BREE GASPED. SHE COULDN’T HELP HERSELF. AND THOUGH she clapped her hand over her mouth the instant the sound escaped her lips, it was too late.
“Did you hear that?” Kitty asked in a harsh whisper.
Bree ducked down and held her breath.
“No.” Donté’s voice sounded thick and heavy.
“Someone’s here,” Kitty said.
“No one ever comes down here,” Donté said. “Trust me.”
Kitty paused as if considering Donté’s reassurance, then checked her watch. “Don’t you have to be at rehearsal?”
Donté groaned. “You had to remind me.”
There were more kissing sounds before the two lovebirds finally separated. “I’ll call you tonight,” Donté said. “Bye, baby.”
“Bye.”
Bree heard shuffling footsteps, then the sharp metallic ring of the spiral staircase as someone ascended from the cellar.
Had they both left or just Donté? After a few moments, she heard another set of footsteps on the stairs. Kitty was leaving as well. Phew.
Bree peeked out from behind the book stacks. That was a close one. Kitty and Margot already had John in their headlights. How suspicious would Kitty have been if she found Bree checking out her junior high school yearbook after trailing her best friend to the library? She was glad she wasn’t going to have to explain that one.
She slid the yearbook from the shelf and jumped back, her heart in her throat, as an eyeball stared back at her from the empty space.
“Bree?” a voice said.
Bree shoved the yearbook back onto the shelf once again and ducked around the bookcase, coming face-to-face with Margot.
“What are you doing here?” Margot asked, suspicion in her eyes.
“What are you doing here?” Bree countered.
“Margot?” Kitty came around the end of the last row of shelves. “Bree?”
Margot and Kitty stared at her—awkward and confused and ever so slightly combative. Really? She was the one under suspicion?
“I was doing research,” she said at last.
“Me too,” Margot and Kitty replied in unison.
Okay. So everyone was keeping secrets. Just what they needed while being framed for murder.
“Whatever you guys say.” Bree pushed past them both toward the staircase. She’d check out the yearbook later when there wasn’t so much traffic. “I’m out of here.”
She’d just gripped the railing when the whole staircase rattled. Someone else was coming down.
“If that’s Olivia,” Kitty said calmly, “I’m going to scream.”
By way of an answer, a soft singing descended into the wine cellar. The song was familiar. Too familiar. “And if I had to walk the world, I’d make you fall for me.”
“It’s John!” Bree whispered. She sprinted away from the staircase, looking for a place to hide.
“He can’t see us together,” Margot said.
Kitty glanced around helplessly. “What do we do?”
Margot pulled a key out of her pocket and sprinted to a glass door on the far side of the cellar. “Follow me.”
In an instant she had the door open. They ducked inside the darkened room, and barely had time to close the door before John’s head descended into the cellar.
Without pausing, he disappeared into the row with the St. Alban’s yearbook.
It seemed as if they waited an eternity huddled on the floor of the special collections room before Kitty heard John’s heavy footsteps on the stairs. She let out a controlled breath as Margot cracked the door.
“Why do you have a key to the special collections room?” Kitty asked.
Margot turned on her. “Why were you holding hands with Donté Greene?”
Kitty flushed pink. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I saw less holding hands,” Bree said with a snide grin, “and more sucking face.”
Kitty set her jaw. “It’s none of your business.”
“He’s a ’Maine Man,” Margot said. “That makes it our business.”
“Not to mention he’s Olivia’s ex-boyfriend,” Bree added.
“He dropped out of the ’Maine Men,” Kitty said coolly.
Bree rolled her eyes. “Yeah, cuz that makes it better.”
Kitty whirled on Bree. “And what were you doing spying on us?” She made air quotes. “Research? Or maybe I should ask why you’re hiding from your boyfriend?”
“He’s not my boyfriend,” Bree said, throwing her arms wide in exasperation. “And that’s rich, you accusing me of keeping secrets.”
That was it. Kitty’d had enough of Bree’s attitude.
“You want to talk about keeping secrets?” she asked, turning toward the library stacks. “Fine.” She scanned the call numbers at the top of each row, looking for the yearbook section. She realized with a start that it was the same row John had just visited.
“What are you doing?” Bree asked, her voice sharp.
Kitty’s eyes landed on one volume, curiously askew on the shelf as if someone hadn’t pushed it all the way back in. It was also the only yearbook whose thick coating of dust had been marred.
“What is it?” Margot asked, following close behind her. Bree lingered near the end of the case.
“A yearbook,” Kitty said.
Margot sucked in a breath. “St. Alban’s?”
Kitty eyed her. “How did you know?”
Margot stared at the book in Kitty’s hand. “That’s what I came down here looking for too.”
“Christopher Beeman,” Kitty and Margot said in unison.
Out of the corner of her eye, Kitty saw Bree flinch.
“Let’s see what he looks like, shall we?” Kitty said. She opened the yearbook with a flourish.
Only the page with Christopher’s photo had been removed.
