No Such Person Read online

  NOVELS BY CAROLINE B. COONEY

  The Lost Songs

  Three Black Swans

  They Never Came Back

  If the Witness Lied

  Diamonds in the Shadow

  A Friend at Midnight

  Hit the Road

  Code Orange

  The Girl Who Invented Romance

  Family Reunion

  Goddess of Yesterday

  The Ransom of Mercy Carter

  Tune In Anytime

  Burning Up

  What Child Is This?

  Driver’s Ed

  Twenty Pageants Later

  Among Friends

  The Time Travelers, Volumes I and II

  THE JANIE BOOKS

  The Face on the Milk Carton

  Whatever Happened to Janie?

  The Voice on the Radio

  What Janie Found

  What Janie Saw (a digital original short story)

  Janie Face to Face

  THE TIME TRAVEL QUARTET

  Both Sides of Time

  Out of Time

  Prisoner of Time

  For All Time

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2015 by Caroline B. Cooney

  Cover art copyright © 2015 by Tasha Marie

  Interior photographs courtesy of the author

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Visit us on the Web! randomhouseteens.com

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Cooney, Caroline B.

  No such person / Caroline Cooney.

  pages cm

  Summary: “A murder mystery in a small town raises suspicions when a member of a well-regarded family in the community is implicated”—Provided by publisher.

  ISBN 978-0-385-74291-7 (trade hardcover) — ISBN 978-0-375-99084-7 (library binding) — ISBN 978-0-307-97952-0 (ebook) [1. Mystery and detective stories. 2. Murder—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.C7834No 2015

  [Fic]—dc23

  2014025075

  eBook ISBN 9780307979520

  Cover design by Torborg Davern

  eBook design based on interior design by Heather Kelly

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v4.1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Novels by Caroline B. Cooney

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part 1

  Part 2

  Part 3

  Part 4

  Part 5

  Part 6

  Part 7

  Part 8

  Part 9

  Part 10

  Part 11

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  It began one summer on the river….

  At first the police are casual.

  She too is casual. Puzzled, but not worried.

  The questions become more intense.

  The questions frighten her.

  Where are the police going with this? They are not giving her time to think. Her tongue is dry and tastes of metal. Her hands are damp. Her breath is ragged.

  They’re asking her about the boat. About the ownership of the boat. About the river. About the woods.

  It’s difficult to swallow. Her voice rises in pitch. The police seem pleased by her fear.

  They have found the gun. They are holding it in a handkerchief. The crisp white cotton hangs down and the small dark weapon is thrust into her face for identification.

  They are standing too close to her, but she cannot back away. There is nowhere to go.

  “Yes, but it was just target practice,” she says. She looks into the woods beyond the police officers. The towering trees are thick with vines and undergrowth, noisy with the clamor of insects. The heat of the day is crushing. Does she really prance into those woods? Hold a real gun and shoot a real bullet?

  She is blinded by the horror of what they are saying now.

  She stares at the gun. It is small and stubby. It will have her fingerprints on it. Her palm print.

  “That’s impossible,” she whispers.

  It is not impossible that a gun could kill. It is not impossible that the police have found a body. The impossible part is that she has anything to do with it.

  “Red bandanna,”she explains, gulping air into her lungs. “We tied it to a tree. For target practice.”

  She has never touched a gun before. She is anti-gun. She believes that people who own and use guns are sick and must be controlled. She would never live in one of those states where people shoot for the fun of shooting. Only people in the army should use guns and even then, they should only be peace-keepers.

  But there she was, a few hours ago: giggling, happy, flirting, going along with the idea. Using the gun herself.

  They want to know more about him.

  She gives them his name and is frightened by how little else she knows. How few facts she can come up with. This is impossible. Of course she knows something about him.

  They feel the same. Of course you know.

  She shakes her head. It does something to her body. Now she’s shaking all over.

  They want her to come with them. She cannot seem to coordinate her feet. They pull at her to get her going. She is horrified by their hands on her. She draws her elbows in and hunches down. Her teeth are chattering.

  She wants to see the dead person, but they won’t let her. It’s a crime scene, they explain. They imply that she has already seen it.

  No! she thinks. There was no one there. It didn’t happen.

  The police stare at her. Their eyes glitter. She is a fawn surrounded by wolves.

  She and the police walk up a path. She has not noticed the path until now. The salt marsh is on her right, the reeds taller than she is. Impenetrable. Quivery in the wind. The woods are on the left. The ground is low-lying and often flooded, so debris piles up against the tree trunks.

  She can barely find a place to put her feet, never mind her thoughts.

  This cannot be happening.

  She is a good person. A moral person. A successful person.

  Someone in the woods is dead by gunshot? They must be wrong about that.

