Frenzy Page 7

  Parker slammed his fist into the door, right next to my head.

  I cringed.

  “Get away from the door, Molly,” he said. “Let me the fuck out of here.”

  I moved.

  He twisted the knob, flung the door open, and left the room.

  It was quiet for several minutes.

  I chewed on my lip, looking at Jill, who was still sitting on the bed, her head buried in her hands.

  “Jill?” I whispered.

  She didn’t say anything.

  Hesitantly, I went to her. I put a tentative hand on her back. “You okay?”

  “No.” Her voice was muffled.

  I sat down next to her. I put my arm around her. “I’m so sorry.”

  She looked up at me. “I can’t cry about it, Molly.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “I keep trying to cry,” she said, sounding desperate. “And nothing happens.”

  I tightened my grip on her. “It’s okay. You don’t have to cry. You don’t have to do anything.”

  She scrunched her face up. “Fuck.”

  * * *

  Jill paced. “Parker’s really upset. I mean, he broke up with her right before it happened. He was angry because she was sleeping around, and he’d just found out about it. And so, he broke up with her, and then she came here, and I yelled at her. And so, the last time that either of us saw her, we were mean to her, you know?”

  I was sitting in Jill’s desk chair. “Well, to be fair, she was kind of mean first. She was cheating on her boyfriend with your boyfriend.”

  “And other people too,” said Jill. “She was kind of a horrible slut.”

  “So, you had every right to yell at her.”

  “Yeah.” Jill nodded. “But she was my friend too, you know. And maybe if things had gone differently, like maybe if I hadn’t yelled at her, maybe she wouldn’t have… died.”

  “It’s not your fault,” I said. “You didn’t kill her.”

  “I know.” Jill stopped moving. She wrapped her arms around herself. “But somehow, that doesn’t really make me feel any better.”

  “Yeah. I guess it wouldn’t.”

  Jill picked up her phone. “You want to see a picture of her?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  She touched the screen, sniffling. She wasn’t crying tears or anything, but she was really upset. My heart went out to her. I wished I knew something to say that would help.

  “Here.” Jill shoved the phone in my face.

  I peered down at it. There was a picture of a girl with curly, dark hair and big, blue eyes. She was smiling and the camera, radiant. She was very, very pretty.

  “So, that’s Cori.” Jill sniffled again. She scrubbed at her eye with the palm of her hand, but it didn’t seem like she was wiping away any tears. “Fuck. Why can’t I cry?”

  “You don’t have to.”

  Jill flipped to another picture on her phone.

  Now Cori was kissing Parker on the cheek. He was laughing.

  “We all hung out,” Jill said. “We rolled together a bunch of times. We went everywhere together.”

  She flipped to another picture.

  Cori and Jill, their arms around each other, making silly faces at the camera.

  “You know, when I met her,” Jill said, “she was in this dorm room, trying to make a pipe out of an apple. You can do that if you have the right kind of pen. You take the pen apart, and you carve out of part of the apple?”

  “Really?” I’d never heard of such a thing.

  “Yeah,” Jill said. “Anyway, my mom was helping me move in, and there Cori was, with the bag of weed laying out on the bed, like it was no big deal. She jumped up and introduced herself and didn’t act like she was doing anything wrong.” She smiled, thinking about it. “My mom didn’t even notice the pot. She was so… alive, you know?”

  “Your mom?” I shook my head. “No, you must mean Cori.”

  “Yeah,” Jill said.

  “I’m really sorry.”

  Jill put her phone in her pocket. “She wasn’t afraid of anything. Once, we were trying to buy beer, but we didn’t know anyone who was over twenty-one. And Cori was like, ‘I’ll get it.’ And she went to the store, and she picked up the beer and took it to the counter. And when the cashier asked for her ID, she handed it over. It was her real underage driver’s license, but the cashier didn’t even look at it. She handed it back to Cori and rang up the beer.”

  I laughed. “That’s awesome.”

  “I know, right?” Jill said. “She was really awesome. And now…”

  I looked down at the carpet in our room.

  “I should go find Parker,” Jill said.

  “Okay,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say.

  Jill left.

  I went over to my side of the room and sat down on the bed.

  Cori’s old bed.

  She used to sleep here. I pictured her, the grinning girl from the picture, lying down on the bed, the place where I slept.

  I got up off the bed.

  Suddenly, it seemed morbid.

  She was dead.

  She hadn’t run off with a whole bunch of drug money at all. She’d been killed. Someone had thrown her body in the river.

  Was the person who killed her the same guy who’d called me on the phone? Professor X?

  But that couldn’t be. Because if he’d killed her, he would have gotten his money first, right?

  Right?

  I wasn’t going to end up at the bottom of the river, too, was I?

  I peered around the room. It was as if the ghost of Cori lingered everywhere. As if she’d left something of herself behind to haunt this space.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The phone rang.

  The purple dorm phone on Jill’s side of the room.

  I gulped.

  Professor X had told me that I had two weeks to get the money. Was he stepping it up now? Was he going to kill me sooner?

