The Last Good Girl (19 page)

A lower drawer held a bunch of student notebooks. Sam said, “Drugs come very small these days.” She took out a notebook and flipped through it. “LSD comes on sheets of paper.” Anna glanced at the pages as Sam flipped. Dylan's handwriting was so neat, it could be its own font. But in the end Sam shook her head. “Just notes from class.”

Sam opened the closet and shone the flashlight in. Something shimmery glinted in the corner. She pulled aside a line of shirts, revealing the floor below. On the closet floor was a soft white pile shot through with silver threads. Sam picked up the fabric, which unspooled and revealed its shape. It was a silvery scarf.

Anna remembered the video of Emily striding away from Dylan. A shimmery scarf had flowed behind the girl like a cape.

It appeared clean; there was no obvious blood or stains. A tag read
URBAN OUTFITTERS.
They would test for DNA and see if Emily's skin cells were present.

A massive boom shook the house. Dust sifted down from the ceiling and landed on Anna's eyelashes. She brushed it away and looked to Sam, who gave her a satisfied smile. “Sounds like they got into the Crypt.” Sam folded the scarf into an evidence bag, and they headed down the stairs.

• • •

The air in the basement smelled of smoke and burnt metal. The metal door to the Crypt was still attached to the wall by industrial hinges, but the doorknob side was now a bubble of twisted metal no longer latched to the frame. Steve pushed his safety goggles back on his head and grinned at Sam.

“You're even better with TNT than dog treats,” Sam said.

“You just have to understand your opponent. Everything has its weakness.”

“Don't tell Steve that my weakness is chocolate-covered strawberries,” Sam said to Anna. “Or maybe do.”

Sam and Steve unholstered their guns and flashlights and pointed them ahead. Sam pulled the mangled door and it swung open with a metallic groan. The Crypt was completely dark inside. Sam shone a flashlight around until the beam landed on a light switch. She flicked it on and the room was illuminated. After a moment, she said, “Clear.”

It was a large basement room with a cement floor angling down to a single drain in the middle. Three walls were drywall painted black, hung with framed artifacts. One wall was stone, apparently part of the foundation. At the front, up on a large marble pedestal, was a mahogany coffin. Steve opened the top of the coffin; the interior was lined with black velvet. It was empty.

Anna walked around the room, taking in the artifacts: a bar tab signed by President Taft, a mast, an Olympic medal in a Lucite box. She recalled the rumor Heide Herrmann had repeated: all the secrets are
below
the Crypt. But how did you get below? There was no obvious break in the wall or floor. Anna knelt down by the drain. It was dank and black, with a faint gurgle coming from deep below. She tried to pry off the grate, but it was firmly bolted.

A room below the Crypt might be a myth, one of those college legends that held more intrigue than truth. Anna looked around the room more slowly. She let her gloved hands travel over the Lucite case, the wood of the mast, the stones in the wall. She knocked on the black drywall. She looked inside the coffin and touched the smooth, cool velvet. “Sam,” she said. “Do you have a blade?”

Sam pulled a box cutter from her tool belt and cut the velvet lining in a line around the top. When she was done, she lifted the sheared velvet out of the coffin. There was no wood below. In the bottom of the coffin was a horizontal door cut in the marble pedestal. The door was painted glossy black with the fraternity's Greek letters stenciled in gold. A circular iron latch was bolted to one side. Sam grabbed the latch and pulled up. The door creaked open until it was resting against the back of the coffin. Through the opening was a series of gray stone steps descending into darkness.

Dylan's gone, but in a way, his ghost is still, like, haunting the campus. Everywhere I go, there's a little bit of his horrible spirit.

Whitney's not talking to me, except to say I “ruined Dylan's life.” I don't see her that often now—she pretty much just hangs out at Beta Psi—but when I do, it's totally painful.

