The Sixes

14

SOMEHOW SHE HAD to entice Alexis to meet her. It would be easier to elicit information face-to-face, and the girl would probably be less likely to bolt again if they made a personal connection.

“Can we spend a few minutes together, Alexis?” Phoebe asked gently. She felt as if she was tiptoeing toward a tiny bird, praying it wouldn’t fly off. “I think you’ll feel more comfortable talking face-to-face.”

The girl sighed, obviously undecided. Phoebe stayed silent, fearful of tipping things the wrong way.

“Are you still here—inside the mall?” Alexis asked finally.

“I’m just outside, in the parking lot,” Phoebe said.

Another sigh, this one practically a groan.

“I’ll meet you, but not in here,” Alexis said begrudgingly. “There’s this big dumpster—right behind Friendly’s. I’ll meet you there. And I only have ten minutes. That’s all.”

Phoebe had no clue where the Friendly’s was, and she didn’t want to waste precious time running inside to check the map again. She squinted at the back of the huge mall in the bright autumn sunlight. There were hulking dumpsters in both directions—every store had one. She won’t wait if I’m late, Phoebe thought anxiously. As she hurried back toward the mall, she asked a woman struggling with two toddlers and sagging plastic bags for directions to Friendly’s. “Up there,” the woman said, flinging her head to the right. Phoebe broke into a jog and zigzagged through endless rows of parked cars, making her way around the perimeter of the mall. Finally she spotted the back of Friendly’s. Alexis was already there, standing by a green dumpster with her arms wrapped tightly around her and shifting her weight back and forth from one foot to the other.

“Thank you for doing this, Alexis,” Phoebe said when she reached the girl, nearly out of breath. She thought briefly of touching Alexis’s arm, just to show support, but quickly scratched the idea. Alexis looked like the slightest touch would make her head blow off.

“Are you sure they’ll never find out?” Alexis said. She shot a frantic look to the left and then to the right, scanning the parking lot as if the Sixes might be lurking behind one of the SUVs.

“They won’t,” Phoebe said. “The only person who knows I’m here is the president of the school. And she’s going to be very grateful for your help.”

“It’s what you said—about not letting them hurt anyone else. I—I just don’t want that to happen.”

“I know. So help me understand. What are the Sixes all about?”

Alexis snorted in disgust. “They’re supposed to be about female power. About being fierce and fearless and ruling the world—and getting what you want out of life. It’s always the same type of girl who gets tapped. Pretty and smart. And a jock. Always a jock.”

“How big is the group—and what do they do, exactly?”

“There’re about forty members,” Alexis said. “They’re supposed to help each other out—have each other’s backs. You exchange stuff about classes, about guys. And then when you leave school, they help you out, too.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m not sure. They set you up somehow. With contacts, stuff like that, I guess.”

“Is Blair Usher the leader?”

Alexis flinched at the sound of the name.

“I think so. I mean, she was the one who always ran the meetings. But sometimes—I don’t know . . . It felt like she was checking in with another person.”

“You said something about circles. You mean, you’d put six chairs or something in a circle?”

“What?” Alexis said, her confusion tinged with irritation. She was getting riled up just talking about the Sixes, and her patience seemed as fragile as an eggshell. “No, not actual circles. Circles of membership. To get to the inner circle, you have to work your way through these six freaking circles.”

“Is that where the name of the group comes from?”

“Yes—and the fact that there were six girls who started it.”

“Are the circles like tests, then?” Phoebe said.

“Yes,” Alexis said. She began to twist and writhe her neck, as if she were struggling to free it from her body. “The first circle is ‘Proclaim.’ You have to leave the number six someplace—like on a building—to declare your allegiance. That one’s easy, like a sorority prank.”

“And then?” Phoebe asked.

“The next is ‘Reveal.’ You have to tell something totally private about yourself—a secret that you’ve never shared with anyone.” Alexis held Phoebe’s eyes for a moment, looking stricken. “Something not good.”

“So it’s a way for you to show your loyalty. Does each circle become harder?”

“Yes,” she said, spitting out the word. “And—and when I found out about the third one, I didn’t want to do it. But you don’t have a choice. They make you think there’s no going back.”

“So what was it, the third circle?”

