I looked down at my feet, in the corduroy slippers I’d wear for the last time, and found they were somehow moving toward the disturbance coming from the Jefferson Street side of The House. Even as I came around the bend to the rec room and saw that it was only the television, left on by one of my sisters to an old episode of I Love Lucy, the one where Lucy keeps offering Ricky objects to smash in lieu of her face, I knew something wasn’t right.
Still, I went around, turning off all the lamps that had been left on in the room, collecting the plates littering the coffee table, sticky with the residue of Jerry’s hot fudge cake. My eyes were burning with tears because I was someone who could cry only when she was angry. The alumnae Tea & Tour started at nine a.m. sharp, and this was how the girls left the place?
My ponytail had loosened in my sleep, and I kept having to shoulder my hair out of my eyes, and at some point, I realized it was because there was a freezing draft filtering through the room. I rocked back on my heels and squinted through the archway to see that the back door had been left open too. Goddamn fucking children, I thought, because that’s what I would normally think if a part of me didn’t also suspect that something unspeakable was unfolding, that moment, right above my head. Drunk goddamn fucking children, I thought again, performing for myself, clinging to the last seconds of normalcy before—
A thud. The thud.
I stopped. Stopped moving. Breathing. Thinking. All functions seem to shut down to divert resources to my eardrums. Overhead, there was a flurry of footsteps. Someone on the second floor was running at a nauseating, inhuman speed.
It was as though a magnet were attached to the soles of those feet, and the nickel in my scalp dragged me along for the ride—past the wall of our composites, under the poorly plastered crack in the ceiling, and finally, to the place between the coat closet and the louvered kitchen doors where the footsteps stopped and so did I. I was standing in the shadow of the main stairwell, facing the double front doors approximately thirteen feet and two inches in front of me. I guessed fifteen feet, but when the detective measured no more than an hour later, I found I’d ever so slightly overshot the distance between us.
The crystal chandelier was undulating, disturbed but still unerringly bright. When the man came down the stairs and darted across the foyer, he should have been very hard to see. Instead, the chandelier acted as my archivist, logging a clear and unabridged shot of him as he paused, crouched down low, one hand on the doorknob. In his other hand he held what looked like a child’s wooden baseball bat, the end wrapped in a dark fabric that seemed to arch and writhe. Blood, my brain would not yet permit me to acknowledge. He wore a knit cap, pulled down over his brows. His nose was sharp and straight, his lips thin. He was young and trim and good-looking. I’m not here to dispute facts, even the ones that annoy me.
For a brief, blissful moment, I got to be angry. I recognized the man at the door. It was Roger Yul, Denise’s on-again, off-again boyfriend. I could not believe she’d sneaked him upstairs. That was an orange-level violation of the code of conduct. Grounds for expulsion.
But then I watched as every muscle in the man’s body tensed, as though he sensed he was being watched. With a slow swivel of his head, he focused like a raptor on a spot just beyond my shoulder. I was paralyzed by a hammering dread that still comes for me in my nightmares, locking my spine and vaporizing my scream in the sandpapered walls of my throat. We both stood there, alert and immobile, and I realized with a wrecking ball of relief he could not actually find me in the shadow of the stairwell, that while he was visible to me, I remained unwitnessed.
He was not Roger.
The man opened the door and went. The next time I saw him, he would be wearing a jacket and tie, he would have groupies and the New York Times on his side, and when he asked me where I was currently living, legally, I would have no choice but to give my home address to a man who murdered thirty-five women and escaped prison twice.
* * *
I found myself heading for Denise’s room, planning on reading her the riot act. I would never be able to adequately explain this to the cops, the court, Denise’s parents, or my own. That while I knew it was not Roger I’d seen at the front door, I had not picked up the phone and called the police but instead had gone back upstairs to reprimand Denise.
Halfway down the hall, the door to room number six opened, and a sophomore named Jill Hoffman staggered out, hunched over at the waist and headed for the bathroom down the hall. She was drunk and running to the toilet to be sick.