“All right.” She pulled her phone from her pocket and held it at the ready.
I opened the door and peered carefully inside. I was shocked but not surprised to see Lola and the man who’d been manhandling her. They were seated in the back row, one empty seat between them. It looked like I’d interrupted a conversation, not a murder.
“Delaney?” Lola said as she stood.
The man turned his face away as if he didn’t want me to see it. I’d been just about to ask if everything was okay when everything suddenly became not okay.
Dr. Carson shoved me, causing me to be flung backward down the concrete stairs that led to the stage.
I didn’t hit my head only because I managed to stop myself from more than one roll by catching my hand on the last chair of the third row down. I twisted muscles in my back and shoulder, but adrenaline kept the pain from going beyond that initial twinge that promised much more agony later.
I heard Lola scream and Dr. Carson yelling for her to shut up.
“What’s wrong with you?” Lola continued loudly.
I looked up toward the door. Lola had joined Dr. Carson, who seemed to be latching the door with some sort of pin. I had a memory of seeing such a mechanism at one time, but it had been a while. Were there other doors? Yes! Dr. Eban had entered through one at the back of the stage when I’d been there before.
“Shut up,” Dr. Carson told Lola again.
I was trying to figure out how to get out of there, but it would have been impossible not to wonder about the other people in the room.
“What the hell, Dr. Carson?” I croaked. “What’s going on?”
She didn’t look at me. She turned her attention to Lola. “I’m doing this to protect you and your father.”
“I don’t want you to protect me by knocking someone down the stairs!” She started to descend toward me.
I put my hand up to stop her. I wasn’t going to trust any of them. I figured chances were about 93 percent that one of these people had killed Mallory.
“Stay away,” I said.
“Oh, Delaney, I’m not going to hurt you,” she said.
I looked at her and remembered our conversation as we walked across campus. She’d seemed so young, but she’d said she was a senior.
“You’re Lily, aren’t you?” I said as a few more tiny pieces came together.
She sighed. “I am. I’m not going to hurt you.”
“The man. He’s your father. He’s Dr. Glenn.”
“He is, but Delaney, he’s not a killer. He never … Oh, Delaney, your arm looks funny. Let me help you.”
“Stay away.”
“All right.” She turned back to Dr. Carson. “I don’t want to be protected; neither does my dad. Come on, let us get some help for Delaney.”
She made a move toward the door, but Dr. Carson pointed something at her. A scalpel. A modern one.
“What the hell?” I said. “What’s going on?”
I hefted myself upright and stood. My shoulder was either broken or out of joint. Either way, even the adrenaline wasn’t going to keep the pain at bay much longer.
“Stop it, Meg,” Dr. Glenn stood too, and came around the seats toward the two women.
“Stay back,” she said as she grabbed Lola and twisted her around, holding the scalpel at her throat.
“Don’t!” I yelled. “Let her go.”
“Meg!” Dr. Glenn said.
“Why can’t everybody just do what I say?” Dr. Carson said.
Dr. Glenn looked at me and then at Meg. “We will, Meg. We’ll do whatever you want us to do.”
I nodded, but the motion hurt all the way to Kansas and back. My eyes filled with tears.
“She’s the one who killed Mallory,” Lily said between clenched teeth.
“Shut up, Lily,” I said.
“Of course I killed Mallory. You destroy me, I destroy you. I’ve killed before.”
Dr. Glenn was seething. I could almost see the smoke coming out of his ears.
“Did you kill anyone?” I couldn’t help but ask him.
“No!” Lily croaked. “She did it all. She set my dad up. It was all her.”
I couldn’t believe that Dr. Carson wasn’t slitting Lily’s throat, but the doctor seemed to be enjoying the sudden notoriety instead. She smiled, some evil mixed with some satisfaction. Dr. Glenn had gotten all the credit for murdering people, but now at least one other person knew differently. If I wasn’t being fed lies.
“I didn’t kill anyone,” Dr. Glenn said. “But she set me up, and good. All evidence points undeniably to me. There’s no doubt I would have been found guilty.”
He was a handsome man, his thick gray hair bushy but neat. The lines around his mouth and eyes were deeper than they should have been, but the younger man I’d seen in the pictures was still there.
“You’re really a doctor?” I said.
Shame pinched at the lines around his eyes. “No.”
“I see. You did fake that part?” He nodded. I looked at Dr. Carson. “And you worked it. You found out and killed all those people and blamed it on him.”
“He wouldn’t leave her!”
“Wait, who wouldn’t he leave? His wife?” Pain muddled my mind, but I could still think a little bit. “This was about that? About him not leaving his wife for you?”
“Yes!”
“You killed Mallory too?” I asked.
She laughed cruelly. It was almost a cartoonish noise. “She had to go.”
“Mallory and my dad met when she and I were roommates,” Lola interjected. “She didn’t know who he was. They … they fell in love.”
A May-December romance to be sure, but that was the least weird thing about it.
More pieces came together tighter in my mind, even if I still didn’t understand it all.
“Your husband? He has an eye for the girls, right? He wasn’t having affairs, forcing women to do things for grades?”
Dr. Carson laughed again. “Not a chance. There’s not a woman interested in him. He was easy to frame, though, much easier than Dr. Jack Glenn,” she sent him a venomous glare, “was all those years ago. A skull here, a jawbone there. That bookshop