  Or maybe he’d heard about Cori, and he realized that I couldn’t have her money. Maybe he was going to call the whole thing off.

  I picked up the phone. “Hello?”

  “Molly?” It wasn’t the same voice as before. It was male, but it wasn’t nearly as deep.

  “Who is this?”

  “It’s Levi. I really think we need to continue that conversation we were having, and I didn’t know how else to get in touch with you. When you told me about Professor X calling you on this phone, I realized that I could call it too.”

  “I don’t think I want to talk to you, Levi. I mean, you’re a drug dealer, and—”

  “Don’t say shit like that over the phone,” he said. “You’re on a campus phone. They can track that shit so easy.”

  “I’m hanging up.”

  “Just meet me.”

  “I’m not going to meet you.”

  “Why not?” he said.

  “Because… I don’t even want to think about it. I’m going to call my dad, and he’s going to fix everything, and it won’t even matter.”

  “What? Don’t call your dad. That’s a really dumb idea. You don’t need to mess with this at all, okay? Come meet me, and I’ll explain everything.”

  “There’s nothing to explain. Cori’s dead, and I don’t know who did it, but that person probably has all of her money, anyway, and—”

  “Wait a second. Did you just say that Cori was dead?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “They pulled her body out of the river.”

  It was quiet on the other end.

  “So, anyway—”

  “Shit.” Levi’s voice was agonized. He hung up the phone.

  * * *

  It was getting dark outside my dorm room. I was sitting at Jill’s desk doing homework. She hadn’t come back since she’d gone off to find Parker.

  I could have worked at my own desk, but it was too creepy being on Cori’s side of the room for some reason. I felt like she was there, watching me or something.
>
  I wasn’t sure if there was an afterlife or not. At Heidi’s funeral, the pastor had spent all this time talking about how she was smiling down on us from heaven. Like that was supposed to be comforting.

  Maybe it was for some people.

  But it wasn’t for me. If Heidi was in heaven, then it hardly made any difference, because I wasn’t ever going to see her again either way.

  Because if there was a heaven, that probably meant there was a hell. And I was sure as fuck going there.

  When I was a kid, we went to church sometimes, but my mom wasn’t really all that into it, and so we stopped.

  Anyway, I didn’t know much about all of that stuff. I had the basic gist. Good people went to heaven. Bad people went to hell. In heaven, you wore white robes and hung out on clouds with harps or something. In hell, you burned to death for eternity.

  Well, I guess not to death, because you were already dead, but whatever.

  Didn’t matter.

  I wondered if Cori was in heaven. Had she been a good person?

  It was weird, because she seemed to have screwed over everyone, but everyone still seemed to like her. For some reason.

  When I looked at her picture, I thought I almost understood. She looked so happy and welcoming. She looked like the kind of person you’d want for your best friend.

  I wondered if Cori and Heidi were in heaven together. Were they talking about me?

  What would Heidi say about me?

  I took a shaky breath.

  And then I got my phone, and I scrolled through my contacts until I found Duncan’s number.

  I called him.

  It rang.

  And rang.

  And rang.

  And then it went to voicemail.

  Of course, he wouldn’t pick up the phone.

  Hey, you’ve got Duncan here. Leave a message.

  Beep.

  I licked my lips. “Hey Duncan. I know we haven’t talked in a while. I know you probably don’t want to talk to me. I don’t blame you. Hell, I don’t know if I’d want to talk to me either.” I laughed a little. “I’m not even sure why I’m leaving you this message. It’s only that I was thinking about Heidi, and so I called you, because I thought… Oh, I don’t know. I guess it was stupid. Listen, I wanted to say something. I know I’ve apologized before, and I know it doesn’t mean anything. Because, it’s like you said. If I’m not really paying for what I did, then I can’t ever really make up for it. But I wonder, Duncan, is there any way to make up for something like that? I don’t think there is. I wish I could. If there was some way I could make something better…” I felt my chest tighten. I might start crying. “You probably aren’t even listening to this. You probably deleted it the minute you heard my voice. There’s no reason for me to think that I anything I do is anything but pointless. I’m sorry, Duncan. I won’t call you again.”

  I hung up the phone.

  I fought tears.

  It was true, though. I couldn’t do anything for Heidi.

  But if Heidi and Cori were together somewhere, sitting on a cloud, playing a harp and looking down at me, well…

  Would it matter if I could do something else? Something for Cori? She was dead, too, but she’d left behind some kind of weird mess with this dealer. And she’d been murdered. What if I could find out who killed her? What if I could find the money?

  Would that make anything better? Anything at all?

  The dorm phone rang again, cutting into my thoughts.

  I reached for it. “Hello?”

  “Molly, it’s Levi again. I’m sorry I hung up on you.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “Look, do you still want to meet?”

  * * *

  “So, anyway, all you need to do is sit tight and wait for Professor X to contact you,” Levi was saying. We were sitting in a booth at The Silver Diner, which was open twenty-four/seven and served breakfast around the clock. “Then when he does, you let me know, and I’ll go meet him and take care of everything.”

