“Why?” Tipkins snorted. “That should be as obvious as any three noncollinear points on a two-dimensional flat surface.”
I blinked at him. “Huh?”
Tipkins scowled. “A plane! God, don’t you kids ever pay attention in class?”
I figured that question was rhetorical at this point.
“Fine,” he said. “I’ll spell it out for you. I had to shut Sydney up before she could tell everyone what was going on.”
“And what was going on?” I asked, wriggling against my bonds. There was no way the rope was going to give out, but if I could possibly slip my hand through the loop…
“I should think that would be obvious. I was selling test answers.”
“You!” I shook my head. “But why?” Honestly, I was genuinely curious. It seemed like the last thing a teacher would want.
“Why?” Tipkins repeated, his voice rising. “Why! Do you know how much I make babysitting ignorant brats like you?”
I bit my lip. There was no right answer to this question, was there?
Luckily, I didn’t have to say anything as he continued his rant. “Hardly enough to survive on, that’s how much. I have a PhD. I graduated at the top of my class from Cornell. I’m a damned math genius! And now I spend the majority of my life trying to figure out how to keep texting idiots from stealing test answers.”
“So you decided to give the idiots the answers instead.”
“Sell,” he corrected me. “I’m finally getting what I’m worth. You idiot brats want to go to college? You go through me.”
“So you sold the answers to your own tests?”
Tipkins nodded. “Mine and everyone else’s. It was easy. I had access to anything I wanted in the teachers’ lounge.”
Mental face palm. All our breaking and entering had been for nothing. No wonder the thief hadn’t worried about locks-he had a key all along!
“But why involve Nicky?” I asked, feeling my hand slip a scant quarter inch lower in the bonds. If I could work up enough sweat on my wrists, I might have a chance of slipping free.
“I couldn’t very well risk the exposure of selling them myself, now, could I?” Tipkins answered. “I caught Nicky last year trying to cheat on one of my tests. It was one of the more sophisticated attempts I’d ever seen, I’ll give him that. He had hacked into my email account and found a copy of the test answers that I’d sent to the administration for compliance with state standards. He’d memorized the answers completely, so there was no proof of anything in the classroom at all.”
I wrinkled my forehead. “So how did you catch him?”
Tipkins grinned, satisfaction at outsmarting a teen clear on his face. “I gave a different test that day. At the last minute, the vice principal had told me they hadn’t gotten the go-ahead from the state on the standards yet, and I ended up giving the old test. Nicky got every single question wrong, but I quickly realized why.”
“And you recruited him to work for you?”
Tipkins shrugged. “I simply told him he could either make a small percentage working for me or I would tell the vice principal I’d caught him cheating.”
“So you blackmailed him?”
Tipkins frowned, his eyes going dark again. “Don’t make it sound like he was innocent here. He was a cheater!”
“Just like Sydney?” I asked. My right wrist had gone as far as I could slip it, so I started wriggling my left as Tipkins nodded in agreement.
“Yes. That’s right. Only Nicky was smart. Sydney was a moron. It was like she wanted to get caught. Answers on her fingernails?” he asked, waving his own grubby set in my face. “How obvious can you get? Every student within a three-desk radius saw what she was doing. I had to bust her. How could I not? I had no choice.”
“But weren’t you worried she was going to blow the whistle on you?”
“What whistle? She had no idea who I was.” He paused. “Until you started asking questions.”
I gulped. “Me?” I squeaked out.
He nodded. “As soon as you started nosing around, Sydney did, too. She knew the school board was investigating and realized how badly everyone wanted to know how the answers had gotten out. She bribed Nicky to tell her who was giving him the cheats, then she called me and said that if I didn’t get her reinstated on the homecoming court she was going to tell the administration all about it.”
I nodded. The blackmailer becomes the blackmailee. Nice move. I had to say, it didn’t sound like Sydney was as dumb as Mr. Tipkins had thought after all.
“That’s why she agreed to meet with me?”
Tipkins nodded. “She said if I didn’t get her back on the court, she was going to tell you everything and it would be all over the paper.”
“But you couldn’t let that happen.”
He shook his head slowly back and forth. “No. I had too much of a good thing going. I was finally making good money. I wasn’t going to let some no-brained bimbo take that away from me.”
“So you went to her house?”
He nodded. “After you came to interview me, I realized I couldn’t let her talk to you. So I went to her house. She was in the backyard, tanning of all things! Made suspension look more like a vacation than a punishment to me.”
“And she had her laptop with her?”
He nodded. “Plugged into an outlet. She was on the damned Titter on her laptop.”
“Twitter,” I corrected automatically.
“Whatever. She was too busy on that thing to even listen to me. I tried to tell her I didn’t have the authority to get her back on the homecoming court. I told her I’d pay her off, make it worth her while to keep her mouth shut.”
“But she didn’t go for it?”
“She said all she cared about was being homecoming queen.”
“So you killed her?”
He nodded, an eerie light in his eyes. “It was easy. All I had to do was give her a little shove, and into the pool she went.”
“With her laptop,” I pointed out.
He grinned, showing off those grotesquely stained teeth again.
I shivered, imagining how her last moments must have been. Had she felt the electric shock? Felt the water flowing into her paralyzed lungs? Or had she died instantly, one minute here and the next just… not?
“And now…,” Mr. Tipkins said, taking a step toward me, “it’s time to tie up the last little loose end.”
Oh, fantastic amounts of fluffin’ fudge.
Chapter Twenty-Three
I WATCHED IN HORROR AS MR. TIPKINS’S EYES CHANGED. Gone was the angry flash when he’d talked about how he was an underpaid, underappreciated teacher, the confusion of trying to figure out Titter versus Twitter, and the disdain when he’d spoken about the ignorance of his current students. This was something different. Something dead, flat, and calm, and more eerily menacing than anything I’d ever seen.
Anxiety balled into pure panic in my stomach, making my body move and squirm all on its own.
“Um, you know what? I’m no loose end. I’m hardly an end at all. You see, I’m not into being homecoming queen, or getting cash, or anything like that. I’m totally just into being quiet. Not talking. Not telling anyone about anything. I can be totally quiet, see?” I shut my mouth illustrating my point.
Tipkins shook his head. He was so not buying this.
And I was so out of time.
I wriggled my wrists as he rounded the starting block, coming up behind me. The left one slipped a little. I’d worked out some slack in the rope. But it still held tight.
“You won’t get away with this,” I said, changing tactics. “Someone will notice I’m gone. They’ll come looking for me.”
Speaking of which-where the heck was Chase? How long would he wait before realizing I wasn’t just in the bathroom? How long had I been out? How long would it take him to figure out I was here, on campus still, by the pool with a Twittercidal maniac?