Goose bumps parade down her arm.
She looks closer.
Sits back and lets her mental imagery go to work, decides she’s going mad. Looks again. No, it’s there. The shoulders aren’t as wide. The nose is a little longer. The chin is a different shape.
The Ash Carlisle she met could be this girl’s sister. Her cousin.
But she’ll bet good money that it’s not the same girl.
56
THE EMAIL
Ford’s morning is a blur of meetings, phone calls, consultations, advice, all of which have gone surprisingly well, considering.
The board assures her they will stand behind her and the school should a wrongful death lawsuit appear, and help fight against any moves by the alumni association to accept the endowment gift and force the school to go coed. She fields plenty of phone calls from concerned parents, but none of them seem to blame her.
A fresh press release is drafted by the lawyers, the school’s wrongful death policy revisited.
The students see the counselors, and Ford walks among them, visiting the dormitories and chatting with anyone who wishes to talk.
Ford has to wait until after lunch to speak with Vanessa and Piper. She decides to go to them. It might make them more comfortable to have this interview in their rooms.
Standing at the entrance to their suite, Ford has to admit the renovation, while lovely, has taken a good deal of the character away from the dorms. She liked the dingy rooms she’d lived in, the dark wood walls and multipaned windows. As bright and airy as things are now, she can’t help but wonder if the girls feel the improvements have ruined the school’s personality.
Vanessa and Piper are on their couch, conversing in low tones. They jump to their feet when they see Ford in the door.
“Sit, sit. I only came to check on you.”
“We’re okay, Dean,” Vanessa says, though the swollen eyes belie her statement.
“I know you’re not, so you don’t have to pretend for me. Camille was your very good friend.”
“We don’t know why she did it,” Piper says, curling herself back onto the sofa. “I mean, she was pissed off about the whole thing with Ash using a fake name, but when Becca said it wasn’t an Honor Code violation—”
“Camille took Ash to Honor Court?” This is news.
“Only a conference with Becca. She shot it down.”
“I need to ask you something important. Do either of you know who Camille was seeing? Who might have been the father of the baby?”
A quick glance between them tells Ford all she needs to know. They do, and they’re going to lie to her.
“May I remind you, ladies, that we have an Honor Code here.”
The threat lands. “We don’t know. That’s the thing, we were just trying to figure it out. She didn’t tell us.”
“Camille didn’t strike me as the type of girl who would keep something of this magnitude to herself.”
“Her sister might know,” Piper said. “Emily took her to the clinic outside of Charlottesville for the pills. But Camille didn’t tell us who got her pregnant. On my honor, Dean.”
“All right. If you two need anything, don’t hesitate. I will reach out to Emily and see if she has any information to share. Take good care, girls.”
She doesn’t know if she believes them. Who are they protecting, and why?
Ford stops by Ash’s room but it’s empty. It has been straightened, the beds made, the clothes hung. Ford will have to clear out Camille’s things, have them sent to Deirdre. Have the bunk bed removed. Ash gets a single for the rest of the year.
If only Camille had left a note. Something definitive. All they have to go on is the reactions of the people around her, teachers and students alike, all of whom say they didn’t think Camille was anything but her normal, bubbly self, and the diary in which she spoke of death. She didn’t say she wished for her own, though.
Ford knows full well that many suicides are shocks to the closest friends and family. That people who seem happy are sometimes the ones in the most danger of succumbing.
Ford wants to read the journal, at length, but it’s been taken into evidence, and she doubts she’ll be given another crack at it. She wants to talk to Ash again when she isn’t under the influence of Becca, the sheriff, and whatever she’d been forced into drinking the night before.
But Ash is nowhere to be found. She’s most likely with one of the counselors. Ford makes a mental note to send for her before dinner.
Down in her office, Melanie is at her desk, nose red and eyes swollen. “Anything new?” she asks.
“No. The girls are understandably rocked. Has the sheriff been in touch?”
“He left a message half an hour ago. He’ll be along presently.”
“All right. I’m going to check my email, have some coffee. Regroup before he gets here.”
She plops down in her desk chair with a fresh cup of coffee. Sunlight spills in through her picture window, a shaft of light runs across the rug. It feels obscene that today is so gloriously sunny. It should be raining, the skies weeping the loss of a child; that’s only fitting.
She opens her computer and clicks on her email. She receives a ridiculous amount, considering. She scans the headlines. Most are from parents, a few reporters asking for comment. She’s had a lid on the situation and plans to keep it that way, so long as Camille’s parents don’t act first and start flinging the story to the press.
An invite from Asolo for her annual Virginia Woolf supper party Saturday evening—well, normalcy is best in these situations. She sends back a note: Good idea. I’ll be there.
An email pops in while she’s working. She doesn’t recognize the sender, but it’s come to her school address, so she deems it safe and clicks it open.
A photo is embedded in the email. Grainy. Black-and-white, clearly a shot taken at night.
It takes her a moment to realize she is looking at Camille Shannon.
And Rumi.
Locked in an embrace.
