Today, she walked quickly, too preoccupied by the plans for Saturday (the day after tomorrow!)—a ten-hour road trip, a real adventure, with her best friend—to care about the prettiness of the day. Because of the landscaping and the angle of the drive, she was practically on the front porch before she noticed two cop cars, one of which had its doors swinging open, as if the officers had been in too much of a hurry to bother closing them. Her mother was speaking to one of them, holding her throat with one hand.
Dad, Gemma thought immediately, and, without realizing it, broke into a run, her backpack jogging against her back.
“Gemma!” Kristina turned to stare as Gemma arrived in front of her, already panting, sweat gathering beneath the waistband of her jeans and trickling down her spine. She reached out and seized Gemma’s shoulders. “What’s the matter? Is everything okay?”
Gemma stared. “What do you mean, is everything okay?” She gestured to the cop cars, and the cop who stood a little ways apart from mother and daughter, hands on his hips, sunglasses on, staring up at the sky as though debating whether he might still get a tan at this angle. “What’s going on?”
“Oh.” Kristina exhaled long and loud, releasing Gemma’s shoulder. “This? It’s nothing. Something stupid. A prank.”
By then, Gemma had noticed that one of the large glass panes of the French doors was shattered, as if something heavy had been hurled through it. She could see a second cop moving through the living room, placing his weight delicately, his footsteps making a crunch-crunch sound on the glass. As she watched, a third cop emerged, a woman, holding what at first appeared to be a lumpy rock in an improbable shade of green between two gloved hands. But as she shifted it to show her colleague, Gemma’s whole body went cold. It wasn’t a rock, but a Halloween Frankenstein mask stapled at the neck. From the way the cop was handling it, Gemma knew it must be heavy. It had obviously been filled with something to help it maintain its shape.
“Oh my God.” Gemma could feel the blood pounding in her temples. Chloe. That fucking bitch. She focused on thinking logically so that she wouldn’t start to cry. How had it happened? How had Chloe arrived so much quicker than the bus? Could she have cut last period? No. Gemma had seen her getting into Aubrey’s car. And how had they gotten past the gates? The whole property was fenced in. But she was sure Chloe and Aubrey were to blame, would have staked her life on it.
Frankenstein. The misshapen monster.
“It’s all right, Gem. It’s all right,” Kristina said, in a shrill voice, as if she didn’t quite believe it. “No one was hurt.”
That only made Gemma feel worse. No one was hurt meant someone could have been hurt. What if her mom had been in the living room? Unlikely, of course. Even though the house—Château Ives, as April called it, only half-jokingly—could have fit an army during wartime, her mom never went anywhere except her bedroom, the kitchen, the downstairs yoga studio, and the bathroom, as if she were controlled by a centrifugal force that kept her rotating between those four places. But what if Ender and Bean, their cats, had been curled up on the sofa? What if Rufus had been sunning himself on the rug?
“If you want us to file a report, we’ll need you down at the station,” said the cop with sunglasses, the one who looked bored. But he was doing his best to be polite. The Ives family, he’d obviously been told, was important.
Kristina shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. “If only Geoff . . .” She trailed off. “My husband is in a meeting,” she said, by way of explanation. Gemma’s dad was always in a meeting, or in a car, or on a plane.
“How’d they get in?” Gemma blurted. The front gates could only be opened by a code. Guests had to be buzzed in. Château Ives meets Fort Knox.
Kristina blushed. Even when she blushed, she looked pretty. Gemma had tried for years to find herself in her mother’s model-pretty face, in her high cheekbones and slender wrists. The most she could detect was a similar way of frowning. “There were vendors in and out for Sunday’s horse show,” she explained, half to Gemma, half to the police. “Florists, the planner . . . I left the gates open so they wouldn’t have to keep buzzing.”
Which no doubt meant: I popped a Klonopin, had a glass of wine, and took a nap. Since her parents never said exactly what they meant, Gemma had become adept at translating for them.
“Finke, look at this.” Yet another cop came jogging out of the front door. He, too, was wearing nylon gloves, and holding a note written on a scrap of paper between his pointer and middle fingers. “This came with the special delivery.”
The bored-looking cop flipped his sunglasses to the top of his head and read without reaching for it. The message was short, but Gemma felt the anger roil inside of her, pulling her heart down to her toes.
your sick your a monster you deserve to die
Kristina gasped as though she’d been physically slapped. Finke nodded, and the other cop withdrew, bagging the note carefully in plastic. Gemma imagined seeing Chloe arrested, her hands wrenched behind her back, her face squashed against the top of a cop car. She imagined her thrown into jail for the rest of her life, bunking with a murderous boulder with a name like Princess.
She imagined wrapping her hands around Chloe’s neck and watching it snap.
“I—I think I’d better come with you,” Kristina said. Now the blush was gone. She just looked pale, and confused. “Who would do something like this? Who would be so awful?”