“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.
“Let’s see,” Sheriff Cruso murmured, sitting down on the couch in the formal living room and hunching over Cindy’s sketch. I was on the floor next to her for support, my legs straight out under the coffee table and my back against the couch’s ruffled base. Sheriff Cruso’s knee was right next to my face, and it was inappropriate how turned on I felt by the two of us sitting like that. I didn’t even like sex. Denise said that wasn’t a “me” problem but a Brian one.
Sheriff Cruso passed the sketch to Detective “pronounced like dill” Pickell, standing behind the couch. “Take a look at that, Pickell,” he said. Pickell and Cruso appeared to be about the same age—younger than I thought a sheriff and detective should be—and while Cruso was Black, he was clearly the one in charge. This was highly unusual in the 1970s, not just in the Panhandle but anywhere. For generations, the Southern sheriff was white, middle-aged, and poorly educated, a defender of the status quo. But as crime increased in rural areas and racial attitudes shifted, voters trended toward younger, more educated candidates. Cruso had his criminology degree from Florida A&M and he was Leon County’s first Black sheriff, which was a milestone New York City wouldn’t achieve until 1995.
Detective Pickell held the drawing under one of the table lamps for a better look. “This is good, Cindy.”
“Can I wash my hands now?” Cindy asked. She was sitting with her carbon-blackened palms turned up on the edge of the coffee table so she wouldn’t stain the cream-colored furniture in the formal room. We were still worried about the nice couch in the nice room when, upstairs, Jill’s blood had seeped through the mattress and would eventually rust the springs.
“Go ahead.” Cruso tipped his head. Then, over his shoulder to Pickell, “Can you check to see if we’re clear for Miss Schumacher here to take us through the house?”
Pickell headed for the foyer, arcing widely around the girls lined up to use the downstairs bathroom after being fingerprinted in the dining room. They were covering their faces so the police wouldn’t see them cry, ruining the arms of my sweaters. The press would go on to write that you could hear our screams from outside, not their most offensive fabrication but one I took umbrage with nonetheless. We conducted ourselves with a restrained horror that I was proud of at the time. I thought if this had to happen to us, at least everyone would remember that we were strong and brave. Back then you were strong and brave if you didn’t carry on about it. But people wrote whatever they wanted to about us with no regard for the truth. Looking back, I should have let everyone scream.