The Case of the Missing Mascot (A Sherlock Shakespeare Mystery Book 1) (3 page)

The two guys without game finally gave up on the girls across the room and took up residence on the stools next to me. I tugged my hoodie around me and subtly swiveled so that my back was angled toward them. Not that it mattered. They were deep in conversation almost as soon as they sat down.

After they were done talking about the 'stuck-up sluts' who'd turned them down, they ordered milkshakes and stopped trying to make every word of their conversation carry across the room to the girls who literally didn't know they existed.

"How do you think they're going to react tomorrow when they don't have their stupid mascot at the game?"

"Probably freak out. You know how superstitious the losers are there, Zack."

"You think they're going to pay the beer ransom?"

Beer ransom? Who were these guys, the nitwit mafia?

"If they know what's good for 'em, they will. You know Randy. He'll get off on sending back that dumb costume piece by piece if they don't."

Now I was glad I wouldn't be calling this school home for the next four or five or ten years. Teenage guys were idiots everywhere, but at least I'd never heard of anything like this happening at the local college.

Oh wait. Nothing ever happened at the local college.
Nothing
.

I tuned them out while I finished the last of my onion rings and then decided to head back to the room for a little TV therapy.

It was surprisingly easy for me to avoid Tom the rest of the weekend on campus. I'd known that I wouldn't run into him Saturday since I'd be with the tour and he'd be off warming the bench at the football game. I hadn't expected that he wouldn't even try to call me the rest of the weekend. I probably should've though. When I looked back over every fight we'd had during the course of our two-year relationship, without fail, I'd always been the first one to apologize and try to fix things.

By early Sunday evening, I was back home and sitting on my bed trying to get through all the reading I hadn't done for my economics class during the weekend road trip. I didn't bother to look up when there was a light knock on my door followed by the sound of it creaking open. Only one person ever climbed the stairs two at a time and he didn't live here.

"Hey, Drew."

"How are you holding up?"

Okay, Drew Holmes and I had been best friends since before we'd both mastered toddling, so we didn't usually waste a lot of time on small talk. Even still, that was an odd way to start a conversation.

I glanced up at him to ask what that was supposed to mean, but the concern I found swimming within his dark eyes answered my unspoken question. "How did you find out?"

"One of the girls on the squad heard it from her boyfriend at church this morning and told me about it when they came in for lunch." He pulled the chair out from under my desk and sat in it backwards, resting his forearms on the back of it. "You're better off. Tom was a tool."

"He wasn't that bad." Why was I defending him? He hadn't been away at college all that long and he already had a supermodel lounging on his bed.

"If you say so."

"I do."

He tilted his head to the side and his chocolate-bar brown hair fell in front of his eyes. "You're probably regretting sleeping with him, huh?"

"Actually, I hadn't even thought about that yet." But I sure was now. I pulled my knees up to my chest and asked, "Why do I tell you things?"

"Because Jamie can't be bothered to listen to anyone else's problems."

He definitely had a point there. Still, I maybe shouldn't've confided in Drew about the loss of my virginity last month before Tom headed down to Austin.

Drew pushed back on the chair and got up, moving to sit next to me on the bed. I always forget how tall and strong he was until he was right next to me with a reassuring arm around my shoulders. I sighed and rested my head against his chest.

"You're right. Tom's a total tool."

"He really is. You can do a lot better than someone like him."

"Right. Because all the guys are always tripping all over themselves to get a date with me. Come on, Drew. Tool or not, he was the only one interested." And I never had quite figured out why.

He gave my shoulder a squeeze. "Why do you always do that?"

"Do what? State the obvious?"

"No. Talk about yourself like you don't matter."

I pushed away from his chest. "I'm not in the mood for this conversation right now."

"Tough." He rose to his feet and moved to the foot of the bed. He may be my best friend, but his constant need to move around drove me nuts when I was in a bad mood. "It's like you've been pretending to be ordinary for so long that you've forgotten it's all an act."

"What does that even mean?"

"You're terrible at playing dumb. You know exactly what I mean." When I didn't respond, he shook his head and continued. "You can't spend your whole life trying to blend into the wallpaper just because you hate your name."

 
"Fine. But don't stand there and tell me I can do better just to cheer me up. I'm not even that upset."

He folded his arms across his broad chest. "You know I don't lie to you."

"Whatever. If I'm such a catch that all these different guys are going to be interested in, how come no one's ever asked me out?"

"Probably because half the football team would've kicked the ass of any guy who came on to the quarterback's girl."

He might have a point about that. "What about now? Apparently the whole town knows about what happened." Which was a little odd since we hadn't officially broken up yet. "Where's the line of guys?"

"The good ones aren't interested in being the guy who vultures his way in."

"And the bad ones?"

Drew grinned. "They're probably trying to figure out if the breakup is gonna take or not. You know, Tanya, right?"

"The captain of your squad, Tanya?" I thought of the dirty look she shot my way at the cafe Friday afternoon. "Yeah."

"She's broken up with her boyfriend eighteen times over the last year. Michelle's broken up with her boyfriend at least that many times over the summer. Everyone's used to the jocks and the hot girls breaking up and making up by now."

I rolled my eyes with so much exaggeration that I could feel it in the back of my eyeballs. "I don't qualify as being hot in general, but definitely not hot like the girls on your cheerleading squad."

"Please." He grabbed the metal footboard and leaned forward. "You may like to hide behind a giant hoodie and glasses you don't need, but you're still beautiful."

