by Gregg Olsen
“Thank you, honey.” Emily hugged her. It was the most thoughtful gift she could have imagined. She could tell the county council members who complain when they see her around town, the truth. She didn’t buy the pants as an FU to their archaic dress code.
“I’m a mother first,” she’d say. “This was a gift from my daughter. I intend to wear them.”
And stay warm.
Mandy Crawford’s disappearance had dominated the week, even the month, as Emily Kenyon tried to put together a puzzle for which there were very few pieces. The photos of Tricia. The affair with Darla. The message on the laptop. Things, she was sure, pointed to Mitch as the purveyor of some kind of evil. But on the other hand, there was still no body. No direct evidence pointing to foul play. Just a bunch of innuendo swirling around a man who seemed to deserve all the bad press and rumormongering that he’d garnered. The pressure was mounting, but the investigation was going nowhere.
Chris stayed over through the weekend, in part to spend time with Jenna, who was back in her girlhood bedroom between consulting assignments at various Beta Zeta sorority chapters in the southern region. When there was a single knock on the door followed by the immediate turn of the knob, everyone directed their attention to the young woman who’d been expected for dinner.
And she wouldn’t have it any other way.
Shali Patterson never went anywhere without making an impression. Subtlety in her dress, hair, and manner seemed utterly foreign to her. She worked at a Nordstrom store in Seattle after graduating from Cascade University but knew that she’d find something better someday. She just didn’t know what it would be. Shali and Jenna had been best friends for years, sorority sisters at Cascade, and were destined to be maids of honor at each other’s weddings.
If either found a steady guy that the other approved of, of course. A good guy was as elusive as a pair of sensible shoes.
Both knew that with true, undeniable adulthood holding them prisoner after graduation, the week between Christmas and New Year’s was likely to be the only chance they’d have to really catch up and hang out together until summer.
Chris Collier hadn’t seen Shali in a while, so when she flopped down on the couch next to Jenna and across from where he sat with Emily, all he could do was grin.
“I think doing hair would have been more fun than med school,” she announced.
“I like the pink highlights,” Emily said, from her place next to Chris on the sofa by the Christmas tree.
“Thanks, Mrs. Kenyon. Magenta is what I’m going for. I did it myself because, well, I just got tired of looking like everyone else.”
“You’ve never looked like anyone else, Shali,” Jenna said, peering up from her laptop, a wide smile on her face. “Not for one minute.”
Shali beamed. “It takes some effort to be me, that’s for sure.” She looked over at Emily and Chris. “Look so cozy, you two.”
“We’re good,” Chris said, resting his hand on Emily’s shoulder. “Doing our best.”
“That’s what my mom says. Do your best!” Shali saw her mother’s words as a rallying cry for mediocrity. She would never consider taking up the cause for “doing one’s best” if that meant life in Cherrystone and nothing more.
“How is your mother? I haven’t seen her for quite some time,” Emily said.
Shali looked at Jenna. Obviously, she hadn’t let the cat out of the bag.
“I thought Jenna might have told you.”
“You asked me not to,” Jenna said.
“I would have told, you know.”
“I know. But this friendship of ours would never survive if it was between two people just like you. One of us needs to keep a confidence.”
“I get that and I’m working on it,” Shali said. She looked over at Emily and Chris, enthralled by the Ping-Pong match that was the two young women’s disclosure. “Mom met a guy online. Texas, I think. She’s sure he’s the one.”
Emily looked at Jenna, but returned her gaze back to Shali. “I hadn’t heard.”
“Well,” Shali said, shifting her frame on the chair, “Mom never met a man who couldn’t charm the pants off her.”
“Shali, that’s not nice.”
“Not nice, maybe. But true.” She nudged Jenna to change the subject. “So what’s up with you? How’s it being the sorority nazi?”
“Let’s see,” Jenna said, pretending to look at an imaginary list. “I’ve just entered battle number two with the Beta Zetas at the University of Kentucky.”
