Part 41 (2/2)

Or everyone, of every age, Mira thought.

That afternoon, as always, she'd strolled across the quiet campus from her office and to the library, raising a hand to Tom Trammer, who looked to her so much like Jeff Blackhawk (especially in the mornings, before her eyes were clearer and before he looked more haggard than he did later in the day, and older) that she almost called him by Jeff's name as he pa.s.sed.

And then she said h.e.l.lo to the dean, Ed Friedlander, a nice enough man, doing what he could at a low-budget community college to keep the faculty-a few with serious drinking problems, and the others with a variety of personality disorders-teaching their cla.s.ses, and the students from killing one another. His resemblance to Dean Fleming was all in the age and the suit, she thought, but the sight of him never failed to unnerve Mira, start up the heart, fight or flight, although she always managed to conceal it, and to smile.

Clark was everywhere, too-although he was always the young husband and father who'd smiled so sadly at her in divorce court, and then, later, nodding solemnly on porch steps as he picked up or dropped off their sons. A depressed man, growing older, seeming to have been expecting something to come, now knowing it wasn't going to.

He'd gotten married again. And that also hadn't worked out. Last Mira had heard, he was in Dallas working in some kind of sports equipment shop. They had no reason to keep in touch now that the twins were old enough to drive themselves from one parent to the other.

And the students, of course.

There was Brent Stone, a nice boy from Muleshoe who wanted to be a gym teacher, and Mary Bright, whose name, unfortunately, did not in any way describe her. These could have been any of Mira's students, in other cla.s.ses, at other places, and she supposed she could have been anyone to them in return. They looked at her and thought, she supposed, Aunt Molly, Ms. Emerson, my mom.

Types. Ideals. Reproductions. Representations. Nearly exact copies of one another.

Perry Edwards, of course, was everywhere, but Mira was used to that after all these years. Really, she took comfort in it now when Perry pa.s.sed her on the highway in his pickup, or said, ”h.e.l.lo, ma'am,” to her from behind the counter at the grocery store. By now, Perry Edwards would have been the age she'd been herself when she met him-but, instead, he was always the age he'd been the night she said good-bye to him in the snowstorm in Jeff Blackhawk's car.

Sometimes she saw him at a movie, maybe a row or two ahead of her, his arm around the shoulder of some girl who looked like Nicole Werner or Denise Graham, or any of those girls, his hand in the popcorn bag between them. She tried never to think of him laid out at Dientz's funeral parlor. The nice suit. The lovely job Ted Dientz would have done to make him look as if he hadn't been shot a few days earlier by a panicked sorority sister with a gun (given to her by a father who firmly believed every pretty girl on an American college campus needed to have one), who had been up late that night reading a book about Ted Bundy when she heard footsteps in the hallway and came out of her room in the dark to find a stranger on the stairwell of the Omega Theta Tau house.

Mira would have gone to the funeral, to see Perry for herself, but Ted had told her that the family had politely requested that she not come-and she'd also received a letter from the university lawyers saying she was not to speak to the media, the students, or the families of the students about anything that had happened. And she was never to write about it.

Mira's own lawyer had said, ”No one has a right to establish these restrictions. Last time I checked, this was a pretty free country. If you want to write a book about it, write the book and we'll stick it to them then.”

But as it turned out, Mira had no interest in writing about death, ever again.

Over the years, until he died one Christmas morning, Mira had kept in close touch with Ted Dientz. He'd become obsessed, as she'd known he would. (She'd thought they were alike that way, but as it turned out he was much more pa.s.sionate than Mira had ever been.) The DNA test had proved (”Incontrovertibly!” he'd shouted over the phone) that the body he'd buried in Nicole Werner's coffin, the one from which he'd taken the sample for his bloodstain card, was in no way related to anyone whose hair strands had been found in the brush Perry Edwards had taken from the Werners' house.

”Unless Nicole Werner was adopted, or that hairbrush was used by someone other than Werner women, there is no way the girl I buried in that coffin was a daughter or a sibling of any female in that family.”

By then, Mira didn't care about Nicole-where she might have been, who might have been buried under her headstone instead of her. Perry was dead, her husband had left her, and she'd lost her job in an explosion of accusations and suspicion and hatred.

Still, she told Ted to call her after the exhumation. There would be, she knew, no talking him out of this. He was determined to dig her up. When Nicole's parents couldn't be located, permission had to be granted by Etta Werner, Nicole's grandmother, to exhume the grave. (Etta was a feisty old woman who'd attended nearly every funeral in Bad Axe for the past eighty years, and the idea of digging up a grave didn't seem to bother her at all. She never even asked for an explanation.) And, afterward, when Ted called Mira with the news, she had to sit down to keep herself from pa.s.sing out when he told her that there was no one, nothing, in that coffin at all.

”Empty,” he'd said, sounding empty himself. ”And no one anywhere to explain that fact to me, or with the vaguest interest, it seems, in investigating it-except for me.”

And although Ted Dientz devoted all the last years of his life to solving that mystery, he never managed to uncover the truth about anything. He closed down his funeral home, wrote letters to newspapers, called authorities and experts everywhere in the world. He became possessed by the empty grave, by Nicole Werner's DNA, by other missing sorority girls all over the state. And then all over the country.

It was amazing how many there were!

