No Saving Throw Read online

  I’ll bet she did, a part of me—the part that wanted Hector to be right—thought. “I feel that way a little, too. Like, if I’d been more attentive, or if I hadn’t let them change their night, or a number of things, Wes might still be alive.”

  “You can’t blame yourself.”

  “Thanks.” I half-smiled at him. “That’s what I hear.”

  The kettle began to whistle, and Craig took it off the burner. He poured the tea and sat silently beside me at the table.

  I bobbed my bag in the steaming water. “Did she mention if she saw anyone—anything—strange that night? You were there, too—did you see anything?” Maybe if I approached it like I was just conducting a general investigation it wouldn’t seem weird to ask about their fight.

  “Playing Mulder?”

  “Mulder? How Mulder?”

  “You know. Hunting vampire kids or whatever.” He grinned at me like he’d said something funny, and I suddenly felt grateful to Meghan.

  I tried to laugh, to butter him up, but it just seemed cruel. I didn’t want to argue, though. “Something like that. I want to help. I think the cops suspect some of the other gamers, and that would be the worst. Not just for me and the store, but for everyone involved with Ten Again.”

  Craig nodded. “I hear you. She did say she heard some of the gamers arguing, but I’m not sure what about. She didn’t talk about it much. I left before she did. I was talking to Donald about those properties I told you about.”

  “Yeah, Max said he saw you two leave.”

  Craig’s brow creased. “Really? Donald went down to the basement when I left. But I guess Max saw him leave after that.”

  I frowned. “Huh. I wonder what he was doing down there.”

  “He said something about checking the doors. You know how he is.”

  “That’s for sure.” I switched directions, as if mentioning Donald’s detour had made me think of it. “How’d Meghan end up in the basement before she left, anyway?”

  “You’d have to ask her.” He took a sip of his tea and grimaced at the heat.

  “Are you guys okay?” I asked. It seemed a reasonable question since he was being cagey.

  He raised his eyebrows. “Yeah, why?”

  “It just seems like . . . maybe she didn’t talk about what happened very much. Or something.”

  “Would you want to talk about it? She found a dead body.”

  Probably, and to at least one therapist. “I dunno.” I decided to bite the bullet. “A woman in the building told me she heard you guys fighting.”

  “I see.” Craig chuckled. “You can take the girl out of the small town, but you can’t take the small town—or the gossip—out of the girl.”

  I bristled. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Come on, Autumn. You haven’t been the most supportive about me and Meghan.”

  I shrugged, trying not to feel defensive. “Trying to be friendly. My mistake.”

  Craig put down his mug and sighed. “Geez, I’m sorry. I’m just a little touchy. We did fight, and now this whole thing has her freaked, and the grant stuff—it’s just not a good time.” He looked at me, sad. “You’re one of the few who gets it right now.”

  I did get it. I felt it, too, like I had to perform for the city’s leadership even when my store was under the worst scrutiny it would ever face. I felt like Jabba’s slave girl, dancing on a chain. But I still had hope of breaking free, and Craig didn’t seem to realize that his girlfriend was trying to drive a stake into my lead. “Meghan’s not making it easy for me.”

  He snorted. “No. She would never do that. She always gets what she wants, and right now she wants that grant.”

  And to put me out of business.

  “What were you guys fighting about?”

  “Oh.” He waved a hand. “It was about taxes—and getting married. She wants to file our taxes separately or something, so that it’s less complicated. Better deductions I guess.”

  That seemed pretty flimsy. “Really? Nina said you guys were shouting.”

  “Yeah. You know how Meghan gets.”

  I did, but she struck me as irrationally calm, not hysterical. Screaming wasn’t in her cold android nature. “I guess so.” I toyed with the string on my tea bag. “She came to me today saying I should back out of the grant competition.”

  “Really?” He didn’t sound surprised. “Are you going to?”

  “No.”

  “Good,” he said. He smiled. “I think your project would be great for that building.”

  “Don’t tell Meghan.”

