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

“No,” Bolt cut in. “The blindfold and the scattered M&M’s were attempts to frame Pi Alpha by making Maggie’s murder look like an initiation gone wrong. But Pi Alpha’s pledges do not go to Petite Falls. They meet their customers, then come back here with the candies they collected during the week. Yesterday, we saw a bowl filled with eight hundred blue M&M’s, deposited by the other four pledges when they returned safely after their probationary trysts. Maggie, sadly, did not survive her first assignment.”

“I don’t believe it.” Dean Collard shook his head. “That any Culbert College sorority or fraternity could indulge in such behavior. Impossible!”

“Is it?” Bolt asked. “You said that in the past Culbert sororities and fraternities indulged in disgraceful practices. You hinted at one of them when you spoke of decadence and

exploitation; you said some initiations involved women who weren’t exactly nice young women, who were willing enough. Just who were these not exactly nice young women, and what were they willing enough to do?”

“Oh good heavens!” Now, the dean blushed. “Well, it was before my time. But apparently, when some fraternity pledges hadn’t — well, if they were still, well, innocents — well, the senior members would find women willing to, well, initiate them.”

“And what senior member would be assigned the task of finding willing women to perform this initiation?” Bolt asked. “The entertainment chairman?”

I expected Fletcher to jump up and deny it. But it was Pamela who jumped. “Stop that!” she cried, draping an arm around Fletcher’s shoulders. He sat hunched in his chair, staring at the floor, as if trying to decipher a message woven into the rug. “Fletcher,” Pamela declared, “would never do that. He didn’t even want to go to his dumb old fraternity party. He spent most of Saturday night with me.”

“He did,” Bolt agreed. “And, charming as you are, it’s odd that on the night of a major party he’d seek you out at the library — the sign on your door told him where to find you — and take you to a movie. Perhaps he needed an alibi, as well as time to compose himself — and his story — before facing his fraternity brothers to explain why he’d failed to provide the promised entertainment.”

“That’s just, like, dumb!” she insisted. “Fletcher, tell him!”

At last, Fletcher looked up. Deliberately, he removed Pamela’s hand from his shoulder. “I’m not saying anything until I call my father’s lawyer. This guy doesn’t have proof. He just gets a kick out of slandering me in front of all these people.”

“I’m sure that upsets you,” Bolt said evenly. “I know you care deeply about what people think. When you spoke of your feelings for Maggie, it was important to you that everyone liked her. But then she dropped you. That hurt your pride, didn’t it?”

Fletcher shrugged. “No big deal. I never liked her all that much anyhow.”

“I think you did.” Slowly, Bolt opened the evidence envelope. “I think we have proof that, long after she broke up with you, you kept a gift she’d given you. We’ll come back to that. Miss Fenz said she screened replies to the Web site and never responded to mail from campus addresses. But your family lives in town; you must have an e-mail address at home. That’s why, when given the task of finding someone to initiate your less experienced pledges, you could make an appointment with one of the young women pictured on the Blue Elegance Web site. It’s no wonder you found her attractive. And it’s no wonder your pride was hurt more deeply than ever when you saw your former girlfriend standing at the designated meeting place, holding a copy of the Atlantic and a blue carnation. Were you infuriated, Mr. Cantrell?”

Fletcher just sat there rigidly, his mouth twitching between a grin and a snarl.

Bolt gazed at him, then nodded. “Probably not. It takes your fury a while to build, I see. And probably, at first, you just felt stunned. Maggie must have felt stunned too, but when you opened your car door, she got in. She trusted you, and she had a job to do. If her first customer was her old boyfriend, that made it easier. So you drove to Petite Falls, thinking it would be deserted at that time of night. You’d brought a bottle of Merlot — had you planned to ply the girl from Blue Elegance with wine, to get her to agree to initiate several bashful pledges? Did you try to dissuade her from continuing down the disgraceful path she’d chosen?”

Fletcher barely shook his head, barely opened his lips. “None of that happened.”