Ellen Graham was wearing the same hot pink bathrobe she’d been wearing earlier that day—although she seemed to have tidied the house a little, perhaps because she’d had some warning this time that Shelly was on her way. The piles of catalogs and envelopes that had been lying on the stairs were now stacked in a few loose piles by the front door. The white cat was lying in a pale patch of porch light that was somehow shining through a crack in the closed curtain. Eerily this cat looked a little like the kind of cat who would have avoided sunlight, anyway, in favor of this reflected winter light. Shelly felt a stab of longing, of grief, for Jeremy, poor Jeremy, who had so loved to bask in a pool of sunlight on the bed or on the kitchen floor.
“Sit down,” Ellen said, and motioned Shelly to the couch. “I’m glad you came back. I thought about you all day. I wondered if you’d had any ideas since you left, since our talk. Ideas about my daughter, where—”
“Again,” Shelly said, shaking her head a little, “I don’t want to mislead you, Ellen. I have no proof of anything. But I have had some more thoughts.”
“You look terrible,” Ellen said. “Has something happened?”
Not now, Shelly thought. She could not tell anyone, now, about Jeremy. That would have to wait. Instead, she said, “After I left here I went home, got on Google, and then I found the boy, the one who was in the accident with Nicole Werner. I went to his apartment, and we talked. There was a professor there, and another student who also knew Nicole. They’re—”
Shelly stopped herself before saying that they had gone to Nicole Werner’s hometown to speak to the mortician who’d buried her because of a suspicion that it might not be Nicole in that grave. Shelly knew that if she were Denise Graham’s mother, she would have known instantly what that meant. She took a deep breath and said carefully, “I believe you might be the only one who can institute any further investigation. I’m not saying that it might even lead us to—”
“Finding Denise.” Ellen nodded. Her eyes looked somehow clearer tonight. Her feet were still bare, and that struck Shelly as the saddest thing of all. It was so cold out, and even in the house, where the thermostat must have been turned up to eighty degrees, the floors were cold. She tried to look away from the feet, but she couldn’t. She thought of Death of a Salesman. Willy Loman. Attention must be paid.
The toenails were clipped neatly, but the toes looked gnarled, red—the toes of a woman who had, until recently, worn high heels every day of her life. Ellen Graham had been a woman who, proud of her long, slim legs, had probably worn knee-length skirts, too, and silk hose, just to go to the grocery store.
“As I told you,” Shelly said, looking from the sad feet to the face, so bright with hope, “I worked at the Chamber Music Society at the university until recently. What I didn’t exactly explain earlier today was that my work-study student this year was Josie Reilly—”
Ellen inhaled, as if willing herself not to scream at the sound of that name.
“Yes. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before, but it’s complicated by so many things.”
Ellen nodded, but her jaw was working on her anger. God help Josie if she ever crossed this woman’s path again, Shelly thought, not without some satisfaction. Eventually, she knew, she would have to tell Ellen the whole, sordid story, but it wouldn’t help either of them now, and might end with Shelly thrown out the front door and into the snow, having accomplished nothing at all.
Instead, Shelly started by telling Ellen what Josie had told her about the coffin, about the Spring Event. The hyperventilation. The EMT kept on hand for emergencies.
Ellen listened without seeming to be breathing.
She had, of course, like so many other mothers, assumed that the Spring Event was a party, a dance, a princess ball. There would be decorations, and hors d’oeuvres, and pretty dresses, and maybe a bit too much champagne, ending in giggling, and dancing around the OTT house in stocking feet.
Even after all that had happened, Ellen had not yet begun to suspect that this image might be entirely wrong.
“Were you ever in a sorority, Ellen?” Shelly asked.
Ellen Graham shook her head. “I didn’t go to college,” she said. “I married my husband right out of high school, and I worked as a secretary until he finished his MBA. And then I had Denise.”
Shelly nodded. “Well, I was,” she said. “It was over two decades ago, but some things are the same. Hazing, and—”
“Hazing is illegal,” Ellen said. “We would never have allowed Denise to join a sorority if we thought—”
“I know,” Shelly said. “But it happens. And being illegal has made it even more dangerous, even more secretive.” She went on to tell Ellen Graham, who held a hand to her mouth now as Shelly spoke, what she knew about the Pan-Hellenic Society and the pressures that could be put to bear by it on a university—a public university, the funding of which was dependent on the goodwill of the taxpayers, which its administrators understood so well.
“I questioned,” Shelly said, “how someone like Josie Reilly had come to get one of the work-study positions generally reserved for students who pay their own tuition and who come from fairly disadvantaged backgrounds. As it happens, the music school dean’s wife was an Omega Theta Tau sister of Josie’s mother. It took only a little bit of research to find out that the two of them are still very involved in the chapter. They would have a vested interest in preventing any scandal related to, say, hazing.”
“But what does this have to do with my daughter?” Ellen asked. From the change in her posture, the rigid backbone, Shelly suspected she already knew.
“I was at the scene of the accident,” Shelly said. She held her palms open, hands resting on her knees in a gesture she’d been taught to make by her mother when beseeching God to take care of her brother in Vietnam, and which she’d never made again after he died.
She looked down at her open hands then and said to them, “Nicole Werner wasn’t visibly injured. She sustained injury, certainly, since she was thrown from the vehicle. She might have sustained terrible, life-threatening internal injuries, but Nicole Werner was not—”
“Beyond recognition.”
