Chapter 10

10

Monday, 11/18/24

Soon turned out to take more than a week, Holiday and I both busy with projects and papers, neither one of us with much time or energy to spare. Back on the Vineyard we'd had endless hours to devote to our amateur sleuthing, the days stretching out in front of us luxuriously empty. This time, we had to fit any investigative work into the margins of our actual lives: classes and practices, another reminder email from Professor McMorrow urging me tersely to make my advising appointment. Hunter returned to lacrosse workouts. The trees lost the rest of their leaves. The whole thing made me feel anxious and jangly, like with every passing day our case was growing colder. Like the longer we waited, the more time Hunter had to get away with whatever he'd done.

We finally managed to meet up the following Monday, Holiday taking the Red Line over to campus with the caveat that she had to get back for a rehearsal later that night. "Any luck with the suitemates?" she asked, checking the time on her phone before setting it down on the table between us. We were sitting in the coffee shop at the Smith Center, all white subway tile and marble-topped bistro tables. Jaunty, French-sounding jazz piped through a speaker overhead.

I shook my head. "Not really," I admitted. I'd given it my best shot at last week's Richard Gere pregame, waiting until Greer was in the bathroom and turning to Margot as casually as I could. "Can I ask you something?" I ventured, reaching for some popcorn in a way I hoped look natural and low-key. "I know Greer said Hunter gave her kind of a hard time when she broke up with him last year. He never made any, like, threats, did he?"

Margot looked at me a little strangely. Celine set down her phone. "No, not threats, " Margot said. "Not really."

"Okay." I nodded, slinging an arm over the back of the sofa. "Do you have any reason to think Hunter would want to, like…hurt her?"

Oh, none of them liked that. Dagny's eyes widened; Keiko's mouth curled with distaste. "What the fuck, Linden?" Celine crossed her arms, leaning back away from me like whatever I had was catching. "That's a creepy fucking question to ask."

"No, I know," I said quickly. "I didn't mean it like—"

"What other ways are there to mean it?" Margot shook her head. "No. And also, from what Greer said, you were also kind of a little bitch when she ended things with you back at your boarding school. Did you want to hurt her?"

The toilet flushed just then, the bathroom door opening and Greer padding out into the common room. "Everything okay?" she asked.

"Well!" Holiday said now, her expression conveying a barely contained amusement. "I might have handled that a little bit differently, but I do as always admire your investigative chutzpah." She glanced at her phone one more time. "Anything they told you would have been circumstantial anyway, at least without hard evidence that Hunter was in Hemlock the night Bri died."

I nodded. "Speaking of which," I said, "what's the play for that, exactly? Just waltz into HUPD headquarters and bat your eyelashes until they agree to hand over the footage from the security cameras outside the building?"

"First of all, you say it like that exact technique hasn't worked extremely well for us before," Holiday reminded me archly. "Second of all, no. I've got a plan." She looked at her phone one more time, then popped the last bite of a chocolate croissant into her mouth, balling up her wax-paper bag and sliding down off her stool. "Come on," she said. "It's time."

I followed Holiday back through campus, jogging a little to keep up. "If I did this right," she told me as we rounded the corner toward the rear of Hemlock House, "we should be able to catch these guys right…about…Yup."

I followed her gaze into the alley: sure enough, there were the same two security guards we'd seen the last time we'd been back here, a haze of smoke surrounding them like a cocoon.

"Hey!" Holiday called. They looked up in unison, twin joints held in their outstretched hands. "I really am sorry about this," she said, then held up her phone and snapped a picture.

"What the—" The taller one blanched. "Delete that!"

"I would love to," Holiday said sincerely, "and I will. I just need one quick favor from you guys first."

The guard's eyes narrowed. "What kind of favor?" he asked, suspicion written all over his pasty face.

Holiday grinned.

Ten minutes later I watched with some wonder as the taller guard—the last name on his badge said DiNapoli—used the key card looped on a Harvard University lanyard around his neck to unlock one of the small brick gatehouses that dotted campus, which the security guards who weren't assigned to specific buildings used as a home base when they weren't out on their rounds. "You better make this quick," the short one warned. "I mean it."

"In and out," Holiday promised seriously. "Nobody will even know we were here."

"Right," DiNapoli grumbled. "Sure they won't."

The shorter one scowled. "If we lose our jobs over this—"

"Respectfully," Holiday interrupted, holding up one finger, "if you lose your jobs over this, it will be because you couldn't wait to light up a J until you clocked out of your workplace for the evening, not because I caught you at it."