Obviously, Dylan's friends are still here—and they hate me. Like, really, really, really hate me. And, wow, those Beta Psis know a thousand different ways to call you a slut. They could write their own entry on Urban Dictionary. It's like—I'm trying to be strong. I keep my eyes straight ahead. I pretend not to notice when they spit at my feet. But it's scary, and it's humiliating. I try to act like I don't even notice them, but my heart races every time. I see other kids watching. Their faces are sympathetic, but they don't want to sit with me.

Online is worse. There's a limit to what people will say to your face. On Twitter, it's a free-for-all. “You're a lying whore,” one kid tweeted at me. Another wrote about the encrusted state of my genitals. One kid tweeted, “Someone should shut that bitch up.”

Preya says not to worry. She says it'll pass. They don't have a long enough attention span for it to go through February.

God, I hope she's right. I hope they break before I do.

A
nna boosted herself onto the marble pedestal and climbed into the coffin. Sam was already several steps ahead, descending the stone stairs into darkness. With each step Anna took, the air got colder—first on her ankles, then her arms, then finally a waft up the back of her neck. She shuddered and took one last look at the Crypt as her head was at coffin height. Then she was fully underneath it, with only blackness ahead. It would be ironic, she thought, if the last thing she ever saw was the inside of a coffin.

She chided herself for thinking that way. She had an armed FBI agent in front of her, and one following behind. This was perfectly safe.

Still, it was hard not to be chilled as the darkness swallowed her whole. The air was dank and musty. The only sound was the shuffle of their feet echoing off stone walls. Anna couldn't hear the search team in the house above; she doubted they could hear anything down here. The only light was Sam's flashlight in front and Steve's behind her. The stairs kept going, down and down, until the light from the door in the coffin was just a memory.

She reached out to steady herself. The stone wall was moist and cool, mossy in places, and she was just thinking it wasn't so creepy when something skittered across her wrist. She yanked her hand away.
It was a roach,
Anna told herself.
Maybe a millipede. Not a big deal.
There were roaches in Superior Court. She rubbed her wrist to try to erase the tickle of the creature's many legs. The stairs kept going down. She did not reach for the wall again.

Finally, they reached the bottom. Sam shone the flashlight around. It was a long hallway with a cement floor. On the walls were iron sconces holding charred torches. Anna could see as far as Sam's flashlight beam. Then it was black. They kept walking.

Fissures in the stone walls and leaching mineral stains indicated this passage had existed for a long time. A torch hung every twenty feet or so. Anna wished the torches were lit, both for light and warmth. The walls radiated a cold so powerful it chilled her to the core. She crossed her arms over her chest and hugged herself tight.

A fluttering sound made Sam shine her light upward. A bunch of bats flew near the ceiling, dozens of wings beating a cloud of black. They sang a chorus of high-pitched shrieks. One dove toward Anna's head. She covered her hair and ducked. The tip of a wing, soft and fetid, brushed her knuckles. Her hair danced in the draft it created.

They flew up through a hole in the ceiling, and their shrieking subsided, then was gone. Steve offered her a hand, and she stood up, shuddering.

“You want to go back?” Steve asked.

Anna shook her head. They walked on.

The hallway ended in an open door, supported on both sides by marble pillars. A marble slab across the top was inscribed with Greek letters. The two FBI agents walked, guns first, through the door. Anna heard them gasp—then silence. She followed them in.

It was an underground chamber, about the size of a college seminar room. Every inch of wall and ceiling was covered in bones.

Toe and finger bones, the size of macaroni, decorated the walls in elaborate swirling patterns. Femurs made crosses and starbursts. The ceiling was covered in a mosaic of stars, suns, moons, and diamonds, all consisting of thousands of individual vertebrae and ribs.

Anna recalled pictures she'd seen of the Capuchin monks' underground crypts in Sicily, where mosaics were made with thousands of old bones. This looked like that. Except the monks had a tradition of using the remains of fellow monks to create monuments to mortality. Where would frat boys get bones?

“Human?” Anna whispered. There was no reason to whisper, but she couldn't imagine talking any louder.

“Looks like it,” Sam whispered back.

“This one definitely is,” Steve said. Anna followed his beam of light. A fully intact human skeleton stood strapped to the farthest wall, its feet hovering an inch above the stone floor. It grimaced at them with perfect teeth. A red Beta Psi baseball cap sat jauntily atop its skull.

