Dead Waters - Anton Strout [106]
“What is this place?” she asked. “Are you police?”
I pointed over to a bunch of chairs along one wall. “Consider this your home until we get some answers,” I said. “Sit!”
“What are you holding us on?” she said, taking her time sitting down, prim and proper. Darryl sat down next to her, but Heavy Mike sat two chairs away holding his injured hand. Trent remained standing.
“Okay, forget about tonight,” I said. “Forget about making me watch one of my least favorite people around here—Director Wesker—take a perverse joy in killing that evil goateed version of me. Let’s put that aside for now. Answer me this: Where’s your blond friend George?”
The blank look disappeared from Elyse’s face. Concern spread across it. “I have no idea,” she said. “I think he said he was heading out of town for a few days. I think he said it was his sister’s quinceañera.”
I knelt down in front of her, staring her straight in the face. “You’re lying,” I said.
“Am I?” she said with a grim smile.
I nodded.
“He used to be a thief,” Jane said. “He knows what lying is.”
“You’re a good actress, Elyse,” I said, “but you’re not that good.”
I walked away from her, went to the workbench, and grabbed George’s messenger bag off of it.
“I don’t think George is going to turn up anytime soon,” I said, walking back over to her. I flipped open the bag’s flap and pulled out the crushed remains of his laptop. “See this? See the bend in the middle, the shattered pieces flaking off of it? I have a feeling that your friend’s body probably ended up in worse shape than that. And I think you probably knew that George was dead, didn’t you?”
Elyse went green at the gills. Darryl did, too, a grayness overtaking his dark skin.
“Yes,” she said, letting out a long breath. “And it’s my fault.” She looked scared for a change, and for once, I was pretty sure she wasn’t acting. “I didn’t think the professor’s plan had worked until a few days ago. When we first took up with him, we knew he had spent years trying to get his magical process to work, but we thought it was only to further his cinematic frustrations with a lack of real fear that he felt was missing from the horror genre. I suspected there might be something more to it, but wasn’t sure what. When he ‘died’ suddenly, I started poring through his notes and at the same time I also discovered instructions he had left me on what he wanted done after his death. I was supposed to go to this lighthouse he mentioned out on Wards Island and play his final film there. He said it was already loaded into the projector and everything, but when I got to the lighthouse, it wasn’t there.”
“Guess who got there first?” I asked.
“So how does this end up with you trying to kill me?” Trent asked, incredulous. “Why?”
Elyse sighed, dropping her eyes to the floor. “I woke up the other night to discover the professor in my dorm room. . . young again and looking crazed. His notes had hinted at cheating death, but how could he be alive and so young? Darryl was with me. He saw the professor, too.”
Darryl nodded.
“Did he say what he wanted?” the Inspectre asked.
“The professor confirmed that the magic could work,” he said. “He was living proof, but he said that it came with a price none of us had counted on. He came looking for blood.”
“Let me guess,” I said. “Yours?”
“That’s what we thought,” she said, “but no. He said I was his favorite. He said he’d spare me.”
“Us,” Darryl amended. “He said he’d spare us.”
“So you offered him someone,” I said. “Someone expendable. A freshman.”
“George,” Trent said, his face turning horrified as he spoke his dead friend’s name. “You gave him George.”
“I know underclassmen barely earn a blip on your radar,” I said, “but this is beyond the beyond.”
The shame on Elyse’s face was evident. Her brow grew thick with wrinkles as she broke into hysterical sobs. “I’m sorry,” she said between gasps of breath. “What do you want from me? He would have killed us instead!”
“I thought you said you were his favorite,” Jane reminded her.