Sisterhood is Deadly: A Sorority Sisters Mystery

by Lindsay Emory

  Casey frowned at the paper and the laptop screen in succession. “How did Ainsley get the phone numbers of the johns?”

  “I didn’t get that part either until the police showed up in chapter meeting tonight.”

  I told Casey the shocking story of the police barging into chapter meeting. Casey was scandalized. “I’ve never even been in a chapter meeting!”

  “Ty confirmed that they got an anonymous tip that Stefanie was the murderer. I think Ainsley must be friends with Stefanie, and that’s how she found out about the phone sex and the johns. She’s now threatening to expose the Delta Beta sex workers.” Casey and I shivered. I wasn’t sure even Casey’s public-­relations expertise was going to save Delta Beta now.

  “You’ve got to give this to the police,” Casey said after a long minute. “It’s evidence.”

  “He probably already has it.” I couldn’t imagine that Ty wouldn’t have kept a copy of the data found on the computer. He was too devious not to.

  Casey didn’t seem convinced. “This is serious, Margot. This isn’t just Liza we’re talking about anymore. If Stefanie Grossman is out there, at large, other ­people could be at risk.”

  “Are you saying—­?”

  “Yes.” Casey looked dead serious. “If she had a bone to pick with Liza, who knows who else she’s out to get? The customers? The other operators?”

  An icy sliver of dread shot down my spine. “I can’t let that happen.”

  “But we don’t know who the other operators are. Unless Liza left other random spreadsheets around.”

  I remembered looking through the computer’s drives. It hadn’t held anything but these spreadsheets. But then I remembered. I jumped up and ran to the bed, where I had left the pair of jeans I had worn that day. I tore them off the bed, patting them furiously, jamming my hands in the pockets. But there were only four pockets and they weren’t that deep. It didn’t matter how long I held those pants, there was no address book hidden in them.

  “CRAP!” I yelled. I fell to the floor, got flat on my belly and searched under the bed. No book. I tore the sheets and quilt back from the bed. No sign of anything book-­related.

  “Margot?” Casey joined me in the room. “What’s happened?”

  “There was a book!” I yelled, ramming my hands through my hair in desperation. “I found a book in Liza’s desk. It looked like an address book. This big, plain black.” I held out my hands to illustrate its size. “I thought it would have names of her friends, her family, but it was gibberish, just phone numbers and coded names.” There weren’t any other places it could have gone, and I knew I’d left it in the pocket of those jeans. “It’s gone,” I said, hysteria rising. “It’s gone, and it’s all over.”

  I ran to the desk where I’d put my chapter notes after the evening’s commotion had died down. My scribblings during chapter meeting were all I had left of the only evidence Liza McCarthy had left behind.

  In desperation, I ran to the chapter advisor’s office, on the slight chance that my brain had stopped working, and the address book hadn’t actually made it into my back pocket. Believe me, stranger things had happened in my brain.

  When I turned left into the kitchen hall, I came face to face with Callie, her hair and makeup all smudged. I couldn’t just run by her. That would’ve been rude.

  “Callie?” She looked as surprised to see me as I was to see her. “Why aren’t you with the chapter at the fro yo shop?” I had given Aubrey my Delta Beta credit card and told her to buy the chapter frozen yogurt. Fat-­free frozen treats seemed the best way to get everyone in a better mood after hearing that their sorority sister was being charged with murder.

  “I …” She faltered and looked over my shoulder at Casey, who was following me, albeit at a more measured pace. Her eyes widened, and her assumption was clear in her face.

  “This is Casey. He’s my friend from headquarters,” I said, but I mouthed “GAY” really big at her. Hopefully, Casey would forgive me for calling him just a “friend.”

  “OH!” A mix of shock and wonder and a little bit of guilt from assuming the worst about me washed over her cute little dimples. “Nice to meet you,” she said with perfect manners. Mary Gerald Callahan would be so proud.

  “Are you feeling okay?” I asked, still noting that she looked a little rough around the edges.

  She patted her hair self-­consciously. “Tonight was a little … overwhelming.” I nodded in sympathy.

