by Joan Hess
Poisoned Pins
Joan Hess
While investigating a sorority member's death at her daughter's college, Claire Malloy discovers the sorority sisters are participants in many bizarre rituals and illegal activities-the kind Claire would not want her daughter to be caught dead in.
Joan Hess
Poisoned Pins
The eighth book in the Claire Malloy series, 1993
I would like to thank Lieutenant Mike Terry of the University of Arkansas Police Department for sharing his time and expertise with me. I would also like to thank Barbara Rose for some of her amazing sorority stories, and several other sources who prefer to remain anonymous (for obvious reasons). Also, Sharyn McCrumb and Les Roberts were kind enough to offer specialized information and deserve my thanks.
1
Summer can be deadly. Oh, it’s got some positive points, I suppose, such as not having to shovel ashes out of the fireplace or drape innocent conifers with tinsel. No sleet, no arctic breezes, no bouts of the flu. On the down side, however, there are virtually no customers in the Book Depot, which leads to no income for its proprietor, who is then obliged to stare gloomily at the pedestrianless sidewalk and think longingly of the other nine months of the year, when Farber College students are burdened with reading lists and a thirst for the sort of analytical insights available from slim yellow study guides.
I was doing just that, rather than battling the piles of paperwork that awaited me in the cramped office at the back of the renovated train station. I’d bought the bookstore more than a decade ago, only a few months after my husband of the moment had a most unfortunate encounter with a chicken truck. Business was never what I’d describe as brisk, but I knew with bleak certainty that the next three months would feel like an eternity as my bank balance dwindled, my spotty old accountant hissed about my delinquent quarterly tax payments, and my spirits inversely reflected the temperature.
The bell above the door tinkled, and I looked up with what optimism I could muster. After a brief struggle with the door, a girl with a towering armload of textbooks staggered across the floor and crashed into the counter with a muted gurgle.
“Let me help you,” I said as I came around the counter and began to unload her. A face emerged, framed by wispy bangs and dull brown hair that needed to be washed. Her eyes were small and yellowish, her nose broad, her lips almost puffy. I continued taking books from her and piling them on the counter until we’d completed the task and the rest of her was visible. The rest of her turned out to be skinny to the point of angularity, with no discernible bust, waist, or hips. Beneath the hem of a wrinkled brown skirt, thick calves provided the only convexity.
She was watching me so nervously that I went back to my stool and sat. “What can I do for you?” I asked in the dulcet tones of a mild-mannered bookseller intent on a sale.
“Do you buy used textbooks?”
I inwardly winced at the nasality of her voice, but merely shook my head and said, “No, I don’t, but Rock Bottom Books does. It’s about four blocks past the tracks, on the opposite side of the street.”
“Four blocks? I barely made it this far. I was scared my arms were gonna fall off.” She tried to smile, but her enthusiasm must have fallen off along the way, too. “Are you sure you don’t…
“Very sure,” I told the witless wonder. “I do, however, sell books, and you’re welcome to look around.”
“Thank you.” She drifted behind a rack of science fiction paperbacks. “You sure have a lot of books, ma’am.”
“Bookstores are like that,” I said as I glanced at the spines of the textbooks. Titles ran the gamut from computer technology to medieval poetry to botany, an impressively varied array for someone amazed by the presence of books in bookstores. “What’s your major?” I asked the top of her head.
“Elementary ed. I’m going to be a teacher when I graduate. There’s something really special about kids, isn’t there? I mean, they’re so young and everything, like little sponges ready to soak up everything they can.”
Was a sale so important? It was well past the middle of the afternoon, and not a completely unreasonable hour to close the store, meet Luanne at the shady beer garden across the street, and drown my financial sorrows while gazing numbly at the desultory old hippies who came out only while the majority of Farber College students were gone for the summer. Pabst, pretzels, and piteous whining-not an unappealing combination for a summer’s eve.
