AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“No—nothing like that.”
I head for the steps. No one’s in any of the offices. My footfalls are loud in the hallways. The only sounds I can hear are the ones I’m making. Everyone’s home for the weekend. My heart starts to race. Wharton’s gone, and Mina has probably already told him that Sam and I are blackmailing him. He’ll toss our room, and if he does, he’s going to find the pictures… and, oh God, the gun. He’s going to find the gun.
“Sam threw his books across the room, and then he got really cold, really distant,” Daneca is saying, although it’s hard to focus on her words. “It was like something just switched off inside him. He told me that he was supposed to meet you and he didn’t care if you didn’t show. He said that he’d take care of things, for once. He said he had a—”
“Wait. What?” I ask, snapping to attention. “What did he say he had?”
A shot rings through the stairwell from the floor above me, echoing through the empty building.
* * *
I don’t know what I expect to see when I burst into Wharton’s office, but it’s not Sam and the Headmaster grappling on the antique oriental rug. Wharton is crawling across the floor, toward a gun that seems to have skittered away from both of them, while Sam’s trying to pin him down.
I go for the gun.
Wharton looks at me dazedly when I swing the barrel in his direction. His white hair is sticking up all over the place. Sam slumps bonelessly, with a moan. That’s when I realize that the red stain surrounding Sam isn’t part of the pattern of the carpet.
“You shot him,” I say to Wharton, in disbelief.
“I’m sorry,” Sam gets out between locked teeth. “I screwed up, Cassel. I really screwed up.”
“You’re going to be fine, Sam,” I say.
“Mr. Sharpe, you are twenty minutes late for your detention,” Dean Wharton says from the floor. I wonder if he’s in shock. “If you don’t want to be in more trouble than you already are, I suggest that you give me that gun.”
“You’re kidding me, right? I’m calling an ambulance.” I cross to Wharton’s burled wood desk. The photos of Mina are there, on top of the other papers.
“No!” Wharton says, pushing himself to his feet. He lunges for the phone cord and pulls it out of the wall with a violent jerk. He’s breathing hard, looking at me with glazed eyes. “I forbid it. I absolutely forbid it. You don’t understand. If the board finds out about this— Well, you just don’t understand the difficult position that will put me in.”
“I can imagine,” I say, pulling out my cell with one hand. I can’t quite work out how to dial and keep the gun trained on him at the same time.
Wharton staggers toward me. “You can’t call anyone. Put that phone down.”
“You shot him!” I yell. “Stay back or I’ll shoot you!”
Sam moans again. “It really hurts, Cassel. It really hurts.”
“This can’t be happening,” Wharton says. Then he looks at me again. “I’ll tell them that you did it! I’ll say that you both came here to rob me and you two got into an argument, and then you shot him.”
“I should know who shot me,” says Sam. He winces as he puts pressure on his leg. “I’m not going to say it was Cassel.”
“That won’t matter. Whose gun is that, Mr. Sharpe?” Wharton says. “Yours, I’ll wager.”
“Nope,” I say. “I stole it.”
He gives me a sudden blank look. He is used to good boys in tidy uniforms who only play at being troublemakers before doing what they’re told, and the sudden suspicion that I’m nothing like that seems to disorient him. Then his mouth twists. “That’s right. Everyone knows your background. Who are they going to believe—you or me? I am a respectable member of the community.”
“Not when they see the pictures of you and Mina Lange. That’s pretty sketchy stuff. You’re not going to look good. You’re sick, right? Brain starting to go. First you forget small things, then bigger ones, and the doctor gives you the news that it only gets worse from here. Time to resign from Wallingford. Not much you can do legally—but illegally— Well, now we’re talking. You can buy children, little girls like Mina, and she can’t cure you because it’s degenerative, but she can give you the next best thing.
“So you don’t get any worse and she starts getting sick. At first you rationalize it. She’s young. She’ll get better. So she misses some classes? That’s nothing for her to be upset about. After all, you’ve gotten her a scholarship to Wallingford, a prestigious prep school, so that you could have her on hand whenever you needed her.
“When she told you we had the pictures, you probably were willing to pay. But then when Sam comes in here, he says something that makes you realize the money is for Mina. And that puts you in a tough spot. If she goes, you get sick again. And if anyone sees the pictures, you lose your job. You can’t have that, so you go for the gun.”
Wharton looks toward the desk as though he wants to make a mad grab for the photos. Sweat is beading on his forehead. “She was in on it?”
“She orchestrated this. She took those pictures. The only thing she didn’t expect was someone to actually try to help her. Sam did, because he’s a good guy. See what it got him. Now I am making this call and you’re not going to stop me.”
“No,” Wharton says.
