Danny lifted the empty cup to his lips and launched a shell into it.
“And dude, get this. One of their heads was on the bookshelf.”
“Bullshit,” said Gavin. “You are so full of shit.”
“Ask the guys inside. Cops were in here earlier and they all but confirmed what they’d heard on the police radio. They got some kind of scanner and shit,” he said. “Hey, you don’t have to believe me. But you’ll read it in the paper soon enough. There are three victims. That crazy fucker cut off a girl’s head and put it on a bookshelf. He stabbed all of them something like ten times, in the chest, with, like, a machete or something. I mean, they’re saying that he cut off their tits and . . .”
“Whoa, whoa, we’ve got it. I got the picture,” Gavin said, as he glanced back at Betsy, whose eyes were trained on Danny.
“Fine. Like I said, don’t believe me if you don’t want to.”
“What’s surprising is that you’re still believing everything you hear. In this town?” said Gavin. “Bored-ass people making up stories is all that is.”
“I speak the truth, brother,” he said, shuffling through the parking lot, head shaking. “Why don’t you ask Phil Donahue what he thinks? He’s setting up cameras in the Plaza right now. They think the killer might be dressing up like a cop, or a deliveryman, since there’s no sign of forced entry. It could be anybody.”
“Good idea, Danny. I’ll ask Phil Donahue if he thinks you’re full of shit,” said Gavin.
“Seems like he’s targeting young girls, maybe brunettes? That’s all they can guess about his pattern so far,” continued Danny, despite Gavin’s skepticism, his raised eyebrow. “Not Phil Donahue, dickhead. That murderous lunatic on the loose.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Just you wait,” he said, scuffing across the hot asphalt, in no particular rush. “You’ll see it in the papers, and think, ‘Ole Danny knew all the news that’s fit to print.’”
Gavin and Betsy drove the rest of the way into campus and neither of them dared to say a word. Betsy had a rare moment of absolute clarity. She was still a kid, selfish as hell, and she couldn’t shake the feeling that these dead girls were ruining their moment. During her entire time at college, she imagined the threat came from the young women around her, casting judgment, chastising her for being different, mocking her behind her back. And now there was a threat so visceral and real that she could barely process what was happening around her. It occurred to Betsy, suddenly, that she should feel sympathy for the parents of the victims, or consider their families in some way. She thought, Why wasn’t that my first instinct?
“I wonder if we knew them,” Gavin said at last, when they were stopped at a traffic light. “Like, did I sit next to one of them in class? Were those girls in that room full of five hundred strangers, nodding off to a lecture nobody remembers?”
“I know,” she said. “I was thinking the same thing.”
Gavin offered to drop her off at “home,” a first-floor apartment in an old, stucco fourplex behind Norman Hall, and he walked her to the door.
“So, my new roommate?” she said, with one hand placed on the doorknob, as she hesitated to let him in. Her words lilted at the end, a tick that was exaggerated when she was nervous or drunk, and she was a little of both. “She’s not back in town with her furniture yet. I just want to warn you, it’s spare in here.” Here came out like a squeak.
She unlocked the door and surveyed the mess, the lonely lamp on the floor, the milk crates full of books, a cardboard U-Haul box spilling over with clothes, the dusty Matisse Harmony in Red poster in a cheap frame leaning against the scuffed wall, and a double mattress on the floor of one of the bedrooms in back. The message light blinked on her answering machine. Melissa had called with the same news that stoner Danny had shared at the gas station, saying that all of the sorority girls were camping out at the houses because no one wanted to go home alone. Betsy and Gavin had escaped to the lake for a few hours, and in that time the fear on campus had grown from something vague and unsettling to something sharper, more menacing.
“You think I’m going to say ‘I love what you’ve done with the place,’” he said, coming out of her empty room. She wondered if he had overheard the message.
“But that would be too predictable.”
“Yes, indeed.”
“I’ve been staying with Ginny, at her place over in Williamsburg Village on 16th. I slept in Caroline’s room while she was away, but she’s back,” she said.
He nodded.