Or I could call Peter Rosen, a man of considerable charm with dark, curly hair, eyes as deceptively guileless as puddles of molasses, a hawkish nose, and an uncanny talent in matters of passion. In other matters he could be somewhat irritating, alas, along with tedious, humorless, dictatorial, and blunt. Cops can be like that. As can men in general, I amended.
“I guess I’d better try to find that other store,” the girl said as she reappeared. I helped her pile the books in her arms, escorted her out the front door, and watched her for a few minutes as she reeled up the sidewalk, oblivious to the potential peril of the uneven pavement. Entertainment’s not easy to come by in Farberville, a mundane place made tolerable only by the slight infusion-or illusion-of culture from the college.
I was reduced to reading the local newspaper when the bell again jangled. This time the door banged open and the sunlight splashed on my face as my daughter Caron careened into the room with the finesse of a runaway locomotive.
“Mother!” she shrieked. “I have this absolutely incredible way to earn thousands and thousands of dollars! That way I can buy a car at the end of the summer! Aren’t you excited?”
Caron is fifteen, an age that precludes pleasantries. Although we are similarly equipped with red hair green eyes, and freckles, she has such an aura of intensity that I feel obliged to offer a disclaimer when I introduce her to the unwary. She’s capable of the brightest explosion or the darkest implosion, neither remotely predictable and both equally alarming. Before she was deluged by demon hormones, she’d not been an unreasonable person with whom to converse. I fully intend to resume such mother-daughter intimacy when it’s no longer a life-threatening proposition.
Following more sedately was her best friend, Inez Thornton, also fifteen but without Caron’s melodramatic flair. Inez is drab and soft-spoken, a perfect counterfoil to my burgeoning Broadway star. Her hair is brown in an oddly colorless way, her face rounded with the vestiges of childhood. The thick lenses of her glasses give her an expression of mild alarm, but if I were in Caron’s wake, I’d look that way, too.
“Thousands of dollars?” I said cautiously.
“Thousands and thousands of dollars!” Aglow with greed, Caron began to dance disjointedly in front of the counter, twirling on one foot and then the other, snatching invisible bills from an invisible money tree. “I think I’ll get one of those foxy little red convertibles. Rhonda’s getting some really stupid car that her brother used to drive. She’ll Absolutely Puke when I pull up in front of her house. Can’t you see her face when she realizes Louis Wilderberry is in my passenger seat?” She wafted away between the racks, lost in this consummate vision of revenge. “Oh, Rhonda,” she continued in a syrupy simper, “Louis and I are going to the drive-in movie. We’d invite you, but it’s too cozy for three. Bye-bye, Miss Cellulite Thighs!”
“Caron’s kind of mad at Rhonda,” Inez contributed with a sigh. “We called to see if she wanted to go to the mall, but she said she had to stay home and baby-sit for her nerdy little brother. We went by anyway, and Louis’s car is parked in her driveway.”
“Oh,” I said wisely. “How does Caron intend to chance upon enough money to exact this retribution?”
Caron capered back into view. “I’m going to be a consultant for My Beautiful Self, Inc. It’s this unbelievably br
illiant opportunity for me to make as much money as I want this summer” Her smile vanished, replaced by a look of sheer agony. “But wait! I can’t have a red convertible!”
An observer who might assume I understood any of this would be severely overestimating my maternal acumen, which, as usual, hovered near zero. I wasn’t about to ask any questions or demand any explanations, however, and merely watched as she slumped against the self-help books and rubbed her face.
“I can’t have black, either,” she said in a dull voice. “I’m Friendly, so I suppose I’ll have to get a bronze or forest-green convertible. I just can’t risk red.”
“I’m Elegant,” Inez said to me. “I could have a raspberry-colored car, but my parents probably won’t even let me drive until I’m twenty-one because of the insurance rates.”
I waited for a moment, but both of them seemed lost in despondency. Despite the innumerable occasions when I should have kept out of it and suffered accordingly, I said, “Friendly and Elegant? I suppose that’s better than being toady and dowdy.”
