Get Even (18 page)

The guy she recognized right away: Donté Green, Olivia’s ex-boyfriend. She saw his face in profile as he kissed the cheek and neck of a tall girl. The girl arched her head back as he ran his fingers through her thick, black hair, and he pulled the V-neck of her shirt aside so he could kiss the exposed area of her chest.

The girl took a deep breath and righted her head, eyes closed, lips parted as if expecting a kiss. That’s when Bree got a clear look at her face.

It was Kitty.

THIRTY-FIVE

BREE GASPED. SHE COULDN’T HELP HERSELF. AND THOUGH
she clapped her hand over her mouth the instant the sound escaped her lips, it was too late.

“Did you hear that?” Kitty asked in a harsh whisper.

Bree ducked down and held her breath.

“No.” Donté’s voice sounded thick and heavy.

“Someone’s here,” Kitty said.

“No one ever comes down here,” Donté said. “Trust me.”

Kitty paused as if considering Donté’s reassurance, then checked her watch. “Don’t you have to be at rehearsal?”

Donté groaned. “You had to remind me.”

There were more kissing sounds before the two lovebirds finally separated. “I’ll call you tonight,” Donté said. “Bye, baby.”

“Bye.”

Bree heard shuffling footsteps, then the sharp metallic ring of the spiral staircase as someone ascended from the cellar.

Had they both left or just Donté? After a few moments, she heard another set of footsteps on the stairs. Kitty was leaving as well. Phew.

Bree peeked out from behind the book stacks. That was a close one. Kitty and Margot already had John in their headlights. How suspicious would Kitty have been if she found Bree checking out her junior high school yearbook after trailing her best friend to the library? She was glad she wasn’t going to have to explain that one.

She slid the yearbook from the shelf and jumped back, her heart in her throat, as an eyeball stared back at her from the empty space.

“Bree?” a voice said.

Bree shoved the yearbook back onto the shelf once again and ducked around the bookcase, coming face-to-face with Margot.

“What are you doing here?” Margot asked, suspicion in her eyes.

“What are
you
doing here?” Bree countered.

“Margot?” Kitty came around the end of the last row of shelves. “Bree?”

Margot and Kitty stared at her—awkward and confused and ever so slightly combative. Really? She was the one under suspicion?

“I was doing research,” she said at last.

“Me too,” Margot and Kitty replied in unison.

Okay. So everyone was keeping secrets. Just what they needed while being framed for murder.

“Whatever you guys say.” Bree pushed past them both toward the staircase. She’d check out the yearbook later when there wasn’t so much traffic. “I’m out of here.”

She’d just gripped the railing when the whole staircase rattled. Someone else was coming down.

“If that’s Olivia,” Kitty said calmly, “I’m going to scream.”

By way of an answer, a soft singing descended into the wine cellar. The song was familiar. Too familiar. “
And if I had to walk the world, I’d make you fall for me.”

“It’s John!” Bree whispered. She sprinted away from the staircase, looking for a place to hide.

“He can’t see us together,” Margot said.

Kitty glanced around helplessly. “What do we do?”

Margot pulled a key out of her pocket and sprinted to a glass door on the far side of the cellar. “Follow me.”

In an instant she had the door open. They ducked inside the darkened room, and barely had time to close the door before John’s head descended into the cellar.

Without pausing, he disappeared into the row with the St. Alban’s yearbook.

It seemed as if they waited an eternity huddled on the floor of the special collections room before Kitty heard John’s heavy footsteps on the stairs. She let out a controlled breath as Margot cracked the door.

“Why do you have a key to the special collections room?” Kitty asked.

Margot turned on her. “Why were you holding hands with Donté Greene?”

Kitty flushed pink. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I saw less holding hands,” Bree said with a snide grin, “and more sucking face.”

Kitty set her jaw. “It’s none of your business.”

“He’s a ’Maine Man,” Margot said. “That makes it our business.”

