Those questions banged around in her head as they wheeled around the end of the first row of lockers to where she’d left the injured girl.
Mrs. Frazer pushed past her but then stopped dead in her tracks. Dana careened into her and rebounded as severely as if she’d walked into a fireplug. The other girls collided and bumped and stopped in a bunch. Everyone stared.
At nothing.
At a completely empty row of lockers.
At a clean floor.
Not one single drop of blood on the fronts of the lockers. No pool of red on the linoleum. There was absolutely nothing there.
“But—but—” stammered Dana. She bolted and checked the next row, even though she was positive this was where she’d seen the girl. Even though her own locker stood open, the sleeve of her sweater hanging out. The next row was empty, and the next. The teacher strode through the room behind her, looking down each row, checking the bathroom, in each stall. In the laundry room. In the foyer that led back to the main hallway of the school’s basement.
Nothing.
The girls crowded around, scared and confused, looking with puzzled expressions at the empty rows of lockers.
Mrs. Frazer turned very slowly toward Dana. “If this is a joke,” she said in the coldest voice in town, “it’s neither funny nor appreciated.”
The other girls moved away from Dana and regrouped around the teacher. There was doubt on some faces, anger on others. A few leaned their heads close to each other, whispering and giggling.
“But I saw her,” insisted Dana. “She was hurt. She was bleeding all over. She was right there.”
“Right where?”
Dana hurried back to the row of lockers against which the girl had stood and placed her hand on one closed door. “Right here. She had this locker open.”
Mrs. Frazer stiffened, and Dana heard several of the girls gasp. Dana looked at the other girls. No one was laughing now. Some stood with hands over their mouths, eyes wide. Two of them had tears in their eyes. A few looked really angry, like they wanted to hit her.
Mrs. Frazer stepped close to Dana. She was only half an inch taller, but she seemed to tower above Dana, her eyes hot, cheeks flushed, one finger hovering like a snake inches from Dana’s face.
“If this is some kind of cruel prank, girl…,” she said, and left the rest to hang, the meaning quite clear.
“What do you mean?”
Mrs. Frazer suddenly slapped her hand against the locker so hard it was like a gunshot. It shocked everyone to silence and tore a yelp of fear and surprise from Dana.
“That poor girl may have made some mistakes,” said Mrs. Frazer. “Maybe she shouldn’t have been at that party, and maybe she was smoking dope. We don’t know what went on … but that doesn’t give you the right to play a horrible joke like this.”
“Joke? I don’t … Wait, what girl? Whose locker is this?”
But Dana already knew.
She looked at the closed and locked metal door, then down at the floor where the blood had pooled, and then up into Mrs. Frazer’s hard eyes.
“Maisie…?” she whispered.
CHAPTER 9
Craiger, Maryland
2:19 P.M.
“Hysteria?” said Melissa. “Seriously?”
“Seriously,” Dana growled. They were outside the school, walking along the street toward the center of town.
“What did they do?”
Dana snorted. “First they took me to the office so the principal could bark at me.”
“Mr. Sternholtz is an orc. I don’t think he ever smiles. Not sure he can.”
“Then they made me lie down for an hour in the nurse’s office. And they called Mom, of course. Not sure what she said, but when he hung up, Mr. Sternholtz looked like he’d been mugged in an alley.”
“That’s Mom.”