The Sixes

22

“I DON’T UNDERSTAND,” Phoebe said, flustered. “What threat do I pose to the person now? They managed to hightail it away from the scene of the crime.”

“If Mr. Hutchinson discovered something incriminating in the notes and alerted the person, it may be the reason he was killed. And the person, having seen you at the cabin, may suspect you’d been talking to Mr. Hutchinson about what he’d found and are still putting two and two together.”

Phoebe swallowed hard. “Tell me. Were Lily and Trevor murdered?” she asked. “If you think Hutch’s death is connected to the drownings, then you must suspect those drownings weren’t accidental.”

“Ms. Hall, it seems you like playing Nancy Drew. You need to stop.”

His comment was almost as good as a yes.

“I’m not playing detective now,” Phoebe said. “I’m simply trying to assess what kind of risk I’m facing.”

“I think you need to take this seriously—that’s all I’ll say. If possible, stay with a friend for a few days just to play it safe.”

Fat chance, she thought. She basically knew only two people well in Lyle, and she wasn’t on wonderful terms with either of them at the moment.

“Good day, then,” Michelson said. “And just so you know, we’re not sharing your involvement last night with the press. It’s a detail we want to keep under wraps for now, partly for your own protection. And of course, we expect you to remain mum about what you know of the crime.”

With that, the two cops departed. Phoebe drank the last of the tepid tea. She could feel fear creeping up the sides of the bed around her. I can’t just lie here and come undone as I did at fifteen, she told herself. She had to try to figure out the revelation Hutch had experienced. As soon as she was home, she would scour the notes again. But first she had to spring herself from the hospital.

She reached for the call button, but before she pressed it, a man with a stethoscope draped around his neck entered the room and introduced himself as Dr. Awad, part of the same “team,” he said, as the doctor who’d treated her last night.

“You feeling a bit better today?” he asked. He was good-looking, Phoebe thought, and no more than thirty-five.

“Yes, much better,” Phoebe said. “I’d like to be able to go home today.”

“Well, let’s see how you’re doing first,” he said. “You did have a mild concussion, and we like to keep an eye on those. How’s the pain on a scale of one to ten?”

“No more than a one or a two,” she told him, which wasn’t exactly the case. But she thought she could manage if they sent her home with painkillers.

After scanning her chart, he listened to her heart, asking her to take quiet breaths. Next he drew a penlight from his pocket and examined her eyes with it. Then he explored her skull with his hands—searching for swelling, she assumed. When he was finished, he stepped back and studied her.

“Your elbow has just a hairline fracture, but you need to keep your arm in a sling for six weeks. As for your head, your tests were all good, and you seem fine now. Why don’t we let you enjoy our fabulous lunch here, and then send you home in the afternoon. It will give us a bit longer to monitor you.”

As soon as the doctor left, Phoebe felt suddenly ambushed again by fatigue, and within moments she was asleep. She had a dream, an endless, irritating one in which she was overheated and sweaty, stuck in a room where people were making too much noise. “Please transfer me,” she told someone who refused to listen to her. She woke to her good arm being lightly touched. Forcing open her eyes, she found Glenda hovering over her.

Phoebe grinned before memory caught up with her. She was still pissed at how Glenda had handled the fake blog incident; her friend had sandbagged her.

“Hey,” Phoebe said neutrally.

“Fee, tell me you’re okay,” Glenda said.

“Yeah,” she said, struggling. She pulled out one of the pillows from behind her and tucked it under her injured arm for support. “Unless you count the fact that I look like I fell face-first into a briar patch.”

“I feel totally to blame—I dragged you into this awful mess.”

“Neither of us could have predicted anything like this. When did you hear the news?”

“I heard about Hutch last night. At first I assumed he’d been killed during a break-in. This morning Craig told me that he’d heard from his contacts in the police department that someone else had been injured at the scene—a woman. But I had no clue it was you. I knew you’d talked to Hutch that one time, but I would never have guessed that you were out there on a Sunday night. And then, late this morning, Dr. Parr’s office called to make sure I knew you were in the hospital, and suddenly I put it together.”

