Shade Me Read online

  He shuffled his feet, shifting his gaze down to them momentarily, and then nodded. “Okay. I just wanted to ask you some questions about Dru Hollis.”

  “What about him?”

  “Well, for starters, what was his relationship with Peyton like?”

  I rolled my eyes. “Detective, I already told you. I’m not friends with the Hollises. I don’t know anything about Dru Hollis.”

  “But you’ve spent some time with him since the incident,” he said.

  The smell of the coffee wafted up, intoxicating. “Well, yeah, but it’s not like I’m sitting there asking for details of his childhood.”

  The detective nodded and licked his lips. I ran my fingers along my robe belt, just to make sure it was still intact. “Fair enough,” he said. “Do you know anything about whether or not he’s been traveling lately? Maybe to Vegas? Or anyplace else, recently, where he might have caught up with some old friends? Or has he been pretty much staying around Brentwood? What has he been up to these days?”

  I shrugged. “We haven’t talked about that, either,” I said. “We’re not spending our time sharing our secrets like besties. His sister is lying in a hospital bed.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Does he have secrets to share?”

  “No, I didn’t mean . . . How would I know?” I squinted. “What are you getting at, exactly? Do you think Dru had something to do with Peyton’s attack?” He remained maddeningly straight-faced, and instantly I was taken back to those early days after Mom’s death. All questions, no answers, and a ton of jumping to conclusions that never got any of us anywhere. Dad was right—cops were all alike, no matter how much yellow I saw when I was around one. I cocked my head to one side. “He’s been by his sister’s bedside since she was brought in. He has been worried sick. He’s cried. I’ve seen it myself. That’s what I know about Dru Hollis.”

  “Yes, he’s been very interested in Peyton’s care,” Detective Martinez said. But his face was grim as he brought his coffee to his lips.

  “You know, I really need to get ready for school,” I said. I opened the front door, holding the knob in my hand, hoping that my robe wasn’t gaping open, but too irritated to really worry about it too much if it was.

  He hesitated, then gave a single nod and headed toward the door.

  “Oh, and here. You can have this back,” I said, holding the coffee out toward him. “I don’t like French vanilla.”

  He took the coffee and stepped out. I slammed the door after him, then watched through the window as he pulled the lid off my drink and dumped it out in the grass. And kept watching until he got into his car and left.

  I leaned against the front door for a moment. Clearly he was suspicious of Dru. But was it normal check-out-the-family suspicious, or was there something more to it? Or was he, like the cops on my mom’s case, just completely clueless and reaching for anything he could get his hands on?

  After I stopped shaking, I took a deep breath and decided on the latter, and then went back upstairs. Something I’d seen in Peyton’s pictures was gnawing at the recesses of my brain, and had been since my conversation with Jones. Something blue.

  BACK AT MY desk, I pulled up Peyton’s Aesthetishare account and scrolled through the pictures once again. There it was, the one at the bus stop. Peyton was turned away, her free hand touching her hair. She was pensively staring at something on the ground. All stark black and white. Except behind her, the partially obscured apartment rental ad. Fountain View Apartments, which shone out to me in what I liked to think of as dolphin blue—the color I always associated with water words. Jones had seen Peyton walking near Gibson’s apartment complex. He’d thought they’d been called Fountain something. But just above the ad, scrawled on top of the word apartment, someone had written something. I’d thought of it as graffiti last night when I’d first seen it, but my brain had catalogued something else about it. The silver.

  Three numbers—412. Silver, brown, pink.

  My fingers felt cold against the keys of my laptop. Were the numbers a clue?

  It seemed so unlikely, so impossible. But it made sense in a way I couldn’t explain—just like I was eight years old again and trying to tell a doctor about my colors. I couldn’t ignore it.

  Dru and I had exchanged numbers the last time we were at the hospital together, just in case. I picked up my phone and dialed.

  “Hello?” The voice sounded gravelly with sleep. I had forgotten how early it still was.

  “Dru?”

  “Who is this?”

