“I don’t know. Like I said, we weren’t BFFs. But she had a boyfriend, and I got the feeling they were pretty tight. I think she went to Mr. Evans for . . . other things.”

“Like what?” Cate capped the bottle of base coat and gave Kayla her full attention.

The other girl fiddled with a pen on her desk, keeping her chin down. “I don’t know.”

But she did.

After the ten years she’d spent dealing with the underbelly of society, it was easy to recognize evasive maneuvers.

Pushing, however, might backfire. If Kayla closed down, all the groundwork she was laying for a friendship that could lead to confidence-sharing would crumble.

“Whatever. I don’t have any plans to go see him again anyway.” She checked the nails on Kayla’s other hand. “These are dry enough to apply the glitter coat.” She cut off a corner of the sponge, opened the glitter bottle, and tipped it onto the absorbent surface. “So were you surprised your roommate ran away with her boyfriend?”

“I never knew what she was going to do—and she didn’t share her plans with me. I wasn’t even here the weekend she left. I was at a teen retreat Reverend Wilson was leading at a camp not far from here.”

So much for any hope that Stephanie could have dropped a hint or two that Kayla had picked up on.

“You ever meet her boyfriend?”

“No.”

“He never came to visit?”

“I didn’t say that.”

Cate continued tipping the polish onto the sponge and dabbing it on Kayla’s nails. “You mean they met somewhere on campus?”

“They could have.”

“Wouldn’t somebody have seen them?”

“Not if they hooked up in the woods.”

“You think they did?”

“Maybe. Sometimes on Friday or Saturday night she’d disappear after dark and wouldn’t come back until one or two. Usually the next day I’d find bits of leaves and stuff on the floor. Once she woke up with a twig in her hair.”

Confirmation that Stephanie had met up with her boyfriend on school property—increasing the likelihood they could have run smack into the middle of the operation Zeke was investigating . . . and decreasing the likelihood a lead would surface that led off campus.

The prospects of an early reprieve from this assignment dimmed.

“You have a boyfriend?”

At Kayla’s question, she refocused. “No. I did once, but he moved away.” That much of her cover was true, anyway. “And I doubt I’ll meet anyone out here.”

“True. Ivy Hill social life isn’t the best. But I kinda like that there isn’t any guy pressure either, you know?” The corners of her lips rose. “We can always look at the hot new Spanish teacher if we want a man fix.”

Cate almost lost her grip on the sponge. “You think Mr. Martinez is hot?”

“Yeah. For an old guy. Don’t you?”