[BLOG TOUR] Trust Me, I'm Trouble (Trust me #2) by Mary Elizabeth Summer
Trust Me, I'm Trouble by Mary Elizabeth Summer
Series: Trust Me #2
Published by Delacorte Press on 13th October 2015
Pages: 368
Series: Trust Me #2
Published by Delacorte Press on 13th October 2015
Pages: 368
Staying out of trouble isn’t possible for Julep Dupree. She has managed not to get kicked out of her private school, even though everyone knows she’s responsible for taking down a human-trafficking mob boss—and getting St. Agatha’s golden-boy Tyler killed in the process. Running cons holds her guilty conscience at bay, but unfortunately, someone wants Julep to pay for her mistakes . . . with her life.
Against her better judgment, Julep takes a shady case that requires her to infiltrate a secretive organization that her long-gone mother and the enigmatic blue fairy may be connected to. Her best friend, Sam, isn’t around to stop her, and Dani, her one true confidante, happens to be a nineteen-year-old mob enforcer whose moral compass is as questionable as Julep’s. But there’s not much time to worry about right and wrong—or to save your falling heart—when there’s a contract on your head.
Murders, heists, secrets and lies, hit men and hidden identities . . . If Julep doesn’t watch her back, it’s her funeral. No lie.
Against her better judgment, Julep takes a shady case that requires her to infiltrate a secretive organization that her long-gone mother and the enigmatic blue fairy may be connected to. Her best friend, Sam, isn’t around to stop her, and Dani, her one true confidante, happens to be a nineteen-year-old mob enforcer whose moral compass is as questionable as Julep’s. But there’s not much time to worry about right and wrong—or to save your falling heart—when there’s a contract on your head.
Murders, heists, secrets and lies, hit men and hidden identities . . . If Julep doesn’t watch her back, it’s her funeral. No lie.
Chapter One: The Stratton Job
I can’t say I have much personal experience with
conscience. I wasn’t born with that particular cricket on my shoulder. But
people who believe in conscience seem to think it has something to do with
compassion. And it could, I suppose, if you tilt your head and squint at it in
just the right light.
The truth is, conscience exists because everyone has
something in their past they’re not proud of. And if you’re smart enough to use
that to your advantage, you can stay one step ahead of the consequences. Any
good con man with the right kind of rope can hang an entire mob.
But my story doesn’t start with the mob. It starts with
a pair of borrowed pumps and the front walk of a black-shuttered Colonial.
I am Ms. Jena Scott, the youngest attorney at Lewis,
Duncan, and Chase Law. Or at least, I am for the next thirty minutes. Then I’ll
turn back into Julep Dupree, sophomore at St. Agatha’s Preparatory School and
all-around fixer. (Julep’s not my real name, either, but we’ll get to that later.)
It’s the officially unofficial talk around school that
I’m a solver of other people’s problems. And I am. I just happen to charge a
respectable sum for my services. St. Aggie’s isn’t cheap, and a job at the
local deli isn’t going to cover the cost of toiletries, let alone tuition.
Luckily, my fellow students can more than afford my rates.
My talent is the one thing I can leverage. I’m a
grifter, a con artist, and a master of disguise. I’m the best, actually,
because I was taught by the best—my dad, Joe. Never heard of him? Well, you
wouldn’t have, because he’s never been caught. And neither have I. The best
grifters are ghosts.
For the newbies out there, a grifter is a person who
specializes in selling people something that doesn’t exist. At the moment, I’m
selling my client Heather Stratton’s parents on the idea that she has applied
to New York University. Which, of course, is a load of crap.
Heather doesn’t want to go to NYU; she wants to be a
model. But since her mom won’t bankroll that endeavor, my job is to grease the
wheels, so to speak, so everyone believes she’s getting what she wants. It’s a
win-win-win, really. Heather is happy, Mrs. Stratton is happy, and I get paid.
When you look at it like that, I’m in the making-people-happy business.
