Kinley half wanted Stratford to be gone when they returned. Just vanished. Or maybe he’d be fine. Maybe Mattie had been wrong about the pulse, and he’d be rolling around, groaning, clutching his head. Maybe he’d be up, walking around, and fail them all for almost killing him.
It was the first time in her life that Kinley wished for an F.
But he wasn’t any of those things.
Stratford was still lying there. Only now his left eye was partly open, and half of the milky white was exposed. Kinley gagged when she saw him.
“There should be more blood,” Ivy whispered into Mattie’s shoulder. “If he’s dead, why isn’t there more blood?”
Mattie shushed her, and Kinley shot her a look. Some people just couldn’t hold it together.
Kinley wasn’t one of those people. She knew she was screwed, but in that knowledge she felt strangely okay. In control. She had the facts, and now she just had to figure out how to arrange them to her advantage.
It was how she lived her life. With facts. Finding the advantages. Making them hers.
Kinley straightened and took a deep breath. “I’ll go keep watch. Tyler, Ivy, grab his arms. Mattie and Cade, his legs. We’re going to get him out of here.”
“What about cameras?” Tyler asked.
Ivy shook her head. “No.” Her voice shook. “They’re being refitted. The new eco-friendly cameras should be in by next week.”
“She’s right,” Kinley said. “Student council voted on it. Now, let’s do this. We’re going to put him in my trunk.”
No one argued. And if it was anyone’s car, it might as well be Kinley’s. No one would ever suspect perfect little narc Kinley to transport a dead body.
And Kinley knew that.
She forced away her revulsion at the idea. “I’m going to go out in the hall,” she said, “and at my signal, you lift.” She pulled her keys out of her bag. “I’m going to pull around.”
She poked her head out into the hallway.
No one was coming.
No footsteps.
They were alone.
“Go,” she hissed back into the room, and she took off down the empty corridor. She didn’t look back. She walked quickly out the double glass doors near the parking lot and into the rain.
The lot was still almost empty. She threw her backpack into the front seat of her Honda and crossed the car to the driver’s side. She opened the driver’s-side door and slipped inside.
Out of habit, Kinley flipped down her visor and caught her reflection. She looked pretty much the same as she always did. A little wetter, maybe.
If only her father could see her now.
She took a slow, deep breath, the same way she did before penciling in the first answer on a big test, and pulled the car up to the curb, as close as she could get.
The rain pattered across the windshield.
Kinley stepped out, leaving the front door open, and popped the trunk. It was empty. She wished, for a moment, that she had garbage bags or something to line the trunk with, so she wouldn’t get body on it. But she had nothing.
And that included time.
She heard the clatter of the door opening, of the bar being pressed and released, and then the slow shuffling of her classmates. She looked up. There they were, carrying their professor’s body over the sidewalk. The legs of his pants were sliding up, exposing the white skin of his calves, which were slick from the rain.
Down the road, in the distance, headlights appeared, two small circles of light.
“Hurry,” Kinley urged. “Someone’s coming!”
“Shit!” Ivy said, and Tyler tripped, dropping Stratford’s arm. It dangled down onto the wet concrete, and the rest of the group grunted. Tyler stood up and grabbed back on to the arm, heaving toward the car.
“Faster!” Kinley said, raising her voice. The group was hardly moving, and the headlights were growing steadily brighter.
“He’s heavy, Kinley!” Cade groaned.
The car was closer. Closer still. What if the car turned into the school? What if someone caught them there, hauling the dead body? Could they pretend they were taking him to the hospital?
She hurried toward the group and squatted down beneath the body, to position her hands under his midsection. “The car’s almost here,” she whispered. She remembered the stories about mothers who were able to lift cars off of their children in desperate times. Athletes who were actually able to channel their adrenaline to perform amazing, Olympic-level feats. She’d have to find that now. She’d have to be the one who got this body where it needed to go.
She had to be the one to save them.
Kinley bent down a little farther and took up more weight, her hands sinking into Stratford’s doughy midsection. She couldn’t think about it. She wouldn’t.
Kinley chanced a look back. The car was near the school. Near enough to see them with the rain? She wasn’t certain. She could hear it now, the engine, the tires on the wet pavement.
“Now lift. One, two, three!” Kinley bent her knees and gave the body a shove, and, like a giant, soggy doll, Dr. Stratford fell into the trunk. “Get in,” she commanded Mattie, who stood still, watching as she pushed the professor’s limbs in and then reluctantly climbed in after the others.
She sprinted toward the front seat and threw herself into the car, and hit the gas. Hard.
“Not too fast, Kinley,” Tyler said.
“I just want to get out of here.” She checked the rearview mirror and pressed down on the accelerator. The tires hissed over the slick pavement and rain pitter-pattered off the windows.
“Drive normally,” Tyler directed. “We don’t need any attention, okay?”
He was right. Of course he was right. Tyler probably knew everything there ever was to know about crime. Kinley forced herself to breathe slowly. Like in yoga class. Channel her energy. Find her center.
