Squirming her shoulders like a penguin, head down under a spray of yellow hair, Ruby Rose pushed through the tangle of legs, arms, and backpacks at the door and tripped down the steps of DeWitt Lab School, annoyed about something but not sure what it was.
Which only made things worse.
"School's out, Ruby. Why you always want to be staring at the ground like that?"
No need to look up. Rex. She could almost hear the lunatic smile on his huge face; he probably grinned in his sleep.
"What do you mean always?" Ruby asked, studying her purple boots and keeping them in rhythm for luck: three regular steps and one long stride, three plus one, three plus one, three and one…
"I mean, you're so busy counting your steps that you're about to miss Simon and his briefcase. Pick up your head and check this."
The briefcase-that was it: the annoying thing.
Simon Buscombe, spidery with damp hair and a fake limp, strode along in front of them, carrying a briefcase that he'd recently started bringing to school instead of a backpack. A briefcase, for eighth grade! Simon being Simon, he'd been all pompous and secretive, making sure no one peeked inside the briefcase when he opened it in class and carefully removed a piece of paper.
"Look. He got that thing handcuffed to his wrist!" Rex said. "Like he's carrying nuclear secrets in there, CIA documents and whatnot. Don't that beat all? And you know all's he got in there is a bunch of them grimy headbands he wears."
"Hey, you do not want terrorists getting their hands on those," Ruby said.
"Aww, no, you do not, now. Drop one of those into the water supply, paralyze the whole city. Toxic onion rings. Weapons of mass putrification."
Ruby started to smile when a hissing sound came from behind and someone said, "Lookit there, the poison girl. Who're you and your dad going to take out next?"
Rex turned, his surprise hardening into a cold stare. He searched the scattering crowd: some high schoolers, others younger, too many kids chuckling and smirking to tell who it was. Another voice called out, "The Poison Rose!"
Ruby clenched her fists. What a place, she thought. DeWitt Lab School, all these young geniuses, the sons and daughters of professors: "the little gods," Rex called them. Didn't even know you existed until they learned that your dad worked in the lab where a crime happened.
What a crime, though! Dr. Ramachandran, the great genius of DeWitt Polytechnic University (which contained the Lab School), poisoned and dead on campus. Murdered. Right there in his office in the forensics laboratory where Ruby had been a hundred times, doing homework. The little gods should be begging her for details about the lab if they were half as smart as they thought they were.
"Rex, c'mon, forget it," she said, turning her friend around. "Let's pull out of here."
Ruby started counting steps again. Oh, to describe all this to a real friend-to Lillian from back in Spring Valley, Arkansas, where Ruby used to live. Rex and Spider Simon with his briefcase and the little gods: Lillian would scream out loud.
Three plus one, three and one… The street from school-she'd describe that, too. College Avenue got stickier and dirtier as it approached their neighborhood, College Gardens, aka "the Gardens," with its Caribbean stores, nail shops, wig shops, moldy bars with moldy people in them all the time. And here, smack in the middle, Garden Terrace Apartments, "the Terraces," the rotting brick-pile tower where she lived.
"What's she always looking at?" said Ruby.
Rex glanced up to the ninth floor where a woman's head was barely visible behind the glare of a window.
"The Window Lady?" Rex shrugged and turned to dash up the steps. "Maybe she got no TV-more later, Ruby."
The first thing Ruby heard when she pushed through the door of her apartment was a rhythmic sound. Pacing. Her father, in front of the table in their small living room. Pacing, serious, holding a letter, his face squeezed up.
"Dad," she said. "What?"
"Nothing, Ru," Mr. Rose said, folding and unfolding the letter, looking for a moment like a little boy, ten-year-old James Rose seeing his first bad report card.
"Ruby, I need to tell you something," he said.
She waited. She could see the DeWitt crest on the letter. That couldn't be good.
"You know about Dr. Ramachandran, of course," Mr. Rose began. He was her dad again. "And you know I was working that night, like normal. Well, Ruby, I'm-" His shoulders fell, and he turned away. "I have to go in for more questioning by the police."
Ruby had to force her words out. "Can't you, you know, find out what really happened?"
"How, Ru? I have to get a lawyer. I don't even know how to do that."
"Well, can't you investigate? Ask people at the lab, like they do on TV? You work there."
"Not anymore, Ruby. Not anymore. My security card was taken away. I can't even get back into the lab. No one who worked there can. I need to talk to someone, I just-I don't know. There's a lawyer comes into Biddy's a lot."
Ruby did not want her father going down to Biddy Runyan's, not now. Biddy's was one of the bars on College Avenue where the older neighborhood people went. Not the best place on earth to look for a lawyer. Her father often went there when he was upset and was worse when he returned.
Ruby picked up the DeWitt Echo and reread the newspaper's story on the Ramachandran murder. Found in his office at a minute before 8 o'clock last Friday. The only people there, other than her dad, were the school's dean, a publicity person, and four graduate students-all of whom Ruby knew.
The university police suspected that the professor had died "from the effects of a monkshood cocktail," the article said. Some help that was. Ruby sneaked another look at her dad, who now seemed to be talking mostly to himself.
"I don't believe it," Mr. Rose was saying. "These people at the university, they really think… "
