Don't Scream

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  Sigma Tau was a fraternity whose chapter at a neighboring college was investigated for hazing last fall after a sophomore pledge landed in the hospital with severe alcohol poisoning. In the end, he suffered permanent brain damage, the Sigs had their charter revoked, and several of their officers were still facing charges in a lawsuit.

  “That could happen to the four of us in a heartbeat,” Tildy warned them. “Cassie, can you imagine what your parents would say if you were arrested?”

  Cassie, the daughter of a high-powered New York politician mother and a neurosurgeon father, looked as though she was going to faint.

  They all knew about her notoriously perfectionist parents. The Ashfords were let down enough when a learning disability, undiagnosed until her senior year at a prestigious Connecticut boarding school, prevented Cassie from earning Ivy League grades and attending their alma mater as her brother did.

  Trouble with the law would put them over the edge.

  “What about you, Brynn?” Tildy went on. “You’re here on a full academic scholarship. Do you actually think the college will let you stay if you’re involved in something this scandalous?”

  Brynn was silent. The answer was obvious.

  “What about you, Fee? You’re a local. You know everyone in town. And what about your parents? Look what they did to your sister last year when she came out and the whole town was gossiping about it. What do you think they’ll do if your name is dragged through the local press in connection with something like this?”

  “I don’t want to think about that,” Fiona said grimly. “None of us can afford to get involved. This would ruin our lives.”

  “Not to mention destroy the sorority,” declared its loyal president. “We owe it to our sisters to keep this quiet.”

  “But we didn’t do anything wrong, Tildy. We didn’t force Rachel to drink, like the Sigs forced that pledge,” Brynn protested.

  “Says who?” Tildy asked.

  “What do you mean? Of course the four of us will stand up for ourselves and say we’re innocent.”

  “Those Sig guys claimed the same thing. Who believed them?”

  “That was different. They were hazing.”

  “Do you think anyone will really care about the details, Brynn?” Cassie spoke up at last, sounding almost frantic. “All they’ll see is a bunch of underage sorority girls drinking in the woods.”

  “My God, Rachel is dead!” Brynn cried. “We can’t just leave her here in the woods. Isn’t that against the law?”

  “No,” Tildy said firmly. “It isn’t.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because it’s not like we’ve murdered someone.”

  “But leaving her here is wrong,” Brynn said in desperation. “Maybe it’s not against the law—which it might actually be—but it’s wrong.”

  “Brynn, there’s nothing we can do for her now,” Fiona said gently.

  “Rachel would never want us to incriminate ourselves,” Tildy added. “We have to leave her. Anyone in our situation would do the exact same thing.”

  Brynn shook her head miserably, unconvinced.

  “Look, somebody will find her as soon as the sun comes up, which is”—Tildy checked her watch with almost preternatural calm—“a few hours from now. We all know that hikers are out on that trail every single morning, right? And she’s lying right there on the path. Nobody could possibly miss her. She’ll be found, and the police will assume that she wandered up here alone, drunk…and fell.”

  “I don’t know…” Even Cassie looked uncertain. “Why would she come up into the woods alone?”

  “She was acting strangely all day yesterday,” Tildy said. “Brynn noticed it, and so did I, and I bet other people did, too.”

  “I did,” Cassie said.

  “So did I, definitely,” Fiona agreed, and Brynn shot her a look.

  Fiona shrugged.

  Clearly, it was three against one.

  “Look, nobody knows we were up here with her tonight, right?” Tildy asked. “You guys didn’t tell anyone where you were going?”

  All three shook their heads.

  And swore each other to secrecy.

  And the next morning waited uneasily for the news that Rachel’s body had been found in the woods below The Prom.

  It never came.

  As far as the rest of the world was concerned, Rachel Lorent had vanished into thin air. On the morning after her twentieth birthday, her bed in her room at the sorority house hadn’t been slept in, she never showed up for classes…in short, she was never heard from again.

