Pretty, Nasty, Lovely

by Rosalind Noonan

  “Get off me. You reek!”

  “I’ll take her upstairs,” I offered.

  “Not to my room! I will not have her throwing up in my suite,” Violet insisted.

  “Come on.” Sidestepping the puddle, I put one arm around Courtney’s waist and guided her toward the hallway.

  “Who is going to clean this up?” Violet hissed in a loud whisper.

  “I’ve got my hands full right now,” I said in a low voice, lugging Courtney up the bottom steps. Behind me Violet gave a grunt of frustration. Ha ha.

  Courtney’s chin rolled toward me. “Are we going to a dance party?”

  “Lift your feet. That’s it. We are going to my room. And you are going to sit on the floor with your head in a trash can.”

  “You’re the best friend ever,” she gushed.

  “I know.” Up in the suite, I helped Courtney lower herself to the floor so that she could lean against the love seat. She was still flopping around, but climbing the stairs seemed to zap her enthusiasm.

  Her head lolled back against the sofa cushion and she looked up at me with hooded eyes. “What are we doing tonight?”

  “Shh. People are sleeping. We’re chillin’ right here.”

  “Hanging with my homegirl,” she said with a huge grin. At least she was a happy drunk.

  I moved the coffee table back to give her space and opened a bottle of Gatorade from our stash. “And we’re going to talk. Quietly.”

  I handed her the bathroom trash can with strict instructions to use it if she needed it and sat opposite her on the floor, a safe distance away. “Tell me where you went tonight.” As long as I had to babysit Courtney, I figured I might as well squeeze out some information while she was in this animated phase of intox. “Out there alone? Did you even know that guy who dropped you off?”

  “That’s Mitch . . . Mick. He’s a Gamma Kappa.” She leaned her hands and chin on the rim of the can. “And I wasn’t alone. I was with Tori and the Gown and Cap-ahs.” She laughed as if she’d just made up the funniest joke in history.

  “What happened to Tori?”

  “She’s still there with her new boyfriend. But shhh! Don’t tell anyone. It’s a secret.”

  “Do you mean Graham Hayden?”

  She gaped at me. “How did you know?”

  “I guess it’s not such a secret. But it seems like a major backstab to me. I know Lydia is dead, but still, she was a sister.”

  Her lower lip jutted out in a pout. “Lydia is dead.”

  Oops. I couldn’t let her fall into a pity session. “Maybe Lydia wouldn’t have cared. I’m not sure she liked Graham that much.”

  “But she did. Lydia loved Graham. She had a plan. They were going to get married and have little babies. A big, beautiful family. She was going to marry a senator’s son. Did you know his father is a senator?”

  “Yup. So Lydia liked him?”

  “She was in love with him! He was the one she called Nick. It was her code name for him because she didn’t want everyone to know who she was talking about because . . . because he wasn’t as into her yet. He didn’t know it, but she was going to marry him and he was going to become a senator, too. With little baby senators all around. And I was going to visit her in the governor’s mansion. We were going to drink fancy cocktails and have a dance party. We had plans . . . we picked out her bridesmaids’ colors. She and Graham looked so good together, with their black hair and dark eyes and . . .”

  As she babbled on I didn’t point out that senators don’t live in the governor’s mansion. I didn’t comment on the wedding plans or the deluded crush. But as I processed it all, my thoughts shifted to Tori and her move toward Graham.

  “Did Tori know that Lydia was into Graham?” I asked.

  “They used to argue about it. Tori told Lydia she should move on, that he was a ten and Lydia was an eight. But Lydia refused to give up on him. She told me that’s the power of love; that you hold on no matter what people say.”

  Hold on to a crush? An infatuation. A sad chill settled on my shoulders at the thought of Lydia clinging to a fantasy of love. Her Nick. Her Graham. Her dream of a happily-ever-after.

  “But she didn’t get to marry him. Poor Lydia.” Courtney’s voice was nearly hoarse now as she bumped along into a crying jag. The inevitable tears of a drunk teen, the predictable ending of a girl’s college drinking binge.

