All The Pretty Dead Girls (9 page)

Ginny sipped her coffee. Gregory was one miserable son of a bitch.

Oh, I’ll come to your office tomorrow, but you’d better be prepared to fire me, because you’re getting it with both barrels. No one interferes with my curriculum—especially not someone who thinks Joyce Davenport is a fine example for my students.

All three people in the dining room of the Yellow Bird turned their heads when the bell over the door rang once again and Bonnie Warner stepped inside.

Bonnie was bone tired. She needed a quick cup of joe to take with her, to propel her the last couple of miles back to Wilbourne. She knew the outside gates to the college had already been locked, but that didn’t concern her. It was the eleven o’clock lockdown of Bentley Hall that was more problematic. Once Bentley was locked down for the night, no one was getting in—or out.

“Coffee, please, to go,” Bonnie said, standing at the corner.

Marjorie nodded, and turned to fill the order.

Bonnie’s eyes made contact with the young man seated near her on a stool. She nodded at him.

“You got to Wilbourne?” the man asked.

“Yes,” Bonnie told him.

“Out kind of late,” he said.

She shrugged. “I have a job in town.”

He nodded, returning to the last of the french fries on his plate.

All Bonnie needed was to chug down the coffee and hop back on her bike and she’d be back at the college in practically no time at all. She glanced at her watch. She still had plenty of time, but she knew tonight she was pushing her luck. But Amy had actually been making progress tonight—Bonnie couldn’t just take off in the middle of explaining why
x
times
y
equaled
z
. Tutoring algebra was a delicate assignment. When the kid’s brain was finally showing some signs of comprehension, Bonnie needed to stick with it and make sure all the points were made.

“Here you go, honey,” Marjorie said, handing her the coffee in a large Styrofoam cup with a secure lid.

“Thanks,” Bonnie said, paying her.

That’s when her eyes lit on the woman in the booth, who was also watching her. Shit! It was Dr. Marshall.

She couldn’t bolt. Dr. Marshall had seen her.

Bonnie took a long breath, then walked over to where Dr. Marshall was sitting.

“Hello, Bonnie,” the older woman said.

Bonnie decided simply to throw herself on Dr. Marshall’s mercy. She liked Dr. Marshall. She had a reputation for being fair. She wasn’t whacked out on authority like so many of the other professors at Wilbourne.

“Dr. Marshall, please don’t tell the dean you saw me,” Bonnie pleaded.

The professor smiled. “Bonnie, you know only upper-classmen are allowed to be off campus at this hour.”

“I know. But I have a job.”

“A job?” Dr. Marshall looked perplexed. “Again, only upper-classmen can hold off-campus jobs.”

“I know, I know. But I’m not a rich girl like so many of the other kids, Dr. Marshall. Somehow I’ve got to find a way to pay for books for the new school year.”

Dr. Marshall looked at her kindly. “What kind of job do you have?”

“I tutor a seventh-grader. The kid’s having major troubles with algebra. I saw the ad her mother placed in a local paper and so I called, and now I ride back my bike into town to see her. Her mother is so grateful, and the kid’s finally making progress.”

“I see. So you’ve been away from campus all evening?”

Bonnie nodded. “I missed the welcome ceremony.”

Dr. Marshall smiled wryly. “Well, count yourself lucky on that score.” Her smile turned warmer. “But you’ll be reprimanded for missing it. They’ll see you didn’t sign in…”

“Oh, no, Tish Lewis said she’d sign me in.”

“I did
not
hear that.”

“I’m sorry, Dr. Marshall, but I need the job…”

“Okay, Bonnie, I won’t say anything. But please—try to arrange your visits to the girl during daytime hours, so you won’t risk getting caught again.”

“Oh, thank you, Dr. Marshall.”

The older woman thought of something. “But the outside gates are locked. I’ll need to give you a lift and—”

“No, no, it’s fine. One of the seniors gave me the code for the gate.”

