Brimstone (58 page)

I’d stolen Cole’s keys when I stole his wallet, but I hadn’t turned them over at the hospital. I planned to remember to do that after I’d checked out his apartment.

The paramedics had made a mess of his piles of paper. I
picked some of them up, glancing at the notes. From what I could tell with my grasp of not-entirely-current affairs, Cole was writing a thriller based on the international politics of oil. Sort of like that George Clooney movie where he grew that awful beard. What I didn’t get was what Devon had meant when she said that she was his muse. I didn’t see the connection between cute, artistic Devon and OPEC.

Laying that aside, I started searching for any clues to what might have happened to him. I riffled through his bedroom, under the mattress and under the bed itself, and through the medicine cabinet. I checked his desk, the kitchen, beneath couch cushions. Nothing out of the ordinary; no poppets, voodoo dolls, talismans.
Nada
.

My phone rang, the caller ID flashing the number for the journalism lab, and I answered. “Maggie? It’s Mike. How’s Cole?”

“Not so good. They’re thinking it may be meningitis.”

“That sucks. Poor guy.”

“Yeah. You’re going to be getting a call about a prescription for preventative antibiotics.”

“Wow. I never thought I’d get that kind of call in regard to a guy.”

I reminded myself that he didn’t know how serious this was. “That’s more than I need to know about your personal life, Mike. Did you call just to check on Cole?”

He got down to business. “Listen. I was going to finish my article on Saturday’s football game with some quotes from the trainer who came up with the defensive strategy. Coach attributes the win to him. But now I’m doing Cole’s job, so I need you to call this guy and ask him about it.”

“I guess I—”

“Great.” He gave me the name and a phone number. “Sooner the better, Maggie. Thanks.”

He hung up before I could say anything else. I looked at my watch. It was midafternoon, I’d missed biology, and at this rate I wouldn’t make it to my last class, either.

What the hell. I dialed the number Mike had given me and Troy, the student trainer in question, answered quickly. I explained who I was and what I wanted, and he laughed.

“I can’t believe Coach is giving me props for that. I just came up with the idea, and he was like, hey, this is great. And I was like, whoa, I’m just a student trainer. I thought, they won’t listen to me, but I couldn’t not say it, you know.”

I deciphered that into English, jotting on a legal pad from Cole’s desk. As I did, something struck me. “When you say you couldn’t
not
tell the coach your idea, do you mean you felt a responsibility to the team, or …”

“Well, yeah. Like, I want to win. But also—and this is weird, right? It was one of those ideas you know is really great, and you’ll just pop if you don’t say it. You know?”

Yeah. I think I did know.

“Thanks. I hope I’m not keeping you from class or anything.”

“Nah. I took the day off. I was feeling kinda crappy yesterday. Probably too much partying, right?”

“But you’re okay now?” He assured me he was. “Do you know a guy named Cole Bauer? Ever take a communication class?”

“You’re, like, joking, right?”

“You live in a dorm?”

“Yeah. Is this going in the paper?”

“Um. No. This is just for, um, demographic research. Thank you for your time …” I glanced at his name. “Troy.”

I hung up and tore off the page, then sat back, looking at the pieces of future bestseller littered around the room. Supernatural inspiration. There was something there, something important, but it stayed elusive. And Cole didn’t have time for me to chase down dead ends.

I decided that exposure to meningitis was a good enough reason to skip class, so I spent the rest of the afternoon in the journalism lab, helping Mike get up to speed on Tuesday’s edition of the
Report
. Fortunately, since he asked me to prepare something on meningitis, I had an excuse to call the hospital for updates on the patient’s condition. (“Unchanged,” all afternoon.)

In the end, however, the doctor called
me
. Cole’s lumbar puncture was positive, and I was to start taking the Cipro they’d given me as a preventative.

Meningitis, Wikipedia told me, was an infection of the membranes covering the brain, and it could cause all sorts of things, including brain damage, hearing loss, and, oh yeah, death. (That’s when I paused in my research to take the antibiotics.) The disease was particularly contagious in close living quarters, like college dorms.

Lovely. I called the university Health Center and spoke with a nurse practitioner who told me that yes, they were aware of the situation, and they were working with the community hospital, outbreak prevention, blah blah blah.

I jotted down a few quotes, then asked, “Do you have any
record of the last time a BU student was diagnosed with meningitis?”

“Hang on.” The tapping of a keyboard came over the line. “It was about twenty years ago. Oh dear.”

“What?”

“One boy died, and another one was in the hospital for two weeks and had to drop out of school.”

“Did they live in the same dorm?”

“Let’s see. Not the same dorm, but the same fraternity house.”

“I don’t suppose it was Gamma Phi Epsilon.”

“There’s no note of the name.”

“Great. Thank you, Ms. Stevenson. You’ve been a big help.”

I hung up and stared at the computer screen for a long while. The date she’d given me, twenty years ago, would have been about the time that Victoria and Juliana were in school. And for the first time, it dawned on me that my mom would have been, too.

