Sisterhood is Deadly: A Sorority Sisters Mystery

by Lindsay Emory

  “Good morning, Aubrey,” I said in a cheery voice, hoping to alleviate the tension that had just risen in the room. If it was this tense before Stefanie Grossman got here, imagine what it would be like when we kicked her out of the sorority.

  Aubrey sat in the right chair, leaving the center one for me. I settled in and waited for Stefanie Grossman to appear.

  Fifteen minutes later, the three of us were still alone in the room.

  “Callie, do you have Stefanie’s number?” Callie called Stefanie, and it went straight to voice mail. We gave her another fifteen. Now she was thirty minutes late. Callie called again. Still voice mail.

  I peeked at my Michael Kors watch. It wasn’t like I had a ton of stuff to do on a Saturday, but the girls probably had schoolwork, errands, and laundry. Still, the hearing was serious business. Our personal lives had to be set aside, and Stefanie deserved her due process. I’d even let her object.

  At ten, it was clear Stefanie had skipped the meeting. “Is this like her?” I asked the ladies sitting by me. They looked up from their cell phones.

  “It wasn’t,” Aubrey said with a sassy note in her voice, “until she got written up.”

  Callie crossed her arms. “Aubrey and Stefanie are BFFs,” she explained to me, her voice also dripping with something unpleasant. I had to stop this before it got out of hand. Only one option was available.

  “I call this hearing to order,” I said in my most official-­sounding voice.

  “But Stefanie’s not here,” Aubrey protested.

  Callie met my eyes and smiled. “The Delta Beta Standards and Morals manual allows for in absentia hearings, section 10.4,” she recited from memory.

  My heart swelled with pride. She was so good at her job!

  “Okay, let’s go over the paperwork,” I said after I called the hearing to order.

  It sucks when I am right. This was, without a doubt, the hardest experience to handle in the whole entire sorority. Reading Stefanie Grossman’s name, her pledge year, and her violations out loud was heartbreaking. Aubrey kept her arms crossed the whole time, her lips pressed tightly together, and it was clear that she had some strong feelings about Stefanie’s losing her pin.

  Ty Hatfield’s mockery of our rules notwithstanding, the Delta Beta expectations were clear. No behavior would be tolerated that would subject the sorority to ill repute and, unfortunately for her, Stefanie had been caught making out with her professor boyfriend in a bathroom during a football game. And she’d been wearing her letters. It was an open-­and-­shut case. I was pretty sure I heard the Law & Order da da DUM playing.

  Then I saw something in the file that made me choke on my recitation of the S&M manual. It was only an asterisk, a footnote, as if it was a minor, unimportant detail. And maybe it wasn’t pertinent to these proceedings. I knew, however, that the fact that Stefanie Grossman’s boyfriend was one Professor Dean Xavier would definitely not be a minor detail to my big sister.

  With a voice that was shaky for several reasons, I made the motion to terminate the membership of Stefanie Grossman for standards and morals violations. Callie seconded. We didn’t need Aubrey’s third. The motion passed. If Stefanie wanted to appeal, she’d have to contact headquarters.

  Ironically, I was picking up the Bible when I heard a word that rhymes with “itch” come out of Aubrey.

  “Excuse me?” Callie demanded.

  “She didn’t deserve this.” Aubrey flung herself out of her chair and stuck her finger in Callie’s face.

  “Ladies,” I said in a warning tone.

  “Did you even hear what Margot read? She deserves to have her pin yanked. She’s not fit to be a Delta Beta!” Callie slapped at Aubrey’s finger in her face. I’m not going to lie, that finger would tick me off, too.

  “Okay, that’s it. It’s done,” I told both of them.

  “Hypocrite,” Aubrey snapped at Callie.

  Callie’s mouth dropped open. “What did you say?”

  Aubrey shook her finger again. “I know, Callie. I KNOW! You know what I’m talking about.”

  Apparently, I was the only person that didn’t know. And I wasn’t sure how much I wanted to know, at this time.

  “If you know so much, why don’t you just say it!” Callie’s voice had risen to a very high volume. “I’m so sick and tired of your trying to bring me down. Since we pledged, you’ve hated me. Since bid day, you’ve been nasty to me. And I’m done with your stupid jealousy!”

