“I’m OK, Mom,” Jenna said.
“Honey, I’m sure you are. But why don’t you come home?”
“A grief counselor is coming in from Nationals, and they want me to stay until he gets here. I said I could do it. I mean, Mom, this girl was slashed to death and the sisters here saw it.”
“Saw the murder?”
“No, no. The aftermath. What I mean is, most of them saw Sheraton’s body and after the police came through with the crime kits, the room has been visited by everyone who lives in the house. One girl sent photos from her cell phone to her dad’s paper in Knoxville and they put them up on their website.”
“Nice. What’s wrong with people?”
“That’s what I thought. Mrs. Barker, the housemother, says that she’ll clean up the mess. I feel a little bad that I didn’t offer to help her.”
“Are you sure you’re OK?”
“I’m a little shaken, but I’m doing all right,” Jenna said, tearing up a little.
Emily knew that Jenna was on the verge of falling apart, but to mention it would be to push her to the edge. She was a thousand miles away and there was no way to wrap her arms around her. “All right,” she said. “Is there anything I can do for you?”
“No. I’m just going to stay until the counselor comes. Then I’m going to come home. Nationals wants me to take a couple of weeks off and skip Gainesville.”
“Good idea. So when will you be home?”
“Monday night at the earliest.”
“I’ll meet you at the airport.”
“Don’t worry about me, Mom. I’m fine. I’m going to help these girls the best that I can, but really, I know that’s not my expertise. So far two of the girls said they’re going home, but I’ve seen their grades and I think they would have dropped out anyway.”
“Do they have a suspect?”
“They won’t say. At least not the police. The girls think Sheraton’s boyfriend was mad at her. But mom, I had dinner with Sheraton last night and she said how much she loved the guy. There were no problems. Not on her part. She wasn’t smart, Mom, but she was a nice girl. I liked her.” Jenna almost said “really liked her” but she knew that was the kind of editing of feelings done after a tragedy. Sheraton was a nice enough girl, and she didn’t deserve what happened to her, but she was hardly anyone with whom Jenna would ever stay in touch.
Now that was impossible anyway.
“Have the police picked up the boyfriend?” Emily asked.
Jenna didn’t answer.
“Jenna?” Emily looked at her phone and the signal was strong. “Jenna?”
“Sorry, Mom. I have to go. They want me to come to the station to make a statement, so, of course, I have to do that.”
“Call me when you get back. I love you.”
“Love you more. Say hi to Chris.”
Emily was overcome with worry. She’d done her best to keep up a calm front, but the idea that her daughter had been so close to a killer was more than unnerving. Sorority houses had been drenched in blood before, certainly. Whenever pretty young girls were sequestered in places like sororities, nursing dorms, or Girl Scout camps, men with evil in their hearts had a way of tiptoeing inside.
The women of Emily’s generation knew of one case that brought an instant and deep shudder of fear.
In mid-January 1978, serial killer and jail escapee Ted Bundy entered the Chi Omega sorority house on the Tallahassee campus of Florida State University. He slipped inside around 3 A.M. No one heard him. No one had a clue that he was even in Florida, let alone on the hunt once more for young, female victims. In a bloody frenzy that lasted no more than a half hour, Lisa Levy and Margaret Bowman were bludgeoned and strangled to death; Karen Chandler and Kathy Kleiner were severely injured.
After that terrible incident, mothers and fathers across the country made hurried trips to see that their daughters lived in houses with security systems that could preclude a killer from gaining entry.
What the parents didn’t know—and what surely would have given them even greater pause—was that most houses had alarms. But girls frequently gave out the alarm codes so tardy sisters could get home late at night.
Later, when David Kenyon got the news of Sheraton Wilkes’s slaying and learned that Jenna had been there when it happened, he called Emily. By then, she was in her office reading Jason’s latest report on what Mitch Crawford’s neighbors thought of him.
“We need to get our daughter out of there,” David said, without bothering to say hello.
Emily sent down the report and put her ex-husband on the speakerphone. She pushed her chair back and glanced at Jenna’s high school graduation portrait.
“Nice to hear from you, David.”
“There’s a crazed killer out there and she needs to come home.”
Emily let out an exasperated sigh. “She has a job. She’s fine. She’s safe.”
“Emily, I think we have different ideas about what’s safe and what isn’t.” The subtext of his remark was meant to hurt, to conjure images of the past when Jenna was, in fact, in grave danger.
Emily could hear a baby crying in the background, which meant that David was likely calling from home.
“Look, David. We don’t need to have conversations like this anymore. We’re done. She’s over twenty-one. And, in case you’ve forgotten, she’s working the Beta Zeta gig because you reneged on your offer to send her to law school. Stupid me. I should have had that written into the divorce decree, but I was dumb enough to still trust you. I didn’t know you and Dani were already so involved.”
“Does it always have to go there? Do you always have to bang the drum about Dani? Get over it.”
Emily felt her face grow hot.
“I am over it. And I’m over you. Consider this conversation over, too. Our daughter’s grown. Don’t ever, I mean,
The baby’s cries grew louder.
“David, give the baby a bottle. Try being a dad to her. You might like it.”
She hit the speakerphone Off button. It felt so good being a bitch to a man who treated their daughter like an after-thought—like something on a list that had to be checked off.
A thousand miles away in the basement office of his Garden Grove home, Michael Barton read Jenna Kenyon’s latest entry, posted around 3 P.M. that same day.
I’m still at DU. I’m sure most of our sisters have read or heard the sad news about one of our own. Sheraton Wilkes was savagely killed. Her parents are going to hold a memorial service in her hometown and I’ll post all the details here later in the week. Nationals is putting together a tribute for Sheraton. I didn’t know her well, but she was a very nice girl. We’re heartbroken in Dixon.
In light of what happened, I’m canceling my recruitment training for the BZ house in Gainesville this week. I’m going home to Cherrystone. You can call me on my cell, leave comments here, or use my e-mail addy. Thanks for understanding,
Jenna Kenyon, Southern BZ Consultant
Everything the young woman wrote made him angry. The way he saw it, Jenna Kenyon pretended to be so concerned about her sisters, the dead girl, and the BZ organization.
He glanced at the calendar and opened his e-mail account, selecting his boss’s name from the address book. He started typing:
