by Diane Hoh
“No, not yet. Thanks to those creeps at Sigma Chi.” A heavy sigh came over the wire. “I guess I shouldn’t have followed Robert Q yesterday. Dumb idea. I wasn’t thinking.”
“Oh, Darlene, you didn’t! I thought Susan and Puffy were making that up. You really followed Robert Q?”
“I said it was dumb, didn’t I?” Darlene snapped. “I won’t make a mistake like that again. Listen, Hailey, I called to tell you I have to go to my grandmother’s for a few days. She’s got pneumonia. My parents want one of us to go with them. Mike can’t miss any classes, so I’ve been elected. My grandmother lives in Willowcreek, about two hours from here. But we’re leaving in half an hour and since I can’t get in touch with Robert Q, I’ll give you my grandmother’s number. Will you give it to him? And tell him why I had to leave?”
Hailey had no intention of delivering a message that would either be shrugged off, or worse, laughed at. To avoid a lie, she said, “I’m sorry about your grandmother, Darlene. I hope she gets better fast. Call me when you get back.”
But Darlene was not so easily dismissed. “You’ll tell Robert Q? That I had to go out of town?”
Why? Hailey thought. He doesn’t care. Aloud, she said, “Don’t worry about Robert Q, Darlene.” But she jotted down the number on a piece of paper before she said good-bye.
Hailey replaced the receiver with an enormous sense of relief. Darlene was leaving town. Maybe, away from Robert Q, she’d have a clearer view of all his character flaws. Hailey smiled to herself. There were so many. Maybe Darlene would meet some nice, cute guy in Willowcreek, someone who wouldn’t treat her like something to wipe his feet on.
But her smile disappeared as a more sobering thought struck her. Not once during the disastrous pizza party or during their telephone conversation just now had Darlene asked how Gerrie Northrup was doing. Not, “Is she okay?” Not, “Is she going to be permanently blind?” Nothing. Not a word about Gerrie.
Hailey lay on her bed, her eyes focused on the photo hanging over her bed. It was her graduation picture, a colored photograph of her in cap and gown. She was smiling in the picture, and triumphantly waving her diploma. Her hair had behaved that day, so it was a better-than-usual likeness of Hailey Court Kingman. And to her, it was also a photograph of both an ending and a beginning. Looking at the picture made her feel good, so she had put it where she could look at it often.
Nell was not as sentimental. They had argued, that first week, over what Nell chose to hang on her wall. She had tacked a poster over her bed. Although Hailey found it disturbing, the ecologically conscious Nell refused to take it down. “It’s about something important, Hailey,” she had said, and the poster remained in place.
The giant photo depicted a huge mountain of trash: empty cans, bottles, jars, newspapers, magazines, clothing, disposable diapers, household appliances, furniture, and countless stuffed plastic bags, many split open, spilling their contents. Printed in large block letters under the picture was the question, IS THIS ANY WAY TO TREAT A PLANET? And under the question was the commandment: RECYCLE!
Hailey thought the poster was ugly, even scary. But Nell had said, “That’s the whole point. It’s supposed to be repulsive. That way, maybe people who look at it will think twice about tossing their sixty-four ounce plastic soda bottles in the trash.”
Hailey stared at the disturbing poster, thinking, That must be pretty much the way my mind looks right about now. There’s so much going on, and I can’t sort it all out.
According to her radio, a rare, early cold front had invaded the area during the night. Hailey dressed in a heavy green sweater, jeans, and boots, still thinking about her conversation with Darlene.
Why hadn’t Darlene asked about Gerrie?
Was it because Darlene really had thrown that rock?
Hailey bent to tie the laces on her boots. The image of Darlene slashing at Robert Q’s jacket flashed in her head. Was Darlene’s grandmother really sick? Or was Darlene suddenly anxious to leave Twin Falls because she was afraid the police might want to ask her some questions, about Gerrie and about the fire that destroyed Robert Q’s car?
Who had a better motive than Darlene Riggs to throw the rock and set the fire?
Well, Bo Jessup, for one. He had to hate Robert Q.
