Mean Sisters

by Lindsay Emory

  ‘Oh God,’ Amanda took a shaky breath, clutched her phone so tightly I thought it would break and headed out of the restaurant.

  Through the front window of the tearoom, I saw her talking on the phone, covering her mouth and facing in toward the building. I hoped something wasn’t wrong with her and Dean, because she looked very intense as she talked to him.

  After about ten minutes, Amanda returned to the table and pushed back her plate, which was fine because I had finished my meal while she was taking her call. ‘Everything okay?’ I asked, trying to be discreet even though there were definite signs of trouble in paradise.

  Amanda waved her hand around. ‘You know. Men. They’re all the same. Like Officer Hatfield, they take and they don’t want to give.’

  I totally agreed with that statement. But if anyone could convince a man to turn his life around, it would be my big sister. She was a pretty persuasive gal.

  The lunch check was on Delta Beta and Amanda had to hurry to a meeting, so I paid the tab and headed out the door, wondering if I had time to run by the Greek boutique and pick up a new Delta Beta Busy Bee for the Chapter Advisor’s office to replace the one that someone had disposed of so violently. Then a beauty pageant-worthy head of highlights stepped in front of me. This time, I recognised her, even without the pale pink and bright orange.

  ‘Ainsley St. John,’ I said, wanting so badly to add ‘I presume’ but feeling that would be a little over the top. ‘Sorry I confused you the other day for your sister.’

  ‘You’re the new Debbie Advisor, right?’ she asked, ignoring my apology and using the nickname that Moos used for us: Debbies, short for Little Debbies, implying that we ate the trans-fat, high-calorie snack cake all the time.

  ‘I’m the pro tem Delta Beta Advisor,’ I corrected her. ‘Can I help you?’

  She pressed a plain white envelope into my hand. ‘There’s a perverted Debbie phone sex orgy going on and it needs to stop or I’m going to bring the whole Debbie circus down.’

  I’m sure my face contained a whole lot of what the hell? ‘And what do you know about it?’

  Her mouth twisted as she looked at the envelope currently crunched in my palm. ‘That’s what I know. And I know the Panhellenic Advisor isn’t doing anything. I just saw you having lunch with her. She didn’t tell you, did she?’

  ‘She told me some jealous Try Moo skanks were spreading rumours about my sorority.’ My insulting snappishness was a long-ingrained reflex even though I knew the phone sex operation wasn’t just a rumour. Still, I didn’t like that a Tri Mu knew about it. If Ainsley St. John knew about it, this was dangerously close to being public knowledge and that would definitely be a lasting mark on the unsullied Deb reputation. Panic started creeping in.

  Ainsley’s face was bitter and the resolve I saw there scared me big time. This girl meant what she said. She was going to blow this whole thing up. The sad thing was she and I both wanted the same thing – to bring down the phone sex ring. But how could I work with a Tri Mu?

  I decided to give it my best shot. ‘Believe me, if this is true, I don’t want this thing to exist.’

  That got Ainsley’s attention. I held up my fist with the envelope. ‘Is this going to help or hurt people?’

  Now her resolve was mixed with anger. ‘Both,’ she said between a clenched jaw.

  I sighed. It wasn’t necessarily the answer I wanted to hear.

  *

  Chapter meeting came and went in a blur. I could barely pay attention to the announcements and the debates and my usual copious and detailed notes tonight consisted of numbers and letters that I haphazardly scribbled down as my subconscious tried to work through all the details and detours I had been presented with in the past few days. Part of my difficulty was that I just didn’t want to believe that any of this was true: that Liza had led a double life; that my beloved sorority was in danger of having its reputation shredded and thrown under an eighteen wheeler; that Amanda may have lied to me. That was the hardest part to accept. After my talk with Ainsley, I had come back to the house and looked at her envelope, immediately recognising her evidence for what it was – proof that tied Liza to the phone sex site. If Ainsley had showed this to Amanda, then why hadn’t Amanda done something to save Delta Beta from its own Chapter Advisor? And why had she told me it was just a rumour?