“Sorry not to call you myself. My phone ran out of battery.”

“I figured you didn’t call because you were still livid with me.”

“Well, that too.”

Glenda slipped out of her dark red coat and folded it across the arm of the chair near the bed. She was wearing a long-sleeved black dress with a flattering high waist. On her neck was a pearl choker. Glenda’s motto had always been: If you look cool in a crisis, people’s first impression will be that you are. And yet Glenda’s face told another story. It was drawn, and she had deep circles under her eyes.

“Fee,” Glenda said, settling into the chair. “I never for a second thought you’d concocted that blog site or lifted that kid’s essay. You’ve got to believe me.”

“Then why not discuss it with me alone and hear my take? Why subject me to an inquisition in front of Stockton and Ball?”

“It was all coincidental. Tom had a number of urgent things to discuss with me, so I asked him over before our lunch. While we were talking, Ball burst into the house with the laptop. He’d told us about the blog seconds before you arrived. I should have demanded they leave and talked to you myself. I wasn’t in any way accusing you, though. I was just shocked by it, and concerned.”

Glenda was right, Phoebe thought—she should have asked the men to beat it before discussing the matter with Phoebe. But it wasn’t such a big infraction that Phoebe couldn’t let Glenda off the hook now.

“Have the tech people made any progress tracing it?” Phoebe said, her voice softening.

“Yes and no. They traced it to a fake e-mail account, but it’s a dead end from there.”

“Well, the New York Post has already posted an item. I need the school to release a statement saying I’m completely in the clear.”

“It’s already in the works. Now tell me about last night.”

Phoebe shared the story, as well as the conversations with Hutch that had led up to it. When she’d finished, Glenda slumped back in her chair and let out a ragged sigh. Phoebe could see her friend felt truly anguished by what she’d heard.

“I just have such an ache in my heart about Hutch,” Glenda said. “He was a good, good man—and it’s horrible that he died in such a brutal way.”

“This must be making things even worse on campus,” Phoebe said.

“You bet. Everything up to now seems like one big May Day festival. Two girls have actually withdrawn—forced to, I’m sure, by Mommy and Daddy.”

Glenda pinched her lips together. “I’ve got to ask you,” she said. “Do you think the Sixes killed Hutch?”

It was a question Phoebe had asked herself more than once as she lay in her hospital bed—both in her drugged stupor and later with a clearer head.

“My answer’s probably going to surprise you,” she said. “Because for days I’ve been trying to figure out if they were behind the drownings. And yet my gut tells me they didn’t do this.”

“Are you thinking it seems off-brand for them?” Glenda asked. “That they may run around in their Frye boots pushing students into rivers, but they wouldn’t beat an old man to death?”

“I’m not saying they didn’t do it. Wesley remembers Blair being at Cat Tails the night he went into the river, and it could be she drugged him as part of this pattern of targeting so-called loser guys. There’s a chance that as Hutch looked back into the river incidents, he saw something that clearly implicated the Sixes and he called Blair, tipping her off. She then showed up at his house—alone or with other members—and killed him.

“But there’s a flaw to that theory,” Phoebe continued. “I keep coming back to the fact that Hutch told me that a big clue lay in the notes about Wesley. And there was nothing in those notes about either Blair or, for that matter, any girls from Lyle College.”

“If the Sixes didn’t kill Hutch, who did? Are we back to the serial killer theory then?”

“Possibly,” Phoebe said somberly. “But with a twist.”

“Explain,” Glenda said.

“Stockton talked about drownings in the Midwest and north of here and how those deaths might be related to the ones in Lyle—that they could be all the work of a killer who moved around the country. But I’m thinking the killer may be someone local. In the notes, Hutch heavily underlined a part about this guy who tried to chat Wesley up at the jukebox. That could have sounded familiar to Hutch for some reason. He mentioned to me that he had pals on the police force here. Maybe in the last year he’d heard tales of a local predator that operates this way but hadn’t connected it back to Wesley until he reread the notes.”

