Drop of Doubt (7 page)

“We’ll see. I’ll try to let you know. Thanks,” Victor said and turned from her. She started down the hall again. He refocused on me. “Okay, Princess. Let me know if you need something. I’ll go get it if you do.”

The girl stopped shortly down the hallway, and her shoulders hunched again. She didn’t turn around, but I gathered she’d heard what Victor said. She didn’t like that? Did she feel he was doing her job?

She continued and disappeared down the hall. Shortly after, Dr. Green came up the stairs, with Luke and Gabriel behind him. It was only then that I started to relax. I suppose having the others around confirmed this was their spot, and that made it okay for me to be here.

“Where’s Mr. Blackbourne?” Silas asked. “Are the others on the way?”

“They’re not coming,” Dr. Green said. “It’s just us.”

“What do you mean?” Victor asked. “Someone’s threatening all of us. The procedure is—”

Dr. Green waved two fingers in the air at him to cut him off. “The procedure has to change this time,” he said. “We’ve got one nut job already leaving empty boxes and calling in bomb threats directed at Mr. Blackbourne. Now we’ve got another possible one targeting the rest of us.” He gazed over at Silas and I on the couch. “Let’s get all our information out.”

We all moved to the dining table. Silas sat to my left, Dr. Green to my right. There were six of us, which nearly filled the table, but at the same time, I felt the others missing. I worried about them, and wondered how Kota and North were. Mr. Blackbourne was keeping his promise. He was keeping himself away from me.

Victor dug out my phone, and found a notebook and pen. He dropped the notebook on the table. He tapped at my phone, turning on the voicemail. He skipped the other saved messages, finding the third and latest one I’d gotten. He hit the speaker button and placed my phone on the table.

The beeping on the phone started almost immediately. As it played, Victor started scratching out letters.

With my toes pressed to the floor, I knocked my ankles together. I wanted to curl up on the chair, but I couldn’t forget that we were in Victor’s house. I wondered at the cost of the chair I was sitting in. He probably wouldn’t want my footprints on it. As it was, I felt like I shouldn’t sit back either. I folded my hands in my lap, sitting up straight, waiting.

Gabriel leaned forward on the table, hovering over Victor as he translated. Luke had taken out his own phone, putting it on the table, flipping it around. Silas sat back in his chair, legs stretched out underneath the table. Dr. Green leaned forward, trying to read Victor’s writing upside down.

When the beeping was done, Victor grunted and tossed the notebook around so everyone could read.

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M
y heart dropped and my voice was too lost to utter the confused moan that started in the back of my throat. I think part of me believed whatever Victor had heard, that maybe it wasn’t so bad. Maybe it wasn’t real to me because I didn’t know the message. Forced to face the truth of the mysterious beeping, I felt the creepiness that must have followed Victor all the way from the school.

Dr. Green repeated the lines under his breath. He blew out a sigh, sat back, and raked his fingers through his hair. “It’s cryptic enough, isn’t it?”

“Is he threatening us or her?” Luke asked.

Victor crossed his arms over his chest, and shrugged. “I want to say he’s after her. He sent it to her cell phone. He expected her to share it with us. So maybe he meant to send us the message, and scare us enough to back off. That’s why he said ‘you all’. Like warning us not to get in the way if we don’t want to get hurt, too.”

Gabriel shook his head. “If he’s from here, he could mean her or us. Kids here say y’all all the time, meaning you or a group.”

“He had to know better,” Dr. Green said. “There’s a group of us and only one of her. But let’s stop trying to figure out why and what he means for now. She’s here with us, the rest of us are either here or in a location he won’t be able to figure out. Let’s focus on who it could be. We need a starting list.”

“It’s got to be one of the guys in our history class,” Victor said. “It started right after the teacher broadcasted her phone number.”

“We don’t have proof, but we can start there,” Dr. Green said. He tapped his forefinger on the table. “So our first job right now is to get the roster for that class. We need phone numbers and data records from everyone there. If they shared her number, we’ll find out who they shared it with.”

