She stopped snuffling to give me a prissy frown. “We don’t allow alcohol in the house, or smoking, either. Some of the seniors smoke in their rooms, and everybody knows Winkie keeps wine in her refrigerator and a bottle of brandy under her bed. One night when I couldn’t sleep on account of worrying over my midterms, I went down to get a glass of milk and I could have sworn I heard a man’s voice right there in Winkie’s suite. I asked her about it the next morning, and she got real peevish with me and told me I’d better stop imagining things and concern myself with my grades. When I told Jean about it, she just laughed and said the same thing Winkie did.”
I clucked my tongue. “Let’s hope National never hears of this. So, what pledge activities would scandalize your preacher back home?”
“Mostly silly stuff, but sometimes… well, you know, things that sure might…“ She gulped and turned away, but not before I saw the red blotches on her cheeks. “I shouldn’t talk to you about those things. If anyone overheard me, I’d be out on my fanny in no time flat.” She promptly discarded her own advice, and dropped her voice to a husky whisper more suitable for secret agents exchanging bomb recipes. “There was one time when I got so upset I thought I’d throw up, but Jean was real sweet and talked to me half the night. She kept repeating how Kappa Theta Eta meant a lifetime of sisterhood and how I’d better learn to accept their ways if I ever hoped to be initiated. Now I don’t know if I want to be a Kappa or not!”
I took a tissue from the box below the counter and gave it to her “If you’re so miserable, why not quit and live in a dorm?” I said pragmatically, if not sympathetically.
“Mama would skin me alive if I quit,” she said. “I just can’t make her understand that most of the girls make fun of me. Jean’s been real kind about lending me clothes, and Pippa did that color thing for half price, but it didn’t do any good. I don’t dress like them, talk like them, have families like them, or drive fancy cars like them. Everything about me’s wrong, according to them. My hair, my accent, my major-everything!”
She sank to the floor and began to snuffle with increasing vigor, until she was sobbing and I was trying to decide what to do about her. Since there were no customers, she was not likely to discourage sales, but it seemed rather cold-blooded to simply watch her until she subsided and I could shoo her out the door. On the other hand, I had no desire to cuddle her in my arms and make soothing noises while she splattered my shirt with tears, not to mention less desirable fluids. She was a wet creature, I thought, and inclined to dribble on every possible occasion.
I opted for a middling approach. “Come now, Debbie Anne, it can’t be all that bad,” I said consolingly, but from a prudent distance. “Your friends will be back in the fall, and you’ll have raised your grade point so you can be initiated and you’ll feel more like a real Kappa Theta…, whatever.”
She wiped her nose and looked up at me. “I don’t see how I can ever be initiated. I’m too scared to go into the chapter room after what happened at the last meeting.”
“Jean said you’d been inadvertently locked in the room!”
“Inadvertently my foot! Jean asked me in a real sugary voice to put away the candles in the ritual closet, then locked the closet door, turned out the lights, and left. I was there for most of an hour, beating on the door and screaming, but nobody could hear me on account of the chapter room’s in the basement. She locked that door, too, and the one at the top of the stairs.”
“The ritual closet? What exactly is a ritual closet?” I asked, allowing myself to entertain macabre visions of mutilated cat corpses.
The bell tinkled before she could answer, to my regret. It was a customer of sorts, a whiskery, pony-tailed science fiction freak of indeterminate years who resided in a reality that mirrored whatever he was reading. He blinked at Debbie Anne for a minute, then waved a hand at me and shuffled into the netherworld of the racks.
Debbie Anne scrambled to her feet, blotted her nose, and stuffed the wadded tissue in her pocket. “Golly, Mrs. Malloy, we’re not allowed to talk about”-she lowered her voice to a twangy whisper-”the chapter room or the ritual closet. That’s secret Kappa stuff, like our whistle and handshake.”
I was intrigued by the arcanum. “You have a secret whistle? Please, I beg of you, let me hear it. I promise I’ll erase the memory afterward and never so much as exhale in any similar way.”
“I can’t! I’m sorry I bothered you, Mrs. Malloy. I’m desperate for some advice, but I can’t tell you about what goes on at the house. You’re not a Kappa.” Having delivered the ultimate insult, she grabbed her book and fled.
I was disappointed, but I reassured myself that my curiosity might yet be assuaged and turned my attention to this rare and precious commodity-the customer. “Finding anything good?” I called.
He poked his head over the top of the rack. “No, not as of yet. I was gonna buy a copy of Bimbos of the Death Sun to give to this lady I’ve been hanging out with, but you don’t have any. She’s kind of spooked by science fiction fans, and refused to go to the last World Con with me, even though I assured her that no one’s been badly injured in a D &D game for more than a year. It was his fault, anyway, for thinking he ought to challenge a five-hundred-pound Plutonian mercenary with a real sword when-”
“I do have a copy,” I interrupted. I was about to give him specifics when it occurred to me that he might not be in a right-left mode. I joined him in front of the gaudy covers. “I saw it several days ago, right…, in that empty space.”
“So maybe you sold it?” he said.
Recalling sales was unpleasantly easy. “No, I didn’t,” I said with a puzzled frown. “I’m certain I had the one copy and it was there two or three days ago. I’ve sold some romances, a few classics that are on the high school reading list for the fall, a book on building decks, and a cookbook. That’s it for the week. If I didn’t sell it, someone stole it!”
I stomped back to the counter, reached for the telephone, and then lowered my hand, and, I hoped, my blood pressure. It was doubtful the police would rush to the scene of the crime to fingerprint the rack and take photographs of the ominously empty spot. Not for a paperback that cost less than four dollars.
“Wow, what a bummer” my SF freak said as he left. “Wow, what a bummer,” I echoed under my breath as the bell tinkled and the cash register stayed mute. “What a bummer, indeed.”
4
At some point Caron had groveled and I’d granted a period of probation, although I’d made it clear that I considered her a habitual offender who’d best tiptoe through the rest of the summer unless she wanted to walk through the rest of her high school years. Peter seemed to have tiptoed off to battle larcenous mall rats, which was fine with me.
On Friday I called Luanne Bradshaw and arranged to meet her late in the afternoon at the beer garden.
“A secret whistle, if you can imagine,” I said to her after we’d settled down at a corner picnic table shaded by a lush wisteria vine. “I always associated that kind of thing with the male-only clubs where they wear funny hats and play games in the woods. It never occurred to me that I was living next door to it.”
Luanne snickered at me, as she so often was inclined to do. She’s of a similar age and political persuasion, divorced, and owns Secondhand Rose, a used-clothing store that specializes in outrageously funky clothes from the thirties and forties. This endears her to Caron, who has elevated avarice to an art form, and I regret to say Luanne’s not immune to taking advantage of it when she needs help unpacking a shipment or straightening stock.
“And a ritual closet,” I added, wiggling my eyebrows. “I’ve learned they keep candles in it, but for all we know, they’ve got an altar; hooded robes hanging on hooks, and all sorts of medieval instruments of torture. They seem to go through cats on a regular basis.”