“You’re scaring me big-time,” said Glenda.

“I know, it’s a sickening thought, but if Hutch figured it out, I might be able to too.”

“You? Phoebe, you cannot take this on, especially after what happened. Do you hear me?”

Phoebe reassured Glenda that she wouldn’t do anything that put herself in more danger. Before Glenda left, Phoebe asked that she track down the number for Hutch’s nephew in Allentown.

The next few hours were interminable. A patrol cop stopped by to return Phoebe’s house key, but that was her only visitor. After lunch an elderly woman rolled in a cart, offering the local newspaper, which Phoebe snatched eagerly to see the murder coverage. There was a small box on the front page about it, likely squeezed in at the last minute because the paper wouldn’t have had time for a longer report. As guaranteed by Michelson, there wasn’t a word about her.

Using her right hand only, she thumbed through the rest of the paper, just to give herself something to do. There were endless pictures of trick-or-treaters—kids dressed as Wolverine and Bat Girl and Harry Potter, and babies posing as strawberries, pea pods, and bumblebees. Someone had been killed on Halloween after all, Phoebe thought ruefully. Against her will, her mind found its way back to the sight of Hutch lying dead on the floor. If the killer hadn’t come by car, how had he or she gotten there? she wondered. Hutch’s cabin was too far out of the way for someone to have walked the entire distance. The killer must have parked somewhere and then reached the cabin by foot through the woods. Phoebe decided that as soon as she could, she would drive along the road and see if she could locate the spot—it might offer insight into who the person was. Something seemed to swim in front of her brain about this, but as she reached out for it, it slipped away.

Finally she was cleared to go home, and she alerted Glenda, who had offered to come back to pick her up. A nurse helped her dress, stretching the sweater carefully over her elbow, replacing the sling, and then draping her ruined peacoat over her shoulders. She was given an envelope of Tylenol with codeine and instructions on caring for her injured arm. The idea of going home filled her with dread. She thought of Duncan. She wondered if he had heard she was in the hospital.

It was cold and bleak outside, the sky once again covered with sooty smudge marks. But Glenda was back in kick-ass mode, a woman on a mission.

“By the way,” Glenda said, as she navigated their way out of the parking lot. “Stockton was asking about you earlier today. He heard from Cameron Parr that you’d had an accident, and he was trying to suss out the facts. I told him you’d been injured but that I didn’t know any details yet.”

“Is he using Hutch’s death to keep fueling the flames of panic?”

“Don’t know. But Madeline told me that at one of their strategy meetings, he made a comment about how the college should have put more pressure on the police when Trevor Harris disappeared. By the college, he means me. It’s pretty clear he’s finding little ways to undermine me.”

“You know, I’d almost forgotten,” Phoebe said. “Saturday night I stopped in at Cat Tails to see it for myself, and I found Stockton there. Claimed he was scoping the place out because it was tied to all the drownings.”

“Or he was looking for a student to hook up with.”

“What do you mean?” Phoebe asked.

“When I first started at Lyle, I tried but couldn’t get a bead on him—like why he’d leave a really prominent institution to come here. About six months ago, an old pal of mine started working at the college Stockton left, and so in light of his behavior lately, I called her the other day to see if she could learn anything on the down-low. I heard back yesterday. Apparently Stockton was rumored to have had flings with female students. It’s not illegal for a professor to have an affair with a student, but it can be dicey, and most colleges frown on it, particularly if it’s a pattern. And a dean of students is technically in charge of all the students, so it’s even more complicated. Apparently he tried it one too many times at the last place, and they eased him out.”

“Any hint he’s done it here?” said.

“None. He’s either wised up or has learned to be more discreet. But regardless, it backs up my instinct that he’s not to be totally trusted.” She paused as she switched car lanes. “By the way, you’re bunking down at the presidential palace tonight. We can swing by your place first to get a change of clothes and whatever else you need.”

