Size 12 and Ready to Rock (15 page)

“Pass me that water glass, will you?” I say to Cooper. I figure I could probably use some hydration too. Cooper is no slouch in the therapeutic massage department either, and Patty has a theory that 50 percent of life’s ills can be solved simply by stopping and drinking a glass of water.

“Look,” I say after I’ve downed the remains of the glass’s contents. Better. “You do realize it’s actually kind of unlikely that at Tania’s level of fame she wouldn’t have any stalkers. How many Facebook fans did Stephanie say she has, like twenty million or something? I’m sorry, but even back in my day, before social networking was at its current height and at my much, much lower level of success, I had a few wackos who wanted me to be their teen bride.”

Cooper raises both eyebrows. “I thought I got that restraining order against me lifted. How’d you find out about it?”

I’m in no mood to joke. “I know if this has occurred to me, it’s occurred to you. Why is everyone so adamant that there isn’t anyone in the world who’d want to hurt Tania? It’s obvious CRT takes her security seriously.”

Cooper looks uncomfortable. “As I’m sure you remember from your days onstage, fans can express as much admiration as they want—even propose marriage—but it’s not considered stalking or even a threat until they say something that suggests violent intent. I talked to Bear and to my father, and as far as either of them knows, Tania’s received no threats of a violent nature. All her fans are of the overly ardent kind.”

“No one at Cartwright Records would be likely to admit it if she
had
been getting serious threats,” I say, “because if she had and New York College got wind of it, they wouldn’t let her come film her show on campus. They wouldn’t want to risk the possible lawsuits if any students were endangered . . .” My voice trails off, and I look at him, wide-eyed. “Unless,” I say, “they decided to let them film in a building that’s empty for the summer. A building that Christopher Allington tipped them off has a reputation that couldn’t possibly get any worse, regardless of what happens.”

Cooper looks at me steadily with those calm gray-blue eyes of his. “That’s one theory,” he says, in a voice that is suspiciously neutral, “I suppose.”

“My God.” My heart feels as if it’s turned to gelato in my chest. “That’s it, isn’t it?
That’s
why you took the job. You don’t think that was a random shooting at all. That’s why you went and talked to Bear. You think there
is
a serious threat, and CRT is hiding it, but going ahead with filming anyway, because they’re in too deep financially to get out of it now. Cartwright Records isn’t doing very well, is it?”

“I already told you,” Cooper says, taking the empty water glass from my suddenly limp fingers and setting it back on the nightstand. “That isn’t why I took the job. The fact that they moved the filming of
Jordan Loves Tania
to your place of work means that, whatever is going on with my brother’s wife, I have an obligation to make sure my own bride-to-be remains in one piece. And that’s what I plan on doing. You do have something of a reputation, Heather, for attracting people with homicidal tendencies.”

His tone is light, but I’ve known him long enough to tell he’s deadly serious.

“What about Tania?” I ask him. “Why would anyone want to kill
her?
” Besides myself, I can’t think of anyone who’d hate Tania Trace enough to murder her. Even
I
don’t hate her that much—at least not anymore—and I have more reason than anyone.

“We don’t know for certain that someone does,” he reminds me.

“Your dad doesn’t approve of what you do for a living, and yet he went to all the trouble of setting up a fake meeting so he could hire you—”

“Because Tania specifically asked for me, remember? Anyway, we’ll find out soon enough whether or not it’s true.”

My heart freezes up again, remembering what happened to Tania’s last bodyguard. “Oh God, Cooper,” I say. “Promise me you won’t do anything brave. Don’t throw yourself in the path of any bullets for her. I realize she’s carrying your unborn niece, but—”

He looks at me like I’m crazy.

“I’m a detective, Heather,” he says, “not Secret Service. I meant I’ll find out soon enough when I begin using my investigative skills. I’m going to
ask
Tania if there’s someone who might have reason to want her dead.”

“Oh,” I say, biting my lip. “Of course. Do you think she’ll tell you?”

“Tania’s never struck me as the sharpest knife in the drawer,” he says, “but my dad said that she basically demanded that the show be transferred to your building or she’d quit, which tells me something about her.”

I snort. “Yeah,” I say, thinking of the cafeteria’s dismal appearance, “that she secretly enjoys slumming it.”

“No,” Cooper says, reaching out to stroke a strand of my hair. “It tells me that, despite the fact that she married my brother, she’s got the good sense to know when she’s found someone she can trust.”

I shake my head, refusing to believe it. “You mean
me?
Oh no, you’ve got it all wrong. It must have been you.
You’re
the one she asked to be her bodyguard. She and I have barely exchanged two words since—”

“I don’t think Tania has a lot of people in her life she feels close to. Did you see the way she was kissing that dog?”

I nod, remembering the image with a pang. I’m not surprised Cooper noticed it as well.

“I guess a part of me felt a little sorry for her,” I confess. “And I’ve never actually thought she was dumb. People like to think pretty girls who run around in short skirts carrying tiny dogs can’t be intelligent, but unless they’ve inherited their money, they usually don’t get to where they are on looks alone. Tania’s incredibly talented. She’s got the same octave range as an opera singer, for instance.”

“Excuse me?”

I frown at him. “How could you grow up in the Cartwright Records household and not know what that means?”

“You know I purposefully blocked out all music-related discussions growing up. I had to, or I’d have ended up prancing around on stage in a pair of leather pants like Jordan.”