  “It’s Nikki Kill.”

  “Oh.” There was rustling, followed by beeping that I knew all too well. “Hey,” he said after a pause. “Sorry, I’m at the hospital.”

  “Any changes?”

  “No. She’s still unresponsive. My dad wants to have her moved. Wants some specialist he knows to look at her, but it’s too risky. The doctor said the brain swelling is not going down, either. It’s bad, Nikki.”

  Words stuck in my throat. I remembered my dad, pulling me into his lap in a special room at the hospital ten years ago, saying the same words. It’s bad, Nikki. But he hadn’t had to tell me for me to know. I’d slipped in the blood. I’d seen the crimson all over the room. I’d already known she was going to die.

  “Hello?” Dru asked. “You still there?”

  I cleared my throat. “I’m here.”

  “Are you coming by today?”

  “I have school,” I said. “But, um, that’s actually why I was calling you.”

  His voice went grim. “I graduated a year ago, remember? You couldn’t pay me enough to go back into that place. I’d take one of my dad’s stupid acting jobs if I had to.”

  “No, not that. You said Peyton moved out of the mansion, right?”

  He paused. “The mansion? What, are we royalty?”

  Just about, but I let it slide. “Sorry. But you said she moved out, right?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  “And you don’t know where she went?” I felt a trickle of sweat run down the side of my face into the raised collar of my robe. I realized I’d been clutching the phone so tightly my fingers ached. I took a breath and eased up.

  “No.” His voice took on that wary tone again. “What are you getting at, Nikki?”

  “I think I might know where she went.”

  There was another pause. “Where?” he asked.

  “I don’t know if I’m right,” I said. “Do you have her keys?”

  “I think so,” he said. “The hospital gave them to me that night. They were the only thing she had on her, besides that phone. So I have them, I just don’t know what they unlock.”

  I stood, shook off my robe, and let it drop to the floor. I raced across my room and grabbed clothes out of the closet without even paying attention to what I was grabbing. Not that my closet offered a lot of variety—worn jeans, concert T-shirts, a couple of Jones’s button-downs. “Meet me at Fountain View Apartments in twenty minutes.”

  “What about school?”

  “I just decided I’m skipping.”

  “How do you know it’s the right place?”

  I hopped on one foot, trying to get a sock on the other, almost dropping the phone in the process. I’ll explain later, I opened my mouth to say, but I knew that wasn’t true. I wasn’t in the habit of telling anyone about my dolphin blue, or any other color, and I wasn’t going to start today. “I just know,” I said, which turned out to be as close of an explanation to my synesthesia as there was anyway.

  I heard the murmur of voices. Maybe nurses. And more beeping, getting closer, as if he were walking toward Peyton again. I closed my eyes and practically saw it on the insides of my eyelids—crimson, crimson, crimson, pounding with my pulse. It’s in your head, Nik. It’s all in your head.

  “So are you going to meet me?” I asked, realizing how husky and desperate my voice sounded.

  “Okay. I’ll be there in twenty.”

  7

  THE FOUNTAIN VIEW Apartment
s were a squat cluster of straight lines and brown stucco with cream-colored balconies tacked on like teeth. Sandwiched between bone-rattling railroad tracks and a drugstore, and surrounded by what seemed like miles of storage sheds and a grocery, they felt worlds away from Hollis Mansion. Hell, they felt worlds away from where I lived, too. Dad and I weren’t rich, by any means, but we had enough. My neighborhood was a place where families settled down—new carpet in the living room, a wet bar in an alcove off the kitchen, a flat-screen wall-mounted in the den. Fountain View Apartments was a place where people lived by necessity rather than by luxury. The type of place a Hollis wouldn’t even know existed.

  Yet Peyton did. I was sure of it. I couldn’t explain how exactly—and I wasn’t even sure I was right—but the photo had told me that this was where I’d find clues to Peyton’s attack.

