Rushing to die, p.13
Rushing to Die, page 13
Before we got started, I quickly glanced up and confirmed that the smoke detectors were disconnected. Then I clapped my hands. “All right, ladies, I know it’s hard to concentrate today, but let’s take advantage of this unexpected free time to really perfect all the details in the preference ceremony.”
Our musicians readied their violin, guitar, and piano, respectively. The music chair put her pitch pipe to her lips. I hit the button on the remote, and the lights in the chapter room dimmed.
The chords started, the beautiful swell of the music took me back. This song had graced these halls for a generation, reminding us what was truest and best about being a Delta Beta.
The melody was simple, the words profound. “I’ll be there for you, when the rain starts to pour,” the ladies sang. “I’ll be there for you like I’ve been there before …” Although everyone was relatively composed today, on the actual night of the preference ceremony, there wouldn’t be a dry eye in the house. “I’ll be there for you, ’cause you’re there for me, too …”
After the song, there were poems, traditionally read by seniors. This year, Aubrey and Callie were the designated orators, and they stepped forward and recited the verses confidently and emotionally.
Then we entered the danger zone. A large white pillar candle stood on an elaborate pedestal at the front of the room. Each sister was supposed to go, light her gold taper from the Symbolic Eternal Flame of Friendship (c), circle the room three times, then offer her candle to her designated rushee. At this point, there would be a violin solo of “God Bless the Winding Road” as everyone looked in each other’s eyes and thought about what sisterhood meant to them. Yes, it sounds awkward. But it’s lovely and moving.
Then everyone would file out of the room, (sobbing, hopefully) and whisper all sorts of unsanctioned things like “I can’t wait for you to be my sister” and “You’re so getting a bid tomorrow,” and the doors would close, and we’d do it all over again and mean it just as much to the next group.
Here, in practice, Zoe lit the Symbolic Eternal Flame of Friendship, and the chapter readied their gold tapers.
“Wait!” I cried out. Ginnifer sent me a what-the-hay look from across the room, where she was diligently timing the ceremony to ensure that we stayed within Panhellenic parameters.
“Let’s just practice it without the flames,” I suggested. Ginnifer very obviously clicked off her stopwatch.
“But we need to practice so we don’t burn the house down.”
She was right. I was just a jumble of nerves from this morning. Seeing body bags tended to does that to me. Right. We had to do this. For the safety of everyone’s highlights.
I nodded. “Let’s do it.” At my signal, the ceremony restarted, and women began to file down to the Eternal Flame, while the piano tinkled softly in the background.
I almost passed out from holding my breath as each of the tapers were lit without incident, held a safe distance from flammable draperies, clothing or hair-spray-coated tresses, then blown out again at the completion of the ceremony.
“We did it!” I squealed to Ginnifer after it was done, and she looked up from her phone distractedly.
“About time,” she muttered.
It was a fair statement, but it ticked me off. The chapter had been through so much, had worked so hard the past few months, and here they had finally gotten through thirty minutes without lighting someone’s hair on fire. Was it too much to ask for a little enthusiasm? A little “yay Delta Betas!” “Way to go avoiding fire!”
It was one thing to have impossibly high standards. It was another never to give credit where credit was due, and I’d had enough of Miss High-and-Mighty.
“You know, I don’t think your attitude is very productive,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, there’s a reason why everyone calls you the Gineral.”
Several gasps rose around me, from sisters who had filtered back into the chapter room and overheard. The biggest gasp came from Ginnifer herself, who looked shocked and stunned. She clasped a hand to her mouth and ran out of the room.
The look of pain on her face was the second worst expression I’d seen that day. And it was only noon. It made me want to go check back into a room at the Fountain Place Inn and pretend like I’d never woken up.
