The Crims Read online

  DEDICATION

  For my family, who are nothing like the Crims,

  except on really bad days

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  The Heist, Step One

  The Heist, Step Two

  The Heist, Step Three

  The Heist, Step Four

  The Heist, Step Five

  The Heist, Step Six

  The Heist, Step Seven

  The Heist, Step Eight

  The Heist, Step Nine

  The Heist, Step Ten

  The Heist, Step Eleven

  The Heist, Step Twelve

  The Heist, Step Thirteen

  The Heist, Step Fourteen

  The Heist, Step Fifteen

  The Heist, Step Sixteen

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  IF IMOGEN CRIM had learned one thing in her two years at Lilyworth Ladies’ College, it was that controlling a school full of posh young women was much easier than controlling a family full of criminals. After years of studying these chirpy overachievers, learning their habits and secret languages, Imogen had become a pro at imitating them—until she’d done one better and had simply become one of them. In just two weeks, her control over the school would become official: After two failed campaigns where she’d lost to older girls, she would beat her competition, Bridget Sweetwine, to finally be elected head girl of Lilyworth.

  Today were the speeches where the candidates announced their intentions, and Imogen was determined to be perfect in every way. She smoothed her hands over her glossy ponytail one more time, smiled a perfectly straight smile into the mirror, and adjusted her collar. Then she picked up her speech, stepped out of her dorm room, and walked with purpose down the corridor. Her grandmother had taught her to do everything with purpose—walk, talk, use her potty (Imogen had only been two at the time for this particular lesson, but it had stayed with her all the same).

  “Im-o-gen!” Ava, her dorm mother, was singing her name. Literally singing it—Ava was an opera singer who had missed her big break but who never missed an opportunity to hit a high C. She’d broken more windows than the beginners pole vault team, but no one really minded—her singing acted as a deterrent to mice, foxes, and burglars with eardrums.

  “Your father called,” said Ava. “Again.”

  “I’ll call him tomorrow,” said Imogen, brushing off the tiniest flicker of guilt. Her father had called three times in the last week, which was unusual, but Imogen couldn’t worry about that now. If there was one thing she’d learned about the Future World Leaders Lilyworth created, it was this: They had laser-like focus.

  And today, Imogen was focused on proving that she’d rocked Lilyworth harder than any of her heir-to-the-crown, yes-that-Heinz-family classmates.

  This is my day, she reminded herself.

  She had an election to win.

  The school hall was packed with girls, chattering to one another in their black-and-yellow uniforms like a hive of gossipy bees. At twelve, Imogen was finally one of the oldest girls in the school, and she liked the way the younger girls looked up to her. She walked (with purpose) to the front row, where the clique she’d carefully crafted was waiting for her, as usual.

  “You’ll be amazing, Imogen!” Lucy said as Imogen sat down beside her. She was the optimist.

  “You’re totally going to kill it,” Alice agreed as Imogen looked over her speech. Alice was the realist.

  “Who are you going to kill?” asked Catherine. Catherine was the dim one. Every successful clique had one, Imogen had learned—she made the others feel more confident in their standing.

  Before Imogen could answer, she glanced up and noticed a familiar blond ball of syrupy-niceness bouncing toward them.

  Bridget Sweetwine.

  Imogen’s eyes narrowed. Bridget Sweetwine was her nemesis. The trouble was, Bridget Sweetwine didn’t seem to know it—she insisted on acting suspiciously nice all the time. But Imogen knew that no one was actually as nice as Bridget Sweetwine pretended to be. (“Never trust anyone without an obvious ulterior motive. Unless they’re a garbage collector. Don’t hesitate to trust a garbage collector”—that’s what Big Nana, Imogen’s grandmother, had always said.)

  Now Bridget Sweetwine pranced up to Imogen, her curls bouncing unnecessarily. It made Imogen sick. Mentally, she drafted an email to her clique: Keep conditioner use to a minimum. All strands of hair should obey the law of gravity. “I just wanted to wish you all the luck in the world for the assembly!” Sweetwine simpered, wringing her hands. “I’m soooo nervous! Are you?”

  She smiled at Imogen like some nauseating Victorian cherub.

  Imogen glared back.