When Drew said things like that, it was almost easy to forget that he was just my best friend trying to boost my ego and not some hunky guy making really intense eye contact with me in my bedroom. "And as someone with such advanced insight into the world of dating, why are you still single again?"

"I spend half the school year with my hands all over varsity cheerleaders and the other half of the year kissing wannabe teen actresses on stage. What girl in our school is secure enough to handle that?"

"Good point."

"But if you run across any..."

"Yes, I send all my uber-secure swimsuit model friends your way." I cleared my throat. "So, did you really just come over here to check on me and have me play matchmaker? We could've done this by phone."

"Naw. I came over to pick up Wats. I didn't decide to check on you until I got here and he told me you were already back."

"When did you and Wats start hanging out?"

"We don't. You're still my favorite Shakespeare. He just needs a ride over to the high school."

"On a Sunday?"

He tilted his head to the side again. His hair fell in his eyes again. My potentially on the rebound self thought he was adorable again. "You don't know?"

"Clearly."

"Champers went missing yesterday."

"What's a Champers?"

"Our school mascot." When my face didn't give him whatever expression he was hoping for, exasperation crept into his voice. "Sherlock, have you been paying attention to anything going on at school? Champers is the teacup pig we've been training to participate in the Homecoming celebration this week."

"I knew about the pig. I just didn't know they gave it a stupid name." I shook my head. "Someone stole our pig?"

And here I thought all the idiots were down in Austin playing beer pong with Tom.

"We aren't sure yet. That's why there's a search party." A smile that he couldn't quite suppress played across his lips. "You wanna come help us solve a mystery?"

I was about to roll my eyes at him, but thought better of it after the first time. "As much as I love fumbling through a good mystery, I'm sure y'all can figure it out without me."

"I thought that's what you'd say." He started to walk through the door, but grabbed the frame and poked his head back inside. "Call me if you need to. I know this is bothering you more than you're letting on."

I tried to focus on the laws of supply and demand after Drew left. It didn't work. Now that he'd mentioned it, I did sort of regret sleeping with Tom. At the time, we were alone in the house and he was making really intense eye contact with me in my bedroom. It had seemed like a good idea at the time. I guess I figured it was better to lose my virginity to the guy I'd been dating for a few years than to have to start over with some stranger after we drifted apart.

I just hadn't counted on the drift starting basically as soon as I slept with him.

Asshole.

Before I could change my mind, I pulled out my phone and assigned the most obnoxious ringtone I could find to Tom's number. On the off chance that he did try to call me, I didn't even want to have to look at his name on my phone before I sent him to voicemail. If I saw his name, or the really cute picture of him that came up under his name, I would probably take the call. I may have always been the one to apologize for fights that weren't my fault in the past, but I wasn't doing it this time.

The satisfaction from that petty task helped me get through about five paragraphs before my mind started wandering to the hot blonde on Tom's bed again. Had the two of them already hooked up? Or was he just laying the groundwork with her for after my visit? Better question... why hadn't he just broken up with me before he went off to college? Was he trying to keep his sure thing on the line in case he struck out with college girls?

This was Drew's fault. I was fine, sort of, before he made that comment about me regretting what I'd done with Tom. If he'd kept his mouth shut, it wouldn't've occurred to me to regret that until I was in the middle of my next econ test.

And what was that little crack about helping solve a mystery? Of all the people in my life, Drew should know I hated when people assumed I solved mysteries because of my name. In fact, the only thing I hated worse was the way kids in school used to say 'here comes Sherlock Holmes' whenever they saw the two of us together. Too bad I was nothing like the real Sherlock Holmes. He'd probably be too engrossed in one mystery or another for the embarrassing breakup to even register in his brain.

Why couldn't I be more like the fictional detective, minus the cocaine habit?

Wait. Why couldn't I?

Sure, I had no skills or training when it came to solving mysteries, but I'd read more than my fair share of them over the years. Books made it look easy to catch serial killers. Finding a stupid teacup pig in a small town couldn't be that hard.

I even knew where to start. I jumped out of bed and crossed the hall to Watson's room. While everyone else was assuming Champers was wandering around in a field frolicking with butterflies, I'd be on the trail of the people who stole our mascot.
 

If nothing else, this would be a great distraction for a few hours.

Just as I expected, Watson had left his tablet sitting on his bed. I picked it up and briefly wished I were as good at accepting who I was as my fourteen-year-old brother was. Instead of hiding from the fact that his legal name was William Watson Shakespeare, he actually used a cover for his tablet that looked like a leather-bound Shakespeare book. At least he got a cool middle name out of the deal. Wats was nine hundred gazillion times better than my middle name.

No power on earth would make me even acknowledge that name in my head. In fact, I'd become a master of covering it up with my thumb whenever I had to show my drivers license.

Whatever.

I opened the tablet cover and used his password to unlock it, briefly glancing over my shoulder to make sure no one was there. I knew I was supposed to be alone in the house, but it felt as though someone were watching me. Weird.

As usual, it opened straight to his favorite social media site. If people knew how nerdy he was about organization, he wouldn't have more than four thousand friends on here.

How did he have one hundred times more friends than I did?

Shoving that thought out of my head, I navigated my way to his lists of friends at other schools. As expected, he was friends with half the football players at the school we were supposed to play on Friday night. I clicked through at least ten different profiles before I saw anything that piqued my interest.