Dr. Marshall sighed. “Do
not
tell me her name. Then I’d be covering up for
three
wayward students.”

“Oh, thank you so much, Dr. Marshall. You’re great!”

“Just please rearrange your tutoring schedule, okay?”

Bonnie nodded. She waved good-bye to Dr. Marshall and turned to head back out into the night. As she neared the door, the young man at the counter called over to her.

“Hey, do you need a ride back to the college? It’s pretty dark out there.”

Marjorie was leaning over the counter next to him. “It’s okay, honey. He’s a cop. You can trust him.”

Bonnie smiled. The man had a kind face.

“Thanks anyway,” she said. “I have my bike.”

“Well,” the young cop said, “be careful.”

“I grew up Brooklyn,” Bonnie told him. “Believe me, I know how to take care of myself. Lebanon is like paradise compared to the streets I grew up on.”

The bell jingled again as she left the Bird.

It wasn’t that Bonnie really enjoyed tutoring Amy. The girl was resistant and resentful. Only tonight had she shown any progress. All summer Bonnie had worked with her, trying to get her ready for the fall term. While the other girls on campus had all gone home for the summer, partying in the Hamptons or taking trips to Europe, Bonnie had stayed here, working in the registrar’s office on campus and tutoring Amy in the afternoons. It was really quite baffling. Amy and her older sisters called Bonnie a “rich girl” from Wilbourne—a “Wilbournian” according to townie lingo—while Bonnie’s classmates looked down on her for having to work off campus.

Can’t win for losing,
Bonnie thought as she biked through the town square.
Halfway there.

She was wearing a pair of shorts and a T-shirt; a baseball cap was pulled down low over her head. She glanced again at her watch. Okay, now she was getting close. It was ten-thirty-five. Twenty-five minutes before the doors of Bentley were sealed shut until seven the next morning. In the event of a fire, they automatically unlocked, but nothing short of a conflagration would get them to open up otherwise.

She pushed on, even though now her legs were starting to burn and her breath was coming in gasps. Six miles into town was a long way on a bicycle. Amy lived out in what was known as “the Banks,” a poorer part of town that reminded Bonnie of her own Brooklyn neighborhood—minus all the trees, of course. She tried to explain to the kid that she wasn’t rich like most Wilbourne girls, that she had grown up in a third-floor apartment over a Greek restaurant. Bonnie wished she could quit the job, but she needed the money. Her parents were sure not sending her any. In any event, the job could only last a few more months at most. There was no way Bonnie could pedal her bike all this way once the weather turned cold.

At last, she passed through the center of town and could see the gates of the school looming in the near distance. Bonnie’s legs ached, and she slowed down.
Almost ten minutes to spare,
she thought, sliding off the seat and taking deep breaths to try to slow her heart rate down a bit. She’d walk the bike through the gate after punching in the code. Then she could slip through the shadows and scramble into Bentley just in time.

I’m going to take a long hot shower and wash my hair, then just relax. My first class isn’t until eleven tomorrow, so I can sleep in, I might even skip breakfast and take my time getting ready. Maybe Tish has something nice she can let me borrow for the first day of class.

She was walking her bike alongside the tall red brick wall that surrounded the school. She was almost at the gate.

And then she heard something off to the side of the road.

The road was dark. The sky was covered with clouds, blotting out the moon and the stars. Across from the campus stretched deep woods. The noise came again. An animal maybe. Something crunching through the leaves.

Bonnie felt a flicker of fear in her chest, but dismissed it.
Right, Bonnie
, she scolded herself.
Like it’s a bear. Probably a squirrel.

She was no more than ten feet from the front gate. She heard the noise again.

Now, don’t scare yourself, there’s nothing out there—

That’s when she was suddenly bathed in a red light.

“What the heck?”

Great. Just great. Apparently I’ve been caught in a new security system to catch girls who left campus after curfew.

