“Pictures,” Kelsey deadpanned, and I laughed as I hung up the phone. If I didn’t hang up, I didn’t doubt that she’d go on and on about how she needed pictures. Ridiculous, because I knew she’d already scoped out a few guys in her dorm building, and I didn’t demand pictures of them.
I mean, what was I supposed to do? Ask him to close his eyes and snap one real quick? I was smooth, but not that smooth, and apparently not so smooth around him.
I made it back to the dorm building in ten minutes. It took a lot longer to walk across campus than it did to glide. Ninety-nine percent of the parents were gone, the street near the dorm empty, no longer jam-packed with cars and suitcases. I took the stairs up to my floor and went for the key in my pocket. I pulled out the lanyard, but my feet stumbled to a halt when I came across the door to my room. Or, rather, what was attached to the door.
It was small, kept up with tape, but it was impossible to miss. Just a piece of paper with red scribbled onto it. One word was all it said, and I felt my stomach clench as I stepped closer, tearing it off the door.
Murderer.
I glanced both ways down the hall, not seeing anyone else out. Someone must’ve put this up after I left. I had no idea what the paper meant, but I crumbled it up and slid it in my back pocket before walking inside. Declan sat at his desk, headphones on, watching some video on YouTube. He wouldn’t have heard them put it up.
Well, I knew the note wasn’t for me, so it had to be for Declan. Declan seemed depressed, but he didn’t seem like a murderer.
Then again, I didn’t know him that well. He was the dean’s son, so maybe he’d got off on something. Could I Google it? I didn’t want to bring up something that might trigger him. Declan didn’t look like he could handle a lot right now.
It was settled. I’d Google it.
Declan didn’t even look at me when I entered, which was good, I supposed, because I’m sure my face was freaked out. Dean Briggs wouldn’t have made me room with a killer, even if it was his son, right? I mean, in what reality did that make sense?
I plopped on my bed and reached for my phone, going into the search bar. After making sure my location was on to only get local search results, I typed in Hillcrest and murder. Nothing popped up. The area was actually pretty safe, probably because of the rich boys and their families.
That, or they just had the money to cover their crimes up. The possibility made my stomach boil. No one should get away with crime, regardless of how much money they had.
I deleted the word murder and replaced it with dead, doing the search all over again. This time different results popped up, and I clicked on the headline that read Wealthy Tycoon’s Youngest Child Found Dead. My eyes scanned the article quickly.
The wealthy tycoon was James Salvatore. He was an avid donator to Hillcrest, and had apparently made his money off of privatizing some kind of pharmaceutical company. Basically making drugs cost so much that people in America had to make a GoFundMe page to cover the cost of their needed medications. About halfway into the article, I finally found out who was found dead.
Sabrina Salvatore. A seventeen-year-old girl, the youngest of the Salvatore children, was found dead, hanging off the banister in the living room by her parents, who were out of town for the weekend.
Hanging meant suicide, not cold-blooded murder.
I tore my eyes off my phone, moving them to Declan, who’d turned to look at me. He’d taken off his headphones and set them on the desk. The way he stared at me, silently judging me, it was almost like he knew what I’d just looked up.
“Was anything on the door when you came back?” he asked, barely moving his lips as he spoke. Was he baiting me, already knowing someone had put something up, or was he genuinely curious? I wasn’t sure how to respond.
“No,” I lied. I didn’t view myself as a fantastic liar, mostly because I never lied. What was the point? Lying only created more misery and heartache. Lying was a coward’s way out, and I was not a coward.
But meeting his brown stare, in that moment, I was a huge coward.
Declan said nothing else, returning to his laptop.
As I did my nightly routine, I couldn’t help but wonder who Sabrina Salvatore was to Declan. Not related to him in any way, since his last name was Briggs and he was the dean’s son. Girlfriend? Lover? A friend? Was that why Declan’s face looked haunted and his expression empty?
And then I wondered why someone would tape a piece of notebook paper to the door with the word murderer scribbled on it with red marker. The only reason someone would do something like that was because they thought he was one.
As the clock turned late and I crawled into bed, I couldn’t help but Google it again, this time reading a few different articles, and finding out a few new things. One—no one in Sabrina’s life, including her brother, believed she’d killed herself. Two—Sabrina had left a suicide note, but her handwriting was off. And, maybe the biggest one, three—there were no nearby chairs to her hanging legs, and she was too far from the staircase to have leaped from the top floor.
How could someone hang herself without jumping off a chair or a table?
The suicide note blamed her ex-boyfriend, though none of the articles named names for the privacy of all parties involved. Through the darkness of the room, I turned my head to see Declan in his own bed, seemingly fast asleep.
This…this was so not what I needed. Classes were going to be hard enough without me wondering if I was rooming with a killer.
Chapter Five – Ash
I didn’t get much sleep that night, mostly because I couldn’t stop thinking about what I read. Sabrina Salvatore. I’d kept myself from looking at pictures of her, mostly because I didn’t want to put a face to the name. Doing so would only make her more real.
I could never imagine how much sorrow a person would have to feel in order to think that taking their own life was the only way out.
Sabrina’s death was ruled a suicide, but everyone had their own suspicions, myself included. My mind was a wonderland of imagination, and it wouldn’t stop until I knew the truth.
The next morning I woke up early and got ready, heading to class all without waking Declan. As I sat in my classes and listened to my professors drone on and on, going through syllabuses and generally being boring, I knew I had to talk to him about it. I couldn’t let something so huge stay in the back of my mind.
I had to know the truth, or at least Declan’s version of the truth, and if he wouldn’t talk to me, I’d go to Dean Briggs.
I wasn’t going to play around here. I was going to figure it out.
I had a two-hour break between blocks of classes, and I skated to my dorm room, hoping to find Declan there. He wasn’t, of course, so I helped myself to whatever was in the fridge and turned on my TV for the mindless sound. I supposed I could’ve texted Kelsey, but if I told her about the whole Sabrina Salvatore thing, she’d flip.
So would my mom.
Flipping out was a natural response to what I discovered last night, but I didn’t need to hear them each flip out in turn. I’d handle this. I was an adult, pretty much. This was my problem to handle…and if it came to be too much, then I’d ask for help.
The microwave beeped, signaling that my hot pocket was done, and as I got off my bed to grab it, a knock echoed from the door. Strong and firm. It was a knock that said I mean business. Business was about to be had.