“ ‘Dominate.’ You fuck somebody up who is a jerk—another student. Somebody who hogs all the talking time in class or is a total showoff or is just a slut. You’re supposed to send a nasty e-mail blast about them or delete their term paper from their laptop or steal their cell phone. Blair kept saying they deserve it.”

“The school didn’t realize this sort of thing was going on?”

“I don’t know. Some stuff, like the term papers, probably just looks like mistakes. I swear I didn’t want to do it. But when you start to protest, they make these little threats. Kind of funny at first with a wink, wink, but then you remember—” Her voice had become almost hoarse. “They know your deepest secret now.”

“So they forced you to do the next one, too—the fourth circle?”

“I—I almost did,” she said. Her lower lip began to tremble. “But then I changed my mind. I couldn’t. You have to sleep with a guy. Some total loser, and then completely dump him and do an unsigned post about him. It’s called the ‘Bewitch’ circle. It’s supposed to teach you how to use power and put guys in their place. But the kid they picked for me, he—I heard he had tried to kill himself in high school, and I just couldn’t do it. What if that had made him try again?”

Alexis started to cry a little, tears slowly streaming down her rough, reddened cheeks.

Was that what the painted doors had been about? Phoebe wondered. She was remembering what Hutch said about the dorky boys.

“Did they paint a check mark on these boys’ doors, do you know?”

Alexis widened her eyes, clearly surprised that Phoebe knew about this.

“Yes,” she said. “Though I don’t think those guys ever realized why the check was there. They just ended up humiliated and ashamed later and didn’t understand it was part of some master plot.”

“So this is when you broke away for good.”

“Blair said I couldn’t leave, that I’d be sorry if I did. But I told her I didn’t care, that if she did anything, I’d let the administration know about the Sixes. And then she said that there’d be payback, that I’d regret it for the rest of my life.”

Alexis began to sob, her chest heaving. Phoebe found herself swept back, as if caught in a flash flood, to her awful year in boarding school. At night she had sobbed into her pillow, hoping Glenda wouldn’t hear. Now she bit down hard on her lower lip, forcing herself back to the present.

“And was there payback, Alexis?” she asked softly.

“Yes,” Alexis said. “You know what those bitches did? The summer before junior year I’d made this—this stupid sex tape with a boy I’d met. That was the secret I shared. They made me show it to them. And once I left the Sixes for good, Blair sent it to this new boy, Chris, I was dating at Lyle. I loved him, and the minute he saw it, he broke up with me. And then they said that if I talked to anyone in the administration, they would send it to my parents and the whole school. If the Sixes find out I’m going to the University of Maryland, they’ll send it to everyone there.”

“All to keep you from telling?”

“Not just that—for revenge,” Alexis exclaimed. “In a way Blair wants girls to betray her. That way she can have a vendetta against them. One of her greatest pleasures is getting back at someone.”

“Did she—”

“Look, I have to go back inside,” Alexis said. “I don’t know how I’m even going to work now. I’m all freaked out.” Using her fingers, she tried to wipe away the mascara smudge marks that her tears had caused.

“But wait,” Phoebe said, nearly pleading. There was still so much she needed to know. She fished in her purse for a clean tissue and handed it to Alexis. “What about the last two circles? Do you know what they are?”

“No. And I don’t want to know either.” She hitched the drooping strap of her handbag higher on her shoulder. She was getting ready to fly.

“Just one more question,” Phoebe pleaded. “What about Lily—was she in the Sixes?”

“Yes. She joined in the spring. I tried to say something to her because I’d started to see what monsters they were. But her boyfriend had just dumped her, and she seemed so bummed. She was looking for something, something to belong to.”

“Do you think she could have tried to leave this fall?”

“I don’t know,” Alexis said numbly.

“Can you tell me the names of some of the members? That would help a lot.”

Alexis shook her head back and forth vehemently.

“No, I can’t. They’ll know it came from me. And they’ll punish me again.”

“Please—”

“I said no. I just can’t.”

Before Phoebe could say another word, Alexis had turned and begun to race along the outside of the mall, headed toward an entrance.

Watching her go, Phoebe finally exhaled. She felt drained from the conversation. She was so distracted it took her a while to find her car, but finally she spotted it. She unlocked the door and nearly threw herself inside. As she leaned against the seat, she realized that despite how the cool temperature was, her back felt damp with sweat.

