In the Blood by Lisa Unger Page B

was shaky and fragile, ready to shatter.
    As I put his snack on the table my phone chimed. It was a text from Ainsley:
    Still no sign of Beck. Her parents are here. Can u come back? I’m losing it.
    “What’s wrong?” Luke stood in the doorway, watching.
    “Nothing,” I said. “Just some problem with my roommates.”
    I didn’t know what was okay to say to him. Even though I hadn’t wanted him to, Langdon had apparently asked around about Luke.
    “He’s very smart,” Langdon had told me. He’d held me after class. “His IQ is higher than most of the doctors on staff, including mine. He has a history of violence with other children, teachers. He is disruptive in the classroom, a wild and incorrigible liar.”
    “I haven’t seen any of this,” I’d told him.
    I’d sat back at my desk in the front row. The room was a windowless space with plush stadium seating. It was in one of the more modern buildings. There were power outlets every few feet on the floor. The seats were generous and comfortable, the half-moon desktops polished wood. No expense was ever spared at Sacred Heart, no corners ever cut. We had a chef in our kitchen, Chef Bruce, and the restaurant served things like Chilean sea bass with lentils and saffron rice accompanied by a vegetable medley, as well as staples like free-range chicken sandwiches (with apple-wood bacon and white cheddar), or all-beef hot dogs with hand-cut fries, fresh-mozzarella Margherita personal pizzas, and organic beef hamburgers.
    “He was a little prickly that first day,” I said. “But since then, we’ve gotten along fine.”
    “There were other incidents. A fire in a wastepaper basket—though no one could prove conclusively that it was Luke. Playgroundfights, which might or might not have been his fault. In second grade, he was so viciously unkind to an overweight girl, such an unrelenting bully, drawing support from other bad personalities in the classroom, that her parents moved her to another school. Luke was reprimanded, but his abuse was only verbal, so no real action was taken. It was almost as if he was already learning how to work the system. He had already learned how to pick on people who were vulnerable, and do it in such a way that he couldn’t quite be punished. He was a natural leader, mainly because children feared him.”
    “I have to be honest,” I said. “I can’t reconcile any of that with the boy I know.”
    But Langdon went on.
    “In fourth grade, he developed an unhealthy attachment to his teacher, a young married woman in her late twenties. When he learned she was pregnant, he turned hostile, verbally abusive. He called her a whore, told her that he hoped she miscarried her baby. Finally, he tripped her as she was walking through the aisles during an independent work period. He was expelled.”
    “Expelled?”
    “Yeah,” said Langdon. “Kind of a big deal for an eight-year-old. But it was the total lack of remorse that really unsettled the headmaster. He wrote that Luke didn’t seem to care, or even to understand, what he had done. He maliciously tripped a pregnant woman; lots of kids saw him do it. When asked if he’d like to draft a letter of apology to his teacher, he refused. ‘She should apologize to me,’ he allegedly said. ‘She said she loved me.’ ”
    I involuntarily shuddered as a sudden chill settled over the room.
    “His mother homeschooled him after that,” he said. “Finally, she enrolled him in Fieldcrest. We only have her account of the lasttwo years, which she describes as ‘challenging.’ But since he began at Fieldcrest this fall, he has been a model of good behavior, and is well beyond his age as far as academics are concerned. So she obviously did something right. Or he’s very motivated to stay at Fieldcrest for some reason.”
    “There are locks on the outside of his door,” I said.
    Langdon raised an eyebrow at that. “Is that so?”
    “I don’t know if they were already there when they