Heart of Ice

far from the open window as possible. Fire codes mandated that the window next to the fire escape remain open. Jenna knew sleeping next to the open window only invited the inevitable—a drunken frat boy proving his prowess by slipping into his girlfriend’s sorority bed late at night. It happened almost every night, on every campus, across the country.

As Jenna drifted off to sleep, she couldn’t help but think that no parent would ever allow a son or daughter to join a frat or sorority if they knew everything there was about them.

If I ever have a daughter of my own, she’s going someplace without the Greek system, she thought.

At first, the cry was unintelligible. Just a guttural scream that started loud and went even louder. It was coming from the second floor, up the stairway to the sleeping porch.

The girl in the bed next to Jenna jumped to her feet. “What’s going on now?”

Jenna sat up and felt for the gooseneck lamp hooked to her bedframe and turned it on. The bulb was no more than twenty-five watts and it barely illuminated the faces of the girls who’d crawled out of bed.

“Megan must have forgotten the front-door combination,” another said.

But the scream wasn’t about being locked out.

“Oh, my God!” came the words this time. The scream. The words. Something was very, very wrong.

Jenna pushed past the girls in the hall and headed down the stairs. At the second-floor landing, she found Midori hunched over, sobbing uncontrollably. She reached down and put her hand on her shoulder.

“Midori, what is it?”

Midori was crying so hard now, she couldn’t speak. She looked up, her face frozen in utter terror.

Jenna got on her knees and held her; in doing so, she felt a wetness on Midori’s nightgown. She looked closer.

It was blood.

“Midori! What happened? How did you get hurt?”

By then, the entire hall was filled with girls—less the ones that were going to take the walk of shame home after spending the night with their boyfriends—and the air was thick with panic.

“It. It. It isn’t me.” She sputtered out her words and turned to indicate the guest bedroom. Midori started to shake. “It’s Sheraton. Something’s happened to her.”

Jenna motioned for another girl to attend to Midori. She commanded a girl who had taken pictures with her cell phone to dial 911.

“I mean, right now.”

Ma Barker scurried up the stairs, swathed in her inch-thick turquoise terry bathrobe. Her head covered with a nylon sleeping cap.

“Good, Lord! What’s going on up here?”

“I don’t know. Sheraton’s hurt.” Midori looked up. “She’s in there!”

Jenna nearly lost her footing as she entered the bedroom. Looking down, she saw the smear of blood. But that wasn’t the worst of it. The wall next to the daybed was splattered with a triple arc of blood that looked like the devil’s rainbow. Three dripping arcs of blood oozed from the wall to the floor behind the bed. Her cream-colored wool coat borrowed by Sheraton in the chill of the night was striped with red.

And there she was. The body of a young woman facedown, the light from the bathroom reflecting off the dark wetness of her head.

“Sheraton?” Jenna said, almost in a whisper. “Are you OK?”

There was no answer, just perfect stillness.

Thump. Whap. Thump!

Startled, Jenna screamed. The noise of the water heater nearly jolted her to the ceiling.

“Ya’ll pull yourself together. Campus police are coming!” Ma Barker called out.

A siren wailed louder and louder. The girls in the hallway started to cry. Ma Barker tried to gather them together to get out of the house.

“We don’t know who did this,” she said, “And I don’t want any of my girls here to meet him, if he’s still in the house.”

Ma Barker was thinking of the slaughter of five girls by a serial killer ten years before. He’d crept into the sleeping house of a Chi Epsilon chapter near St. Louis and cut the throats of five girls. All but one bled to death. The deaths were painful, slow, and beyond anything anyone could have imagined. The lone survivor recovered and eventually testified against Paul Walton, the boyfriend of one of the victims. He’d been angry that she’d broken up with him and was sure the other sisters were behind it. Today, he was in prison on death row.

As the girls followed Ma Barker down the stairs to the front door, Jenna hurried back up to the sleeping porch and turned on the overhead lights. Her heart pounded and fear gripped her so tightly she could barely breathe.

“Is everyone out of here?”

She ran over to a bed on the north side of the room. The girl curled up under the covers wasn’t moving.

“Oh God, not another!”

Jenna pulled the blanket from the bed and prepared herself for the worst. But it was only a decoy, two pillows arranged by a girl who decided her reputation was something worth saving. Or at least worth lying about.

Jenna was acquainted with police procedure as well as anyone. She knew what was to come. The sad task of notifying the dead girl’s parents. The questions. The follow-up. All of it. Not only had she been raised on Law & Order in all of its incarnations, she had a realistic view of police work through her mother’s experiences as a cop. Few meals or evenings were left without some comment about some investigation in the news, or even closer to home.

Jenna wanted to cry, but knew that tears did nothing.

A man stood in a coffee line at the Nashville airport. His right hand was sore and he’d bandaged a small cut with tape he purchased from a drugstore. Despite the pain, he was nearly euphoric. He’d had a great business trip. One of the best ever. He could hear Wolf Blitzer’s voice coming from the bank of TVs bolted overhead in at the gate. Wolf was talking about a breaking news story coming out of the college town of Dixon. Without turning his head toward the screens, he fixed his auditory senses on Wolf’s words.

“…The body of a college student was found earlier today at the Beta Zeta House on the campus of Dixon University.”

No name was given. The audio had some quotes from some young people who were devastated by the grisly discovery. It was boilerplate reporting, and the only thing that made it interesting was the fact that the victim was young, pretty, and a college student. She was, as the story implied, too young to die. Too full of promise.

“…a person of interest is being questioned.”

That line made him smile.

“Tall latte, no foam,” he told the girl behind the counter, still listening to the news report.

The real person of interest put Equal in his latte.

This is too good to be true, he thought.

He was right about that. It was.

Emily Kenyon was overcome with concern. Jenna was on the phone telling her about the horrific discovery of Sheraton Wilkes’s blood-drenched body at the BZ house at Dixon University. Jenna called earlier in the morning, but Chris was staying over and she just let the phone ring. She felt like a bad mother just then. A really bad mother. Most women who attempted to build new relationships felt the twinge of regret any time they put a new love over their children, no matter if they were toddlers or grown.

“You must be terrified,” she said. “The poor girl.”

“Jesus, Mom, I’ve seen a lot in the past few years, but nothing like this. I’m talking like something out of a slasher movie. Spatter all over the wall.”

She wanted Jenna to get on a plane right that very minute. Certainly, she knew Jenna’s strengths. She was tough, because she’d had to be. They’d made it through a nightmare five years earlier with the three horrific murders that shook Cherrystone and the ensuing events that nearly cost them their lives. But that was past them. It was water under the bridge. It had to be. To let violence consume either mother or daughter would be letting go of the love they had for each other. The bond they had was unbreakable.