  “Look!” I spread my arms out at both of them, placing myself between them. I wasn’t sure I was ready to actually stop a fight, but I wanted to look like I was. “I said, that’s enough! So you two hate each other. Everybody in a sorority hates each other at some point; that’s what sisterhood is all about.”

  “I don’t hate her,” Callie said archly, keeping her glare on Aubrey. “She has ceased to exist for me.” And with that, she turned on a heel and marched toward the door, her blond curls bouncing behind her like a shampoo commercial. Man. Even her dramatic exits were perfect.

  Aubrey yelled at Callie’s retreating back. “Whatever Callahan. No one buys your little miss perfect act anymore!”

  Suddenly, I had a raging headache. On a Saturday. And I hadn’t even had anything to drink the night before.

  Aubrey collapsed into the chair and threw her head onto the table, crying. I flipped through the pages of my agenda, avoiding Aubrey’s drama and wondering how it would look for a chapter advisor to quit after less than a week on the job. Would it be better or worse than a chapter advisor’s running a phone-­sex operation? These were difficult questions, even for a philosophy major.

  Finally, I went to Aubrey and gave her an awkward pat on the shoulder. What I’d said was true. Drama was par for the course. Despising a sister who had formerly been a friend was a very common phenomenon. Too many women, too many hormones, and too many egos. They didn’t have to be best friends, but they had to treat each other like ladies. It was kind of the whole goal of this organization.

  “Do you want to tell me something?” I asked, the reluctance clear in my voice, praying that Aubrey did not, under any circumstances, start the story of how she and Callie started hating each other over some minor peeve on bid day two years ago. I just didn’t have the energy.

  Aubrey wiped her nose, took a moment to collect herself, then looked up at me, her face red and swollen. I saw the same fear and guilt that I’d seen the night before. She slowly shook her head.

  Inner Margot breathed a sigh of relief. “I’ll have to get to the bottom of it soon.” It was a warning, between adults. Get it together before it hurts the chapter. Work it out between yourselves, so I don’t have to get involved. Please.

  Aubrey nodded again in understanding. “I’ll end it. I promise.”

  I took her word for it.

  Chapter Twenty-­one

  THERE’S A SPECIAL place in Hell for ­people who bang on a door early on a Sunday morning. I scrambled out of bed, made sure my girls weren’t hanging out of my tank top, and mentally prepared a diatribe to be delivered to the first person I saw.

  Unfortunately for me, the first person I saw was a police officer. Back in his official uniform polo, Ty Hatfield stood at the front door of the sorority house, with two other ­people I didn’t recognize. But I did recognize their blue lab-­ish coats and their tool kits. Excitement about seeing real-­live fingerprinting in action warred with my high level of irritation at being wakened without a quadruple-­shot, nonfat, four-­Equal latte.

  “What,” I snarled when I opened the door.

  Ty flipped open his badge, all official-­like. “We’re here to fingerprint the site of the break-­in.”

  I crossed my arms. “You said you were coming Saturday.” Not like I was waiting for him, or, I mean, them, or anything.

  “We’re here today.”

  Officer Hatfield, king of the obvious. Grudgingly, I had to let them in. As I walked them back to the chapter advisor’s office, I caught a glimpse of mys
elf in the hall mirror. My topknot was messy and stringy, my half-­outgrown bangs bent every which way, and my tank top and boxer shorts were so not professional. I fought back the impulse to go change; I really wanted to see what fingerprinting looked like.

  Fifteen minutes later, they were done, which was, like most of my experiences with male visitors on a Sunday morning, underwhelming.

  And they’d left a mess behind. Fine powder coated everything. I walked the group back to the front door and Ty told the fingerprinters to go on ahead. Then he turned to me and laid those baby blues on the rat’s nest on my head, my barely modest pajamas, and, finally, my black-­and-­gold pedicure, an homage to Delta Beta colors, of course.

  “Yes?” I asked, still a little cranky from being awake.

  “Do you have anything you want to tell me, Margot?”