The thing to do, Hailey told herself, cramming her thick strawberry-blonde hair under a floppy brown felt hat, is wait and see what happens now, with Darlene two hours away in Willowcreek.
As she hurried across campus fighting a brisk northerly wind smelling of snow to come, Hailey spotted Robert Q, his hands bandaged in white. He was flanked by Lyle and Richard. It seemed strange to see them on foot. She was used to Robert Q tooling around campus in the red Miata. She’d seen him hop into it to drive no more than a few hundred yards from building to building on campus. Lyle, Hailey had heard, had had his license suspended for drinking while driving, and Richard’s father had refused to let his son bring a car to campus until he had “proved himself” academically. Now that Robert Q’s car had been reduced to melted metal, the trio had no wheels at all.
They looked like little boys whose favorite toy had been confiscated.
But, as someone had said the night before, Robert Q would probably have new wheels before the sun set. And he’d find a way to drive in spite of the white mittens on his hands. Then they’d all be smiling again.
She hurried past them without a greeting, and when one of them—Richard, she thought—called her name, she pretended she hadn’t heard. They’d ask her about Darlene, and no way was she discussing Darlene with those three.
But, as she quickly discovered throughout the day, Darlene was the subject du jour. The topic of the day. No one wanted to talk about anything else. Darlene, it was said, was a woman scorned, wild with fury at both Robert Q and Gerrie, and had therefore punished both of them.
“I heard,” Puffy told a group shivering out on the commons at noon, “that the police went to her house this morning to question her, and she wasn’t there. She’s skipped town!”
Hailey, hurrying home, couldn’t help remembering that the same thought had crossed her mind. She was tempted to stop and find out more about what the police had done, but she was freezing. The temperature had plummeted and she hadn’t worn gloves. Her fingers felt like ice. Thoughts of her warm, cozy room propelled her feet onward, past the gossiping group.
She was disappointed that she hadn’t seen Finn Conran all day. No wonder the sky looked so black and gloomy. Or was it because campus had become such a scary place to be?
Had the police really gone to Darlene’s house? What had they thought when they discovered she’d left town? Was her brother home to explain, or did he live on campus? Darlene hadn’t said.
Hailey couldn’t really blame the police for wondering about Darlene. Wasn’t she wondering about Darlene, too?
And I know her, she thought guiltily. The police don’t know her. All they know is that Darlene had a very strong motive for hurting both Gerrie and Robert Q. The oldest motive in the world: jealousy.
But Bo Jessup had a motive, too: revenge. Did the police know about Bo?
It was a relief to be out of the wind, with the heavy front door of Devereaux Hall closed behind her. The building rang inside with dozens of stereos competing with each other, footsteps pounding along six floors of corridors, muted laughter and chatter escaping from behind closed dorm rooms. The elevator hummed behind her as she climbed the stairs to the second floor.
Nell probably wouldn’t be home for a little while. She had gymnastics practice every afternoon from two o’clock to four, and it was just four o’clock. Hailey didn’t mind being alone. It would be nice, after such a rotten day of nasty gossip, to have the room all to herself. Peace and quiet, that was what she needed.
The door to room 242 wasn’t locked. Although the administration and the Devereaux resident advisors had issued strict warnings about everyone locking their doors during that horrible business at Nightingale Hall, Hailey had l
ost or forgotten her keys so often, Nell had finally thrown up her hands in despair and said, “Okay, okay, so we’ll leave the door unlocked! But if some creep comes in here and swipes my stereo, you’re buying me a new one.”
Hailey did intend to get a replacement key. It was one of the items on her TO DO list push-pinned to the cork bulletin board over her desk. But she hadn’t yet made the trip to the campus security office in the administration building.
Maybe tomorrow …
Humming softly to herself, Hailey pulled open the door numbered 242.
And stood frozen in horror on the threshold, her mouth open, eyes disbelieving.
In shock, Hailey swayed, and had to lean against the doorframe for support, never taking her eyes off the terrifying scene before her.
All four white walls were streaked with wide slashes of what appeared to be black paint.