  Just then, Imogen’s math teacher, Mrs. Pythagoras, stepped onto the stage and tapped the microphone. Imogen turned from Sweetwine, fists unclenching. “Good morning, girls!” Mrs. Pythagoras said. “It was on a lovely morning, just like this, that the ancient Persians discovered the triangle. And aren’t we glad they did?”

  Imogen glanced around. She couldn’t help but note that most of the girls—aside from Sweetwine, of course—didn’t seem that glad.

  “But enough from me! Now for the moment you’ve all been waiting for: It’s time to hear from the two exceptional students who are seeking your vote for head girl of Lilyworth! Please give a warm welcome to your first candidate: Imogen Collins!”

  Imogen smiled at her classmates as she stood up and made her way to the stage, running a hand over her pearls and going over the opening lines of the speech in her head. But just as she was about to climb the steps, the school secretary scuttled onto the stage in front of her and whispered something into Mrs. Pythagoras’s ear.

  Mrs. Pythagoras gasped. She rushed over to meet Imogen at the side of the stage.

  “I’m so sorry, my dear,” she said, “but the headmistress has asked to see you in her office right away.”

  Imogen stared at her, uncomprehending. “Why? What’s wrong?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know,” said Mrs. Pythagoras.

  Imogen glanced back at her classmates, trying to look head girlishly unbothered. “Will I get to do my speech later?” she asked from the corner of her mouth.

  “I don’t know that, either,” Mrs. Pythagoras said gently. “But I’m sure that, like a particularly tricky quadratic equation, we’ll find the answer eventually.”

  That wasn’t very comforting. Imogen felt her lips drop into a frown and then recovered, waved breezily at the audience, and stepped down from the stage. This is all very strange. She had never been to Ms. Gruner’s office before. No one went to Ms. Gruner’s office unless they were in deep trouble, and Imogen was never in deep trouble—not even shallow trouble. She made sure of that.

  Imogen walked back through the audience to the hallway, trying to ignore her friends’ curious eyes. She kept her smile pasted on, but as soon as she escaped to the hallway, it collapsed into a scowl. She felt sick with nerves. Taking a deep breath, Imogen walked the short distance to the main office, walked past the secretary’s desk, and knocked on Ms. Gruner’s door.

  “Come in,” called the headmistress.

  Imogen pushed the door open.

  Ms. Gruner pushed her glasses onto her nose and looked up from her desk. She was frowning, as usual, and her dark hair pulled back into a bun so tight that it gave Imogen a headache just looking at it. She was wearing an itchy-looking cardigan in an alarming shade of green.

  “Sit down,” Ms. Gruner said.

  Imogen stepped inside, closed the door behind her, and sat down.

  “I am sorry to have to tell you this,” said Ms. Gruner, “but you have been expelled from Lilyworth Ladies’ College.”
>
  Imogen blinked. I must be hallucinating. She should have known better than to eat spicy food on the night before the big speech. It never agreed with her. Imogen shook her head. “Excuse me,” she said, “could you repeat that? For a moment I thought you said I’d been expelled.”

  “You have,” said Ms. Gruner. “Effective immediately.”

  This was feeling all too real. “But— You can’t expel me!” cried Imogen, panic rising up inside her.

  “I think you’ll find I can,” said Ms. Gruner, pitiless, just as she would be if this were actually happening.

  “I’m the best student in the whole school!” Imogen insisted.

  “That’s a matter of opinion,” said Ms. Gruner.

  “Oh, really?” said Imogen. Imogen was far too careful to let her superiority be a “matter of opinion.” She crunched the data herself each and every night—grateful for the statistics lessons her father had given her as a child. Now she pointed to a graph behind Ms. Gruner’s head, which showed that Imogen was miles ahead of her fellow students in every single subject. Everything except needlework—but that was the sort of silly, useless subject that only a true evil genius like Bridget Sweetwine would bother to be good at.

  “Yes, your grades are impeccable—but that doesn’t matter now. Because it has come to my attention that your place at Lilyworth was awarded based on . . . fraudulent information.”

  “‘Fraudulent information’?” she repeated.

  “Yes. Fraudulent information.” Ms. Gruner opened her desk drawer and pulled out a letter, then handed it to Imogen.