She sounded exactly like her mother—actually, she sounded exactly like my mother—in a way that made me laugh; I stifled the sound of it into a cough as best I could, though not before DiNapoli shot me a dirty look. We were not making any friends here today, that was for sure.

Holiday, for her part, didn't seem particularly worried about that. "We're looking for footage from one specific camera outside Hemlock House," she told him, nodding at the computer on the desktop. "From one specific date."

All four of us were silent for a moment as DiNapoli entered the appropriate values into the computer, Holiday sitting down at the desk to scroll through the results. I was peering over her shoulder when the shorter guard jabbed me in the side with one elbow. "Hey," he said, pointing at me accusingly. "Aren't you the kid who ate the goldfish?"

I winced even as Holiday snorted to herself, dragging the video footage along. "I didn't eat it," I tried, turning to frown at him. "I mean, I didn't, like, chew— "

"But you did in fact swallow a goldfish."

"I mean, technically."

"I don't see what's technical about it," the guard argued smugly. "You either swallowed a goldfish or you didn't."

"Okay," I said. "You know what, dude—"

"Shut up," Holiday said softly. "There he is. Hunter Hayes."

"Seriously?" I turned and looked back, as relieved for the interruption as I was excited she'd found him. I squinted at the screen, watching as Hunter strolled up the path and hopped up the last two steps, catching the door before it shut behind a guy who'd just keyed himself inside. Judging by the time stamp, he must have come directly here after I— technically —drank the goldfish.

The security guards watched as Holiday dutifully deleted the picture of them from her phone. "Off the cloud too," one of them prompted, and she nodded.

"Gentlemen," she said, holding a hand out. "Pleasure doing business with you." Neither one of them shook.

"He was there," I said when we were alone again. It was hard not to feel pleased with myself—for once in our entire relationship, I'd been the one with the killer instincts. I'd known there was something off about Hunter this whole time, and this proved it. "It was him."

"That's our opportunity—" Holiday agreed.

"All three things!" I crowed.

"It's good," she admitted, "but it still isn't ironclad." She thought for a moment. "You guys have parties at the lacrosse house most weekends, right?"

"Looking to meet a nice guy?" I teased.

Holiday snorted. "I would truly rather renounce Judaism, join an order of nuns, and live out my days cloistered in an abbey singing hymns in Latin all night and day."

"Sounds peaceful."

"It does," she agreed, "but anyway, no. I want to get a look inside Hunter's bedroom."

"Seriously?" I frowned, a little uneasy. Last time we'd snooped around in a suspect's room, we'd almost gotten caught. As it was, we'd wound up jammed nose to nose in a closet. I couldn't imagine getting that lucky a second time. "That's…risky."

"It is," Holiday agreed, "but I don't see another way to get the kind of unequivocal proof we're going to need if we want to go to the cops with this."

"Unequivocal proof like what? A signed affidavit? A journal entry that details precisely what he did and how he did it?"

"Greer's watch," she countered, ticking the option. "A piece of paper with his handwriting on it that matches the note. Truly, any number of things." She shook her head. "Anyway, we can't tomorrow, obviously, but if there's a party on Saturday—"

"Why can't we tomorrow?" I asked her—or started to, anyway. I was interrupted by Duncan bounding down the steps of the science building, Harvard beanie slightly askew on his curly head.

"Hey!" he said; then, doing an actual, physical double take: "Holiday!" He shook his head, blushing a little. "Hey, Holiday."

"Hey yourself," Holiday said with a grin. "Duncan."

"What's up?" he asked. His smile was megawatt.

"Not much," she replied. "Just heading to the T."

"Me too!" he said immediately. "Well, not to the T, exactly, but—" He shook his head, looking momentarily confused by his own destination. "Can I walk with you?"

"Sure," she said, already taking a step back toward the sidewalk. "That'd be great." She lifted an eyebrow in my direction, almost imperceptible. "Bye, Michael."

"Bye." I managed not to roll my eyes, but barely. It wasn't like I didn't understand why he was interested: Holiday was like that, the kind of girl people wanted to be around. Having her full attention felt like standing next to a space heater, warm and occasionally a little bit itchy. "I'll let you know about a party!" I called pointedly, though I wasn't sure either one of them would hear me.

"You do that!" Holiday yelled, without looking back.