#3 Dead and Gone (Mike & Riel Mysteries) by McClintock Norah

Author:McClintock, Norah [McClintock, Norah]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Darby Creek Publishing
Published: 2014-03-01T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

If it were TV instead of real life, the whole story would have been splashed across the front page of the newspaper the next day. But I scanned every headline on every page—even the little headlines in the “In brief” columns, and found no mention of the body they had found in the woods, no mention of Tracie Howard, no mention of John Riel.

Riel woke me up at the same time he usually did. His face was pale and his eyes were puffy, and he drank two cups of coffee instead of his usual one while I ate my granola, but other than that he seemed okay.

I didn’t say anything to Sal or Rebecca about what had happened. It didn’t seem right to tell them something that had been so hard for Riel to tell me. At lunchtime I headed for the pay phone in the cafeteria and dialed the number for Emily’s cell phone. She picked up on the second ring.

“How come you didn’t call me back sooner?” she said, sounding mad.

“Something came up.”

“Well?” she said. “Did you get anything?”

“Not much,” I said.

She wanted to know what I had got, exactly, so I told her about the colored contact lenses and the hair dye. She liked that.

“So the guy has changed the color of his eyes and the color of his hair,” she said. “What do you think, he’s a fugitive from justice?”

Yeah, right. I was getting the idea that Emily liked to make things exciting, liked to pretend she was living in a TV show.

“What else?” Emily said. “Where does he live? Is he married?”

“I don’t know.”

“Find out,” she said. It came out like an order. “Find out and I’ll give my wallet to you instead of taking it to the police. Come over to my house tomorrow, one o’clock.”

“I work until one.”

“So come at two. You can do that, right, McGill?” Pushing me now with that rich-girl way of talking she had.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’ll be there.”

“Be where?” said a voice behind me. I almost dropped the phone and, of course, Rebecca noticed that. She also noticed the nervous, guilty look on my face that I was working hard to hide. I dropped the receiver back onto its cradle. “Who were you talking to?” she said. Only instead of sounding casual about it, like she was interested but not dying of curiosity, she sounded the way my mom would have if she’d caught me doing something I shouldn’t have been doing. And stupid me, all of a sudden I acted like I was five instead of fifteen.

I said, “No one. It’s nothing.”

Rebecca did the same thing my mother would have done in the same situation. She crossed her arms over her chest, tilted her head to one side, looked hard at me, and said, “You were talking to no one?”

“No one important,” I said. Then I smiled at her and said, “You look great.” I reached for her hand. She snapped it away from me.

“You were talking to no one important who, I suppose, you’re planning to meet nowhere,” she said.

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