Part of Phoebe longed to be tucked away safely in that yellow guest room tonight, but she knew she had to take a pass.

“I really appreciate it, G, but like I said before, I’d only be putting off the inevitable.”

“I’m not taking no for an answer.”

“There’s another reason why it’s probably best that I don’t.” She told Glenda about Mark’s comments to her in the hall.

“He’s got a lot of nerve,” Glenda snapped. Phoebe had never seen her speak of her husband with such bite.

“What’s happening on that front?” Phoebe asked.

“It’s just more of that secretive thing, and it’s started to work my last nerve. This past weekend I found a receipt for a restaurant that he hadn’t mentioned eating at. He claims he was with a client, but he seemed flustered when I asked him about it.”

“Are you thinking he’s having an affair?”

“I came right out and asked him, and he told me I was being paranoid. It’s funny. He’s the one guilty of weird behavior, but I’m the one who’s being made to look crazy.”

Though she’d never been tight with Mark, Phoebe hated the idea of Glenda’s marriage possibly unraveling. Especially now, in the middle of all this other mess.

“What about trying some marriage counseling?”

“Yeah, I’ve thought about that. But I can’t do it right this moment. I need to focus on keeping the damn college together.”

Driving down Hunter Street, Phoebe saw long strands of toilet paper dripping eerily from the tree branches. They were from last night, she realized, the handiwork of some devilish trick-or-treaters, and yet to her they seemed like a warning. Go away. This is not a place for you anymore. I don’t want to stay on this street tonight, she thought, but where the hell can I go?

As they pulled up in front of her house, Phoebe spotted her car in the driveway and she grabbed the keys from inside, where the police had left them for her, before entering the house with Glenda. The cops had definitely checked out the scene inside—there were sooty marks on the kitchen counter where they’d taken fingerprints, and the spoons were gone. Slowly Phoebe eased open the dishwasher door and saw to her relief that they’d run the wash cycle. As Glenda waited, she did a search of the other rooms, and then the two hugged good-bye.

Once Glenda had left, Phoebe charged her phone and called the number for Hutch’s nephew, which Glenda had provided. Reaching only voice mail, she left a message offering her condolences and saying she wanted very much to talk to him.

Next she listened to a string of voice-mail messages on her own phone. Craig Ball had made contact, asking that she debrief him about Hutch’s murder. Though Michelson had said they were keeping her involvement under wraps, Ball had managed to find out about it—probably from contacts he had in the police department.

There was also a follow-up call from her agent, as well as the Lyle College tech guy, wanting to discuss the fake blog. Dr. Parr had tried Phoebe twice to see how she was doing, as had two other people in the English department, including Jan. And to her surprise, two of her students had called just to tell her they were thinking of her. She was surprised at how good the calls from them made her feel.

Not a peep, though, from Duncan. Surely by now he would have heard she’d been injured, and his failure to contact her stung. It also told her everything she needed to know. He’d been attracted to her initially, she was sure of it, and yet something had happened to dampen his ardor—perhaps he disliked her playing detective as much as Michelson did. She doubted she’d ever find out the real answer.

She was anxious to go through Hutch’s notes again, but she had also begun to feel slightly lightheaded, probably from having eaten so little. She rooted around the fridge for dinner, trying to find something that wouldn’t involve chopping, and finally plucked out two eggs to scramble. She could tell that having one arm in a sling was going to be a bitch to deal with.

It was nearly dark out, and she felt her unease starting to grow. The house seemed oppressively silent. I need music, she thought. She popped in a Neko Case CD and turned the volume up high.

The eggs turned out not to be as easy to prepare as she’d counted on, but she managed to beat them and pour them into a frying pan. While they cooked, she tried to focus on the music, but she could feel panic circling her. What if the killer was staking out her house right now? Tomorrow, she would investigate getting a security system installed. She didn’t care what the hell it cost.

She flipped off the gas, and at the same time a song ended. There was utter silence. And then a sound. A footstep. Her whole body froze. Someone was walking in her living room.