The parking lot next to the long-abandoned factory off Wooderson Road was thick with weeds. And the weeds themselves were thick. Like, celery thick. The sound of them smacking the undercarriage of Tess’s Honda was a jungle sound. Why the hell were we out here?
Because Special Agent Carla Rosetti was calling the shots, that’s why. As we pulled in, she was already parked, out of her car, and putting up a hand like a traffic cop. Something that looked like a DustBuster dangled from her other hand.
“Reach for the sky,” she hollered as we exited the vehicle.
We did our best, tippy-toeing and stretching out as Rosetti waved the device over Tess’s body. The thing was connected by a cable to her phone, where an app flashed and blipped.
“Metal detector?” Tess asked. “Because I have a tin of Altoids in my pocket.”
“Won’t matter,” Rosetti said. “This detects radiation. Explosives. The nasty stuff. It’s what the Secret Service uses. Top of the line.”
Rosetti moved on to me, leaning in as she swept my body for . . . who knows what? Spontaneous combustion juice? As she bent over and her hair brushed my face, I gave her a good sniff.
A little weird, I admit. But also informative.
Rosetti wore perfume. Nice perfume. Not that I expected her to smell like coffee and gunpowder, but it was surprising how subtle and soft her scent was. Undergarments were now something to wonder about. What manner of lace was rubbing up against her holsters?
“Both clean,” she said as she moved the device past my ankles and stood up. Man, did I want her to spin the thing in her hand and blow on it like the smoking barrel of a pistol, but all she did was slap it to her hip and carry it back to the Tesla.
Dylan had joined us at this point, hands in pockets, looking adorable and a tad nervous.
“Nice to see you again, Dylan,” Tess said.
“And you,” Dylan said, and he did a little bow. Which ignited the polite young lady in Tess and she responded with a little curtsy. I joined in by dancing little pirouettes, because . . . well, because I’m odd.
“Enjoying ourselves?” Rosetti asked when she returned from her car.
Pirouettes are usually best not left unfinished, but Rosetti deserved my respect, so I stopped one halfway through, planted my feet, threw my arms to the side, and said, “Sorry. I get carried away.”
Rosetti waved a dismissive hand and said, “You’re a child.”
So harsh, but at that moment, unfortunately true. I didn’t say another word.
“And who are you?” she then asked Tess. “Friend?”
“Um . . . I’m Tess McNulty and I like to think of myself as more than—”
“What’s your deal, Tess McNulty?” Rosetti asked. “Give it to me quick.”
The poise that had guided Tess through so many math olympiad victories and slam-dunk babysitting interviews leaked from her body like the whites from a cracked egg. “Well,” she said. “I’m, well, I told you my name and I guess I’d say . . . well, I’m hoping to go to RIT in the fall. Oh, and I was on the field hockey team but, you know, the season was canceled and . . . I like music and movies and . . . stuff?”
Rosetti did her shittiest to feign interest, stare-squinting, and clearly waiting for Tess to shut up. When she was finally given an opening, she said, “Tell me this, Miss McNulty. Do you blow people up?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Good to know. Moving on.”
“Why are we here?” I asked. It was the middle of the day, sunny and perfectly pleasant, but the place was giving me the creeps. It wasn’t the weeds or the cracked bricks of the building, or even the overall hauntedness of the place. It was the odor: metallic and animal at the same time, a rusty rot.
“Glad you asked,” Rosetti said, and she pointed at the building. “Do you know what this used to be?”
“My dad always told me they made fertilizer,” Dylan said.
Rosetti smiled and said, “Dad was a good liar. Or maybe he never knew the truth. Truth is, this place was into far dirtier things than that. And when you’re located on a river and you do dirty things, well, I don’t know all the details, but let’s just say there was a time in the fifties when kids downstream were born with their organs on the outside.”
I couldn’t see it, but I could hear the rush of the Patchcong River through the trees. We were at the bottom of the gorge on the edge of town, not far from the reservoir where all the county’s water originated.
“Shit,” I said. “So you think we’re all drinking tainted water and that’s why—”
“No,” Rosetti said. “They dealt with all that years ago. Cleaned up and covered up. But this place is a symbol. Something is tainted in your town. But it’s something new. Even nastier than what came before.”
It made me think of that novel I had been working on. You know, All the Feels? It was set in the town of Cloverton, New Jersey, where seedy secrets are the stock in trade, and the seediest secret is the one kept by the protagonist—the intrepid and smoking-hot Xavier Rothman. I decided that if I was going to write more of it, then I should add a character with Rosettiesque qualities. A scenery-chomping detective with supersleuth abilities.
“Okay, so then why are we here?” Dylan asked.
“Because I wanted a moment in private, away from the media, the police, my partner. I wanted to talk to my favorite pyromaniac, his always-in-the-wrong-place-at-the-right-time girlfriend, and our resident . . . field hockey star.”
Tess looked away and whispered, “I wasn’t technically a star.”
“So what do you think is tainting us?” I asked.
“Don’t know yet,” Rosetti asked. “But I have my suspicions. We can rule out chemtrails and other broad factors. But something has gotten into your bodies.”
A pickup truck rumbled past, and a guy stuck his head out the passenger-side window and yelled something. Vulgar by inflection, though I couldn’t make out the words.
“Ignore them,” Rosetti said. “Ignore all of them. This town is full of people who think they know why this is happening. But all we really know is that this is happening to you. All four incidents have involved students in your senior class. The odds that this is random aren’t even odds at all.”
“So you’re saying we’re fucked?” I asked.
“I’m asking for your help. I want you to come to me with all the rumors, all the gossip, all the things you know and hear about your peers. I want to feel like I’m undercover among your classmates, something I am obviously not equipped to do.”
Rosetti pulled at her suit jacket to straighten it. She was thirty-six years old—or at least that’s what my research had told me—and she had been something of a prodigy, having graduated at sixteen. Which meant she hadn’t been a high school student in twenty years.
“So we’re tattletales?” I asked.
“Volunteers,” she said.
“So we’re not suspects?” Dylan asked.
“Everyone is a suspect,” Rosetti said. “However, I don’t think the three of you have been plotting together to take down the senior class if that’s what you mean.”
“Give us some credit,” Tess said. “We can plot. We’re clever.”
“Not that clever,” Rosetti responded. “What you are is scared. And scared people all want the same thing.”
“Which is?” I asked.
“To survive,” she said. “So bring me something. Whatever it is that’s finding its way into your bodies. And we’ll get rid of that fear.”
My mom’s voice whined its way into my head and I blurted out, “Drugs. Maybe it’s drugs.”
“Okay then,” Rosetti said. “Bring me drugs.”