Heather’s paying for a full pig-in-a-poke package: fake
application, fake interview, fake acceptance. And it’s going to cost her. I’ve
already had Sam, my best friend and partner in crime, build a fake NYU website
showing Heather’s application status. Then came the official-looking brochures
and letters on NYU stationery Sam and I spent an afternoon making. And that was
easy compared to getting the envelopes to sport a postmark from New York.
Now I’m doing the interview bit. Ms. Scott is a new
creation of mine. A lawyer by way of NYU undergrad and University of
Pennsylvania law school. She works at a big-deal firm here in Chicago and
occasionally does admission interviews for her alma mater.
I straighten my suit skirt in the perfect imitation of a
lawyer I saw on television last night. There’s a good chance nobody’s watching,
but it never hurts to get into character early. I touch my hair to make sure
the longish brown mess is still coiled into a tight French roll. I adjust the
thin, black-framed glasses I use for roles both younger and older than my
near-sixteen years.
Then I remember my gum—doesn’t exactly scream
professionalism. Lacking an appropriate disposal option, I take the gum out and
stick it to the bottom of the Strattons’ mailbox. I walk up to the covered
porch and rap smartly on the blue door. A few moments later, a brittle,
middle-aged woman with a too-bright smile and Jackie O style opens it.
“Mrs. Stratton, I presume,” I say in a slightly lower
pitch than usual. People assume you’re older if your voice is deeper.
“You must be Ms. Scott,” she says. “Please, come in.”
She’s easy enough to read. Nervous, excited. She’s an
easy mark, because she wants so much for me to be real. I mean, look at me.
This disguise is a stretch, even for a professional grifter. But she won’t
doubt it, because she doesn’t want to. No disguise is more foolproof than the
one the mark wants to believe. I might feel a little bad for her if I were a
real person. As it happens, I’m not a real person, and she is not my client.
I cross the threshold into an immaculate foyer. The
living room opens off to my left, rich and inviting but lacking in the warmth
the plush upholstery implies. It’s a gorgeous room, beautiful and cold, like an
ice sculpture in the sun.
Mrs. Stratton motions me into the room and I sit in an
armchair next to a brick hearth that hasn’t seen a fire in years. Julep would
have chosen the couch, with its army of throw pillows, but “Ms. Scott” is here
on business and doesn’t approve of all the touchy-feely nonsense that comes
about sitting next to people.
“Would you like something to drink?”
“A glass of water would be most appreciated,” I say.
Mrs. Stratton leaves the room, returning a few moments
later with a precisely cooled glass of water. She places a coaster on the polished
end table next to me. I smile my approval, and her smile widens.
“I’ll go get Heather,” Mrs. Stratton says, and calls up
the stairs for her daughter, who is expecting me.
Heather enters the room in what I can only assume is her
Sunday best. Her family is Episcopalian, I’m fairly sure. I can usually tell by
the decor of the house, the mother’s clothing choices, and the books on the
shelves in public spaces. For example, you can always tell a Baptist household
by the oak dining room table, the spinet in the living room, and the variety of
Bibles on the shelf next to the television set. Episcopalians don’t often have
televisions in their living rooms. Don’t ask me why.
“Hello, Heather,” I say, standing and extending my hand.
She shakes it, shooting me conspiratorial glances while acting fidgety, and
overall doing a lousy job of pretending she doesn’t know me. But her mother
will chalk it up to nervousness as long as I do my part right.
I sink back into the armchair, and Heather sits across
from me on the couch. She looks tense, but then she would be. Heather’s mother
hangs around for another moment or two before realizing she is supposed to
leave and finally whisking herself away to some other part of the house.
I raise my hand when Heather opens her mouth. So many of
my clients foolishly think we don’t have to go through with the scam from
beginning to end. They assume that once they can no longer see the mark, she’s
not still around listening. My dad calls it the ostrich syndrome.
“Tell me about yourself, Heather,” I say. “What do you
want to study at NYU?”
