The Complete Hush, Hush Saga Page 44

  “Did you hear something, Nora?” Vee asked. “I thought I heard something.”

  “You definitely heard something,” I agreed.

  “Could that be . . . a dog fart I heard?” Vee asked me.

  I nodded. “I think so.”

  Marcie’s eyes thinned to slits. “Ha, ha.”

  “There it went again,” Vee said. “Apparently this dog has real bad gas. Maybe we should feed it Tums.”

  Marcie thrust the punch bowl at us. “Donation. Nobody gets inside without one.”

  “What?” Vee and I said at the same time.

  “Do-nay-shun. You didn’t really think I invited you here without an agenda, did you? I need your cash. Pure and simple.”

  Vee and I eyed the bowl, which was swimming with dollar bills.

  “What’s the money for?” I asked.

  “New cheerleading uniforms. The squad wants ones with bare midriffs, but the school’s too cheap to spring for new ones, so I’m fund-raising.”

  “This should be interesting,” Vee said. “The term Slut Squad will take on a whole new meaning.”

  “That does it!” said Marcie, her face darkening with blood. “You want in? You’d better have a twenty. If you make another comment, I’ll boost the cover charge to forty.”

  Vee poked me in the arm. “I didn’t sign up for this. You pay.”

  “Ten each?” I offered.

  “No way. This was your idea. You pick up the tab.”

  I faced Marcie and pulled on a smile. “Twenty dollars is a lot,” I reasoned.

  “Yeah, but think how amazing I’ll look in that uniform,” she said. “I have to do five hundred crunches every night so I can trim my waist from twenty-five to twenty-four inches before school starts. I can’t have an inch of fat if I’m going to wear a bare midriff.”

  I didn’t dare pollute my mind with a mental image of Marcie in a promiscuous cheerleading uniform, and instead said, “How about fifteen?”

  Marcie cupped a hand on her hip and looked ready to slam the door.

  “Okay, calm down, we’ll pay,” said Vee, reaching into her back pocket. She stuffed a wad of cash into the bowl, but it was dark and I couldn’t tell how much. “You owe me big-time,” she told me.

  “You’re supposed to let me count the money first,” Marcie said, digging through the bowl, trying to recapture Vee’s donation.

  “I just assumed twenty was too high for you to count,” Vee said. “My apologies.”

  Marcie’s eyes went slitty again, then she turned on her heel and carted the bowl back into the house.

  “How much did you give her?” I asked Vee.

  “I didn’t. I tossed in a condom.”

  I lifted my eyebrows. “Since when do you carry condoms?”

  “I picked one up off the lawn on our way up the walk. Who knows, maybe Marcie’ll use it. Then I’ll have done my part to keep her genetic material out of the gene pool.”

  Vee and I stepped all the way inside and put our backs to the wall. On a velvet chaise in the sitting room, several couples were tangled together like a pile of paper clips. The center of the room was filled with dancing bodies. Off the sitting room, an arched entryway led to the kitchen, where people were drinking and laughing. Nobody paid Vee or me any attention, and I tried to rally my spirits at the realization that getting inside Marcie’s bedroom unnoticed wasn’t going to be as hard as I’d thought. Trouble was, I was beginning to think I hadn’t come here tonight to snoop through Marcie’s bedroom and find evidence that she was with Patch. In fact, I was dangerously close to thinking I’d come because I knew Patch would be here. And I wanted to see him.

  It looked like I was going to get my chance. Patch appeared in the entrance to Marcie’s kitchen, dressed in a black polo shirt and dark jeans. I wasn’t used to studying him from a distance. His eyes were the color of night and his hair curling under his ears looked like it was six weeks past needing a cut. He had a body that instantly attracted the opposite sex, but his stance said I’m not open to conversation. His hat was still missing, which meant it was probably in Marcie’s possession. No big deal, I reminded myself. It was no longer my business. Patch could give his ball cap to whoever he wanted. Just because he’d never loaned it to me didn’t hurt my feelings.

  Jenn Martin, a girl I’d had math with freshman year, was talking to Patch, but he looked distracted. His eyes circled the sitting room, watchful, as if he wasn’t about to trust a single soul there. His posture was relaxed but attentive, almost like he expected something to happen at any moment.

