Read Online Mr. Kiss and Tell by Rob Thomas - Free Book Online

could say anything else, Grace hung up.

CHAPTER NINE
    A few hours later, Veronica stood in front of the Eloise Gant Theatre Building at the heart of Hearst College’s verdant campus. The bell tower had just chimed five. The quad was almost deserted; very few students stuck around for summer. A single mole-like professor blinked and scurried toward the parking lot. Otherwise, the only movement was from the flock of pigeons strutting across the cobblestones.
    A painful sense of déjà vu set in. Veronica had gone to Hearst for a year before she transferred to Stanford, and happy memories were pretty thin on the ground. In fact she’d spent most of her first year of school trying to stop the Hearst Rapist, the predator who managed to drug and rape at least four women before Veronica finally exposed him. One of the victims had been Mac’s roommate—and Veronica had heard the assault as it happened. At the time she’d thought it was consensual; she’d heard a moan, a creak of bedsprings. It hadn’t occurred to her to turn on the lights and investigate.
    She’d never fully forgiven herself for that. Not even after she caught the rapist. If she’d just turned on the lights that night, if she’d just asked a simple question—
Hey, Parker, are you okay?
—she could have stopped him sooner.
    And here we are again: same shit, different day. Questioning a girl who’s already been through the details more times than anyone should ever have to.
    She steeled herself as best she could and pushed in through the building’s glass doors.
    Hearst’s main stage was a cavernous theater bounded by red velvet. Painted across its high ceiling was a dramatic, swirling mural of the constellations—Orion with his club, Ursa Major with its too-long tail, Pegasus with wings outstretched—dotted with pinprick lights that represented stars. She entered quietly, holding the door to keep it from shutting too hard. On the stage, a group of actors were clustered midscene. Veronica sat down in the back row of plush seats.
    A man at stage right held his back strangely hunched, facing a woman at stage left. Behind her a small entourage waited. Everyone was in street clothes, and it appeared to be early in rehearsals. Some of the ensemble didn’t seem to know where or how to stand yet, still experimenting with postures and blocking.
    “Sweet saint, for charity, be not so curst,” cooed the man, taking the woman’s hand in his. She violently snatched it away.
    “Foul devil, for God’s sake, hence, and trouble us not.”
    Veronica recognized the voice before she recognized the speaker. It was the same buttery alto she’d heard just a few hours earlier on the phone. Now, though, it rang from the rafters.
    “For thou hast made the happy earth thy hell, fill’d it with cursing cries and deep exclaims. If thou delight to view thy heinous deeds, behold this pattern of thy butcheries. O, gentlemen, see, see! Dead Henry’s wounds open their congeal’d mouths and bleed afresh!”
    Grace was almost unrecognizable as the exquisitely coiffed creature Veronica had seen in the surveillance photos. Now she wore slouchy boyfriend-cut jeans, a plain white tank top, and sneakers. Her hair was in a sloppy ponytail, her face free of makeup. But as she moved, Veronica could see it: that same deliberate energy, the same poise that she’d shown crossing a lobby in Jimmy Choos. She projected the nuance and subtlety of the scene to the very back of the theater.
    As the scene went on, Grace took a step toward the hunched man, her fingers clenching below her chin and then falling impotent at her sides. “O God, which this blood mad’st, revenge his death! O earth, which this blood drink’st revenge his death! Either heaven with lightning strike the murderer dead, or earth, gape open wide and eat him quick, as thou dost swallow up this good king’s blood which his hell-govern’d arm hath butchered!”
    She was good. No, not just good…she was remarkable.