He looks at me like I’m crazy.
“I’m a detective, Heather,” he says, “not Secret Service. I meant I’ll find out soon enough when I begin using my investigative skills. I’m going to ask Tania if there’s someone who might have reason to want her dead.”
“Oh,” I say, biting my lip. “Of course. Do you think she’ll tell you?”
“Tania’s never struck me as the sharpest knife in the drawer,” he says, “but my dad said that she basically demanded that the show be transferred to your building or she’d quit, which tells me something about her.”
I snort. “Yeah,” I say, thinking of the cafeteria’s dismal appearance, “that she secretly enjoys slumming it.”
“No,” Cooper says, reaching out to stroke a strand of my hair. “It tells me that, despite the fact that she married my brother, she’s got the good sense to know when she’s found someone she can trust.”
I shake my head, refusing to believe it. “You mean me? Oh no, you’ve got it all wrong. It must have been you. You’re the one she asked to be her bodyguard. She and I have barely exchanged two words since—”
“I don’t think Tania has a lot of people in her life she feels close to. Did you see the way she was kissing that dog?”
I nod, remembering the image with a pang. I’m not surprised Cooper noticed it as well.
“I guess a part of me felt a little sorry for her,” I confess. “And I’ve never actually thought she was dumb. People like to think pretty girls who run around in short skirts carrying tiny dogs can’t be intelligent, but unless they’ve inherited their money, they usually don’t get to where they are on looks alone. Tania’s incredibly talented. She’s got the same octave range as an opera singer, for instance.”
“Excuse me?”
I frown at him. “How could you grow up in the Cartwright Records household and not know what that means?”
“You know I purposefully blocked out all music-related discussions growing up. I had to, or I’d have ended up prancing around on stage in a pair of leather pants like Jordan.”
I smile at him. “Simply put, the span from the lowest to the highest notes Tania’s voice can produce without straining is about three octaves—that’s really rare. All that stuff about Mariah Carey and Céline Dion hitting five octaves is crap. I mean, they can hit the notes, but not without straining. They have about the same range as Tania. Even though the songs Tania chooses to sing aren’t the best, she’s got a really great voice. I don’t know how she has the lung capacity to do it with that tiny body, especially since she was never classically trained, but she has a vocal range that’s practically operatic, way broader than mine ever was, even when I was taking regular voice lessons and at the top of my form. Not many people realize this, but to hit the notes that she can, as consistently as she does, in a live performance, night after night, she actually has to be really, really talented and really, really dedicated to her craft.”
Cooper reaches out and pulls me down against him, disturbing Owen, who gives us a dirty look and stalks to the far end of the bed where he won’t be jostled.
“I don’t know,” Cooper says as my hair tumbles across his chest. “I heard you belting out something this morning in the bathroom and you sounded really, really talented to me.”
“That was ABBA,” I say with a sniff. “Everyone sounds good singing ABBA, especially in the bathroom. Why do you think they’re so popular?”
He lifts the sheet to peer beneath it. “You look at the top of your form to me,” he says. “As a licensed investigator, I suppose I better check to make sure.”
Before I could stop him, he did. Though truthfully, I didn’t try that hard.
Chapter 11
Check-in day for Tania Trace Rock Camp doesn’t start like one during which you might expect to witness a homicide, even if you work in a place referred to by many as Death Dorm. Besides, I’d been so busy during the few days preceding it, I completely forgot there might be someone—besides me—who wanted Tania dead.
This proves to be a fatal mistake.
But I don’t know this when I step outside into the backyard to check the temperature after waking up. Instead, I find that it’s one of those rare perfect summer days when people can lie out and work on their tans without sweating (which is why my tan is mostly the result of tinted moisturizer—I hate sweating). There isn’t a cloud in the sky, and the humidity is low. When I go back inside, I find I’m able to blow my hair out straight, and it stays that way for once.
I haven’t seen much of Cooper over the past few days, not only because whatever he’s been doing to prep for guarding Tania is taking up so much of his time, but also because I’ve been having to stay later and later at Fischer Hall every night. Miraculously, I’ve accomplished practically everything on my pre-check-in to-do list:
Made sure we have enough keys for each resident? (You would not believe the number of students who move out and forget to give back their key.) Check.
Gone over every detail about the assigned rooms, from the toilets (do they flush without flooding the room below?) to the window guards. (Does every window have one? Often residents remove the window guards so they can open the windows wider than the regulation two inches in order to stick their heads through the gap to smoke. In my experience, this only ends with bodies falling out of windows and hitting the skylight in the cafeteria.) Check.
Met with the housekeepers, building engineers, and resident assistants (thank goodness I hired one for every two basketball players—I’ve put them in charge of making cute name tags to stick on the front of each camper’s door) to make sure everything is ready and nothing could possibly go wrong, including confiscating the not-so-secret stash of cigars that belongs to Carl, the chief engineer? (I’ll return them to him by the end of the day.) Check.
Spoken with every single mail attendant, member of the paint crew, and security guard to ensure that, despite the presence of major celebrities in our midst, regular daily tasks like sorting and forwarding the mail and painting the rooms will continue as usual and every single visitor to the building, no matter how famous, will be required to leave photo ID and be signed in at the security desk? Check, check, and check.