Raley crossed his arms over his chest. “Well, as far as I can tell, the only thing Nicky and Sydney have in common is you.” He shot me a pointed look.
“Me?” I squeaked out. “You can’t possibly think I had anything to do with this.”
“What I think is that you have a serious problem minding your own business.” And with that, he grabbed my upper arm and steered me toward the elevator.
“Where are we going?”
“Home.”
“But-” I started.
But Raley shut me up with one look, his evil eye staring down at me.
I clamped my lips together. Fine. The joke was on him. I needed a ride home anyway.
I sat in silence in the front seat of Raley’s beige sedan, trying hard not to inhale the stale scent of a hundred stakeouts lingering in the cheap fabric seats. The smell was somewhere between the locker room at the gym and the cafeteria when they forgot to take the garbage cans out after Meat(ish)loaf Monday. Luckily, it was a short drive, and I took in deep breaths of fresh air as soon as Raley opened the passenger-side door and propelled me up the walk to my front door.
Mom had it open before I even hit it, a sure sign that Raley had called ahead.
“Oh, Hartley, what have you done this time?” she asked, coming in for a hug.
“Geez, Mom, you make it sound like the police are always bringing me home.” Which was hardly fair considering it had been at least a good fifteen hours since it had last happened.
“She’s fine,” Raley assured her. “But I’d suggest keeping a close eye on her over the next few days. At least until we find out who attacked that boy in the park last night.”
Oh, that was a low blow. Calling in the SMother? As if I needed more parental supervision.
“Oh, don’t worry. I will!” Mom said. With just a little too much gusto if you’d asked me. I had a bad feeling Quinn’s grounding was going to look like a picnic next to my life.
“And thank you for bringing her home,” Mom continued.
“No problem.” Raley shot me a look. “I’m confident it will be the last time.”
I’m glad someone was.
“Can I thank you with a plate of cookies?” Mom asked. “They just came out of the oven.”
I was about to warn Raley that if they were Mom’s cookies, they were likely gluten-free, fat-free, dairy-free, and loaded with flaxseed, but considering the way he’d just sealed my fate with Warden Mom, I decided to let him fend for himself.
“Thanks, actually a cookie sounds great,” he said, following Mom into the kitchen.
On the downside, Raley was in my house. On the upside, it was the first time in days I’d seen Mom apart from her computer.
Not surprisingly, Mom put me on lockdown until the “park attacker” was caught. Which sucked because, with Raley barking up the wrong tree, I was pretty much the only one looking for the real attacker. Which I couldn’t do from my bedroom. I hate irony.
With lockdown mode firmly in place, Mom insisted on not only driving me to school but actually walking me to my first class. I kept my head down and prayed no one would notice.
It wasn’t until lunch that I had a chance to tell Sam and Kyle what had happened at the hospital. I caught up to the two of them in the cafeteria. Only, as I approached their table with my tray, I realized they weren’t alone. Chase was sitting next to Kyle, laughing about something on Kyle’s phone.
I bit my lip. I hadn’t seen Chase since the awkward non-date at Pizza My Heart. While I thought I’d played off the I’m-totally-not-overdressed-and-date-ready-for-you thing then, I still felt a blush hit my cheeks as I remembered my foray into Idiotville thinking he had possibly been interested in me. I took a deep breath, trying to diffuse the heat in my face, and walked toward the table as confidently as I could.
Chase spotted me first, but if he had any inkling of the awkward controlling my every movement, he didn’t betray it. “Hey,” he said, scooting his tray over to make room for me.
I set mine down, doing my best to eradicate the awkward from my voice as I returned his “Hey.”
“Hart, check out the shirts I had made!” Sam said, gesturing to her chest.
I looked down. Today Sam and Kyle were wearing matching red ones with big gold half hearts on each.
“Cute.”
“Oh, wait for the full effect…” She nudged Kyle in the ribs and he moved in close, putting his arm around her shoulders. Sam put her arm around his back, and with the two of them close together, the two heart halves on their shirts came together to make a whole.
“Okay, that is actually kinda clever,” I admitted.
Sam beamed. “Ashley Stannic took our picture after second period and said she was putting us in her column as the Herbert Hoover High Honeys of the week. How cool is that?”
Chase smirked and shook his head at Kyle. “I can’t believe you let her dress you, dude.”
Sam stuck her tongue out at him before turning to me and doing an artful subject change. “So, what did Nicky say yesterday?”
I quickly filled them in while I dug into my platter of chicken nuggets (our lunch lady’s version of “Wings Wednesday”).
“So, Nicky’s too scared to talk?” Chase asked when I’d finished.
I nodded. “Yep.”
“But clearly someone is after him.”
I nodded again. “Clearly.”
“And chances are it’s the same someone who went after Sydney,” Sam added.
“Be quite a coincidence if it wasn’t,” Chase said, mirroring my own words to Raley yesterday.
“I guess that means that Sydney’s Twittercide does have to do with the cheats after all,” Sam said.
“Which puts both Quinn and Connor in the clear,” Kyle observed.
I thought about this, chewing on a nugget. “Not necessarily.”
“What do you mean?” Chase asked, grabbing a nugget from my plate.
I moved my tray out of his reach. “I mean, what if Quinn was the person stealing the cheats in the first place?”
Sam raised an eyebrow at me. “Could that be?”
“Why not? Sydney gave up that Quinn was in on the cheating scandal, but what if what she didn’t say was that Quinn was the one behind the whole thing? Maybe Sydney found out that Quinn was the one supplying the answers to Nicky in the first place. Maybe that’s what Nicky was going to tell me that night, only Quinn whacked him from behind before he could.”
“Brilliant!” Sam said. “Let’s go bust Quinn.”
“Hold on there, Sherlock,” Chase said, putting a hand on Sam’s arm. “How would Quinn get the answers?”
I chewed the inside of my cheek. “I dunn-” I stopped myself just in time from saying the forbidden word in his presence. “We’d have to find that out,” I hedged instead.
I thought I saw the corner of Chase’s lip quirk up ever so slightly, but it might have been my imagination.
“Well then, what about Connor?” Kyle suggested.
“What about him?” I asked.
“Couldn’t he be the guy with the answers?”
I shrugged. “I guess. But then why would Sydney go through all the trouble of buying them from Nicky if her boyfriend had them all along?”
“Maybe she didn’t know,” Sam said, jumping on the theory. “Maybe it wasn’t until she bought them from Nicky that she figured out where they came from. And once Connor dumped her, maybe she wanted a little revenge. Maybe she was going to blow the whistle on him, and he killed her before she could.”
“Or,” I said, getting into the swing of things, “what if it was Jenni? What if she got the answers, then sold them to Sydney to set her up so she could get Connor!” I’ll admit it, I really wanted the twit with the big hair to be the bad guy.
“There’s just one small problem with all these harebrained theories,” Chase said.
“And what would that be?” Kyle asked.
“How did they get the answers to the test in the first place?”