What follows is a yawn-fest of questions and answers. I
couldn’t care less about Heather’s GPA. And student government? Really? But I’m
helping her swindle her parents—I’m hardly in a position to judge.
At the end of the interview I cut her off, almost
midsentence, and stand up, not having touched my water. I’m out of the house
and at the door to Sam’s Volvo, proper good-byes offered and promises to put in
a good word for Heather with the admissions office made. I open the
driver’s-side door and slide into the leather seat, exhaling as I settle in.
It’s a far cry from the hard plastic chairs on the “L,” which is my usual form
of transportation.
I sense more than hear the purr as the engine turns over.
I pull away from the curb cautiously, not because I’m a cautious driver by
nature, but because I am still in character. Once I’ve turned out of sight of
the house, I crank the radio up and slide the windows down while I push the gas
pedal to coax the car to a peppier speed. It’s a warm Sunday in early
September, and I want to milk it for all it’s worth. With one hand, I pull out
the pins holding my hair back, letting the tangled tresses fall naturally to my
shoulders.
Sam knows I’m not a legal driver. We’ve known each other
since fourth grade, when we started pulling the three-card monte on our
classmates, so he’s well aware of my age. You’d think he’d be more nervous
about lending his brand-new Volvo to an untried, untested, unlicensed driver.
But then, I’m the one who taught him how to drive.
Ten minutes later, I pull into the parking lot of my
local coffee haunt, the Ballou, which is half a block from the St. Aggie’s
campus, and claim a space next to a souped-up seventies muscle car. Chevelle, I
think, though I’m hardly an expert. Black with two thick white racing stripes
down the hood and windows tinted black enough to put Jay-Z’s to shame.
I take off my jacket and untuck my blouse. Kicking off
the heels, I flip open my ratty old canvas bag and take out my well-worn
Converse high-tops. I wriggle my feet into them as I tie my hair up again. Then
I toss the glasses into the bag and grab my dad’s old leather jacket.
The Ballou is pretty much what you’d expect a coffee
shop to be: wooden tables, scuffed and stuffed chairs, a lacquered bar polished
to within an inch of its life, a smattering of patrons sipping lattes and
reading Yeats. You see lots of MacBooks and iPads, and the occasional stack of
textbooks gathering dust while their owners text or surf the Web.
Sam is sitting at our favorite rickety, mismatched table
with the cardboard coffee-cup sleeve under one of the legs.
“To the minute,” Sam says, spotting me over the top of
his graphic novel. “I’ll never know how you can guess that close.”
“Just have to know the mark.”
“That’s what you say for everything,” he says, smiling
and moving his bag aside.
“Well, it’s true for everything,” I say while I casually
steal his cappuccino.
Sam has a gorgeous smile. I often tease him about it,
which he hates, or at least pretends to hate. But I think he secretly
appreciates being noticed for something besides his status as the only son of
Hudson Seward, board chairman of the Seward Group and the richest black man in
Chicago. Sam wants to escape his father’s name as much as Heather wants out
from under her mother’s iron fist.
Everyone wants something, I suppose. Me? I want a full
ride to Yale. Hence my internment at St. Agatha’s.
“How’d it go?”
I yawn.
“That good?”
“Cake,” I say. “But we prepped well this time.” I take a
swig of his coffee.
“As opposed to any other time?”
“Granted.” I set his keys on the table. “Thanks for the
car.”
He pockets the keys. “And you’re thanking me because . .
. ?”
“Hey, I say thank you sometimes.” I cradle the cup
between my hands to warm them.
“No you don’t,” he says.
“Yes I do.”
He plucks the cup out of my grasp and leans back. “No
you don’t.”
I’ve just conceded when Heather appears. I don’t love
that she insisted on meeting up with us, but she’s the sort who needs to know
each step of the plan in detail. She’s more her mother’s daughter than she
thinks. She slips gracefully into the chair next to mine.