The drawers in the twin maple chests had been emptied, their contents dumped out onto the floor. T-shirts, lingerie, jeans, sweatshirts, and sweaters were scattered across the pale blue carpet. Huge, ugly blotches of the same black goo defacing the walls clung to many of the clothing items.
Her beautiful quilt and Nell’s bedspread had been sliced to ribbons and tossed haphazardly about the room. A handful of red plaid strips dangled crazily from the brass ceiling fixture in the center of the room.
Both of their bed pillows had been shredded. Fat wads of white foam rubber littered the carpet and polka-dotted the trail of paint-spattered clothing.
The lampshades on two small desk lamps had been pierced so deeply and so repeatedly with something sharp, the light bulbs were clearly visible through the multitude of jagged holes.
Hailey moaned, a sound thick with pain.
Every desk drawer was not only empty, its contents ripped and tossed, but the drawers themselves had been stomped into fragments. Chunks of inexpensive wood lay in corners and under the beds.
The most hideous act of vandalism was so unexpected, so stunning, that at first Hailey couldn’t believe what she thought she saw.
But, peering at the grotesque sight more closely, she realized there was nothing wrong with her vision. Her lunch rose into her throat.
What the vandal had done was remove Hailey’s graduation photo from its frame, then carefully cut out her figure. Then, slicing a narrow slit in Nell’s ugly landfill poster, he had thrust the figure of Hailey, headfirst, into the mountain of trash. The upper part of her body had disappeared behind the poster, making it look as if she had been buried in the mountain. Only the lower half of her body was visible, but she knew who was wearing that blue graduation gown and those black pumps.
The message was clear. Someone wanted Hailey Kingman buried.
Chapter 9
PEOPLE PASSING BY IN the hall saw Hailey crumpled in a heap in the doorway, and stopped. Like Hailey, they were shocked into silence by the utter devastation in her room. There were only soft whispers of horror as a crowd gathered around her.
“Call security!” a voice commanded, and then a strong arm lifted Hailey and supported her. “I was looking for you.” It was Finn. “But I didn’t expect to find you in a war zone.” He turned her toward him, away from the wreckage. “Are you okay?”
At first, Hailey couldn’t speak, or even nod. Then she forced out, “The poster … it’s so horrible …”
“Poster?” Finn leaned around her to glance into the room. He made a sound of disgust low in his throat. “You’re right. It’s pretty awful. Look, let’s get out of here. Security and maintenance can handle this.”
“No. I can’t leave. I have to be here when Nell gets back. I can’t let her walk in on this.” Hailey raised her eyes to meet his. “Why would someone do this? Why?”
“Why what?” Nell’s voice asked as she pushed her way through the crowd to Hailey’s side. “What’s going on?”
“Don’t go in there!” Hailey cried sharply, then quickly added more quietly, “Our room’s been trashed.”
“Trashed?” Nell took a step forward, but Finn blocked her way.
“Hailey’s right,” he told Nell. “It’s not a pretty sight.”
“Maybe not. But it’s my room, and I want to see what’s happened to it.” Nell darted past Finn and into the room. Her horrified gasp echoed throughout the silent group standing near the door.
Nell appeared in the doorway again, her black eyes snapping with rage. “Who would do this?” she cried. “What kind of animal went on a rampage in here?” Then her anger left her and she sagged against the open door. “Oh, Hailey,” she said softly, “all our things …”
Two uniformed campus security officers appeared, followed by a young man from maintenance. The officers began asking questions of Nell and Hailey. The questions seemed endless. And, for the most part, unanswerable.
But when one of the officers asked Hailey if she had any idea who might have wreaked such havoc, she saw again Darlene wildly slashing at Robert Q’s sweater. That kind of rage could have destroyed their room, couldn’t it?
But Darlene had no reason to be angry with Hailey or Nell. Did she?
“Maybe,” Hailey said slowly, “a guy named Bo Jessup. I don’t really know Bo,” she admitted. “I just know that he might be angry with Nell and me, for helping his girlfriend when she was dating someone else.” Bo had a temper. He could easily have been angry enough to do some pretty severe damage.
Although the guard shook his head in impatience with the romantic goings-on at the university, he promised to question Bo Jessup.
