The Sixes (26 page)

As soon as class was over, she flew up to her office, closed the door, and called Wesley. He would be at work right now, but hopefully he would answer his cell phone. She reached only voice mail and left a message. Less than five minutes later, he called her back.

“I’m glad you phoned,” he said. “I’ve been going to call you ever since Monday, but I was feeling so weird about everything.”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“That guy Hutchinson who died. I feel really strange about it.”

“Why?” she urged.

“He was the head security guy who interviewed me after I woke up in the river. You know, the one who just seemed to dismiss my whole story.”

“I know, I know,” she said impatiently. “But why do you feel so weird?”

“Well, he called me last Sunday, after I saw you. He said he’d been reviewing some notes about the case. I was about to blow him off, but he admitted that he might have misjudged the situation last year.

“I went over the details from that night with him,” he continued. “But this time . . . well . . .”

“What is it, Wesley?” Phoebe said. Christ, just spit it out, she wanted to scream.

“I told him about that girl Blair being there. That I hadn’t mentioned it the first time because I didn’t think it was important. And then he goes and gets killed, and those girls get arrested. I feel really guilty.”

So Phoebe had been right. Hutch
had
contacted Wesley. After learning about Blair, he’d obviously pursued the lead on his own.

“You still there?” Wesley asked.

“Yes, I’m here. And no, you shouldn’t feel guilty. How would you have known what they were capable of?”

“I know what you’re going to say next. You’re going to tell me to call the cops again. I already did. I called them right away once I heard about Hutchinson’s death.”

“Good,” Phoebe said. “Did Hutch ask you any specific questions about that night at Cat Tails?”

“Hutch? Oh, did you know him yourself?”

“Yes, a little bit.”

“I don’t recall him asking any specific questions. He just wanted me to go over that night again. You know, describe everything I could remember.”

“Did he give you any hint about what was on his mind—I mean, about any theories he might have had?”

“No, he didn’t let on about anything to me. He just said once more that he was sorry he hadn’t taken my situation more seriously last year—and that was it. Excuse me a sec, will you?” He turned from the phone. “If you’re looking for the fifty-pound bags, they’re against the wall.”

“One more thing, Wesley,” Phoebe said when she had his attention again. “Hutch reviewed the notes he and I both took about you being in the river, and he said he found something important in them—though he never had the opportunity to share it with me. By any chance, did he mention those notes to you?”

“Um, no. He just seemed interested in that girl, Blair.”

“Okay,” Phoebe said, frustrated. “If something occurs to you, just leave me a message.”

After signing off, she tossed the phone down and rested her chin in her hand, thinking. Something still gnawed at her, something she couldn’t see.

Her phone rang, and she swung her eyes toward it on the desk. The screen displayed a number she didn’t recognize.

“Hello, Phoebe,” a man’s voice said as soon as she picked up.

Her body tightened in surprise as she realized the caller’s identity.

Alec.

26

“H
ELLO, ALEC,” PHOEBE
said trying to keep her voice casual. “What’s up?”

“What’s
up
?” he asked, as if her question had baffled him. But why wouldn’t she ask that? The last time she’d actually spoken to the man was back in April, when he’d been sweet enough to update her on his new relationship status. After that there had been a few final details for the two of them to sort out about bills and joint possessions, mostly handled via e-mail. Oh, I’ve got it, she thought: he needs information of some kind—the name of the hotel they’d loved in Aix-en-Provence, or whether his winter coat might still be stuffed in the back of her hall closet.

“Well, I doubt you’re calling to see what costume I wore for Halloween,” Phoebe said. “What can I do for you?”

“To be perfectly honest, I was simply calling to ask how you were.”

Oh, please, Phoebe said to herself. He can’t think I’d buy that.

“My phone doesn’t recognize the number on the screen,” she said. “Did you change jobs?”

“I did, actually. I’m with a new firm—Searles, Minka and Holt. Still in midtown, though.”

That was interesting, she thought. Had it become uncomfortable or too intense for him to work in the same firm as his new squeeze?

“I know you liked your firm,” Phoebe said. “Was this just too good of an offer to turn down?”

“More or less. But I didn’t call to talk about my new job. Like I said, I was wondering how you were doing.”

“Um, good, I guess. I’m enjoying teaching. And it’s been great to be around Glenda.”

A few seconds of silence followed. Phoebe found herself growing annoyed. Obviously Alec had an agenda, and she wished he’d just get it over with.

“That’s it?” Alec said finally. There was a tightness to his voice that Phoebe recognized. She’d ticked him off with the brevity of her response.

“I’m not really sure what you’re looking for, Alec,” Phoebe said. “It’s been months since we’ve talked. Do you want to know how my love life is? Or if there’s career life after plagiarism? If you can be more specific, I can probably do a better job of answering you.”

Don’t go all bitchy on him, she told herself. It’s not worth the psychic energy, and besides, you’ll regret it later.

