Page 6 of The Ruse

“Do you think he did it?” I asked Cambrielle before my imagination could run too far off.

“I don’t know.” She put the game on a shelf and shut the closet door. She walked back toward me. “I’ve been trying to give him the benefit of the doubt, since I don’t want to think that he could do that. But you never really know.”

“Is that why he didn’t come back to school earlier this year?” I asked. Miss Crawley had said that Asher had decided to go online after some stuff happened last spring—the stuff that I now knew was a possible murder investigation.

Yikes!

“I’m sure it was. The rumors were crazy. Reporters were coming to the school grounds. It was all over the local news. He had to stay in town at first since he was a person of interest and leaving right then would have made him look even more suspicious,” Cambrielle said. “But after things died down, I think he went to live with his aunt and uncle somewhere in New York.”

“Was he from Eden Falls originally?” I asked.

Most of the kids at Eden Falls Academy who boarded like Ava and me came from all over the U.S.—some from other countries. But maybe he was just a day student back then and had to leave home because the gossip around town was too much for his family to deal with.

Cambrielle nodded. “He grew up here, but his dad died a few years ago and then some stuff went down with his mom, so the older brother got custody of Asher.”

I’d heard that one of the science teachers at our school—Mr. Park—was Asher’s brother. But he seemed too young to be a teenager’s legal guardian. He was like twenty-three—just barely out of college and in his first year of teaching from what he’d told our class.

I wanted to ask what happened to Asher’s mom, but Mrs. Hastings’ voice sounded over the intercom system, “Cambrielle. Elyse.Are you coming?”

“We better head down before they send someone up,” Cambrielle said. “My dad doesn’t like waiting for his turkey.”

“But do you think Asher did something to his girlfriend?” I asked, unable to ignore the tightness in my chest. I really didn’t want to think that the guy I’d be playing opposite in the play could be a killer.

“I don’t know. He and Bailee were always so good together. I mean, they were the ultimate couple goals. Prom King and Queen right before she disappeared. And from my point of view, he always seemed so in love with her.”

“But you said someone saw them arguing right before she disappeared?” I asked, trying to piece together the details.

“Yeah, so maybe he did do it.” She shrugged.

Why had I brought this up?

I looked down the hall, wondering what I was supposed to do with this information. Like, should I be afraid of Asher?

Should I be scared that I was supposed to play Christine and he was Raoul?

If he was actually dangerous, did that mean I needed to drop out of the play and keep my distance in order to stay safe?

To stay alive?

But the headmistress wouldn’t have allowed him to come back, and Miss Crawley wouldn’t have cast him if he was actually a bad guy.

They wouldn’t put the rest of us in danger, would they?

Cambrielle must have sensed my anxiety because she touched my arm, bringing me back to the present. “I don’t think he did it. I don’t know what happened to Bailee that night. But I don’t think Asher would have hurt her. He loved her too much.”

He loved her too much.The words echoed in my head.

Joe had loved Beck inYou—the Netflix show I was watching—and look what happened to her.

I shook the images that came with those thoughts away.

I was just jumping to the worst-case scenario. Asher wasn’t a serial killer like Joe. He wouldn’t have come back if he were. He was just a teenage guy who had been at the wrong place at the wrong time and had been a victim of his circumstances. He’d lost someone he apparently loved.

“You shouldn’t worry about Asher,” Cambrielle said, her blue eyes sincere when she met my anxious gaze. “Nash may not like him very much, but that rivalry was there long before Bailee disappeared. I really don’t think you have anything to worry about.”

“You sure?” I asked. “Because I’ll be spending a lot of time with him over the next two months.”

“I’m sure.” She looped her arm through mine. “Now let’s get downstairs and eat some food.”

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