“That went . . . well?” she says with a slight question
at the end, like she’s asking for confirmation.
“It did,” I say. I make it a policy to avoid
hand-holding. But she’s my client, and far be it from me to begrudge her a bit
of customer service.
“So what now?” She huddles into herself and lowers her
voice to a whisper. Really, how my clients keep anything a secret when their
body language continually screams Look at me! I’m planning something nefarious! is beyond me. I guess it’s true what
the French say: fortune favors the innocent. Lucky for me, it also favors the
moderately dishonest.
“Now I welcome you to NYU,” I say.
Then I detail the rest of the plan, which involves
sending Heather a fake internship offer from a modeling agency to raise the
stakes. Mrs. Stratton will be so desperate to secure Heather’s spot at NYU she
won’t think to question our irregular instructions for sending the tuition
check. In my profession, this is called the shutout, and it works every time.
“But how do I cash a check made out to NYU?” Heather
asks.
“It won’t be made out to NYU. It will be made out to me.
Or to Jena Scott, actually.”
“You think she’ll fall for that?”
“Fall for it? She’ll be the one suggesting it. Trust me,
the check is the easy part.”
Heather’s doubt is evident, but she’s not the one whose
confidence I’m trying to steal.
A half hour later, Sam drops me off at my apartment
building.
“Catch you on the dark side,” I say as I get out and
head to the front door.
“The dark side is a bad thing,” Sam calls after me.
I wave while he pulls away from the curb, shaking his
head at me.
“Hi, Fred,” I say to the homeless man sitting between
the row of mailboxes and the radiator in the entryway.
“Hey, Julep,” he says in his Dominican accent. “How’s
shit going?”
“Shit’s good,” I say, and open our mailbox. I pull the
comics out of the paper and hand them to Fred. If anyone needs a laugh, it’s
him.
In case the homeless guy hasn’t given it away, my dad
and I live deep in the West Side slums—the same apartment building we’ve been
in since my mom left us. I was eight at the time, so that’s, what? Seven years?
Well, in all that time I’ve seen neither hide nor hair of any maintenance
personnel beyond the very occasional plumber.
I’m so used to it, though, that I climb the narrow
stairs without seeing the fuchsia and black graffiti or the grime in the
corners. In fact, I don’t even notice when I get to our apartment that the door
is slightly open. When I try to put my key in the lock, the door swings away
from me. Still, I’m distracted by a tuition bill from St. Aggie’s, so I walk
right in.
The first thing I notice is my dad’s chair tipped upside
down, the stuffing from the cushion littered around it like yellow sea foam. My
lungs constrict as I take in the rest of our shattered belongings: Pictures
torn down to reveal stained walls. Drawers pulled out and overturned. Even some
of the linoleum flooring in the kitchen has been ripped up and left in curling
strips.
“Dad?” The sound of my heart hammering is probably
carrying farther than my voice.
This makes no sense. We have nothing worth stealing—no
one breaks into the apartments in our building for monetary gain. Not that there
isn’t violence; it’s just usually domestic or drug related.
I push open the door to my dad’s room and it gets stuck
about a third of the way open. This room is in even worse shape than the rest
of the apartment. Books and papers and blankets and broken bits of furniture
cover the ratty carpet like shrapnel from a bomb blast. But still no Dad. At
this point, I’m not so sure that’s a bad thing.
Not as much damage in my room, but it’s still trashed.
Curtains trailing along the floor. Desk knocked over, the bulb from the lamp
shattered and ground into the carpet.
I pick my way back toward the kitchen as I study what
was left behind. I’m certain someone was looking for something, but I have no
idea what. It’s not like we stashed a Monet under the floorboards.
My dad does have a gambling problem. He’s the best
grifter you’ve never heard of, like I said, but we’re still living in the
ghetto. I’m sure you’re wondering why, since I keep telling you he could con
Donald Trump out of his toupee. Well, that’s the reason. No sooner does he get
a “windfall” than it gets spent on the ponies.