  There was nobody there, she tells herself. I didn’t shoot anybody.

  They have reached a road. She is surprised to find pavement so close. Coming by water, the place seemed so remote. She doesn’t recognize the road, which is confusing, because she is a local. It must be someone’s driveway. But she sees no house. Instead she sees a police car. Parked behind it are two more police cars.

  They open the back door of the cruiser. The back is where prisoners go. They are opening that door for her. She stops walking. She tries to grip the soil with the bottoms of her sneakers.

  The female officer asks what is in the pocket of her Bermuda shorts. “Is it a weapon? Anything sharp?”

  It is her cell phone, of course. They do not let her pull it out. They take it.

  Her hand actually aches for the weight and texture of that little rectangle. The cell phone is her best friend. It never lets her down.

  Now it is evidence.
r />   She has not agreed to this. She will be lost without her phone. She must have it back. She reaches to retrieve it, and they glare at her as if she is overstepping the bounds, to want her own cell phone in her own hand.

  They tell her to get into the back of the police car.

  Rarely in her life has she even been nervous. Now fear owns her, like a dog holding a duck in its teeth. She shoves at the fear, but it is a police officer she is hitting. They take her arm. Not roughly, but as if it is theirs. She tries to pull free. They’re too strong.

  They shout at her to calm down and behave.

  No!

  Nothing will make her get into that police car. This is not her life! This is not—

  They grip her shoulders and elbows. They pull her arms behind her.

  They are going to put handcuffs on her wrists.

  She doubles over, drags them down, tries to head butt them.

  They are shouting in her ear, deafening her, trying to knee her into the car.

  She is screaming, kicking. She would bite them if she could.

  “Stop it!” they yell at her.

  She is an animal. Intelligence, knowledge and poise are gone. She who dislikes bracelets, can’t stand the jangle, is irritated by how they slide up, slide down—she now has bracelets that cannot be removed.

  They tell her to be good; to cooperate. Act your age, they say, as if she is having a tantrum in kindergarten.

  She fights so hard it takes four of them to trap her in the backseat of the police car, and before they are done, they have also fastened her ankles together with a padded Velcro strip, like a massive Band-Aid.

  They close the door.

  The brutal metallic slam shuts her up. She stops screaming. She doesn’t look left or right, up or down. She freezes, hoping it will all go away, like a shadow in the night.

  I won’t cry, she tells herself.

  But she does.

  The tears stream down her face. She has no tissue. She can’t even use her short sleeve because of the way her wrists are fastened.

  There is so much horror in her mind that she can’t arrange it; can’t assess it. Pieces of nightmare fly in her face like the wings of vultures; like carrion birds eager to chew on her flesh.

  Who is dead?

  Why do they think I did it?

  Are they right?

  What if they are right?

  Am I a killer?

  SATURDAY MORNING

  The cottage is close to the edge of the bluff. The steep riverbank is rough with stubby willows, pricker bushes and one massive oak. Long rickety stairs in need of painting lead forty feet down to a skinny dock, more of a shelf really, where their Zodiac, a rugged flat-bottomed rubber-raft-type boat from which they fish and swim, bumps gently in the wake of a passing powerboat.

  There are only a dozen houses on this part of the Connecticut River. They are cut off on the south by a tidal marsh filled with islets of pine and rock, and on the north by a ravine, impassable because of a tumbling brook and a fall of glacial rocks. The Allerdon cottage is the only house at the very edge of the river. Several houses are hard by the narrow country road and a few are across the road, tucked among rocks and crags. Those houses have no river access, but wonderful views.

  The big screened porch juts out from the back of the Allerdon cottage, almost hanging over the river. They often refer to the cottage as a screened porch that handily comes with a kitchen and bath.

  They have been awake since the first bass boat streaked down the river for the opening of a tournament.

  Miranda’s father has made an enormous pot of coffee. He is on his third cup, not awake from the caffeine, but happily comatose with relief that he does not drive into the office on Saturdays.

  Her mother is still sipping her first cup. She is curled on the chaise with the neighbor’s dog, Barrel, who comes over every morning for his own coffee. He likes milk and extra sugar.

  Miranda is doing nothing, which is what summer is for. Her only plan for the entire day is to take Barrel for a run.

  The neighborhood boys will be over at some point during the morning. Henry and Hayden Warren, who are seven and six, always show up. Jack, who is twelve, will come, hoping that Miranda is baking. She might. She loves to bake. And baking is cheerful proof that she is not wasting the entire day. Geoffrey, who is her own age, will lumber noisily through the bushes. It’s a neighborhood thing or maybe a boy thing: never use the driveway if you can push through the shrubbery. Geoffrey will fish off their dock or maybe play catch with Miranda’s father, a mindless activity they both love. Stu, whose house is highest on the hill, and whose parents have let the trees in front grow up so high they hardly have a river view anymore, may put his kayak in from their dock. Stu is a little too old to be called a boy, but each year he attends and drops out of yet another college, which seems to keep him young. Stu has a long-term crush on Miranda’s sister, Lander.