“Not to mention he’s Olivia’s ex-boyfriend,” Bree added.

“He dropped out of the ’Maine Men,” Kitty said coolly.

Bree rolled her eyes. “Yeah, cuz that makes it better.”

Kitty whirled on Bree. “And what were you doing spying on us?” She made air quotes. “Research? Or maybe I should ask why you’re hiding from your boyfriend?”

“He’s not my boyfriend,” Bree said, throwing her arms wide in exasperation. “And that’s rich, you accusing
me
of keeping secrets.”

That was it. Kitty’d had enough of Bree’s attitude.

“You want to talk about keeping secrets?” she asked, turning toward the library stacks. “Fine.” She scanned the call numbers at the top of each row, looking for the yearbook section. She realized with a start that it was the same row John had just visited.

“What are you doing?” Bree asked, her voice sharp.

Kitty’s eyes landed on one volume, curiously askew on the shelf as if someone hadn’t pushed it all the way back in. It was also the only yearbook whose thick coating of dust had been marred.

“What is it?” Margot asked, following close behind her. Bree lingered near the end of the case.

“A yearbook,” Kitty said.

Margot sucked in a breath. “St. Alban’s?”

Kitty eyed her. “How did you know?”

Margot stared at the book in Kitty’s hand. “That’s what I came down here looking for too.”

“Christopher Beeman,” Kitty and Margot said in unison.

Out of the corner of her eye, Kitty saw Bree flinch.

“Let’s see what he looks like, shall we?” Kitty said. She opened the yearbook with a flourish.

Only the page with Christopher’s photo had been removed.

“Gone?” Bree blurted out. “His photo is gone?” She stared at the page in disbelief. Had John ripped Christopher’s photo out of the yearbook?

Margot lifted the book from Kitty’s hand and examined the page in question. It had been torn cleanly from the spine, leaving a minuscule flap of paper. “Whoever did this,” she said, handing the yearbook back to Kitty, “used a straight-edge razor or paper cutter, which implies that the act was deliberate and premeditated.”

“Not just this one,” Kitty said. She returned the impotent yearbook to the shelf. “The copy at St. Alban’s, too.”

Bree felt her entire body go cold, as if she’d been plunged into an ice bath. Her brain felt sluggish, not quite grasping the reality. “Someone ripped the same page out of both yearbooks?”

“Looks like it,” Kitty said.

Christopher Beeman. Archway Military Academy. She couldn’t keep ignoring the signs, especially if John had already figured out that both of them were connected to Bree’s involvement with DGM. She needed to face her past. She needed to face Christopher.

“Do you remember what he looks like?” Kitty asked.

Bree stared at the shelf. “Short, kinda chubby, brown hair, brown eyes. Generic.”

“Do you think you’d recognize him?” Margot asked.

Bree shook her head. “I barely recognize myself from junior high.”

“Really?” Kitty asked. “You wouldn’t recognize your best friend?”

“Best friend?” How did Kitty know that? “Who said he was my best friend?”

“Oh.” Kitty’s eyes faltered. “I . . . I thought Mika said you were.”

“Uh-huh.” Kitty was a horrible liar. Who had she been talking to about Christopher Beeman?

Kitty cleared her throat. “Well, at least we know who tore the photos out.”

Margot shook her head. “John didn’t have anything in his hand when we left.”

He was down here before.
Only Bree didn’t share that out loud. If John had ripped the pages out of both yearbooks, did it mean he’d discovered what she’d done to Christopher all those years ago? And if so, could he ever forgive her for it?

“I’m late for theater rehearsal,” she said, heading for the stairs. She had to get home as soon as possible. There was one more yearbook that needed to be checked.

“Bree,” Kitty said, “we have to—”

But Bree didn’t hear her. She was already up the stairs, sprinting through the library.

