I drew an X through the box for property damage and paused, tapping the bulbous end of my ballpoint pen against my lips. “Do you think I can also check off the relocation assistance? It says sexual battery, but we are out of pocket for everyone who flew home and stayed at hotels.”
Brian scrunched up his face. “To be safe, I’d say no. You don’t want to give them a reason to deny you.”
My pen was tracing a phantom check mark, just above the page. “True,” I wavered.
“I mean, no one was raped, right?”
“Right,” I said quickly. “But I think it can also apply if there was, like, a sexual nature to the crime.”
“But there wasn’t really that either.”
I saw Denise’s underwear on the floor. “Right,” I said again. I left the box unchecked.
A car sped past, the driver cheerfully slapping the horn. Brian raised his hand in the rearview mirror. “Steve,” he told me. Steve was one of his fraternity brothers, presumably on the way to the funeral too. “That was his car in the ranger’s lot.”
I nodded, signing the form with a flourish, not really listening.
“He said Roger tried to come with him this morning.”
That I heard. “Are you for real?”
Brian grimaced. Afraid so. Upon the revelation of Roger’s troubled past in the papers, FSU had expelled him, and his fraternity brothers had packed up his things and left them on the curb. Though Roger had been questioned for close to forty-eight hours, Sheriff Cruso had no choice but to release him. There wasn’t any evidence to keep him behind bars. I’d heard he’d gone to stay with a cousin in Pensacola for the time being.
“You don’t think he’d just show up, do you?” I chewed my lip, thinking how awful it would be for the Andoras if there was a scene. Thinking how awful it would be for Bernadette.
“Honestly?” Brian ducked away from me as I went to smooth down a flyaway in his hair. I’d asked him to trim it for the funeral, to which he’d said, How about we meet in the middle? Which meant combing it off his face. “He just might. He’s taken all this really hard. Losing Denise.”
“Mmm,” I murmured neutrally. I didn’t feel like arguing with Brian, but I was about to see Mr. and Mrs. Andora for the first time since they’d lost their only daughter. The people who weren’t just taking this hard but couldn’t take it at all. Who had shattered.
“I know he lied,” Brian said. “I know he’s done a lot of bad things, and maybe he even did this, but I can’t help feeling sorry for the guy.”
“Brian,” I said, appalled.
“I can’t help it, Pamela!”
I didn’t care that Brian felt bad for Roger. I felt bad for everyone, always, especially the people who had done something they should feel bad about but for some reason didn’t.
What I did care about was Brian still thinking there was a possibility Roger had done this. That I was confused about whom I’d seen at the front door. “Roger has done a lot of bad things, and you don’t even know the half of it,” I said sharply, “but this, he didn’t do.”
“Agree to disagree,” Brian said with a shrug, as though we were arguing over the ref’s polarizing call at last weekend’s Super Bowl that allowed the Cowboys to take home the win.
* * *
Denise’s home in Jacksonville was pale yellow with upper and lower wraparound porches and a short fat palm tree in the front yard still strung with Christmas lights.
“I’ll wait for you in the car,” Brian said when he saw those lights. They’d knocked the wind out of me too. Mrs. Andora took great pride in appearances, and yet she hadn’t had the energy to take down the Christmas lights before one hundred people showed up at her house that day.
Inside, Denise was everywhere. Her parents had her sit for professional photographs before the school year started, every August since kindergarten. Denise and I used to laugh about how she’d be hobbling into a Sears portrait studio with a cane when she was ninety years old, but instead she died decades before she could count her first gray hair.
Denise’s aunt Trish put me to work for the next few hours, vacuuming the curtains, moving every chair in the house into the living room, salting a fruit salad, something I had no idea anyone did before I went to school in the South. She appeared here and there to tell me what I was doing wrong and what I needed to do next. Every time I heard her footsteps, I held my breath, thinking it was Mrs. Andora. But I spent all morning in the pretty yellow house, mopping and mixing, and the only evidence that Mrs. Andora was even under the same roof was the blast of the hair dryer upstairs. I remember thinking if Mrs. Andora had the strength to blow-dry her hair, I had no excuse not to get out of bed that morning.
The phone rang and Aunt Trish answered. “Andora residence.” She held out a canister and gestured for me to keep salting the cantaloupe in her stead. “No, this is not she. May I ask who is calling?”
I went to take the canister but found that Aunt Trish’s knuckles had calcified around it. We stood there, awkwardly holding the tube of table salt like some kind of baton, while Aunt Trish spoke to the person on the other end of the phone in a pleasant tone she never used with me. “If you call here again,” Aunt Trish said through her country-club smile, “I will have you arrested. Goodbye, now.” She swung the phone at the receiver, but at the very last minute caught herself, placing it into the cradle with a trembling delicacy.
I was dying to ask who that was, what that was all about, but I knew Aunt Trish well enough to know she would only tell me to mind my own business.
“Was it him?”
Aunt Trish and I reached for one another at the sound of Mrs. Andora’s voice, at the state of her in the doorway of the kitchen. She had always been thin, but on the morning of Denise’s funeral, she was skeletal. Her skin was gray and loose, and a dirty bra strap hung limply off her shoulder.
Aunt Trish arranged her expression into one of pure capability. “He won’t be calling here again.” She went over and tucked Mrs. Andora’s undergarments back into her clothing.
“Did you read it?” Mrs. Andora was looking at me over her sister-in-law’s shoulder with provoked animal eyes.
I nodded, petrified. Sheriff Cruso’s interview had been devastating.
“We think the killer planned the attack, picking Denise Andora as his first victim, and keeping her under his surveillance,” he’d told the reporter at the Tampa Bay Times. “The design of the sorority house on Seminole Street, where four of the five victims lived, allows an observer to learn which room a girl lives in. Each second-story room has a large window. Any person watching the girls enter the house at night could see the lights in the room come on a few seconds later.”
When asked why he thought Denise had been targeted, Sheriff Cruso had reportedly run a hand down his face. “I hate to make the Andora family feel bad,” he’d answered, “but Denise knew a lot of people. We think it was probably someone known to her, and the other girls were collateral damage.”
Denise knew a lot of people. The polite language was what gave the appearance of impropriety. Denise was gorgeous and got asked out a lot, and she knew how to enjoy sex, which was a quality I admire about her to this day. It was the dancing around the truth that made it seem like she had something to be ashamed of, that gave others license to blame, and you better believe they used it.
“Remember,” Aunt Trish said, patting Mrs. Andora’s bare upper arm, “we are setting the record straight today.”
“Can I help?” I asked.
Aunt Trish glanced at Mrs. Andora, who nodded. “There’s a reporter from the Tallahassee Democrat doing a piece about Denise,” began Aunt Trish. “We’ve invited him back to the house after the burial. He’s looking forward to speaking to you about Denise. Who she really was, from her best friend and the president of the smartest sorority on campus.”
I clasped my hands at my pelvis and said with regret, “I was told not to speak to the press.”
“Who told you that?” Aunt Trish laughed brashly. Whomever had said such a thing was sorely mistaken.
“An alumna. Her name is—”
“You’re the president. I thought you decided.”