Yikes, Bolt, I thought, that’s awful flimsy. And Dean Collard had said the Pi Alpha girls were really nice. I tugged on Bolt’s sleeve again. “Don’t forget their good reputation,” I warned. “Perfect behavior, charities, activities. That’s evidence too.”
“Evidence of a negative sort,” he agreed, “but damning. Your sorority takes such elaborate precautions to safeguard its reputation, it stands to reason you’re covering something up. Then there’s the list of activities we saw yesterday. Workshops in makeup and self-defense, in health precautions and investment strategies, all perfectly suited to young women who need to look their best and to know how to protect themselves, who face certain health hazards in hopes of benefiting financially. Maggie obviously hoped to reap such benefits: She opened a savings account the day she died because she expected to start earning that very night. The scavenger hunt was just a ruse to fool the dean; Maggie bought her Donny Osmond lint brush so quickly that you must have told her where to find it. Her actual quest was to find and satisfy her first customer. That is the true nature of your Hell Night initiation. That is how your pledges prove themselves.”
“Absurd!” Dean Collard protested, so pale his lips had faded to a beige blur. “I watch the sororities and fraternities so closely — how could they ever manage it?”
“Sometimes,” Bolt said grimly, “it takes a genius. As Lieutenant Johnson noted, communication is important, but some things are so delicate you can’t broadcast them — you have to be more sophisticated. That’s why Pi Alpha admitted Willie Fenz, the only member who doesn’t participate directly in its distinctive form of free enterprise. Instead, for a percentage of the others’ earnings, she manages a Web site so discreetly that neither the college nor the police detected it. This Web site offers visitors glimpses of scantily clad young women, their faces obscured by blue silk scarves. That’s how Pi Alpha screens customers and sets up assignations. Miss Fenz has admitted as much.”
So many people gasped that I expected the walls to cave in because of the sudden change in air pressure. People whipped their heads around, looking for Willie Fenz. But she’s a genius, not a dummy; she had taken off long ago. Then Pamela started crying.
“So that’s why Maggie killed herself,” she sobbed. “At the last moment, she couldn’t, like, go through with the ickiness. She went to the Falls, and she must have been, like, ‘Whoa! I can’t do this!’ So she blindfolded herself, and—”
“No,” Bolt cut in. “The blindfold and the scattered M&M’s were attempts to frame Pi Alpha by making Maggie’s murder look like an initiation gone wrong. But Pi Alpha’s pledges do not go to Petite Falls. They meet their customers, then come back here with the candies they collected during the week. Yesterday, we saw a bowl filled with eight hundred blue M&M’s, deposited by the other four pledges when they returned safely after their probationary trysts. Maggie, sadly, did not survive her first assignment.”
“I don’t believe it.” Dean Collard shook his head. “That any Culbert College sorority or fraternity could indulge in such behavior. Impossible!”
“Is it?” Bolt asked. “You said that in the past Culbert sororities and fraternities indulged in disgraceful practices. You hinted at one of them when you spoke of decadence and exploitation; you said some initiations involved women who weren’t exactly nice young women, who were willing enough. Just who were these not exactly nice young women, and what were they willing enough to do?”
“Oh good heavens!” Now, the dean blushed. “Well, it was before my time. But apparently, when some fraternity pledges hadn’t — well, if they were still, well, innocents — well, the senior members would find women willing to, well, initiate them.”
“And what senior member would be assigned the task of finding willing women to perform this initiation?” Bolt asked. “The entertainment chairman?”
I expected Fletcher to jump up and deny it. But it was Pamela who jumped. “Stop that!” she cried, draping an arm around Fletcher’s shoulders. He sat hunched in his chair, staring at the floor, as if trying to decipher a message woven into the rug. “Fletcher,” Pamela declared, “would never do that. He didn’t even want to go to his dumb old fraternity party. He spent most of Saturday night with me.”
“He did,” Bolt agreed. “And, charming as you are, it’s odd that on the night of a major party he’d seek you out at the library — the sign on your door told him where to find you — and take you to a movie. Perhaps he needed an alibi, as well as time to compose himself — and his story — before facing his fraternity brothers to explain why he’d failed to provide the promised entertainment.”
“That’s just, like, dumb!” she insisted. “Fletcher, tell him!”
At last, Fletcher looked up. Deliberately, he removed Pamela’s hand from his shoulder. “I’m not saying anything until I call my father’s lawyer. This guy doesn’t have proof. He just gets a kick out of slandering me in front of all these people.”
“I’m sure that upsets you,” Bolt said evenly. “I know you care deeply about what people think. When you spoke of your feelings for Maggie, it was important to you that everyone liked her. But then she dropped you. That hurt your pride, didn’t it?”
Fletcher shrugged. “No big deal. I never liked her all that much anyhow.”
“I think you did.” Slowly, Bolt opened the evidence envelope. “I think we have proof that, long after she broke up with you, you kept a gift she’d given you. We’ll come back to that. Miss Fenz said she screened replies to the Web site and never responded to mail from campus addresses. But your family lives in town; you must have an e-mail address at home. That’s why, when given the task of finding someone to initiate your less experienced pledges, you could make an appointment with one of the young women pictured on the Blue Elegance Web site. It’s no wonder you found her attractive. And it’s no wonder your pride was hurt more deeply than ever when you saw your former girlfriend standing at the designated meeting place, holding a copy of the Atlantic and a blue carnation. Were you infuriated, Mr. Cantrell?”
Fletcher just sat there rigidly, his mouth twitching between a grin and a snarl.
Bolt gazed at him, then nodded. “Probably not. It takes your fury a while to build, I see. And probably, at first, you just felt stunned. Maggie must have felt stunned too, but when you opened your car door, she got in. She trusted you, and she had a job to do. If her first customer was her old boyfriend, that made it easier. So you drove to Petite Falls, thinking it would be deserted at that time of night. You’d brought a bottle of Merlot — had you planned to ply the girl from Blue Elegance with wine, to get her to agree to initiate several bashful pledges? Did you try to dissuade her from continuing down the disgraceful path she’d chosen?”
Fletcher barely shook his head, barely opened his lips. “None of that happened.”
“I wish it hadn’t.” Sadly, Bolt reached into the envelope and pulled out the key chain. “This was in Maggie’s purse, loaded down with the sorts of trinkets many girls attach to key chains, a rabbit’s foot, a tiny ballet slipper, a plastic flashlight. And this was in her coat pocket.” He held up the gold-plated flashlight on the snap-apart chain. “Duplication — that’s what the lieutenant said when he saw Maggie had one flashlight on her key chain, another in her pocket. Why would she carry two flashlights?”