It was past lunchtime, but Phoebe had no desire to eat. Once she had maneuvered her way back onto I-83, she dug her phone from her purse and called Glenda. According to her assistant, Glenda was in a meeting and couldn’t be disturbed. Phoebe asked her to deliver the message that she had information worth sharing and could be reached on her cell phone.

Phoebe drove as if on autopilot, her mind running back and forth over what she’d learned from Alexis. After the rats in her freezer, she’d had no doubt that the Sixes existed and that they were nasty as hell, and her conversation with Alexis had backed that up. But she needed to find out what the last two circles involved before deciding if they could actually be behind Lily’s death. That would tell her just how far the girls were willing to go to get their way—or to enact the kind of vendettas that Blair seemed to relish.

Thirty minutes later, after pulling off the highway to fill her gas tank, Phoebe checked her e-mail. Glenda had written, saying that she was anxious to hear Phoebe’s news, but she was jam-packed for the rest of the day and evening. Therefore she’d arranged for Stockton to meet Phoebe in his office at 6:30 and receive the update.

Damn, Phoebe thought. It made sense for Glenda to delegate the meeting to Stockton—that way he could jump-start any investigation that needed to be done—but she’d promised Alexis that only she and Glenda would know about their meeting. Besides, Phoebe just didn’t like Stockton, and she hated having to turn over what she’d learned to him.

Phoebe scanned down her other unopened e-mails. With a start she saw that there was one from her agent, Miranda, with “Priority” in the subject line. Ever since last spring anything urgent-looking from her agent had flooded her with dread. As it turned out, Miranda had seen Tobias’s mention of her in the Post and wanted to be sure Phoebe was aware of it. “You need to get out of this guy’s line of sight,” she wrote. “He’s a real bastard.”

Duh, Phoebe thought. She briefly considered calling Miranda and filling her in, but she knew her agent would ask if Phoebe had an idea for her next book yet. And that was one discussion she wanted to avoid.

She kept scrolling and found that there was also the promised e-mail from Glenda’s assistant about Wesley Hines. Though the college had no cell phone number or e-mail address for Wesley, it did have a current home address, and to Phoebe’s surprise, it was in Doring. That was a town just a few miles from Lyle. As she stared at the address, she wondered if Hines had grown up in Doring, gone to Lyle because it was close, and resettled temporarily with his parents as tons of kids seemed to be doing these days.

I need to talk to him, she thought. As soon as possible. Hutch had assumed Hines had fallen into the Winamac drunk, but that might not be the case. If there was a serial killer in the area, as Stockton believed, Hines might have been a victim—one who miraculously survived. She wondered suddenly if the Sixes could have been involved in the incident. Was Hines the kind of dorky boy they targeted?

She glanced at her watch. She’d been making decent time on the road, and that meant she’d definitely be back in Lyle before six—which left just enough time for her to swing by Hines’s home before her meeting with Stockton. If Hines had a nine-to-five job, she might catch him as he was arriving home from work. She punched his address into the GPS and fired up the car.

The rest of the drive was uneventful, and she pulled into Doring a few minutes earlier than expected. She’d assumed that Wesley Hines was still bunking down at his parents’ place, so she was surprised when the GPS led her to a subdivision of attached gray town houses—row after endless row of them, and with new ones under construction at the end. These were the kind of units you lived in when you downsized after retirement or landed yourself a decent job after college. Hines was likely living here alone.

As she drove down the road that wound through the town-house “village,” scanning the numbers on each house, Phoebe realized that Hines’s place—2118—was going to be near the end of the row, and she grabbed an available parking place there.

Hines’s house was indeed the very last in the row. It abutted a cluster of oak trees, which surprisingly the bulldozers had left standing. As Phoebe headed down the sidewalk in that direction, she discovered that she wasn’t in luck. The windows of 2118 were dark, suggesting that no one was home. But then she spotted a young guy emerging from around the far side, probably coming from a parking lot behind the house. He crossed the yard and walked up the three steps of the porch, where he opened the mailbox and dipped his hand inside.

That’s him, Phoebe thought, and then immediately she found herself thinking, No, it couldn’t be. The silhouette seemed too grown-up-looking to be just out of school—he was wearing a three-quarter-length dark green coat, pressed khaki pants, and loafers. But as she cut across the lawn to reach the house, she got a closer look and realized that he couldn’t be any older than twenty-three. He was a bit heavyset, clean-cut looking, with blond hair that spiked up a little in front.