  I hadn’t had time to figure it all out or make peace with it, with the demands of the chapter meeting, setting up the ritual items and dealing with last-minute agenda additions. After the chapter meeting, Casey was coming to the house and we’d go over everything, step by step. Casey would help me make sense of things. He’d make me smile. He’d make me feel better.

  The closing ritual was about to start and the energy in the air shifted as the ladies reached for each other’s hands. It was in this very circle, a week ago, that Liza had dropped dead. Around the room, the memory was sketched on faces, in lines that no college student should have. The thought made me angry that someone had done this to us, that we should have such a happy moment that celebrated friendship and loyalty and sisterhood forever marred by a senseless act of violence.

  The time was now, for a Chapter Advisor to speak up, to share inspirational words, perhaps a quotation from Leticia Baumgardner. But the words got stuck in my throat, raw and splintered. Around the room, fifty hands formed a circle with their thumbs and forefingers. Fifty mouths said words that generations had recited solemnly. Then, fifty sets of eyes gazed in horror as the door to the chapter room was wrenched open in the middle of a ritual and a man in uniform strode in.

  ‘Lieutenant Hatfield!’ I yelled as the room dissolved into chaos. Ty barely shot me a glance as he marched to the front of the room with his hands held high. In one hand was a piece of paper.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  With just a slightly raised, deep voice, Ty had the chapter’s attention. He held up a folded piece of paper. ‘I’m Lieutenant Hatfield, from the Sutton PD. We’re looking for Stefanie Grossman.’

  The chapter room immediately erupted into whispers and exclamations. In the next moment I was at Ty’s side, yanking down on that lifted arm. ‘What do you want with her?’ I demanded. The room went quiet at my voice. It seemed the rest of the chapter wanted to know as well.

  ‘I have a warrant for her arrest for the murder of Liza McCarthy.’ I closed my eyes as the room exploded, biting back several very un-Deb-like profanities.

  Ty looked at the room again. ‘If anyone has any information as to her whereabouts, you are legally required to inform the police.’ Then he met my eyes. ‘I’ll be waiting out front if you’d like to speak with me.’ And then, like he hadn’t just done the equivalent of unveiling a transgender stripper in the middle of the First Baptist Sunday morning service, he marched himself right out of the chapter room.

  Forty minutes later, I had calmed almost everything and everyone down. There were girls crying. Some were freaking out, some were calling their mothers. Everyone wanted to know where Stefanie was and why the police wanted her. In the chaos, I saw Aubrey giving Callie the evil eye from across the room. It was clear Aubrey was still loyal to Stefanie, but she had to know that Callie writing Stefanie up on S&M matters wasn’t why the police had issued a warrant for Stefanie’s arrest. At least, I hoped it wasn’t.

  Still, I wasn’t quite clear why Stefanie was suddenly the number one suspect in Liza’s murder. When I could, I made my way to the front yard to see if Ty Hatfield was still available to answer a few questions.

  He was sitting in the bench swing that hung from a huge oak branch, the swing on which each pledge class affixed a small brass plaque. After all the years, the back of the bench glittered with reptilian brass scales, catching in the sunlight or the moonlight, sparkling on clear nights like tonight.

  I walked slowly towards him, wrapping my arms around myself, chilled from the cool October evening. ‘Lieutenant,’ I said when I got closer.

  ‘Ms Blythe,’ he said slowly.

  ‘Why ar
en’t you out there, looking for Liza McCarthy’s killer?’ I was surprised at the bitterness in my voice.

  ‘We can’t find her. That’s why I came here, to see if any of your sisters had any information.’ The way he said, ‘your sisters’ made me uncomfortable. Like I was responsible for anyone who was hiding Stefanie someplace.

  I hesitated for a moment. ‘Stefanie was supposed to come to a standards hearing on Saturday. She never showed. From what the girls told me, she stopped coming to chapter events after she was told she was being written up. She even stopped returning calls. No one’s seen her.’

  Ty nodded, a single head bob. ‘I’ll need you – and whomever you’ve been talking to – to come down to the station tomorrow to give those statements.’

  ‘Tomorrow’s Liza’s memorial service.’

  ‘After that. I’ll give you a ride.’

  ‘You’ll be there?’ I was surprised. I didn’t think he knew Liza.

