26

Mustard

The group of Blackbrook students who had gathered to take their tests on this still, foggy morning looked more like they were lining up for a firing squad. Mustard could have sworn he’d seen more enthusiastic expressions on the faces of Farthing plebes about to go on a four-day survivalist hike.

He didn’t understand it, personally. From everything he was given to understand, their parents were paying their extraordinarily high tuitions to Blackbrook so as to ensure that, even if they were idiots, they’d be duly selected for acceptable Ivy League or Ivy League–adjacent colleges. They could simply put their names on the test and walk away, just as easily as their parents could put their names on the buildings they donated to the schools they wanted their children to attend.

Money talked in this world. Mustard had picked up on that right away. He’d even tried to make it talk for him, for all the good it had done.

He’d been surprised to see Tanner so stressed out, last night as well as this morning. His roommate never seemed upset about anything, but Mustard had heard him tossing and turning all night long, and when Mustard came back from the shower this morning, he’d caught the tail end of a fight he was having with someone on the phone. Mustard wasn’t sure what the argument was about. Maybe he’d been hoping for a last-minute reprieve. Mustard knew a bunch of his classmates had made alternate arrangements, due to the stress and anxiety of just being at Blackbrook.

Mustard had taken a practice test. His score was adequate. It would be enough for him to get into West Point, if West Point would have him with an expulsion on his record.

And if not . . . well, the army didn’t even require standardized test scores to enlist.

All of that, of course, assumed that he didn’t get kicked out of another school.

Their proctor showed up eventually and unlocked the door to let them all into the testing room. It was one of the nicer rooms at Blackbrook—one of the nicer ones remaining, anyway—with wood paneling, spacious desks, and giant windows to let in daylight. Not that there was much daylight to be had today. The fog was thick and slate gray, and the air felt heavy, as if half of the sea itself had blown in over the island.

He watched the students shuffle in, some with travel mugs full of coffee, others with fistfuls of number two pencils. He tried not to think too hard about who was there and who wasn’t. Of the Murder Crew, he saw only Scarlett and Peacock, and both girls looked ready to vibrate out of their socks with nerves. Orchid and Green were MIA.

So was Plum.

Mustard wondered if Plum, too, had gotten out of the tests. Or if he should call him. Just in case.

“Okay,” said their proctor, “let’s get settled in here. I want to get started on time. Everyone, take your seats.”

Mustard found a seat somewhere in the middle. Scarlett, he saw, was sitting in the front row, and Peacock was sitting beside her. Tanner was with Amber, who had brought enough pencils for the entire class.

The hairs rose on the back of Mustard’s neck just as the door opened.

“You’re late,” said the proctor. Every eye in the room turned toward the newcomer.

Plum.

“Sorry,” said Plum. He scanned the room, and his gaze snapped to Mustard, as if a magnet connected them. Uh-oh. Plum skirted around the rows of desks and slid into a seat beside him right before Violet Vandergraf could do so.

This wasn’t good. Mustard looked down at his desk, where he’d apparently pressed the tips of both of his number two pencils too hard into the surface and broken them.

That wasn’t good, either.

“Hey,” said Plum under his breath.

“Hey,” Mustard replied. Could he borrow more pencils from Amber? Was there a pencil sharpener up front?

“I have to talk to you.”

People were passing back thick envelopes with the test materials sealed inside.

“Not a great time.”

“I think I might have made a tiny mistake yesterday.”

“Oh yeah?”

“No talking!” the proctor called out from the front of the room.

“Sorry, ma’am,” said Mustard. “I broke my pencil.”

Amber’s head popped up. “Here, have a few of mine.” She started passing them back.

The proctor crossed her arms. “Okay, now, is everyone adequately supplied?”

There were nods all around the classroom.

“Mustard,” Plum hissed under his breath. “I think I might have let Vaughn know too much about . . . things.”

Mustard’s head whipped up. “What things?”

Plum held up his hands. “What you told me. About . . . Rusty . . .?”

Better. Not much better, but better. “You told him?” He gritted his teeth. “You were supposed to help, not—”

“I thought I was helping. Vaughn was close to that guy. And I figured maybe he’d know his family in Rocky Point, but—he got really upset.”