And then, the car was there. It slowed down and put on its blinker.
It was pulling into the school.
Her pulse went crazy.
The car was pulling into the school.
It was old—probably more than twenty years—and it was so rusted and dilapidated that she couldn’t even tell what color the car had originally been painted.
That was the kind of car you transported a body in.
It rolled past them, slowly. The night was too dark to see who was inside.
Why would anyone be here this late? Kinley gulped, and forced herself to leave the parking lot at a reasonable speed.
A few moments longer, and they would have been caught. If she hadn’t helped them . . .
“Where are your cars?” Kinley asked.
“I rode my bike,” Mattie volunteered. “I’ll get it later.”
Tyler shrugged. “Grounded. My dad told me to find my own way home.”
“My dad’s driver dropped me off.” Cade yawned. Actually yawned. Kinley stared at him in the rearview. What was wrong with him that he could actually yawn at a time like this?
Ivy looked back. “My car’s in the lot. Is it weird if I leave it there?”
“Didn’t you always used to leave your car here?” Cade asked. “I mean, you’re always making someone else pick your royal ass up, aren’t you? I swear, your car spends more time in the school lot than the bus.”
Ivy settled back in her seat and wrapped her arms around her body. “I guess we can say I made Kinley drive,” she muttered. “And Mattie got a ride home too, since he didn’t want to ride his bike in the rain.” She yanked at a strand of her hair, running the tips of her fingers over the ends.
Kinley’s heart did a quick double beat. How strange that she’d once envied Ivy McWhellen and her entourage. The girl who sat distraught in the backseat was nothing like the beautiful, confident queen Kinley had so admired.
“My uncle has a farm,” Kinley volunteered.
“So what?” Tyler said from the passenger seat. He looked over at her, and all the wit and charm was gone.
Kinley looked at him. “It’s far away from the town. No one lives there since my uncle passed two years ago. It’s a place we can go to . . . figure stuff out.”
“You mean stash the body.” Cade almost sounded bored.
“I mean figure out where to stash it,” Kinley said. “Listen, I saw this TV show, and they used chemicals to destroy the body. Do you think we could do that? Get some Rubbermaid containers—”
“It worked on Breaking Bad,” Mattie murmured, his voice breaking. “Shit, I can’t believe we’re talking about dissolving a body.” He put his heels up on the seat, tucking his knees into his chest.
“If you have a brighter little idea floating around, we’d love to hear it,” Cade snapped. “Shit, Mattie, pull it together.”
Mattie shut his mouth with an audible snap. He huddled closer to Ivy, and she put a hand on his knee. Kinley frowned. She’d keep an eye on Ivy and Mattie. The heroes of the equation, really. She could see them forming an alliance.
She almost smirked. She would never have imagined Ivy McWhellen doing something that would be considered good, but she’d been the only one who actually tried to save Stratford’s life tonight. Even though he’d just told her she was going to fail his class.
The Ivy who Kinley knew—the same Ivy who bleached the tip of her braid white in seventh grade—would have ground a boot heel in the asshole’s face and left him to choke on his own blood.
So who was this new Ivy?
Kinley narrowed her eyes. She didn’t trust her.
The group was silent as they drove, and the lights of the city faded in the distance. They didn’t mention how the washboards of the road and the thick mud rattled the car and sent it pitching left and right and nearly off the road and into the ditch. Kinley knew what they were thinking: if something happened, they all deserved it.
The rare farmhouse passed, and with it an occasional faint light, a reminder that there was life out in the deep country. Mostly, there was darkness. Thunder erupted from the sky, and lightning exposed the farmland: the fences, running along either side of the road, and the cottonwood trees that grew wild in the fields. The rain was carving deep ravines in the narrow dirt road. Normally, Kinley wouldn’t have dared drive on roads so dangerously close to being washed out, but tonight it just meant that there wouldn’t be anyone else to see them.
It was perfect.
And it was horrible.
The group was still silent when they pulled up to the abandoned barn on her uncle’s property. And when they got out of the car. There wasn’t anything to say. Not really. Kinley popped the trunk, and they wrestled the body out. The corpse’s flesh was waxy and slick in the rain, but they didn’t drop him this time.
Inside the barn, Kinley lit a couple of old gas lamps and hung them. The resulting glow was wholly eerie, as if they had faded into another century. The body rested in the corner, facedown. None of them could bear to look at Dr. Stratford.
“Mattie, Cade, and Ivy? Take my car. Drive slowly, and find the chemicals. Don’t search them on your phone, just try to find the right things. Tyler and I will stay here. Stay in contact. If you aren’t back in an hour, we call the cops. Deal?” Kinley tossed them her keys. They landed on the cement floor.
“Whatever,” Cade said. “I’ll drive. Let’s go.” He bent down and picked them up, and they were gone a moment later, leaving Tyler and Kinley alone in the barn.