Bree dragged a chair over to her closet and used it to reach a series of boxes shoved onto the uppermost shelf. She deposited the first two on the floor, but the third was significantly heavier. With a grunt, she heaved the box off the shelf and dropped it onto the carpet.

Bree hadn’t gone through her junior high crap since, well, junior high. The collection was embarrassing. Tickets to concerts by bands she now loathed. Cutouts from fashion magazines featuring clothes she wouldn’t be caught dead in. Friendship bracelets from people she no longer spoke to. Damn, a lot had changed in four years.

With a shake of her head, Bree hauled three yearbooks out of the bottom of the box. The St. Alban’s Fighting Jesuits, complete with a sword-wielding priest as a mascot. The yearbooks from seventh and eighth grades she discarded, leaving just her sixth-grade keepsake. Without giving herself time to change her mind, she whipped it open and flipped to the alphabetical beginning of her sixth-grade class.

She froze.

An entire page had been ripped out of her yearbook.

Bree had a moment of panic as reality hit her: while she could have explained away the missing page of her own book as some kind of repressed guilt memory or forgotten moment of prepubescent rage, there was no way in hell she would have forgotten the defilement of the yearbooks in two different libraries unless she’d had some sort of psychotic breakdown in the last few years that she’d forgotten about.

Which meant someone else had torn out those pages.

Someone like John, who’d been rummaging around in her closet just last week.

“No!” She refused to believe he would have gone through the trouble. He didn’t have any motive for hiding Christopher’s identity.

Because that was the logical reason the yearbooks had been defaced. Someone didn’t want anyone to know what Christopher Beeman looked like.

Bree tried to think back. She remembered a short, chubby kid with mousy brown hair and glasses who looked five years younger than the rest of the boys in their class. He was quiet, but smart. Only spoke when he had something important to say, and preferred reading in the library to athletic activities of any kind.

But his face . . . Bree squeezed her eyes closed and tried to picture it. Brown hair, brown eyes. He looked like every kid, Harry Potter–generic without the telltale scar.

Bree opened her eyes and sighed. She wasn’t getting anywhere.

Okay, who would want to make sure all traces of Christopher Beeman were erased from the world? If Bree assumed that she was not, in fact, losing her mind and hadn’t ripped out those pages herself, then someone else had been in her room, dug through her things to find her sixth-grade yearbook, and vandalized it.

The suspect list was short, as very few people had ever been in her room: aside from herself and her parents, there was only the cleaning lady and John.

John, who spent plenty of time in her room. John, who knew how to gain access to the house. John, who had been holding the yearbook at the library an hour ago. John, who was clearly on a mission to unmask DGM. Could he have discovered Bree’s secret, and her reason for joining DGM in the first place?

And if he had, what would he do next?

THIRTY-SIX

DONTÉ WAS WAITING FOR KITTY AT THE SIDE ENTRANCE OF
school Monday morning. His face was pained, and Kitty immediately knew something was wrong. “You aren’t going to believe this,” he said, holding the door open for her.

Kitty halted the moment she set foot inside the building.

The rows of dull, metallic lockers that lined both sides of the wide hallway had been plastered with neon pink fliers. Each taped below a locker number, hundreds of fliers fluttered in the breeze like a blinding fringe.

“What the . . .” Kitty’s voice trailed off. Her eye caught the letters printed in massive, boldface type on the top of the fliers:

REWARD: DGM

Kitty pulled a flier off the nearest locker. Her hand shook, her throat closed up, and her brain only took in about every other word.

“‘Reward: DGM,’” Donté read over her shoulder. “‘The administration of Bishop DuMaine Preparatory School hereby announces the following reward: any student who supplies information that leads to the identification of DGM will have their tuition fees waived for one full year.’”

“A bounty,” Kitty said, her voice raspy. “He’s offering a bounty on DGM.”

“‘In addition,’” Donté continued, reading more quickly, “‘by special directive from Father Uberti, the student service organization known as the ’Maine Men is now under the direct command of Coach Creed. You will offer them every support and compliance during this time of crisis.’”

