* * *
It was eight in the morning, the sun thawing the frost on the grass and the police rummaging through the upstairs rooms like mutant rats in the walls, when I stood at the head of one of the two long tables in the dining hall and told The House that Denise and Robbie were dead.
“Why?” someone asked straightaway, her eyes dry. It was a gritted-teeth why, the outraged kind that demands an answer.
I read about us in the paper, the way we hurled the word why around the church service we attended later that morning. The press made it sound like the question was rhetorical, as though we wailed it melodramatically. But it was always a serious question. Why did this happen? One day we would get our answer, and it’s not the one you think. Right here, right now, I want you to forget two things: he was nothing special, and what happened was not random.
Still, it remained beyond comprehension that the ones who had survived were Eileen and Jill, with their pulpy faces, their ruptured eardrums, the pain in their jaws that would prove chronic. That Denise and Robbie had died when they were the ones who had just looked like they were sleeping. A few years later, the journalist Carl Wallace would publish his seminal true-crime bestseller and quote Sheriff Cruso as saying that Jill and Eileen were alive today only because The Defendant was so tired from killing Robbie and Denise. There’s a diet for you. I lost five pounds in four days after reading that.
“Do they expect us to keep living here?” Bernadette asked. Her big beauty-queen eyes were swollen and shiny, as though she’d taken a hit in a bar brawl.
“I don’t think I can ever sleep here again.”
“Who’s going to clean it up? Do the police? Does the school?”
“Does the school know yet? I mean, what? Do we go to class tomorrow?”
“Write your questions down,” I said, producing a pen and paper, “so that we don’t forget them. I’m going to get them answered.”
Answers. Answers. It was all we wanted. Even to be told that the police had the same questions we did, that they were working to sort it all out, would have been something. As the pen and paper made their way around the table, someone raised her hand.
“We should go to church,” she said. “Denise’s church.”
Privately, I knew Denise never went to church anymore, that she only pretended like she did for her parents and anyone else who asked. There were a few members of the press gathered outside, and I thought it would protect our image if they reported we’d turned to God in our time of need. That was what good Southern girls did. I was afraid that if anyone looked hard enough, they would see we were not good, not to the standard that a young woman is held. No one is, not even today.
“Let’s go to church,” I said, so sure we would be the ones to game the system.
Ten a.m.
Boris Wren, head of campus safety, was waiting for us when we returned from the church service. He wore a wrinkled sack of a suit, and though his dark gray hair was gelled back, gluey pieces had gotten plastered in the damp of his temples like spindly-legged insects in amber.
There was little that was comforting about the slovenly head of campus security, but still I found myself wanting to crawl across the table and into his arms out of sheer gratitude. Here was a person with an impressive title and no doubt a plan who could tell us what the hell was going on, who could lay out what would happen next. My relief bordered on giddy.
“I wish I could say I am here to reassure you,” Mr. Wren said, “but I am here to put the fear of God in you.”
Someone moaned. Someone coughed. Someone dropped her dirty tissue on the floor and banged her head picking it up, muttering ow accusingly. Hadn’t she endured enough?
“Last night,” Mr. Wren continued, “about half an hour after this person fled your residence, he broke into an off-campus apartment on Dunwoody Street and beat another female student within an inch of her life.”
I brought my hands to the back of my neck and dropped my chin to my chest. Protect your neck. This is what you do when a bear attacks you. Denise taught me that, driving through Ocala National Forest on our way to her parents’ house. Black bears denned in the sand pines, and there were safety signs posted everywhere. What you do is you lie on your stomach and you spread your legs wide and you clasp your hands around the back of your neck and you don’t fight, never fight, even if you’re being torn limb from limb.
“But she survived?” I heard myself ask.
“She’s at the hospital with the others, but that’s all I know for the moment.”