“No,” Cooper says.
I’m not surprised. They’ve ambushed him, following me home and—despite my assurances that it’s going to go down this way—insisting he’ll let them borrow his precious and tenderly restored BMW ’74 2002.
Yeah. Because that’s about as likely to happen as my getting up every morning to run a 5K. For the fun of it.
Still. They’re standing in his second floor office, where he has the window wide open to let in the late- afternoon breeze, stray random bullet from the park be damned.
“Cooper,” Sarah says. “You don’t understand. This is an emergency. A young man’s life may be at stake.”
“Take the train,” Cooper says. He’s sitting with his feet on his stupendously messy desk, going through his mail in a bored sort of way. Cooper is usually very tidy in his personal life—he keeps the public areas of his house and even his bedroom almost obsessively neat most of the time.
But his office and car are another story. I can’t understand it. Often it looks like a tornado ripped through both—papers, cheese-smeared burger wrappers, wadded-up napkins, empty coffee cups, Post-it notes with cryptic writing on them, piles of them, everywhere. Periodically he goes through both—the office and the car—and cleans them beyond recognition to sparkling and spartan neatness. Then he starts letting things pile up again. He claims this is how he stays “organized.”
It’s really a good thing that he has me to do his billing, actually, or he’d have no money at all coming in, seeing as how he’d never even be able to find his clients’ statements, let alone send them out on time.
“Sure,” Gavin says. He’s looking at a fly that’s just landed on a particularly cheesy-looking wrapper from Johnny Rockets that’s sitting on top of one of Cooper’s office stereo speakers. “We could take the train. But how are we supposed to get from the train station to Jamie’s house? Huh?”
“Easy,” Cooper says, casually flipping an announcement from Publishers Clearing House that he may be a million-dollar winner onto the parquet floor. “It’s called a cab.”
“I don’t even know if they HAVE cabs in Rock Ridge,” Sarah cries. “In fact, I very much doubt it fits in with their town plan.”
“Tough break, kid,” Cooper says. “Guess you’re gonna have to rent a car.”
“You have to be over twenty-five to rent a car in New York,” Gavin points out.
Cooper looks up from the Victoria’s Secret catalog he’s found beneath the rest of his mail. “Well, what do you know?” he says. “Heather, aren’t you over twenty-five? Oh, but wait… I believe you and I already had a little talk about you getting involved in this particular murder investigation this morning, didn’t we?”
I scowl at the tops of my shoes. I get where he’s coming from. I really do. But he doesn’t have to be so insufferably pedantic about it.
“You guys,” I say to Sarah and Gavin. “Cooper is right. The police don’t need our help. We should probably stay out of this.”
“But Sebastian didn’t do it!” Sarah shrieks.
“Then he has nothing to worry about,” Cooper says calmly, as he hands the Victoria’s Secret catalog to my dog, Lucy. Since she’s been sitting beside him this whole time, patiently waiting for exactly this moment, she lets out a happy doggie gurgle, then slides to her belly and sets to work, methodically ripping the catalog to shreds, and adding to the general detritus already lining Cooper’s floor.
Sarah does not seem particularly soothed by Cooper’s assurance. In fact, it seems to have the complete opposite effect on her. She flops down onto the paperwork-strewn couch across from his desk (fortunately Cooper has an outer office in which he receives clients, and which he keeps scrupulously neat. Were they to see this, the inner sanctum, doubtless his client list would shrink significantly through lack of confidence in his detecting abilities—primarily his ability to find anything in his own office, such as his clients), and, hugging herself, begins to rock back and forth, her gaze fixed on the floor. She appears to be making a slight keening noise.
Cooper eyes her as warily if she were a cheeseburger he’d ordered well done that had arrived medium rare.
Gavin takes this opportunity to announce, “This… this is bullshit.” Then he pivots around on his heel and leaves the brownstone, banging the front door noisily behind him. I hurry to Cooper’s open window and lean out from it just in time to see him run down the front stoop and head toward Sixth Avenue, his shoulders hunched, his fists buried in the pockets of his jeans.
“Gavin,” I call after him. “Wait! Where are you going?”
Gavin’s shoulders tense, but he doesn’t respond. He doesn’t even turn his head, even though I know he’s heard me. Every drug dealer on the corner has turned and cried, “Oh, hey, Heather!” in a pleasant way.
Kids.
I wave to the drug dealers, then duck back into Cooper’s office.
“I don’t get it,” I say, to the room in general. “Where does he think he’s going?”
“Where do you think?” Sarah says, bitterly, from the couch. “He’s going to see her.”
I blink at her. “He is?Why? ”
“Why do you think?” Sarah demands wildly, shoving a wave of thick dark hair from her face to glare at me. “God, when did you get so dense? Are you blind? Jamie Price looks exactly like you. Except, you know.Younger.”
Too shocked to know how to reply to this, I opt for saying nothing. For a second or two, the room is silent, save for the sound of Lucy’s contented licking, shredding, and chewing. Then Cooper says, “Ooookay. So when exactly did we all hop on the train to crazy town?”
Sarah heaves a shuddering sigh, then says in a small voice, careful not to meet either of our gazes, “Look. I’ve got to talk to Sebastian.”
We both glance at her. Slowly, she raises her gaze from the floor.
“They let them have visitors?” she asks, looking suddenly much younger than her twenty-two years. “In jail? Right?”
“With suspected co-conspirators,” Cooper says, “in order to get their stories straight? Yeah, not so much.”
I swing around to stare at Cooper in shock, just as Sarah sucks in her breath… and promptly bursts into tears again.
“How—how c-could you?” she cries. “I never—you have to know I would n-never—” She breaks down into loud, hic-cupping sobs, burying her face into the arm of the sofa.
I give Cooper a sour look. He stares at Sarah in astonishment, then looks up at me. “What’d I say?” he wants to know.
“Don’t give me that,” I growl at him. “You know exactly what you said. Suspected co-conspirators, my ass. Sarah.” I cross the room to sink down beside her on the couch, then try to gather some of her copious hair from her eyes. “Sarah, he didn’t mean it that way. He didn’t mean he thinks you’re a co-conspirator. He meant that from the prosecutor’s perspective, that’s how it might seem if you were to ask to see Sebastian right now—”
“Oh, Heather, you’re home.”
With his usual perfect timing, my father appears in the doorway. He’s holding a large cardboard box of his belongings. My dad’s been moving out, slowly but surely, for the past week.
When he notices Sarah, and her theatrical sobs, his happy grin that I’m home from work fades, and he says, “Oh dear. I see this isn’t a good time. I did hear the news, you know. About your boss. Such a shame. People do seem to die at an alarming rate at your place of work, Heather. I don’t believe in that sort of thing, of course, but if I were a superstitious man, I might almost start to suspect that Fischer Hall is, in fact, cursed.”
Lucy, seeing my dad, gets up from her now almost completely shredded magazine, and, her tail wagging, goes over to give him a lick on the hand.
“Oh, hello, Lucy,” he says. “Not now, dear. We’ll have our walk in a little while. I have to get this box uptown. Which reminds me, Heather, when you have a moment, there’s something I need to speak to you about. A little business proposal Larry and I have been meaning to discuss with you. It could work out to be quite advantageous for all three of us. It’s something I think you’ll quite like, actually. But, er, I can see now is not quite the time… ”
As Sarah’s sobs rise in volume, Dad flings a questioning look in Cooper’s direction, since I’m obviously too
