In the Blood by Lisa Unger Page A

give me shit about it. I just wasn’t in the mood.”
    I heard Lynne’s voice in the other room, an easy conversational pitch that ebbed and flowed. Who was she talking to? I wondered. What would she learn about Beck from the cast of characters in her phone book? Some of it might not be pretty.
    “ Do you have a crush on him?” the detective asked. There was a smile in his voice, a friendly tease.
    I realized I’d hiked my shoulders up high, and I consciously pushed them down. “No,” I said. “I don’t. He’s a lot older than me. He’s also my professor.”
    He shifted in his seat and it groaned under his weight. It was cheap furniture from IKEA, the kind that you put together with one of those torturous little metal L-shaped tools. Did those things have a name?
    “It’s not like it doesn’t happen,” he said. He gave me an understanding smile. “You’re both consenting adults.”
    “It’s inappropriate and unethical.” Was I really such a prude? Beck was always accusing me of being too stiff, too uptight. Loosen up, my friend. Let go.
    “Who is it?”
    “Professor Langdon Hewes,” I said. He nodded as though the name meant something to him. He got internal for a second, maybe searching his memory for a connection. Of course, he’d be looking for connections now that two girls had gone missing in two years. Elizabeth’s death was ruled an accident, but no one had ever felt good about it. There were too many unanswered questions. Her parents had been back to town twice, trying to get the case reopened. So far, that hadn’t happened.
    “Why didn’t you tell me before that you two had argued?” he asked.
    “I don’t know,” I said. I blew out a breath, brought a hand to my forehead. There were a couple of ways I could play it. Finally, I said: “It didn’t seem important.”
    He cracked some tension out of his neck and leaned toward me.
    “But being mad at you would be a decent reason for her not to come back to the room.” He sounded cool and reasonable, like he was looking for a reason that Beck would be fucking with us.
    “I guess,” I said. “Honestly, it just wasn’t that heated, you know.” It hadn’t been, really. Not for us.
    The third time she disappeared was after our encounter at the frat party, our kiss. She didn’t come back to the room for three days after we slept off our hangovers. She’d met a guy in town a few days before the party, and she’d been yammering on about him in that kind of goading way she had—as though she was trying to elicitsome response from me. He was a construction worker or something, but he was into raves. He’s as dumb as a thumbtack, she said. But even thumbtacks have their application .
    She made a point of saying she was meeting him for coffee the day after, then spent the next three days at his place—blowing off classes, not returning calls. Her parents had come down that time, too. When she wasn’t getting enough attention, she still regaled me with tales of her sexual exploits that week; he was the best she’d ever had, she claimed. Which—coming from a nineteen-year-old—sounded pretty silly.
    I suppose she was trying to make me jealous, imagining her with someone else. She was a child, always looking for attention and drama to keep herself entertained. And she never heard from that guy again.
    “Someone said you were in tears.” The detective held me in his gaze; I could tell he wasn’t sure whether I was being honest or not.
    “I wasn’t,” I said with a little laugh. “Really.”
    “So after the library, where did you go?”
    “I came back here,” I said.
    “You left the library at around eight, according to witnesses,” said the detective. “And you came here around nine-thirty? But the library is only a ten-minute walk at most.”
    I didn’t say anything right away. I remember this from my father: Don’t say too much. Talk as little as possible.
    Finally, “I just walked around a bit.”
    “But you weren’t