Chapter 64
The news of an off-campus murder made only minor ripples at Helshire.
There was general agreement that the Motorway Inn was cursed—Shuriken had to move his Adderall sales to an all-night diner.
A few students recalled a pink-haired woman skulking around campus, but not why she was here.
If my hallmates made any connection between our mysterious visitor and the dead girl at the Motorway, they said nothing, though I felt an extra layer of protectiveness at Lavernick for the next few weeks.
Crystal was an outsider, after all. She didn’t belong in the Helshire pantheon with Laney Maxwell, Anthony Sandino, and Peter Morton. Much bigger events in town—the high school fire, the county clerk’s arrest—had slipped past unnoticed on campus.
The death was being treated as suspicious, though not officially a homicide.
The forensics had to be tantalizing. Rigor and algor mortis didn’t match, the body had been moved, and Sebastian had finished her off with his bare hands.
But, as Orrin often told us, a good rain washes away a multitude of sins.
We had erased Crystal without consequence to ourselves or Faraday. It was too easy—the world so awash with random violence that ours, in all its purposes, remained invisible.
When Sebastian and I filed our report, my family were pleased. Crystal had shown up looking for Hiromi’s lost girlfriend, and we’d snipped the thread. Nothing about her death pointed back toward the city and Lyon’s cult, which Garrett and Arabella were still incorporating.
As an unexpected bonus, Faraday’s punishment for Oscar Junior’s wrack was delayed—Cyrus and Orrin preferred not to commit assault with a homicide investigation underway in town. They’d probably wait until she was back in Boston for Thanksgiving, which meant less drama for me and Sebastian.
Faraday remained blasé about her transgressions, born and bred to go off the rails. She was busy piling on new ones, turning up at the Banner storm party in Crystal’s Helshire sweatshirt, wearing it to afternoon tea.
“No bloodstains. Who cares?”
A new motto for the Wilbert-Lees.
I returned to the task of keeping myself hidden.
As the older caretakers had warned us, it was difficult. Being a true Morton came with daily rituals, ways of dressing and speaking. Secret caches in the library, the best rooms on campus. A lofty indifference to ordinaries.
Care was an absence. No training sessions, no special classes. Just the faintest signals hidden in a conversation: glancing words to remind one another we were all hiding the same secret.
Caregiver, scarecrow.
The others seemed nervous around me. Regina and Leopold were friendly, but guarded. Kumar hardly talked to me at all.
Was it because I was an unlikely recruit—the aunties’ pet turned traitor? Or was it my too-frequent tears? No one else had cried at our initiation. The steady, impervious Jessica Morton was gone. This new me reeked of self-doubt.
Whoever was in charge of our rebellion was wary of me too. No assignment came. No details about our long-term plans. All I had to go on was what Sebastian told me, which was never enough. But my mind was always working, trying to solve the equation of the legacies.
The strongest move I could imagine—the only way to make evil take a year off—was to ruin every incorporated family in the world, all at once.
ACH transfers were limited to a million dollars a day, but SWIFTs were infinite. For families whose wealth was physical, like gold mines and land, we could forge a dozen contradictory last wills and testaments. Whatever we hadn’t disappeared would be tied up in probate for decades.
Of course, issues with inheritance would require killing people.
What about an arson attack on the freeports? All those cars, Picassos, bottles of wine, simply gone. Jewels and ancient coins, melted into slag. I started reworking my paper for Ms. Delicato, looking at how loans were leveraged against physical assets, at how insurance companies went bankrupt.
The Belmonts, but on a vaster scale.
When Frankie got a new computer, I borrowed her old one and began to devise the specifics of my plan. If Care ever came to trust me, I wanted to show them what an accountant could do.
One afternoon, a month after Crystal’s death, I was reading on the lawn in front of Ogden. The lacrosse team was running drills, the odd loose ball bouncing past me. The smoke and heat of the semester’s start were a distant memory. The storm had wiped everything away.
Xavier Lindqvist came striding across the grass, looking pleased to see me. He shimmered with unusual intensity.
“We have something to discuss.” He glanced at the ordinaries across the lawn.
My skin tightened. Bianca might be my ally now, but that didn’t mean the other Lindqvists had forgiven me for Halcyon Hall.
I closed my book, readying myself. The old reflexes were still there.
Xavier sat on the grass beside me. “I’m pleased you’ve kept your hair short.”
I did not respond.
“Am I interrupting?” he asked.
“I was reading about the SWIFT system.” His face went blank, so I said: “The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication.”
“Sounds like an interruption would be welcome.” His smile returned.
He wasn’t here about the fire.
“How are you, Xavier?”
“Splendid, thank you. I hope senior year is everything it should be.”
“A few complications.”
“Yes. That business in town.”
I didn’t react. Xavier had connected me to Crystal.
Why did he care? Maybe Sebastian was right, and he’d never quite gotten over our night together when we were fifteen.