  The question caught me off guard. “Are we still doing that? The ‘you-­tell-­me, I-­tell-­you’ deal? Because I considered it null and void after you withheld Liza McCarthy’s other job from me.”

  Ty shrugged his shoulders. “Wouldn’t hurt to share, would it?”

  Any other situation with a cute guy, I could probably do something with that statement. But not now. Not with my eyes still half-­swollen from sleep. “You go first,” I heard myself saying.

  “The tests came back on Liza McCarthy’s body.” He was watching me very closely, making me wish I’d put a bra on before answering the door.

  “And they’re not good,” I finished.

  “Why do you say that?” He was suspicious.

  I threw up my hands. “Because you sounded like Dr. Huang does on Law & Order, SVU when he has to break bad news to someone about the cause of death, all grim and mysterious. Context clues, Hatfield.” I wanted to tell him that he wasn’t as good at being cagey as he thought he was, but that wasn’t entirely true. He was pretty good at caginess. I was just getting better at reading him.

  “So she was murdered.” I was surprised at the businesslike tone of my voice. This was a murder, after all. Of a sister. But I guess my brain had gotten acclimated to the idea.

  Ty nodded, once. I rolled my eyes. “Your turn,” he said.

  I thought about what I could share since I didn’t have access to fingerprinting dust or toxicology reports. “I called the phone-­sex line,” I blurted out. That got a reaction out of him. Something very interesting flared to life in his blue eyes, but all he said was, “And?”

  It was my turn to shrug. “Someone picked up. Someone who got real nervous when I mentioned Liza’s name.”

  Then Lieutenant Hatfield glared at me like I was the biggest dumb-­ass ever. “That could compromise our investigation!”

  “Oh please,” I snapped. “You don’t get to have it both ways, playing games with me, pulling me into the circle of trust, then shoving me back out again.”

  Ty’s brows furrowed together, as if I were speaking an obscure Chinese dialect. “I’m not …”

  “Have a good day, Officer.” I smiled. And then the front door to the Delta Beta house slammed in his face. Accidentally.

  I HAD A few hours to kill on Sunday (is that a bad choice of words?) as Casey was busy arranging Liza McCarthy’s memorial ser­vice on behalf of headquarters, which I thought was a nice gesture, especially since they weren’t going to be too pleased when they found out about the phone-­sex side job. Since Ty Hatfield hadn’t strung yellow police tape around the door of the chapter advisor’s office or told me to stay out, I decided that it was my job to clean the office. Again.

  Being a chapter advisor was not as glamorous as I’d always thought.

  I pulled in a big trash can from the kitchen and got ruthless about tossing items in it. The leftover parts of a smashed computer monitor, the poor, unstuffed carcass of Busy Bee, and assorted broken knickknacks all got heaped together. Then I started on reorganizing. Again. I stacked manuals, straightened books, and filed papers in folders, which went into a drawer. At the bottom of the drawer, I saw the address book again, the one with all the codes and numbers. With trembling fingers, I opened it, and this time, the codes made more sense.

  The ten-­digit codes had to be phone numbers.

  I’d seen the numeric codes after those in Liza’s spreadsheet—­812, 409, etc.

  The unpronounceable Eastern European names with no vowels had to be codes, as well. They made no sense to me, and I sucked at code breaking unless it was Pig Latin. And even then I got confused when a word started with a vowel.

  I slipped the address book into my back pocket. Casey would want to see it, and maybe he’d have a brilliant flash of insight like his idea to Google “sorority phone sex number” the day before.

  After straightening the office, I checked my watch. I had unavoidable chapter-­advisor duty in an hour, and I had to look as cute as I could. My hair perfect, my makeup flawless. My outfit of skinny jeans, a trendy top, and boots was as fashionable as they come. The Delta Beta chapter was headed to the Tri Mu Bowling Tournament, and we would all be on the top of our game.

  It was an inviolable Panhellenic rule that sororities all supported each other. In public. We’d donate our time and money to each other’s philanthropies, sit together at football games, smile and clap in unison during rush. In private, we were vicious, catty, and downright hostile. In public, we were sisters. I liked to think it taught us what real life was all about.

