She sniffled; Bolt handed her a tissue. “Poor Maggie,” she said. “I always tried to be there for her, but I guess I wasn’t really. The dean said she was blindfolded. She must’ve thought she couldn’t go through with it if she could look down and see the falls.”
Go through with it? “You think she committed suicide?” I asked.
Pamela blinked at me. “Well, obviously, Officer. She must have jumped. Dean Collard said something about an accident, but Maggie wouldn’t walk across those stepping-stones just for fun. What do you think she was — stupid?”
“I wouldn’t say stupid,” I said, blushing. “You wouldn’t have to be stupid to — never mind. Any other reasons for thinking she might have wanted to kill herself?”
She tilted her head to the side, considering. “Sort of. She worried about money a lot. I mean, a lot. She’d paid her first year’s tuition herself, but this year she had to let her parents pay, and she was all stressed out about tuition for next year.”
“Her parents weren’t willing to help?” I asked.
“Oh, they’re willing,” Pamela said. “Her mother cashed in half her retirement fund to cover tuition this year. But they’re also putting her older brother through law school, and they just spent a bundle on her older sister’s wedding, and her little sister has orthodontist bills. Maggie hated being a burden to them — that’s the way she put it. So I guess she decided she’d relieve them of the burden by... by... you know.”
She blew her nose, and I sneaked more crackers. “Did she talk about these problems a lot?” I asked, swallowing hard and reaching for the Tang.
“She used to.” Pamela accepted a fresh tissue. “And I tried to, like, sympathize. But my parents have real jobs — I just don’t have those problems, y’know? I don’t even have to work part time. Maggie worked at Burger Bonanza, but minimum wage doesn’t make much of a dent in tuition. And she was working so many hours her grades went down, and she was worried she’d lose this tiny merit scholarship she had. The whole thing was making her real tense. Then she started acting, like, irrationally.”
“In what way?” I asked.
Her face shifted from sorrowful to sour. “She pledged Pi Alpha. That made no sense. Last year, we got lots of invitations to rush parties, and we just, like, laughed them off. We both thought sororities were so dumb; you waste so much time and money, and most of the girls are so stuck up. And then this year, when Maggie has absolutely no time or money to spare, she’s all of a sudden like, ‘Maybe I’ll pledge Pi Alpha.’ And I’m like, ‘Why?’ But I wanted to support her, so I went to the rush party with her.”
“But you decided not to pledge?”
She pursed her lips. “I didn’t get a bid. See what I mean, about the girls being stuck up? They only take really skinny girls, girls who look so... so just so, y’know?”
“Well, not all of them,” I said, remembering. “When we were at the Pi Alpha house, we saw this Billie or Jillie or—”
“Willie Fenz,” Pamela said. “Well, yeah. But she’s a computer genius. She maintains the college’s Web site single-handedly, and she’s got, like, a four-point-two-million GPA. Everybody figures the Pi Alphas let her in so they’d never have to worry about keeping their own grades up. All fraternities and sororities have to maintain a group GPA of at least 2.5. With Willie pushing their average up, the Pi Alphas are set.”
Maybe, but Dean Collard had said all the Pi Alphas were honor students anyway. “And all the other members are very attractive?” I asked.
“Flat-out gorgeous. But they’re not from good families or anything — just regular families, all of them. Anyhows, when they turned me down, I thought Maggie would refuse her bid. I mean, we were best friends, almost. You’d think she’d be loyal. But no. And after she pledged, she stopped really talking to me. It was just like, Pi Alpha this, and Pi Alpha that — no real conversation. I wasn’t the only person she shut out, either.”
“Do you mean Fletcher Cantrell?” Bolt asked. “The young man you met at the library? The young ladies at Pi Alpha called him Miss Warren’s ex-boyfriend. At what point did he cease to be her boyfriend and become her ex-boyfriend?”
“At the point when she pledged Pi Alpha.” She sighed. “He’s the nicest guy, from a great family. His father’s company takes up three whole floors in the Bradstone Center downtown. And they’d dated so long — a whole year, almost. He even e-mailed her over the summer. At first, they were real close this year. Then, right after pledging, Maggie tells Fletcher she wants to just be friends. You know what that means — just be friends.”
I knew exactly what it means. It means you’re being dumped. I cringed, remembering high school, remembering college, remembering all the girls who’d told me they wanted to just be friends. Thank goodness I finally met Ellen; thank goodness she was willing to marry me and didn’t care about being friends.
I glanced at my notes. It looked like Maggie had been under lots of pressure, had cut off some friends — did that add up to suicide? Maybe. The blindfold could fit with suicide, too — not that it takes all that much courage to look down at a ten-foot jump if you’re hell bent on killing yourself anyway. But if Maggie had a fear of heights...
The door flew open, and a young guy in jeans and a Culbert basketball jacket rushed in. “Pam!” he cried. “Is it true? Seth Baker said Maggie — but it can’t be true!”
In a second, Pamela bounced up from her perch on the edge of her bed, wrapped her arms around the guy’s neck, and collapsed on his shoulder. “Oh, Fletcher!” she sobbed. “I’m sorry, but it’s true!” Still clinging to him, she pointed at us. “These are policemen — Officer Johnson and somebody else. I told them how upset Maggie’s been this year, and that must be why she went to the falls and decided to jump and—”
“Decided to jump?” He disentangled himself from her arms and took three steps back. “No way, Pam, no way! Maggie wouldn’t do that!”
“I know it’s horrible to think she felt so hopeless,” she said, holding out her arms, walking toward him again. “You must feel like you let her down; so do I. But we can help each other through this. We can, like, comfort each other. We can—”
“The hell with that.” He looked at her for a moment, grimaced, turned to face us. “Look, I never let Maggie down. And if Pam says Maggie committed suicide — no way!”
“That’s just one theory,” I said soothingly. “You’re Fletcher Cantrell?”
He stuck his hands in his jacket pockets, hunched his shoulders forward, and stared at the floor. “Right. How’d you know?”
“Your name’s come up a few times. I put two and two together.” I’d done some real detective work, all right — it was hard not to look smug. I put a hand on his shoulder. “Look, son, you’ve had a nasty shock. Sit down. You can have my chair.”
“And you need a drink,” Pamela said eagerly. “I’ll make Tang.”
“I don’t wanna sit down. And I don’t want Tang.” He paced four steps, reached the wall, had to turn around and pace in the opposite direction. “I gotta keep my head clear. Seth said it’s all over campus that Maggie was pushed over Petite Falls. He said she’d been blindfolded with her pledge scarf, and her hands were tied, and—”
“Don’t believe everything you hear,” I said. “Her hands weren’t tied. And we don’t know if she was pushed.” Oops, I thought — shouldn’t have said that much, not yet.