  I waited for Dru in the parking lot, fiddling with the radio dial until I finally became frustrated and antsy and turned it off. I watched as a man came out of an apartment, carrying a hard-shell lunch cooler in one hand, and got into his truck and rumbled away, leaving a polluting cloud of old country tunes in his wake. A few minutes later, a woman in a pair of shorts and a T-shirt with a ratty knee-length robe tossed over it came outside and loosed a tiny dog onto the ground. I thought about Chris Martinez barging in on me in my robe and felt a pang of embarrassment again. The little dog scampered, picked a spot, and squatted. The woman watched on as she smoked. My fingers itched to hold a cigarette.

  Just when I’d almost convinced myself to get out and bum a smoke from the lady in the robe, a silver Spyder crept into the parking lot—all chrome and shiny paint and wheel-waxed tires, dubstep thumping angrily through its speakers—and pulled up next to my car.

  I sucked in my breath. My God, you could smell the posh. Dru must have really felt like he was slumming it here.

  Not that I was caught up in money, but there was something seriously sexy about seeing him behind the wheel, his hair ruffled from the top being down, his sunglasses hiding identity and emotion, the glint of midmorning sun reflecting on his watch. He stepped out and headed toward me, his button-down tucked loosely into his jeans. I felt myself flush but rolled down my window with shaky fingers.

  “Nice car.”

  “Birthday present,” he said, glancing at the Spyder.

  “Wow, happy birthday, huh? I got a laptop.”

  He shrugged. “I guess. If you’re into that sort of thing.” Again, he glanced at the car, and I could have sworn the look on his face said that he kind of wasn’t into that sort of thing, which went against every rumor that ever floated about every Hollis. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a set of keys. He held them up, jangled them. “You ready?”

  I nodded, rolled up my window, and got out, walking toward the buildings, trying to ignore the violet feeling of being pulled toward Dru. I was almost tempted to trade exploring Peyton’s apartment for exploring each other instead.

  “You want to explain how you know this is where Peyton lived?” Dru called after me.

  I scanned the numbers on the doors, kept moving. “Nope.”

  “Don’t you think it might be important information for her family to know?” Emphasis on the word family.

  I stopped, and he nearly walked into me. “Not really,” I said. “I found it—isn’t that the important part? Besides, it’s just a hunch.”

  “You brought me out here on a hunch?”

  I rolled my eyes. “It’s an apartment complex, not Siberia, for God’s sake. And it’s . . . well, it’s more than a hunch, but I can’t explain it. Or more like I won’t. And this is the one,” I said, pointing to the door we stood in front of, stickers misaligned so that the 412 looked like it was riding a wave. Silver, brown, pink—just as it had been in the photo, of course. But seeing them here gave me confidence that maybe I was right.

  He looked at the door, then at me, skeptically. “This is where Peyton moved to? My spoiled sister? You’re sure?”

  “Well, I won’t know for sure until we open it. But that’s your job. Unless you want me to kick it in?” Doubt settled into the pit of my stomach. All my life, I’d been intuitive. I never lost things. I had a pretty good memory. And I could get a feel for a room or a person or a mood pretty much the moment I was near. I’d never tried it with a photo before, but why couldn’t it work?

  His mouth dropped open, and he slid his sunglasses down the bridge of his nose to look over them at me. “You mean we could open this and someone else could be in there?”

  Yes. It was possible—if Jones was right—that Gibson Talley could be in there. And I hadn’t really thought through that part until just now. He seemed like just the kind of guy who waited around for opportunities to shoot people who came trespassing into his space. But Peyton’s family had every right to go into her apartment, no matter who she shared it with. Especially if she were to die, they would need to pack up her . . . I shook my head, remembering the cleaning ladies Dad had hired to box up Mom’s things, how vulture-like they’d seemed to me. I didn’t want to go there. “If it’s not hers, the key won’t work,” I said, evading the subject.

  A grin pushed up one corner of Dru’s mouth. “You are a little mystery, aren’t you, Nikki Kill?”

