I pause. “You don’t have to,” I tell him. I don’t want Liv to get the wrong idea if I show up with Drew.
“I don’t mind,” he says. “How else would you get here, anyhow?”
“Bike?” I venture.
He laughs. “I’m not making you ride your bike all the way to the Périphérie when it’ll barely take me any time to swing by your place.”
I’m ready to go ten minutes later in a black tank maxidress and a striped cardigan with ballet flats. While I wait for Drew, I boot up my laptop and check my email, which I haven’t done in days. Along with a few dozen junk messages and a bunch of ads for Sephora, Glamour magazine, and some online bookstores, there are a few forwarded chain emails from Meredith, which I delete instantly, and a note from a guy named Ross I had a few classes with back in New York asking whether I want to go see a movie with him. I laugh out loud at that; a date with a guy who hasn’t even noticed I’m gone doesn’t sound like the best idea.
I check the time and see that I still have a couple of minutes, so I pull up Google and enter LSU newspaper into the search box. It sends me to the site of The Daily Reveille, the official school paper. I enter Carrefour into the search engine and am relieved when nothing comes up. Then I type in murdered + fraternity, and one result, from earlier today, is returned. I click on the article and begin to read.
The body of a Louisiana State University senior was found early Sunday afternoon in the Fantome Swamp region of Louisiana, about an hour outside Baton Rouge, after Louisiana State Police received a call from the man’s fraternity brother Sunday morning. I nearly drop my laptop when I get to the next line: Blake Montoire, 21, a member of the Lambda Delta Epsilon fraternity, was stabbed several times before his car was stolen, police say.
Blake Montoire was the name of guy who was talking to me at Peregrine’s party, the guy who tried to walk me home before Caleb stepped in. But the grainy photo featured on the website doesn’t match the person I met, except for the glasses, which can only mean one thing: I was talking to Blake’s killer. Worse, he’d seemed overly interested in getting to know me.
“Eveny?” Aunt Bea’s voice from the door startles me. I look up to see her staring at me suspiciously. “What were you reading?”
“School assignment,” I lie as I quickly shut the computer.
“You look awfully freaked out for an assignment,” she says.
“Math scares me,” I say as innocently as possible. I know that if I tell her what’s going on, she’ll insist we leave Carrefour. But if I go, the town will have no chance of surviving now that Main de Lumière has gotten in.
Like it or not, this is my fate. And I have no choice but to face it head-on.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
..................................................................
23
Ishoot Peregrine and Chloe a quick text telling them that I saw the probable killer—the fake Blake Montoire—then I shut off my phone and try to forget about zandara and death for the evening.
Drew arrives at 6:45 on the dot, and when I open the door, he grins. “You look real pretty,” he says. Once we’re in his pickup, he turns to me. “You know I wanted to ask you out, right? When you first got back to town?”
“What? No!”
He gives me a look as we rumble down the hill. “What’d you think that invitation to the crawfish boil was?”
“I thought it might be a date,” I admit. “But then you kind of acted like we were just friends.”
“Admittedly, I don’t have the smoothest mackin’-on-theladies moves,” he says.
“Mackin’-on-the-ladies moves?” I repeat, stifling a laugh.
“Fine, so maybe I’m not good at talking about my moves either,” he concedes. “But then you came to my show, and I figured, hey, girls go for musicians, right? But you disappeared with Caleb Shaw before I could do anything.”
“I’m sorry,” I say. I want to explain to Drew that our shared history makes him feel more like a brother to me. But I have the feeling that’ll only make things worse.
Before I can say anything, he says, “I guess I was stupid to think you could like someone from my side of town.”
“That’s not it at all!” I say instantly. “Look, if I did anything to hurt your feelings—”
He cuts me off. “I wasn’t trying to make you feel bad, Eveny. I was just saying that I’m glad. I mean, it worked out the way it was supposed to. I hadn’t really thought of Liv like that, but then I kept running into her because of you, and . . .” He shrugs and says, “Well, anyway, I’m really happy she said yes to going with me to the Mardi Gras Ball.”