  “Yeah, don’t tell her I told you that.”

  “Scout’s honor.” I glanced around. “It’s weird that we’re in your kitchen.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. You own a house; you have a kitchen. You cook food here.”

  “You have a house, a kitchen. I assume you cook.”

  “Of course I do.”

  He tilted his head. “Yeah, okay, I see what you mean. It’s a little weird. I remember when you couldn’t heat up frozen pizza bites.”

  I snickered. “Yeah. I’m surprised you didn’t get food poisoning, eating all that charcoal.”

  Craig laughed out loud. He stood. “Come on, let’s go sit in the living room. It’s a little less grown-up.”

  It wasn’t. As I followed him in, mug in hand, I realized Craig was grown up. His furniture matched. He had coasters on the tables. The DVDs weren’t stacked precariously on the TV stand like at my house. He had become an adult while I was away at school, and our newly rebuilt friendship had formed only a small step stool, giving me mere peeps into the windows of his life. My existence was much easier to see: I worked in the store, and the store was my home. It was an extension of myself. While it reflected my community of gamers, too, it was mine in all ways. My dream, my work, my haven.

  If this was Craig’s haven, it didn’t tell me much. A pile of papers stood on the coffee table—contracts, I thought, and what looked like some development plans. A fat spy novel sat on the couch, surprising me. I didn’t think he read much, but the book’s spine was broken, and the bookmark sticking up from its battered pages looked well loved. A basket of fashion magazines rested beside one of the armchairs, the lone mark of Meghan’s presence.

  Craig picked up the book and tossed it onto the coffee table with the papers, then slid a coaster my way. I sank onto the leather couch and wrapped my hands around my mug. “Will you guys live here when you get married?”

  Craig glanced at me. “Nah. Meghan wants to find a new house, start fresh together.”

  I nodded. It made sense, I suppose. And Craig didn’t seem to have planted his roots here. When the inevitable stilted silence fell, I glanced around, searching for some way to bring the conversation back around to Friday night and his argument with Meghan. Meghan’s presence in the building wasn’t terribly suspicious, but their fight still seemed like fertile ground for reasonable doubt. The title of the papers read, “Proposed Development Plan A, Property 8142, White Lake, Wisconsin.” Yawn. Craig’s firm did that sometimes—bought properties to redevelop.

  That raised another question. “What were you doing at the building Friday night, anyway?”

  “Hanging out with Meghan.” Craig’s expression was bland as he sipped his tea.

  “Yeah, but you said you’ve been talking to Donald,” I prompted.

  “Oh, that.” He put his mug down. “Donald came to me when you and Meghan made the semifinalists. He wanted to know how your proposed changes would increase the value of the building.”

  “Is he looking to sell?” I asked, alarmed.

  “Not at the moment, but he is interested in how improvements like yours affect a property’s chances in the market. He’s looking to invest elsewhere, as well. Lots of investors are interested in those sorts of changes right now.”

  “How would my changes affect a property’s chances in the market?�
��

  Craig grinned, in his element. “Well, long-term, they’re for the best, but in the short-term, it might raise the price—the value—out of the range investors in a community like White Lake can afford. Like I said, though, in the long-term, green building and utility management will increase the property’s marketability. The key is efficiency. Investors want property that can help to sustain itself, especially in a college town, where corporate developers can build new properties more cheaply than they can buy existing ones. A building like Independence Square Mall might not earn back on the initial investment for improvements for many years, meaning it won’t become self-sustaining in terms of energy for even longer.”

  I frowned. “But it would have an immediate improvement in its utility costs, and—”

  “I’m talking in sheer dollars, Autumn. That reduction of utility costs won’t cover the price of the improvements themselves for several years. It has to earn out before it can actually earn, you see. It’s fine for a case like yours, of course, when the property owner isn’t putting the money down himself. But for investors buying a building, it makes less sense. There are records of similar sales, both with and without those sort of upgrades—I could have Paige bring you some figures. They might help with your final grant presentations, actually.”