I smile at him. “Simply put, the span from the lowest to the highest notes Tania’s voice can produce without straining is about three octaves—that’s really rare. All that stuff about Mariah Carey and Céline Dion hitting five octaves is crap. I mean, they can hit the notes, but not without straining. They have about the same range as Tania. Even though the songs Tania chooses to sing aren’t the best, she’s got a really great voice. I don’t know how she has the lung capacity to do it with that tiny body, especially since she was never classically trained, but she has a vocal range that’s practically operatic, way broader than mine ever was, even when I was taking regular voice lessons and at the top of my form. Not many people realize this, but to hit the notes that she can, as consistently as she does, in a live performance, night after night, she actually has to be really, really talented and really, really dedicated to her craft.”

Cooper reaches out and pulls me down against him, disturbing Owen, who gives us a dirty look and stalks to the far end of the bed where he won’t be jostled.

“I don’t know,” Cooper says as my hair tumbles across his chest. “I heard you belting out something this morning in the bathroom and you sounded really, really talented to me.”

“That was ABBA,” I say with a sniff. “Everyone sounds good singing ABBA, especially in the bathroom. Why do you think they’re so popular?”

He lifts the sheet to peer beneath it. “You look at the top of your form to me,” he says. “As a licensed investigator, I suppose I better check to make sure.”

Before I could stop him, he did. Though truthfully, I didn’t try that hard.

Chapter 11

Check-in day for Tania Trace Rock Camp doesn’t start like one during which you might expect to witness a homicide, even if you work in a place referred to by many as Death Dorm. Besides, I’d been so busy during the few days preceding it, I completely forgot there might be someone—besides me—who wanted Tania dead.

This proves to be a fatal mistake.

But I don’t know this when I step outside into the backyard to check the temperature after waking up. Instead, I find that it’s one of those rare perfect summer days when people can lie out and work on their tans without sweating (which is why my tan is mostly the result of tinted moisturizer—I hate sweating). There isn’t a cloud in the sky, and the humidity is low. When I go back inside, I find I’m able to blow my hair out straight, and it stays that way for once.

I haven’t seen much of Cooper over the past few days, not only because whatever he’s been doing to prep for guarding Tania is taking up so much of his time, but also because I’ve been having to stay later and later at Fischer Hall every night. Miraculously, I’ve accomplished practically everything on my pre-check-in to-do list:

Made sure we have enough keys for each resident? (You would not believe the number of students who move out and forget to give back their key.) Check.

Gone over every detail about the assigned rooms, from the toilets (do they flush without flooding the room below?) to the window guards. (Does every window have one? Often residents remove the window guards so they can open the windows wider than the regulation two inches in order to stick their heads through the gap to smoke. In my experience, this only ends with bodies falling out of windows and hitting the skylight in the cafeteria.) Check.

Met with the housekeepers, building engineers, and resident assistants (thank goodness I hired one for every two basketball players—I’ve put them in charge of making cute name tags to stick on the front of each camper’s door) to make sure everything is ready and nothing could possibly go wrong, including confiscating the not-so-secret stash of cigars that belongs to Carl, the chief engineer? (I’ll return them to him by the end of the day.) Check.

Spoken with every single mail attendant, member of the paint crew, and security guard to ensure that, despite the presence of major celebrities in our midst, regular daily tasks like sorting and forwarding the mail and painting the rooms will continue as usual and every single visitor to the building, no matter how famous, will be required to leave photo ID and be signed in at the security desk? Check, check, and
check.

Sure, I’m exhausted, because I’ve had to do all of this on my own, since Lisa Wu was still moving in and Sarah was continuing to work through whatever it is she’s working through and was too grumpy to be helpful. One of the tasks on my to-do list was to find out what was wrong with Sarah. Sadly, I wasn’t able to put a check next to this item.

“Sarah,” I said to her the day before check-in, “do you want to take a break and go get a cup of coffee? Brad can cover the office while we’re gone. I think we need to talk about . . . well . . . whatever it is that’s been bugging you.”

I suspected—but could not prove—that what was bugging Sarah was Sarah’s boyfriend. For most of the summer, I hadn’t been able to get Sebastian to leave the office, and technically he didn’t even work there. He hung around all the time because he was so in love with Sarah.

Lately, however, the office has been a Sebastian-free zone. I’ve noticed a distinct lack of phone calls to Sebastian on Sarah’s part, and whenever her cell phone rings, she viciously sends the call to voice mail. All is clearly not well in Sarah-and-Sebastian land.

When I asked if she wanted to talk about it, however, Sarah looked up from the supply request she was filling out on the computer and said angrily, “Not unless you want to tell me what’s been bugging
you.
”

I blinked back at her, surprised. “Nothing’s bugging me. Well, aside from the fact that we have fifty teenage girls checking in here tomorrow and we’re nowhere close to ready—”

“Really?” Sarah interrupted. “You don’t have
anything
to tell me? Nothing at all going on in your life that might have been distracting you? So much so that you forgot to bring me back a Shack Attack from Shake Shack after your doctor’s appointment last Monday even though you said you would because your doctor’s office is right around the Madison Park Shake Shack and you can never resist a visit to Shake Shack? But evidently
something
stopped you from going, didn’t it, or at least from remembering my Shack Attack. And you never even said you were sorry.”

I stared at her, openmouthed. I’d been so stunned after my doctor’s appointment, I hadn’t even noticed the Shake Shack, which
was
odd, because the line snaked almost all the way through the park.

“Sarah,” I said, “I’m so sorry. Your shake completely slipped my mind—”

“It’s no big deal,” Sarah said, with the kind of hostile shrug that indicated it was a very big deal indeed. “I realize I’m just someone you work with, not a friend with whom you might share confidences. And a Shack Attack is a frozen custard, not a shake, FYI.”

“Sarah,” I said, “of
course
you’re my friend—”

“But not one with whom you share personal news,” she said with a sniff. “Like you do with Muffy Fowler.”