“Oh, Mother,” Caron said, lading the words with contempt as only a seasoned teenager can do, “nobody’s toady or dowdy. There’s only four categories: Sophisticated, Elegant, Lively, and Friendly, as in S-E-L-F. That’s to help you remember them when you’re doing a My Beautiful Self analysis.”
“And this leads to thousands-and thousands-of dollars?”
“My sixteenth birthday is the week before school starts, so you’d better hope it does. I have to have a car, you know, and not some ugly old pickup truck with dents all over it and a gun rack and horrible splotches of mildew.”
“Mildew?” Inez said, then slithered behind a rack as Caron glared at her
“Who said anything about a pickup truck?” I asked.
“Were you planning to buy me a new Camaro?”
I closed the ledger and locked the cash register. “Frankly, my dear, I wasn’t planning to buy you anything more complex than new loafers. We cannot afford a second car, especially in a recession. We’ll be lucky to survive the summer, and I’m going to have to figure out a way to increase inventory for the fall semester without selling you into white slavery.”
Caron’s lower lip shot out. “I am not going to be the only person at the entire high school without a car. Everybody’ll have a car this year, except maybe the nonentities who take welding and home nursing and disgusting things like that. Maybe I should forget about Honors Algebra and sign up for Teen Living? That’s the course where you carry around an egg all year, waiting for it to take its first step and call you Mama.”
“Allison Wade fried hers in the middle of the semester,” Inez said, “and the teacher flunked her.”
“How about omelets for dinner?” I suggested, then locked the store and herded them up Thurber Street toward our duplex across from the lawn of Farber College. Sally Fromberger’s café was closed for the summer, I noted unhappily, as were the renovated theater and pricey sportswear store. Their proprietors had acknowledged the inevitable, and if they were starving, they were doing it without the daily humiliation of silent cash registers.
“Don’t you want to know more about how I’m going to get rich?” Caron asked, the lip having retreated for the moment. I nodded. “Well, one of the girls from the sorority house next door came by while I was putting out your garbage and-”
“My garbage?”
“It’s certainly not mine. Anyway, she asked if I was interested in making a whole lot of money this summer. Then she told me all about how I could become a My Beautiful Self consultant, and how by the end of the summer I’d probably need a stockbroker and a bank account in Switzerland and-”
“A My Beautiful Self consultant?” I interrupted before we moved into the realm of treasury bonds and retiring the national debt.
We were in front of the sorority house, an imposing white brick structure reminiscent of a plantation with its pillars and green shutters. It would have been imposing, that is, had the paint not been peeling, screens missing from some of the windows, a shutter hanging crookedly, the sidewalk cracked, the shrubbery brittle, the lawn yellowish-brown and crisscrossed with worn paths. Although I’d walked past it numerous times a day for years, I’d never so much as paused to study it. It took me a moment to interpret the Greek letters on the sign:
Kappa Theta Eta.
I heard rock music coming from an open window on the first floor “I thought all the fraternity and sorority houses closed for the summer.”
“Not this one,” Caron said impatiently. “Anyway, Pippa’s going to train me, and when I’m a certified consultant, I can charge people for sessions and make as much money as I want. I can even recruit new consultants and train them myself. Then when their clients order cosmetics and stuff, I get ten percent.”
I tried to keep my voice light. “And this sorority girl spotted you clutching a garbage bag and realized you were the ideal candidate?”
“She said she’s always looking for potential trainees, and she’s noticed me walking past the house and thought how perfect I’d be. There are a few consultants in the dorms and other sorority houses, but there’s no one working the high school market. It ought to be a gold mine.
“And she gets ten percent of the gold you dig up at the high school?” I asked. “Is this Legitimate?”
