Rushing to Die (2 page)

 

Chapter Two

T
HREE MONT
HS' EXPERIENCE
as a chapter advisor, combined with my deep and abiding love for my sisterhood, had prepared me, yet again, for this nightmare of a situation. The girls hadn't been overreacting. There was a corpse in the middle of the frozen Delta Beta backyard, one with straight blond hair splayed in the dead grass, matted with dried brown blood. She was facedown, and even though I was normally a curious person, I was not touching the body to see if it was anyone I knew. I just couldn't face it. Not yet.

I made the dreaded call to 911. Delegating the chapter's care to Ginnifer, I hugged Christopher, Berger, and Prejean tightly and handed them off to Callie Campbell, the chapter standards and morals director, for hot chocolate. Then I went to wait at the street for the first responders.

The nightmare continued when two fire trucks, an ambulance, and two squad cars came blaring down sorority row, lights flashing. Could there be anything worse? Even if the dead woman was a hundred-­year-­old nun who died in the process of running a triathlon benefiting Ethiopian orphans, this was not a good look for our chapter. But I couldn't think about public relations or rush rumors or how the heck I was going to explain this to the Panhellenic Council, much less Deb HQ, just yet. Not until I after I dealt with the tall police officer crossing the street to talk to me with a grim, hard look on his face.

“Lieutenant Hatfield.”

“You rang.” He was not amused despite his sort of cute greeting.

I burst into tears.

He let me cry for almost a full minute before he asked, “Where is the body?”

I wiped my nose. “Is that all you can think about? At a time like this?”

Hatfield leveled me with his no-­nonsense blue stare. Okay, it came out wrong. But still. Even on
Law & Order
, they'd show a little compassion to the overwrought chapter advisor who had sent sisters outside for light punishment, only to have them stumble on a dead body.

I resolved to handle this like the professional I was. I knew the drill from experience, so I pointed out the location of the deceased and got out of the way while the police and EMTs did their thing.

After the initial photos and observations, Ty Hatfield knelt in front of me with his little pad of paper, just like Olivia Benson used. “What was her name?”

“Whose?”

Hatfield blinked slowly.

“Oh.” I closed my eyes and recalled the body I'd looked at earlier, briefly. “I don't know.”

Hatfield didn't believe me. “I couldn't see her face!” The woman had been facedown, in a sky-­blue T-­shirt and jeans. I ran my hands over the sleeves of my cardigan, thinking I should probably feel colder, sitting out in the parking lot on a January evening.

Ty frowned, then took a small digital camera out of his back pants pocket. He selected a photo and showed me the face of the woman I'd only seen from her lifeless back side. “Do you know her?”

The dead woman's eyes were wide open, frozen in shock, her complexion gray and waxy. I shivered, finally feeling the bite of the North Carolina winter wind. “No. Who is she?”

Not accepting that answer, Ty kept his arm outstretched, the camera still shining that frozen face in mine. “Are you sure?”

“Yes.” I couldn't look anymore. I shifted my gaze back to the slightly-­less-­dangerous eyes of the handsome police lieutenant who had avoided me for the past three months.

This just wasn't fair. All of the chapter's hard work, all of our toil and strife, and it was all going to be for nothing because someone had to die a bloody and probably tragic death in our yard.

I pushed myself up off the ground and stood tall for my chapter. “I want a transfer!”

Ty followed me with a quizzical look. “What? Where are you going?”

“Not me! You!” I waved my finger around the rest of the Sutton town public-­safety workers still hanging around the crime scene.

“You want
my
transfer? Why?”

“You're biased!” I knew my voice was raised, and I didn't care. It felt good. Positive, if slightly unprofessional. “And the rest of the town! I want new ­people out here. Who haven't already investigated a crime scene here.”

“The town's not that big.”

“This is not a laughing matter!” I gestured toward the sheet-­covered gurney being wheeled by us.

“Of course it's not. What the hell do you take me for?”

I crossed my arms and thought briefly about how to put this. “What do you have?”

“Huh?”

“In the pool.”

“Margot, I really don't know—­”

“The 911 operator told me about the pool down at the station.”

Now the police officer was the one getting caught out. Lieutenant Hatfield paused, awareness on his distractingly handsome face.

“It was probably not the best idea—­”

I threw my hands up. “Probably? How do you think it makes me feel when I call 911 and the operator asks me if I could just wait another week to report a crime so he'd win fifty bucks?”

A muscle worked in Ty's hard jaw. “I'll definitely have a talk with someone . . .”

But I kept going, my voice rising hysterically. “It makes me feel bad, that's how it makes me feel. It makes me feel like no one in the community supports me or thinks that I can do my job—­”

Ty's hand clamped around my shoulder and gave it a small shake. “Get a grip, Blythe. You've got an audience.”

Filing out the side door was a bunch of girls, holding each other, blankets wrapped around their shoulders. Ty leaned over and spoke in a low voice. “You're right about one thing. I am biased. No one believes you can handle this more than I. But there's another dead body, and you're going to have to get it together, or else no one is going to be able to help you.”