More photos fill the screen, loading one by one, telling the story of an interlude. A series of interludes.
A fight. A hug. A kiss. A farewell wave.
Ford shuts her eyes against what she already fears. The father of Camille’s baby must have been Rumi.
More photos are loading. Her heart begins to pound.
This is her front door. Rumi is stepping in, and there’s a flash of white she knows is her thigh.
The glint of glass.
A smile.
The door closing behind him.
Had he come from Camille’s arms straight to Ford’s bed?
She remembers the night perfectly. He’d shown up in silence, taken her against the wall. She’d assumed it was lust, but now she wonders if it was simply frustration that his younger paramour had turned him away.
Someone has seen them. She doesn’t know what she’s more frightened about, that her illicit affair will be revealed, or the much darker thought—Rumi knew Camille.
Rumi was having an affair with Camille.
It isn’t a leap for her mind to ask, Did Camille kill herself because Rumi rejected her for Ford?
Worse is the next thought, even darker, more disturbing.
Did Rumi kill Camille to shut her up?
Every conceivable curse word she knows runs through her mind, followed by a single, edifying thought.
Who sent this?
Ford is not a computer genius but she isn’t a Luddite, either. The email address is gibberish, but she clicks “More Information” in the header and a series of commands spill onto the page. This, though, is unintelligible. Letters and numbers that make no sense.
There is someone on campus who can decipher it for her. Can she trust him to keep his mouth shut?
She prints out the header,
wonders what to do with the photos. Should she delete the email entirely? She can’t let it sit in her school mailbox; Melanie could stumble upon it. But if she deletes it, is she hampering the investigation? And if she deletes it, what’s to say it won’t simply be resent? Or sent outside the school. To the parents. To the board. To the press.
Now she’s in a real quandary. She’s complicit regardless of the next steps she takes.
The crisis management lawyers she talked with this morning had been very clear. There are three ways to respond to a crisis. Yes, I did it, who cares? Yes, I did it, and I’m sorry. No, I didn’t do it, prove it.
Prove it won’t work—there’s photographic evidence, which means the originals are out there. There’s no way to pretend she didn’t receive the email—somewhere, a server has registered she’s opened it. There’s no way to say who cares, either. Everyone will care.
Her mother’s voice launches at full speed from the back of her mind. How stupid could you be, having sex with a child?
He’s not a child. He’s twenty. He’s a man. He can vote. He can fight. He can pull a trigger.
Yes, Ford, but how long has this been going on?
That answer, if given honestly, is what will get her thrown out on her ear. Or perhaps put in jail.
Maybe there’s a fourth crisis management response. Run like hell. But this isn’t an option for her. Not really.
Her choices are quite limited.
Expose herself.
Expose Rumi.
Or wait for the anonymous emailer to expose everything.
A wild, terrible idea—if I’m not here, I can’t be hurt.
She gives herself a mental shake. Don’t be a fool, Ford. You’ve made a mistake. That’s all. Life will go on.
“Ford?” Melanie calls from the antechamber. “Sheriff Wood is here.”
Ford, startled from her dark thoughts, looks up to see the sheriff’s car is sitting outside her window. She hadn’t even noticed him drive up.
Without another thought, she deletes the email and exits the program. Yes, she is kicking the can down the road, but she needs time to think. To plan.
To talk to Rumi.
She pinches her cheeks and pastes on a smile.
“Send him in, Melanie.”
57
THE BABY
Tony looks wrecked, dark circles under his eyes. He’s wearing the same uniform as last night; she can smell spilled coffee and the acrid scent of his sweat.
She waits to see if his niece parades in after him, is relieved to see he is alone.
Though Melanie is floating around him like a hopeful lightning bug. “Sheriff? Coffee? Tea? I can send to the kitchens for some cookies if you need a boost.”
“No thanks, Melanie. Appreciate it.”
Melanie wilts, then pulls the door. If Ford wasn’t freaking out, she would laugh. Yes, Tony is a catch. For someone.
He takes a seat across from Ford. Balances his hat on his knee. Yawns.
“You look as bad as I feel.”
“You always were a charmer, Ford.” But the recrimination is made without heat.
“I didn’t mean to be rude. I’m sorry.” She is. She needs him on her side, on Goode’s side, now more than ever.
“No worries. I haven’t slept. I wanted to drop by and fill you in. The official report will be filed tomorrow.”
“Okay. Shoot.”
“They found something on the post. Kid was still pregnant. Apparently, the pills didn’t work, or she never took them. They took tissue samples for a DNA run. Since no one claims to know who she might have been sleeping with, we’ll at least have something to go on. If you can tell me who she was seeing, we can get a match faster. Take a couple of weeks, minimum.”
Two weeks. This is good news.
She has time to warn Rumi. They can make a plan.
“Oh, how terrible. I don’t have any news on the relationship front, I’m afraid. What about her parents? Do they know?”
“No. The mom’s a real piece of work, isn’t she?”
“No comment.”
“I hear she’s making noises about a lawsuit? Care to comment on that?”
