MYSTERY TEXT

I sat in my final class of the day that afternoon, staring out across the quad at the now-silent construction zone. The bulldozers and the backhoe sat motionless in the center of the plot, as if their drivers had up and fled right in the middle of work. It made them look oddly lonely and sad, like great, hulking orphans. Up at the front of the classroom, Mr. Cheever helpfully outlined every item that would be on my calculus final, but I hadn’t once looked up at the board. Instead, my eyes were trained on that damn frozen backhoe, as if simply glaring at it would make it roar to life.

I had already placed calls to every important county executive I could find online, not knowing which one might be able to help me, but it wasn’t like it mattered. I’d been screened by each of their assistants and no one had called me back. I wished Mr. Lange were still alive. He would have known exactly the right person to contact, exactly how to smooth things over. But me? I was clueless and utterly lost. And I didn’t like the feeling.

I could have gotten in touch with Chester Worth again, but I tried not to bother him too much. Sometimes I could tell that the tentative phone calls of a naive schoolgirl grated on his nerves, almost as much as the tenth call of the day from Janice Winthrop grated on mine, and just knowing that I might be annoying him made me nervous to call. Somewhere in the back of both our minds, we realized I was not his responsibility, and sooner or later his duty to his deceased business partner was going to wear out.

If only I could get Noelle involved. That girl was definitely her father’s daughter. It was like she instinctively knew how to get things done, and get them done right. She had a way of talking to people that made them snap to attention.

But Noelle was off the project and, deep down, I knew why. She was angry at me because that knife her father had taken in the gut had been meant for me. She had never said it, she probably never would, but I knew she was thinking it. She had to be. Because I was thinking it too. I’d been thinking it every day since it happened, feeling the weight of it, the crushing blame. Our father had died to save me. I spent at least 99 percent of my waking hours trying not to let that fact overwhelm me. Which was another reason that rebuilding Billings was so important to me. Staying focused on every minute detail of such an overwhelming project kept me from obsessing on other, more horrifying thoughts.

I knew Noelle wouldn’t have wanted to lose me, but I often wondered, if it had come down to a choice between me and her father, which one of us would she have chosen to keep alive?

Someone in the room coughed, rousing me from my thoughts. I looked at the board and quickly jotted down a few notes, but there was no way I could catch up now. I glanced across the two rows of diligent students that separated me from Sawyer and hoped that he was taking good notes, because I was definitely going to need to borrow them.

Suddenly, I saw something flash out by the construction site. Someone was walking quickly away from one of the trailers. It didn’t look like one of the workers, though. He was too slim, too skittish, too young. He wore a black canvas jacket and a baseball cap and was moving so fast and furtively it made my nerves sizzle.

My phone vibrated in the back pocket of my jeans, making me jump. Behind me, Astrid snorted a laugh. I yanked the phone out and held it in both hands under my desk, cursing whichever alumna had decided to scare the crap out of me in the middle of class. The text was from an unknown number. Even though this wasn’t completely out of the ordinary—some of the alums had texted from numbers I didn’t have stored in my phone—my heart still pitter-pattered nervously. I’d had some bad luck with mystery texts in my recent past when Noelle and her grandmother had staged her fake kidnapping and sent me on a series of ridiculous tasks to get her back.

At the board Mr. Cheever droned on. I held my breath and opened the text.

U KNO U’VE GOT POWERFL ALUMS ON UR SIDE W/BILLINGS. U JUST NEED 2 FIND RIGHT ONE. HINT: SHE’S FILED UNDER G.

My throat went dry. I glanced around the classroom, but everyone in sight was focused on the teacher, their pens scratching over their notebooks. No one had a phone out—not Missy, not Lorna, not Diana Waters, not Sawyer or Marc Alberro. Of course, not every student at Easton was in this classroom, but most of them were currently in class somewhere. And technically, texting in class was verboten. But anyone could have sent this message and then stashed their phone away before I even had a chance to pull my cell out of my pocket.

My fingers trembling, I texted back.

WHO R U?

The message came up that it was sending. And sending. And sending. Then the screen lit up with the words: MSG FAILED.

Pressing my teeth together in frustration, I tried again.

WHO R U?

MSG FAILED.

I sat back hard in my chair and turned my phone off, mentally letting out a string of curses that, if spoken aloud, would have landed me in detention for a week.

Then, out in the hallway, I heard a giggle. I glanced up at the open door just as someone darted past. A blond someone in a pink dress. My heart completely seized and I sat up straight, but no one else in the room seemed to have noticed. It was all I could do to keep myself from sprinting across the room and checking the hall.

I glanced around the desks again, and my eyes met Missy’s. She was glaring at me from across two rows of desks, her mouth set in an angry red line.

“Reed,” Astrid whispered from behind me. “Are you all right?”

“Yeah. I’m fine,” I whispered back hoarsely, tearing my gaze away from Missy’s to face forward again.

My hands trembled beneath my desk, holding tight to my phone. I felt vulnerable and small, as if at any moment someone or something was about to attack. But the hallway was silent now, and the construction site was still, nothing moving other than the flag atop the crane, flapping in the breeze.