  I took a drink of my coffee. It was a little burnt, but I didn’t mind. “How will you do that?”

  “Don’t worry about that,” he said. “The less you know about all of this, the better. You never should have gotten mixed up with it in the first place.”

  “Well, do you have four thousand dollars lying around or something? Because that’s what he wants.”

  “Like I said, don’t worry about it.”

  I picked up a plastic creamer container and toyed with it. “I’m not sure if I can do that.”

  “Why not?” he said.

  “Well, for one thing, what if Professor X gets mad that I told you and comes and kills me anyway?”

  “He won’t,” said Levi. “Trust me, that won’t be a problem.”

  “How do I know that? You don’t know the guy. You wouldn’t be begging me to set up a way to meet him if you regularly hung out with him or something. You have no idea what he would do.”

  Levi sighed, sitting back in the booth. “If there was a way I could guarantee your safety, would that make this easier?”

  “Not really,” I said. “Because it’s not only about my safety.”

  “What else is it about?”

  “Well, I’ve been thinking,” I said. “What if whoever killed Cori took her money?”

  “Maybe,” he said. “So?”

  “So, what if we could figure out who killed her? Then maybe we could get the money back.”

  “From a murderer.”

  The waitress came by. She set down a slice of cherry pie in front of Levi and a piece of cheesecake in front of me.

  Levi smiled at her. “Thanks.”

  “Enjoy,” said the waitress.

  Levi unwrapped his silverware from his napkin. “If someone took the money, they probably spent it, don’t you think?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “How were you going to deal with the money?”

  “I can get it if I have to,” he said. “Don’t worry about that.”

  “You mean, you would sell drugs and make that much money?”

  “Can you stop yelling that out?”

  I rolled my eyes.

  “I really don’t see what you’re getting at here, Molly.”

  I took a bite of my cheesecake. “I want to find out who murdered Cori.”

  “Don’t you think that’s a job for the police?”

  “I hate the police,” I said. “I don’t trust them.”

  “None of them?”

  “Think about it,” I said. “What kind of job is it to be a police officer? You get paid shit. You have to work crappy hours. You spend all your time looking for people breaking the law, and then you have to confront them and punish them. How much fun does that sound like?”

  “I don’t think they take the job because it’s fun.” He used his fork to cut off a bite of pie.

  “Well, it wouldn’t be fun for a regular person,” I said. “But I think there are some kind of people who would find that fun. People who like pushing other people around and enjoy having power. People with small dicks and small minds. Bullies and narcissists. And those kinds of people are the ones who are attracted to a job in law enforcement.”

  He chewed on his pie, raising an eyebrow.

  “And they’re precisely the kinds of people who shouldn’t be enforcing the law.”

  He set down his fork. “Come on, all cops aren’t like that.”

  “You’re defending the police? I wouldn’t think you’d like them either.”

  “I don’t,” he said. “But only when they’re messing with stupid stuff. Murder cops are different than drug cops.”

  “They’re all the same. They’re all pinheads.”

  “Okay,” he said. “So, you don’t trust the police.”

  “No.”

  “That’s still not a good reason for you to try to find a murderer. You don’t know how to do that. And it would be dangerous. You could get hurt.”

  “Well, I’m not proposing t
o do it on my own,” I said. “I was thinking you’d help me.”

  “Me? Why would I do that?”

  “Because you want me to set up a meeting for you with Professor X.”

  He groaned. “You’re like blackmailing me.”

  I considered, gesturing with my fork. “Actually, I think this is a bribe.”

  He ate more cherry pie. “Why would you even want my help? I didn’t think you liked me.”

  “I guess because you know people around here better than me. And because you knew Cori. And because you called me on the phone right after I decided to do this. So, I guess you’re handy.”

  He laughed. “You’re crazy. This is a completely stupid idea.”

  “If I’m right about the money, we might find it.”

  “And we also might not,” he said.

  “I have to do this,” I said. “I can’t really explain why, but it’s sort of… penance. For something in my past. See, before I got here, I screwed stuff up really bad. And I want to do something good, something that helps someone. Maybe it’ll balance things out.”

  “You want to do something good, volunteer at a soup kitchen.”

  “That wouldn’t be big enough,” I said. “I screwed up really bad.”

  “What could you have possibly done?”

  I became very interested in my cheesecake. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “This is the only way you’re going to help me meet up with Professor X?”

  I nodded.

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ll try to help you out.”

  I smiled at him. “You will?”

  “I guess.” He ate another bite of pie. “But I don’t even know how to do this. How do you find a murderer?”

  “Oh my god, do you not watch television or something? We gather suspects.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Jill stuffed her student ID card into the swipe slot on the front of the door. “God damn stupid thing never reads it on the first try.”

  I hung back, watching her. I was following her around in the art building as she was doing her work study gig. She’d asked me for company, and I didn’t have anything better to do.

  She yanked the card out. A little green light came up, and she turned the handle. The door opened. “I always have to do it twice. I swear, someone needs to fix these things.”

  “You have keycard access to all of these rooms?” I peered inside. It was a tiny room, no bigger than a closet. There were no windows.