The Lady Sleuths MEGAPACK TM(253)
And then the piano finished its four-story freefall and slammed into me.
The dead girl was Katie.
* * * *
The next several hours went by in a blur. Someone—it must have been me, although I don’t remember—called a floor meeting and told the rest of the hall. We were all in shock, of course, completely devastated. I think everyone cried, even Jake, our token football player. I know I did.
Afterwards, Gavin started planning a memorial service for Katie—which Katie herself would have found way ironic. The day before, early Friday afternoon, Gavin had stormed into my room, totally upset. He and Katie had gone to lunch together, he’d told me, as they did every Friday, and in the salad line at Proctor he’d asked her out to dinner.
“On a date?” Katie’d said. “Have you lost your mind?”
And then she’d laughed at him.
Gavin, of course, had been mortified. He’d dropped his tray and sped back to Stewart, heading immediately to my room to tell me what had happened and ask for my advice.
Maybe I shouldn’t admit this—I certainly didn’t say it to Gavin—but I was secretly pleased. Katie had dumped me on Thursday afternoon, claiming she was tired of hiding, tired of not being able to tell her friends about our relationship. If anyone had found out that I was dating one of my freshmen, though—well, I would have been fired, for starters, probably bounced out of the dorm and possibly even suspended from school. I’d believed Katie when she’d told me that that was the reason she was breaking up with me, and her refusal to go out with Gavin was reassuring. I told myself that, as soon as the year was over and my JC obligations were history, we could go back to the way things had been between us, pick up where we’d left off. That’s why I’d let her keep the red Hingham Hockey sweatshirt she’d swiped off my chair one chilly October evening when we’d been watching a DVD in my room.
Anyway, once I’d finally convinced Gavin that this was not the end of his undergraduate love life, I’d booted him out of my room. As I ushered him out the door, I spotted Ethan, his roommate, disappearing down the hall.
Perfect. How much of our conversation had that little sneak overheard?
* * * *
Later, after the floor meeting, by the time I remembered Professor Griffen’s paper, my deadline extension had come and gone. My heart wasn’t even near it, let alone in it, but I managed to focus enough to finish proofreading the last couple pages and email it off to him with an explanation. I was pretty sure he’d understand—and, if not, well, whatever.
Late Saturday afternoon, I was lying on my bed, still in shock. Katie was dead. She was dead. And the policeman who was investigating her death was a Homicide cop. Was it possible that she’d been murdered?
I was curled up in the fetal position, cupping my iPod in my hands, watching a video of her I’d taken late one night with my digital camera’s video-capture mode.
Late nights were the only times we had ever really been able to be alone. She’d wait for her roommate Dee to fall asleep and the hallway to clear, then slip silently past Gavin and Ethan’s room and the bathroom and into mine, where we’d sit up till all hours, mostly just talking about everything under the sun, until it was time for her to slip back down the hall before the early birds began to stir.
In the video, Katie was holding her hairbrush like a microphone and singing along with Vampire Weekend’s “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa” with all the energy and conviction of an American Idol audition. Her long blond hair flew as she shook her head to the beat, her blue eyes sparkling like sapphires as they reflected the glow from the desk lamp I’d pointed at her to illuminate the scene.