Sometimes I want to punch Perry in the throat.
“I think we have a fairly good excuse for canceling,” Cooper says soothingly. “So you let me handle Perry. You take care of the situation here.”
The weight of his strong hands on my shoulders—not to mention his deep voice—has a soothing effect, and for the first time since I entered the room to find Jasmine lying there—maybe for the first time since her resident’s mother Mrs. Harris took a seat next to my desk—I begin to feel calm.
I wrap my own arms around Cooper’s waist, comforted, as always, by his warmth, and the smell of the fabric softener we use, mixed with his own innate Cooperish scent.
“I’m sorry I snapped,” I say. “It seems horrible to say under these circumstances, but I was really looking forward to going over the seating arrangements with you.”
“Not horrible,” he says. “Human. And another one of the many reasons I love you.”
He kisses me, then, almost as abruptly as he appeared, he slips out the door to room 1416 and disappears down the back staircase, well before the elevator doors open and several uniformed officers from the Sixth Precinct show up, looking around questioningly.
“Down here,” I call, raising an arm.
It’s a good thing Cooper isn’t here, I think, or he’d comment on how the cops look as young as Jasmine.
At that very moment the door to room 1412 opens, and a pale brown, inquisitive face, framed by a mass of dark curling hair peers out, first at me, then at the approaching police officers.
“What’s going on?” the girl asks drowsily.
“Nothing,” I say, noting that the handmade tag on her door—in construction paper cut into the same cloud shapes as the ones on Jasmine’s ceiling—has the names Chantelle, Nishi, Kaileigh, and Ameera written on it in sparkly silver cursive. “Go back to bed.”
The girl doesn’t listen. Even washed free of makeup, her eyes are huge and dark and beautiful.
“Why are there police here?” she asks in a sleep-roughened voice. She has a British accent. “Has something happened?”
“Nothing for you to worry about, miss.” The first officer is a gangly young man, the leather of his gun belt creaking noisily as he strides toward us. “We got it under control. Go on back inside your room.”
It’s too late. By now the girl is standing in the middle of the hallway in her cream-colored slip and flowered silk dressing gown, her brown feet bare, her hair a riotous ebony halo around her slim shoulders. She wears no jewelry except for a single gold chain around her neck, from which dangles a pair of interlocked silver rings, which jingle softly when she walks.
I know that all the other residents of room 1412—
Chantelle, Nishi, and Kaileigh—are out to lunch at Nobu with Prince Rashid. This girl, then, must be Ameera, the one Kaileigh’s mother described as “a slut.”
I’m not sure what a slut is supposed to look like, but to me, Ameera looks more like an angel. I remember what Prince Rashid said, about Ameera being “amiable.” She seems like the kind of girl a prince—or any boy—would find amiable indeed.
Her gaze travels past me, into Jasmine’s room.
“That’s where my RA, Jasmine, lives,” she says, fully awake now. “Is she there? Jasmine?” Ameera darts toward the door I’ve foolishly left opened behind me. “Jasmine?”
I manage to catch her around the waist—she’s slim as a child, and doesn’t weigh much more than one. One of the female officers darts forward to help me, but Ameera is much stronger than she looks. She manages to drag both myself and the female officer a few steps into Jasmine’s room . . . enough so that she sees her RA’s dead body on the bed.
That’s when Ameera begins to scream.
It’s a long, long time before she stops.
7
Fischer Hall Casino Night
Do you like to GAMBLE?
$ Blackjack $ Roulette $ Texax Hold’Em $
Ready for a night of revelry
on a romantic riverboat ride
around manhattan Island?
Then Come to Fischer Hall’s Freshman
Orientation Casino Night!
Win chips that can be cashed in
for New York College loot!
$$$$
Buses leave outside the building
at 5:00 P.M. SHARP
Be there or be
LEFT OUT FOREVER
One thing I did not expect when I took on the job as assistant resident hall director of Fischer Hall was that I was going to get to know so many investigators from the NYC Office of the Chief Medical Examiner on a first-name basis.
But thanks to there having been so many sudden deaths in the building over the past year, that’s exactly what’s happened.
“Hi, Heather,” says Eva, the MLI (medicolegal investigator) who shows up to examine Jasmine. “How’s it going? Oh, hey, thanks for the wedding invitation. Is it all right if I bring my mother as my plus one? She’s so damned excited about going to a real celebrity wedding, and she’s never been to a wedding at the Plaza before. Plus, you know the chances of my ever getting married at this point are slim to none—Mom says I scare guys off with all these tattoos—so you’d be doing me a real solid.”
“Oh,” I say, surprised to hear this . . . not that Eva wants to bring her mother to my wedding, but because these are not exactly the first words I expect to hear someone say as they’re walking into the room of a deceased twenty-year-old. “Sure.”
Also, I don’t recall inviting Eva to my wedding.
But this isn’t the most pressing concern on my mind at the moment.
The Housing Office has kicked into crisis mode, sending all its best people over to Fischer Hall to “deal with” the situation, including the on-staff psychologist, Dr. Flynn, and grief counselor, Dr. Gillian Kilgore.
It’s Gillian who—along with a nurse from Student Health Services—gets Ameera calmed down. She turns out to be way beyond my help. Every time she looked at me—and the female police officer—after we removed her from Jasmine’s room, all she seemed to able to see was the face of her dead RA.
That made her start weeping again, burying her head in her hands so that her long dark hair fell over her face.
It took two young male police officers to drag Ameera out of room 1416 and back into her own room. Afterward, they sat her down and explained that we’d found Jasmine that way—none of us had done it to her.