Except the light didn’t seem to come from anywhere. It seemed, rather, just to
be
: a strange, eerie red glow.

Bonnie turned, ready with her excuses.

But what she saw left the words frozen in her throat.

She tried to scream, but couldn’t.

She dropped her bike. It clattered on the road beside her.

Bonnie ran, heading for the gates of the college as fast as her tired legs could move. She heard the steps coming behind her, crashing through the underbrush on the side of the road, and then directly on her heels.

This time she found she was able to scream.

Sue didn’t sleep well. It wasn’t that the bed was uncomfortable, or even that she was in a new and different place for the first time in her life. It was the dreams. They had started almost from the first moment she’d set her head down on the pillow. Weird, crazy dreams that she remembered only in fragments now—a face screaming at a window, a long dark road, a blond girl in a baseball cap riding her bike…

“Good morning,” Malika sang out when the alarm went off at seven-oh-five. “Rise and shine and greet your first day as a Wilbournian!”

Sue sat up in bed. “You’re pretty perky in the morning. Not sure I can get used to that.”

Malika was already dressed and sitting at her desk, sipping a cup of coffee while she read the news on the Internet. “I was very good not to wake you,” she said over her shoulder. “Did you sleep well?”

“No,” Sue grumbled. “Is there more coffee?”

Malika laughed. “I told you not to read Joyce Davenport before going to sleep.”

“Well,
something
gave me weird dreams.” Sue replied, standing, stretching, stumbling to the bathroom.

Could it have been Joyce Davenport’s strident tone that so upset her and caused her mind to wander all night? The book had been a grab bag of interesting opinion and outrageous nonsense—sprinkled, as Malika had warned, with some heavy helpings of outright bigotry. Arabs were “savages” in Davenport’s description. Mothers on welfare were, one and all, “freeloaders.” But she also talked about personal responsibility and moral convictions—things Sue thought were often absent from political life today.

Still, it was Davenport’s stridency that left Sue with a bad taste. There was nothing Joyce had said in the book she hadn’t heard around the dinner table from her grandfather growing up, but the way Joyce put things—she stripped down all of her positions to their lowest and most basic levels and made them seem crass and vulgar. And those who disagreed with her were accused of smearing her—the very same tactic Davenport was using herself. No wonder that people were unable to have civil conversations about politics these days.

Malika rapped on the bathroom door. “I’m out to my first class. Good luck with yours, Sue. Oh, and by the way—the coffee is in the lounge.”

In the shower, Sue thought more about Joyce Davenport. Not so much about her politics or her stridency, but the fact that she was the first person she’d ever met who’d actually known her mother.

Was my mother the same way? Did she think the same way Joyce does? What kind of a person was she?

She’d wondered about her mother so often, alone in her room, all through her girlhood. So many times, Sue had stood in front of the shrine to Mariclare, staring up at the pictures of her mother, and wondered. What kind of a person had she been? What kind of dreams did she have, what did she want from life, what were her hopes and fears?

Sue used to run her finger across one particular photograph of her mother. Mariclare was young, maybe nineteen, so fresh-faced and happy.
Was she excited when she discovered she was pregnant with me? Would we have been close?

She was so pretty. So much prettier than Sue considered herself. Did boys line up to take her out? Was she kind, was she sweet, was she nice to people? Did she study hard and get good grades, or was she flighty and bouncy like some of the girls at Stowe?

And then there was Sue’s father. How had Mariclare met him? Were they madly in love? What kind of parents would they have been?

So many times, Sue had wished that her grandparents would talk to her about Mariclare.
Couldn’t they understand how much it means to me to know something—anything—about my mother? I know it must be incredibly painful to lose your only child, but wouldn’t that wound ever heal enough? It surely wasn’t healthy to never mention her, never talk about her. And they could help me so much…why didn’t they understand that I need to know about my mother and my father?

