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

“That’s not what she said.” Angrily, he took a cracker from the box Pam held out. “She just said we should cool things down. Well, fine. To tell the truth, I’d been thinking that myself. I mean, I liked Maggie — she was real pretty, a real good time. Everybody liked her. But she’d been getting serious, even talking about a ring, and I wasn’t ready for that. So I was just waiting for the right time to let her down easy. Then she says she wants to break it off. In some ways, I was relieved, but I was worried about her, afraid it was because these Pi Alpha freaks had got their hooks into her.”

Bolt looked up from his notes. “You say no Pi Alphas have steady boyfriends. Do you suspect that — well, that their sexual preferences lie outside the mainstream?”

Fletcher stared. “Hell, no. No.

Maggie wouldn’t have had anything to do with them if they were like that. But something’s wrong with them, and they drew Maggie in. I don’t know how — money, maybe. She was worried about that, and the Pi Alphas have a way with it. They buy stocks, and they’ve got a real strong alumni network. They’re always getting great jobs. Maybe they promised to make her rich, but first they made her go through this initiation, and they sat there and partied and watched her die.”

The phone rang, and Pamela ran to answer it. “Hello?” she said. “Oh. Hi, Bianca. Thanks. Horrible, but I’m coping. Fletcher’s helping me — thank God he’s so strong. A memorial service? Tomorrow at seven? Yes, I’ll say a few words. I’ll write a poem.”

A memorial service. I jotted down the time. You can learn lots by watching how people react at memorial services. As soon as Bolt and I were in private, I called the station. The coroner still had tests to do, she said; she’d have her report in the morning. Frankly, I was just as glad she didn’t have anything for us yet.

“We’ve put in enough hours for a Sunday, Bolt,” I said. “Let’s go home and eat.”

Not that there was much to eat at home. Ellen and Kevin were still all stony and surly about the Sunday school mess, and Ellen was too mad at both of us to make a real dinner. We sat down to a silent meal of warmed-up tuna casserole and garlic bread made from stale hamburger buns. Then Kevin stomped upstairs and pretended to do homework while I pretended not to know he was really fooling around on his computer. Ellen went to bed early, so I watched a Sopranos rerun and had a hard time working up sympathy for Tony. I mean, sure his family doesn’t appreciate him, but that can happen even if you don’t mess around with other women and don’t get guys whacked. And at least, no matter what he’s done, Carmela always has a nice dinner waiting for him.

Things didn’t get better in the morning. “Not exactly a rave review,” Ellen observed, tossing the newspaper and a box of Pop-Tarts at me.

I glanced at the front page. A photo of Maggie — her high school graduation picture, probably — and a headline: CULBERT STUDENT FALLS VICTIM TO RANDOM STREET CRIME. The article said Maggie Warren, an honors student at Culbert, had drowned in Slushy River, the apparent victim of a deviant who picked her off the streets at random and assaulted her. A guy from the mayor’s office and the public safety commissioner were quoted, saying how shocked they were. The mayor’s guy hinted maybe the solution was cracking down on the homeless. And an editorial — Ellen had plastered it with a purple sticky-note, to make sure I didn’t miss it — said the police should clean up the streets and protect innocents from random street crimes.

I stuck my untoasted Pop-Tart in my pocket and drove to the station. Bolt, already at his desk, was peering at stuff from Maggie’s purse and pockets.

The coroner, hovering nearby, tossed me a manila folder. “She wasn’t raped,” she said, “despite the paper’s oh-so-delicate insinuations about ‘assault.’ No signs of struggle or recent sexual activity. Not a virgin, but if she was the victim of a ‘random street crime,’ the crime was not rape.”

“That’s a start,” I said, biting off a corner of my Pop-Tart. “Anything else?”

“Not yet. Her coat was dry-cleaned recently but has several hairs on it, some definitely Maggie’s, some definitely not. Find us a suspect, we’ll see if the definitely-nots match up. As to time of death — if she ate dinner at six, she died between eight and ten.”

“Any signs of drugs?” I asked. “Or drinking?”

“Drugs, no,” she said decisively. “Drinking, yes. One or two glasses of red wine, right before she died, most still in her stomach, not her bloodstream. So I guess she shared a toast or two with this deviant who forced her into his car.”

“Let’s say she drank the wine at a sorority party right at the falls,” I said, remembering the broken bottle of Merlot. “Are the facts consistent with that theory?”