  Before his eyes made it around to me, I shifted my gaze. Best not to be caught staring with regret and longing.

  Anthony Amowitz smiled and waved at me from across the room. I automatically smiled back. We’d had PE together this year, and while I’d hardly said more than ten words to him, it was nice to think somebody was excited to see me and Vee here.

  “Why is Anthony Amowitz using his pimp smile on you?” Vee asked.

  I rolled my eyes. “You’re only calling him a pimp because he’s here. At Marcie’s.”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “He’s being nice.” I elbowed her. “Smile back.”

  “Being nice? He’s being horny.”

  Anthony raised his red plastic cup to me and shouted something, but it was too hard to hear over the music.

  “What?” I called back.

  “You look great!” A goofy smile was plastered on his face.

  “Oh boy,” Vee said. “Not just a pimp, but a smashed pimp.”

  “So maybe he’s a little drunk.”

  “Drunk and hoping to corner you alone in a bedroom upstairs.”

  Ugh.

  Five minutes later, we were still holding our position just inside the front door. I’d had half a can of beer accidentally sloshed on my shoes, but luckily, there’d been no vomit. I was about to suggest to Vee that we move away from the open door—the direction everyone seemed to run moments before spilling the contents of their stomach—when Brenna Dubois came up and held a red plastic cup out to me.

  “This is for you, compliments of the guy across the room.”

  “Told you,” Vee whispered sideways.

  I stole a quick glance at Anthony, who winked.

  “Uh, thanks, but I’m not interested,” I told Brenna. I wasn’t very experienced when it came to parties, but I knew not to accept drinks of questionable origin. For all I knew, it was tainted with GHB. “Tell Anthony I don’t drink from anything but a sealed can.” Wow. I sounded even dumber than I felt.

  “Anthony?” Her face twisted with confusion.

  “Yeah, Anthony Pimp-o-witz,” Vee said. “The guy who’s making you play delivery girl.”

  “You thought Anthony gave me the cup?” She shook her head. “Try the guy on the other side of the room.” She turned to where Patch had been standing only minutes ago. “Well, he was over there. I guess he left. He was hot and wearing a black shirt, if that helps.”

  “Oh boy,” Vee said again, this time under her breath.

  “Thanks,” I told Brenna, seeing no choice but to take the cup. She faded back into the crowd, and I set the cup of what smelled like cherry Coke on the entry table behind me. Was Patch trying to send a message? Reminding me of my flop of a fight at the Devil’s Handbag when Marcie had doused me with cherry Coke?

  Vee pushed something into my hand.

  “What’s this?” I asked.

  “A walkie-talkie. I borrowed them from my brother. I’ll sit on the stairs and keep watch. If anybody comes up, I’ll radio.”

  “You want me to snoop in Marcie’s bedroom now?”

  “I want you to steal the diary.”

  “Yeah, about that. I’m sort of having a change of heart.”

  “Are you kidding me?” Vee said. “You can’t chicken out now. Imagine what’s in that diary. This is your one big chance to find out what’s going on with Marcie and Patch. You can’t pass that up.”

  “But it’s wrong.”


  “It won’t feel wrong if you steal it so fast that the guilt doesn’t have time to soak in.”

  I gave her a pointed look.

  “Self-talk helps too,” Vee added. “Tell yourself this isn’t wrong enough times, and you’ll start to believe it.”

  “I’m not taking the diary. I just want to . . . look around. And steal Patch’s hat back.”

  “I’ll pay you the eZine’s entire annual budget if you deliver the diary to me in the next thirty minutes,” Vee said, beginning to sound desperate.

  “That’s why you want the diary? To publish it in the eZine?”

  “Think about it. It could make my career.”

  “No,” I said firmly. “And what’s more, bad Vee.”

  She heaved a sigh. “Well, it was worth a try.”

  I looked at the walkie-talkie in my hand. “Why can’t we just text?”

  “Spies don’t text.”

  “How do you know?”

  “How do you know they do?”