  The campus was in a turmoil. Faculty and students formed search teams that walked shoulder to shoulder over acres of ground, searching.

  They found nothing.

  A few days after Rachel’s mother had filed a Missing Person’s Report and fliers bearing her smiling face had gone up all over campus, Brynn, Fiona, Cassie, and Tildy walked silently up the trail to the spot where she had landed, dead.

  It was empty. Not even a sign that Rachel had ever been there.

  How was that possible?

  As Tildy had said, there was no way anyone passing along could have missed her body on the path…and there was no way, with the beautiful late-summer weather, that the trail hadn’t been traveled in all that time. Anyway, the searchers had repeatedly covered this ground in the past few days.

  Maybe wild animals dragged her away that first night and devoured her remains, a fate too horrible for any of them to envision.

  For months afterward, they held their collective breath, expecting some sign of their lost sister to turn up…perhaps a disembodied limb found deep in the woods, or a shred of clothing, or even the mason jar…

  But nothing ever did.

  Rachel Lorent had never been heard from again.

  Or had she?

  CHAPTER 5

  It was Fiona who selected the meeting place: Glenview Springhouse, an elegant eighteenth-century country inn not far from where the Mass Pike and Interstate 91 converge. It’s centrally located for all of them: a little over an hour west of Boston, ninety minutes north of Danbury, and almost an hour east of Cedar Crest.

  It makes sense for Brynn and Fiona to go together. Fee insists on driving, though Brynn offered.

  “I can’t leave the office until noon, and I’ve got to get back for a three forty-five appointment,” was her reasoning.

  Brynn pointed out that they would get there and back in the same amount of time regardless of who drove.

  Fee didn’t dispute that, but Brynn could tell she wanted to…And she would have been right.

  The speedometer of Fiona’s silver BMW quickly rises to eighty as they leave Cedar Crest, and never falls until they pull off the exit.

  “You drive like the car was just catapulted out of a cannon. You know that, don’t you?” Brynn pulls her cell phone out of her purse as Fiona stops at a light and quickly snaps down the visor mirror to check her reflection.

  “Of course I know that. I can’t afford to tool along taking in the sights. Who are you calling?”

  “Garth.” She pauses, about to hit SEND. “Why?”

  “Why are you calling him?”

  “To see how the boys are doing.”

  “Already?” Fiona’s tone smoothly melds amusement with disapproval.

  Brynn shrugs and dials anyway, needing the connection to her life back home. Especially now, when she’s about to come face-to-face with the past.

  She told her husband the truth about today’s getaway, in a sense, saying she and Fiona are meeting two old sorority sisters for lunch near Springfield.

  She just didn’t tell him why.

  Nor did he ask.

  He merely told her he was glad she was taking some weekend time to do something for herself for a change.

  She felt guilty that he was so sweet about it, and about the money she’ll be spending on a fancy lunch they can’t really afford.

  “Hey, it’s me. How are the boys?” she asks
when Garth cheerfully answers the phone.

  “They’re good. Where are you?”

  “Just about to get to the restaurant.”

  “That was fast.”

  “You have no idea,” she says wryly. “What are the boys doing? Did you remember to give Caleb his antibiotics? Did they eat lunch?”

  She glances at Fiona, who is looking in the mirror. Her lips are pursed to apply more lipstick, but probably would be anyway.

  “I’m making lunch now, yes on the medicine, and they’re on the couch watching Dora the Explorer.”

  “That’s what I was afraid of.”

  She made Garth promise he wouldn’t stick the kids in front of the television all day.

  “It’s just to keep them out from underfoot while I make lunch.”

  She wonders what he can possibly be making that’s so involved it might take longer than a minute or two, but doesn’t ask. She would if Fiona wasn’t sitting beside her in silent disapproval.

  “You know the boys like the crusts cut off their bread if you’re making sandwiches, don’t you?”

  He pauses just long enough for her to realize that, somehow, he doesn’t know that.

  “I know.”

  She smiles faintly. “Just making sure.”

