The Dead Girl's Wheel of Wish novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Who Said It

Elias takes Jo to Corinna's old room, they fight and set terms, and a notebook lists twelve usernames. At 2:14 they watch Dane climb the fire stair.

"I know what it says," I said.

My voice came out thin and strange in the cold air.

"Then say why," Elias said.

He didn't say it loudly.

He picked up the box and started walking, and I followed him because the alternative was standing alone on the path.

Corinna's room was on the second floor of Linden House, and the door was still taped with a campus police notice.

Elias tore the notice off with his thumb and let me in first.

I had lived in this room until January.

My bed was gone, and a bare mattress stood on its side against the wall.

Corinna's side looked the way she'd left it, with the pink lamp's empty spot on the desk and the dried lavender over the window.

"I closed at the diner that night," I said. "A double. I got back at one and fell asleep in my clothes with my phone on silent."

Elias sat down on the edge of her desk.

"You slept."

"Yes."

"She called you at 2:14 and you slept."

"Yes," I said. "I saw it at seven. I've been looking at it every night since, so you don't have to say it to me."

He looked at the floor for a long time.

When he spoke again, he had his hands pressed flat on his knees.

"I read that log in my truck outside the police station," he said. "I hated you for a week. I came here planning to find you and ask you what could possibly have been more important."

"And?"

"And then I watched a girl take a phone out of her best friend's hand in front of two hundred people who wanted to hang her for it."

He raised his head.

"Why did you do it? Don't give me a speech. Tell me what you know."

So I told him.

I told him about the letter on Corinna's bed in February, and the Hollis Law seat with her name at the top.

I told him about Dane's blazer and Brock's five million and the lab partner with Corinna's cheekbones.

I told him the wheel had given away three things in three days, and every one of them had been Corinna's, or the shape of Corinna's.

I did not tell him about the counter yet, because I didn't know what it meant.

"They aren't gifts," I said. "She's not forgiving anybody. I don't know what it is, but a girl who got buried a week ago doesn't throw a party for the people who put her there."

"Maybe somebody else is running it."

"Maybe."

"Maybe you're wrong and the girl's mother lives."

"Maybe," I said. "But I'd rather be wrong about that than right about the other thing."

Elias pulled open the desk drawer behind him.

"The police boxed up everything on top," he said. "They didn't look in here."

Under a pile of sticky notes was a green spiral notebook.

He opened it to the last used page, and I came around the desk to read over his arm.

Across the top, in Corinna's square handwriting, it said: WHO SAID IT.

Under it were twelve usernames in a column, each with a time and a date.

BT_lax was at the top.

Next to it she had written: first repost, 12:04 a.m.

My throat closed.

"She was keeping count," Elias said.

"She was collecting evidence," I said. "She was going to take it somewhere."

"Instead she took it to the roof."

I turned to go.

I didn't know where I was going, only that I couldn't stand in that room another minute.

His hand closed around my wrist.

It wasn't hard.

It was warm and rough, with a callus along the edge of the palm.

"Don't go yet," he said.

I looked at his hand and he looked at it too, and let go.

"We should set something up," I said, because the silence was worse. "Terms."

"Terms."

"Until that wheel is gone, this is about her and nothing else. Nothing personal. I don't need you to forgive me and you don't need to be nice to me."

"Fine," he said.

"Fine."

"Nothing personal, Hartigan."

His phone buzzed on the desk.

Then mine buzzed in my pocket.

We read them at the same time.

Mine was the one I had already seen.

His was new, from Corinna_S: Bell Hall. 2:14 tonight. Bring her.

Elias set the phone down on the desk and kept his hand on it.

"Whoever this is," he said, "they know who you are."

"Or she does."

He didn't answer.

We spent the next hours with the lights off, sitting on opposite ends of Corinna's bare floor, because the window faced the quad and Bell Hall rose on the far side of it.

At midnight the campus went dark and quiet.

At one he stood up and stretched, and I looked at the back of his neck.

At two he gave me his flannel jacket without comment, because I had started shivering.

At 2:13 the roof of Bell Hall was black against a grey sky.

At 2:14 a shape appeared on the outside fire stair of Bell Hall.

It was a man in a T-shirt, climbing steadily without a light.

Under the stair lamp on the third landing, I saw that his feet were bare.

I knew the straight set of those shoulders even in the dark.

"That's Dane Whitlow," I said.

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