But he never borrows to bet. He bets everything we have
but nothing we don’t. His bookie’s his best friend. Ralph even comes to my
birthday parties. So I seriously doubt it’s a payment problem.
It has to be a con that’s gone south somehow. Which
means my dad’s in trouble. He has something his mark wants. And not just any
mark—a mark willing to break in and do this. That means a mark on the shadier
side.
I reach the kitchen and tip a chair upright. What could
my dad be into that would have resulted in this? What could he have that
somebody would be looking for? The answer is lots of things: forged documents,
information about something incriminating, who knows? The two bigger questions,
though, are did the person find what he was searching for, and why didn’t my
dad tell me what he was doing?
My dad is not the sort to shelter his offspring. We’re a
team. I sometimes help him brainstorm when he’s planning a con. He doesn’t
often use me as a roper, mostly because I’d stick out like a sore thumb in the
circles he tends to work. But he always tells me his angle.
I lean against the wall, surveying the destruction in
the kitchen. Something tells me that whoever tossed the place did not find what
he was looking for. That might very well be wishful thinking, but I decide to
act on the hunch anyway. Can’t hurt to do a bit of searching of my own.
But before I turn over even a plate, two thoughts occur
to me. One, I should call the police before I tamper with any potential
evidence. Two, if the home-wrecker didn’t find what he was looking for, he
might come back.
I reach for my phone and tap a nine and a one before I
come to my senses. I can’t call the police. Police plus abandoned minor equals
foster care. Hello! I let out a shaky breath at how close I came to screwing
myself nine ways to Sunday. I delete both numbers and quickly pocket the phone,
as if my fingers might somehow betray me.
I’m sure you think I’m being melodramatic. But I’m not
an idiot. Everyone knows that foster care is a prison sentence. Umpteen
thousand crime procedurals cannot be wrong. Besides, my dad and I are our own
system. I’m the only one who knows him well enough to figure out where he’s
hidden whatever the intruder was searching for. If the police get involved,
they’ll be the ones ruining the crime scene, not me.
I picture my dad, every detail from his thick brown hair
to his scuffed oxfords. If I were my dad and I had to hide something . . .
What hasn’t been touched? I turn in a slow circle till I
find it—the perfectly upright, not-even-a-millimeter-out-of-place trash can.
Only cops dig in the garbage, Julep, and even then, only on TV.
Before considering the consequences, I yank the bag out
of the can and empty it onto what’s left of the linoleum. Last night’s chicken
bones come tumbling out, along with several plastic wrappers and a lump of
grease-covered foil. Gross, yes. Illuminating, no. I root around in it anyway,
holding my breath and hoping. But there’s nothing in the bag that can remotely
be construed as valuable. No pictures, no papers, no money, nothing.
I plop on the floor next to the mess, swearing to
myself. I mean, who am I kidding? How am I supposed to find my dad in a pile of
half-eaten chicken? The trash can mocks me with its dingy plastic lid. Still
upright, it is the only thing in the apartment that’s exactly where it should
be.
I kick out and knock it over. Might as well finish the
job, right? But as it falls to the floor, I hear something bang around inside
it. I pull the mouth around to where I can see. Inside the can is a padded
envelope.
Ignoring the muck, I reach in and grab the envelope. As
I rip it open, I have this strange sense of doom, like liberating its contents
is some kind of point of no return. I ignore the feeling. He is my dad, after
all.
But when I pull out said contents, I’m even more
unnerved.
In one hand, I hold a note:
Beware the Field of Miracles.
In the other, I hold a gun.
Mary Elizabeth Summer is an instructional designer, a mom, a champion of the serial comma, and a pie junkie. Oh, and she sometimes writes books about teenage delinquents saving the day. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her daughter, her partner, and her evil overlor–er, cat. TRUST ME, I'M LYING, a YA mystery, will be released by Delacorte in Fall 2014.
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