Chapter Twenty-four
AT THIS POINT, I was 98 percent sure that giving Ty Hatfield my full participation in his murder investigations was the right thing to do. Rush was super important, of course, but the death of a freshman rushee hit me hard, and I couldn’t get her out of my mind all day. Her identity was broadcast almost immediately on social media: Daria Cantrell, a freshman business major, from Cleveland. Her last Instagram was being reposted everywhere, a photo of her hand, holding a Starbucks cup, with the hashtag #letsdothis.
As I let Ty into the Deb house, that tiny 2 percent of doubt hung around my head. Voluntarily getting involved in another set of murders I was one hundred percent sure my chapter was not involved in had not been in my rush-week plan.
But Daria Cantrell’s Starbucks cup haunted me. How could I not offer up my help to the Sutton Police Department? It could be my Instagram picture next. Or Aubrey’s. Or Callie’s. Or anyone on Greek Row. Daria Cantrell would never again post a selfie with the hashtag #Iwokeuplikethis. If another woman died or was hurt, I would not be able to forgive myself.
Ty followed me into the chapter advisor’s apartment on the first floor of the house, where Zoe was waiting. He took one look at my desk and groaned, closing his eyes like he was in pain. “Please tell me this is not what I think it is.”
Well … “What do you think it is?” I asked, just to be sure before I implicated myself in anything.
“I think it’s a very expensive, very thorough surveillance system.” He peered at one of the monitors that held nine different camera angles. “Are those …” His mouth kind of hinged open, then he turned his head to look at me. “You bugged the other houses?”
“NO!” I gasped.
“Define ‘bugged,’ ” Zoe said.
“Why didn’t you come forward with this before?” He was having a very hard time controlling himself. I took a step back, just to be safe.
“It was—”
“—don’t say it—”
“—confidential,” I finished.
“I told you not to say that.” Ty spoke through a clenched jaw, and I was sort of worried about what his dentist must see in his mouth. He leaned over again, examining the third monitor. Out of six, stacked high.
“You have the Tri Mu backyard …” He paused, steadied himself. “You have almost the whole damn Greek Row on camera.” He kept staring at the camera feeds, and Zoe and I exchanged nervous glances. I wasn’t quite sure that a silent police officer was a safe police officer.
“Ty—”
“Shhh.” He cut me off with a hand slicing through the air. “I’m trying to figure out a few things.”
“Like?”
“Like how to explain to the district attorney that I got evidence from a private surveillance system.”
I knew the answer to that. “Voluntarily,” I affirmed with a quick nod. “You got this completely voluntarily.”
He frowned. Maybe that was the wrong answer? “What else were you trying to figure out?” I asked.
“Why the hell you didn’t tell me about this when Shannon Bender was found dead in your freaking backyard.”
I held up both hands. “Because …”
Zoe jumped in. “Because I didn’t have it up yet.”
That was sweet of her to try to protect me. “Because I hadn’t given them permission to use it yet. I wasn’t sure this was the direction we wanted to take.”
“It’s a hell of a direction,” he said with a wry lift of his eyebrow. “And what, exactly, did you think you would do with all this?”
I knew that Ty had been in a fraternity in college. He was in my class, but I didn’t really remember him—he had lost fifty pounds since then and mysteriously gotten way hotter in a uniform and badge—though he remembered me (slightly awkward). But sometimes he acted like he had no clue how sororities worked, like he hadn’t paid any attention to the better half of the Greek system.
“We used it for background information, to track deliveries, coming and going of influential persons, what the other houses are using for decorations and outfits.”
Zoe moved to the computer and pulled up a database. “Which we then input into the Sutton rush database—it’s proprietary,” she informed him, as if he were about to market it and take the company public for a billion dollars. I made a mental note to discuss that option with Zoe at a future date.
Ty leaned forward to examine a Web site pulled up on the screen. “Who’s Casey Fenner?” He looked at me in confusion. “Isn’t that your friend? From headquarters?”
So Ty did pay attention to some things. “No,” I answered. “That’s Casey Kenner. We just used his name for inspiration.”
“For what?” He did that thing he did with his jaw when he was getting impatient. Before I could finesse something that wouldn’t make him grind his teeth again, Zoe blurted out the answer.
