The Cover Story

by Deb Richardson-Moore

  “Call me Branigan. I’ve been talking to Sophie and some of the other Greek Row residents today and wanted to run one more thing by you.”

  “Okay.”

  “It turns out that the man in jail for killing Maylene Ayers recorded some fraternity and sorority functions with the idea of blackmailing students. Sophie confirmed that he did try that with the Kappa Eps.” Branigan watched Anna closely, but the girl’s face gave away nothing. “Did you meet Ralph when you interviewed Maylene?”

  “No. She was by herself.”

  “So you don’t know him?”

  She shook her head.

  Branigan realized she was going to have to be more confrontational. “Ralph claims he taped Maylene and Janie Rose Carlton before their deaths. He says the video will help prove he didn’t kill Maylene. But his phone has disappeared.”

  When Anna didn’t speak, Branigan added, “Do you know anything about that?”

  “Why would I?”

  “You were one of the last people to talk to Maylene.”

  “So?”

  “So she lived with Ralph and he buried the phone under their tent. It would make sense that she knew about any video he had.”

  “But as you pointed out the last time we talked, Maylene didn’t confide in me.”

  “Didn’t she?”

  “Miss Powers, you gave me an ethics lesson because you thought I’d betrayed her. Now you’re suggesting she trusted me so much she gave me some kind of video?”

  Branigan was silent, wondering how much this girl knew, wondering if her knowledge placed her in danger. She changed tack. “Are you working on a story for next Saturday’s Swan Song?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will it be something the police are interested in?”

  Anna couldn’t help preening slightly. “Maybe.”

  Branigan nodded. “Anna, be careful. Two of your fellow students are dead. If you don’t want to tell me, that’s fine. But if you know something, you do want to tell Detective Scovoy.” She grabbed a business card from her purse and scribbled Chester’s cell phone number on the back. “My number’s on the front and his is on the back,” she said.

  Branigan turned to leave. She heard a quiet click. It sounded as though it came from the adjoining room.

  “Is someone else here?”

  “No, just me.”

  “Do you mind if I look?”

  “Not at all. You’re making me nervous.”

  Branigan walked through the open doorway next to Anna’s desk, blindly searching the wall with her palm until she found a light switch. The room leapt into brightness. It was empty. She tried the door to the hallway and found it unlocked. She poked her head out, but saw that the hallway was empty as well.

  “Do you always come up here by yourself?” she asked Anna, returning to the first room.

  “Well, yeah, but the radio guys are just down the hall.”

  “Do they know you’re here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you want me to drive you back to the sorority house?”

  Anna glanced out of the window at the inky blackness that had fallen. She grabbed her laptop and purse. “Yes, actually, I think I do.”

  Anna turned off the office lights, and they exited.

  “You don’t want to take the elevator?” Branigan asked as Anna walked past it.

  “It takes forever. The stairs are faster.”

  As the women entered the stairwell, they heard a door close on the floor below. Branigan held a finger to her lips, then ran down the stairs. She pushed the door bar and looked onto the second floor hall. A dark figure had reached the end of the hall and was starting down the wide staircase to the dining room below. A figure somehow familiar.

  Branigan sprinted down the hall, leaving Anna behind. She reached the staircase only to see the figure disappear out of a side door next to the bottom step. She hurried down, pushing through the door and into a shadowy alley between buildings. The lakeside patio fifty feet away was well lit, but back here, next to the building, the college wasn’t trying to show off anything. Branigan darted from the alley to her right and saw no movement, so she turned back toward her left. Shrubbery taller than she was hugged the side of the building. She ran a few steps toward the patio, toward the welcoming light.

  A padded arm reached out and grabbed her.

  Branigan was in mid-scream when her brain registered the bulky coveralls, the nylon do-rag, the dreadlocks.

  The scream died. “Malachi?” she hissed.

  “Miz Branigan,” he said in surprise. “Why you followin’ me?” He extricated her from where she’d half fallen into the bushes.