  “It’s sad,” I agreed. “Even sadder that Tori was probably plotting to get Graham for herself.”

  “She always liked him, but she stayed away,” Courtney said. “Out of respect for Lydia.”

  Did Tori really stay away? I wasn’t so sure of that. I’d never known Tori to sacrifice anything she wanted.

  “Aw, I miss Lydia so much,” Courtney moaned.

  “I know. I was going through the archives and I found something weird. A lot of cash. I think it was Lydia’s money. Do you know anything about it?”

  “It was hers,” she said sheepishly.

  “How did Lydia get thousands of dollars?” When she didn’t answer, I gave her a nudge. “Courtney, you shared a room with her. Was Lydia working as a prostitute?”

  “No! Of course not. She would never do that.” Courtney lifted her head from the bucket and slumped down to the floor. “Lydia was too proper. She just . . . she figured out a way to make guys pay her money. She was so smart.” She curled into a fetal position.

  The list of names. The cash. The guys owing money. Oh, so smart. How much had Violet said it cost? Six hundred dollars. Times how many names in the book? That would account for the mega-cash Lydia had accumulated, minus her expenses.

  “Let me guess. She would bag a guy, tell him she was pregnant, and then demand money for an abortion.”

  “How did . . . how did you know that?”

  “But the poor doofus didn’t get her pregnant, so she just pocketed the catch. Yeah, she was smart. Except that she had to have sex with those guys.”

  “You’re disgusting,” Courtney whimpered, mashing one cheek against the floor. “Everything is spinning. I can’t make it stop.”

  “Take deep breaths.”

  Bone-tired but stuck on this new discovery, I went to the closet and dug through my backpack until I found the business card for Detective Taylor. I didn’t want to betray a sister, but these events were far beyond the secrets I’d promised to keep. Nothing in our ritual or initiation elicited loyalty for a sister practicing blackmail and extortion. I decided that the police needed to know that Lydia was no angel, and the list of guys who might have been angry enough to wrench her pretty neck was more than fifty names long. And then there was Tori, who may have been so battered by Lydia that she had killed her to stop the torture. Had she killed Lydia? I didn’t think so. But as a suspect in the case, I could only gain by passing this information on to the police.

  I called the detective’s cell phone, but got a recording. Of course. She wasn’t going to answer in the middle of the night. The morning would be soon enough.

  CHAPTER 33

  It was happening again.

  Monday morning, as Angela and I left our art class, a fire truck blocked our view of the ravine. “Is there a fire?” I asked two firefighters standing behind the truck.

  “You’re okay. We’re here for backup. Police action down in the ravine.”

  As we moved around the truck the blue and red lights of police vehicles flashed over the rocks and bald dirt of the ravine. This time, they were farther down the river, near the Stone Bridge.

  “Not again. I can’t.” Angela grabbed my wrist, starting to freak out. “I can’t take this.”

  I turned to the firefighter, a lanky, gray-bearded man, who was opening the door of the cab. “Did someone else jump?”

  “I’m not supposed to say.”

  “That means it’s a suicide,” Angela said. “That’s it. I’m putting in a transfer.”

  Graybeard looked around and stepped closer, leaning down toward us. “Someone reported a homeless man hi
king down under the Stone Bridge. The cops went down to move him out, but found some, uh, human remains in the process. A dead baby.”

  A dead baby. A baby in the ravine. How could it be?

  My heartbeat thudded in my chest as I tried to make sense of it. Not mine. Not mine. Not mine.

  Angela and I gaped up at Graybeard, who held up his hands. “You didn’t hear it from me.”

  “Got it.” I ignored my thudding heart as I tugged Angela toward the bridge, but the pressure in my chest made it hard to breathe. “I can’t believe it,” I muttered. “It can’t be.”

  “Really. A homeless man was carrying around a corpse? That is too gruesome.”

  This time there wasn’t much of a crowd watching from the North Campus Bridge. All the action would have been around the Stone Bridge, but from a distance it didn’t seem too crowded. I figured the homeless guy had been taken away, as well as the small body.

  A baby’s body. What the hell?