“Kind of you to take an interest,” I said blandly.
A wounded look. “Always, with old friends. I’m just curious, should we be celebrating?”
“Celebrating?”
“Was she an assignment? Or was it personal?”
It took me a moment—he wanted to know if Crystal had been my Hefnd.
He wanted me in his club.
“Doesn’t that happen before you’re blooded?” The nearest lacrosse player was fifty feet away, but I lowered my voice. “Bianca must have told you I killed Peter. Lyon was mine as well.”
“And that other girl,” Xavier said with a wave of his hand. “Or was that the good doctor’s work? Murder-suicides are so conveniently opaque.”
I couldn’t answer without screaming, so I stayed quiet.
“Fine, keep your secrets,” he said, wounded again. “The Hefnd doesn’t have hard-and-fast rules—that’s the whole point. If you killed this girl because she annoyed you, we should mark you with a black heart.”
“Crystal wasn’t an assignment, just a loose end.”
“But so close to home. Makes it feel personal.”
I hadn’t done the deed. I wasn’t even there.
“Hate to disappoint you, Xavier, but it was reported to the family and approved. A tragic lack of petty motivations. Hardly any chaos.”
He sighed, leaning back on his elbows. The movement tugged at his sleeves, and a makeshift bandage on his right forearm slipped out.
Plastic wrap, held fast with medical tape. A recent tattoo.
“You killed someone.”
He closed his eyes, his expression sublime.
“You did this somewhere far away, I hope.”
“The personal, Jessica, does not always leave room for the tactical.”
“Are you fucking with me? I haven’t heard anything.”
“It was four hours ago.”
“Xavier,” I groaned. “Please tell me it wasn’t a student. We don’t need the heat right now.”
He snapped out of his revery, shook his head. “A dubious character, meeting an unsurprising end. He was inconveniencing an old friend of mine.”
I stared at him, trying to figure out what he was telling me. There was a glow in his eyes, a gleam of triumph that went beyond a first kill.
Personal. And he’d come to tell me about it a few hours later.
“Xavier Lindqvist. Did you murder someone…for me?”
He pushed up his sleeve to pick at the bandage.
I shook my head. I didn’t have enemies. The old Jessica hadn’t cared enough to make them.
“He told the police about a woman in a mask.” Xavier peeled the plastic wrap away, and blew gently on the tattoo. A black heart, framed with spots of seeping blood. “I took it as an affront.”
The bearded man at reception, the one I’d bribed with a $100 bill.
“You’re welcome,” Xavier said.
My head swam for a moment. “Do you seriously think it helps me if there’s another murder linked to that hotel?”
“A murder, Jessica? Please.” He gently pressed the bandage back on. “Well, if you aren’t going to congratulate me, maybe one of your cousins will.”
He stood up and dusted his pants. “Do you ever think about our little tryst?”
I wondered what he wanted me to say. What would the old Jessica have said? Something cutting.
But he wouldn’t have dared ask her.
“We were children,” I said.
“We were never children. It wasn’t allowed. I thought you were perfect—fearless, so sure of yourself. You were the one who showed me how we’re supposed to be. Always in control, but somehow never cold to the touch.”
None of those things was true anymore. But I ached for them. I missed that certainty.
He took a step closer, bent down. “Is that a tear on your cheek?”
I wiped it away. “That happens now. Since the smoke.”
A sigh as he stood again. “I’ll pretend otherwise. Drinks at Riley’s, midnight, to celebrate my Hefnd. If you care to join.”
“No place I’d rather be,” I said. “Congratulations, Xavier. I look forward to hearing the story.”
He beamed, unable to hold a grudge. “I’ll spare no details. Enjoy your dreary banking studies, but save something for my party.”
It was on the news before midnight.
A hotel employee, found in his bedroom, dead of an overdose. A suspect in Crystal’s murder, who’d tried to confuse the investigators with wild stories. He had a history of drug use, a rap sheet of offenses—nonviolent, but crimes were crimes. Clearly the killer.
Xavier had done us all a favor. The case would close with nothing implicating me or Helshire.
This wasn’t the vengeful Hefnd I’d expected from Xavier, no severed heads lugged home at dawn. This was a different kind of passion—a gift for me.
That look of ecstasy on his face.
But as I waited for his party, a question stuck in the back of my mind: How had he known about my bribe?
Were the Lindqvists tracking Crystal’s case? Would Xavier have used family sources for his Hefnd? That seemed to go against the spirit of Halcyon Hall.
There was only one other way…
I’d told Sebastian about the bearded man that night.
My cousin, with his politicking of the other families, his certainty that protecting me was worth any amount of collateral damage. I could imagine him whispering in Xavier’s ear, choice words to settle the waters around Helshire at last.
Bellamy—
Did you know that doctors do something called “triage”? In an emergency, you separate injured people into three piles:
A) the patients who need help right away
B) the patients who can wait
C) the patients who will die no matter what.