  “Go to bed, Callie, you’ll feel better in the morning. At Liza’s funeral.” That hadn’t come out like I wanted.

  She left, and Casey and I continued to the office, unlocking the door.

  “ARE YOU FREAKING KIDDING ME?” I yelled.

  Everything had been knocked off the desk. And I had just cleaned this place up.

  Chapter Twenty-­four

  THIS IS THE part where I started to cry. Huge, ugly, uncontrollable sobs. No, not because of the mess in the chapter advisor’s office. That had pissed me off, and I hadn’t found the address book besides.

  No, the tears came at Liza McCarthy’s memorial ser­vice.

  I hadn’t even known her. Heck, I wasn’t even sure I liked her at this point.

  But there’s nothing like a Delta Beta funeral. Thankfully, so far, the only Deb funerals I’d gone to were of older women, former executive officers at headquarters who had devoted seventy years of their lives to the advancement of our sisterhood.

  Those were emotional, of course. All funerals were sad, made you reflect on the meaning of life, blah blah blah.

  Liza McCarthy’s memorial ser­vice was a whole other story. Casey had arranged everything to perfection. At the Mathias Farmer Memorial Chapel on campus, masses of yellow roses plummeted around the sides of a huge portrait of Liza. He’d gotten her pledge portrait from her chapter in Cincinnati and blown it up to three by four feet. At eighteen, Liza had been radiant, her fresh face full of promise and really excellently applied eyeliner. (When the picture was this size, I couldn’t help but notice.) More roses were gathered in vases around the chapel, wrapped in gold-­and-­black ribbon. Another arrangement featuring roses in the shape of a Delta and a Beta had been sent from headquarters. They were really going to regret that once I got back and gave them the full report on the phone sex that Liza had been involved in. Or when they read about Stefanie Grossman’s trial in the news. Whichever came first.

  Mabel Donahue was there, and she presented the crowd with a stirring oration, invoking the Delta Beta creed and also Liza’s love of TV shows such as Gray’s Anatomy. Several quotations from that show really made us all think.

  The chapel was packed to the rafters, filled with ­people who had come from far and near. The whole Sutton Chapter took up the first five rows, and I was proud of their appropriate shoes and solemn facial expressions. When I first entered the chapel, I had caught a glimpse of Ty Hatfield sitting in the back row, no doubt taking notes and keeping a sharp eye out for Stefanie Grossman. If I were a murderer, I wasn’t sure I’d come to my victim’s memorial ser­vice filled with all my friends, but a thousand cop shows couldn’t be wrong.

  Amanda was there, too, as was Dean Xavier. Curiously, they didn’t sit together. I guessed they didn’t want to go public with their relationship yet, due to some sort of Sutton College regulations about employees dating. Hunter, the house brother, was barely recognizable in a jacket and tie, sitting just behind the chapter. I thought that was sweet, like he took his “little brother” status seriously. He also probably knew Liza pretty well since her office was right around the corner from the kitchen.

  After a very long, dreary hymn about heaven or something, the chapter chaplain, a thin, redheaded girl with bright pink lipstick stood up, piously closed her eyes, clasped her hands, and lifted her face to the ceiling to lead the gathering in prayer.

  “Dear Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior, we thank you today for bright sunshine, good, good friends, and the life of Liza Jean McCarthy. She was a special flower t
hat grew for a summer, before she was accidentally whacked by Satan, the undocumented gardener of Hell. Please let her know that we are thinking about her and hope she has lots of fun in Heaven, with you. We ask that you keep our friends close and our enemies closer. In your name we pray, AMEN.”

  Next came the interpretive dance, which could have been cheesy, but the hidden symbolism behind their reenactment of the chapter-­meeting ritual was too evocative to ignore, especially at the end, when the dancer in black flung herself off the rear of the stage. I saw Mabel Donahue’s shoulders shaking, so I assumed even she was deeply affected. It wasn’t something she saw every day stuck in an office at headquarters.