She heard him take a breath. “There’s no reason to be sarcastic, Phoebe,” he said. “I read the
New York Post
stories. They said there might be some sort of a serial killer out there, and your name was mentioned in the same story. It also said someone on campus had accused you of plagiarism. I just wanted to be sure everything was okay.”

She still sensed an agenda hiding cagily somewhere, but she knew the best strategy would be to respond politely—and then hustle him off the phone.

“It’s nice of you to inquire, Alec. The plagiarism charges, by the way, were false. The
Post
will be running a retraction this week.”

“And you’re okay?”

She glanced down at her left arm, her fingers curling slightly out of the end of the sling.

“Yes, I’m fine,” she said. “Thank you for asking. And how have
you
been? Happy with the job switch?”

“Yes, quite happy. Coincidentally, I have a client in Allentown, which isn’t all that far from you, I believe. I need to see him next week, and I was thinking that if I met with him in the morning, I could drive down afterward and take you to lunch.”

She nearly laughed in surprise. She’d not seen this coming at all. Not only didn’t she have a shred of interest in his offer, but she thought he had a lot of nerve to ask.

“I don’t think so, Alec. But thank you for thinking of me.”

“Do you mind my asking why not?”

“Hmm, let me see how to put it. You announced out of the blue you were done with the relationship and moved out. You didn’t even bother to get in touch when the tabloids were beating me to a bloody pulp. And then suddenly you want us to have a friendly lunch together.”

She’d really lost it that time, but she didn’t care.

“Out of the blue?”

“Pardon me?”

“You said I announced out of the blue that I was done with our relationship. Maybe if you’d been paying attention during the previous year, you would have realized things weren’t right for us.”

“Oh, were you sending smoke signals along the horizon, and I failed to notice them?”

“You just don’t get it, do you, Phoebe?” Alec snapped.

“Obviously not. Why don’t you tell me what I can’t seem to get?”

“You never see when something’s wrong because you’re always too preoccupied with your research. You lose sight of everyone, including yourself. It’s like you don’t really want to connect—or ever get your feet wet emotionally.”

She didn’t think Alec could affect her anymore, but she felt the sting of his words.

“Which implies that on the other hand, you were there for me,” she said. “But at a time when I needed you most, even just in friendship, you didn’t bother to pick up the phone. I have to go now. Good-bye.”

As she disconnected, she felt like hurling her phone across the office. She couldn’t believe how much she’d let him get to her.

Her next class was in just a few minutes, and she needed to cool down and to splash some water on her face, which she could sense was beet-red. After gathering her things, she hurried to the ladies’ room at the end of the hall.

As soon as she entered the small vestibule, she heard a noise coming from one of the stalls. She realized after a moment that someone was vomiting. The toilet flushed then, and a second later she heard the person emerge and turn on the water at one of the sinks. Phoebe stepped inside, expecting to find a student there, a girl with a painful secret perhaps.

But it was Val who was standing at the basin, dabbing at her mouth with a tissue. She made eye contact with Phoebe in the mirror for a brief second, then lowered her eyes and dropped the tissue into her purse. Was Val ill? Phoebe wondered.

“Hello, Val,” Phoebe said. “Is everything all right?”

“What do you mean?” Val asked curtly. She was fishing in her purse for something, and seconds later pulled out a lipstick.

“I just thought that—well, maybe you weren’t feeling well.”

“I feel fine,” Val said. She turned around finally, and Phoebe saw that she indeed had been sick. Her skin was white and waxlike, and her eyes were bloodshot, exactly the way they might appear if she’d just been busy hurling her breakfast into a toilet bowl.

“But thanks for asking,” Val said, turning back to the mirror. She uncapped the lipstick and swiped a plum color on her lips. “How are
you
doing, by the way? Still recovering from that nasty spill?”

“Much better, thank you.”

Val tossed the tube of lipstick back in her purse. “Well, have a good day,” she said.

“You, too,” Phoebe said as Val brushed by her. Val was dressed down a bit today, Phoebe noticed—black pants and a tight black jersey turtleneck. Simple dangling silver earrings. Clearly she wasn’t feeling at the top of her game.

Though she had ten minutes before her next class started, Phoebe parked herself in the corridor outside the classroom. She was hoping Jen would come early and she could ambush her, arranging a moment to talk again. But by the time the class officially started, Jen had yet to arrive. Ten minutes into the class, Phoebe realized she definitely wasn’t coming. But her friend Rachel was there, keeping her eyes glued to her laptop.

Phoebe used the same tack she had in the earlier class—a newsroom-style discussion about the campus situation and how it should be covered, followed by assignments for everyone. This group of students seemed equally engaged by the process. It’s taken a series of tragedies for me to figure out how to connect with them, she thought, but at least I’ve done it.

“All right, lunch beckons,” she said when class was over. “Writers need to eat, too.”

Phoebe packed up her things quickly and put her coat on. Was Jen purposely avoiding her? she wondered. Or was she off in a panic someplace because of Blair and Gwen’s arrest?