“Gone?” Bree blurted out. “His photo is gone?” She stared at the page in disbelief. Had John ripped Christopher’s photo out of the yearbook?
Margot lifted the book from Kitty’s hand and examined the page in question. It had been torn cleanly from the spine, leaving a minuscule flap of paper. “Whoever did this,” she said, handing the yearbook back to Kitty, “used a straight-edge razor or paper cutter, which implies that the act was deliberate and premeditated.”
“Not just this one,” Kitty said. She returned the impotent yearbook to the shelf. “The copy at St. Alban’s, too.”
Bree felt her entire body go cold, as if she’d been plunged into an ice bath. Her brain felt sluggish, not quite grasping the reality. “Someone ripped the same page out of both yearbooks?”
“Looks like it,” Kitty said.
Christopher Beeman. Archway Military Academy. She couldn’t keep ignoring the signs, especially if John had already figured out that both of them were connected to Bree’s involvement with DGM. She needed to face her past. She needed to face Christopher.
“Do you remember what he looks like?” Kitty asked.
Bree stared at the shelf. “Short, kinda chubby, brown hair, brown eyes. Generic.”
“Do you think you’d recognize him?” Margot asked.
Bree shook her head. “I barely recognize myself from junior high.”
“Really?” Kitty asked. “You wouldn’t recognize your best friend?”
“Best friend?” How did Kitty know that? “Who said he was my best friend?”
“Oh.” Kitty’s eyes faltered. “I . . . I thought Mika said you were.”
“Uh-huh.” Kitty was a horrible liar. Who had she been talking to about Christopher Beeman?
Kitty cleared her throat. “Well, at least we know who tore the photos out.”
Margot shook her head. “John didn’t have anything in his hand when we left.”
He was down here before. Only Bree didn’t share that out loud. If John had ripped the pages out of both yearbooks, did it mean he’d discovered what she’d done to Christopher all those years ago? And if so, could he ever forgive her for it?
“I’m late for theater rehearsal,” she said, heading for the stairs. She had to get home as soon as possible. There was one more yearbook that needed to be checked.
“Bree,” Kitty said, “we have to—”
But Bree didn’t hear her. She was already up the stairs, sprinting through the library.
Bree dragged a chair over to her closet and used it to reach a series of boxes shoved onto the uppermost shelf. She deposited the first two on the floor, but the third was significantly heavier. With a grunt, she heaved the box off the shelf and dropped it onto the carpet.
Bree hadn’t gone through her junior high crap since, well, junior high. The collection was embarrassing. Tickets to concerts by bands she now loathed. Cutouts from fashion magazines featuring clothes she wouldn’t be caught dead in. Friendship bracelets from people she no longer spoke to. Damn, a lot had changed in four years.
With a shake of her head, Bree hauled three yearbooks out of the bottom of the box. The St. Alban’s Fighting Jesuits, complete with a sword-wielding priest as a mascot. The yearbooks from seventh and eighth grades she discarded, leaving just her sixth-grade keepsake. Without giving herself time to change her mind, she whipped it open and flipped to the alphabetical beginning of her sixth-grade class.
She froze.
An entire page had been ripped out of her yearbook.
Bree had a moment of panic as reality hit her: while she could have explained away the missing page of her own book as some kind of repressed guilt memory or forgotten moment of prepubescent rage, there was no way in hell she would have forgotten the defilement of the yearbooks in two different libraries unless she’d had some sort of psychotic breakdown in the last few years that she’d forgotten about.
Which meant someone else had torn out those pages.
Someone like John, who’d been rummaging around in her closet just last week.
“No!” She refused to believe he would have gone through the trouble. He didn’t have any motive for hiding Christopher’s identity.
Because that was the logical reason the yearbooks had been defaced. Someone didn’t want anyone to know what Christopher Beeman looked like.
Bree tried to think back. She remembered a short, chubby kid with mousy brown hair and glasses who looked five years younger than the rest of the boys in their class. He was quiet, but smart. Only spoke when he had something important to say, and preferred reading in the library to athletic activities of any kind.
But his face . . . Bree squeezed her eyes closed and tried to picture it. Brown hair, brown eyes. He looked like every kid, Harry Potter–generic without the telltale scar.
Bree opened her eyes and sighed. She wasn’t getting anywhere.
Okay, who would want to make sure all traces of Christopher Beeman were erased from the world? If Bree assumed that she was not, in fact, losing her mind and hadn’t ripped out those pages herself, then someone else had been in her room, dug through her things to find her sixth-grade yearbook, and vandalized it.
The suspect list was short, as very few people had ever been in her room: aside from herself and her parents, there was only the cleaning lady and John.
John, who spent plenty of time in her room. John, who knew how to gain access to the house. John, who had been holding the yearbook at the library an hour ago. John, who was clearly on a mission to unmask DGM. Could he have discovered Bree’s secret, and her reason for joining DGM in the first place?
And if he had, what would he do next?