Typing like a madwoman, I entered the information from the Health Center and the quotes from the nurse practitioner into the article, called the hospital one more time (“Status unchanged”), and uploaded the draft to the server.

“Mike,” I called, grabbing my jacket and book bag, “article’s ready for proofing. I need to run home for a few minutes before meeting tonight.”

He didn’t look up from the screen, but I saw his hand appear over the monitor and wave.

On the walk to the Jeep, I tried Devon’s cell again, then Justin. Neither answered. I called Lisa, too, but got her voice
mail as well. I tried not to imagine anything ominous in it, but it was hard not to when I had no idea what was going on except that it was bad, and getting worse all the time.

Mom was fixing a snack when I got home—a sandwich of peanut butter, sweet pickles, bacon, and mayonnaise. On toast, with a glass of milk on the side.

“It must be an obedient-stomach day,” I said, going to the fridge for a Coke.

She sat on a barstool, elbows on the counter, as she took a big bite of sandwich. I didn’t know who this woman was, who’d replaced my stickler-for-manners mother. “I have to eat while the eating’s good.”

Eyeing her plate, I said, “I’ll take your word for it.”

“What are you doing home?” She wiped a drip of mayo from her lip with a ladylike dab of her napkin. That was more like her. “You don’t usually come home before chapter meeting.”

“It’s been a weird day.” I leaned against the opposite cabinet. “Listen, Mom. Do you remember two Gamma Phi Eps who got meningitis while you were in school?”

She took a sip of milk, her expression thoughtful. “Yes,” she said, then with more surety, “yes, I do. I was a sophomore, I think.”

“I don’t suppose you remember who they were dating.”

“Goodness, how would I know that?”

“Well, they were Gamma Phi Eps, so …”

“So chances are they were dating Sigmas.” She bit into her sandwich and chewed it, and the question, over. “No, wait. They
weren’t
Gamma Phi Eps.”

I leaned back in surprise. I was sure I’d been on the track to something.

Mom reminisced, smiling at things past. “We were all so jealous of the SAXis. Homecoming, Greek Week … It was always Sigma Alpha Xi and Gamma Phi Epsilon.”

“And that didn’t seem odd?”

“That they were so lucky? Not really. Do we have any potato chips?”

I got them out of the pantry, and she put a few in her sandwich. “There was something, though, now that you remind me, about their being jinxed.”

“Jinxed?”

“Yes. I think the Deltas started the rumor, because they were always coming in second in everything.” Her face lit with a click of memory. “That’s right! Those guys who got sick weren’t Gamma Phi Eps, but they
were
dating Sigmas. That’s when the joke started. It was those guys, and a Phi Delta broke his leg, and then everyone came down with food poisoning after a SAXi party. A couple of the guys even ended up in the hospital with dehydration.”

“But this jinx. It didn’t stop the frat guys from wanting to date them?”

Mom shook her head. “It was a mark of status. The SAXis’ boyfriends were chapter presidents, football captains, fellowship recipients … I guess when you think of the good things that happened to guys that dated Sigmas, it pretty much balanced out the bad. So they couldn’t really have been jinxed, right?”

I didn’t answer. She laid down her sandwich and looked at me closely. “Right, Maggie?”

“Sure, Mom.” Funny how much concentration it can take to read a Coke can when you don’t want to look at your parent.

“Oh, Maggie.” The maternal unit in question sighed. “You’re not in the middle of something
weird
again, are you?”

Picking up my satchel, I headed for the stairs. “Weirder than my being in a sorority in the first place? Come on, Mom.”

Question evaded, I went up to my rooms, hearing her call up to me: “Did you clean up that mess?”

“Sure!” I yelled back, staring right at my self-ransacked bedroom. Dropping my bag onto the study sofa, I went to close the French doors. Out of sight—

The door swung shut and there, two inches in front of my face, was the answer. Crimson and indigo, compass and North Star. Even a stupid octopus. The door decoration had been there since the night I pledged, turned back against the wall.

Out of sight, out of mind.

I’d gotten Lisa and Justin online—despite the fact that he hated IM for anything but brief exchanges—because they were both in semipublic, and a phone conversation about sorcery was bound to attract the attention of their classmates.

As soon as the door decoration—which I’d seen on Holly’s door, too, so I wasn’t special—was submerged in the salt bath, I’d felt something like when your ears pop in an airplane, a change in the pressure around my head. And clarity. Finally, I could think and talk about the Sigmas without the muffled, wool-headed feeling.

I considered the plethora of crimson and indigo decorations in every SAXi room I’d seen, and wondered how many girls never questioned their good fortune, accepting it with perfectly normal Greek elitism. But that led to more questions. If you accepted something suspicious without question, did that make you guilty, or just stupid?

Either way, it didn’t change what I knew, now more than ever, I had to do.

He wasn’t going to like her answer. I didn’t, either, but I was prepared when Lisa typed …