Out of the small crowd of Debs, a small, determined figure marched toward us. Ginnifer was holding her megaphone, and from the fierce glint in her eye, I feared she'd use it to issue orders to the police—­not always the best idea, in my experience.

“Have we got this straightened out yet?” she asked, skewering both of us with her stare.

Ty's face was back to his usual professionally blank expression. “Miss?”

Ginnifer thrust her hand toward him. “Miss Ginnifer Claire Martinelli. I'm the designated sisterhood mentor to the Sutton College Delta Beta chapter for the next ten days.”

Ty shook her hand and glanced toward me. “Another one?”

“Margot is just the chapter advisor now. I'm the representative of headquarters,” Ginnifer informed him. “Now. Can we go? We have work to do.”

It took a lot to rattle Lieutenant Cool Hand Luke, but Ty looked taken aback.

“Take the girls inside, have them work on decorations,” I said. Ginnifer looked like she was going to argue but gave a sharp nod and returned to round up the sisters. Hopefully, an hour or two of crafting and stringing tulle and twinkle lights would be sufficiently distracting from a fresh murder investigation.

I should have known it wouldn't be that easy.

“She was wearing a Deb shirt.”

I had automatically gone into chapter-­advisor and rush-­preparation mode in my mind, running through the checklist of decorations that needed to be completed that night. “It's required for sisterhood mentors,” I explained.

“No.” His voice was low, almost gentle. “The DOA. She was wearing a Delta Beta T-­shirt.”

Because I was a
Law & Order
megafan, I understood the acronym and who Ty was talking about. I didn't understand the rest of it until he showed me another picture on his digital camera, this one from farther away—­showing that the DOA was indeed wearing a sky-­blue T-­shirt imprinted with hot-­pink Greek letters: delta and beta.

And I still had no idea who she was.

“We'll have to ask the members then—­”

“No!” I think I might have stomped my foot. These girls were young, innocent, and identifying dead bodies was traumatizing. Not only that, but they had a lot of twinkle lights to hang.

As usual, Ty Hatfield would not be moved by my arguments for the best interest of the Delta Beta sisterhood.

“I'll give them a day or two,” he relented. “But if we can't ID her, we're going to need to bring some ­people in.”

I nodded and thanked him for understanding. A day or two wasn't much, but during rush, it was a lifetime.

 

Chapter Three

A
N
EIGHT O'CLOCK
meeting on a Saturday is just inhumane—­not only terribly unrealistic but a travesty of justice. I hurried into the Panhellenic offices of the Commons, the student center, on the Sutton College campus to find that of the eleven ­people invited to attend the meeting, ten ­people were already in the room.

Eight o'clock.
A.M.
, ­people. Who does that?

Still, I lifted my chin, squared my shoulders, and smiled brightly at the other four Sutton College sorority chapter advisors, the new campus Panhellenic advisor, and the five women of the Sutton College Panhellenic Rush Council. “Long line at the coffee shop,” I said by way of explanation, holding up my huge coffee tumbler emblazoned with the Delta Beta letters. (When you get a dozen extra-­large triple-­shot lattes a week, it's much kinder to the environment to use a personal cup.)

“Thank you for joining us, Margot. We were worried something had happened . . .” Louella Jackson's voice trailed off, leaving a thread of innuendo hanging in the air. I didn't bite. I knew what they wanted, and they weren't getting it from me. Not yet, anyway.

“Just needed coffee!” I said with a chipper air that I wasn't feeling yet. “You know how it is during work week.”

Despite their lust for gossip, the other ten sorority women nodded in agreement. We might have been competing, but we could still commiserate. Work week required coffee. Lots of it.

“Let's get started then. We have a lot to go over,” said the new Panhellenic advisor, Maya Rodman. She had been hired over the winter break, and no one knew much about her yet besides the basics: She had been a Kappa at Tulane, majored in international studies followed by a master's in educational counseling, and moved to New York. Also that she had a four-­year-­old daughter and a suspicious scar on her right eyebrow that some gossips believed was the remnant of an unwise piercing. I wasn't one to judge her for that, of course, but let's just say there are some very traditional sorority women at Sutton College, and the phrase “unfit to be a role model” might have been whispered over a glass of Chardonnay at the annual prerush advisor girls' night out.

Maya went over an agenda, and I had to admit, I was very impressed with her ability to read, let alone prepare an agenda, at this hour of the day. I silently sipped my coffee, waiting for the caffeine to do its heavenly magic. As the ladies droned on about quotas and late registrations, I slowly became more alert. There were a whole bunch of new rules this year about rush, and some of the other advisors were not happy with it. For my part, it didn't matter—­the Debs were going to follow the rules, no matter what, or die trying. My million-­item task list started zooming through my brain, and I itched to pick up a pen and make notes. But to do so here would be a bad idea.

Sorority rush is the single most cutthroat, competitive event in the world today. When sorority women heard about Tonya Harding's arranging Nancy Kerrigan's knee injury with a lead pipe, they laughed and called her an amateur. Dance moms? They've got nothing on sorority moms, angling for their precious legacies to secure a bid. When Hillary Clinton talks about right-­wing conspiracy, sorority women roll their eyes. They invented vast conspiracies to take down the powerful, the bold, and the beautiful. A sorority woman during rush is more vicious than a Taylor Swift breakup song, and just as pretty in red lipstick.