  “I’m not. I mean, not unless you were in the newspaper office on the third floor. Were you?”

  “Nah, I ain’t been up but to the second floor.” He peered into the darkness. “I follow that Mr Carlton here. But I ain’t seen him after I got inside.”

  “Harry Carlton came to the student center? Not his wife’s building?”

  Malachi nodded, looked around once more. “He come in whatever building this is.”

  “What was he doing here?”

  Malachi shrugged. “Like I say, I lost ’im.”

  “Could he have gone to the third floor?”

  “Dunno.”

  Anna came alongside Branigan and looked from her to Malachi. “Why would Janie Rose’s dad be in the newspaper office?” she asked.

  Branigan looked at the girl but couldn’t make out her expression in the gloom. Obviously, she knew more than she was letting on. But would she have agreed to meet Mr Carlton? Or, more to the point, would Mr Carlton meet with her? Or had he been in the office to find out something? For that matter, had he been in the office at all?

  “So you weren’t supposed to meet Mr Carlton in your office?” Branigan asked her.

  “No, why would I?”

  Branigan stood on the sidewalk, brushing leaves from her coat sleeves. Malachi stepped out to join her. Anna looked from one to the other without speaking. Then the three headed toward Branigan’s car, none of them entirely at ease in the presence of the others.

  Branigan was beginning to understand Sophie Long’s dread. She too wanted to get free of this campus.

  Chapter Ten

  Charlie Delaney exited her doctor’s office and actually skipped across the parking lot. Her mother started to call her back, but her dad shook his head.

  “Let her go,” Liam said. “Lot of pent-up energy.”

  Both her arm and her leg cast had been sawn off. As Liam and Liz leaned against Liam’s SUV, their daughter danced like a six-year-old across the asphalt. “At least I’m not twirling, Mom!” she cried.

  “I can’t watch,” Liz laughed as she got into the car. “Come on, you goofball, it’s cold.”

  Charlie fell into the back seat, breathing hard. “Boy, I’m out of shape. And my ribs hurt.”

  “That’s not a bad thing if it’ll keep you from overdoing it,” said her mom.

  Winter had returned to the South, and though the sun showed up occasionally between flying clouds, the wind was frigid. The three stopped for fast-food tacos, then Liam dropped Liz and Charlie at home.

  “I’ve got to meet with a client,” Liz said, gathering up giant binders of fabric swatches. “We’ll be downstairs. What are you going to do with your first cast-free afternoon?”

  “I’ve got homework,” said Charlie. “But first I’m going to call Chan. This is too major for a text.”

  “I won’t be tied up long. Tell your brother hi for me.”

  The next morning Charlie accompanied her dad to Jericho Road so she could take his car for the day. Breakfast was ending and many of the departing homeless people hugged the young woman with whom they’d shared Sunday worship and Friday night pizza. Charlie asked aft
er their children, friends and even the pets some of them kept in the encampment under the Garner Bridge. Her dad had taught her the importance of remembering names in a population that felt unnoticed, unheeded, unseen. Tiffany Lynn hung back, waiting to see her.

  “Tiffany,” Charlie said, catching a glimpse of her. “I’ve been trying to find you ever since I saw the Good Samaritan painting. It’s amazing.”

  “Thank you,” the artist said. “Good to see you outta yo’ wheelchair.”

  “That’s been awhile. I’m even off crutches now.”

  “Yeah, that too. Miz Charlie, they ever catch the fellow what did this to you?”

  “No, and I’d sure like to get hold of him. I’m not quite so forgiving as Saint Dad.”

  Tiffany laughed. “I ain’t so sure Pastor would be forgivin’ this time neither.”

  Charlie drew a cup of coffee from the nearly empty urn and filled it liberally with milk. She wandered back to her dad’s office and wasn’t surprised to find Malachi Martin mopping the hallway.

  “Mr Malachi!” she cried. “Mom told me you came to the hospital, but I never saw you.”

  “Just checkin’ to see you was all right, Miz Charlie.”

  “I am now. See? No casts.”

