“Martini all right?” Brad asked. I nodded and took the cool cocktail glass he handed me.
“I think we’ll be able to make you comfortable if you’d like to move into the house, Rod,” Arthur Marris said.
“I can see you’re pretty crowded and I’m an outsider,” I said. “I’ve taken a place on the beach. Turn left at The Dunes. Right at the end of the road. I see no reason why it can’t be the Gamma U annex.”
Arthur Marris looked a little hurt. He glanced at his watch. “One more round and then we’d better go in,” he said.
The names and faces were slightly blurred at dinner. I knew I’d get a chance to straighten them out later. The cliques began to straighten out in my mind. Brad Carroll, with Siminik as a stooge, ran the opposition to Arthur Marris. The controlling group in the fraternity during the past years had been composed of veterans. Marris was one of the last of them in school. Bald-headed Step Krindall and Marris were the only two left in the house.
Brad Carroll was the leader of the group trying to get the reins of authority back into the hands of the younger nonveteran group. His biggest following was among the sophomores. Better than half the seniors and almost half the juniors seemed allied with Marris. With enough voting strength, Brad Carroll could effectively grab the power from Marris this year, even though Marris would retain the title as president of the house.
I found that there were thirty-three members. Ten seniors, nine juniors and fourteen sophomores. They hoped to take in fifteen freshmen who would not be permitted to live in a house until their sophomore year. Of the active members living in the house, eight were seniors, seven were juniors and ten were sophomores. My presence brought the number of seniors up to eleven.
After dinner, much to Brad’s poorly concealed concern, Arthur Marris took me off to his room. Daylight was fading. He lit his pipe, the match flare flickering on his strong features.
“How do you like the chapter?” he asked.
“Fine. Fine! Of course, I’m not acquainted yet, but everything seems—”
“You’re not a kid, Rod. You don’t handle yourself like a kid. You spoke of the navy at dinner. How old are you?”
“Twenty-six,” I said, chopping off a couple of years.
“I’m twenty-five. I can talk to you as man to man. That sounds corny, doesn’t it? I want to ask you if you’ve noticed the tension. I can feel it. It’s all underneath, you know. I brought you in here to talk to you about it. Part of my job is to protect the reputation of the chapter. You’ll make friends outside the house. They’ll gossip. I prefer that you hear the bad things from me, not from outsiders.”
I shrugged. “So the boys get a little rough sometimes. Is that serious?”
“This is something else. This is a jinxed house, Rod. I want to tell you a little about last year. I was a junior. The house president was a senior named Harv Lorr. In October, just as the rushing season was about to begin, two sophomores on their way back from Tampa rolled a car. Both of them were killed.”
I whistled softly. “A tough break.”
“That’s what we all thought. Just before Christmas vacation one of my best friends went on a beach party. His body was washed up two days later.”
“Accidents in a row like that aren’t too unusual.”
His voice was grim. “In March a boy, a senior, named Tod Sherman, was alone in his room. The guess is that he was cleaning his gun, an army .45. It was against the rules to have it in the house. His door wasn’t locked. It went off and killed him.”
“Maybe they come in threes.”
“In June, during the last week of school, one of the most popular kids in the house hung himself. A boy named Teddy Flynn. He was a senior, a very bright boy. Ha was graduating a week before his twentieth birthday. He hung himself in this room. I took it for this term because no one else wanted it. He used heavy copper wire and fastened it to a pipe that runs across the ceiling of that clothes closet.”
It bothered me to think that it had happened in this room. It made the whole situation less of an academic problem. It made me realize that I had taken a smart-alec attitude from the beginning. Now that was gone. There was a tangible feeling of evil. I could taste it in the back of my throat.
“Let me get this straight, Arthur. Why are you telling me this?”
“One, two or three deaths might be written off as accident and coincidence. I think five can too, in this case. But outsiders don’t see it that way. They think it’s fishy.”
“Do the police?”
“Oh, no. I didn’t mean that responsible people consider it fishy. The kids in the other houses do. By next year, it will all be forgotten. The transient population will take care of that. But this year is going to be rough. It’ll affect our pledge total. There’ll be a lot of whispering. For those inside the group it’ll mean a stronger unifying force, I suppose. I thought you, as a senior transfer, should know all this.”
“Why did the Flynn boy kill himself?”
“We’ll never really know, I guess. His gal was really broken up. She was a junior last year.”
“Did she come back?”
“I saw her at registration. Her name is Mathilda Owen. Tilly. You’ll probably run into her sooner or later. This is a big school, but she’ll travel in our group, I imagine.”
“The five boys that died, Arthur. Outside of their being members of the fraternity, is there anything else to tie the five of them together?”
“No. Nothing.”
“Teddy Flynn hung, Tod Sherman shot, two sophomores killed in a car and one unnamed guy drowned.”
“That’s it. The boy who drowned was Rex Winniger. The sophomores were Harry Welly and Ban Forrith. It was... a pretty bad year here.”
“I can imagine.”
He leaned over and put on the desk lamp. Evil was thrust back into the far shadows. He smiled without humor and said, “There had better not be any accidents this term.”
I made myself laugh. “Hell, all the accidents for the next ten years are used up now. We’re over the quota.”
Chapter Two
Axes to Grind
The creative writing deal met once a week for a two-hour session, Friday from ten to twelve. It was taught by a dry but pompous little man who, the year before, had hit one of the book clubs with a novel that had little to recommend it but the incredible size of the heroine from the waist up and the frenzy with which she met all emotional experiences.
Tilly Owen was in the class. I located her at the first session, a tallish dark-haired girl, almost plain. Her face showed nothing and I was disappointed in her. She took notes meekly, her dark head bent over the notebook. But when she walked out, I did a quick revision. The tall body had an independent life of its own. Her face showed a clear and unspectacular intelligence, an aloofness — but the body was devious and complicated and intensely feminine, continually betraying the level eyes. She went off with a few other girls before I could make an intercept.
During the week leading to the next session when I saw her again, I enlarged my circle of friends inside the fraternity. Brad Carroll thawed a great deal, particularly after I had a few of them out to the beach house for cocktails. I began to learn more about the insides of the brethren.
Step Krindall, with the baby blue eyes and the pink head, was as uncomplicated and amiable as a dancing bear. Arthur Marris had too deep a streak of seriousness in him, verging on self-importance. His touch was thus a shade too heavy. The better house president knows when to use a light touch. Every house has its types. Bill Armand, the dark, vital junior was the house skeptic, the cynic, the scoffer. Ben Charity, the shy blond Georgia boy was the gullible one, the butt of most practical jokes. The angel-faced redheaded sophomore named Jay Bruce was the house clown. There was the usual sullen, heavy-drinking kid on his way off the rails — one Ralph Schumann, a senior.