyed about us disturbing her beauty sleep than worried about Allison. Unlike me, she has no shame about Wes seeing her in her pajamas.
“She just needs to sleep it off.” Samantha bends over Allison and slaps her lightly on the cheek. “Isn’t that right, Hadley?”
Allison squirms a little but keeps her eyes shut. Samantha smacks her again, harder this time.
What the hell? Is she allowed to hit us?
“Look at me,” Samantha orders.
Allison opens her eyes, but squints against the light. Her skin looks slightly green, and there’s a sheen of sweat over her whole body. With another exasperated eye roll, Samantha goes over to Allison’s desk, dumps the contents of her trash can into the matching one under my desk, and brings the empty can over to Allison’s bedside.
Just in time for Allison to lean over the side of the mattress and vomit. Samantha sighs and gathers Allison’s hair back into a ponytail with her fist, like she’s done this a hundred times before. For all I know, she has.
Allison retches again, and Samantha tugs her hair tighter.
Wes presses his knuckles into his teeth like he’s trying to keep from being sick himself. “Is she okay?”
“Ask her again in the morning,” Samantha says, shooting him a glare.
Allison lies back on the mattress, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. I peer at the vomit-spattered trash can. “Shouldn’t we clean that out, or—”
“Let her do it herself when she sobers up,” Samantha says. “You might want to sleep in the common room tonight, Schiller.”
I shake my head. “No way, I should stay with her. She could choke on her own vomit, or—”
Samantha shrugs. “Suit yourself.”
Wes steps closer to me—although he’s stayed pretty close this whole time, standing right over my shoulder. “I can stay too. You shouldn’t have to—”
“Now I know you don’t think I’m going to let a male student spend the night in this female-only residence.” Samantha raises her eyebrows at Wes. “Do you?”
She’s such a fucking hypocrite. Her own boyfriend is probably asleep in her twin bed down the hall right now.
“Fine.” Wes turns back to me. “I’ll come over first thing in the morning, okay?”
I bite my lip. “Okay.”
“Good night, Wesley.” Samantha’s smiling, but her tone says get the fuck out loud and clear.
Wes leaves, with one more guilty look back at Allison’s prone form on the bed. Samantha follows him, but she pauses in the doorway. I think for a second she’s going to give me some sage RA advice. But instead she says, “You better not wake me up unless she’s dying.”
I nod, trying to keep the anger seething under my skin from showing on my face. This is Samantha’s job—she’s supposed to take care of us.
I should have gone to the party. This wouldn’t have happened if I’d been there. Allison would have been hanging out with me, not with Bash. I can see it as clear as if I had actually been present: him pouring shot after shot down her throat, dancing pressed up against her, putting his hands all over—
I wasn’t there for Allison at the party, but I can be here for her now.
First, I clean out her trash can, leaving my own in its place in case she has to throw up again while I’m gone. I bring some damp washcloths back from the bathroom and move my desk chair next to her bed so I can watch over her. I can’t sleep until I’m sure she’s okay.
Allison vomits twice more. I stay by her side, laying fresh washcloths over her forehead and the back of her neck, until dawn peeks through the window. She’s over the worst of it, settled into a real sleep, so I go wash out the trash can again. I feel disgusting, the scent of sickness clinging to my skin, but I’m so exhausted I’m pretty sure I’d fall asleep standing up if I tried to shower.
I’ll go back to bed for a little bit first, then scrub myself as many times as it takes to get the smell out. Before lying down, I pull Allison’s covers up to her chin, double-checking she’s still breathing and everything. I’m about to collapse into my bed when she stirs.
“Hey.” Her eyes are bright and dazed, but they’re focused on me. “Where are you going?”
I look toward my rumpled bedding, then back at her. “I was just—”
“C’mere.” Allison slides back so she’s closer to the wall, leaving a spot big enough for me.
I hesitate. She’s still drunk.
But the way she’s looking at me… it makes my legs feel all wobbly. And suddenly I’m sitting down on the edge of Allison’s bed.
She lifts up the comforter—inviting me in.
I stretch out beside her, my heart pounding so loud I’m afraid it will vibrate the bed frame. But Allison doesn’t seem to notice. She drapes her arm across my waist, snuggling up to me. Our bare legs twine together under the covers, and the thump of my pulse moves lower.
We’re face-to-face now, sharing the pillow. “Thanks for taking care of me,” Allison whispers, and as her lips move, they brush mine.
It’s not quite a kiss; it might have been an accident. Even though her breath is sour with liquor and vomit, it’s all I can do to keep myself from pulling her in for a real one.
21 SCARLETT
Stright’s usual overly friendly grin stays in place, but I can see the irritation scrawled all over his face. “What?” he says.
“Your wife,” I repeat. “She couldn’t make it?”
“She, uh…” Stright scratches the back of his neck. “She had a headache.”
My smile turns sharper. “I bet.”
Ashleigh Lawrence is already backing away from him, her glossy pink lips pursed. Mina’s pressing her lips together too, but in her case it’s a fruitless attempt to hide her amusement at Stright’s discomfort.
Stright reaches for Ashleigh’s elbow. “Hey, wait a—”
But she’s already gone, hurrying off toward a group of partygoers closer to her own age who are playing horseshoes at the edge of the lawn. Drew and Rafael have wandered outside as well, and Drew bounces a worried look between Stright and me.
Stright’s even drunker than I thought, his eyes flat and bleary—trying to relive his college glory days in more ways than one. I hold his glassy gaze, unblinking, until he looks away and drains the rest of his beer.
“Rafael and I were just heading out,” Drew says to him. “Why don’t you let us take you home?”
He touches Stright’s arm, but Stright shrugs him off, stumbling in the direction Ashleigh headed. I grab his sleeve, much more forcefully than Drew.
“Lemme go,” Stright slurs, trying to shake free of my grip.
I dig my nails in around his elbow. “You don’t want to do that.”
“Mind your own fucking business.”
Stright wrenches his arm away, losing hold of his beer in the process. The bottle smashes against the bonfire logs, shattering into glittering green shards.
Mina gives Kinnear a look, like she’s waiting for him to intervene; it is his party, after all. But he seems oblivious to the tension, sipping his drink as if nothing’s wrong.
Stright turns on me, scowling. He’s nowhere near as handsome without that winning smile plastered on his face.
“Bitch,” he mutters—just low enough that Kinnear can pretend he didn’t hear.
“Hey,” Mina snaps. “That’s enough.”
She threads her arm around my shoulders, and I let her pull me tight against her side and draw me away from the men. Once we’re far enough that I can barely feel the heat of the bonfire anymore, Mina stops. Instead of letting go of me, though, she draws me even closer. Even with the smoke in the air, I can smell her perfume. Flowers, that’s what she smells like. Jasmine and something sweeter.
“You okay? I’m so sorry about that arsehole. Well, about both of them.” She throws a glower back in the general direction of her ex-husband.
It adds fuel to the fire of my rage, hearing her apologize for them. Mina starts rubbing comforting circles into my back with the heel of her hand, and I want to scream. Stright is letting Drew and Rafael lead him away now, and it’s taking every scrap of my willpower not to run after them, pick up one of those bottle shards, and slash the jagged edge across Stright’s throat.