“Yes. She’s a lawyer, and she’s in pain. The two don’t go well together. People always want someone to blame. Though I am to blame. It’s my job to keep the students safe, and clearly I failed. I didn’t even know Camille was suicidal. Though in my defense, no one else did, either.”
“If you want to keep the family jewels intact, I’d refrain from saying that aloud again, publicly or privately.”
“My mother agrees with you.”
“Your mother is here?” Tony looks over his shoulder as if he expects Jude to be standing behind him, scowling as she always does when Tony Wood is in her presence.
“She showed up in town a couple of days ago. Almost as if she could smell the crisis brewing.”
“Hmm.”
“What do you mean, ‘hmm’?”
“She have access to the keys?”
“Tony! My God. You’re out of your mind.”
“Timing’s just weird, that’s all. I didn’t know y’all were getting along.”
“We aren’t, which is why the house on the square normally stands empty and she lives full time in New York. Don’t worry. She’s conniving, but she’s not crazy. She’ll be out of here soon enough.”
“Why’d she show up now?”
“To push an endowment stipulation in my face. Someone in the alumni association thought they could get to me through her.” At his blank look, she waves a hand. “It’s irrelevant, they’re setting up a play for Goode to go coed.”
“Is that all?”
“It won’t happen. And my mother does this. I don’t talk to her for weeks and then she appears as if everything is normal and expects me to play along. She misses the school, I think. It was her life for so long.”
“And it’s not yours?”
“It is. But perhaps not in the same way.”
“That’s right. You’re getting out.”
“Would you please stop throwing that in my face?” She stands and goes to the window. She doesn’t want to be too close to him right now. Doesn’t need to have her barriers broken down. Because she could use a friend. She could use a man. Some real comfort. Some real love. Not being fucked against a wall by a handyman.
Well, that’s over.
“Sorry, Ford. Sorry. Really. Gosh, you bring out the worst in me sometimes.” He rubs a big hand over his face. “Guess I’m not as over you as I thought.”
His eyes find hers, hopeful. She can’t do this. If she opens this door again, she’s going to end up stuck in this tiny town, married to a cop, nursemaid to a bunch of spoiled rich girls, sitting down for dinner every night to hear about the gruesome car accidents and deer slaughters and meth busts that make up 90 percent of a rural sheriff’s work life. It doesn’t matter that he’s handsome and kind and crazy about her. No. No!
“Tony. You know I care about you, deeply. If I wanted to stay here, at Goode, things would be very different. But it’s unfair of me to ask you to give up your life so I can pursue my dreams.”
“I know. You’ve been clear. Hurt me a little now so you don’t break me a lot later. Still, I miss you, girl.”
She sits back down, puts her hand over his, squeezes the rough skin.
“It’s okay, Tony. We’re all stressed. We’ll get through this.”
“Right.” When she doesn’t leave any room for the conversation to continue in this vein, he tightens down again, back to business. “The shirt we took from the roommate? The fabric is a match.”
Ford sucks in a breath.
“But. The piece we have tests out as standard 100 percent cotton, could be from anything of the same weight and color. I’m willing to bet there are a
hundred shirts on campus that match the fabric. Not to mention, who knows how long it’s been there? Without a perfect match and a hell of a lot of proof, it’s not something that will hold up in court. Ash’s shirt is torn, yes, but she says the shirt was a gift that she received the night of the incident. A decent defense attorney will have it struck from evidence in a heartbeat, saying the fabric was there prior to Camille going off the edge. No way to prove otherwise without more—fingerprints, DNA, something. If someone was up there with her at the same time, we need more. Right now, there’s plenty of reasonable doubt.”
“It might be circumstantial in a court of law, but she was wearing a shirt that matches with a tear in it. Is that enough for us to assume she was up there? That she’s lying to us?”
“We need more to go on. She said the shirt was a gift. If she’s telling the truth, then where did it come from? Who gave it to her? We need to run it down.”
“She did seem quite frantic that we took it from her. It means something to her.”
“I agree. Whether she was wearing it while killing her roommate, or it’s just an innocent coincidence, she didn’t want to give it up. I don’t want to jump to conclusions, but it doesn’t look good. Now, the key—how could she get access to your keys?”
“I’ve been thinking about that. I have to assume it’s one of the secret societies, though, for all I know, Security could have been up there and left it unlocked. They deny it, but without cameras, we have no proof. It’s a mystery we need to solve.”
“Well, Ford, it’s your school. That I leave to you.”
“I appreciate that, Tony. I will look into it, from every angle. I promise. And the moment I know something, I’ll reach out.”
“Good. In the meantime, my office will continue running down what we have. Though I gotta say I’m not sure of the girl who was pushed off the ledge. I’ve read the journal. She really was a mess. If there was a note, I’d say we’d have a clear-cut case of suicide, and the ME didn’t feel differently.”
“I hate to say this, but I’d rather that be the case. The very idea someone on my campus could hurt one of my girls is too disturbing for words.”
Good Girls Lie Page 24