Luke pointed at my phone. “What about those text messages? Are any of those from this guy?”

“I haven’t gone through them yet,” Victor said.

“That’s your job now,” Dr. Green said. “Whoever it is probably wasn’t expecting us to jump up and leave school together so quickly. He’s going to be thrown off by that. We have a little time to come up with a plan.”

“Is he smart enough to track the GPS in her phone?” Victor asked. “That’s what we need to know.”

“He may not know how to use a tracking GPS and hack her phone to be able to follow.” Dr. Green rubbed his palm against his forehead. “I doubt he is that clever. He couldn’t figure out her phone number before. He had to wait until it was given to the class. If he was that smart, he probably could have picked up her phone number before now.”

“Are we overreacting?” I asked. I’d been thinking about how my neighbor Derrick once told me how he felt about the Academy cavalry jumping in at every small thing. “I get those notes all the time. Now it’s just phone messages and text messages. They’re not all asking about my bra size or my phone number, are they?”

Gabriel’s eyes flared. “What do you mean someone asked about your bra size? Who did that?”

“We don’t overreact,” Dr. Green said, a gentle smile toying at the corner of his mouth. “We’re just really averse to veiled threats.”

“But those notes aren’t all questions like that, are they?” I asked. “There’s so many.”

Luke shook his head. “We’ll have to check in with North. He reads them. Maybe we’ll find a connection with the text messages and the notes and the weird Morse code thing.”

“I think that’s what bothers me the most,” Victor said. “The guy had to have been thinking of this for a while. It was only what, a half hour since her phone number was passed out before he sent it? So he had to think of a message. He’d want it to be cryptic enough to code it, send it with an unknown number and assume she knew the code or we would to be able to translate it.”

“Right,” Dr. Green said. “No. You did the right thing. If it was someone goofing off, he wouldn’t have worked so hard at this. If he wanted attention from her, he’d send notes and text messages like every other little boy who can’t talk to her face.”

Victor leaned his elbows on the table. “So it is possible it’s one of the guys in class, or someone who got sent her number during the early part of class. That might narrow down the list.”

“Is her phone on now?” Silas’s voice startled me. He’d been so silent before. He stared at my phone on the table.

Victor touched the button to light up the screen. “I haven’t turned it off. Why?”

“Why is it so quiet now?” Silas asked.

We all exchanged glances before looking down at the screen of my phone. Victor punched at the text messages and scrolled through them, but it didn’t appear to be accepting new ones at this point.

“Is it because they’re all in class now?” Luke asked.

Dr. Green chuckled. “Those little monsters won’t put away their phones just for class time. Trust me.”

“Maybe it locked up,” Victor said. “She’s got hundreds from different phone numbers.”

“Is she out of space on her phone?” Gabriel asked. “Delete something.”

“I have to go through the messages.”

“Just delete our texts,” Gabriel said. “We don’t need those right now. See if it’s because the phone’s too full.”

“It shouldn’t be,” Victor said. He scanned through the messages, finding the ones where the boys’ names were listed, and started deleting the conversations. “She’s got the biggest hard drive a cell phone can get. There’s no full storage error icon.”

“We should call North,” Luke said. “We need to get started.”

Dr. Green perked up suddenly. He fished his phone out of his pocket. “That might be them, now.”

Luke and Gabriel twitched similarly, digging in his pocket for their phones.

Silas found his phone. “Are they sending everyone a message? We checked in. They know we’re all here right?” He flicked on his phone.

Victor frowned, finding his phone and checking. “I guess so.”

Dr. Green’s eyes darkened. The others’ faces dropped at the same time.

“What is it?” I asked. “What’s wrong? Is it Mr. Blackbourne?”

Dr. Green swallowed. “I might have been wrong about the capabilities of this kid.”

I knelt in the chair, snagging Silas’s arm. I ducked my head near his to read the message.

Only it wasn’t a message. It was a photo.

It was me, a picture taken in the same outfit I was wearing now. It looked like it was taken in the hallway, while I was walking between classrooms. Victor was walking beside me. And it had to have been taken today, because I’ve never worn this outfit to school before.