  “Listen, have fun,” Garth says before they hang up, as the light changes and Fiona guns the engine to hurtle them on toward the inn.

  “I will.”

  No, she won’t.

  “Tell the girls I said hello.”

  “I will.”

  No, she won’t.

  He knows Tildy and Cassie, of course, just as he knew Rachel. He had them in class during their days at Stonebridge. Both Tildy and Cassie popped in and out of Brynn’s life in the early years of her marriage, before the boys came along and everyone drifted.

  But today isn’t about catching up on each other’s families, jobs, lives.

  It’s about something Brynn isn’t yet prepared to dredge from the murky depths of her memory.

  But it’s too late to back out now, even if she dared suggest that to Fiona.

  She and Fee haven’t spoken much during the drive—and not at all about the birthday cards, or Rachel, or the past. Or, thank goodness, the expensive Lladro figurine Jeremy demolished in Fiona’s office yesterday, which Brynn offered to pay for, and was grateful when Fiona refused. She knew it would probably cost more than a mortgage payment, and she and Garth are having a hard enough time making those lately.

  Fee spent much of the last hour on her cell phone with clients, in as blatant disregard of the mandatory hands-free headset tossed carelessly on the backseat as she is the posted speed limit.

  At least she didn’t smoke.

  Well, not after the first cigarette she was already puffing on when she pulled into the Saddlers’ driveway.

  Brynn asked her not to smoke in the car.

  “I can roll down the window.”

  “It still bothers me. I get nauseous, and you don’t want me to vomit all over your car, do you?”

  Obviously, Fiona did not.

  Glenview Springhouse is a sprawling, white clapboard house. Judging by the rambling architectural style, Brynn concludes it’s probably been added on to repeatedly over the years. The restaurant entrance is off to one side, in a wing that consists mainly of a glassed-in atrium.

  Here we go, Brynn thinks, still clenching her cell phone in a hand that remains white-knuckled even now that her speed-demon friend has stopped the car.

  She can’t help but wonder what she’s doing here.

  She should be home in Cedar Crest, eating peanut butter sandwiches—no crusts—with the boys, and nagging Garth about fixing the plastic towel bar in the bathroom that dropped off the tile wall again this morning.

  That’s her life, not this…this…

  This nightmare.

  “Do you think they’re here?” she asks as Fiona pulls into an empty spot and turns off the engine.

  “Tildy definitely is.” Fee indicates a gleaming red Ferrari 612 Scaglietti parked nearby.

  “That’s her car? How do you know?” Brynn asks uneasily, remembering Fiona claimed earlier that she hasn’t seen Matilda in years, either.

  Claimed?

  So you think she was lying about that?

  Why would she?

  Her thoughts awhirl with paranoia and suspicion, Brynn can’t seem to look her friend in the eye.

  No matter. Fee is too busy looking herself in the eye, focused again on the visor mirror as she says matter-of-factly, “I don’t know it’s Tildy’s for sure. But that’s a quarter-of-a-million-dollar car, and I’m willing to bet it’s hers. It’s her style.”

  Brynn, noting that she herself failed to discern said quarter-of-a-million-dollar car from the red Hyundai parked next to it, is mired in a familiar sense of being well out of her league.

  When she first met the infinitely astute Fiona, Brynn marveled that a girl who grew up in a blue-collar Cedar Crest household could possibly be so worldly.

  Brynn has long since accepted that it’s no accident. Driven by ambition long before she was voted Most Likely to Succeed at Saint Vincent’s High, Fee shed her local roots like a worn housecoat.

  She’d have gone away to college if her parents could have afforded it; instead, she used local connections and worked her way through Stonebridge. By the time she was asked to pledge Zeta Delta Kappa, no one outside her closest circle of friends even realized she was a townie.

  She seemed to have everything, even back then: brains, ambition, friends, a great wardrobe—and one of the hottest boyfriends around.