  “I see that. Congrat’lations.”

  “I have to admit, it gives a whole new meaning to feeling free.”

  “If you looking for your daddy, he in there.” Malachi nodded to Liam’s office, its door ajar. “He got somebody with him.”

  Charlie tiptoed over the damp floor, and listened at her father’s door. Hearing soft voices inside, she stepped away. “I won’t bother him now,” she told Malachi. “Thanks for coming to the hospital.”

  She left a message with Dontegan at reception that she would check in with her father by noon. Then she hurried into the gray-white day, texting as she went.

  Do u have 15 mins to meet this AM?

  Maggie Fielding shot back immediately:

  No time 2 come 2 your house.

  Have car. Can meet at RL coffee shop.

  OK. See u @ 9:30.

  Charlie was winded by the time she reached her dad’s SUV. Eight weeks off her feet had wreaked havoc with her muscle tone and stamina. She eased into the driver’s seat and caught her breath. At least she had plenty of time to drive to Rutherford Lee. Like many residents of Grambling, she was familiar with the campus. Her family went to the occasional football and basketball home game, and she had attended soccer camp there for three summers during high school. She shook her head to think how much sprinting she’d been capable of this time last year. “Girl, you got some territory to make up,” she said aloud.

  Charlie drove through the college’s brick arch, barren now of the climbing roses that would return in the spring. There had been a few days at UGA when she’d wondered if she’d made a mistake in not coming here instead. One day in the campus post office, used almost exclusively for care packages these days, she’d received a handwritten letter from her dad. Reading it, she had slid to the floor, her back against the wall of small, metal-doored openings, and cried. She’d wanted to leave home, she really had. She knew it was the best thing. But breaking up the foursome that had been her mom, dad, Chan and her hadn’t been easy. She wondered now what it’d been like for her parents, sending her and Chan off at the same time. They’d put a brave face on it. But that letter, telling her how proud he and Mom were, how much they loved her and Chan, the hopes they had for them…. It wasn’t what she needed to hear at that homesick moment.

  She rounded the entrance fountain, meandered on the one-way road with its adjacent bike lane. She wanted to get some visuals on the events that had rocked her life this winter, so her first stop was the football stadium. She couldn’t see anything from the parking lot, so she got out of the SUV. Pulling her coat tightly around her, she made her way through the empty concourse to the field where groundsmen in the college’s navy and yellow windbreakers were consulting in one end zone.

  She took a seat on an aluminum bench on the home side, near the yellow goalpost, and imagined the scene of a year ago. She’d read her Aunt Branigan’s story a dozen times, and tried to think how a brief drunken accident could send things spiraling so darkly out of control. Mackenzie Broadus was paralyzed, possibly because of a mistake Janie Rose Carlton and Maylene Ayers had made in moving her. She didn’t know Mackenzie or Maylene. But there was a solemnity to Janie Rose at Georgia that hadn’t been there in middle and high school. They’d attended different high schools but kept enough mutual friends to see each other occasionally. So what caused the change? Was it guilt? And the way she’d acted in the Jeep that last morning. Was it fear? Of what? Had she recognized the Kappa Ep hearse and known something that Charlie didn’t?

  There was no obvious link between Janie Rose’s death and Maylene’s. But how odd that both girls were present at Mackenzie’s accident.

  Charlie had a sudden thought: Could it be some unbalanced person from Mackenzie’s family, seeking revenge? Her father or a brother or a friend? She made a mental note to suggest it to Branigan.

  Charlie paused to catch her breath after climbing the steps to exit the stadium. I’m pitiful, she thought, walking slowly back to the car. She drove past the chapel and then to Greek Row, curious to see where the hearse had come from. She’d like to see it again, but knew it was still in the police compound.

