Plastic Smile (Russell's Attic Book 4) Read Online Free PDF Page B

the glass of water down on his table, undrunk. “I had my own grave, did you know?”
    “No,” he said after a moment.
    “Not a grave, really. One of those shelves in the wall behind a plaque. Where they put ashes.”
    “A wall niche,” he said. Know-it-all.
    “I don’t know why I knew to go there,” I said. “I have no idea. I just went. And then I was standing there, in front of this wall with names all across it…”
    I’d subconsciously expected something mathematical to jump out at me. Some confluence of vectors, some fascinating numerical cluster that would tell me why the fuck I’d come.
    Instead, I’d seen my name.
    “It’s not every day you see your own grave, right? Fuck if I’m going to leave that alone. I smashed it all open. Nice metal urn inside, but instead of my ashes, there was a note, because apparently I am an excessively morbid person. That’s what I got out of this whole thing, anyway.”
    “Sounds more practical than morbid,” said Checker.
    “I left myself a note in a cemetery,” I said, managing to roll my eyes around and focus on him condescendingly.
    “Where else could you leave something for years or decades, undisturbed?” pointed out Checker. “Most storage spaces require some sort of regular payment. Any other place would run the risk of being rebuilt or plowed over. And a safety deposit box would require ID, and for you to know what name you’d used. If you really wanted to leave something somewhere it wouldn’t be disturbed, and you knew it might be a really long time and all manner of things might happen before you came back for it, a columbarium is actually a really smart place.”
    “Morbid,” I insisted. I wasn’t going to concede that he’d made a creepy amount of sense.
    “What name did the cover stone say?” he asked.
    “I told you,” I said. “My name.”
    “Cas Russell?” he probed.
    “Cassandra.”
    “Did it say anything else?”
    “A date of death. See, morbid.”
    “When was the date?”
    “My fake death date? Why the hell would you want to know that?”
    “Because,” he said in a very patient voice, “it’ll give us some idea of when that note was put in the wall. It would raise too many eyebrows for the death date to have been in the future, right? I’m guessing it would have been a random date recently before the note was walled up there, to avoid questions.”
    “Oh,” I said. “I don’t remember. It was years ago; I noticed that.”
    “It’s okay; I’ll go look at it. Just tell me what cemetery.”
    “I told you, I broke it.” The surrealism of my surroundings was fading, snapping back into reality and leaving me with a dull ache in the back of my skull. My vision still wouldn’t focus quite right, splotching, as if a flash had gone off in front of me. “The stone,” I clarified impatiently. “The cover. Whatever you call it. The thing with my name on it. I broke it to get in.”
    “Well, they probably repaired it,” said Checker.
    Right.
    “That could be helpful, actually,” he added. “We can ask them about vandalism and insist Arthur be allowed to crime scene it. See if there are any fingerprints inside, other than your own.”
    “That seems like a stupid amount of trouble.”
    “Cas. This is important to us.”
    “I still don’t know why.”
    He poked me gently in the arm. “If you think about it really, really hard, maybe you’ll figure it out.”

Chapter 4
    I checked my email as soon as I reached my current apartment, but neither Pilar nor Checker had sent anything my way yet. I spun aimlessly on a stool for a few minutes, then brought up a new modern algebra proof that had been making a splash. I’d hit the twenty-third page, and was torn between schadenfreude and exasperation, when my phone rang.
    “What!”
    “Miss Russell, it’s Sonya.”
    I groaned internally. Professor Sonya Halliday was a friend of Arthur’s I’d helped out the year before. Unfortunately, being a computational theorist,