  I opened my mouth to argue, but at that moment, the door opened. Craig’s face went from salesman-friendly to sick in a heartbeat.

  “Is that—her—car?” Meghan’s voice echoed in the front hallway. “Is she here?”

  “Whoops,” Craig muttered.

  I peeked at the clock on the wall—only four. Chic stayed open till five on Sundays, and Meghan shouldn’t have been done at the store yet. I’d been so careful about timing my visit. So much for that. She stormed back to the living room, her high heels loud as a poorly oiled mecha warrior on the hardwood floor. Craig stood, his arms spread defensively. “Meg, she just came here to talk about—”

  It was a good thing she didn’t let him finish that sentence, because I’m not sure what he would have said. I hadn’t given him a reason for my presence.

  She stopped in the doorway to the living room and pointed at me over Craig’s shoulder. “You,” she said. “You bitch, you think you can intimidate me?”

  “What the hell?” I stood. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Meghan, calm down, Autumn has been right here—”

  Meghan stamped her foot. Her cheeks were flushed with anger and the early spring cold. If there’d been a trinket by her, she would have thrown it at me, I felt sure. “But she was there earlier! I saw her!”

  “I was where?” I still had no idea what we were talking about.

  Meghan changed tactics. “She and her little friends did it, I’ll bet anything. I know what you were doing today, poking your nose around, asking questions about me. If you think I’m going to lay off of you because of one sick little diorama, you’d better think again. Never were the brightest, were you?”

  Craig looked at me over his shoulder. I shook my head. “I have no idea what’s going on.”

  “Oh yeah?” Meghan flung her purse from her shoulder and began to fish through its depths.

  Alarmed, I took a step back. “She doesn’t have a gun, does she?” I muttered to Craig.

  “No, she does not,” he said, but he said it in a warning tone, not a reassuring one. I took another step back.

  “I don’t have a gun,” Meghan gasped. “But I do have a phone.” She brandished it, the blank screen reflecting Craig’s and my bemused faces. “Here,” she mumbled, pulling it back and poking at the touchscreen with a trembling forefinger.

  When I took the time to study her, I realized how upset she actually was. Her shirt had come untucked on one side, her skirt had giant creases around the hips, and her usually smooth hair was gathered back into a rumpled ponytail. A streak of something red outlined the slim muscle of her forearm.

  “Look,” she said, holding the phone up again, an image on its screen.

  Craig took it from her and turned to me, studying the image. The palm-sized digital screen showed a photo of a figurine, a gaudily painted plastic medieval princess, the type commonly sold at big box stores, hardware stores, educational stores—and game stores. We had some of them in my store. The toy’s head had been cut off, and fake blood—red paint, I guessed, or even costume blood—pooled around her dissected form.

  Someone had traced the words, “You’re next, bitch,” in the puddle.

  My mouth dropped open. “What the hell?” I said again.

  Meghan pointed at me, and I realized the red on her arm was the paint, smeared when she was cleaning up the mess.

  Or doing it herself, a tiny voice in my head said.

  “One of your little friends did this. It was on the sidewalk outside my store.”

  “Come on, Meg, you have no proof—” Craig said.

  She ignored him. “I’m next? You know what that means, right? One of her little gamers killed one of their friends, and now they’re after me—that gamer probably did something to hurt you, and now that I’m looking like a threat, I’ll be taken down, too. Everyone who doesn’t like you, one by one, we’ll die!”

  “You’re acting insane,” I said, my voice shaky. “No one I know did this, would do this. You want me out of the grant contest so bad, maybe you set it up yourself just to discredit me—”

  Whoops. I hadn’t meant for that to slip out. Meghan swelled like Violet Beauregarde but without the blueberry tint or winning personality. “I vandalized my own store now? How dare you suggest that I would ever stoop to such a pathetic prank? You—”

  “Oh, but it’s fine for you to accuse me of harboring a murderer—you’d have accused me directly if Craig hadn’t been able to vouch for me!”

