Black Heart

Page 22

“Did you find out where this is going to take place?” I ask, and open the car door. I feel numb.
“Monday speech out near Carney, on the site of a former internment camp. They’ll pitch tents by the memorial. The Feds have got the security sewn up, but who cares, Cassel? You’re obviously not going.”
I have to go, though. If I don’t go, Patton gets away with it and Mom doesn’t. I might not think my mother is a good person, but she’s better than him.
And I don’t want the Feds to get away with it either.
“Yes, I am,” I say. “Look, thanks for doing this. I know you didn’t have to, and it really helps, knowing exactly what I’m getting into.”
“Fine, go. But just show up and screw it up. What are they going to do, give you a good scolding? Mistakes happen. You screw up everything anyway.”
“They’ll just set me up again,” I say.
“Now you’ll be looking for it.”
“I was already looking for it,” I say. “I still didn’t see what was going on. Besides, someone should stop Patton. I have a chance.”
“Sure,” he says. “Someone should. Someone who’s not being set up. Someone who’s not you.”
“If I don’t go along with this, the Feds are threatening to go after Mom. And that’s the best we can hope for—because Patton will kill her. He’s already tried once.”
“He did what? What do you mean?”
“She got shot and she didn’t want us to know. I would have told you, but the last time we talked, you hung up on me abruptly.”
He ignores the rest of what I’ve said. “Is she okay?”
“I think so.” I belt myself into the driver’s seat. Then, sighing, I turn on the ignition. “But look, we have to do something.”
“We aren’t doing anything. I’ve done all I’m going to do, looking through those files. I’m looking out for myself. Try it sometime.”
“I have a plan.” The vent floods the car with cold air. I crank up the heat and rest my head against the wheel. “Or, well, not a plan exactly, but the beginnings of one. All I need you to do is stall Patton. Find out where he’s going to be on Monday and keep him there so he’s late to his speech. For Mom’s sake. You don’t even have to visit me in jail.”
“Do something for me, then,” he says, after a pause.
The chances of me pulling this off and getting away with it are so bad that I’m actually not that concerned about whatever evil scheme my brother will try to involve me in next.
It’s kind of freeing.
“Fine. I’ll owe you a favor. But after. I don’t have time right now.” I look at the clock on the dashboard. “In fact, I don’t have any time. I have to get to Wallingford. I’m already late.”
“Call me after your school thing,” Barron says, and hangs up. I toss the phone onto the passenger seat and pull out of the driveway, wishing that the only plan I’ve got didn’t depend on putting my faith in two of the people I trust least in the world—Barron and myself.
It’s ten after ten when I pull into the Wallingford parking lot. There’s no time to go to my room, so I grab for my phone as I’m crossing the lawn, figuring I’ll call Sam and get him to bring the photos of Wharton. But as I start thinking about the pictures, I have that awful feeling that there’s something I’ve overlooked. In the diner I said that I thought Mina must have intended for us to see the pictures, but she didn’t just let us see them. She made sure that we had copies.
Cold dread works its way up my spine. She wanted someone else to blackmail Wharton. Someone to claim they took photographs and they want money. But we don’t have to really do it. We just have to seem like we’re doing it.
Stupid, stupid. I am so stupid. As I am thinking that, the phone rings in my hands. It’s Daneca.
“Hey,” I say. “I can’t really talk. I’m so late to detention, and if I get another demerit—”
She sobs, liquid and awful, and I bite off whatever I was planning to say next. “What happened?” I ask.
“Sam found out,” she says, choking out the words. “That I was seeing your brother. We were in the library together this morning, studying. Everything was just normal. I don’t know, I wanted to see him—and figure out if there was still anything between us, if I felt—”
“Uh-huh,” I say, crossing the green, hoping that Wharton is still in his office. Hoping that I’m wrong about Mina’s plans. Hoping that Sam is somewhere burning those photos, even though I’m pretty sure he’s too busy being devastated, and even if he wasn’t, he has no reason to think we’re in trouble. “Maybe he’ll get over it.”
It’s pointless to think about the fact that neither of them getting over things is what broke them up in the first place. He’s going to be furious with her and doubly furious at me for not telling him about Barron. Which, predictably, I deserve.
“No, listen. I left the room for a minute, and when I got back—Well, Barron must have texted me. And Sam read it—and read the other ones too. He started screaming at me. It was really ugly.”
I pause. “Are you okay?”
“I don’t know.” She sounds like she’s trying to fight back more tears. “Sam’s always been so gentle—sweet. I just never thought he could be that angry. He scared me.”
“Did he hurt you?” I am pushing open the doors of the administrative building, trying to think.
“No—nothing like that.”
I head for the steps. No one’s in any of the offices. My footfalls are loud in the hallways. The only sounds I can hear are the ones I’m making. Everyone’s home for the weekend. My heart starts to race. Wharton’s gone, and Mina has probably already told him that Sam and I are blackmailing him. He’ll toss our room, and if he does, he’s going to find the pictures . . . and, oh God, the gun. He’s going to find the gun.
“Sam threw his books across the room, and then he got really cold, really distant,” Daneca is saying, although it’s hard to focus on her words. “It was like something just switched off inside him. He told me that he was supposed to meet you and he didn’t care if you didn’t show. He said that he’d take care of things, for once. He said he had a—”
“Wait. What?” I ask, snapping to attention. “What did he say he had?”
A shot rings through the stairwell from the floor above me, echoing through the empty building.
I don’t know what I expect to see when I burst into Wharton’s office, but it’s not Sam and the Headmaster grappling on the antique oriental rug. Wharton is crawling across the floor, toward a gun that seems to have skittered away from both of them, while Sam’s trying to pin him down.
I go for the gun.