  Figuring it wasn’t worth an argument, I tucked the walkie-talkie into the waistband of my jeans. “Are you sure Marcie’s bedroom is on the second floor?”

  “One of her ex-boyfriends sits behind me in Spanish. He told me every night at ten sharp Marcie undresses with the lights on. Sometimes when he and his friends are bored, they drive over to watch the show. He said Marcie never rushes, and by the time she finishes, he has a cramp in his neck from staring up. He also said there was this one time—”

  I clapped my hands over my ears. “Stop!”

  “Hey, if my brain has to be polluted with these kind of details, I figure yours should too. The whole reason I know all this vomit-inducing information is because I was trying to help you.”

  I flicked my eyes toward the stairs. My stomach seemed to weigh twice as much as it had three minutes ago. I hadn’t done anything, and I was already sick with guilt. When had I become low enough to snoop in Marcie’s bedroom? When had I let Patch twist and tangle me up this way? “I guess I’m going up,” I said unconvincingly. “You’ve got my back?”

  “Roger that.”

  I climbed the stairs. There was a bathroom with tile floors and crown molding at the top. I moved down the hall to my left, passing what looked to be a guest bedroom, and an exercise room equipped with a treadmill and elliptical. I backtracked, this time taking the hall to the right. The first door was cracked, and I peeked inside. The room’s color scheme was a frothy pink—pink walls, pink drapes, and a pink duvet with pink throw pillows. The closet had spewed itself onto the bed, floor, and other furniture surfaces. Several photographs, blown to poster size, were tacked to the walls, and all were of Marcie posing seductively in her Razorbills cheerleading uniform. I experienced a mild rush of nausea, then saw Patch’s ball cap on the dresser. Shutting myself in the room, I rolled the bill of the cap into a narrow cone and crammed it into my back pocket. Beneath the ball cap, lying on the dresser, was a single car key. It was a spare, but it had a Jeep tag. Patch had given Marcie a spare to his Jeep.

  Swiping the key off the dresser, I shoved it deep into my other back pocket. While I was at it, I figured I might as well look for anything else belonging to him.

  I opened and closed a few dresser drawers. I looked under the bed, in the hope chest, and on the top shelf of Marcie’s closet. Finally I slipped my hand between the mattress and box spring. I pulled out the diary. Marcie’s small blue diary, rumored to contain more scandal than a tabloid. Holding it between my hands, I felt the overwhelming temptation to open it. What had she written about Patch? What secret things were hiding in the pages?

  My walkie-talkie crackled.

  “Oh, crap,” Vee said through it.

  I fumbled it out of my waistband and pushed the talk button. “What’s the matter?”

  “Dog. Big dog. It just lumbered into the living room, or whatever you call this humongous open space. It’s staring at me. Like, staring right at me.”

  “What kind of dog?”

  “I’m not up-to-date on my dog species, but I think it’s a Doberman pinscher. Pointed, snarling face. It resembles Marcie a little too much, if that helps. Uh-oh. Its ears just went up. It’s coming toward me. I think it’s one of those psychic dogs. It knows I’m not just sitting here minding my own business.”

  “Stay calm—”

  “Shoo, dog, I said shoo!”

  The unmistakable growl of a big dog came through the walkie-talkie.

  “Um, Nora? We have a problem,” Vee said a moment later.

  “The dog didn’t leave?”

  “Worse. It just bounded upstairs.”

  Just then there was a snapping bark at the door. The barking didn’t stop—it grew louder and more snarling.

  “Vee!” I hissed into the walkie-talkie. “Get rid of the dog!”

  She said something in response, but I couldn’t hear over the dog’s growls. I flattened my hand to my ear. “What?”

  “Marcie’s coming! Get out of there!”

  I started to shove the diary back under the mattress, but fumbled it. Handfuls of notes and pictures spilled from the pages. In a panic, I raked the notes and pictures into a pile and tossed them back inside the diary. Then I rammed the diary, which was quite small considering how many secrets it was rumored to hold, and my walkie-talkie into the waistband of my pants and flipped the light switch off. I’d deal with putting the diary back later. Right now, I had to get out.

