“Interesting,” Pickell said eventually, because Cruso wasn’t biting. “Remind me the name of your sister who spoke to Robbie Shepherd?”
“Bernadette Daly,” I said, drawing out her name, then spelling it for him too. He wrote it down, then leaned in and muttered something in Sheriff Cruso’s ear, his face turned away from me so I couldn’t read his lips.
Sheriff Cruso nodded grimly at whatever it was Pickell whispered, then said to me, “Thank you, Pamela. That’s all for now. You can go call your parents if you’d like.” He started up the stairs.
“Please use the phone in the kitchen,” Detective Pickell added, following him.
It was clear I was being dismissed, and neither man was going to volunteer any more information about how the injured girls were doing. I’d have to ask. I walked backward so that I could keep Sheriff Cruso and Detective Pickell in my sightline as they ascended the stairs.
“I’ll need to call the parents of the girls who went to the hospital,” I said. “Let them know what happened and how they’re doing. It’s one of the guardian obligations under the oath you take when you become chapter president.” I smiled while I said this, hoping to infuse my words with the peppy brand of helpfulness that I was all too often told I lacked. During my first year in The House, the former chapter president had reprimanded me for how I answered the phone: Hello? instead of Hello! It was the difference between What do you want? and How can I be of service to you today?
Sheriff Cruso was fiddling with the chandelier’s switch on the second floor, strobing the foyer bright and dark, and I don’t know why, but I thought of Studio 54, how Denise was always begging me to take her there, like I had any shot getting past that velvet rope when not even Warren Beatty could.
“What should I tell the parents?” I pressed with a wincing smile. Sorry for being such a pest! My eyes were itchy and dry from the lack of sleep, and if Sheriff Cruso didn’t stop flashing the chandelier, I was afraid I was going to have a seizure.
He spoke without looking at me. “All the girls are at Tallahassee Memorial Hospital, Miss Schumacher.”
Five a.m.
By the time I got to the phone in the kitchen, the number keys on the dial pad were smudged with ink. I added my own prints as I dialed home, brimming with a perverse kind of anticipation. My parents spent a lot of money to neglect me, and I was always fantasizing about something awful happening that would force them to take care of me in ways money cannot.
With each doleful ring, I devised for them a new excuse. It was so early, and they were sound sleepers. Maybe they couldn’t hear the phone because someone in the neighborhood was having work done on their house. On a Sunday. At five a.m. Or maybe they were away. Sometimes they went on trips and assumed the other one would remember to tell me, though there was no precedent for this. We were a family of forgetters.
The answering machine picked up, and I considered leaving the terrible news in a message. But it was so rare to have what I had in my possession—a report of a cataclysmic event that would jump-start their dead parental batteries—that I decided to hold off until I got one of them on the line.
I slammed the phone into the receiver, hard, then picked it up and slammed it down again. Harder. Immediately I regretted it. What if someone had seen me lose my cool? But the industrial-sized kitchen was deserted and hospital-grade clean, which both pleased and agitated me. I’d abandoned those dirty plates in the rec room, where all the action was happening. I wondered if I should make up a reason for the police to come in here, to see that we were not, in fact, a bunch of messy and gum-chewing sorority girls, that we were responsible adults. That if I said it wasn’t Roger at the front door, they could take me at my word.
I opened the sorority’s directory and found the entry for Roberta Shepherd. I wanted to start with someone whose face wasn’t viciously battered, but I didn’t want to start with Denise. I was hoping that by the time I called the other girls’ parents, more information would have come through about how she was doing.
“Shepherd residence,” said a man who sounded like he had a phone on his nightstand, like gravity was pinning his voice to the back of his throat. Robbie’s father.
“Mr. Shepherd?” I said.
He coughed up some morning phlegm. Then, formally, “Speaking.”
I exhaled hard and led with the only thing that mattered to a parent. “First I want to say that Robbie is fine. My name is Pamela Schumacher, and I am the chapter president of The House. I’m calling because there has been an incident. An intruder broke in and some of the girls were hurt. They’ve been taken to Tallahassee Memorial Hospital to be looked at.”
Mr. Shepherd aimed straight from the hip. “Are we talking about rape?”
“No,” I replied, matching his tone, thinking it was some sign of maturity that I could discuss rape without so much as a wobble in my voice. I thought of Denise’s underwear crumpled on the floor, even as I declared, proudly (proudly!), “No one was raped.”
“Let me find a pen,” Mr. Shepherd said.
Mr. Shepherd took down the address of the hospital and thanked me politely for the call. I thought, Well, that wasn’t so bad, and in doing so placed a hex on myself.
Eileen’s mother dropped the phone when I said Eileen had sustained some injuries to her face, and her younger brother picked it up and finished the conversation with me. Jill’s parents demanded angrily that I let them speak to someone in charge. I am in charge, I said just as angrily.
I hung up and counted five deep breaths before punching in the phone number for the Andoras’ home in Jacksonville. I didn’t even need to flip the directory pages to the A’s—I’d had Denise’s number memorized since the first break of freshman year.
It was still early but, like Mr. Shepherd, Mrs. Andora answered on the second ring, even though I knew the Andoras didn’t keep a phone in the bedroom. “Well?” she asked with a heavy sigh, suggesting she had been waiting for this call. “How is she?”
I wondered who had gotten to her first. Maybe the Shepherds. Denise and Robbie were both from Jacksonville. They were a year apart, but surely their parents had crossed paths over the years. “It’s Pamela,” I told her. “She’s at the hospital, but she’s going to be fine.”
There was a long, bargaining pause, as though there was still time to take back what I’d just said. “Who is at the hospital?”
“Denise,” I said, less sure of myself. “They took her a little bit ago.”
“Denise?” Mrs. Andora sputtered. “Why? Why would she be at the hospital?”
“I thought you knew.”
“Knew what?” When all language abandoned me, she repeated herself in a shrill tone that terrified me. “Knew what, Pamela?”
“You asked how she was, like you knew—”
“Knew what? Knew what?” Mrs. Andora was shouting by then. I wanted to tell her to stop, that she would startle the cats. She had four, and they were very skittish.
I came to, clinging to the edge of the counter with both hands, my chin in my chest, the phone spinning on the kitchen floor, wondering how the hell the phone had ended up spinning on the kitchen floor.
I picked it up and asserted bullishly, “There’s been an incident.” I thought that about summed it up, but then I realized Mrs. Andora was no longer listening to me. She had pulled the mouthpiece away and was hollering for Mr. Andora, something about Denise being in a car accident.
“No,” I said, feeling unspeakably tired all of a sudden. I wished I could hang up the phone and walk away from this conversation, from the confusion, have someone else explain it to them as well as to me. Then I wanted to lie down and sleep for a week straight. “Not a car accident. It was a robbery. Maybe. We aren’t sure.”
“A robbery?” Mrs. Andora cried. “What are you saying, Pamela? Why don’t you know? Where are you? Is Denise with you? Can I talk to her? It’s Pamela, Richard. No, Richard. Stop—”