“Anyway, I’d crash on their couch, but I just heard that they’re all camping out at the house until they catch this guy, you know . . .” She trailed off.
“The psychokiller.”
“Yep, that one.”
They stood there for a bit, under the bright overhead light in the kitchenette, and she was suddenly aware of her own pulse, every creak in the building, the tiny bugs circling the lightbulb above their heads.
“I tell you what. You grab some clothes and you come to my place for a night or two, just until the roomie arrives,” he said.
“What?”
“I’m serious,” he said. “My roommate, Jeff, isn’t back for fall semester yet. We’ll sneak you in the back door. Mack won’t notice a thing. You’re at work a good three hours before he wakes up anyway, right?”
“But, Gavin, I’m not, I mean . . .”
“You’re not having sex with me. I get it. Totally fair.”
“It is?”
“Of course, I wouldn’t mind if you . . . wanted to. Believe me. But I get it.”
They stood in silence and made the only truly awkward moment of the day last for longer than it should have. While the prospect of premeditated sleeping at a semistrange guy’s house was terrifying, it was not as terrifying as the idea of being decapitated in her sleep, or worse. Despite her serious doubts about the merits of the idea, she grabbed whatever clothes she found on top of the box and shoved them into a grungy, monogrammed boat and tote. It’s just a night, two, tops, she thought. If it got ugly, she’d beg Melissa and her grouchy roommates to let her come back, or she’d call Ginny and crawl back to the sorority house to beg for mercy.
Despite the apartment’s utter lack of anything worth stealing, she left the hall light on and locked the door and the dead bolt behind them.
“So, nothing weird,” she said, back in the car. “No middle of the night groggy, maybe she won’t remember it date-rape situation?”
“Jesus, Betsy, who have you been hanging out with? Oh, scratch that. My classy friend Mack, right?” he said, opening her car door. She slid into the passenger seat and he leaned down to kiss her. Betsy felt a strange tightness around her lungs, a warmth creeping across her face from her neck. She imagined it was a little like a heart attack, maybe slightly better.
“Just getting that out of the way,” he said, his mouth close to her ear.
Back at Gavin’s place every interior light was on and the back door was unlocked. “Went to Joe’s. Fuck you,” read a note scrawled on the top of a half-full pizza box on the counter in Mack’s handwriting.
“Guess I should remember to lock that door,” Gavin said. “But look, Mack bought us dinner!” He turned off the lights and took the box and a six-pack of Rolling Rock into his room, which had a bed, a desk, columns of paperbacks neatly stacked on the floor, a guitar propped in one corner, and a turntable with speakers on a piece of plywood between two wooden boxes. When they finished eating, Gavin pulled out crates of albums from the closet.
“We’ve got nothing but time, right?”
He started with the Velvet Underground.
“That’s Nico. I know this,” she said, nodding eagerly, relieved to not be a complete idiot.
The Pixies she also knew, albeit vaguely, plus a little pre–Combat Rock Clash. Then he moved on to Fugazi, Hüsker Dü, Dinosaur Jr. Years later, when she remembered that night, she felt the sort of nostalgia that would have made her twenty-year-old self cringe
. When you lived in Florida in the 1980s, and every shitty Buffalo wing–slinging dive posing as a family restaurant dished out sanitized 1960s hits from a jukebox to sunburned middle-aged tourists, nostalgia was the weakest, most pathetic thing in the world. Slurring through “Louie Louie” in a rayon floral shirt over a plate of mushy peel ’n’ eat shrimp was life at its worst, the way Betsy saw it. She was drowning in a sea of oldies, watching needle-thin speedboats barrel through the turquoise water blasting the Steve Miller Band. She’d seen enough too-tan old men in golf shirts, driving their pastel Cadillacs with the windows down, singing along to “Under the Boardwalk,” the Drifters song that was nearly as ubiquitous and irritating as “Cheeseburger in Paradise.” For decades to come, any time she’d catch the sound of Jimmy Buffett’s twangy, vapid lyrics about shellfish and frozen drinks, her eyes would cloud with a murderous rage. John from New Jersey liked Jimmy Buffett. She bet his lame girlfriend did, too.
