by Gregg Olsen
“But wouldn’t they work harder if, well, they knew we were bottom-tier?”
“We’ve been doing this a long time. You aren’t the first to need a nudge in the right direction. If your girls knew, some—and maybe even the strongest girls—would leave. And we can’t have that.”
Sheraton seemed confused. “But they’ve taken the pledge. They can’t leave.”
“I like your attitude,” Jenna said, unsure if the girl standing in front of her was naive or a dream come true.
Sheraton smiled. “Thank you,” she said.
Must be naive.
Jenna ended the conversation reminding Sheraton that she’d have to be ready at 7:30.
“The day will be long,” she said, “but I think we can do it. Yes, we can!”
She rolled her eyes at the thought of her own inane words. She knew that she was doing the sorority gig to make money for law school, but it seemed pretty tasteless. If the BZ organization was in trouble, it wasn’t necessarily because its girls were not up to par. The whole organization needed to be Vera Wanged.
Jenna answered a knock on the door. It was Sheraton, dressed to the nines, holding a cup of coffee.
“Mocha, extra hot, extra shot,” she said, with a voice that Jenna could only describe as a grating chirp. “Just like you like it.”
Jenna looked surprised. “Thank you. How did you know?”
The girl beamed. “I Facebooked you!”
Jenna smiled at her. “Oh, I’ll have to add you as a friend.”
“Invite already sent,” Sheraton said, beaming. “Just log on and we’ll be able to stay in touch all the time.”
“Oh-my-God,” Jenna said, letting her vernacular drift not to Southern-fried, but to the kind of Valley-speak that still seemed to be the dialect favored by the young, blond, and educationally disinterested. “That’s awesome.”
She motioned Sheraton to sit on the daybed while they went over the PowerPoint presentation that the national office had provided. The first slide with its smiley-face art trumpeted the purpose of the meeting
IN IT TO WIN IT: RECRUITMENT MADE EASY.
“This looks amazing,” Sheraton said. “Very high-tech. Do you want me to make it go to the next slide? I’m a communication major.”
“I thought you said fashion merchandising yesterday.”
Sheraton made a face. “I did. But I’m not sure. I might go to medical school. I just want to help people.”
Jenna wondered for a fleeting moment how fashion merchandising fit into the category of “helping” people.
“Wonderful,” she said.
Jenna refocused on the images of the pretty and perfect—and a few of the less so for diversity’s sake—as they floated into view. The bullet points accompanying the images stressed sisterhood, the importance of a first impression, and how to ensure success when it comes to making sure the top girls pledge their sorority.
“I have to be honest with you,” she said turning to look directly at Sheraton. “This recruitment effort is crucial. We have to fill up every bed in this house. We have to ensure that we never have another incident like what happened last fall.”
Sheraton made a face.
Sad? Sorry? Regretful? Annoyed? It was hard to say.
“Oh, that. I guess that was pretty bad.”
That was, without room for argument, the understatement of the century.
Jenna knew the story well. Everyone did. It was the reason this particular BZ house was nominated by the university newspaper as the sorority as the “Girls Most Likely to…Do Anything!”
The previous September, the Beta Zeta girls hosted a cruise on the Little Tobacco River that ran lazily through town and into the corn and tobacco fields that made up most of the area’s agricultural economy. Such cruises were part of the BZ program—invite some potential sisters for fall recruitment, some cute frat boys, and maybe even a former valedictorian or two. Midori and the BZ social team ordered T-shirts silk-screened with the BZ logo, and the words “Cruisin’ for Love.”
The next day, the event was renamed “Boozin’ for Love.”
The sisters and their guests took a bus from Greek Row for the hour-long drive out to the launch for the cruise. Midori and Sheraton sensed trouble nearly from the outset. Two of the frat guys—handsome and hopped-up—brought a stash of vodka.
“No one can smell it. No one can tell we’ve been prefuncing,” one of the guys told some girls in the back of the bus.