“You get all the good schools, don’t you? Seriously, what’s going on with them?”
“Just a bunch of nasty and anonymous e-mails from the girls down there. They’re mad at me because they were caught holed up in the lounge smoking pot, drinking rum shots, and watching America’s Next Top Model—a marathon.”
“I love that show,” Shali said. “That’s what I should have been, instead of doing hair or being a doctor.”
Emily leaned closer to her daughter. Jenna looked at Shali, with a stern shut up now glance. “What’s going on, honey?”
Chris seemed more interested than alarmed. He knew that Jenna could handle just about any situation. She’d proven that long ago. But whether she holds a badge or not, a mom is a mom.
“Just a big mess, Mom. I’m getting e-mails that trash the president, a nice girl named Sarah Lee.”
Shali brightened. “Like the frozen cheesecake?”
“Yeah, like that,” Jenna said.
“Mrs. Kenyon, do you have anything sweet around here?”
“You know where the freezer is, honey.”
Shali got up for the kitchen and Emily, concerned about her daughter, moved into Shali’s spot on the couch. Chris, Emily, and Jenna’s eyes followed Shali out of the room.
“What are the e-mails about? And what’s the national office doing to help?”
Jenna laughed, but it was a laugh choked with sarcasm. “First of all, Nationals does nothing. They talk like they’re so concerned about the girls, their welfare. But all they care about is a smoke-free environment and diversity as long as you’re white.” She clicked on her laptop and read from her e-mails.
“Just so you know, the president here was drunk in her room earlier this week. Three sisters saw her. I’d give you their names, but I don’t want to be dragged into this mess.”
“It came from the same IP address as this one,” Jenna said, scrolling down.
“My father’s a lawyer and he says that he can make a case against the BZs for the way they’ve treated some of the girls here. Sarah Lee is a big liar and a whore. She’s not the kind of girl we want representing any of us here. She’s also bulimic.”
“Sounds pretty petty, Jenna,” Chris put in.
“Tell me about it. I wish I never took this job. Dumb idea.”
Shali came back in the room with a frozen Three Musketeers candy bar. She was so excited she looked like she’d won the lottery. “Mrs. Kenyon, you still freeze these. I love you!”
Jenna smiled at her friend, but resisted the opportunity to say something snarky about frozen candy bars. “I was telling them about those stupid girls back in Kentucky,” she said. “I’m dealing with a bunch of whiners who feel like the whole world is against them when they all drive BMWs and have spray-on tans.”
Shali took a spot on the floor next to the fire. “Tell them about your meeting last week. That sounded so fun.”
“This is good, I guess,” Jenna said, kind of enjoying the attention of her mother and her detective boyfriend. Or whatever he was. “I thought it would die down. You know, Thanksgiving, Christmas, the holiday season. No such luck. One of the girls called Nationals saying that someone peed on her pillow and cut the straps on all of her tank tops and bras.”
“Sounds very mature,” Chris said. “Aren’t these girls adults?”
“Age has nothing to do with maturity,” Emily said, doing everything she could not to land her eyes on Shali’s pink hair.
Jenna was on
a roll. “So they had this big meeting. Everything is supposed to be secret, of course. No girl who is being admonished by the chapter or Nationals is supposed to speak of it to anyone. But Sarah Lee did. I got to the meeting place—a banquet room in the back of a pizza restaurant off campus—and I had to walk past at least two dozen BZs. They glared at me and said that I was being unreasonable.”
“Sounds like a Lifetime movie. You know the part, where the girl has to walk past all of her classmates that know that she was really raped by the quarterback with the shaved pecs and sexy stubble on his face.”
“Tiffany Amber in No One Heard Her Scream.”
“Yes. That’s how it felt. A very Tiffany Amber moment.”
Chris looked at Emily and Jenna. They clearly understood Shali’s reference to a TV movie. He didn’t have a clue, but said nothing. Admitting he didn’t know who or what Tiffany Amber was, would only serve to make him older than his fifty years.