She shut off the shower, stepped out, and began towel-drying her hair. This was the result of her grandparents’ years of silence. On Sue’s first day of college, rather than thinking about her classes and what lay ahead, she was still ruminating over the same old questions.

That’s what meeting Joyce Davenport last night had done. It had sucked out all the anticipation about college from her, and left her once again a little girl pining after her unknown mother.

Sue had so envied her friends at Stowe Academy. She was the only student there who was technically an orphan. She would fall silent whenever any of her friends would launch into a litany of their parents’ latest sins against them, always thinking,
At least you have a mother, even if she does drink
too much or fight with your dad or won’t let you stay out as late as you want. She’s your mother and when you need her she’s there. You don’t have a grandmother trying to take the place of your mother—a grandmother who’s really too old to take care of you and a grandfather who won’t even let you bring up the subject of your parents. You have brothers and sisters and you don’t have any idea of how lucky you are—all I have are my grandparents and when they die—and they aren’t young now—I’ll be all alone in the world.

Her earliest memories were of standing in front of the shrine to Mariclare, thinking how beautiful her mother was and indulging herself in fantasies about the life she could have had with her parents. They would have been a family—a real family—a real family that her grandparents, no matter how much they might love her, had never really given her.

Sue understood her fantasies were just that, but in her mind it was so easy to imagine Mariclare as the perfect mother. Mariclare would understand her. She’d be her best friend. She’d take her shopping and out to see movies. They’d have lunches together in the city, chatting about their lives. Sue would be able to talk to Mariclare about anything, and Mariclare would always understand. Mariclare would be wise and kind and loving, with a soft gentle voice and a wonderful laugh—the kind that made you smile when you heard it, because it was so full of love and joy.

Whenever her grandparents were out, sometimes Sue would lift one of the pictures down from the shrine and carry it into the bathroom. She would hold the photograph up next to her own face and try to see any resemblance there. She never could. All through her teen years, Sue kept doing it, but never did she see a trace of herself in her mother’s face.

But Joyce Davenport said I had my mother’s eyes.

Sue had always assumed she took after her father. But her father was even more of a mystery to her than her mother.

Once, when she was ten, she found a photograph in a drawer. She recognized Mariclare, but the man she was standing with was unfamiliar. A man about her age, with blondish hair and a serious expression. On the back of the photograph someone had written the name James. When Sue had shown her grandmother the photograph, the old woman had snatched it away from her and told her not to go snooping in drawers. But the name lingered in Sue’s mind. She was convinced “James” was her father.

I must have other relatives out there somewhere,
she always thought.
There must be someone on my father’s side who would know something.

Dressing for class, Sue tried to refocus. This was the day she’d been waiting for—the day she’d dreamed about. Away from home, on her own. In college! She could spread her wings, be her own person, find out what life was like outside the oppressive glare of her grandparents.

But all the excitement of the first day of classes paled before the simple fact that she had met someone who actually knew her mother—and knew her well!

If only it wasn’t Joyce Davenport.

“Maybe she isn’t so bad,” Sue mumbled to herself as she slipped her shoes onto her feet. “She probably goes for shock value because it sells books.”

She glanced down again at the cover of Joyce’s book. The bio on the jacket described Joyce as “witty and vivacious”—though Sue had found the book to be bullying.

She’d score more political points if she didn’t come across so intolerant herself, Sue reasoned. Joyce reminded her of a girl she’d known at Stowe—Lorraine Harrington. Lorraine was just mean. She liked making fun of people—plain and simple. She often would mock another girl right to her face—making fun of her braces, or her clothes, or her accent. Thankfully, Sue had never been a target of Lorraine’s cruelty, but still she’d disliked her. In some ways, she disliked even more the girls who’d been friends with Lorraine—the girls Sue had thought of as the “flunkies.”

Is that what my mother was like? One of Joyce’s flunkies?

She stood and looked at herself in the mirror. She wore a pink T-shirt over khaki pants. Her blond hair was tied back in a ponytail. Kind of preppy, but not as prepped out as some of these girls here. She flicked on a little mascara.

