A Lesson in Vengeance(87)

Ellis was still giving me that odd look, but she nodded.

I turned her hand to glance at it from all angles, cross-checking with my book whenever I wasn’t sure about an interpretation. “This is your dominant hand,” I told her. “All the readings here represent what you come into later in life. The other hand would be your innate characteristics. So this hand is more important, as you might imagine.”

I trailed a finger along the length of her heart line, and Ellis didn’t move, didn’t even flinch. I wanted to believe she was too still, like she was trying very hard not to appear unsettled.

“What does my palm say?” Ellis asked at last.

“You’ll have a long life. Healthy. And—you might have guessed this—you’re a creative person. These branches here suggest ambition and achieving impossible goals.”

Ellis grinned. “That’s me.”

I flipped to the next page and examined Ellis’s hand again. Her palm was smooth, rosy, her fingertips callused by the keys of her typewriter. A fleck of ink stained the inside of her index finger. If I were one of those charlatans who owns a shop in the seedier part of town, thick with incense smoke and draped in gauzy veils, I might have told her, You’re a writer, aren’t you?—and that would have been how I seized her trust and suspended her disbelief.

“But…you should be careful about the friends you let into your life,” I continued. “You shouldn’t trust anyone. A mysterious older figure will spell destruction and a fall from grace.”

A quick and sharp grin cut across Ellis’s face. “I knew Wyatt had it in for me.”

“Better run,” I advised very seriously. “Change your name, change your identity, flee the country—”

“—burn this place in my wake—”

“—salt the earth so nothing grows again.”

We both laughed, Ellis harder than me, hard enough that her cheeks went pink and she tipped forward to press her brow against my knee. Her long fingers curled around my ankle and stayed there. As if I would ever move when she touched me like this.

Of course, when Ellis read my palm in turn, she didn’t even reference the book. She just told me that I would live forever, become very famous and very wealthy, and share all my money with her.

Nothing in Ellis’s fortune gave any sign of what she really was. I should have paid better attention. I should have marked the smaller crosses and stars on her skin, should have found the truth written in her flesh.

I should have known she was a killer.



* * *



—

The police arrive on campus first thing Thursday morning, twenty-four hours after Clara fails to return to classes after her trip. I locked myself in my room after Ellis left and haven’t emerged since, so I don’t know what took them so long. I don’t know if the Godwin girls didn’t want to snitch on Clara if she was on a bender somewhere, or if Ellis had convinced them to wait.

Maybe it doesn’t matter.

From the reading nook at the hall window, I watch the police cruisers roll up to the bottom of the hill, watch them tramp up the drive in their blue uniforms and murmur inaudible things into their radios.

The last thing I need is for someone to tell them I’ve been hiding in my room since Clara’s disappearance. So I change out of my pajamas and into real clothes, brush my hair and pull it into a low chignon, apply a hint of pink lipstick—enough to look like Felicity Morrow, a good girl, of the Boston Morrows—and I go downstairs.

Ellis is already in the kitchen, sitting perched at the window, gazing out toward the woods. Her charcoal sweater is too big for her, swallowing up her torso. She has a coffee in hand. She doesn’t look at me, and I don’t speak to her.

What else is there to say?

The police interview us all separately.

“When did you notice Clara was missing?” Officer Ashby asks, once I’m settled alone with her and her partner, Officer Liu, in Housemistress MacDonald’s office.

“She didn’t come back from her camping trip on Tuesday.”

“How long did it take for you to realize something was off?”

I have both hands in my lap. I refuse to twist my fingers together, knot them up in my skirt. I don’t want to seem nervous. “I don’t know. Last night, I suppose. We all assumed she was at one of her clubs….”

“Didn’t you call her?”

“Clara doesn’t have a cell phone,” I say.

Ashby’s brows flick up. “You’re telling me a high school girl doesn’t have a mobile phone?”

Officer Liu snorts. But when I look at Liu, she doesn’t say anything, just shakes her head and holds up both hands, a derisive smile settling on her lips.

“We prefer to focus on our work,” I say.

“I’m sure,” Ashby says, leaning forward like she wants to come across as reassuring. “Felicity, is Clara Kennedy the type of person who would run off like this? Did she give you any reason to believe she didn’t want to come back to school?”

I shake my head.

“Has she been acting strangely lately?”

Another no.

Liu taps short nails against her ceramic coffee mug. “I have to ask the question: Did Clara have any enemies? Anyone who might want to hurt her?”