That might have been good advice, if the girls hadn’t started so early and been so eager to have fun.
Misty or Missy Johnson—no one really knew her, or her name—was the first to start throwing up. The bus pulled off the highway in Bakersville and the rest of the girls who were drinking fell in line. A wave of vomit roiled through the back of the vehicle. In less then two minutes, the sympathy pukers started in.
The bus driver, a big barrel-chested fellow with an accent as deep as an oil well, ignored the entire scene. He had a job to do and if he didn’t get the busload to the river in time, he didn’t get paid. He cracked a window and kept driving. By the time he arrived, things had calmed down a bit and he could later feign no knowledge of the chaos of the drive.
But it got worse.
Once everyone got on board the boat, the booze continued to flow. The Diet Coke bottles—liter-sized—were spiked with rum. One of the potential recruits brought enough marijuana that she could have made one of those airplane travel pillows out of her stash.
Both Sheraton and Midori did their best to try to stop the debacle.
“Hey, you guys,” Sheraton said, in near-tears, “we need to get control of this situation.”
She was met by blank stares.
Midori steadied herself with her hands on her hips. “She means it!”
Again, no response.
The captain’s voice over the loudspeaker did, however, get the point across. “I’ll have no hanky-panky or drinking on my vessel. My crew will be watching your every move. You signed a waiver to come aboard and I’ll hold you to it. No drinking. No smoking—or you’re kicked off. Thank you.”
The thank-you was a bit odd, but the man made his point. For a time, it seemed that order was restored. The boat went down the river. The DJ played eighties music stalwarts like Bananarama and Tears for Fears, and the girls who weren’t drunk had a good enough time.
One had too good of a time.
Dressed in a quasi-sailor suit and tennis shoes, the woman in charge of the tortilla chips and salsa went back into the boat’s storage locker off the galley. Despite the rumble of the motor, she heard the kind of noises that belonged more in a motel room than on a boat.
“What’s going on here?” she asked once inside.
One of the BZs was on her knees, her bleached blond head down, in position while a frat boy with his brown eyes rolled back into his head moaned at her, “Don’t stop! Keep going! You’re doing good!”
“Enough!” the woman yelled at the two of them. The BZ snapped to, wiping her mouth. But the young man looked right at her.
“You next?” he asked.
“I’m going to tell the captain and you’re going to swim back to the dock.”
“Sure? In your dreams.”
Of course, there was no walking the plank. The kid zipped up his pants and thought he’d be able to disappear into the crowd. But he couldn’t. The lady in the sailor suit never forgot a face. The incident was written up and made its way into the annals of disastrous sorority social events.
The only saving grace for Sheraton and Midori was that they hadn’t been drinking and that they’d done their best to thwart disaster. The women at the national office gave them copies of a popular self-help book that came with a promise in its title: No One Will Ever Push Me Around…Again!
Although a communication major, Sheraton Wilkes was technologically challenged when it came to helping out with the presentation part of the chapter meeting. She had an excruciatingly difficult time adva
ncing the PowerPoint slides. Jenna took over the remote clicker midway through the presentation.
“No worries, Sheraton. I’m a bit of a control freak anyway,” she said. The girls all laughed. Jenna, however, was disappointed. Part of the strategy from Nationals was to get the president involved in the presentation.
“If she clicks it, she’ll stick with it,” was the advice of the fifty-five-year-old sorority sister in the deep red suit and triple strand of pears. Real pearls, at that.
On the last slide, Jenna looked around the dining room at the girls who were about to be drafted into an army of representatives for a faltering chapter.
“Each of you holds a great power here,” she said. “We want you to succeed. We want you to be all that you can be.”
The girls stood and applauded. Jenna smiled, but she felt silly. She said the text as it was written, but it always felt a little over the top. Almost like it was an ad for the Army.
“Thank you,” she said. “I know you guys can do it. I know you guys are ready to make sure that next year is unforgettable.” She stopped and self-edited. “But not as unforgettable as last year, that’s for sure.”
