Pickell was feeding the blade of the measuring tape, closing the distance between the front door and where I stood, and his eyes were trained on his superior, as if to see whether Sheriff Cruso agreed that what I was saying was important.
“That means all this happened in about a twenty-minute span.” It was seventeen minutes, according to the original crime scene report, oxidizing somewhere in the Florida Museum of Archives. “How could one man do what he did to four girls in a twenty-minute span? What if there were two of them? Roger and this other guy?” I held my breath. I did not at all believe what I was saying, and I had no idea the damage done in that moment, just trying to get them to listen to me.
“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.