  Lander of course is achieving things. Lander is twenty-two, having finished college in the same blaze of glory with which she finished high school. In a few weeks, she is going on to medical school, where she will become a surgeon. This is perfect for Lander, who has a cutting-edge personality. Miranda is seven years younger than her sister, and their lives have never really intersected.

  Miranda is surprised to find herself up and around. During the summer she doesn’t usually get up until lunch is in sight.

  Lander, however, rarely goes to bed before one or two a.m., and is up at dawn. Her agenda is long and fierce, and Lander completes everything in a timely fashion. Right now, Lander is gazing at the screen of her laptop. Although Lander does play many games, she is probably studying. Lander has already finished one e-textbook for a course that won’t begin until next month.

  Henry and Hayden, still in their pajamas, gallop across other people’s backyards, whoop hello and throw open the screen door. There’s a door at each end of the long porch and the slap of wooden doors against wooden frames is one of Miranda’s favorite summer sounds. Miranda hugs the boys. It’s a lot like hugging Barrel. The dog sheds and drools; Henry and Hayden are sticky and damp, having just had cereal, spilling the milk on themselves. The boys often spend the night in the Allerdon cottage so that Miranda can babysit without going anywhere. Henry and Hayden love dragging their sleeping bags across the grass and staying out in the screened porch with Miranda. There are always big plans for learning stars and constellations, but nothing ever comes of it because they instantly fall asleep.

  Lander is not a fan of grubby little boys. She retreats to the kitchen.

  Out in the water, the Saturday circus is on.

  There are powerboats, sailboats, Jet Skis, kayaks, canoes and one raft. The river is very wide here. A few hundred yards out, a small powerboat tows a boy learning to water-ski. Miranda picks up the binoculars. The driver of the boat and the boy on skis are shirtless and muscular. They are far and away the best scenery on the river.

  The boy driving the powerboat—which is called the Paid at Last; it is amazing to Miranda that people would squander a wonderful boat-naming opportunity by calling it after their finances—is dark-haired, and his hair is wet, and his body gleams, perhaps with sunblock. The boy in the water is blond and has no idea what he is doing. The few times he does manage to stand on the skis, he immediately falls back in the water.

  The boat driver circles, giving advice, making sure his friend has a good grip on the tow rope, and then accelerates again, hoping for success.

  To Miranda’s amazement, Lander produces a plate of toaster waffles for Henry and Hayden to share. The boys are ardent with gratitude. They slosh rivers of syrup over the waffles and eat with their fingers. Lander walks over to Miranda and extends her hand for the binoculars, like a surgeon extending her palm, expecting the nurse to put the proper scalpel in the proper position.

  Miranda would like to tell her sister that the way to acquire the binoculars is to ask courteously for a turn. But Lander doesn’t operate like that
. Every encounter with her older sister requires Miranda either to confront Lander or submit to her.

  Lander hasn’t been home much in four years. Once she leaves for medical school, she really won’t be home much. The last thing their parents want during the final month of summer is bickering, so Miranda doesn’t start anything, although there is something so satisfying about bickering. No one can ever win; it’s like tossing a baseball back and forth.

  Miranda hands Lander the binoculars. Lander does not say thank you, because Miranda is just a little sister, not a person.

  Miranda feels the usual stab of regret that she and her sister are not friends. They aren’t enemies. They just aren’t close and she has never figured out how to solve this.

  She goes to the other end of the porch, where the scope sits on a tripod, focused on an osprey nest across the river. They have watched several generations of fish hawks rear their young, catch their fish, hang out on their snags and sail in the wind. But Miranda is not interested in nature, although it’s nice to have around. Miranda is interested in people. Right now, she is interested in the two handsome male people on display in the water.

  She refocuses the scope.

  The two young men are laughing. She can’t hear them over the sounds of many boat motors but she laughs with them. Miranda loves laughter. She believes that Lander doesn’t laugh enough, but although it is fine for the older sister to tell the younger one how to improve, it never works when the younger sister tells the older one how to improve.

  The young man driving the powerboat wears baggy shorts and no shirt. The young man water-skiing wears tight black swim trunks and a large silver-and-blue flotation device. Both have fairly long hair, the wet fair hair of the skier plastered to his skull and the dark hair of the driver blowing in the wind.

  “I pick the driver,” says Lander, smiling at Miranda, and Miranda melts, because attention from Lander is so infrequent. “Okay,” she agrees. “I take the water skier.”