“What are you telling me?”

Finn shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe nothing. I figured maybe I could talk to him this morning before the test, but I was waiting out by the bridge to Rocky Point, and he didn’t come in. So then I thought maybe I’d missed him, but he isn’t here, either.”

“Ahem.” They both looked up to see the proctor standing between them. “I thought I was very clear about the ‘no talking’ instruction. What’s next, you guys fill in the bubbles with ink?”

“Sorry, ma’am,” said Plum.

Mustard frowned, toying with the edge of his test packet. Green wasn’t here at the test, and neither was his girlfriend, Orchid. Wherever they were, they were probably together.

“Hey, Scarlett,” Mustard called. “You didn’t happen to see Orchid this morning, did you?”

Scarlett turned in her seat, rolled her eyes, and said, “Like I care what she’s doing.”

That surprised Mustard. She usually cared what everyone was doing.

The proctor frowned. “There are students missing? Dr. Brown assured me no one would be late.”

“There are several students missing,” volunteered Violet.

The proctor went back up to the front desk and shuffled through her papers for what Mustard assumed was a list of the kids taking the test.

“No one talked to Orchid?” Mustard addressed the room. All the girls from Tudor House exchanged guilty glances.

This was why barracks were better than all these private rooms. No one was ever late to anything if everyone slept in the same room.

“I hope she didn’t oversleep!” cried Peacock. “I was just—so involved this morning, I didn’t even think to knock on everyone’s doors . . .”

“She’s fine, trust me,” said Scarlett. “She’s not going to have any problem getting into the college of her dreams. People like her never do.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” asked Amber.

“No. Talking!” announced the proctor, her eyes wide with disbelief. “Now, excuse me for a minute while I call Dr. Brown. Do not unseal those packets. And do not talk.” She exited the room.

Of course, everyone started talking at once.

Peacock thought Orchid and Vaughn must be back at the hospital on the mainland. Maybe Rosa had taken a turn for the worse overnight?

Amber and Violet opined that that was why they all should have been given untimed tests, just from the stress of living in Tudor House.

Scarlett rubbed her temples and told everyone to calm down and that if Orchid and Vaughn missed their tests, then it was their own fault.

Plum picked that moment to turn to Mustard. “Hey, so . . . here’s the thing. On the off chance that the two of them are . . . I don’t know, going to the cops on the mainland right now? Is there anything in the secret passage that might connect things to you? Or, um, me?”

Mustard shushed him. “This is not the place to discuss this.”

Plum looked around. He was by far the chillest person in the room. “Then let’s get out of here.”

“Don’t you care about the test?”

Plum shoved his packet away from him. “Not as much as I care about you not getting framed for murder.”

For a moment, the chaos in the room seemed to fade away. Mustard caught his breath and looked at Plum—really looked. The floppy brown hair falling over his glasses, the winter-pale skin, and the slight blush that grew as Mustard kept looking—from his cheeks to his jaw and down his neck, right into the collar of his button-down shirt.

And then he realized that everyone else had grown silent, and that was probably why Plum was blushing.

“What do you mean, murder?” Scarlett asked. “Who got murdered?”

“Headmaster Boddy?” prompted Violet. “Duh.”

Mustard looked around. Every person in the room was now staring at him and Plum. Some of them had stood up.

“Are you talking about Rusty?” Scarlett continued. “Was that a murder?”

“Yes,” said Plum.

Mustard glared at him.

“I told you that the other night, Scarlett,” he went on, with a meaningful glance at Mustard. “Remember? I told you I thought he had a head wound.”

“Oh my God,” said Violet. “That’s—that’s two murders in Tudor House. I’m never sleeping there again!”

“Why would anyone murder Rusty?” asked Amber. “The cleanup isn’t going that badly.”

“Maybe he found out something he shouldn’t,” said Scarlett. “About the school’s plans for Rocky Point. Just like with Mrs. White, except they decided to shut him up first.”

“But Mrs. White was the murderer,” said Peacock. “She didn’t get murdered.”

“Please stop saying ‘murder’!” begged Violet.