Inez nodded. “It’s this big company with regional supervisors and catalogs and brochures and everything. My mother had some of her friends aver one night-”
“Of course it’s legitimate!” snapped Caron. “The founder is this Hungarian aristocrat who wanted to share her beauty secrets with the world. The training’s very involved and you end up with a certificate and a card to carry in your purse. You have to sort of make an investment in the beginning, but you earn it back right away, and after that, everything’s clear profit.”
The last sentence had been said in a fast mumble, but I caught it nevertheless. “How much of an investment?”
“Not that much,” she said in such a defensive tone that I knew I was going to hear a real whopper “You have to order the official My Beautiful Self kit, but it’s no big deal and it’s totally necessary for when you do the sessions. I’ll be able to pay you back at the end of the-”
I stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. “Pay me back?”
The long-suffering martyr rolled her eyes in a heavenly direction. “We’re talking sixty dollars or so, not a zillion.”
“Don’t forget the shipping and handling charges,” Inez added. “That adds another twelve dollars and eighty cents, for a total of seventy-two dollars and eighty cents.”
Caron did not sound pleased with this display of arithmetic astuteness. “So there’s shipping and handling. The point is, Mother, that I’ll pay you back within a few days when I sign up all my friends. I can charge whatever I want, but Pippa says I should get a minimum of ten dollars for the basic analysis, and as much as twenty for an accessory awareness session. I get twenty-five percent of all the orders I generate, and ten percent of the orders of my trainees for the first six months.”
Before I could share my feelings about what might well be immoral, a silver Mercedes parked at the curb. A battered green truck pulled up behind it, and both drivers emerged from their vehicles. One was a slender middle-aged woman in a beige silk suit and matching heels, who moved with the brisk self-assurance of a Junior League president. The other was a shambling man with a stubbly face, thick wet lips, red-rimmed eyes, hair that might have been styled with pruning shears, and paint-spotted overalls. They started toward the sorority house.
I tried to nudge Caron and Inez into motion. “We will continue this discussion when we get upstairs,” I said in a cold, curt voice. I was actually rather proud of myself, in that my stomach was twisted into a cruel knot and I was having difficulty breathing. Clouds had not crossed the sun, but everything seemed to glow in an eerie way.
“Did you see who that was?” gasped Caron. Apparently Inez was too flabbergasted to do anyth
ing more than goggle at the figures on the porch of the sorority house.
“It’s none of our business,” I said.
Inez finally found what there was of her voice. “It’s Arnie. You remember him, don’t you, Mrs. Malloy?”
“Yes, I do.” I grabbed their arms and propelled them through the door and up the stairs to our apartment. Once we were safely inside, the door locked and the chain in place, I abandoned them and headed for the kitchen to make myself a stiff drink. Minutes later, I made myself another
“Arnie?” Peter choked on the name, spraying the coffee table with a mouthful of beer. “Not Arnie, please. Seeing him was just some form of recurrent hallucination brought on by-”
“Lack of sales?” I leaned my head on his shoulder and stared at the living-room ceiling. “The girls recognized him, too. He’s driving a disreputable green truck instead of that hideous Cadillac he used to have, but he’s the same Arnie right down to his neon nose and slobbery lips. No better, no worse-just good ol’ Arnold Riggles. Can’t you keep him in jail for more than ten minutes?”
“He was in the county jail, and your estimate of ten minutes is apt to be accurate. The facility’s crowded, and someone charged with a misdemeanor hardly qualifies for a lengthy period of free room and board. All he did was steal a couple of dogs and a cat, Claire.”
“And the other times? Drunken driving, drunken hiking, car theft, fleeing the scene, being a nuisance, accusing me of being-”
“All misdemeanors, I’m afraid,” Peter murmured, trying to sound soothing despite the edge of amusement in his voice. “We almost nailed him with a felony a couple of months ago, but the prosecutor decided to ignore the small fry and go after the big fish.”
I was not in the mood for piscatory puzzles. “What are you talking about, Peter? Rigging a bass tournament?”