“Yes. She joined in the spring. I tried to say something to her because I’d started to see what monsters they were. But her boyfriend had just dumped her, and she seemed so bummed. She was looking for something, something to belong to.”
“Do you think she could have tried to leave this fall?”
“I don’t know,” Alexis said numbly.
“Can you tell me the names of some of the members? That would help a lot.”
Alexis shook her head back and forth vehemently.
“No, I can’t. They’ll know it came from me. And they’ll punish me again.”
“Please—”
“I said no. I just can’t.”
Before Phoebe could say another word, Alexis had turned and begun to race along the outside of the mall, headed toward an entrance.
Watching her go, Phoebe finally exhaled. She felt drained from the conversation. She was so distracted it took her a while to find her car, but finally she spotted it. She unlocked the door and nearly threw herself inside. As she leaned against the seat, she realized that despite how the cool temperature was, her back felt damp with sweat.
It was past lunchtime, but Phoebe had no desire to eat. Once she had maneuvered her way back onto I-83, she dug her phone from her purse and called Glenda. According to her assistant, Glenda was in a meeting and couldn’t be disturbed. Phoebe asked her to deliver the message that she had information worth sharing and could be reached on her cell phone.
Phoebe drove as if on autopilot, her mind running back and forth over what she’d learned from Alexis. After the rats in her freezer, she’d had no doubt that the Sixes existed and that they were nasty as hell, and her conversation with Alexis had backed that up. But she needed to find out what the last two circles involved before deciding if they could actually be behind Lily’s death. That would tell her just how far the girls were willing to go to get their way—or to enact the kind of vendettas that Blair seemed to relish.
Thirty minutes later, after pulling off the highway to fill her gas tank, Phoebe checked her e-mail. Glenda had written, saying that she was anxious to hear Phoebe’s news, but she was jam-packed for the rest of the day and evening. Therefore she’d arranged for Stockton to meet Phoebe in his office at 6:30 and receive the update.
Damn, Phoebe thought. It made sense for Glenda to delegate the meeting to Stockton—that way he could jump-start any investigation that needed to be done—but she’d promised Alexis that only she and Glenda would know about their meeting. Besides, Phoebe just didn’t like Stockton, and she hated having to turn over what she’d learned to him.
Phoebe scanned down her other unopened e-mails. With a start she saw that there was one from her agent, Miranda, with “Priority” in the subject line. Ever since last spring anything urgent-looking from her agent had flooded her with dread. As it turned out, Miranda had seen Tobias’s mention of her in the Post and wanted to be sure Phoebe was aware of it. “You need to get out of this guy’s line of sight,” she wrote. “He’s a real bastard.”
Duh, Phoebe thought. She briefly considered calling Miranda and filling her in, but she knew her agent would ask if Phoebe had an idea for her next book yet. And that was one discussion she wanted to avoid.
She kept scrolling and found that there was also the promised e-mail from Glenda’s assistant about Wesley Hines. Though the college had no cell phone number or e-mail address for Wesley, it did have a current home address, and to Phoebe’s surprise, it was in Doring. That was a town just a few miles from Lyle. As she stared at the address, she wondered if Hines had grown up in Doring, gone to Lyle because it was close, and resettled temporarily with his parents as tons of kids seemed to be doing these days.
I need to talk to him, she thought. As soon as possible. Hutch had assumed Hines had fallen into the Winamac drunk, but that might not be the case. If there was a serial killer in the area, as Stockton believed, Hines might have been a victim—one who miraculously survived. She wondered suddenly if the Sixes could have been involved in the incident. Was Hines the kind of dorky boy they targeted?
She glanced at her watch. She’d been making decent time on the road, and that meant she’d definitely be back in Lyle before six—which left just enough time for her to swing by Hines’s home before her meeting with Stockton. If Hines had a nine-to-five job, she might catch him as he was arriving home from work. She punched his address into the GPS and fired up the car.
The rest of the drive was uneventful, and she pulled into Doring a few minutes earlier than expected. She’d assumed that Wesley Hines was still bunking down at his parents’ place, so she was surprised when the GPS led her to a subdivision of attached gray town houses—row after endless row of them, and with new ones under construction at the end. These were the kind of units you lived in when you downsized after retirement or landed yourself a decent job after college. Hines was likely living here alone.
As she drove down the road that wound through the town-house “village,” scanning the numbers on each house, Phoebe realized that Hines’s place—2118—was going to be near the end of the row, and she grabbed an available parking place there.
Hines’s house was indeed the very last in the row. It abutted a cluster of oak trees, which surprisingly the bulldozers had left standing. As Phoebe headed down the sidewalk in that direction, she discovered that she wasn’t in luck. The windows of 2118 were dark, suggesting that no one was home. But then she spotted a young guy emerging from around the far side, probably coming from a parking lot behind the house. He crossed the yard and walked up the three steps of the porch, where he opened the mailbox and dipped his hand inside.
That’s him, Phoebe thought, and then immediately she found herself thinking, No, it couldn’t be. The silhouette seemed too grown-up-looking to be just out of school—he was wearing a three-quarter-length dark green coat, pressed khaki pants, and loafers. But as she cut across the lawn to reach the house, she got a closer look and realized that he couldn’t be any older than twenty-three. He was a bit heavyset, clean-cut looking, with blond hair that spiked up a little in front.
Before Phoebe could call out to him, he caught her movements from the corner of his eye, and his head swiveled in her direction.
“Can I help you?” he asked, studying her. She suddenly realized that she had seen him someplace before. But where? she wondered. He didn’t go to Lyle anymore.
“Are you Wesley Hines?” Phoebe asked.
“Might be,” he replied coolly. “Depends on who’s asking.” Clearly the town-house village wasn’t one of those charming little neighborhoods where people just popped over to say hello to new neighbors.
“Sorry to bother you,” Phoebe said. “I teach at Lyle College. I’m on a committee looking into a few campus issues. I was hoping to talk to you for a few minutes. ”
“I doubt I’d have much to tell you,” he said, now friendly, the edge gone from his voice. “I only spent two years there—I transferred from a community college. And I wasn’t all that involved when I was there.”
“I know what you mean,” Phoebe said. “I wasn’t in the thick of things at college myself. But I’m interested in something that did directly involve you—that night you found yourself in the Winamac River.”
For a few seconds Wesley just stared at her. She sensed the wheels in his brain spinning rapidly.
“Why curious after all this time?” he asked finally.
“Because, as you may have heard, a girl was found dead in the river this past weekend. Her name was Lily Mack. And I’m wondering if there might be a connection somehow. That someone could be targeting students.”