Wharton looks at me dazedly when I swing the barrel in his direction. His white hair is sticking up all over the place. Sam slumps bonelessly, with a moan. That’s when I realize that the red stain surrounding Sam isn’t part of the pattern of the carpet.
“You shot him,” I say to Wharton, in disbelief.
“I’m sorry,” Sam gets out between locked teeth. “I screwed up, Cassel. I really screwed up.”
“You’re going to be fine, Sam,” I say.
“Mr. Sharpe, you are twenty minutes late for your detention,” Dean Wharton says from the floor. I wonder if he’s in shock. “If you don’t want to be in more trouble than you already are, I suggest that you give me that gun.”
“You’re kidding me, right? I’m calling an ambulance.” I cross to Wharton’s burled wood desk. The photos of Mina are there, on top of the other papers.
“No!” Wharton says, pushing himself to his feet. He lunges for the phone cord and pulls it out of the wall with a violent jerk. He’s breathing hard, looking at me with glazed eyes. “I forbid it. I absolutely forbid it. You don’t understand. If the board finds out about this—Well, you just don’t understand the difficult position that will put me in.”
“I can imagine,” I say, pulling out my cell with one hand. I can’t quite work out how to dial and keep the gun trained on him at the same time.
Wharton staggers toward me. “You can’t call anyone. Put that phone down.”
“You shot him!” I yell. “Stay back or I’ll shoot you!”
Sam moans again. “It really hurts, Cassel. It really hurts.”
“This can’t be happening,” Wharton says. Then he looks at me again. “I’ll tell them that you did it! I’ll say that you both came here to rob me and you two got into an argument, and then you shot him.”
“I should know who shot me,” says Sam. He winces as he puts pressure on his leg. “I’m not going to say it was Cassel.”
“That won’t matter. Whose gun is that, Mr. Sharpe?” Wharton says. “Yours, I’ll wager.”
“Nope,” I say. “I stole it.”
He gives me a sudden blank look. He is used to good boys in tidy uniforms who only play at being troublemakers before doing what they’re told, and the sudden suspicion that I’m nothing like that seems to disorient him. Then his mouth twists. “That’s right. Everyone knows your background. Who are they going to believe—you or me? I am a respectable member of the community.”
“Not when they see the pictures of you and Mina Lange. That’s pretty sketchy stuff. You’re not going to look good. You’re sick, right? Brain starting to go. First you forget small things, then bigger ones, and the doctor gives you the news that it only gets worse from here. Time to resign from Wallingford. Not much you can do legally—but illegally—Well, now we’re talking. You can buy children, little girls like Mina, and she can’t cure you because it’s degenerative, but she can give you the next best thing.
“So you don’t get any worse and she starts getting sick. At first you rationalize it. She’s young. She’ll get better. So she misses some classes? That’s nothing for her to be upset about. After all, you’ve gotten her a scholarship to Wallingford, a prestigious prep school, so that you could have her on hand whenever you needed her.
“When she told you we had the pictures, you probably were willing to pay. But then when Sam comes in here, he says something that makes you realize the money is for Mina. And that puts you in a tough spot. If she goes, you get sick again. And if anyone sees the pictures, you lose your job. You can’t have that, so you go for the gun.”
Wharton looks toward the desk as though he wants to make a mad grab for the photos. Sweat is beading on his forehead. “She was in on it?”
“She orchestrated this. She took those pictures. The only thing she didn’t expect was someone to actually try to help her. Sam did, because he’s a good guy. See what it got him. Now I am making this call and you’re not going to stop me.”
“No,” Wharton says.
I glance at Sam. He looks very pale. I wonder how much blood he’s already lost.
“Look, I don’t care about Mina or the money or you losing your mind,” I say. “Take the photos. Keep your secret. Tell the ambulance people whatever you want when they come. But he’s really hurt.”
“Okay. Let me think. You must know someone,” the dean says in a low, pleading voice. “The kind of doctor who won’t report a shooting.”
“You want me to call a mob doctor?”
The eagerness on his face is exaggerated, manic. “Please. Please. I’ll give you anything. You can both graduate with a 4.0. You can blow off all your classes. If you make this go away, as far as I’m concerned, you can do whatever you want.”
“And no more demerits,” says Sam weakly.
“Are you sure?” I ask Sam. “This doctor’s not going to have all the stuff that a real hospital—”
“Cassel, think about it,” Sam says. “If an ambulance comes, we’re all in trouble. We all lose.”
I hesitate.
“My parents,” he says. “I can’t—they can’t find out.” I look at him for a long moment and then remember that Sam was the one who brought a gun into the dean’s office and threatened him with it. Normal parents probably frown on that kind of thing. I bet judges don’t like it either. This isn’t a zero-sum game for the dean, Sam, and me. There’s plenty of trouble to go around.
With a sigh I flick the safety on, shove the gun into my pocket, and make the call.
The doctor with the crooked teeth arrives a half hour later. His answering service never asked for a name from me and never gave one for him, either. In my head I am still calling him Dr. Doctor.
He’s wearing a similar outfit to the one I saw him in the last time—sweatshirt and jeans. I notice he’s got on sneakers with no socks and there’s a scab of some kind on his ankle. His cheeks look more sunken than I remember, and he’s smoking a cigarette. I wonder how old he is. He looks like he’s maybe in his thirties with a full head of unruly curls and the scruff of a man who can’t be bothered to shave every day. The only thing that indicates he’s a doctor at all is the black bag he’s carrying.
I’ve elevated Sam’s leg and padded it with my T-shirt. I am sitting on the floor, applying pressure. Dean Wharton wrapped Sam in my coat to stop him from shivering. We’ve done our awful best, and I am feeling like the worst friend in the world for not insisting we take him immediately to the hospital, whatever the consequences.