  So that’s why, on a beautiful October Sunday afternoon, the sorority women of Sutton College gathered together in a stinky, smoky, dark bowling alley to cheer each other on and support Tri Mu’s national philanthropy, a good cause that we all cared deeply about: blind dogs. Or was it disabled dogs? Diabetic dogs? I could never keep them straight.

  During every Delta Beta’s pledge semester, she was taught the history of the sorority she had just pledged. A history that told how, in 1879, best friends Leticia Baumgardner and Mary Gerald Callahan formed a “sacred temple of sisters, sworn to love, loyalty, and secrecy” at Walnut Valley College. This was Delta Beta. Leticia and Mary Gerald selected members based on the highest standards of beauty, poise, intellect, and charity.

  In 1880, women who did not qualify for Delta Beta formed their own second-­rate sisterhood at Walnut Valley College and called it Mu Mu Mu. In public, the two sister sororities embraced each other, celebrating their common ancestry. Both sororities’ headquarters encouraged cooperation and joint ventures. In private, Delta Beta and Mu Mu Mu were not so cooperative. Or encouraging. Or civil. But like any family, we kept our feuds private, behind closed doors and fueled with an impressive amount of alcohol.

  Casey texted me that he couldn’t handle being around a “herd” of Tri Mus. Not for the first time, I envied Casey’s non-­Panhellenic status. He got all of the good parts of being in a sorority and none of the pain-­in-­the-­ass parts.

  The Debs had picked their best bowlers to represent the chapter, and studious Jane was the captain. She was as ferocious about knocking down pins as she was about enforcing study hours. The Delta Beta sisters tried their hardest to cheer and stay excited about the tournament, but it was bowling, after all. I never could understand why Tri Mu had picked the least interesting sport as a way to raise money. But I didn’t understand most everything about the Moos.

  I started to drift away after the fourth time the little box came down and rearranged the pins. I was out of practice faking enthusiasm for stuff. Deciding that as chapter advisor, I should really walk around and make sure everything was in order, I started at the end of the alley where the snack bar was. If I got a giant tub of buttered popcorn, that would probably be okay, too.

  I was standing in line at the snack bar when I saw two familiar heads in the shoe-­changing area. It was semiblocked off by open cubbies where bowlers could exchange their shoes for strangers’ old shoes. (There was nothing about that custom that I understood. One, I’d never leave my shoes where just anyone could take them. Two, strangers’ shoes? Ew.)

  I paid for my popcorn and extra
butter and slipped in behind the cubbies on instinct, thinking that if the Panhellenic advisor was talking to my chapter president, it was probably something I needed to be informed about. I couldn’t tell you why I didn’t make my presence known immediately; I wasn’t the type to slink behind stinky-­shoe cubbies, but something about the tone of the words made me draw up short. And they were talking so softly that I had to be real still to hear.

  “What do you want from me?” the blond head said.

  “This is none of your business. It’s been handled.” That was Amanda’s voice. I recognized it easily even though it had been years since we lived together in the sorority house.

  “Handled? That’s what you call it?” the other voice hissed.

  “Do you think I need your help? Do you know who I am?” Amanda sounded like the quintessential Panhellenic queen bee.

  “Do you know who I am? Who I know? One call to nationals, and this whole thing is done.”

  “Are you threatening me?” Amanda sounded as shocked as I was.

  “It’s not a threat. I already called. I’m not letting this travesty go on.”

  “That’s not very Panhellenic of you.” Amanda paused, her voice softening. “I think you need to trust the process.”

  “I want it done. Or I’m handling it my way.” There was a rustling sound, then a perfect blond head swept out of the changing area, not looking back at me or at Amanda. I would recognize those perfect blond waves anywhere. They were Aubrey St. John’s waves. In a pale pink and bright orange Tri Mu shirt.

  I counted to five and circled into the changing area from the opposite way. Amanda sat on a bench, her head resting on a locker behind her, her eyes closed.

  “Hey, Amanda Jennifer Cohen,” I trilled, sounding as casual as possible. Amanda’s eyes snapped open. “Didn’t know you were going to be here!”

  “Margot Melissa Blythe.” She smiled, using my whole name in response. Best friends have silly little traditions like that. “Panhellenic advisors get to go all the philanthropy events.”