Shattered

By: Abellen

Chapter Four: Friendship

I glanced up from the computer when the office door opened and Anza and Tehama walked in, talking animatedly. I checked the clock and raised my eyebrow in surprise. I'd been so engrossed in my own brainstorming session that I hadn't notice the morning slip away. It was lunch time, and while I'd compiled a list of likely victims I was no closer to finding a suspect.

'I swear, he wasn't paying any attention during English. Something's bothering him,' Karen said as she put her lunch box down on her desk.

'He's worried about Ingrid,' Anza reasoned.

'Who is?' I smiled when the pair of them jumped. Neither of them had noticed my presence, and now they shifted uncomfortably.

'Fillmore,' Anza admitted. 'I mean, I thought it was bad when he didn't know where you were, but now it seems worse.'

I frowned in disbelief, and felt a dark zephyr of worry insinuate itself into my mind. 'Maybe it's something going on at home. Has he said anything? He can't be that worried about me.'

'I don't know, Ingrid. You're number one on my worry list right now,' Tehama pointed out, grabbing a sandwich and taking a healthy sized bite.

'She's right. We're your friends, Ingrid, but Fillmore's your partner and, well, you're close.'

I narrowed my eyes at Anza's last statement. 'Fillmore's a good friend, he's just concerned. I'll ask him later, and see if he's okay. Everyone's been paying attention to me… Maybe we missed something.'

'Ingrid, I'll bet you five dollars the only thing on Fillmore's mind is you,' Anza responded, a tiny, secretive smile twisting on his lip, before it vanished. 'You've been through a lot, Ingrid. First your parents, then there's the Harris thing, and now you're getting threatening note.'

'And phone calls,' I mumbled.

'Phone calls?' Fillmore asked as he and Danny entered the office.

His eyebrows had drawn instantly into a frown and I could hear Anza and Tehama busying themselves nearby. Danny hurried away muttering something about paperwork, desperate to get out of the way of a potential verbal cross-fire.

I heaved a sigh, more of regret than annoyance. I should have told him before he went to English class, but the note Tony had given me had pushed the thought from my head. I rubbed a hand across my forehead, wincing when it caught on one of the neat stitches.

'There was just one, not long after you left for class this morning. I got it on tape.' I retrieved the tiny cassette from the answering machine, and put it in an evidence bag. 'The voice was heavily disguised, but I think it was male. I'll try and enhance it in the A/V room. It's a long shot, but maybe I can recognize the voice.'

'Why didn't you tell me that when I saw you with Monaco?' Fillmore demanded, his voice angry.

'Monaco, Tony Monaco?' Tehama interrupted, her eyes wide. 'You were talking to Tony Monaco?'

'Yes?' I narrowed my eyes as Tehama squealed in delight.

'Oh, he has such a lovely voice, and his eyes are gorgeous!'

'I - I didn't notice.'

Tehama looked at me as though I had to be blind and deaf not to notice Tony's assets. 'Why were you talking to him?'

'I just bumped into him, that's all. Anyway, I would have mentioned it, Fillmore, but I forgot. Tony had just given me the note linking him and Jeff Mitchell into the case,' I hurried on, successfully quelling any questions Tehama had. 'I'm going to go and see if I can make anything of the tape.'

I made a break for it, clutching the small cassette in my right hand. If I stayed any longer I'd have to tell them about my panic attack, which didn't appeal, especially when Fillmore was there watching my every move like a hawk. It was sweet - no - lovely that he was worried about me, but I just wanted to get my life back on track, and leave as much of this behind me as I could.

A sob caught in my throat, taking me by surprise. I stopped dead in the corridor and tried to get a grip. The social services worker had talked to Ariella and I in great depth about the grieving process. She said the first stage, denial, was more of a constant until acceptance was reached.

'It's normal to feel disbelief at first, but it's important not to bottle up the tears. They might take you by surprise, and it might seem like they'll never stop, but it's important to cry.'