A
nna felt dizzy. The musty smell she'd been inhaling took on a more ominous flavor. She fought back a gag.

“Could that be Emily?”

“We'll test,” Sam said. “But I doubt it. Even pros can't take a full human body down to clean bones in three days.”

“Who then?”

Steve shook his head.

In front of the skeleton was a marble table surrounded by four candlesticks taller than Anna. Massive half-melted black candles topped them.

On the table was a book as big as an unabridged Oxford dictionary. Embossed in gold on the black leather cover was the title,
The Book of Earthly Pleasures
. With gloved hands, Sam opened it. The pages were brittle and yellowed with age. Anna sneezed on the dust.

The first page had large black calligraphy script that said
BETA PSI
. The fraternity's seal was printed in gold. Sam flipped to the next page. A man's name was written at the top, followed by a series of letters and numbers.

Robert James Vary

1915–1919

Y.J. 9/25/15

S.D'U. 3/12/16

H.V. 10/5/16

G.A. 4/4/17

A.McH. 9/2/17

T.L. 5/3/18

J.W. 10/3/18

M.W. 2/6/19

T.Y. 5/1/19

The skeleton seemed to be watching with its hollow eyes. The next page had four pictures pasted onto it. They were all black-and-white shots of pretty young women with hair in elaborate buns, wearing corseted dresses. Pressed into the book's crease was also a lock of yellow hair bound in faded pink ribbon, and a small piece of lace, cut from a larger garment.

Sam turned to the next page.
BRUNO FREITAS
, it said across the top, 1916–1920. Below the name was another list of initials and dates. On the next page was a picture, cut from a newspaper, of a beautiful teenage girl in a long, frilly white dress. A caption below the picture said, “Gayle Joseph Makes Her Debut at the Detroit Debutante Ball.”

Anna said, “Go back a page.” Sam flipped to the list of initials the page before. Anna pointed to the list.

“G.J.,” Anna said. “Gayle Joseph.”

Sam nodded slowly. “It's a brag book. The initials are the girls. With mementos attached on the next page.”

“But what kind of bragging?” Anna said. “Sexual conquests? Or something more violent?”

“You mean, did they kill all these girls?”

Anna nodded.

“I doubt it. Debutantes are so much harder to kill than prostitutes. They're not usually the top choice for serial killers. We'll see.”

Sam kept turning the pages, which followed the same pattern. A male name at the top, a list of initials and dates below. The next page was always covered with small mementos: pictures mostly, but also lockets, playbills, snips of fabric. In the 1950s a man named Scott Westerman listed M.M. among the initials. The next page included a glossy picture of Marilyn Monroe and a snippet of platinum hair.

“No way,” Steve said.

They kept going, through the '60s, '70s, '80s, '90s. The women's hairstyles changed, the pictures got color, and the mementos became more current: a bar tab from Lucky's, the printout of a text message. But the format was the same. The Beta Psi boy's name, then the initials, then the mementos.

Finally, they came to the pages where the date ranges were current. “Whoa,” said Steve when they came to Dylan's page.

Dylan Highsmith

2011
–20
15

K.G. 11.14.11

V.H. 1.5.12

G.F. 5.17.12

E.C. 9.1.12

R.O'T. 9.3.12

V.B. 9.5.12

M.V. 9.5.12

K.L. 9.8.12

A.T. 9.12.12

T.U. 9.24.12

V.W. 9.30.12

H.R. 10.4.12

O.C. 10.7.12

U.M. 10.11.12

L.K. 10.18.12

S.S. 11.3.12

P.R. 12.1.12

M.F. 12.8.12

N.Q. 1.3.13

T.G. 1.14.13

K.M. 1.23.13

C.W. 1.31.13

R.E. 2.2.13

V.T. 2.7.13

E.D. 2.15.13

T.Z. 2.28.13

I.R. 3.4.13

V.O. 3.15.13

U.B. 3.22.13