They could have formed their own private sorority house somewhere: some large old mansion hidden behind a shadowy hedge, where they built floats out of tissue paper flowers and styled one another's hair and sang songs and took secret oaths for all of eternity.

Ted believed that someone from the university, or from the sorority, or both, had been trying to hide a hazing death and had come in the night and spirited away the remains of the dead girl so that her ident.i.ty could never be determined. They were professionals. They'd done it with surgical precision. The gra.s.s over ”Nicole's” grave, the crucifix, the stuffed animals-all appeared to the naked eye never to have been disturbed.

But, later, when none of the hundreds of relatives of the Werners' in Bad Axe were able, or willing, to reveal the whereabouts of Nicole's parents so that they might be told the news that their daughter's grave was empty, Ted came to suspect not only Nicole's parents but the entire Werner clan. (Even Etta: Hadn't there been something almost gleeful in the way she'd given her permission to exhume her granddaughter's corpse?) He thought most of them knew exactly where Nicole was, and that she hadn't been the girl in that grave.

But there were other possibilities Ted Dientz was willing to consider, especially as the years pa.s.sed. He had worked with the dead long enough, he told Mira, to know that strange things happened. This world was more than a material thing. Was it impossible that he had buried Nicole Werner on her funeral day, and that, somehow, she had escaped from her grave?

What could Mira say?

Ted Dientz died without answers, and Mira had no idea what his wife and children might have done with the bloodstain cards he'd kept all those years in the bas.e.m.e.nt. All those souls he'd wanted to bring back, that army of his dead he'd been waiting to raise-he was with them now, she supposed. There were so few answers in this life, and what few there were often scattered with winds. And only now and then little bits of belated justice.

It took a decade, but eventually some sharp soph.o.m.ore who wrote for the university newspaper dug up the story of Denise Graham, of Nicole Werner. The student managed to pa.s.s herself off as an Omega Theta Tau pledge for six months, and then to expose the rituals for what they were.

The sorority sisters were not, as it happened, drinking tequila and hyperventilating and pa.s.sing out before their raisings in the coffin. They were being injected by an EMT from the local ambulance service with Scopolamine, the zombie drug.

At the right dosage, the soph.o.m.ore reported, as Mira already knew, the drug causes you to sleep and then awake feeling born again. At higher dosages, it makes it impossible to form memories of anything that has happened in the hours before and after the injection. At the wrong dosage, it kills you.

Mira followed the story on the Internet from Texas. She would have been lying if she hadn't admitted that she wanted to see some administrators fired, but they never were. She'd hoped at least that the Omega Theta Tau chapter would be shut down. But it wasn't-receiving, instead, a hefty fine, and its members, counseling.

Mira hoped they might be able to prove that Craig Clements-Rabbitt had been injected, himself, with Scopolamine, and that's why he remembered nothing of the accident. She was herself convinced that the car he'd been driving with Nicole in it had been chased off the road by someone trying to cover up for the sorority, someone who knew that Nicole and Craig had the dead, or dying, Denise Graham in the backseat. Someone who knew that they were trying to get her to a hospital and who was trying to keep them from getting her there.

Craig and Nicole were run off the road, and the car was burned later by those trying to cover up the hazing, the overdose.

Nicole's death was faked. Denise had been her stand-in. Being a good sorority girl, Nicole went along with it.

Craig Clements-Rabbitt was blamed, and he'd taken the blame. He'd been drugged, and he'd been in love, which is its own zombie drug, especially when mixed with guilt and grief.

You could still Google Nicole Werner, and still find bloggers who claimed to see her ghost at G.o.dwin Hall.

And there was evidence to be found on the Internet, too, that students had never managed to squelch the fascination with Alice Meyers, either. Every year, there were the cutters. Every year there were fewer and fewer applicants to G.o.dwin Honors College-a fact that would have been officially blamed on the laziness of today's students, Mira knew, but which she suspected was because parents didn't want their kids, especially their daughters, living in G.o.dwin Hall.

But there was always one such hall on every campus, wasn't there? It used to be Fairwell Hall they shunned, as Mira recalled.

Here at South Plains College there was an Alice Meyers, too-a girl who haunted the auditorium where, it was said, she'd hanged herself from the rafters.

And there was also a Nicole Werner: Here her name was Sara Bain. One day she'd been holding on to her boyfriend's back on his motorcycle, and they'd hit-who knows? A squirrel? A rabbit? A rock in the road? The details didn't matter. Sara Bain was thrown from the back of the motorcycle. She landed in the median, where her boyfriend, dazed and b.l.o.o.d.y, had rushed to her side.

A small mound of stones ringed a cherry tree in the South Plains College courtyard. Every spring, a group of girls was rumored to huddle around the cherry tree on the night of a full moon to cut themselves, and sing songs, read their poetry aloud. In the morning some horrified faculty member would find blood splashed on the stones. There would be talk of chopping down the tree, of carting away the stones, but no one ever did.

109.

Karess got lost somewhere south of Bad Axe, and by the time she found her way off the freeway she was exasperated and wondering why the h.e.l.l she'd thought this was a good idea, and what it was she'd been hoping to find or lose by coming back to this G.o.dforsaken state after all these years away in search of a boy she'd barely known.

But somewhere inside herself she also knew, even as she threw her ruined map (coffee spilled on it, and wrinkled to s.h.i.+t) behind her into the backseat of her rental car, why: Somewhere inside her Perry Edwards was still alive.

<script>