Shelly could not look up from her hands until long after she’d nodded and Ellen Graham had already spoken again:
“But that boy,” she said, “the one who was drunk, why wouldn’t he have said something if—?”
“If there was someone else with them?”
Ellen nodded this time, boring her eyes deeply into Shelly’s, and Shelly felt an incredible wave of wild energy and bravery emanating from her.
To sit so completely still, with her poor feet pressed together, chapped hands folded sadly in her lap, waiting for Shelly’s answer.
“As I said, I spoke to him. Today. Finally. I don’t know what took me so long to go looking for him. He doesn’t remember anything.”
“But of course that’s what he’d say. They could have put him in jail for years for what he did.”
“Yes,” Shelly said. “I’m a suspicious woman, too, Ellen. I feel I have good radar for liars, cheats, cons—but I don’t think he’s one. He doesn’t remember. He truly does not know. Or he only peripherally knows. Something happened to him.”
Shelly went on then to tell Ellen Graham what Josie had told her about the ritual. The tequila, the hyperventilation, the coffin, the girl who would be “raised from the dead.” Reborn as an OTT sister. They kept a paramedic on hand. They knew what could happen. Wasn’t it possible, Shelly asked, that sometimes the girl did not come back, that the ritual might—?
“Kill a girl.” Ellen Graham did not nod this time. She closed her eyes.
“Yes,” Shelly said, trying to speak quietly. “And you can imagine the scandal for the sorority, the Pan-Hellenic Society, the university, and the lengths they might go to cover it up. Isn’t it possible that an accident might be—?”
“Staged?”
“Staged, or made to happen. Created? Devised?”
Ellen Graham opened her eyes now and looked from Shelly to the ceiling.
“Ellen, I was there,” Shelly said. “That boy swerved to avoid something, but only seconds later what he’d swerved to avoid wasn’t there. And the girl they say was killed, injured beyond recognition, burned with the car, I saw her. I would recognize her anywhere. She wasn’t dead. There was no fire.”
“Why are you telling me?” Ellen said, standing up, heading toward a buffet that sprawled in all its shining oaken splendor from one wall of the living room to the other. She yanked open a drawer by a flimsy brass handle and pulled out a pack of Marlborough lights. Her hand was shaking as she put a cigarette between her lips, but she didn’t light it. She turned back to Shelly, eyes blinking and blazing at the same time. “Why did you come here? You know so much. Why haven’t you told someone who can do something?”
“I’ve tried,” Shelly said. “I called the papers, I called the police, I waited for the police to call me, but—”
“Now what?” Ellen asked, tossing the cigarette back into the drawer with the pack, and heading back to the couch, but not sitting down. “You think that was my daughter then, don’t you, in the backseat of that car? Maybe she was already dead? Maybe they set it on fire? Maybe they buried my baby up there instead of this Nicole Werner girl? I’m sorry. I see what this means, what you’re saying about what you saw, except, if it was, if you’re right, where in the fucking hell is Nicole Werner now?”
Shelly took a moment before she spoke, before she could even consider speaking.
She tried to think of a way to phrase this thing, which seemed so insane, so that it would not sound insane. Finally, she said, “She’s still there. She’s at the sorority.”
Ellen Graham started to shake her head so quickly, so wildly, that, remembering those earrings Josie had snitched, Shelly imagined Ellen wearing them, her face lacerated by jewels, and Shelly held up a hand to try to stop her from shaking her head so violently. In the calmest voice Shelly could call forth from the depths of her own shaken self, she said, “I can’t prove anything, Ellen, but I believe they would have sheltered her, Nicole. I know now that they—the sorority, the Pan-Hellenic Society, the university—have enough power to drive the only witness to the accident out of town, to involve a dean in doing so, and who knows—”
“How did Josie drive you out of town?”
Now Ellen stopped shaking her head, and Shelly knew she had to tell her. As she spoke the words of the affair with the girl, of the photographs, of the last conversation she’d had with Josie at the Starbucks, Shelly opened her hands again, looking at her palms, and she thought, for no reason she could fathom, of sheep. Sheep with blood on their fleeces, with flies in their eyes. Maggots in their ears, in their anuses. She finished the story and stopped speaking, and then she brought the hands to her eyes. When she looked up again, Ellen was watching Shelly with a kindness that would have knocked Shelly to her knees if she hadn’t been sitting down. It was not compassion, or empathy, or pity. Ellen Graham was simply looking at Shelly as if the story hadn’t surprised her at all.
As if she’d been hearing such stories all her life.
After the silence, Ellen said, in the voice of the very competent secretary Shelly knew she must once have been, “Okay, Shelly. They got rid of you, if your theory’s right. But the boy was a witness, too.”
“Yes,” Shelly said, trying to regain her composure, to echo the all-business tone of Ellen Graham. “Yes, the boy, too,” she said. She nodded. “He doesn’t remember anything. But they are doing things to try to drive him away, too. Postcards. Ghosts.”
Ellen didn’t ask for elaboration. “Just tell me what to do,” she said. “Your story—frankly, Shelly, I hate your story. I hate everything it might mean. I think it’s crazy. But it’s no worse than all the stories I’ve invented in my mind. And you’re the first help we’ve ever had. We’ve gone everywhere, spoken to everyone. The state police, the FBI, the—”
“The FBI,” Shelly said, an idea forming. “Speak to them again. Tell them you believe there’s been a case of mistaken identity, and demand that Nicole Werner be exhumed, examined. I can’t do anything, Ellen. I have no credibility in this at all. But you’re the parent of a girl who disappeared. They might listen to you.”