And he wasn’t doing that.
“So, anyway,” Jenna went on, “enough of that tangent. The bottom line here is that Sarah Lee’s dad, the lawyer, threatened to take the BZs for everything they had if they didn’t fix the problem. He used words that made the national office shudder with fear.”
Chris, once more, looked puzzled.
Emily touched his shoulder. “This is a shot in the dark, but is it the you’re fostering a hostile learning environment?”
“Yup,” Jenna said, “the gold standard.”
“So what happened?” Chris asked.
“Nothing. Same as usual. The nice girls get bullied by the ones who have the loudest parents with the most money.”
“Sounds like a Little League baseball game,” Emily said.
“That’s about right, Mom. The only thing that I hate worse than the drama of a dispute that’s escalated to the national level is making a road trip to help some failing house build up its pledge base.”
“That doesn’t sound so bad,” Chris said. “I mean, it’s all about marketing, right?”
“Honestly, Chris, sometimes it feels like it’s all about babysitting. I know it isn’t much longer and I’ll be off to law school by this time next year, but I really do hate what I’m doing.”
Emily wanted to kick her ex-husband and his greedy wife Dani to the curb just then. If they had helped out a little more, Jenna might have taken another route to finance more of her education. Emily wondered if she had miscalculated and should have pushed for more college loans. She just couldn’t, having experienced the burden firsthand with her own student loans and David’s from medical school.
“Who’s hungry?” Shali asked. “Because I am.”
“You always are,” Jenna said, ending the conversation about money, her dad, and bratty sorority girls.
“Your mom can cook. My mom never met a can opener she didn’t like. What’s that I smelled when I came in here?”
Emily stood and looked toward the kitchen. “Nothing fancy. Just the best meal you’ll ever have. Come on. Let’s eat.”
“Just a sec,” Jenna said turning her attention back to her laptop screen. “I have to finish this blog post.”
“What are you doing, blogging? That’s so five minutes ago.”
“I know. The headquarters women think it is so ‘cutting-edge’ to blog. But that’s how we share the information that builds stronger sisterhood or something like that.”
She finished typing the entry:
Hi Girls,
I’m looking so forward to seeing all of you in Dixon. I might be late, so dinner might not work out. Could someone save me a late plate, just in case? We’ll have so much fun talking about recruitment and how we can maximize our efforts to ensure that we have the very best new pledges. Go BeeZees!
Love, Jenna Kenyon, your Southern District Consultant
She posted a happy-face icon and powered down.
Dinner smelled so good.
A thousand miles away, a man logged on to Jenna’s blog. Her picture filled him with an unbridled rage that he was sure would be transparent to anyone who saw his face, even days later. She was pretty, sure. He tried hard to read more into what she was saying on her blog. How it spoke of her frivolous nature. How it indicated that she was a callous bitch who cared only about herself.
And now she was about to get what she deserved. She was on his list.
Chapter Twenty-two
Tricia Wilson’s photographs were haunting. Emily had seen horrific images similar to them before, of course. As a Seattle cop working homicide or special victims, she knew firsthand what the brutal hand of an enraged man could do to the small bones of a child or a woman without the strength to fight back. She knew that when people indicated someone had been beaten “black and blue” that it was really a shorthand for a range of colors from indigo to red to blue to yellow, even green. Human skin could change hues nearly as fast as gasping fish on a riverbank. Just like that. From pink or brown to splash of hideous color that told the world the color of pain.
But Tricia’s photos weren’t like that. Emily looked deeper into the Polaroids. The colors were crisp, rather than muddy. Distinct, rather than blurry.
Something’s awry here, she thought. It passed through her thoughts that Tricia had said that she kept copies and returned the negatives. She figured that the woman, caught up in memories of the past, had made a mistake. Polaroid cameras didn’t use negatives.
Jenna caught her mom by the coffeepot, waiting to steal a cup before it finished brewing the next morning. It was clear that she was lost in thought, distracted by something.