  Four years older than Fee when she began her freshman year, Pat was a law student at Stonebridge by day and a bartender by night. Plenty of girls were drawn to his affable personality and striking good looks. Black Irish, Fiona used to say, with his shock of dark hair and sooty lashes that fringed coal-colored eyes.

  Pat was from New York—Brooklyn. He was going to be a big-shot lawyer. Fiona often spoke of how they would move to Manhattan, where she would work for some top PR firm.

  But Pat never made it to the Bar, thanks in large part to the bar: the Rat, where he worked.

  It was obvious that Pat preferred doling out drinks and socializing to studying law. Obvious, that is, to all but single-minded Fiona, so in love with Pat that she saw only what she wanted to see.

  Brynn supposes their relationship boiled down to plain-old chemistry: a wild, mutual attraction that struck at first sight, lingered for a few years, and wore off soon after the wedding.

  They had been married a few months when Pat flunked out of law school.

  Stunned, Fiona turned up on Brynn’s doorstep late that blustery night, saying she had left him.

  “I don’t belong with some loser dropout. I deserve a lot better than that.”

  The next morning she woke up, ran straight to the bathroom to vomit, and miserably asked Brynn to run over to CVS to pick up a pregnancy test.

  Ashley was born eight months later.

  To appease his wife—and support her and his new daughter—Pat landed a job with a couple of sleazy divorce attorneys up in Pittsfield, working as a paralegal. He continued to tend bar at the Rat at night and on weekends, but spent every spare moment with Ashley.

  He still does. He’s a devoted daddy—even Fiona will give him that.

  Pat longed for a second child.

  Fiona Fitzgerald Public Relations was born the September Ashley entered preschool, and there was no looking back. Fee might not be working in a fancy, high-profile New York PR firm, but she was running a thriving business. One that unfortunately propelled her spiraling marriage right into the ground.

  Brynn often wonders whether her friend ever has regrets—and whether she occasionally she envies the Saddlers’ stable lives.

  Probably not.

  Now, watching her friend check her teeth for lipstick, then snap the visor mirror back into place, she asks, “What do you think they’re going to say about all
of this?”

  They, of course, are the two sorority sisters presumably waiting inside.

  “Only one way to find out. Come on.”

  Reluctantly, Brynn climbs out of the car and follows Fiona on wobbly legs.

  It’s too late in the season for summer vacationers and too early for foliage spectators, yet the inn’s large dining room is fairly crowded this first weekend after Labor Day. The round tables, draped in rich amber linen and centered with flickering candles and fresh autumn-hued flowers, are occupied mainly by couples and retirees.

  Matilda Harrington is the lone occupant of a round table for four. She had asked the hostess to move her twice before deciding this was as private a location as possible, in a relatively secluded corner beside a tall, lace-curtained window.

  Tildy sips her chilled white wine and takes in the Colonial ambience: the low-beamed ceiling, white-painted woodwork, gleaming, dark hardwood floors. Windows on three walls open onto profuse perennial gardens in brilliant, late-summer bloom and, beyond, a verdant woodland backdrop sure to be ablaze with color in another couple of weeks.

  Glenview Springhouse would be the perfect place to spend a romantic birthday weekend, considering that she can’t appear in public with the man in her life. Not as a couple, anyway.

  Just last night, she made the mistake of saying, “I’m so sick of sneaking around that I’m starting to think I don’t care who finds out.”

  His eyes darkened so swiftly at that remark that she wished she could take it back. He grew quiet and left soon afterward, saying he had to get home.

  He always has to get home.

  What Tildy wouldn’t give to spend just one night—the entire night—in his arms.

  I deserve that, she concludes. And this would be the perfect place.

  She’ll have to pick up an inn brochure on the way out, so she can show it to him. With enough advance notice, maybe he’ll be able to swing it.

  “After all,” she’ll tell him, “I’m only turning thirty once in my life. I want to celebrate it privately, with you.”

  She’s beginning to wish she had never planned the big party. She booked the date—the night before her birthday—at the Imperial Ballroom at the Park Plaza Hotel a few months ago.