Heart of Ice

money.”

“Sounds like a Little League baseball game,” Emily said.

“That’s about right, Mom. The only thing that I hate worse than the drama of a dispute that’s escalated to the national level is making a road trip to help some failing house build up its pledge base.”

“That doesn’t sound so bad,” Chris said. “I mean, it’s all about marketing, right?”

“Honestly, Chris, sometimes it feels like it’s all about babysitting. I know it isn’t much longer and I’ll be off to law school by this time next year, but I really do hate what I’m doing.”

Emily wanted to kick her ex-husband and his greedy wife Dani to the curb just then. If they had helped out a little more, Jenna might have taken another route to finance more of her education. Emily wondered if she had miscalculated and should have pushed for more college loans. She just couldn’t, having experienced the burden firsthand with her own student loans and David’s from medical school.

“Who’s hungry?” Shali asked. “Because I am.”

“You always are,” Jenna said, ending the conversation about money, her dad, and bratty sorority girls.

“Your mom can cook. My mom never met a can opener she didn’t like. What’s that I smelled when I came in here?”

Emily stood and looked toward the kitchen. “Nothing fancy. Just the best meal you’ll ever have. Come on. Let’s eat.”

“Just a sec,” Jenna said turning her attention back to her laptop screen. “I have to finish this blog post.”

“What are you doing, blogging? That’s so five minutes ago.”

“I know. The headquarters women think it is so ‘cutting-edge’ to blog. But that’s how we share the information that builds stronger sisterhood or something like that.”

She finished typing the entry:

Hi Girls,

I’m looking so forward to seeing all of you in Dixon. I might be late, so dinner might not work out. Could someone save me a late plate, just in case? We’ll have so much fun talking about recruitment and how we can maximize our efforts to ensure that we have the very best new pledges. Go BeeZees!

Love, Jenna Kenyon, your Southern District Consultant

She posted a happy-face icon and powered down.

Dinner smelled so good.

A thousand miles away, a man logged on to Jenna’s blog. Her picture filled him with an unbridled rage that he was sure would be transparent to anyone who saw his face, even days later. She was pretty, sure. He tried hard to read more into what she was saying on her blog. How it spoke of her frivolous nature. How it indicated that she was a callous bitch who cared only about herself.

And now she was about to get what she deserved. She was on his list.

Chapter Twenty-two

Tricia Wilson’s photographs were haunting. Emily had seen horrific images similar to them before, of course. As a Seattle cop working homicide or special victims, she knew firsthand what the brutal hand of an enraged man could do to the small bones of a child or a woman without the strength to fight back. She knew that when people indicated someone had been beaten “black and blue” that it was really a shorthand for a range of colors from indigo to red to blue to yellow, even green. Human skin could change hues nearly as fast as gasping fish on a riverbank. Just like that. From pink or brown to splash of hideous color that told the world the color of pain.

But Tricia’s photos weren’t like that. Emily looked deeper into the Polaroids. The colors were crisp, rather than muddy. Distinct, rather than blurry.

Something’s awry here, she thought. It passed through her thoughts that Tricia had said that she kept copies and returned the negatives. She figured that the woman, caught up in memories of the past, had made a mistake. Polaroid cameras didn’t use negatives.

Jenna caught her mom by the coffeepot, waiting to steal a cup before it finished brewing the next morning. It was clear that she was lost in thought, distracted by something.

“What’s bothering you, mom?”

“Honey, it’s the photos. Something isn’t right.”

“Mom, don’t get caught up in this one. Not like last time.”

In a way, the comment was sweet. Emily took it as such. Jenna was looking out for her mother. She knew how involved she could get when it came to abuse cases. The previous summer, thirty-one-year-old Maria Hernandez was beaten so badly by her husband that it took more than a hundred stitches and a metal plate to mend her injuries. Emily didn’t sleep for weeks when she worked that case, hoping against hope that by the time Maria was released she would agree to testify against her husband, Carlos.

But it never got that far.

Carlos was there to pick her up the day of her discharge. The family’s van was packed and headed south, out of town.

Family members in Cherrystone haven’t heard from either since.

Emily couldn’t get the photos out of her mind.

“I know. I know. But these are so graphic.”

“Just keep doing your best, Mom. You’ll get him.”

They talked awhile longer, Jenna saying that things at the sorority house were a disaster. The girls wanted to host a party—as another sorority had done the week before—but they were dangerously close to being put on probation.

“Stick to your guns, Jenna.”

“I will. Just like you.”

Emily poured some more coffee and searched for another container of creamer. She knew what it was that bothered her. It was the fact that Tricia’s injuries were so very visible. She hadn’t been beaten until her kidneys failed. She hadn’t been punched in the stomach. These were Nicole Brown Simpson–type injuries—visible and overt.

For a man who cares about what everyone thinks about him, she thought, you’d think he’d have punched her where it didn’t show. He wasn’t only a wife beater, he was a stupid one.

As they had since before they wore bras or even had a concept that they’d really like boys enough to touch them, Jenna and Shali retreated into her bedroom—a room that had once been her mother’s and might one day be the guest room for a little girl of her own. Jenna half-smiled as the thought came over her. If she found a decent guy, got a job, worked awhile, well then maybe.

Maybe not in that exact order.

In some ways, the room was a museum to her past. The old Mac computer that she’d used growing up was on the desk, a collector’s item, her mother mused when Jenna wanted to trash it. It had long since been replaced by a sleek new laptop. Next to a collection of dried corsages—from weddings, mostly—a framed poster of the cover of People magazine hung over the bed. The celebrity on the cover was Mariah Carey, but Jenna wasn’t really a Mariah fan. She never had been. Just below Mariah’s photo was a tagline that referenced when Jenna was held captive by Nick Martin, Cherrystone’s crazed kid. Jenna had initially thought she was helping the boy, but in the end, he taught her the greatest lesson of all: Not everyone wants to be rescued.