The girls laughed. They got it.
Chapter Thirty-three
It was worse than a couple of angry midgets wrestling in the closet. A pillow over the head did nothing.
Thump. Whap. Thump!
The intermittent banging of the pipes reverberated from the bathroom with its Vera wallpaper and cheerfully outdated daisy appliqués. It was 2:00 A.M. and Jenna Kenyon knew she couldn’t sleep in that room. She grabbed the pillow and a blanket, and started for the TV lounge, where she figured she could grab a spot on the couch. The TV was still on, and all of the couches were occupied with young women glued to a dating-show marathon that featured four pretty women in an RV vying for the affections of a smooth-chested hunk with a unibrow.
The BZ girls were sucking it in with a big fat straw.
“You’d think he’d wax his brow if he’s gonna wax his chest,” said one of the girls, a redhead in yellow pajamas with lips and fingers stained orange from Cheetos.
“No kidding,” a brunette agreed.
“I still think he’s so hot.”
“Oh, yeah. Superhot.”
Jenna lingered for a moment, but none of the girls saw her. And she decided that there was no way she was going to kick them out of their cozy cocoon and away from their inane conversation so she could crash there. She doubted they’d offer, and if they did, they’d do so begrudgingly. It was too late to impose anyway. It didn’t matter that the TV show they were riveted to was nothing short of complete garbage.
Tired and beginning to feel stressed, Jenna decided to go upstairs to the sleeping porch. She hated the sleeping porch at her BZ house at Cascade University, and knew this was no better. Dozens of beds. Lights always out. A snorer or two in utter denial. It was a sleepy girl’s nightmare. She tiptoed inside, and searched for a bed as far from the open window as possible. Fire codes mandated that the window next to the fire escape remain open. Jenna knew sleeping next to the open window only invited the inevitable—a drunken frat boy proving his prowess by slipping into his girlfriend’s sorority bed late at night. It happened almost every night, on every campus, across the country.
As Jenna drifted off to sleep, she couldn’t help but think that no parent would ever allow a son or daughter to join a frat or sorority if they knew everything there was about them.
If I ever have a daughter of my own, she’s going someplace without the Greek system, she thought.
At first, the cry was unintelligible. Just a guttural scream that started loud and went even louder. It was coming from the second floor, up the stairway to the sleeping porch.
The girl in the bed next to Jenna jumped to her feet. “What’s going on now?”
Jenna sat up and felt for the gooseneck lamp hooked to her bedframe and turned it on. The bulb was no more than twenty-five watts and it barely illuminated the faces of the girls who’d crawled out of bed.
“Megan must have forgotten the front-door combination,” another said.
But the scream wasn’t about being locked out.
“Oh, my God!” came the words this time. The scream. The words. Something was very, very wrong.
Jenna pushed past the girls in the hall and headed down the stairs. At the second-floor landing, she found Midori hunched over, sobbing uncontrollably. She reached down and put her hand on her shoulder.
“Midori, what is it?”
Midori was crying so hard now, she couldn’t speak. She looked up, her face frozen in utter terror.
Jenna got on her knees and held her; in doing so, she felt a wetness on Midori’s nightgown. She looked closer.
It was blood.
“Midori! What happened? How did you get hurt?”
By then, the entire hall was filled with girls—less the ones that were going to take the walk of shame home after spending the night with their boyfriends—and the air was thick with panic.
“It. It. It isn’t me.” She sputtered out her words and turned to indicate the guest bedroom. Midori started to shake. “It’s Sheraton. Something’s happened to her.”
Jenna motioned for another girl to attend to Midori. She commanded a girl who had taken pictures with her cell phone to dial 911.
“I mean, right now.”
Ma Barker scurried up the stairs, swathed in her inch-thick turquoise terry bathrobe. Her head covered with a nylon sleeping cap.
“Good, Lord! What’s going on up here?”