So me, writing down my rush to-­do list here in a roomful of my competition? Well, it would just be admitting weakness—­and inviting them to accidentally spill my coffee in my lap so they could get a look at my notes. And I was not willing to sacrifice my coffee. Not today.

Finally, Maya gave the floor over to the Rush Council. I knew most of them from my days as a collegiate member at Sutton College. Fifty years ago, there had been some sort of scandal during rush involving the not-­at-­all-­impartial Panhellenic counselor giving the Epsilon Chis an extra five hundred dollars in their budget to fly the Beach Boys in for bid day. Since then, Sutton College rush has been presided over by a council of five women, an alumna of each of the houses. They were like the United Nations Security Council except way more powerful.

The five elderly women sat at a long table in front like oracles from on high, their wisdom and experience still clear in their eyes, in fine lines that, at eighty, even a great dermatologist couldn't erase. We defer to their every ruling, seek their approval in all things, and avoid their wrath like a chipped manicure. Behind their backs, we call them the Mafia because they rule sorority rush like Tony Soprano ruled trash pickup in the Garden State. We can do nothing without their say-­so.

Patty Huntington, the Epsilon Chi member of the cabal, spoke first like a kindly grandmother. “Is everyone ready for Monday?”

The room's response was unanimous. We nodded and smiled with the appropriate blend of polite enthusiasm.

Clara-­Jane Booth raised an eyebrow toward the Beta Gam chapter advisor. “We've been hearing some chatter about some interesting behavior.”

Lucy, the Beta Gam advisor, ducked her head. Wuss. She should just own the fact that her chapter went out on the town last night. We all saw the shots on Instagram.

“I don't think anyone has to remind you of the standards that we expect from all the chapters here at Sutton,” said Louella Jackson, the Delta Beta representative. She avoided looking my way. We have a complicated relationship going back to my sophomore year, because of my strong stand on free speech—­specifically the chapter's right to include a Black Eyed Peas song in a rush skit. Suffice it say, she is not the biggest Fergie Ferg fan.

The four other members of the Mafia shook their heads gravely, then, as if on cue, they all did what Louella wouldn't. They stared pointedly at my end of the table.

This wasn't going to be good.

Alexandria Von Douton sniffed conspicuously. She hadn't changed at all in the past ten years, thanks to regular trips to a spa in the Swiss Alps, religious application of platinum dye to her classic French twist, and her (rumored) string of young Latin dance tutors. That was a Tri Mu for you. “With all the attention placed on Sutton College Panhellenic this year, we must all be doing our utmost to ensure everyone does her part to ensure that the media has no more fodder for its reprehensible programming. The administration is also going to be keeping a close eye on further misconduct. With that in mind, we will have a zero-­tolerance policy on any and all rush infractions.”

I tried to keep my face blank, as if I didn't know she was obliquely referring to my chapter and Nick Holden's special report. I firmly believe in the wise adage of, if you can't say anything true, don't say anything at all. My brief time in the Sutton city jail drove that message home.

The Tri Mu advisor, however, couldn't resist the chance to pile on.

“I so agree with everything you've all said.” Sarah smiled at the Mafia.
Kiss ass
.
“I want you to know that the Tri Mu chapter is absolutely, one hundred percent committed to having a classy, coordinated and, most importantly, crime-­free rush.”

Oh, Sarah McLane and I were going to have it out one of these days. I could see that trashy Tri Mu setting me up, but I would not—­could not—­let her goad me to public action. Private retaliation was another story.

Sarah continued, “Which is why we've arranged for Sheila DeGrasse to assist our chapter with rush this year.”

My stomach dropped. No. It couldn't be.

The other advisors were having similar reactions given their sudden sharp gasps and nervous shifting in their seats. Even the Mafia looked discomfited at this bombshell dropping right in the middle of their meeting. Well, all of them except for Alexandria Von Douton. She had probably arranged the whole darn thing.

“Sheila DeGrasse?” Maya repeated the question in a slightly confused way, bless her heart. “Isn't she a rush consultant?”

“Yes,” Lucy replied, looking mournful.

“She's very good at what she does.” Sarah looked triumphant, and why not? She had Sheila DeGrasse on the Tri Mu side.

“She's legendary,” Alexandria assured the room, as if we all (minus poor, clueless Maya) didn't know the international reputation of Sheila DeGrasse. She was the rush consultant with a flawless record for not only hitting quota with each pledge class but also filling each with girls as beautiful, rich, and mercenary as an entire clan of Kardashians.

“Thank you for the update,” said Sue Barton, the Lambda leg of the Mafia, seemingly anxious to move on from the discussion of how Tri Mu had rush in the bag. “Anyone else have something they'd like to talk about?”

Sarah raised her hand. Hadn't she done enough? “I'd like to ask Margot about the presence of emergency vehicles at the Delta Beta house last night.”

It was a fair question, but I resolved right then and there that Sheila DeGrasse or not, Sarah McLane and the rest of her Tri Mus were going down.