  Ty smiled, a bland expression that didn’t reach his eyes. Oh, of course. The killers always came to the victim’s funeral. At least they did on TV. Maybe they did in real life, too, and Ty was hoping to catch a murderer.

  We stayed silent for a long moment as Ty continued rocking on the swing, the creak of the chains hanging in the air, the moonlight turning his dark blond hair as shiny as the pledge class plaques.

  ‘How do you know it was her?’ I couldn’t contain my curiosity.

  Now it was Ty’s turn to hesitate. Then he seemed to decide something. ‘She had a personal vendetta against Liza. The only thing taken from the Chapter Advisor’s desk was her file. Seems she wanted to keep something quiet.’

  I crinkled my nose. Her giving a BJ to her BF in a bathroom hadn’t stayed under wraps. ‘But we went ahead with her standards hearing,’ I said. ‘It didn’t stop us.’

  Ty’s head sliced through the air. ‘Not that. She was one of Liza’s girls.’

  I gasped. It was my worst fear, the one that I hadn’t even spoken in my head, let alone out loud. Learning everything I had about Liza, I was still praying, hoping against hope, that Liza hadn’t violated the sacred Chapter Advisor trust and recruited her phone sex-ers from the chapter. It looked like my prayer hadn’t been answered. I sank onto the swing next to Ty, feeling that my legs weren’t all that trustworthy at the moment.

  ‘Were there … others?’ I asked, barely able to make the words audible.

  ‘We had an anonymous tip,’ Ty responded quietly, almost gently. ‘We’re trying to confirm that now.’

  ‘Did the tip come in a white envelope?’ I couldn’t look at him. When he said yes, I stood and walked back into the house without looking back, knowing he was watching me the whole time.

  *

  Casey held the white envelope in one hand and the notebook paper in his other. The piece of paper had been torn out of an ordinary college-ruled notebook, the perforations and holes all jagged on the left side.

  ‘I don’t get it,’ Casey said.

  ‘These are phone numbers.’ I pointed at the sheet. Then I pointed at his laptop screen. ‘They’re the same. The records on the computer were a phone log, with how many minutes were charged, the total amount and then …’ I moved my finger across the spreadsheet to the smaller columns with the dollar signs. ‘The disbursements. Presumably one to Liza, one to the … operator.’

  Casey peered at the screen. ‘But there are three disbursement columns.’

  ‘Taxes? I don’t know,’ I said in exasperation. I was trying to put all this together with limited information. ‘But this is independent verification that Liza was behind the phone sex site.’

  Casey frowned at the paper and the laptop screen in succession. ‘How did Ainsley get the phone numbers of the johns?’

  ‘I didn’t get that part either, until the police showed up in chapter meeting tonight.’

  I told Casey the shocking story of the police barging into chapter meeting. Casey was scandalised. ‘I’ve never even been in a chapter meeting!’

  ‘Ty confirmed that they got an anonymous tip that Stefanie was the murderer. I think Ainsley must be friends with Stefanie and that’s how she found out about the phone sex and the johns. She’s now threatening to expose the Delta Beta sex workers.’ Casey and I shivered. I wasn’t sure even Casey’s public relations expertise was going to save Delta Beta now.

  ‘You’ve got to give this to the police,’ Casey said after a long minute. ‘It’s evidence.’

  ‘He probably already has it.’ I couldn’t imagine that Ty wouldn’t have kept a copy of the data found on the computer.

  Casey didn’t seem convinced. ‘This is serious, Margot. This isn’t just Liza we’re talking about anymore. If Stefanie Grossman is out there, at large, other people could be at risk.’

  ‘Are you saying–?’

  ‘Yes.’ Casey looked dead serious. ‘If she had a bone to pick with Liza, who knows who else she’s out to get? The customers? The other operators?’

  An icy sliver of dread shot down my spine. ‘I can’t let that happen.’

  ‘But we don’t know who the other operators are. Unless Liza left other random spreadsheets around.’

  I remembered looking through the computer’s drives. It hadn’t held anything but these spreadsheets. But then I remembered something. I jumped up and ran to the bed where I had left the pair of jeans I had worn that day. I tore them off the bed, patting them furiously, jamming my hands in the pockets. But there were only four pockets and they weren’t that deep. It didn’t matter how long I held those pants, there was no address book hidden in them.