“Our fake social-media accounts.”
“Do I want to know?” he asked me.
“Probably not.”
But Zoe was proud of this. I’d come up with the idea for the database and social-media effort as drastic measures, for our chapter to have any hope of surviving being known as the murder house; and Zoe had done the computer-whiz work.
“Casey Fenner is an eighteen-year-old freshman at Sutton College.” With a tap on the mouse, she pulled up a Facebook page featuring a normally pretty girl, nondescript in dress and background. “Two months ago, she began requesting to be friends with every girl who was registered for rush.” Zoe clicked again, and there was Casey Fenner’s Instagram account, her Twitter, and her Vine.
“Oh God …” Ty managed to say.
“It was Margot’s idea,” Zoe said with a note of pride in her voice that I couldn’t help but appreciate. I had no guilt about using underhanded methods to get a look at rushees’ locked accounts. I was only doing what a potential big sister would do, spotting red behavioral flags.
“You’ve been tracking rushees from a fake account.”
“I wouldn’t say tracking,” I replied. It sounded like we were hunting rushees for their fur on the Oregon Trail.
“Yes,” Zoe said. “Mainly to judge their character.”
“Of course.”
Zoe didn’t pick up on Ty’s dry sarcasm. He’d made it clear to me in the past that he thought sororities’ emphasis on morality was old-fashioned and dumb. Zoe continued. “To find out if they’d gone to fraternity parties, if they’re drinking, or if they run a secret phone-sex hotline. I developed a bot that would flag suspicious posts and turn the rest into data points.”
“How have you not flunked out of school?” Ty asked Zoe.
“She’s a tech genius,” I told him, and this time it was my voice that was filled with pride.
“That’s how you knew about the Witness glasses.”
Zoe nodded carefully.
Ty straightened up and crossed his arms. “So what can you tell me about Daria Cantrell?”
Zoe looked at me with a clear question in her eyes, and I nodded. “I can give you a full report on all her accounts in the next hour.”
“And the footage of the Tri Mu house?”
Again Zoe gave me a questioning glance, and this time Ty noticed. “What’s this about?”
“We don’t have a clear view of the murder site,” I explained.
“How do you know where the murder site was?”
Aha. I was glad Zoe and I had taken the time to prepare before this meeting. I knew Ty would have some tricky questions. “Because we have shots of Daria Cantrell walking down the street toward the Tri Mu house.”
“And then she walks on their north side,” Zoe took over, pulling the footage up on a separate monitor. In grainy black and white, the three of us watched what was probably Daria Cantrell’s last moments on the planet. “And then we lose her.”
Ty watched the screen intently. “Where does she go?”
“To the back, I guess,” Zoe said.
“We don’t have anything back there,” I added.
Ty slammed his palm on the desk. The monitors shook, wobbly in their uneven towers. “What good is this, then?”
“Well, we know who put the cheese into the Tri Mu vents,” Zoe hurriedly offered. “And we can pretty much tell who put the blue dye on the Lambdas’ lily delivery.”
“I don’t care about cheese. Or flowers,” Ty said. “That’s not evidence of a murder.”
The three of us stood in silence for a long moment, the frame of Daria Cantrell frozen on the screen. Then I remembered something.
“Actually …”
Ty’s head swiveled toward me.
“We might have something.”
“What do we have?”
“We have blue lilies.”
“Margot …” I liked when Ty said my name like that. Like he was tired of fighting me and had decided to just give in to whatever I wanted.
“I need to see the card from Shannon Bender’s spy-glasses again.”
Chapter Twenty-five
WE AGREED THAT when I went to the police station to deliver the report on Daria Cantrell’s locked social-media accounts and the surveillance footage of Greek Row, I could get another look at the footage on the Witness glasses. I refused to say anything else to Ty about what I was looking for; truth be told, I wasn’t altogether sure. The evidence we had linking Shannon Bender and Daria Cantrell’s murders was very slim, but something had to be there. Two murders one after another didn’t happen that often on Greek Row. Well, except for that time three months ago.
