Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. Vol. 50, No. 1 & 2, January/February 2005

Nancy hesitated. “I’d guess she used that cell phone, Sergeant, but it’s not actually hers. She didn’t have one, so I lent her mine so she could keep in touch with us. It was, well, a safety measure, since she’d be out alone at night.”

That sounded sensible. Whenever Kevin’s out after dark, Ellen gives him her cell phone. “Did she say anything else when she called?” I asked.

“Just that she’d come here after running some errands,” Bianca said. “We didn’t really start worrying until midnight. Then we called her roommate, Pamela Andrews.”

“This Pamela Andrews isn’t a member of the sorority?” I asked.

“No. She and Maggie roomed together last year, and this year they took a room in Schuster Hall. Then Maggie decided to pledge. Since she’d already paid for her dorm room through first semester, she planned to move to the house in January. That’s when most pledges move in. Anyway, Pamela wasn’t in, so we left a message.”

“At that point,” Nancy said, “we thought Maggie had probably changed her mind about joining. Then, this morning, Pamela called and said Maggie never came back to the room last night. We then called Maggie’s ex-boyfriend, Fletcher Cantrell, but he hadn’t seen Maggie all week. Next, we called the hospitals. They had nothing to tell us.”

“We also called the police.” Bianca’s face hardened a bit, and her voice grew crisper. “You probably have a record of the call. I asked if there might be any information about Maggie Warren. The desk sergeant asked if I were a member of her family. I said no, and he said in that case he couldn’t tell me anything.”

Well, if they’d been worried enough to make all those calls, no wonder they didn’t seem more shocked when we showed up, especially since the sergeant hadn’t been one hundred percent tactful. Or maybe the calls were part of a scheme to cover up what had happened at the real initiation at Petite Falls. “So according to you,” I said, “all your members were in this house last night. Were the senior members here all evening?”

“That’s right,” Bianca said, with a confused glance at Nancy.

“According to you, all the other pledges showed up well before the time for the ceremony,” I said. “Are there witnesses who can confirm that?”

“I don’t know,” Nancy said. Now it was her turn to shoot a confused glance at Bianca. “We don’t let non-members in the house on Hell Night, except Dean Collard. He stopped by at about ten o’clock; he stops by all the houses on Hell Night. Perhaps the neighbors — but you still haven’t told us how Maggie died. Was it, well, a car accident?”

“Was Miss Warren in a car when she left for the scavenger hunt?” I asked.

“No, but she could have been run over,” Bianca supplied quickly. “I’m sure that’s what Nancy had in mind. Was that it? Was Maggie run over?”

That didn’t sound like a real question. “No,” I said. “She drowned.”

This time, they both gasped, and if it wasn’t genuine, they must both be theater majors. “Drowned?” Bianca jumped up from her chair again. “You mean she — drowned? Oh my God! Where? How? How is that possible?”

Just get it out, I decided, and see how they take it. “It’s plenty possible,” I said, my voice a tad brutal, “if you try to walk across the stepping-stones above Petite Falls and slip and hit your head, and your so-called sisters run off and leave you in the river. It’s especially possible if you’re blindfolded with a blue silk pledge scarf.”

“Blindfolded?” Nancy started sobbing again. “Oh, Maggie!”

Bianca stared at me for a full minute. “Her pledge scarf,” she said. “That’s why you asked — my God. You think it was an initiation. You think- No, Lieutenant. Absolutely not. We don’t do that. We don’t do anything like that.”

She sounded so passionate that I felt like apologizing and getting the hell out of there. Then I remembered. “It sure looked like there was a party at Petite Falls last night,” I said. “How else do you explain the wine bottle and the blue M&M’s? That’s right. Blue M&M’s, a hundred and ninety-eight at last count. Think we’ll find two more?”

That really got to Nancy. She stopped crying suddenly and looked straight at me, face hard with fury. “You’re wrong, Lieutenant,” she said. “It wasn’t us. It was — it must have been a man. It must have been some filthy pervert who — who took Maggie by surprise, I’m sure that’s what he did. And he drove her to the falls, and—”

“That’s enough, Nancy,” Bianca said sharply. “Lieutenant, you think Maggie’s death resulted from some initiation ritual. I can say categorically that it did not. If you have more questions, I will answer them tomorrow, with an attorney present. I have Pi Alpha’s reputation to consider, and I will protect it. We’ll go to court if necessary, if defamatory insinuations work their way into the press, for example. Most likely Nancy is right, and Maggie was killed by a deviant who picks his victims at random. Concentrate on ridding the streets of such criminals, not on harassing us. Now, if you’ll excuse us—”