  “You’re only here so you have an alibi. I bet you set the whole thing up.”

  “Ladies!” Craig said. “Calm down—”

  “I’m not the one who needs an alibi. You’re the one who found Wes dead. You’re the one no one saw right before he died—”

  “You think I killed him, you pathetic little—”

  “Enough!” Craig shouted. Meghan subsided, panting. I stared at her, my teeth clenched so hard my jaw hurt, my hands curled into fists. Craig turned to look at me. “Autumn, I think you’d better go.”

  I nodded. One by one, I forced my muscles to relax enough to propel me forward, toward the door, out of this house where I never should have come. I stopped when I reached Meghan’s side in the doorway.

  “You reported it?” I asked.

  “You bet your ass I did.”

  “Good. I’m glad. They’ll know I had nothing to do with it.”

  As far as parting shots go, it wasn’t a great one, but I took the last word and ran. I had an alibi, and I was sure Hector and Bay had one, as well. I couldn’t control the other gamers, even if one of them had done it. Vandalism was beneath them, if not out of the question, and no one but my employees knew Meghan had been threatening me. But having the cops know what happened would serve me well.

  The vandalism disturbed me. Either someone had let slip my amateur investigation attempts, or someone else had connected Meghan to all this mess, whatever it meant. That meant the grant competition and the murder weren’t so neatly separated as I wanted them to be. Regardless of who had done it, this would mean more publicity, and it wouldn’t take a genius to make a connection. Meghan had little in common with the game store beyond our shared roof and the grant competition. It all boiled down to the building.

  Of course, the simplest answer was that Nick and Paige had threatened Meghan. Meghan had witnessed Paige fighting with Wes—maybe Paige worried Meghan’s testimony would incriminate her. But Wes had had something on Meghan in return. If it had been math, all of the negatives on either side of the equation would have balanced out to zero, but as it was, I felt like the one with nothing.

  Meghan’s screaming
voice echoed in my head as I strode back down to my car, parked in the street. I adjusted my opinion of her as I walked—perhaps she wasn’t quite the ice queen we all thought she was. And she certainly wasn’t the type to let things go.

  Maybe she would kill to get ahead, which would put me in the line of fire. Or maybe I was so unreasonable, so blind to the obvious answer before me, that screaming was the only way to get through to me. And that would mean my gamers, my friends, had committed these crimes.

  I wasn’t sure which answer I preferred.

  9

  EARLY MONDAY MORNING, I found myself at City Hall again. The city built its ultra-modern government building about fifteen years prior, and the airy structure had a slick, timeless quality that made it stick out in scruffy downtown White Lake like a Stormtrooper in a sea of Browncoats. Many local businesses had picketed it, saying the new, tall façade ruined the historic “skyline” of the retail district around the square, but the City Council persisted and now people cared just as little about the new hall as they had about the old one.

  It was my turn now to try to drag the town of White Lake kicking and screaming into the present, and knowing that in a decade no one would care did not make my task seem any easier.

  I wore my normal clothes this time, refusing to pretend to be something I wasn’t. Vanessa Cleary, the city councilwoman serving as head of the grant committee, met me in the lobby. Alice, the receptionist, gave me a small smile as she touched the bosom of her rainbow-striped sweater, an eye-searing number worthy of Wesley Crusher, and gave me a thumbs-up. My face flared red, and I glanced reflexively down at my T-shirt, just to double-check. All clear. Alice was an old friend of my family—she babysat me when I was little, and my stepmom did her husband’s taxes every year, and while her mood was perpetually as bright as her clothes, she had a sensible head on her shoulders. Apparently I should pay attention when she gives me umpire-style signals.

  Donald joined us, puffing and red-nosed from the cold. We said little, and Vanessa led us directly to the conference room where we gave our presentations. The room had been rearranged with three tables forming a U-shape. A woman from the Economic Development Commission met us there, but no one else showed, which was probably a very bad sign.