  Students walking and biking to class on this Tuesday morning were concerned mostly with staying warm. No one glanced at Charlie as she crept by the elegant Gamma Delta Phi house. So that was where Janie Rose had lived. Three structures over, Charlie saw the Kappa Epsilon Chi letters on the last house before a vacant lot. She crawled past, staring at the brick façade. She realized she didn’t know if Maggie lived here or in a dorm or in an off-campus apartment. She looked around, thinking she might spot her friend. When she didn’t, she drove on to the student center and walked across the frigid lakeside patio into the coffee shop.

  Maggie was already seated, and waved to Charlie from a booth. “No crutches?” Maggie called excitedly. The two hugged, and she handed Charlie a laminated card. “Get something to drink with this.”

  Charlie waved her off. “I had coffee at Jericho Road,” she said, sliding into the seat facing Maggie. “I don’t need anything else.”

  “It’s so good to see you up and walking,” Maggie said. “How’s it feel?”

  “Good,” said Charlie. “Though I kinda got caught off guard by how out of shape I am.”

  “You’ll get that back in no time,” her friend assured her. “What’s brought you to Rutherford?”

  “I want to meet Janie Rose Carlton’s freshman roommate. Can you find out who she is and where I could find her?”

  “Yep. Actually, I rushed her and she pledged Kappa Epsilon.” Maggie’s fingers flew over her phone’s keypad. “Her name is Ashley Paul. I have no idea if she’s in class right now, but we’ll see.” She looked up. “What else?”

  “Janie Rose’s mother told my Aunt Branigan that she was dating someone from Louisiana. Can you find out who that was?”

  Maggie’s face froze. After a moment she said, “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Why would I be kidding?”

  Maggie continued to stare at Charlie. “Maggie, what?”

  “Jones dated Janie Rose the semester before we started dating.”

  Charlie’s heart began to pound as she remembered Jones leaning over her hospital bed, insisting upon straightening her pillow. She tried to speak, but a croak came out. She cleared her throat and tried again. “I thought he was from Virginia.”

  “Why’d you think that?”

  “When you guys visited my room, he said he was going home to Alexandria.”

  “Oh. Well, it’s Alexandria, Louisiana.”

  Now it was Charlie’s turn to stare. “Why didn’t you say anything b
efore?”

  “What was there to say? We didn’t want to remind you of Janie Rose’s death when you were recovering. And they’d stopped dating months before the accident. It was never serious.”

  “But…” Charlie stopped. It was serious enough for Jones Rinehart to visit Janie Rose at UGA as late as Thanksgiving. He must have been dating both women at the same time. But she didn’t want to say that to Maggie, who was wearing Jones’s engagement ring.

  “I… I… guess I don’t need to talk to him then,” she stammered.

  “Your Aunt Branigan already did,” Maggie said. “Something about a homeless guy who was taping frat parties and trying to get money from students. Jones said it was the Robies and a lot of other Greeks. Including us.”

  Charlie couldn’t get the vision of Jones and Janie Rose out of her head. Her mind was spinning wildly. Janie Rose had dated Jones. When they stopped, was she scared of him? Was Jones at the hospital to see if Charlie recognized him from the hearse? She was afraid her face would betray her confusion. “Do you know why they broke up?” she asked.

  Maggie shrugged. “They’d only dated from the middle of the fall until Janie Rose left school last winter. I don’t think he saw her but a time or two after that. It wasn’t serious enough for them to continue long distance. Then we started dating. And that was that.”

  Charlie knew that wasn’t true. Janie Rose had mentioned at least three visits from her Rutherford Lee boyfriend during the same semester he was supposedly seeing Maggie. Should she say something?

  Before she had a chance, Maggie’s phone beeped, alerting her to a text. “Ah, here you go. Ashley has an hour between classes. She’s on her way over.”

  “That’s fantastic. Thank you so much.”

  The awkwardness between them didn’t dissipate, but Charlie’s heart rate slowed and they managed to find neutral ground until Ashley arrived. Maggie gave Charlie a quick hug and hurried away.

  Ashley Paul was a muscular, wide-shouldered girl with a flawless complexion and wiry brown curls that fell past her shoulders. Charlie struggled to wrest her attention from Janie Rose’s former boyfriend and focus on her roommate.