  While I focused on easing the thudding pulse moving up to my throat, Angela stopped to talk with some guys she knew from the basketball team. Graybeard hadn’t shared anything that most of the campus didn’t already know. On a campus this size the removal of an indigent man was routine. But the baby—that was big news.

  “This is not the first time the body of an infant was found in the ravine,” Zeke Hartwell said, holding up his phone to read the Internet entry. “A male infant corpse was found in 1967 in the rocks under the Stone Bridge. The case was never solved. But that was the sixties. Free love and psychedelic drugs. Abortion wasn’t legal yet.” There was something calming about his comment, this twentyish geek with his big black glasses and sly smile. Maybe this was just another random abandonment. It had to be.

  By the time Angela and I continued walking, my pounding heartbeat had faded and I was able to take a deep breath. Panic attack averted. I tried to think of good things to keep calm. Rory coming back from the mountain in the afternoon. My meeting with Detective Taylor to get this heavy weight off my chest.

  I was starting to feel better when we swung into the front door of Theta House and nearly smacked into Charlie’s Angels. Tori, Courtney, and Violet stood in line like an army of goddesses. Fierce, furious goddesses.

  “The Rose Council commands your presence immediately for an emergency meeting.” Tori’s voice was low but chilling.

  “That means now,” Courtney said, trying to siphon off Tori’s cool composure but failing in her hungover state. Her hair was flat, her mascara from the night before smudged.

  “It’ll have to be later,” I said. “I have a class.”

  “This can’t wait,” Violet said. “We’ll go down to the babe cave.”

  “I really don’t have time.”

  “You can’t refuse the Rose Council!” Courtney seemed offended. “It’s in the bylaws.”

  Angela fixed her eyes on Courtney. “Scholarship is in the bylaws, too. Or maybe you missed that one.”

  That lit Courtney on fire, but Tori pointed a finger at Angela and warned, “You don’t want a piece of this mess.”

  “Maybe I do,” Angela challenged.

  I was grateful that she had my back, but I wasn’t up for a catfight. “Just chill. Let’s go downstairs and get this over with.”

  “Fine.” Violet led the way to the stairs. I mouthed a thank-you to Angela and followed.

  Down in the babe cave a few freshman girls were set up, studying, but Violet shooed them away. I hated the way she stood over them as they nervously collected the index cards that had been set up in a grid pattern.

  “Thanks, you guys,” I told them. “We won’t be too long if you want to come back.”

  They spared me a quick smile and scrambled out. When I turned, Tori had already set up a folding chair in the place of shame, in front of the large TV.

  “Sit,” she ordered. “And tell us what the hell you were thinking when you tossed that baby down in the ravine.”

  “I didn’t toss her. I would never—”

  “Well, they found her,” Courtney interrupted. “The body was out there under the Stone Bridge. Not even covered.”

  “I can’t tell if you were just careless or truly moronic,” Tori said sweetly.

  “We trusted you to do the right thing.” Violet lit a candle and cradled it. The flickering light danced eerily under her heart-shaped face. “We thought you were an organized young woman who crossed her t’s and dotted her i’s. But this was unforgivable. It was out in the open for all the world to see. Not buried or anchored down in the rivvah or—”

  “Anchored down in the river? Like that’s the right thing to do?” I lifted my hands. “Seriously? You’ve got a sick mind. We’re not mobsters.”

  “I just expected the job to be done properly,” Tori said. “Disposal is disposal.”

  “I didn’t . . .” I stopped myself, realizing I had been planning to bury the baby’s body before the little thing came back to life. But these girls didn’t know that part; I’d never told them about the miracle. It was in the second layer of secrets.

  I wanted to remind them that they’d sent me out, sick and exhausted, with a horrible task and no clear plan, but I saved my breath and tried to calm them down. “The baby they found today? It must have come from someone else,” I said.

  “You’re so full of shit, and now they’re going to trace it back to us.” Tori was freaking out, pacing and jiggling her fingers in the air like jazz hands. “I touched it. I wasn’t wearing gloves. What if my fingerprints are on it somewhere? What if they think it’s mine, or that I killed it?”