I shook my head and kept walking, ignoring the growing ache in my chest and the hollow in the pit of my stomach. There was a time and a place for tears, and this was neither.

The A/V lab was wonderfully quiet. There were no sounds but the gentle hum of machinery and I quickly fed the audio data from the tape into an enhancement program on the computer. After removing the static I separated the sounds into different streams, isolating the voice from the other components. Even after filtering it through various clean ups I couldn't recognize the speaker. It was male, but that was it.

I was just about to turn my attention to the background sounds when something wet fell on my arm. I looked down in surprise at the tiny spherical droplet reflecting the computer screen in its liquid surface. Another splashed down to join it and I raised my hand to my cheek. The skin was wet with tears, and my eyes stung painfully. A shiver ran across my skin and my breath choked in my throat as the despair flooded through me. For a brief second I was disconnected from the world, totally lost within my own sorrow. No light or sound could penetrate, and I felt like curling up and letting the world carry on without me.

A sharp bite of pain in the palm of my hand brought me back to reality. Four crescent shape cuts bled slightly where my nails had dug into the skin of my hand. The red fluid bloomed into a droplet which I smeared with my fingertips absently before cuffing the tears away and pushing all the feeling below the surface once again. I promised myself that later I would cry properly, but right now I needed to solve this case. If nothing else it would stop Fillmore from worrying.

There was no clock in the A/V room, but when I emerged the corridor was empty. I walked passed closed classroom doors and caught brief glimpses of teachers talking and gesticulating enthusiastically, or pointing something out on the board. I recalled my timetable and realized that it was time for math, one of my favorite subjects. Mr. Hartley was always interested to check over the more complex equations I'd done, and was content to let me push the boundaries of my knowledge while the rest of the class got to grips with the curriculum.

The office door was unlocked and I arched an eyebrow in surprise. If there was no one inside we always locked the door, but everyone should be in lessons. I opened the door carefully, ready to slam it hard in the face of any threat, but all I saw was Fillmore reading through a sheet of paper with a frown on his face.

'Another note?' I asked, hoping that it was something more mundane.

'Math. Did you find anything from the tape?' Fillmore looked up and his dark eyes narrowing slightly behind his glasses as he scanned my face, no doubt noticing the last remnants of tear blotches on my pale skin.

'No, not really. The person was standing near lockers, or something else with metal doors when the call was made. It was a male, but that's all I know. Why are you sitting at my desk?'

'Your chair's more comfortable than mine.'

I looked over at his battered chair. One of it's wheels had stopped turning years ago, and the seat cover was threadbare and tired.

'Okay, can I ask why you're not in Math?'

'Mr. Hartley sent me back here to keep an eye on you. He said if I got stuck you could use the mentoring experience.'

I snorted in disbelief, and was relieved to see Fillmore smile in response. 'You don't need help with Math.'

'Maybe not, but Tony Monaco called by earlier along with Jeffrey.'

'Numbers five and four. What for?'

'They got threatening phone calls. They couldn't record them, but they did their best to transcribe them for use, including phonetic alphabet symbols, which I can't decipher very well.'

He handed the paper to me, and I scanned through it, shaking my head. 'Nothing very definitive. The dialect is local.'

'Female speaker though. I checked Debbie Li and Vanessa Williams,' he tapped the list in front of him. 'Number three and your closest competitor for the top spot. They have also received a note, flower and phone call. They said their speaker was male.'

'So there are at least two people involved,' I concluded. 'Numbers six and seven perhaps?'

'What would their motive be?' Fillmore asked, checking the list I had compiled and highlighting their names.

'The ten students with the highest grades at X get access to a scholarship fund. Number one gets the highest payment for high school and university, and it goes down throughout the ten. Maybe they want more money?'

'Wouldn't it be more likely that it's numbers eleven and twelve, since they get nothing?'

'Possibly.'