On that night with Gavin, she felt like she’d found the secret door in the library, the one where if you’d lifted a dog-eared copy of The Stranger out of its place on the dusty shelf, it would open up and reveal a passageway to the place where the other people lived. She’d seen every decent band that had made its way to Gainesville in the last year. She devoured as many of the music magazines as she could find to read about new CD releases that she couldn’t afford to buy. Somehow, with any other guy, she’d have resented the seminar. She would have squirmed with discomfort, annoyed that a guy had to explain it to her, embarrassed by her cluelessness. She would have left. With Gavin, it was different. He wanted her to listen to hear what she thought, not to prove what she didn’t know. That he was showing off for her, trying to impress her, didn’t occur to Betsy. And she was desperate to hear it.
Betsy went so far as to join a Baptist church youth group in the ninth grade on the promise that the associate pastor would chaperone a group to the U2 concert at the Sun Dome in Tampa. Otherwise, she would have never been allowed to go. Ten kids crammed in a white van with four rows of seats, singing along to “The Unforgettable Fire” in the tape deck, made the hour drive north on a blistering May afternoon. They parked in the last row of the vast parking lot, and walked past legions of guys in stonewashed jean shorts, their dates in brief white skirts and neon tank tops swigging from Malibu Rum bottles, ducking next to their Camaros to shotgun cans of Busch beer. Once inside the small arena, Betsy broke off from the group to wind her way to the front of the general admission crowd on the floor in front of the stage. Someone passed her a flask, and she took a long swig of something strong and terrible. Halfway through “A Sort of Homecoming,” she was transfixed, convinced that Bono was singing directly to her. She wept, surrounded by total strangers trying to console her. Somehow, she’d been jostled around enough in the fray to lose one of her Keds. After the show, when she eventually hobbled back to the church van on one purple sneaker, the accusatory looks on the faces in the group made it clear that she would not be invited back for Stryper the following month. No surprise, she got the last seat in the very back row of the van, which was particularly claustrophobic once the windows fogged up with the evaporated sweat of multiple, irritatingly sober teenagers. She smiled to herself thinking that Bono didn’t look any of those other chumps dead straight in the eyes and sing about running on a borderland. Betsy also knew for once without a doubt, that there were other people like her, people who understood the supreme awfulness of Night Ranger. Since then, she’d been on a mission to learn about music, driven by the desperate feeling that she had years of catching up to do.
Just a few years later, she was in Gavin’s bedroom, fully clothed but asleep at 3:00 a.m. When the needle of the record player scratched along the inner edge of Dinosaur Jr.’s Bug, she woke up with a start. I’m safe, she thought, as she looked around the strange room and at Gavin’s sleeping form. I think.
CHAPTER 9
WEIRD BOBBY’S PARTY
August 26, 1990
At 5:20 the next morning, Gavin gave Betsy a ride to Bagelville, with the promise of meeting her for a burrito later. She stood in the low, muddy light, since dawn was just starting to creep over the trees, and watched him drive away. Just yesterday morning, she didn’t really know Gavin. Then he wandered in out of nowhere. She smiled to herself as she replayed the last twenty-four hours in her head. This was the Gainesville she would miss. It was a place where time stretched out into long, lazy hours, which were oddly boring and unpredictable at the same time. All it took to change your life was one person coming in to order a cup of coffee. Betsy wondered what strange new development this day would bring as she made her way down the side alley to the back door. Somehow, even the muggy morning didn’t bother her. There was a faint breeze in the air that hinted at the promise of autumn. She rounded the corner to the back parking lot, dreamy and distracted, thinking of how it felt to wake up in Gavin’s bed, hoping she would get to do it again.
Then she heard something move near the Dumpster, a rustle of boxes, and in less than a second there was a flood of adrenaline that filled her brain with a roar in her ears. Instinctively, she looked around for something that she could use to protect herself and knocked into a metal trashcan, which made a harsh metallic sound as it scraped the cinder block wall and hit the ground. The reality of her surroundings came rushing back. She wouldn’t remember it as the day she fell in love with Gavin. It was the day that police learned that someone was hunting and slaughtering students, women like her, the day when people stopped feeling safe. She wanted to run, but then she’d be late to work.