“Guys,” said Tanner. “Calm down. Rusty was a townie. No one on campus knew him like the locals. If someone held a grudge against him, isn’t it more likely that it was one of them?”

“Yes!” Plum pointed at Tanner. He shot Mustard a triumphant smile. “That’s exactly what I think. Some feud on Rocky Point.”

“Oh my God,” said Amber. “Is that why Vaughn isn’t here? Did he murder Rusty? Is he on the lam?”

Mustard shut his eyes. Sure, divert attention from him and refocus it on the only purely innocent kid on this campus. The one who’d done what Mustard should have from the start and gone to the police with the information he had.

Mustard’s choice was clear.

Outside the room, their proctor had noticed the commotion and now came back in, her expression appalled. “What is going on in here? Everyone back in your seats. If you all don’t get your behavior under control at once, I’ll be forced to collect your packets, and you’ll all get zeroes.”

“Really?” asked Scarlett in her signature withering tone. “How are you going to score us if we haven’t even put our names on them yet?”

“In your seat, young lady.” The proctor pointed. Scarlett sat.

The others followed suit. Mustard, too, after a moment.

He looked at his test packet.

He thought about Green, who had raged at the idea of Dr. Brown covering up Rusty’s true cause of death. He thought about how he would have felt in Green’s shoes, to learn that other people in the Murder Crew might know the truth and were hiding it for selfish reasons.

He thought of the way he’d hidden in those passages and listened to shouts and screams and didn’t go back to help Rusty.

And how maybe Rusty was dead because of him.

“All right,” said the proctor from the front of the room. “When I give the signal, you may open your test packets. You will have sixty-five minutes for the first section.”

Mustard stood up. “I need to be excused.”

The proctor was unmoved. “You should have gone to the bathroom before this.”

“I’m not going to the bathroom,” he replied. “I’m—I’m just going.”

He dropped his pencils on his desk and walked out. Gasps erupted behind him. The proctor shouted to get everyone’s attention.

And then the door shut behind him. Blissful silence. Icy Maine fog. Mustard started down the hill.

“Sam!”

He kept going.

“Mustard!”

Now he stopped and took a breath. He turned around to find Plum racing after him, his coat unbuttoned, his scarf streaming behind him like a flag. Plum had abandoned the test. For him.

Or, more likely, for his stupid dye.

“What are you doing?” he asked when Plum reached him. It came out sounding very annoyed. Which was probably for the best.

“What are you doing?” Plum panted.

“I’m going to the cops.”

“That’s what I was afraid you were going to say.” Plum shook his head. “Don’t do that unless we have a plan.”

“That is the plan,” said Mustard. “I’m going to the cops, and I’m telling them what I know.”

“All of it?”

“I’ll leave your precious dye out of it, if that’s what you’re asking.”

Plum was fighting to keep up. “That’s actually not what I’m asking, but while we’re on the subject, how do you intend to do that? What reason did you have to bribe Rusty to get into that tunnel if it wasn’t to get the dye?”

“I was trying to sneak into the girls’ dorm, of course,” he said. “Everyone will believe that.”

Plum was quiet. Because Mustard was right. Everyone would believe that. It was easy to believe that of someone like Mustard. What was hard to believe was the other thing.

They walked on, and with every step, Mustard’s heart pounded harder. They reached the administration building and stepped into the shadow of the colonnade.

Mustard felt the touch of fleece-covered fingers on his freezing hand. “Wait.”

He looked at Plum. The other boy was still out of breath, his cheeks bright pink from the cold. His eyes were intent on Mustard when he spoke. “I know you think you have to do this, and maybe you’re right. I’m certainly not the person who can tell you whether you’re wrong or right—about anything, maybe.” He smiled and lifted his shoulders. “But . . .”

“But what?” Mustard asked him. Their hands were still touching, but Mustard could not bring himself to move away. “You’re not going to come up with a clever solution this time, Professor. This is what it is.”

Plum’s mouth became a narrow line. “Okay.” He nodded. “Then we go together.”

“What?” Mustard asked, disbelieving.

“We go together,” he said again. “Murder Crew forever.”

His fingers tightened around Mustard’s.

The fog was thick. The campus was deserted. And the shadows beneath the colonnade were very, very deep.