Before Phoebe could call out to him, he caught her movements from the corner of his eye, and his head swiveled in her direction.

“Can I help you?” he asked, studying her. She suddenly realized that she had seen him someplace before. But where? she wondered. He didn’t go to Lyle anymore.

“Are you Wesley Hines?” Phoebe asked.

“Might be,” he replied coolly. “Depends on who’s asking.” Clearly the town-house village wasn’t one of those charming little neighborhoods where people just popped over to say hello to new neighbors.

“Sorry to bother you,” Phoebe said. “I teach at Lyle College. I’m on a committee looking into a few campus issues. I was hoping to talk to you for a few minutes. ”

“I doubt I’d have much to tell you,” he said, now friendly, the edge gone from his voice. “I only spent two years there—I transferred from a community college. And I wasn’t all that involved when I was there.”

“I know what you mean,” Phoebe said. “I wasn’t in the thick of things at college myself. But I’m interested in something that did directly involve you—that night you found yourself in the Winamac River.”

For a few seconds Wesley just stared at her. She sensed the wheels in his brain spinning rapidly.

“Why curious after all this time?” he asked finally.

“Because, as you may have heard, a girl was found dead in the river this past weekend. Her name was Lily Mack. And I’m wondering if there might be a connection somehow. That someone could be targeting students.”

Again the stare. Then Wesley exhaled loudly.

“Wow,” he said. “I’ve waited a whole year for someone to take me seriously about that night. I guess better late than never.”

Yes, Phoebe thought with excitement. Here we go.

“Would you have a few minutes to talk now?” she asked. “I really want to hear your version of the events.”

“Uh, sure,” Wesley said. “Why don’t you come in? Though you’ll have to excuse the mess. I didn’t have a chance to tidy up before I left this morning.”

As he dug through his coat pocket for his keys, Phoebe crossed the rest of the lawn and climbed up the stoop steps. Wesley unlocked the door, and Phoebe followed him into the house. For one brief moment, as they were both standing side by side in the darkened space, Phoebe wondered nervously if it was wise to walk into a strange man’s house this way, but as soon as Wesley flicked on the light, she relaxed.

The comment about tidying up seemed absurd in light of how the town house looked. The L-shaped living room was incredibly neat, except for the Eagles mug on the coffee table. The place was pleasantly fixed up, too, with a leather sofa and matching chair.

“What a nice spot you’ve got,” Phoebe said. “I take it you found gainful employment, unlike other recent college grads.”

“I’m pretty lucky,” Wesley said, slipping off his coat and dropping it over a wooden coat peg behind the door. He was thinner than she’d realized outside—his coat had added bulk, and his head, which was disproportionately large for his body, had helped foster the illusion. He was wearing a gray crewneck sweater that matched his eyes, and underneath, a crisp white button-down shirt. Not exactly a dork, but neither what any girl would describe as a hottie. “My dad owns a feed company in the area, and I’m managing it right now. Don’t get me wrong, though. I work my butt off.”

“Feed company?” she asked.

“We make feed for livestock—cattle, pigs, chickens. Of course, with all the farms around here dying off, it isn’t exactly a booming business, but I’ve added a lawn care department, which is going gangbusters. In fact, I’m going to be doing business with the college. I just signed a deal with them.”

Suddenly she realized where she’d seen him. He had been one of the two guys standing next to her in the crowd in front of Lily’s dorm that night.

“That’s terrific. Though it sounds like you had a tough time convincing people from the school to take you seriously last year.” She wanted to maneuver back to why she was here.

“Yup,” Wesley said, easing past the coffee table to sit on the couch. He let his legs fall apart and rested a hand on each knee. “I suppose I can’t totally blame them, though. They figured I’d been drunk, your typical college boy, but it was still—if you’ll excuse the expression—frustrating as hell.”

“Would you mind if I took notes?” Phoebe asked, slipping a pen and pad from her purse.

Wesley flipped over his palm in a gesture that said she could do as she pleased. “I’m just glad someone’s finally listening,” he said.

“So tell me what happened that night,” Phoebe said, her pen poised above an empty page. “You just came to and realized you’d ended up in the river somehow?”

“Not somehow,” Wesley said, narrowing his eyes. “Someone dumped me in there.”