A message had been scrawled over my face as if with a Sharpie marker. Part of the lettering cut through my eyes.

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I
was afraid to move or breathe. The notes I dismissed. The text messages and the cryptic phone call I was concerned with.

The photograph was way more than I was able to handle, especially after everything else.

Dr. Green ordered everyone to take out their SIM cards, disabling any more cell phone activities and turning off the GPS devices.

I stood stiffly aside as they all repeated what they were going to do and where they were going.

They were only interrupted once, by the same plain girl that had been there earlier. She slipped in quietly, and placed a tray of finger sandwiches and fruit cups on the table in front of us. Luke thanked her. He and Gabriel and Silas gobbled at the food the moment she put it down, as if used to this. She glanced at Victor once as if waiting for approval. Victor was absorbed with talking to Dr. Green. She narrowed her eyes at me and then left the room without a word.

Luke, Gabriel and Dr. Green decided they were going to get the class directory, and find those students’ phone numbers. Dr. Green had a shift to cover at the hospital. Luke and Gabriel were going to work the diner tonight. There was some argument about their general safety, but the verdict was I was to stay here. They now were sure this new threat was after me. Besides, the diner was pretty busy now, and whoever it was would have a hard time trying to get to them there without revealing himself.

After Dr. Green and the others left, Victor and Silas turned to me.

“Time to work,” Victor said. He held out a hand, palm up. “Want to come along, Princess?”

“She doesn’t want to watch you type at a computer,” Silas said. “I mean, is she even supposed to? Isn’t there Academy stuff in there?”

“She won’t know what’s what,” Victor said. “Besides, it’s not like I leave Academy stuff laying around. There’s the maids and security and my parents here after all.”

“What do you want to do?” Silas asked me. “Want to swim? The pool out there is heated.”

“To be honest, I don’t know if I want her outside right now,” Victor said.

“If you’re worried about your parents finding us, we’ll keep quiet.”

“It’s not that.” Victor hooked a couple of fingers into the collar of his shirt, forcing the top button open. “I don’t know if I want her out of sight right now.”

“She’d be with me.”

“I know,” he said. “Not that I don’t trust you. I just ... can we keep her in here? I know there’s a wall and security, but I’m feeling paranoid right now.”

Silas sighed. “You’re probably right. It’s not that high of a wall. I just didn’t want her to be bored.”

“I’m not bored,” I said. It was true. I was way too on edge to be bored.

“I was trying to be nice. I mean I don’t want you to be too stressed,” he said. “You look like you’re about to explode.”

“We can’t really blame her,” Victor said. “It’s been a really crazy day.”

“I’m not going to explode,” I said. I stood taller, trying to swallow back my heart in my throat. “I want to find out what is going on. I don’t want to sit around while everyone else is working. Tell me what to do.”

A spark lit up in Victor’s eyes. “See? This is why she’s with us. Give her a problem and she’s itching to figure it out.”

“Okay, okay,” Silas said. “Shit, I was just suggesting. Let’s find the bastard already and then I can take her swimming.”

Victor tugged me down the hallway toward the twin doorways. He stopped at the one on the left, and opened the door. He stepped in and then off to the side, allowing me access.

I wasn’t sure what I was expecting, probably more ornate furniture, more carvings in the ceilings and along the walls.

The walls were wood panel, very plain compared to what I’d seen downstairs. There were wood slat double doors opposite the one we came in, and a regular sized door off to the side, also closed. Along one wall was a bookcase filled with binders and computer manuals.

There was a long, light wood table that took up one side of the room. The top of it was littered with a collection of computers and other electronics I didn’t recognize. Nearly all were opened, with half of the guts taken out and exposed on the table. There were other, smaller tables against the walls around the room. These were also piled with various computer parts and the shells of laptops and phones. It wasn’t disorganized so much, it was just half-finished projects ready to be pieced together.

One of the smaller tables, in particular, had two cell phones on it with pink cases. I blushed, recognizing my old broken phones. There was also a familiar broken laptop nearby. He kept the ones I’d broken?