  I felt myself blush down what felt like the entire length of my body, which pissed me off. I hated when I blushed. Made me feel like a little kid. I pressed my chin down toward my chest to hide my face. “Just open the door before I grow old and die waiting,” I said.

  Dru stepped around me and stuck a key in the door. Nothing.

  “Try another one,” I said. He did. Still nothing.

  My heart pounded, waiting for angry footsteps on the other side of the door, waiting for Gibson Talley to whip it open and rearrange Dru’s half grin permanently. “Try another one,” I said again.

  “This one’s a car key,” he said. “There’s only one more.”

  He stuck the last key into the lock. At first it stuck, and I felt my shoulders sag with disappointment. I’d been so sure. Well, not sure sure. But it would have been cool for me to have figured out where Peyton lived based on that photo alone. Serves me right, I thought. I stop fighting my synesthesia for the first time ever and it lets me dow—

  But Dru jiggled the key a little and it sank all the way in, giving a crunching sound that the others hadn’t. It was the sound of key teeth meeting home. We glanced at each other, and then he turned the key and grasped the doorknob.

  It turned.

  We were in.

  “Holy shit,” I said, pushing past Dru and stepping through the doorway. “I was right. Hello?” I called out tentatively.

  “Who’s going to answer you? Peyton’s in the hospital, remember?”

  Dru had followed me in and shut the door behind us. I found myself fumbling for a light switch. “Just a precaution,” I muttered, though inside I was thanking God that nobody had answered. There was a difference between being able to defend yourself if you had to, and wanting to actually have to. “Find a light, would you?”

  Instead, Dru whipped back the curtains that had been pulled tight across the front window, letting in a flood of morning sun. I held my breath. Then looked around and let it out.

  Other than the heavy gray linen curtains, the apartment was stark. A plain beige sofa sat across from a small television, which was perched atop a nondescript side table. There were no decorations on the walls, no photos on the mantel, and, most importantly, nothing that looked like a heavy-duty rocker slash hard-core drug dealer lived there.

  I walked down the hall toward the one bedroom in the back, half bracing myself to find a passed-out Gibson Talley sprawled across the bed, or waiting for me behind a door with a baseball bat decorated with Peyton’s dried blood.

  But the bedroom was as bare as the living room. The bed was unmade, a white sheet set and plain gray blanket tousled across the mattress. The closet door stood open, showing off an impressive array of designer jeans, silk shirts, purses—the on
ly nod to Peyton’s former lifestyle. I pawed through the clothes, recognizing a few pieces. The white J. Mendel sleeveless V-neck dress she wore on the first day of school, everyone losing their freaking minds over how tan her legs looked against the fabric (A month in the Dominican, I’d overheard her purr countless times that day). The Isabel Marant leather top with the lace-up sleeves that she told everyone she got at Barney’s during spring break. The rows and rows of Blahniks on the floor—what Jones, with not a little bit of disgusting awe, used to call her screw-me heels.

  But not one stitch of men’s clothes.

  Not one hint of Gibson Talley at all.

  Peyton had moved out, but she clearly lived alone. Why? And, more importantly, this was obviously a temporary place for her. She planned to set up house—real house—somewhere else.

  Dru had joined me in the bedroom and was leaning against the door watching me. “You planning on raiding my sister’s closet?”

  I let out a derisive snort. “Please,” I said. I held up a lace baby-doll top—pink, of course. “Like I would be caught dead in this.” I twirled my finger through my hair. “Have the maid bring me up a cosmo, Dru. With the imported vodka, of course.”

  His face darkened. “That’s not what it’s like, you know.”

  I hung the shirt back on the rack and knelt in front of a suitcase on the floor. “What?” I unzipped the front pocket of the suitcase. There was a small stash of photos inside. Peyton clearly liked her photography. Underneath them was a pocket-sized notebook filled with what looked like poetry. At the bottom of some of the poems, she’d written©Hollis/Talley. Song lyrics. I dropped the notebook back into the suitcase.

  “We’re not all ordering our maids around and living lives of luxury all the time,” Dru said. “Rich people have problems, too.”