  “My fingerprints are on it, too,” Courtney said dully. “Oh my God, Tor. Maybe we’ll go to women’s prison together. We could be cellmates. But orange is not a good color for me.”

  Tori pressed her fingertips to her temples. “Do not call me Tor.”

  I tried to reel them in. “No one here is going to prison because one, I didn’t leave the baby girl in the ravine. So it’s got to be a different baby. And two, unless you have fingerprints on file, the police database will not make a match. And that’s assuming that they can lift prints from the . . . the baby’s body.” I stood and faced them. A cool undercurrent of strength moved me along. “You guys need to chill. And I have to go.”

  “Wait.” Tori squinted at me. “So what did you do with the body?”

  “The less you guys know, the better,” I said firmly. “But she’s not in the ravine, okay? Whatever the police found—it’s not the body of our baby.”

  * * *

  The news had hit Finn like a punch in the gut. The remains of an infant just below the Stone Bridge. He thought of Emma, her beautiful, wondrous story. He wanted to believe it was true, but the facts pointed to something different. He sent her a text, asking her to stop in to his office after noon.

  It can’t wait.

  She stopped in on her way to the library. Her dark hair was wild and windblown, but she seemed calm. She tried to finger comb it as she walked in. “Something tells me this isn’t about the task force.”

  “I know you’ve heard the news about the body in the ravine.”

  “That’s all I’ve heard all day. It’s awful.”

  “I have to ask you, Emma. Is that the body of your baby? Did it die eventually?” He had begun to wonder if the baby had not come back to life as Emma had told him. Maybe that was her fantasy, some sort of postpartum hallucination.

  “No,” she said cautiously, “and I told you, it wasn’t my baby at all. I wasn’t the mother.”

  “The mother was someone else in your sorority?”

  “Someone else. A friend.” She squinted at him. “You don’t believe me?”

  “But you were sick. Dehydrated. You said you ached all over.”

  “I was getting over the flu, and I had to pull an all-nighter.”

  “Okay. I’m sorry to bring it up again, but with the incident this morning, I had to ask.”

  “I get that.” She frowned. “It’s a weird coincid
ence, I know.”

  “Are you nervous about the police connecting you to the remains in the ravine?”

  “Nope. Not at all. The miracle baby is alive and well.”

  “Thank God for that.” That night on the bridge they had promised to be honest, to keep it real, and he didn’t want to push too hard. Trust was a tenuous thing. Stretched too far, it snapped. “So what else is going on?”

  “Besides the scandal of the day?” she teased. “You want more?”

  “I guess one is enough.”

  * * *

  She was waiting for me outside Dr. Finn’s office. Another cop, this one with sparkle gel on her skin and hair styled to feather around her face. Nice try with the makeover, but she had blown her cover when I caught her staring as I left the office. She popped out of a chair by the receptionist’s desk and just gaped.

  Letting my breath out with a hiss, I turned away and trudged out. This one had to be new; she followed me out of the building without even trying to be discreet.

  My teeth clenched as I skirted around a mossy section of the path and started uphill. I was getting so sick of being followed by the cops, annoyed at having to arrange a campus escort after dark. I wanted to turn around and yell at her. If you didn’t waste so much time following me, maybe you would have caught the killer by now.

  But I kept my cool. I was proud of myself for not getting rattled by the Rose Council ambush that morning. The confrontation had forced me to tap an unknown resource of strength, and now I was on a roll.

  The sparkle gel cop peeled off as I went into the library. Maybe she knew I was scheduled to work there for a few hours. Whatever.

  Needing to keep busy, I pushed the cart down the aisle and shelved books. There was something satisfying about this job, mostly because I imagined that a student might be looking for one of the books on the cart for a report. I liked being the one to make each book available.

  The library was more crowded than usual, probably because we were creeping up on the end of the term and students were trying to complete all the papers and assignments that they’d left until the last minute. The buzz of conversation floated up from the crowded tables on the main floor. I glanced down and immediately spotted Sam down below. It was his voice that had caught my attention, and I paused near the balcony rail, listening as he explained something to the other guys at the table. He came to the punch line of the story, and some of them laughed.