Had he recognized her? If he had, he might guess she’d eavesdropped and would have another reason to keep her on his shit list. But what worried her even more were the words she’d overheard. Why wasn’t the person supposed to call him on the landline? And what was it that Mark was supposed to produce?
She drove to campus and parked in the lot behind the student union. It was raining harder now, and her sweater sleeves and sling were soaked by the time she reached the front of the building. There were a few tables on the plaza draped with plastic coverings, but most, she realized, had obviously been dismantled because of the weather, and only a half dozen people now milled around. A dripping sign, written in script and propped against a chair, read, “Rain Date: Friday.” Phoebe tried Glenda again on her cell, but she reached only voice mail. She waited for fifteen minutes under an overhang, thinking Glenda might still show, not knowing the fair had been canceled. Finally, after the last table was hauled off, Phoebe tramped back to her car. The ache in her elbow had returned full force.
Once home she popped two ibuprofen and made green tea, hoping to calm her jangly nerves. With the mug in one hand she circled through her rooms, hashing over her conversation with Jen. She had to find out what committee Lily had been on and who she’d fallen in love with. That could very well be the killer. But there were confusing aspects. How would Hutch have learned about the connection? And how did Trevor Harris’s death fit into this scenario? Had Lily’s lover killed him out of jealousy? But that couldn’t be the case: it had sounded like Lily had fallen in love this fall after Trevor was clearly out of the picture. Phoebe grabbed her phone and dialed Jen’s number.
“Is there any chance that Lily started the relationship with the older man when she was still with Trevor?” Phoebe asked when the girl picked up.
“No, it started this fall,” Jen said. “And besides, she loved that guy Trevor. They were going to live together, and she was really upset when she thought he took off.”
“So she never suspected something bad had happened to him?”
“No, because he’d been talking a lot about how fed up he was with Lyle and with being hassled here.”
“Hassled?”
“About his grades. And by the campus cops. He told Lily they had it in for him.”
That was interesting. Phoebe asked if Jen knew why, but the girl said she had no clue. Phoebe signed off, promising to call tomorrow.
It was dark out now, and foggy too, and the rooms seemed to be shrinking, pinning her in. She knew she had reason to be on edge, but the fading light wasn’t helping. She dreaded the coming night and wished she’d never opened up that piece of cardboard. Why, she wondered, hadn’t Glenda called her? And where was Duncan? Why the hell was no one getting back to her?
And then, it was as if she had conjured him up. She heard a knock at the front door, and when she spun around, she saw Duncan through the glass in the window.
“Hey,” he said when she opened the door. His black trench glistened with water. “I got so crazed I never checked my phone, and when I heard your message, I decided to just hurry over.”
“Oh, God,” Phoebe said. “I’m just so glad you’re here. There’s something totally freaky going on.”
As he stripped off his coat, she began to tell him about the tarot card.
“Let me play devil’s advocate,” Duncan said when she’d finished. “Couldn’t it just be the Sixes leaving their own specific warning for you—that your fate is about to change?”
“Sure, I guess,” Phoebe said, flinging her arms up. “But the more I think about it, the more it seems like too big of a coincidence. Fortuna always left the mark of the wheel. And there’s a wheel right on the front of the card.”
Duncan looked at her sympathetically, but she suspected he felt she was making much ado about nothing. “Even if someone did find out about Fortuna—let’s say that Glenda mentioned it to someone—you shouldn’t let it cause you any grief, Phoebe. What difference does it make if someone knows about your past?”
“What if it’s more than that?” she blurted out. To her dismay, she heard her voice tremble as she realized something she hadn’t considered before. “What if someone from Fortuna is here—at the school? I never knew who all of the members were.”
“That seems unlikely. But even so, why be so afraid of them? They bullied you, but that’s really it, right?”
“No,” she said, her eyes welling with tears. “It was worse than that. Worse than I ever told you.”
***
AFTER HER CLOTHES were shredded, she finally confided in a teacher, who brought her to the headmistress. The woman had listened, nodded, expressed concern and said that the school would not only investigate but also reimburse her for some of the clothing. But at the same time the headmistress, with her too-pert nose in the air, had seemed unsympathetic, as if she’d been forced to discuss something that she found trivial, the problem of a student too wimpy to fight her own battles and take care of herself.
Later she thought about the choice of the word investigate. That word never suggested that the culprits in Fortuna—because surely it was them—would be brought to justice. And from what she knew, no one ever was.
But at least after that things were quiet. Spring came. She met a boy from a coed prep school nearby, and they had coffee twice in town. To her relief, life seemed normal again. Maybe, she thought, Fortuna had moved on to someone else.
On Easter weekend she stayed on campus to work—she had so much to do leading up to finals. The fact that the campus was nearly deserted was actually a relief to her. And then on Saturday night, as she was walking back to the dorm, the boys had grabbed her.
She never saw their faces. They came up behind her and threw a hood over her head. From the sound of them muttering to each other, she knew that there were three of them, and they weren’t that old. They led her to a car and threw her in the back seat.
She thought she would be raped, and she was out of her mind with fear. But after a ten-minute drive they yanked her out of the car and forced her into some kind of crawl space. And then they sealed it shut.
She could barely breathe. It was cold and damp, and she thought she heard rats, scampering somewhere near her. Although she knew they must have driven away, she called out, again and again, to no avail. She tried to push, too, at what she thought was the opening, but she was too wedged in to create any force.
For the next thirty-six hours, she just lay there in the total dark, weeping sometimes, wetting herself. She pretended her mother was next to her, telling her to hold on, to be strong. She knew people would start to look for her, but how would they ever guess she was in this place? She was certain that she was going to die.
28
DUNCAN SLIPPED HIS arm around Phoebe, careful of her bad arm, and led her to the couch, easing her onto one of the cushions.