No matter what I might think of her,
Sue told herself,
I am going to have to call Joyce Davenport.

“Now,” she said, gathering up the books she’d need for her first class, “where did Malika say that coffee was?”

The lounge. It was next to the bank of elevators, a tidy little room with two plaid upholstered couches, and a big television set mounted to the wall. Girls were all heading in and out, grabbing Styrofoam cups of coffee from the big silver urn set on a table. Sue briefly wondered if any of these girls might be future friends. A few nodded at her as she entered, but most were engaged in animated chatter with their friends. It was going to be difficult breaking into cliques, especially being a freshman in a mostly sophomore dorm.

Sue filled a cup, dumped in some cream and sugar, and took a sip. Not bad.

“Oh, my God!”

It was a girl’s voice in the hallway. Sue couldn’t see her face, as other girls were gathering around her. A small huddle gathered in the doorway of the lounge.

“No way!” someone else said.

“What’s going on?” Sue asked, looking over at a couple of girls beside her.

“I don’t know,” one of the girls replied, raising her eyes to look at the group in the hallway.

Sue took a few steps toward the excitement, as the chattering of the girls just outside the lounge grew louder. She could see the first girl now. She was tiny. She looked like she couldn’t weigh more than eighty pounds soaking wet, and her long brown hair tumbled over a
WILBOURNE COLLEGE
sweatshirt. She had apparently brought some news to the group.

“Yes, you do know her,” the tiny girl was telling one of her friends. “She was in our lit class last semester—remember, she was the blond chick with the thick Brooklyn accent?”

“Oh, right,” said the other girl. “She didn’t like Jane Austen. I thought Dr. Michalak was going to have a stroke.”

“So she skipped out on the welcome ceremony?” another girl was asking. “How did she get away with that?”

“Tish Lewis signed her in,” the tiny girl told her. “You know Tish, don’t you? I can only imagine how much trouble
she’s
in.”

Sue gulped down the rest of the contents of the cup. “Excuse me,” she said into the group. “But I need to get to class.”

“Honey,” said one girl, “I’m not sure there are any classes at the moment.”

Sue looked at her oddly. “Why not?”

The girls all looked back at the tiny girl in the sweatshirt. She gave Sue a quizzical look.

“And who are you?” she asked.

“I’m Sue Barlow. A freshman.”

The girl’s face softened. “Okay. Chrissy Hansen.” They shook hands. “Welcome to Wilbourne. But I hope you don’t go running right back to wherever you came from.”

Sue smiled. “Why would I do that?”

“Something’s happened to one of the students. They think she may have been attacked.”

“Attacked?” Sue gasped.

Chrissy nodded. “Her name was Bonnie Warner. I was just out jogging, and down by the front gate there are police cars everywhere.”

The girl to Chrissy’s left shuddered. “This freaks me out.”

“The campus is safe,” Chrissy insisted. “Bonnie was attacked off campus.”

“But right outside the front gate!” another girl chimed in.

“When did it happen?” Sue asked.

“Sometime last night. They found her bike this morning.”

Sue looked at Chrissy intently. “They found her bike? Where is she?”

Chrissy took a deep breath. “That’s just it. No one knows. All they found was her bike and her baseball cap.” Her face had turned pale. “And a whole hell of a lot of blood.”

“Blood?” Sue asked, her knees suddenly weak.

Chrissy nodded. “Everywhere. On the road. On her bike. But no sign of Bonnie anywhere.”

“What—what do the police think happened to her?” The coffee was churning in Sue’s stomach, and she was struggling to keep on her feet.

Chrissy shrugged. “No idea.”

Another girl came bounding off the elevator just then. “Classes have been postponed until noon today,” she blurt out. “Bonnie Warner is missing and they found her bike with a lot of blood—”

“We know!” Chrissy yelled. For such a little thing, she sure had a loud voice.