I let the phonetically transcribed note fall back to the desk and perched on the edge, swinging one foot absent-mindedly. There was a sheet of paper with a complex Math algorithm scribbled over it. It wasn't bad, but the writer had dropped a variable or two. I scribbled in the correction and then frowned in confusion.

'This isn't yours, is it?'

Fillmore looked at it, and frowned. 'Ingrid, why would anyone in this school want to work on the paramagnetic algorithm theory, except you?'

'Oh, is that what it is?' I frowned at the scribbles wondering, as I had done many times in my life, how I could make sense on a mathematical level, but couldn't always apply what I saw seeing to reality.

'Monaco brought it in. Apparently it's something extra-curricular, and he got confused. He wanted your help,' Fillmore mumbled, his voice suspicious and he scrawled his way through some trigonometry.

'You sound like you don't believe it.'

'I believe that someone might want your help, but I don't believe Monaco. He's just trying to get your attention.'

'Why?'

'Maybe he likes you.'

'I've only met him for five minutes.'

'He might be quick to form good opinions.' Fillmore's face was perfectly neutral, but he was obviously struggling to keep the distaste for Tony from his voice.

'Fillmore, are you all right?' He carried on scribbling until I snatched the pencil out of his hand. 'Take a break from tangents, Fillmore.'

'Yes, Ingrid. I'm fine.' He held his hand out for his pencil, and only looked up when I didn't return it. 'What?'

'Are you sure you're okay? Anza and Tehama said you were distracted in English, and barely paid any attention. I just want to make sure that there's nothing going on.'

'Like what?'

'I don't know, like maybe your parents are fighting, or your grades are falling or you've got a crush on a girl and are dying from a broken heart or something.'

Fillmore snorted and stood up, walking around the desk until he stood in front of me. 'Ingrid, I promise you that I'm fine. I'm just worried about you.'

'You're sure?

'Yes. Are you all right?'

I bit my lip, knowing that the evidence of my tears spoke for me. 'I'll live.' I picked up another scrap of paper and stared at it unseeingly. Fillmore's hand around my wrist forced me to look up into his eyes.

'You look tired, Ingrid, and you've been crying.'

He loosened his grasp on my wrist and instead rubbed the pad of his thumb lightly against my palm. His touch was both hypnotic and thrilling and I barely heard his next words. 'Why don't you go home and have some time to yourself, maybe it'll help?'

I ducked my head, not wanting to do as I was told. I felt better here, with Fillmore. At school I was surrounded in life. My house was more of a hollow shell, a corpse of a family home. Here there were people, and friends, and things to keep me busy, but at home I'd just wander around aimlessly.

'Come on, Ingrid. Just rest, even if it's just for today. Please?'

I don't think Fillmore ever realizes the devastating force of his dark puppy-dog eyes, but I was subjected to that emotion-filled gaze. Eyes were the windows to the soul, and Fillmore had a lot of soul to spare.

'Fine, but I'll be back tomorrow morning,' I warned him, not wanting to give in totally.

'I know. I can't walk you home though, I've got class.'

'Fillmore, you don't have to walk me home every night. I think I'm safe, and it's a long way for you to go.' I grabbed my bag and flung it over my shoulder before grabbing the list of victims and potential suspects, as well as the other documents relating to the case.

Fillmore sighed and shook his head, but didn't stop me picking up more work to do at home. I was on my way out of the door when he called my name. 'Can I walk you home because I want to? I mean, as a friend?'

I watched him in silence for a second. He was standing by his desk, arms crossed defensively, but he looked ever-so slightly vulnerable. 'Of course, Fillmore. I'd like that. Tomorrow?'

'Okay, tomorrow. See you later, Ingrid.'

'Bye.'

I lingered for just a second longer, before walking out of the door and making my way along the empty corridors of X. A tiny smile tugged at my lips and I bounced down the steps. Fillmore was walking me home because he wanted to. That was more than just partners, that was proper friendship.

End of Chapter Four