“You . . . you don’t think anyone will actually go for this, do you?” Kitty paused, as if afraid of the answer. “I mean, with all the rich kids at this school, it seems kind of silly.”

“Maybe for the Rex Cavanaughs,” Donté said. “But once word gets out to the parents, you can bet your ass they’ll be pressuring their kids to squeal.”

Bishop DuMaine was about to morph into a school of DGM bounty hunters, complete with their own gestapo, the ’Maine Men.

Donté reread the flier and shook his head. “When I signed up for the ’Maine Men, it seemed like a good way to help the school, you know? But now . . . I don’t know. The stuff they’ve been doing lately makes me really uncomfortable. I’m glad I dropped out.”

Kitty wanted to throw her arms around Donté’s neck and kiss him right there in the hall, she was so elated. Instead, she just nodded. “Me too.”

He squeezed her hand. “Look, try not to let all this bother you, okay?”

Kitty closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “I’ll try.”

“How about we do something fun this weekend? Something to take our minds off the drama around here?”

“Like what?”

“There’s a show at the Ledge Sunday night. That band everyone’s talking about? The lead singer goes to our school?”

“Bangers and Mosh.”

“Right! They’re in the school play and we’re all supposed to go and support them.” He pulled her close. “What do you say? Ready to make our relationship DuMaine-official?”

Coach Creed was addressing the leadership class—beefy hands planted on his hips, legs shoulder-width apart like he was a drill sergeant instead of a second-rate gym teacher—when Kitty entered the classroom after prepping the announcements. He paused, clearly annoyed at the interruption, and glared at her while she took her seat.

“It has been one hundred and twenty-five hours since a member of the ’Maine Men was cut down in cold blood,” Coach Creed continued. “And there are still no suspects in custody. So we’re taking matters into our own hands.” He was wearing a blue ’Maine Men polo shirt two sizes too small, tucked into a pair of camo pants. A complex flowchart drawn in multiple colors adorned the whiteboard behind him.

A smattering of applause rippled through the room. It made Kitty’s skin crawl.

Coach Creed pulled a laser pointer from his pocket and aimed it at the whiteboard. “Based on your assignment from last week, I’ve assembled a profile of the most likely perpetrator. Our primary suspect—the DGM ringleader—is male, between the ages of sixteen and seventeen. He’s a loner, quiet. Maybe with a dangerous, artistic temperament. He’s got a smart mouth, but for the most part he keeps it shut. He doesn’t have many friends, maybe one or two at most, and he feels safe here at Bishop DuMaine, almost like he’s an insider or has a relative who works on staff.”

Kitty licked her lips, which had gone bone dry despite a layer of balm. Coach Creed wasn’t describing some anonymous profile of a suspect, he was describing one person quite specifically. He was describing John Baggott.

Coach Creed smiled wickedly. “Last of all, he’s cocky.” He leaned forward on his desk. “I think we all know the kind of student I’m talking about.”

“Hell, yeah!” Rex said. Tyler reached out and high-fived him.

“That’s what I thought.” Coach Creed straightened up and began to pace behind the desk. “We must be diligent. If we put enough pressure on him, he’ll cave.” He paused. “Did everyone see the fliers around campus?”

“Yes, sir,” Rex said.

“One year of free tuition,” Coach Creed said. “To whoever can force our suspect to confess to his involvement with DGM.”

Force our suspect to confess?
This couldn’t be good.

Coach Creed folded his arms across his chest. “It’s time to take back our school.”

A cheer went up, as Rex and a group of ’Maine Men rushed to the whiteboard, where Coach Creed was diagramming the school, circling certain target areas like the quad and the baseball field, as if they were planning an attack.

Coach Creed had whipped the ’Maine Men into a frenzied mob that was about to be unleashed.

She needed to warn Bree.