Meg Cabot - Missing You

“No,” I said. “I told you. I don’t do that kind of thing anymore. And if you’re going to hang around with me, you can’t, either. There are better ways to make someone sorry for what they’ve done than smacking them.”

“Really?” Rob had stooped to pick up a magazine someone had left lying on the glass-topped coffee table in front of the flat-screen television.Teen People . “I’d be interested in hearing about them.”

“Watch and learn, my friend,” I said, heading to the bedroom. “Watch and learn.”

The bedroom was as depressing as the living room. Not because it was drab or poorly furnished. The opposite, in fact. The king-size bed was covered in a tasteful beige spread, the walls decorated with nicely framed Monet prints. There was an expensive gilt mirror above the long, modern-looking dresser, and the bathroom fixtures were top of the line.

It was a room that simply bore no hint of the personality of the person who lived in it. There was a hairbrush on the vanity, and a scattering of makeup. In the closet hung a few dresses and tops of a style that indicated their owner was young and reasonably attractive—or at least assured of her own good looks, since they were pretty skimpy.

But there were no photos, no books, no CDs—nothing at all, really, that gave any hint as to who the dark-haired girl really was.

“What are we looking for?” Rob wanted to know, pulling open dresser drawers and finding only jeans and—somewhat provocative—underwear in them.

“I’ll tell you when I see it,” I said, looking around the room. There was a smoke detector on the ceiling, centered directly over the bed.

“Maybe he went to his parents’ house,” Rob said, meaning Randy. “They live right here in town, you know. Over in that new subdivision behind the mall.”

“What new subdivision behind the mall?” I asked, startled.

“The one Randy Whitehead Senior built,” Rob said, looking surprised I didn’t know about it. Then he said, “Oh, that’s right. It was while you were gone. Well, he built a new subdivision. It’s full of five-, six-bedroom homes with three-car garages and in-ground pools.”

“McMansions,” I said.

“Right. I bet that’s where we’ll find Randy,” Rob said. “Holed up with Mom and Dad. They probably have a security system, even the subdivision is gated.”

I raised my eyebrows. “A gated community? Here in town? Seriously?”

“Keep out the riffraff,” Rob said. “And enraged older brothers who want to beat Randy’s face in.”

“We’re not looking for Randy,” I said, staring at my reflection in the gilt mirror above the dresser. The king-size bed was directly behind me.

“Well, whatare we looking for?” Rob wanted to know.

“I told you,” I said. “I’ll let you know when I find it. Help me move this mirror.”

Rob looked at the mirror, which was huge. “No way. It’s probably bolted to the wall.”

“It isn’t,” I said simply, and moved to put my hands under one end of the frame. “Come on. Lift.”

Rob went to the other end of the mirror, and together we lifted it off the wall. It wasn’t easy—the thing weighed a ton. And with the dresser in the way, it was hard to balance.

But eventually we got the mirror down, and leaned it up against the bed.

Then we both stared at the spot in the middle of the wall where the mirror had hung. The spot where a section of the wall had been cut out and a video camera tucked inside, where it had apparently been filming through the glass in the mirror, which was apparently not a mirror at all, but a piece of two-way.

Rob, seeing the camera, said a very bad word.

“Remember how you told me to tell you what we were looking for?” I said. “And I said I would when we found it? Well, we found it.”

Twelve

“But, seriously, Jess,” Rob said. “How’d you know?”

“I didn’t,” I said. We were sitting on the floor of the walk-in bedroom closet of Apartment 1S. Around us lay a pile of men’s shoes. They were what we’d pulled down from the closet shelf on which the video camera sat, pointing through the hole in the closet wall into the bedroom. Randy had obviously hidden the camera from view under piles of Adidas and JP Tod’s driving moccasins.

“I just guessed,” I said. “Something he said.”

Rob looked at the tapes we’d pulled down from a closet shelf high above our heads—I’d had to be lifted to reach it. Randy obviously used a stepladder. Each tape was neatly labeled with a name.CARLY .JASMINE .ALLISON .RACHEL .BETH .

There were multiple copies of each. Sadly, I think we were going to have to watch them in order to see if they were multiple copies of the same tape, or different movies of the same girl.

Not that it mattered. Except that if they were multiple copies of the same tape, it meant they weren’t merely for home use, but for distribution.

I wasn’t sure whether or not this had occurred to Rob yet, and I wasn’t about to bring it up. He looked pale enough as it was.

“He’s taping them,” he said dazedly from where he sat on the closet floor…which was carpeted in—what else?—beige.

“Some of them,” I said. I’d been relieved there’d been no tapes markedHANNAH . I just hoped the reason why—that the tapes of Hannah, if they existed, were upstairs in 2T—didn’t occur to him.

“You don’t think he’s got tapes of Hannah somewhere?” Rob demanded.

Ooops. So I guess ithad occurred to him.

“Let’s not jump to conclusions,” I said.

But it was too late. Rob was already on his feet.

Damn it.

I struggled to put all the videotapes we’d pulled out back into the boxes they’d come from.

“Rob,” I said. “Wait. Don’t do anything—”

“Don’t do anything what?” Rob demanded, whipping around to glare down at me from the closet doorway. “Hasty? Violent? What? Jess, what do you want me to do? That’s mysister .”

Then he turned around and stomped from the room.

Damn it again. I shoved all the videos I could grab into the box I was holding, and staggered out after him. I’m not kidding, that box was heavy. There were a lot of videos in it.

“Rob,” I called. “Rob, don’t—”

But it was too late. He’d left the apartment.

I knew where he was going, though, and I hurried after him, lugging the box of tapes.

“Rob,” I said, lurching out into the warm evening air and following him up the outdoor cement steps to the second floor of the apartment complex. “You don’t want to do this.”

“Actually,” he said, as he breezed past 2S, and found himself outside 2T. “I really do.”

“Well, at least let me—”

But it was too late. Before I had a chance to take out my ID card, he’d kicked the door open with a single powerful blow from the heel of his motorcycle boot.

“Well,” I said, putting down the box of tapes and following him inside, “that was subtle. No one noticed that, I’m sure.”

Two-T looked exactly the same as I’d left it a few hours before. And the setup was exactly the same as it had been in the apartment below. The camera was in the bedroom closet, behind the mirror. Only the names on the videotapes were different. There were, unfortunately, several markedHANNAH.

“That’s it,” Rob muttered. “He’s dead.”

“No, he isn’t,” I said tartly, taking the videotape from his hands and putting it back in the box it had come from. “You aren’t going to do anything to him, Rob. I mean it. The police can handle it.”

Rob’s breathing was on the heavy side. He seemed to be trying to force down something that wouldn’t stay put.

“That’s what you’re going to do with those?” he demanded, thrusting his chin towards the box I was holding. “Hand them over to the police?”