  When a trio of sisters slowly walked to the stage and began singing Delta Beta’s “Ode to Ser­vice” in perfect, three-­part harmony while Asha Patel accompanied them on the violin, that’s when I lost it. And when I lost it, it was contagious. I heard sniffles spread around the chapel, then little sobs, then the bawling that echoed my own.

  Any Deb would do the same. The song is really, really meaningful. They reached the final verse: “To our sisters, here and gone, our friends, true and long, we vow our oath most fervent, that you deserve our ser­vice.”

  It brought down the house. Hunter stood to give a standing ovation and quickly sat down when I gave him a sharp little nod. That was taking it a bit too far. This wasn’t a Taylor Swift concert. This was a funeral, for Pete’s sake. Have some decorum.

  After the ser­vice, Casey had arranged a reception at the sorority house, so he and Mabel left together in her Cadillac, leaving me to find Ty Hatfield and see if he meant what he said about a ride to the station.

  “You ready?” Ty asked me, and I tried to ignore the note of concern in his voice. I still wanted to be mad at him for withholding information.

  “Is anyone ready for this?” I lifted my hands to the decorated chapel. It was a little rhetorical, but I was a philosophy major.

  But it seemed he wanted to discuss something else. “I just thought you might want to change.”

  I looked down at my LBD. It was Calvin Klein and appropriate for both a funeral and a police station, not that I’d actually ever had the occasion to wear an outfit to those two destinations on the same day before. “No,” I said shortly. “Unless you’re going to throw me in a cell again.”

  He had the decency to look embarrassed by that. “Okay. My car’s out front.”

  We walked out of the chapel doors, and I paused when I saw the cruiser. “I get to sit in front, right?” I asked. Calvin Klein did not belong in the back of a police car.

  Chapter Twenty-­five

  ON LAW & ORDER, statements are usually given in a bleak, gray interrogation room with a two-­way mirror, where officers can drink coffee and speculate on the suspects’ motives outside of the perp’s hearing. Not at the Sutton police station. No, we were back in Ty’s office, which, while bleak, did not have a two-­way mirror, as far as I could see. And there wasn’t anyone playing good cop to Ty’s bad cop. There was just Ty, who, if I had to be honest, had the traits of both a good cop and a bad cop. Both sides scared me a little.

  He turned on a tape recorder and asked me questions about Stefanie Grossman. I felt guilty even answering since I’d never met her, but I answered honestly.

  Then he turned the recorder off, and it seemed that was that. But when has that ever been that when Ty Hatfield was in the room?

  “How did you know about the envelope?” he asked. I double-­checked to make sure the recorder was off, and he saw me doing it.

  “What envelope?” I said it to be a pain. Give him a taste of his own medicine.

  Ty had the patience of a really cute saint. “How did you know we received an envelope?”

  “I guessed.” I met his eyes in challenge. He couldn’t make me say more because it was true. I had guessed.

  “You guessed.”

  I examined the French manicure I’d gotten before I came to Sutton. It was already ragged, the white tips chipped from recleaning and organizing Liza’s office a half dozen times. “Lots of ­people use white envelopes. Probably a large majority of the envelope-­using population, if I had to guess.”

  Ty leaned back in his chair and linked his hands behind his head, his elbows sticking out like pennants. “Why do you keep secrets from me, Margot Blythe?”

  I couldn’t help the incredulous laugh that burst out. “I could ask the same of you!”

  “Where’s Stefanie?” His flat question showed he really thought I knew.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Who does?” The question was a command. Would some politeness be so hard?

  “I don’t know,” I said again. I cocked my head. “Aren’t you asking other ­people, getting their statements? Or do you just like talking to me?”

  “Yes.” The single curt word caught me off guard. His eyes held me for a long moment before I recovered.

  I picked up a baseball off his desk and twirled it in my fingers, then wrapped two fingers around it as if to throw. “Don’t the police have ways to track ­people? Like GPS and credit cards and cell phones?”

  Ty’s jaw clamped tightly as he dropped his arms and sat up straight again. “Her parents swear they haven’t heard from her although we’ve got Nashville PD watching the house. There’s been no activity on her cell phone or her cards. No one’s seen her. She’s just disappeared.”

