Bernadette and I fanned out, covering the room counter and clockwise, gathering as much information as we could. Who had seen something. Heard something. One of our pledges told me it was a burglary and we should check to see if the television was missing. Another insisted we’d been shot at by the Soviets, that the country was going to war. “I don’t think that’s what’s going on,” I said, giving her knee a little squeeze.
Bernadette and I huddled up to compare notes. Even in the mornings, in her bathrobe and single hair curler, she carefully margined her lips in glossy cherry lipstick. It was startling to see her pale mouth, and I could tell she was self-conscious to be without her signature color. She kept chewing on her bottom lip, flushing it momentarily with bright blood. She was still wearing the beaded blouse she’d started the night in. This turned out to be a crucial detail.
“I couldn’t get this off,” Bernadette said, indicating the button on her beaded blouse. I leaned in, pinching the fabric between my thumb and pointer finger. The crystal appliqué had gotten tangled in the buttonhole. “I knocked on Robbie’s door for help. She has those fabric scissors.” Robbie was a fashion merchandising major. “I remember her groaning that it was three in the morning. And I looked at her clock because I knew she was exaggerating. And I said it’s two thirty-five, Robbie. And she said do you want my help or not?” Bernadette exhaled, incredulous. “When did this happen? How did I not hear anything? She was fine. When I left. She was fine.”
“We’ll go see her at the hospital as soon as they let us out of here,” I promised her. Everything I promised that morning seemed possible now that I’d had the chance to conduct reconnaissance. A stranger had come into The House, likely to steal from us, and he’d encountered some of the girls and panicked. Home invasions were not an uncommon event. No one had intended us harm, and though Jill and Eileen had been bruised and bloodied, it was one of those things that looked worse than it was. Like when you nick the back of your ankle in the shower and it gushes with the force of a main artery. It had to be like that; otherwise, like Bernadette had just pointed out, we would have heard something. I dusted my hands on my thighs, my concerns allayed for the time being.
It felt like we were in that room for hours, but it couldn’t have been more than twenty or thirty minutes because the birds hadn’t started up yet when a new officer opened the door. We’d fallen into a listless stupor, but the moment an outsider entered the room, everyone wiped their faces and sat at attention. We were used to gathering for meetings and announcements, and the officer seemed unprepared to have the floor so unanimously ceded. He stalled out for a long moment with something like stage fright.
“Do you have any news?” I prompted. He nodded at me, grateful for the reminder of what he was doing here. He was broad and barrel-chested, a local boy with a badge, but his voice didn’t carry. We had to lean in to make out what he was saying.
“There’s a lot of people on the second floor now, and they’re gonna be here awhile. We’re gonna move you downstairs.”
I raised my hand, not to be called on but to announce that I was going to speak. That was how it worked in chapter too. If you had something to say, you signaled, but no one called on you. This wasn’t class and we weren’t students here. I was always saying that we were associates running the business of The House. “What’s happening with the other girls?” I asked. “How are they doing?”
“The girls are at Tallahassee Memorial.”
“All of them?”
He nodded, his face shiny and sincere.
The relief was stabilizing, not just because it was the answer I wanted but because it was an answer. In the month of uncertainty that was to follow, what I wanted, what we all wanted, was clarity. What had happened? Who had done it? What did we do now?
“When can we call our parents and let them know what’s going on?” I asked.
The officer swished his mouth to the side, thinking. “Maybe an hour? That’s about how long it’ll take to fingerprint a group this size.”
The girls broke ranks then, their questions and objections unruly but reasonable. I allowed it, figuring everyone had earned a few moments of disorder. I stood and moved into the center of the circle, and everyone shushed one another. “We’re being fingerprinted?” I asked in a calm but concerned spokeswoman’s voice. “Why?”
“Everyone always gets fingerprinted.”
“Who is everyone?” I snapped, losing patience.
“Anyone at a crime scene. Not just assailants.”
“Assailants? Does that mean there were multiple?”
“What? No. Maybe. We don’t know.”
“So you haven’t caught the person who did this?”
“We got a lotta guys out there looking.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose in frustration. “Can everyone at least get back into their rooms to change before we go downstairs?”
“No,” he said. And then, in response to a chorus of complaints about parading around without pants in front of all these men, the officer shrank into himself, retreating, and told us he would give us five minutes to get ourselves together.
“You can all borrow as much as you want from me,” I said. I started for my closet, its contents so desired by the one person who was not there in the room with us, but I stopped at the knock on the door.
A different officer poked his head in this time. “Which one of you saw him?”
I turned. “I did.”
“I need you to come with me right away,” this new officer said.
“Can you take charge while I’m gone?” I asked Bernadette. She nodded, her naked lips pressed together resolutely.
I hurried out, eager to help, to get all this sorted so I could go and see Denise at the hospital and rush back here to tidy up before the alumnae arrived. I could call my boyfriend! Brian jumped at any opportunity to put his freshmen pledges to work, and they would get The House shipshape while the girls showered and dressed. The alumnae would no doubt be shaken when I explained we’d had an incident in the night—an attempted burglary, it seemed—but impressed that the tour still went off without a hitch. I imagined them reporting back to the governing council that the women of the FSU chapter showed extraordinary poise in the face of a harrowing ordeal. I followed the officer downstairs, fevered with hope.
Four a.m.
His nose. Really, it all came down to the nose. It was his most distinctive feature and the easiest to describe for the art major who volunteered to try her hand at that earliest forensic sketch. Straight and sharp, like the beak of some prehistoric killer bird. Thin lips. A small man. In seventeen months, I would relish repeating this description for a courtroom. I’d had about enough of hearing how handsome he was, and no man likes to be called small.
The hat he wore covered his ears and eyebrows. The art student, a sophomore named Cindy Young, struggled with the hat, taking the gray eraser to the page twice. The first try made him look like he was wearing a bathing cap, the second a helmet. “I’m usually better than this,” she said, sweat on her furrowed brow. Like me, like all of us under that roof, she was a perfectionist whose hand was too shaky to meet her own exacting expectations.