Cross My Heart (Alex Cross 21)

Karla Mepps took off her leather jacket, revealing just how tightly the long-sleeved white turtleneck clung to her breasts. She cocked her head coyly, as if she’d caught him looking, and said, “But you like girls, right?”

“Well, yeah. Sure,” he said, feeling his cheeks burn and happening to glance at the back of her left hand where the sleeve had pulled back. She had some kind of tattoo there, like the tail of some animal.

“Well, yeah, sure,” she said, and laughed. “Good. The other way would have been such a tragic waste to womanhood.”

Damon didn’t understand at first, but then did, and his ears burned, too. He couldn’t look at her and instead turned his gaze back to that tattoo of a tail slinking out from under her sleeve. What kind of tail? He wondered what the rest of the tattoo looked like.

“You wanted to ask more about the school?” he said finally.

“I do,” Karla Mepps said.

And for the next half hour, she kept the conversation squarely on school life, asking first about housing. He explained that the annual housing lottery was at the end of the school year, with seniors having first draw. He’d picked tenth and gotten one of the nicest rooms on campus, a single with a fireplace on the first floor of North Dorm, looking toward the woods, where he often saw deer in the morning.

“Can you show me this North Dorm on the map?” she asked, getting the school’s brochure out of her jacket pocket.

Damon did and then said, “We didn’t get over there on the tour. Here’s a picture of North, though.”

He pushed the brochure back to her and tapped a photograph of a granite-faced building that looked more than a hundred years old. “That’s my room there on the far left corner.”

“Yes?” she said, and studied it carefully. “Very lucky.”

“I was. Yes.”

When Karla Mepps asked about the quality of the tea

ching at the school, Damon replied that every teacher he’d had at Kraft was tough but seemed to care about him, and that the teachers were almost always available.

“Your parents?” she asked. “They’re happy, too?”

Damon hadn’t really thought about it before, but he nodded. “I think they would say so. My dad says I’ve grown up a lot the past couple of years.”

“You see them often?”

“Every six or seven weeks,” Damon replied. “Either they come up here for a long weekend, or I go home on vacations. And summers, of course.”

“How many vacations do students get?”

Damon had to think about that. “Four—three long, one short at Thanksgiving. Then three weeks at Christmas, and like ten days at Easter.”

Karla Mepps found that interesting. “So you have a vacation soon?”

“I leave a week from Friday morning,” he replied, nodding.

“And how will you get home to…?”

“Washington?” Damon said. “I usually get a jitney in town that takes me over to Albany to catch the train.”

“Amtrak?”

He nodded. “Takes five or six hours.”

“That’s not bad,” she allowed. “But I wonder if my sister will want my nephew to fly all that way alone back to Louisiana on breaks.”

“They have, like, escorts and stuff for that,” Damon offered. “Some of the younger kids get them.”

She smiled again as she stood. “Well, thank you, Damon Cross. I must go. It’s getting dark and I have a long way to drive.”

“Oh, sure,” he said, struggling to get up. “Hope I’ve helped.”