  Imogen took it with hands she could not keep steady. Who would . . . ? The envelope, addressed to Ms. Gruner, was written in green ink, which made it look rather poisonous. She opened the flap and pulled out the letter. The words were made up of letters cut out from magazines, like a ransom note. This can’t be happening, thought Imogen. She felt her face grow hot with horror as she began to read:

  dEAR hEADMISTRESS,

  tHERE’S A PUPIL AT YOUR SCHOOL WHO CALLS HERSELF iMOGEN cOLLINS . . . BUT THAT’S NOT HER REAL NAME. nOT at all.

  hER REAL NAME IS . . . iMOGEN cRIM!!!!

  hER WHOLE FAMILY ARE CRIMINALS! hER FATHER IS A CRIMINAL! hER MOTHER IS A CRIMINAL! hER UNCLE IS A CRIMINAL! hER OTHER UNCLE IS A CRIMINAL! hER AUNT IS A CRIMINAL! hER GRANDMOTHER WAS A massive CRIMINAL! bUT SHE’S DEAD.

  yOU GET THE IDEA!!!

  tHEY’RE ALL REALLY, REALLY CRIMINAL!!!!

  hER WHOLE APPLICATION IS ONE BIG LIE!!!!!

  jUST THOUGHT i’D LET YOU KNOW.

  lOVE AND KISSES,

  a FRIEND

  XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

  Imogen put down the letter. She felt like she’d been punched in the stomach. She tried to control her breathing. Sweetwine, she thought, in a sudden, satisfying rush of murderous rage. She’s finally shown her true, evil colors. No one but Sweetwine could have written that letter. Only she was that cunning, that manipulative, that fond of exclamation marks. Imogen shook her head. She’d known Sweetwine was her nemesis, but clearly, she was even more ruthless than Imogen had realized. That bouncy-haired, daisy chain–loving evil mastermind knew she had no shot at being elected head girl fairly, so she was prepared to get Imogen kicked out. But how did she learn my secret? wondered Imogen. I’ve been so careful. . . .

  Imogen could feel Ms. Gruner looking at her. She couldn’t let the headmistress see how she felt (horrified, humiliated, and a little homicidal). So she took a deep breath and pasted her most amused, electable smile on her face.

  Imogen held up the letter. “Surely you don’t believe a word of this, Ms. Gruner.”

  “As a matter of fact, I do,” said Ms. Gruner, folding her arms over her unbelievably green cardigan.

  “Do I really seem like a criminal to you?” Imogen asked lightly, fighting to ignore her rising blood pressure. “Would a criminal study that hard for her trigonometry exam? Would a criminal read with the younger girls during her lunch break? Would a criminal write such a brilliant essay about the use of symbolic chickens in Great Expectations?”

  “That was a brilliant essay. Almost moving.”

  Imogen smiled graciously. “Thank you. I thought so too.”

  “But I’m afraid the evidence is overwhelming.”

  Evidence? She can’t mean one measly, poorly punctuated letter . . . ?

  As if in answer to Imogen’s thoughts, Ms. Gruner reached into her desk drawer again. She pulled out a huge stack of papers and pushed it across her desk to Imogen.

  Imogen felt her stomach flip.

  Staring up at Imogen from the top sheet was her own face in black-and-white. She was looking at a copy of her passport. Not the fake one—the real one. The passport belonging to Imogen Crim.

  Imogen Crim—the person Imogen had been two years ago. Before Lilyworth. Before she’d learned the meaning of the words “ambition,” “power,” and “twinset.”

  Imogen stared at her foolish, young self with something that felt close to pity.

  She was, indeed, overwhelmed by the evidence.

  But I can’t leave Lilyworth. I belong here!

  Maybe this was all a vision; an incredibly realistic, effective bad dream—that would explain the color of Ms. Gruner’s implausible cardigan. She closed her eyes and pinched herself, like people do in books. She opened her eyes again.

  She was still in Ms. Gruner’s office.

  The cardigan was as green as ever.

  Sweetwine’s note was still lying there on the desk.

  She was still expelled from school.

  Imogen sucked in a breath. There was only one person smart enough to get her out of this: herself.

  It was do-or-die time.

