41

Pella, having showered and dressed, dried her hair and done her makeup, was pacing the apartment waiting for David to return. Amid the scatter of papers on her dad’s desk in the study lay a half-full pack of Parliaments. He really was smoking again, as she’d suspected; something was up with him. She needed to make him stop, even if that meant calling his doctor and tattling on him; smoking was streng verboten in the Affenlight family.

She’d never smoked much herself, not since junior high anyway, but a cigarette right now would calm her nerves. She tapped one out with her uninjured hand and managed to light it with a match without smearing her still-wet nails. She opened the study window. No sooner had she leaned out to exhale than her father emerged from the front door of the building kitty-corner to Scull Hall. She didn’t have a very good handle on the campus layout—the buildings all looked alike, with their weathered gray stone—but she was pretty sure that one was a dorm, the same dorm Henry pointed to last night when he offered to go get her ice. Her dad looked left, right, left, like a noir character who thought somebody might be tailing him. Then he headed across the quad toward the alley behind the dining hall, where he kept his car.

Three and a half minutes later, as she stubbed out the cigarette on the window frame, Owen Dunne emerged from the same door—which made sense, since Henry and Owen were roommates, though it didn’t explain why her dad had been in there. Maybe it was a mixed-use building; maybe he’d needed that ice machine.

The downstairs buzzer rang; David was here. Cue ominous music. She ran to the bathroom to gargle some mouthwash.