Chapter 40 #2
Fola sighed, stopped fiddling with the mouse, and turned to face Octavius now, Romeo following suit.
“Do you want to tell him or should I?” Fola asked.
Romeo straightened up, clearly nervous. “You know Evie …”
Octavius felt his stomach twist at the sound of the girl’s name. Of course he knew Evie.
He nodded, saying nothing.
Romeo continued. “She kind of lied about something, something pretty big, and I was telling Fola about it and Fola thinks it was suspicious, given everything.”
“What did she lie about?” Octavius asked.
“Well, yesterday, Mrs. Gray told me Evie was back for a short visit for the holidays. But then Evie told me she was actually back here for a longer visit but hadn’t told her parents.”
“People lie to their parents all the time, what’s weird about that?” Octavius said.
“It’s not the lie that was weird; it was something she said last night.
She said that she needed to speak to Dad, that he’d helped her with a situation in Italy and she needed to thank him for helping her get a promotion at her dance company.
But then today she claimed she’d never been promoted and that she hadn’t been in Italy or at her ballet company in a year.
So I was wondering why she lied in the first place, where she’s been all this time, and why she mentioned Dad helping her at all.
I don’t know, it set alarm bells off in my head. ”
“It also set the alarm bells off in mine,” Fola chimed in. “This felt like something worth looking into. So I asked a guy I know in IT to do a background check, see if there was anything strange or shady, and lo and behold, he found something shady.”
Octavius raised an eyebrow at this brand-new information. “Wait … You just have a guy on speed dial that can do background checks on people? Fola … are you secretly in touch with the Mafia?”
She rolled her eyes. “I’m not answering that question.”
“Because you took a blood oath,” Octavius said, eyes widening.
“No, because it’s a stupid question and quite frankly, I don’t answer stupid questions,” she said. “Anyway, the guy I know managed to put together a whole file on Evie and emailed it over.”
Fola gestured to the email now on the screen.
“I have her entire history right here. My guy says Evie did leave Italy last year—so she lied about just being back for the holidays. And, more than that, what she failed to mention was that she hadn’t just left.
She’d been kicked out of her ballet company altogether.
Now we need to work out why. If you want to be helpful, help me read through the files for anything damning.
As Romeo said, she wanted to speak to Dad last night—and urgently.
Why couldn’t she wait a few days, if she’s moving back anyway?
Sounds suspicious to me, and would definitely sound suspicious to the police.
All we need now is to find evidence in these files to support this suspicion and then the cops can take it from there. ”
Now Octavius was actually convinced it was his sister that was secretly in the mob. That or she’d finally lost the plot.
He felt uneasy about it all. “But Evie’s already been dismissed,” he said.
“Well, I’m going to find a way to undismiss her. It’s her fault for not leaving when she had the chance to. That feels even guiltier to me,” Fola said with a shrug. “She’s stuck around to listen to everyone else’s evidence, strengthen her own alibi, and cover her tracks.”
“Are you sure about this—”
“It has to be her, okay? I’ve been looking into all of the remaining guests throughout the day, and she’s the only one worth pursuing. We don’t have any other choices and we are running out of time. We have to make sure Chief Waxler makes the right arrest, okay?” she said, looking at her brothers.
As messed up as it was, Fola was right. They did not have time or many other options. He couldn’t stop thinking about the way Waxler looked at him … like he was guilty. And the worst part is, Octavius was, he so was.
Octavius nodded silently but Romeo did not react at all.
Octavius thought again about the lessons their father would teach them down in the laboratory. How brutal human nature could be.
“Are you guys going to help me look through the files or what?” Fola asked, and Octavius tried not to think about the implications of this, what terrible people it made them, as he settled down next to Fola and Romeo at the old computer.
The computer was one of those techy multiuser-friendly ones, meaning that two of them could scroll on the screen at once, reading different sections at the same time.
Octavius watched in silence as Romeo scrolled through some files with his mouse, and Fola with hers.
They spent a few minutes doing this before they found anything of use.
“Wait, what was that?” Romeo asked suddenly, pointing at one of the many open tabs on his side of the split screen.
“What was what?” Fola asked.
Romeo double-clicked on the tab, enlarging it as an image loaded. It was a photocopied newspaper clipping, with a yearbook photo of a girl in black and white next to a photo of a car wreck.
“It’s in Italian,” Fola said, pointing to the screen. She and Romeo turned to Octavius then, since he was the only one who could actually read any Italian (a necessary skill while studying music).
“What does it say?” Fola asked him.
Octavius squinted at the screen, trying to decipher what he could. Since his Italian was largely music related; he knew words like crescendo and adagio and presto. He wasn’t sure how well his knowledge of how quickly to play an instrument would fare here.
“It seems to be about some girl who died last year in Italy …,” he said, finally extracting some meaning from the jumble of words.
Fola sat up. “Which girl? How did she die?”
“I think …” He swallowed, a heaviness settling into his chest. “I think it was a car crash. Her name was Adelina Toscano. She was seventeen.”
“Why would an article about a random Italian girl’s death show up in Evie’s file?” Romeo asked.
Fola had a dangerous look on her face, a mixture between delight and vindication. It was the same look she had whenever she was nearing the end of a chess match and was only two or three moves away from checkmate.
“Well, that’s what we have to find out.”