Their resident advisor, Michelle Chang, arrived. There was, Hailey and Nell were told, an empty room on the fourth floor. Two girls had recently moved into the Tri-Delta house.
But before they could check out the fourth floor, there were reports to be filled out, more questions to go unanswered, and the salvaging of those few objects left untouched by the vandal. Finn stayed with Hailey throughout all of it, leaving only long enough to call Burgers Etc. and explain that he wouldn’t be in to work that night.
The crowd of onlookers offered to help the girls uncover the few belongings left intact. Hailey and Nell thanked them, but refused the offer. Neither of them could bear the thought of any more hands touching their things.
Then they learned, to their dismay, that there wouldn’t be any clean-up just yet. One of the security men told them they wouldn’t be able to remove from the premises anything more than a toothbrush until the Twin Falls police had investigated the scene.
“Can we at least,” Hailey asked in a shaky voice, “get rid of that horrible poster?” Her eyes avoided the grotesquerie as she pointed sideways.
“Sorry, miss. It’ll have to stay for now. Likely to have fingerprints.” The middle-aged man in khaki smiled at her with sympathetic eyes. “But soon as the police are done in here, I’ll get rid of that for you, I promise.”
“Thanks.”
Toothbrushes but not much else in hand, Hailey and Nell followed Michelle upstairs to room 416, their new home. As she handed each of them a key, Hailey again thought how stupid they’d been to leave their door unlocked. Then again, judging by the violence of the attack, a locked door wouldn’t have stopped him … or her. The real question wasn’t how, but who? And why?
Who hated Hailey Court Kingman and Ellen Marie Riley enough to commit such a vile act against them? What had they done to make someone so angry?
Room 416 was immaculate. The wide windows that cranked outward over the commons were bright, even on such a gray, gloomy day.
Still, in spite of the cheerfulness, the room felt foreign and unwelcoming to Hailey. The white walls were so bare, the built-in dressers free of jars and bottles, hairbrushes and combs and makeup, the bedside tables empty of alarm clocks and magazines, the desks empty of papers and books, the closets holding only naked metal hangers.
“We’ll have to start from scratch,” she whispered to Nell. “After we worked so hard getting our room just the way we wanted it.”
Assuring the two gi
rls that “nothing like this will ever happen again here at Devereaux,” Michelle left.
Nell, seeing the despair in Hailey’s eyes, said with false bravado, “We’ll make this room ours, Hailey.” Tears moistened her lower lashes. “And I promise, I won’t hang a single poster that you’re not crazy about.”
As if it were Nell’s fault that her poster had been used to send an ugly message. “We’ll pick out new posters together,” Hailey said as cheerfully as she could manage.
And then, unable to keep up the front, she covered her face with her hands and began crying quietly.
Nell did the same.
They sat on one of the beds, crying out their anger and fear and shock until Finn, who had stayed behind to talk to one of the security guards, arrived.
He didn’t tell them to stop crying. Instead, he disappeared again and returned a few minutes later to hand each of them a small white towel. “Compliments of the occupants of room 418,” he said. “They heard about what happened and were glad to help. Cassie and Joanne. You can thank them in person when you return the towels.”
Hailey wiped her eyes with the towel and flashed Finn a grateful smile.
“Now,” he said, “if you’re really ready to show the world that no crazy vandal is going to send you into hiding, dinner’s on me. Well, actually, dinner’s on Caesar, my manager at work. When I told him why I wasn’t coming in tonight, he insisted we all come there for a free meal. He’s one of the good guys. So how about it?”
Although neither girl felt like eating, they were eager to get away from Devereaux Hall and the memory of what room 242, two floors below them, looked like.
“We’d love to go,” Hailey said.
They were about to leave when a group of four girls appeared in the open doorway. Two of the girls carried sheets, blankets, and towels. Another girl held a round white wicker basket filled with toothpaste tubes, bars of soap, washcloths, even a curling iron. The fourth girl had her arms laden with looseleaf binders, notebook paper, a package of ballpoint pens, a calendar, several posters, a Salem University pennant, and, on top of the pile, a well-worn paperback dictionary.