“I don’t know. Sheraton’s hurt.” Midori looked up. “She’s in there!”
Jenna nearly lost her footing as she entered the bedroom. Looking down, she saw the smear of blood. But that wasn’t the worst of it. The wall next to the daybed was splattered with a triple arc of blood that looked like the devil’s rainbow. Three dripping arcs of blood oozed from the wall to the floor behind the bed. Her cream-colored wool coat borrowed by Sheraton in the chill of the night was striped with red.
And there she was. The body of a young woman facedown, the light from the bathroom reflecting off the dark wetness of her head.
“Sheraton?” Jenna said, almost in a whisper. “Are you OK?”
There was no answer, just perfect stillness.
Thump. Whap. Thump!
Startled, Jenna screamed. The noise of the water heater nearly jolted her to the ceiling.
“Ya’ll pull yourself together. Campus police are coming!” Ma Barker called out.
A siren wailed louder and louder. The girls in the hallway started to cry. Ma Barker tried to gather them together to get out of the house.
“We don’t know who did this,” she said, “And I don’t want any of my girls here to meet him, if he’s still in the house.”
Ma Barker was thinking of the slaughter of five girls by a serial killer ten years before. He’d crept into the sleeping house of a Chi Epsilon chapter near St. Louis and cut the throats of five girls. All but one bled to death. The deaths were painful, slow, and beyond anything anyone could have imagined. The lone survivor recovered and eventually testified against Paul Walton, the boyfriend of one of the victims. He’d been angry that she’d broken up with him and was sure the other sisters were behind it. Today, he was in prison on death row.
As the girls followed Ma Barker down the stairs to the front door, Jenna hurried back up to the sleeping porch and turned on the overhead lights. Her heart pounded and fear gripped her so tightly she could barely breathe.
“Is everyone out of here?”
She ran over to a bed on the north side of the room. The girl curled up under the covers wasn’t moving.
“Oh God, not another!”
Jenna pulled the blanket from the bed and prepared herself for the worst. But it was only a decoy, two pillows arranged by a girl who decided her reputation was something worth saving. Or at least worth lying about.
Jenna was acquainted with police procedure as well as any
one. She knew what was to come. The sad task of notifying the dead girl’s parents. The questions. The follow-up. All of it. Not only had she been raised on Law & Order in all of its incarnations, she had a realistic view of police work through her mother’s experiences as a cop. Few meals or evenings were left without some comment about some investigation in the news, or even closer to home.
Jenna wanted to cry, but knew that tears did nothing.
A man stood in a coffee line at the Nashville airport. His right hand was sore and he’d bandaged a small cut with tape he purchased from a drugstore. Despite the pain, he was nearly euphoric. He’d had a great business trip. One of the best ever. He could hear Wolf Blitzer’s voice coming from the bank of TVs bolted overhead in at the gate. Wolf was talking about a breaking news story coming out of the college town of Dixon. Without turning his head toward the screens, he fixed his auditory senses on Wolf’s words.
“…The body of a college student was found earlier today at the Beta Zeta House on the campus of Dixon University.”
No name was given. The audio had some quotes from some young people who were devastated by the grisly discovery. It was boilerplate reporting, and the only thing that made it interesting was the fact that the victim was young, pretty, and a college student. She was, as the story implied, too young to die. Too full of promise.
“…a person of interest is being questioned.”
That line made him smile.
“Tall latté, no foam,” he told the girl behind the counter, still listening to the news report.
The real person of interest put Equal in his latté.
This is too good to be true, he thought.
He was right about that. It was.
Emily Kenyon was overcome with concern. Jenna was on the phone telling her about the horrific discovery of Sheraton Wilkes’s blood-drenched body at the BZ house at Dixon University. Jenna called earlier in the morning, but Chris was staying over and she just let the phone ring. She felt like a bad mother just then. A really bad mother. Most women who attempted to build new relationships felt the twinge of regret any time they put a new love over their children, no matter if they were toddlers or grown.