“What’s bothering you, mom?”
“Honey, it’s the photos. Something isn’t right.”
“Mom, don’t get caught up in this one. Not like last time.”
In a way, the comment was sweet. Emily took it as such. Jenna was looking out for her mother. She knew how involved she could get when it came to abuse cases. The previous summer, thirty-one-year-old Maria Hernandez was beaten so badly by her husband that it took more than a hundred stitches and a metal plate to mend her injuries. Emily didn’t sleep for weeks when she worked that case, hoping against hope that by the time Maria was released she would agree to testify against her husband, Carlos.
But it never got that far.
Carlos was there to pick her up the day of her discharge. The family’s van was packed and headed south, out of town.
Family members in Cherrystone haven’t heard from either since.
Emily couldn’t get the photos out of her mind.
“I know. I know. But these are so graphic.”
“Just keep doing your best, Mom. You’ll get him.”
They talked awhile longer, Jenna saying that things at the sorority house were a disaster. The girls wanted to host a party—as another sorority had done the week before—but they were dangerously close to being put on probation.
“Stick to your guns, Jenna.”
“I will. Just like you.”
Emily poured some more coffee and searched for another container of creamer. She knew what it was that bothered her. It was the fact that Tricia’s injuries were so very visible. She hadn’t been beaten until her kidneys failed. She hadn’t been punched in the stomach. These were Nicole Brown Simpson–type injuries—visible and overt.
For a man who cares about what everyone thinks about him, she thought, you’d think he’d have punched her where it didn’t show. He wasn’t only a wife beater, he was a stupid one.
As they had since before they wore bras or even had a concept that they’d really like boys enough to touch them, Jenna and Shali retreated into her bedroom—a room that had once been her mother’s and might one day be the guest room for a little girl of her own. Jenna half-smiled as the thought came over her. If she found a decent guy, got a job, worked awhile, well then maybe.
Maybe not in that exact order.
In some ways, the room was a museum to her past. The old Mac computer that she’d used growing up was on the desk, a co
llector’s item, her mother mused when Jenna wanted to trash it. It had long since been replaced by a sleek new laptop. Next to a collection of dried corsages—from weddings, mostly—a framed poster of the cover of People magazine hung over the bed. The celebrity on the cover was Mariah Carey, but Jenna wasn’t really a Mariah fan. She never had been. Just below Mariah’s photo was a tagline that referenced when Jenna was held captive by Nick Martin, Cherrystone’s crazed kid. Jenna had initially thought she was helping the boy, but in the end, he taught her the greatest lesson of all: Not everyone wants to be rescued.
Date in a Dungeon—Girl Held Captive Tells Her Story
Shali looked at the magazine cover as she flopped on the bed. “Why do you keep that shitty magazine, Jen?”
Jenna sprawled out next to her friend, tilting her head way back to take in Mariah’s photo. “I don’t know. I guess to remind me how close I came to losing everything. Mom said that it was better to ‘own’ your past then run from it.”
“Your mom is a nut.”
Jenna laughed. “She is, but I love her. She’s my mom.”
“Better by far than mine.”
“No argument, there.”
Shali picked at a small blemish on her chin. “So tell me about this so-called consultant job. Is it as bad as we thought it would be?”
“Worse.” Jenna stopped herself. There were parts of the job she liked—meeting people and problem solving, to name two. But there was an overdose of self-pity and self-absorption that seemed to come with the chapter insignia.
“These girls have everything,” she said, “but they think they have nothing at all.”
Shali stopped picking at her pimple. “They sound like us, don’t they?”
Jenna shook her head, and the bed rocked a little. “Look, I was mixed up with a junior serial killer and I have a father that would rather align himself with his new wife and replacement kid than be a father to me. That’s me. Let’s talk about you, now.”
“Let’s not.” Shali sighed.
Jenna got up and retrieved a brush from the bedside table.
“I like your hair that way. Looks prettier than that goth shit.”