  I put the baseball back on his desk. “On Law & Order, that usually means something really shady has gone down.”

  Ty looked like he shared that feeling. He reached for the baseball and tossed it into the air. Something he’d said earlier had reminded me.

  “What about the phone logs?”

  Ty caught the ball and stared. “What phone logs?”

  “The phone-­sex line. If Stefanie was one of the operators, maybe she had another phone, a disposable one, and you could trace that.”

  He shook his head. “We already got the records for the phone-­sex number. It looks like all the operators used burners. We can’t get a warrant to search all those records; there’s not a close enough connection between the suspect and the warrant.”

  I thought the government did stuff like all the time. Apparently, Ty Hatfield was one of the good guys; or maybe this small-­time PD lacked the technology.

  “How many were there?”

  Ty stopped tossing the ball at my question. “Margot …” he drew my name out.

  “Just tell me,” I sighed, brushing my bangs out of my eyes and behind my ear.

  His eyes focused on that ear before he answered, reluctantly. “At least ten separate operators, from what we can see. Of course, it could be fewer if someone changed numbers. But we have no way of knowing.”

  I remembered Casey’s advice to be forthcoming with the police. “There might be a way.” I told him that what I’d identified as the chapter financials weren’t for the chapter at all, that they didn’t match up to the paperwork from headquarters—­and my theory that they were phone records for Liza’s phone-­sex business. At some point, Ty started jotting down notes. He didn’t turn on his recorder, though, and I felt grateful for that.

  I paused for a moment, then decided to reveal everything. I described the address book, the numbers and letters and the codes.

  “And where is this book?” Ty was still writing. When I didn’t answer immediately, he looked up at me, those blue eyes seeming to know that I was leaving something out.

  I closed my eyes and rushed the explanation. “It’s gone.”

  “Gone?” The pen fell to the desk.

  I lifted my hands helplessly. “It was there, in my pants when I went to chapter. When I came back, Casey was there and my pants …”

  “Were gone?” I snapped my gaze at him. I didn’t appreciate the implication that Casey had something to do with my missing pants. They weren’t even his size.

  “The book was gone,” I said archly. “My pants were fine. Thanks for asking.”

  “Where
did the book go?” Ty asked deliberately.

  “How the heck do I know? I looked everywhere. I even went back to the office in case I’d left it there.” Oh yeah. I had something else to tell him that he wouldn’t like. “And the office was a mess again.”

  Now it was his turn to close his eyes. His mouth opened and closed like he had just lost the ability to speak.

  “But it was just a mess. Not like someone ransacked it.”

  Ty flashed his blue eyes open. “And you can tell the difference how?”

  I lifted my shoulders. For nine months of the year, I virtually lived in any number of sorority houses. I can tell the difference between types of messes.

  “Was anything else missing?” Ty seemed out of sorts.

  I shook my head. Just the address book. With my luck, that darned book was probably the only way any of this was going to make sense.

  Ty got a call on his phone. With an irritated look at me, he picked it up. His frown only got deeper the longer he listened to whatever he heard. “Keep me updated,” he said with a gruff voice, then hung up.

  “You didn’t say good-­bye,” I observed. Manners are important to me.

  I became the recipient of another irritated scowl from Ty Hatfield. “What the hell is going on, Margot?”

  “What?” I squealed. “What did I do?”

  “That was campus police on the line. Someone broke into Professor Xavier’s office.”

  “Dean Xavier?”

  “I think he’s just a professor.”

  I leaned back, and the realization hit me. “Someone’s looking for something.”

  He grabbed the baseball again, his jaw tight, his grip tighter. “I swear to God, Margot, tell me what you know.”

  “And then there’s Stefanie,” I managed to say, deep in thought.

  “What?” Now Ty looked furious. “What do you know?”

  I shook my head as pieces clicked into place. “But no one’s seen her for days. She wouldn’t search Xavier’s office. It doesn’t make sense.”

  “Why not?” Ty was one step away from steam shooting out of his ears. I decided to take pity on him.