  I raised the window, expecting to have to remove the screen, but it was already done for me. Probably Marcie had removed it long ago to avoid the nuisance when she was sneaking out. That thought gave me a small measure of hope. If Marcie had climbed out before, I could too. It wasn’t like I was going to fall and kill myself. Of course, Marcie was a cheerleader and a lot more flexible and coordinated.

  Poking my head out the open window, I looked down. The front door was directly below, under a portico supported by four pillars. Swinging one leg out, I found traction on the shingles. After I was sure I wasn’t going to slide off the sloped portico, I brought my other leg out. Balancing my weight, I lowered the window back in place. I’d just ducked below the window line when the glass filled with light. The dog’s nails clicked against the glass, and it uttered a round of furious barks. Dropping to my stomach, I squeezed as close to the house as I could and prayed Marcie didn’t open the window and look down.

  “What is it?” Marcie’s muffled voice carried through the window-pane. “What’s the matter, Boomer?”

  A trickle of sweat fell down my spine. Marcie was going to look down, and she was going to see me. I shut my eyes and tried to forget that her house was filled with people I had to attend school with for the next two years. How was I going to explain snooping in Marcie’s bedroom? How was I going to explain holding her diary? The thought was too humiliating to bear.

  “Shut up, Boomer!” Marcie shouted. “Would somebody hold my dog while I open the window? If you don’t hold him, he’s stupid enough to jump out. You—in the hall. Yes, you. Grab my dog’s collar and don’t let go. Just do it.”

  Hoping the dog’s barking would mask any sounds I made, I rolled over and planted my back against the shingles. I swallowed the knot of fright in my throat. I had kind of a phobia about heights, and the thought of all that air between me and the ground had sweat leaking from my skin.

  Digging my heels into the roof to push my weight as far away from the ledge as possible, I wrestled the walkie-talkie out of my pants. “Vee?” I whispered.

  “Where are you?” she said through the music blaring in the background.

  “Think you could get rid of the dog any day now?”

  “How?”

  “Be creative.”

  “Like feed it poison?”

  I wiped sweat off my forehead with the back of my hand. “I was thinking more like lock it in a closet.”

  “You mean touch it?”

  “Vee!”

  “Okay, okay, I’ll think of something.”

&
nbsp; Thirty seconds ticked by before I heard Vee’s voice float through Marcie’s bedroom window.

  “Hey, Marcie?” she called over the barking. “Not to interfere, but the police are at the front door. They said they’re responding to a noise complaint. Do you want me to invite them in?”

  “What?” Marcie shrilled directly above me. “I don’t see any police cars.”

  “They probably had to park a couple blocks over. Anyway, as I was saying, I noticed illegal substances in the hands of a few guests.”

  “So?” she snapped. “It’s a party.”

  “Alcohol is illegal under the age of twenty-one.”

  “Great!” Marcie shouted. “What am I going to do?” She paused, then raised her voice again. “You probably called them!”

  “Who, me?” Vee said. “And lose the free food? No way.”

  A moment later, Boomer’s frantic barking faded into the house, and the bedroom light blinked out.

  I held perfectly still a moment longer, listening. When I was positive Marcie’s bedroom was empty, I flipped to my stomach and belly-crawled up to the window. The dog was gone, Marcie was gone, and if I could just—

  I pressed my palms to the window to force it up, but it didn’t budge. Leveraging my hands lower on the pane, I put all my strength into it. Nothing happened.

  Okay, I thought. No big deal. Marcie must have locked the window. All I had to do was hang out here another five hours until the party ended, then get Vee to come back with a ladder.

  I heard footsteps on the walk below and craned my neck to see if by some stroke of luck Vee had come to my rescue. To my horror, Patch had his back to me, walking toward the Jeep. He punched a number into his cell and raised it to his ear. Two seconds later, my cell phone sang out in my pocket. Before I could hurl the cell into the bushes at the edge of the property, Patch came to a stop.

  He looked over his shoulder, his eyes traveling up. His gaze fell on me, and I thought it would have been better if Boomer had shredded me alive.

  “And here I thought they were called Peeping Toms.” I didn’t need to see him to know he wore a smile.

  “Stop laughing,” I said, my cheeks hot with humiliation. “Get me down.”