  ‘CRAP!’ I yelled. I fell to the floor, got flat on my belly and searched under the bed. No book. I tore the sheets and quilt back from the bed. No sign of anything book-related.

  ‘Margot?’ Casey joined me in the room. ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘There was a book!’ I yelled, ramming my hands through my hair in desperation. ‘I found a book in Liza’s desk. It looked like an address book. This big, plain black.’ I held out my hands to illustrate its size. ‘I thought it would have names of her friends, her family, but it was gibberish, just phone numbers and coded names.’ There weren’t any other places it could have gone and I knew I’d left it in the pocket of those jeans. ‘It’s gone,’ I said, hysteria rising. ‘It’s gone and it’s all over.’

  I ran to the desk where I’d put my chapter notes after the evening’s commotion had died down. My scribblings during chapter meeting were all I had left of the only evidence Liza McCarthy had left behind.

  In desperation, I ran to the Chapter Advisor’s office, on the slight chance that my brain had stopped working and the address book hadn’t actually made it into my back pocket. Believe me, stranger things had happened in my brain.

  When I turned left into the kitchen hall, I came face to face with Callie, her hair and makeup all smudged. I couldn’t just run by her. That would’ve been rude.

  ‘Callie?’ She looked as surprised to see me as I was to see her. ‘Why aren’t you with the chapter at the froyo shop?’ I had given Aubrey my Delta Beta credit card and told her to buy the chapter frozen yogurt. Fat free frozen treats seemed the best way to get everyone in a better mood after hearing that their sorority sister was being charged with murder.

  ‘I …’ She faltered and looked over my shoulder at Casey, who was following me, albeit at a more measured pace. Her eyes widened and her assumption was clear in her face.

  ‘This is Casey. He’s my friend from headquarters,’ I said, but I mouthed ‘GAY’ really big at her. Hopefully, Casey would forgive me for calling him just a ‘friend.’

  ‘OH!’ A mix of shock and wonder and a little bit of guilt from assuming the worst about me washed over her cute little dimples. ‘Nice to meet you,’ she said with perfect manners. Mary Gerald Callahan would be so proud.

  ‘Are you feeling okay?’ I asked, still noting that she looked a little rough around the edges.

  She patted her hair self-consciously. ‘Tonig
ht was a little … overwhelming.’ I nodded in sympathy.

  ‘Go to bed, Callie, you’ll feel better in the morning. It’s Liza’s funeral.’ That hadn’t come out like I wanted.

  She left and Casey and I continued to the office, unlocking the door.

  ‘ARE YOU FREAKING KIDDING ME?!’ I yelled.

  Everything had been knocked off the desk. And I had just cleaned this place up.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  This is the part where I started to cry. Huge, ugly, uncontrollable sobs. No, not because of the mess in the Chapter Advisor office. That had pissed me off and I hadn’t found the address book besides.

  No, the tears came at Liza McCarthy’s memorial service. I hadn’t even known her. Heck, I wasn’t even sure I liked her at this point. But there’s nothing like a Delta Beta funeral. Thankfully, so far, the only Deb funerals I’d gone to were of older women, former executive officers at headquarters who had devoted seventy years of their lives to the advancement of our sisterhood. Those were emotional, of course. All funerals were sad, made you reflect on the meaning of life, blah blah blah.

  Liza McCarthy’s memorial service was a whole other story. Casey had arranged everything to perfection. At the Mathias Farmer Memorial Chapel on campus, masses of yellow roses plummeted around the sides of a huge portrait of Liza. He’d gotten her pledge portrait from her chapter in Cincinnati and blown it up to three by four feet. At eighteen, Liza had been radiant, her fresh face full of promise and really excellently applied eyeliner. When the picture was this size, I couldn’t help but notice. More roses were gathered in vases around the chapel, wrapped in gold and black ribbon. Another arrangement, featuring roses in the shape of a Delta and a Beta had been sent from headquarters. They were really going to regret that once I got back and gave them the full report on the phone sex that Liza had been involved in. Or when they read about Stefanie Grossman’s trial in the news. Whichever came first.