“Betsy, is that you?” said Tom, who was now standing at the back door. One of the night-shift bakers peeked out from around the Dumpster, where he was breaking down boxes.
Betsy felt the blood drain from her face. There’s a serial killer stalking this place and I’m still worried about punching the clock, she thought. Pathetic.
“Jesus, you see a ghost or something?” he asked.
“No, I was just a little absentminded, and then I heard . . . I don’t know,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s nothing. I should have known it was nothing.”
Tom studied her face carefully.
“Nah, don’t worry about it,” he said. “Everybody’s on edge. Come and get some coffee while it’s hot.”
“You mean before it boils down into that sludge we serve our customers?” she said, feeling her pulse level off.
“Exactly.”
Betsy spent her shift pretending not to eavesdrop on the conversations among the customers about the Gainesville PD and what, if any, leads they had. She scanned a copy of The Gainesville Sun that someone left behind on a table. According to the paper, the details at the three crime scenes were shocking, and though facts were scarce while the investigation was under way, everyone somehow knew the specifics of the violence, the taped wrists, the nipples that had been sliced off of the bodies, and passed the information through conspiratorial whispers.
WHEN GAVIN SHOWED up where he said he would on campus, only two minutes late, Betsy reacted like it was a minor miracle. She would have spent more time worrying about her lowered expectations from life if she hadn’t been so preoccupied thinking about everything else happening around her. When she went to the registrar’s office to pick up her fall schedule, Betsy was given a notice from the administration that, because of the “situation” with the “tragic loss of innocent lives,” they were informing students that the semester wouldn’t begin in earnest until the chaos had died down, or until they had a suspect in custody. Classes were postponed for a week and it was implied that the police department would step up to the challenge of catching the perpetrator in that designated time frame, even though it was a case well outside of their usual beat.
News vans had begun showing up and were parked along 8th Street. Reporters, popping up on the lawns skirting the perimeters of campus in their pastel skirt suits, lined up to talk to eager viewers at home about sporty students with “. . . Colgate smiles .
. . feeling stalked by a madman.” No one on campus had any experience with publicity that wasn’t focused on the aggressive and corrupt habits of recruiters wooing promising athletes, or the lawless behavior of the athletes themselves, so the town felt quieter and more somber than usual, and more than a little stunned.
Gavin and Betsy made the long walk through campus, past Fletcher Hall, a Gothic dorm built during the Depression as part of the Public Works program that, despite its beauty, was the last to fill up because it was without modern conveniences—or just the most critical one: air-conditioning. Gavin mentioned that some friends left town when they heard the news, considering it an extension of their summer vacation, since the seasons blended together without much distinction anyway. At Burrito Brothers, they picked up two bean and cheese and ate them on a concrete bench near the business quad. After lunch, the rest of the day played out a lot like the one before, only with less talking. Betsy wondered whether the silence was about the dead students or about her, or if they’d said enough the day before for a week. They drove to the lake, went for a swim, which they followed with a couple of beers, under the shade tree, this time on the far side of the parking lot.
On their way back to the car, Weird Bobby spotted them and called them over to his usual spot next to Jacob at his designated picnic table. This time they were joined by a girl with delicate blonde dreads falling past her shoulder blades, grazing the top of her Indian cotton halter, sitting with her back toward them. Betsy didn’t need to see her face to recognize that this was Channing Williams. She had noticed her a hundred times before, the way she could wear a scarf wrapped around her head and manage to not look like she was wearing a fortune-teller costume, or how she always found an electric green tuft of grass to sit on and look irritatingly perfect and mellow between classes. She’d seen her at the bars downtown, at the occasional show at the Dish. And even though she danced like a creepy Deadhead, in a sort of rhythmless hop with palms outstretched, Betsy thought that her own life would be better if it were a little bit more like Channing’s.
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