“Gena? Gena?” The line was dead.
The crowd pressed in behind me, muttering as I stood there with the phone to my ear. I replayed the broken bits and pieces of conversation. Reece was out of jail. Someone bailed him out using my name. And now he was missing.
Found a stray cat. Think he belongs to you.
Reece. It had to be. He was the only student I had left.
My feet stuck to the floor when I remembered the ad in today’s paper. Some cats don’t dance. Dead or alive when you find him?
“Ticket, please.”
I looked up at the attendant, holding my ticket close to my body.
“Your ticket, miss?” he insisted with a hard smile.
I looked at the black-and-white ticket. It should have all been so clear. My freedom was on the other side of that door. But the only answer that made any sense—the only thing I really wanted—wasn’t.
I turned headlong into the crowd and bulldozed my way through. I had to solve the ad before nine o’clock.
A uniformed police officer shifted his weight, fingers resting on his sidearm as I emerged. A sweating mess of panic and frustration, I lowered my eyes and walked steadily through the terminal, pausing only to buy a Metro ticket home.
I fingered Lonny’s card in my pocket.
It all comes down to motive . . .
Reece’s voice buzzed in my ears.
Who has a reason to kill people you care about? To put you behind bars? Who would want to ruin your life, Leigh?
I’d never hurt anyone. Had never taken anything that belonged to anyone else. But my father had.
He couldn’t see the lives he was destroying.
Was it possible all this could have something to do with him? I clutched my bag tight, remembering what my mother had told me about my father. What he’d done. How he’d been caught. My father had lied and stolen and left his partner to take the fall. It was a crazy thought, but could I be paying for his crimes because he wasn’t here to suffer for them himself ?
And suddenly it all began to make a terrible kind of sense.
I knew whose life my father destroyed.
? ? ?
Dead or alive when you find him? It was as if we’d come full circle. Back to the beginning. It had all started with Schr?dinger, the morning I’d found the first ad, and Rankin’s voice droning on about the damn cat. The cat was dead. It had to be. He’d said it himself. The cat couldn’t be both dead and alive at the same time. Dead, like the cat on my porch. Dead, like Kylie and the others. He was going to kill Reece.
I got off the city bus at West River and took the side streets at a sprint. Crouching in the bushes next to the high school, I watched as deejays carried amps and speakers, and student council members toted the last of the decorations and balloons to the gym. Some cats don’t dance. No, the killer wasn’t luring me to the prom. He was taking me back to the beginning. Back to the chemistry lab where we first learned about Schr?dinger’s cat. Where he’d left the first message, Dead or Alive, on my desk.
An unmarked police car idled near the main entrance, so I slipped inside through a back door, sticking to the quiet, dark passages and emerging at the empty chem lab.
The lights were off and the room reeked of disinfectant. Muddy chalk swirls were drying on the blackboard. I rotated slowly, taking in every detail of the room. Late-evening sun streamed between the plastic slats and stretched over the neat rows. I grabbed my stool off the table and set it quietly on the floor. My desk was clean. Nothing. No clues, no notes.
The answer’s in the box.
I ran to the storage closet and flipped on the light, illuminating floor-to-ceiling gunmetal shelves stuffed with cardboard boxes, all of them sorted and labeled by my own hand. I moved to the far end of the closet where I’d organized the fourth semester lab materials. We’d covered Schr?dinger six weeks ago. If there was a clue, it was . . .
Here.
A chill raced through me. The box was labeled Schr?dinger’s Cat in indelible blue ink, fresh fumes still clinging to the air around it. It was long and wide, big enough to fill the space below the lowest shelf. Big enough for a body.
Respite in a box . . .
Dead or alive when you find him?
“Reece!” I dragged the box, leveraging my weight and
heaving it out from under the shelf until I could reach the seam. Breathless, I grabbed a box cutter from a supply cabinet and dragged it across the tape, ripping the flaps open and plunging my hand inside. I dropped to my knees, dug to the bottom. Crumpled newspaper spilled onto the floor, exposing rows of heavy microscopes underneath.
With an angry shout, I pitched the cutter across the room. I slumped into the pile of news filler and pressed my head into my hands.