Phoebe hurried to her car. She’d been anxious to find the spot along the road where Hutch’s killer had parked, and this was finally a good opportunity. Alec’s words were still weighing on her, railroading her attention, but she needed to stay focused. Something was continuing to gnaw at her about Hutch’s death, and she needed to figure out what it was. Seeing the spot where the killer parked might provide a clue, she thought, or spark an idea.

She knew it would be tough for her to drive by Hutch’s place, but as she neared his driveway, the force of her reaction took her by surprise. A sob caught in her throat, and she choked back tears.

It didn’t take long to find the spot she was looking for—or where the police suspected the car had been parked. That was because of yellow police tape. The cordoned-off area was a deep dirt shoulder of the road about half a mile past Hutch’s driveway. Phoebe parked just beyond it, under two evergreen trees, and climbed out of her car. Michelson had better not drive by in the next five minutes, she told herself, or he might drop her in a vat of boiling oil.

After reaching the spot, she sidled up to the tape and searched with her eyes. There was room inside the tape for a car to park and be safely off the road, and though the car wouldn’t have been hidden from sight, anyone driving by at night would have only seen the dark hulk of its shape.

She lowered her eyes to the ground. There were no tire tracks, but the ground had been disturbed—almost as if someone had swept the dirt. At first glance it seemed that after returning to their car, the girls had driven it up the road a bit, returned on foot to the shoulder, and quickly swept the ground here. Pretty clever. But was that really something Blair and Gwen would have been smart enough to do?

Phoebe raised her eyes and let them roam the woods beyond the shoulder. She realized she must be standing fairly close to where she had fallen and passed out. She shuddered, remembering her desperate scramble in the dark.

She returned to her car and slipped into the passenger seat, trying not to jar her elbow. There was one more stop she wanted to make.

She headed back into town, rounded the college, and then drove north to the antique store, the Big Red Barn. There were just a few customers this afternoon. As she climbed from her car, Phoebe noticed that most of the Halloween decorations had been taken down, but some tired corn stalks were still leaning against the building.

Traffic whizzed by on the highway, and after waiting for an opening, Phoebe hurried across to the river side of the road and turned right, in the direction of the spot she’d stood in last week. It was deserted today, except for a red cardinal bobbing along a tree branch that had been stripped of its leaves. This, she realized, was the last place she’d seen Hutch alive.

She had planned to fight her way through the trees and underbrush to secure a closer look at the spot where Trevor Harris’s body had been found, but as she approached the woody area directly in front of the river, she saw that there was still yellow police tape looped through the trees. At the rate things were going, Phoebe thought, the cops were about to go through the county’s entire supply of it.

She returned to the area across from the Big Red Barn and perched on one of the gray weathered picnic tables. There was police tape here, too, blocking off an area farther ahead along the riverbank. The muddy Winamac chugged along quietly, clearly oblivious to all the misery it had caused.

Phoebe glanced around at the other tables and the two blackened stand-up grills. She wondered how long it had been since one of the grills had been fired up. And yet it was clear from the scuffed ground that the area was used frequently by picnickers and nature lovers. And someone else—there was a very good chance, she realized, that this was where Trevor had gone into the river. The access to the water was so much better here than by the wooded area. His body would have drifted away briefly and then been snatched by the tree roots farther down.

And Lily, too, Phoebe realized. Her body might have been snagged close to where Trevor’s body lay, reuniting the two briefly in death before it was dislodged several days later and made its way downstream.

If you were going to toss someone into the river, this would be a perfect place to do it, Phoebe thought. It was totally isolated. No one would hear any screams or the sounds of a struggle. Rows of trees lined the road, so that the bike path and the picnic area were blocked from the view of passing motorists. If Lily and Trevor had been murdered, it meant a car had been involved, just as with Hutch—and that the killer was pretty familiar with the area. And yet, she realized,
Wesley
hadn’t been taken to this particular spot.

Once again, she wondered if the deaths were really the work of the Sixes. She couldn’t imagine what the motive would have been, or how it linked back to the last two circles of membership.

A light drizzle had begun, and Phoebe scooted off the picnic table. It would be even trickier to drive in this weather, and she wanted to head home now. Once she was in the car, she e-mailed Glenda, asking her to find out what dorm Jen was in. She would just head over there and nab the girl coming or going. As Phoebe started to drop her phone into her purse, it rang in her hands.

“Ms. Hall?” the person asked when she answered. It was a male voice she didn’t recognize.

“Yes.”

“Dan Hutchinson here. Ed Hutchinson’s nephew.”

“Oh Dan, thanks for calling back,” she said. “I’m so sorry for your loss.”

“I appreciate your call. My uncle even mentioned you to us. He was hurrying back on Sunday to chat with you.”

“I know. I just feel horrible about what happened. Will there be a service of some kind?”

“Yeah, definitely. It’s been delayed because the coroner held on to the body for a while. I’ll e-mail you the details when I have them.”

“Thank you,” she said and gave him the address. “By the way, is Ginger okay? Do you have her?”

“Yup, we’ve got her—though she seems awfully freaked out. Wish we could keep her, but my wife is allergic. We’re asking around to see if any friends can take her while we look for a permanent home.”