  She looked Ms. Gruner in the eye. (“When all else fails, tell the truth. Unless a corpse is involved”—Big Nana.) “Okay, Ms. Gruner,” she said, “I admit it. I lied about my family. But that’s because I have nothing to do with them. I’ve worked really hard to make an honest life for myself—”

  “Honest? Ha!” said Ms. Gruner, tipping back in her chair. “You have done nothing but lie since you got here!”

  Imogen winced. “I just told a few little white lies, so you’d give me a chance—”

  “I’m afraid this school does not believe in giving chances to master criminals.”

  “I’m not a master criminal!” yelled Imogen, suddenly angry. “Look how rubbish my fake name was—I didn’t even bother changing the Imogen bit! A master criminal would have chosen a much better one—Marigold Underwhelm or something like that!”

  “I beg to differ,” said Ms. Gruner. “A name like Marigold Underwhelm would have drawn attention to itself. A master criminal would have called themselves something really boring and ordinary. Something like Imogen Collins, say.”

  Imogen stared at her headmistress with an expression that would make clear that she was not about to back down. Unfortunately, it seemed that Ms. Gruner wasn’t backing down either. “Look,” she said, “it doesn’t affect my performance here. Since I arrived at Lilyworth, I haven’t been involved in any criminal activity. I haven’t so much as stolen a cabbage roll from another girl’s plate.”

  “Why would you?” asked Ms. Gruner. “Cabbage rolls are revolting.”

  Imogen pressed on. “Bad example. The point I’m trying to make is, I’ve turned my back on crime. And yes, fine, my family likes to think they’re criminals, but believe me, they’re hopeless. My uncle once tried to steal a carnival. My mother held a stray dog for ransom—nobody even noticed. My aunt Drusilla actually died slipping on a banana peel. That’s the sort of thing we’re dealing with here.”

  Ms. Gruner raised her eyebrows. “Oh, really?” she said. “The Crims are hopeless, you say? Then how do you explain . . . this?”

  Ms. Gruner reached into her (surprisingly spacious) desk drawer again and pulled out a newspaper. She spread it out on the desk in front of Imogen.

  The headline read: “Criminal Family Jailed for Breaking and Entering W
ooster Mansion.” And the photo on the front page made it clear that the criminal family in question was, indeed, Imogen’s criminal family.

  Imogen felt like a balloon with a sizable, leaking, rude noise-making hole. She shrank embarrassingly as she stared at the photo, slack-jawed. She couldn’t believe what she was seeing. But indeed, there were all the Crims, grinning up at her from behind bars. All the grown-ups, anyway—like Uncle Clyde, with his shock of black hair, giving two thumbs-up; her mother, Josephine, preening for the cameras in a fox-fur coat; Uncle Knuckles, fiddling with his false teeth; and Aunt Bets, who somehow managed to look completely at home in the cell and completely like a member of the royal family at the same time, in a shift dress and pearls. The only person who seemed remotely unhappy to be in prison was Imogen’s father, Al. Imogen felt a twist in her gut, remembering the unanswered phone calls. He seemed to be looking directly at her, pleading for her help with his eyes.

  Imogen coughed and dragged her eyes away, staring at her hands in her lap.

  She knew exactly why her family would have wanted to break into Wooster Mansion—they’d been planning to do it since before she was born—but there was no way they could have actually pulled it off. She hadn’t been lying to Ms. Gruner: her family had always been very, very bad at crime. All except Big Nana. But Big Nana was dead.

  Imogen looked up at Ms. Gruner, pleading with her eyes. “They’re innocent, I swear,” she said.

  “We’ll have to agree to disagree about that,” said Ms. Gruner.

  Imogen sat up straighter. “But they— Look.” Focus, she told herself. “Even if they’re not, I had nothing to do with this.”

  Ms. Gruner shrugged. “Be that as it may,” she said, “we can’t have your kind at Lilyworth. The other parents would be horrified to know that their children were being educated alongside a criminal.”

  “But . . .” Imogen suddenly felt weary enough to lay her head down on the desk.

  “No more buts. I’m sorry, Miss Crim. A cab will be here in twenty minutes to take you to the train station.”

  This can’t be. Do something!! Imogen sat up with a start. “Please! Please don’t expel me!” she begged.