I left Zoe at the computer to download the database and keep sweeping Casey Fenner’s accounts. After spending the night in my time-out with Sheila, I took a few minutes to review the most recent recruitment reports from Panhellenic. But that was just busywork to avoid what I really needed to do: update Delta Beta headquarters. Just three months ago, I would have had Mabel Donahue, the Delta Beta international president, on the phone pronto to report the significant irregularities of this rush. But now, as chapter advisor, I found that my loyalties were much different. My first priority was this chapter, not the bigger international sisterhood. Which was surprising when I thought about it, and as I did, a sick feeling crept over me.
The Gineral was in the position I was in three months ago. She was the sisterhood mentor, traveling from chapter to chapter, promoting the interests and betterment of the entire Delta Beta sorority. I knew her job better than anyone: three months ago, I was the longest-serving sisterhood mentor ever, at six years and counting. The mentor’s manual was clear: Regular, fully informed updates to headquarters were a necessity.
So why hadn’t I gotten a call from Mabel Donahue or anyone at headquarters about Shannon Bender, the high jinks between the chapters, the Mafia’s new rules, or the postponement of rush? No one was more plugged into HQ than Casey, who had sincerely responded like he hadn’t heard a thing about Shannon Bender’s murder. And I would know if he were faking with me; Casey is a wonderful person and a fabulous friend, but he cannot keep a secret from me to save his life.
The only conclusion I could come to was that Ginnifer had not reported to HQ. Which was … welcome but very suspicious. And possibly meant she was bad at her job. Which in turn meant I would have to report her for not fulfilling her duties as sisterhood mentor; so, report her not reporting me. This was getting complicated.
There was only one thing to do. I had to find Ginnifer and lay it all on table. Before I called headquarters about anything, I had to know who had told whom what.
I headed out of the Rush Dungeon for Ginnifer’s quarters on the second floor, in the tiny single room for houseguests, but I was delayed by the crowd of women heading into the chapter room.
“What’s going on?” I asked a sophomore near me. I didn’t remember there being a meeting or practice. In fact, I had specifically given the chapter some free time and urged them to relax and recharge. I wasn’t a complete rush Nazi.
“We all got texts to come downstairs,” was the answer. Immediately, I pulled my phone out of my back pocket. No text.
This was bad news. There were only two reasons why someone would anonymously summon the whole chapter to gather without me. The first would be, obviously, a surprise birthday party for me. But I was pretty sure that by now, the chapter would know that (a) my birthday was in July and (b) I had stopped celebrating birthdays at twenty-five. The other possibility was that someone was trying to sabotage us.
My mind shot through the possibilities. More stinky cheese? Smoke bombs? Water balloons filled with gelatin? Check, check, and check. They’d all been done. Whoever was trying to play a dirty prank on my chapter didn’t want me there because they knew that I’d foil their evil plan. Well, I’d show them. I pushed my way into the chapter room and made sure I had a good seat at the front of the room, where I could easily jump up and take leadership should the worst occur.
Distantly, I heard a knock at the front door and Ginnifer’s voice. Well, at least I knew where she was now. As soon as this was over—whatever it was—we’d have that little chat about her irresponsible (but charitable) lack of reporting to HQ.
Ginnifer rushed into the chapter room, panic-stricken. “Has anyone seen—” She broke off at the sight of me. “Margot!” She was relieved when she ran to me, clutching at my upper arms.
“What’s going on?” I asked, instantly on guard.
“The police,” she heaved.
“The what?” I asked.
“The police, ma’am.” A burly officer I’d never seen before stood in the door to the chapter room, with two other unknown uniformed officers. Strange. I wondered why Ty had sent the new guys. All three of them still had their mirrored sunglasses on, with caps pulled low over their heads. A nervous yet excited ripple of chatter moved through the room at the sight of the policemen, physically imposing and very stern, standing straight in uniforms that seemed … sort of tight.
