But no such luck. The cab has been sitting empty on the first floor, and when the doors slide apart, there’s no one inside.
“Get in,” Rachel orders, and I do as she says. Rachel follows, then inserts her pass key and presses twenty.
We’re going to the penthouse. And there won’t be any other stops along the way.
“Girls like you, Heather,” Rachel says, not looking at me. “I’ve been dealing with girls like you my whole life. The pretty ones are all alike. You go through life thinking everybody owes you something. You get the record contracts and the promotions and the cute guys, while people like me? We’re the ones who do all the work. Do you know that Pansy is the first award I’ve received in my field?”
I glare at her. This woman is going to kill me. I don’t see any reason to be polite to her anymore.
“Yeah,” I say. “And you got it for cleaning up after your own murders. That stuff in those girls’ files—about Elizabeth’s mom wanting her sign-in privileges revoked, and Mrs. Pace not liking Lakeisha—that stuff never even happened, did it? Those women never called you. You made all that stuff up, as a way to justify your meetings with those girls. What did you talk about when you were meeting with them, anyway? What kind of twisted, sick stuff were you terrorizing them with?”
“Heather.” Rachel looks at me critically. “You’ll never understand, will you? I’ve worked hard all my life for what I have. I never got anything easily, like you. Not anything, men, jobs, friends. What I do get, I keep. Like Christopher, for instance. And this job. Do you have any idea how hard it was to get myself a position at this school, in the same building as him? So you understand why you have to die. You’re jeopardizing too much for me. If you hadn’t started snooping around, I’d have let you live. We made a nice team, you and I, I always thought. I mean, when I stand next to you, I look extra thin. That’s a real bonus in an assistant.”
The elevator pings, and the doors slide open. We’re on the twentieth floor, in the hallway outside the president’s penthouse. I know the minute we step onto the gray carpeting that the motion detector will be set off downstairs at the guard’s desk. Would Pete glance at the monitor and see Rachel and her stun gun?
Please look, Pete. I try to use Vulcan mind control on Pete, even though he’s twenty floors down. Look, Pete, look. Look, Pete, look…
Rachel pushes me out into the hallway.
“Come on,” she says, pulling out the building’s master key. “I bet you always wanted to see where the president lives. Well, now’s your chance. Too bad you won’t live long enough to enjoy it.”
Rachel unlocks the front door to the Allingtons’ apartment and steers me into the foyer. Tiled in black and white, this is where Mrs. Allington had stood and accused me of chasing after her son like a harlot. The foyer opens into a spacious living room, walled on two sides by French doors leading out onto the penthouse terrace. Like the Villa d’Allington, the predominant decorating theme appears to be black leather, and lots of it. Martha Stewart, Mrs. Allington apparently is not. Well, I kind of already guessed that.
“Nice, isn’t it?” Rachel says conversationally. “Except for those hideous birds.”
Just off the foyer, in that six-foot-high wicker cage, the cockatoos whistle and dance, eyeing us suspiciously. Rachel aims the stun gun at them and laughs as they shriek at the sight of the leaping blue flame.
“Idiot birds,” she says. Then she grabs hold of my arm and starts pulling me toward a set of French doors. “Come on,” she says. “It’s time for your big finale. I figure a star like you would make a really dramatic exit. So you’re not going the elevator surfing route. You’re going to plunge off the roof of Fischer Hall…kind of like that turtle, in that movie your psychotic friend in the cafeteria is always talking about. Only you, unfortunately, won’t be saved by a rope shot from inside your shell.”
Before I have a chance to react, a door on the far side of the living room is thrown open, and Mrs. Allington, in a pink jogging suit, stares at us.
“What the hell,” she demands, “are you two doing here?”
Rachel smiles pleasantly. “Don’t mind us, Eleanor,” she sings. “We’ll be out of your way in no time.”
“How did you get in here?” Mrs. Allington begins striding toward us, looking furious. “Get out, this instant, before I call the police.”
“I wish we could, Eleanor,” Rachel says, to the woman who, in a different world, might have been her mother-in-law. “But we’re here on official residence hall business.”
“I don’t give a damn why you’re here.” Mrs. Allington has reached a wall phone. Now she’s lifting up the receiver. “Don’t you know who my husband is?”
“Look out, Mrs. Allington,” I yell.
But it’s too late. Like a striking cobra, Rachel lashes out with the stun gun.
Mrs. Allington stiffens, her eyes going wide, like someone who’d just gotten some very bad news…maybe about her son’s LSAT scores, or something.
Then she seems to fling herself over the back of one of the leather couches, twitching until she lies in a heap on the parquet floor, her eyes still wide open, her jaw slack and shiny with saliva.
“Oh my God,” I cry. Because it is, without a doubt, the most horrible thing I’ve ever seen…worse even than what I’d seen Tania Trace doing to my then boyfriend. “Rachel, you killed her!”
“She’s not dead,” Rachel says, the disgust in her voice obvious. “When she comes to, she’ll have no idea what hit her. She won’t remember her last name, let alone me. But that won’t be unusual, for her. Come on,” she says, and grabs my arm again.
Now that I’ve seen firsthand what that gun could do, I’m in no hurry to experience it. I realize I’d been stupid not to try to get away from Rachel downstairs. Sure, she might have zapped me, then hauled me into the elevator. But I’d have been dead weight, and it would have been difficult for her. This way, it’s too easy for her, and more difficult for me. The only place I have to go is down.
This thought is enough to cause me to make a break for it. I yank my arm from Rachel’s grasp and run. I don’t know why, but I head for the door through which Mrs. Allington had come. I can’t run fast, being so stiff from what had happened in the elevator that day before, and all. But I know I’ve surprised her when Rachel lets out a furious scream. Surprising her feels good, because it means she doesn’t have the upper hand anymore.