The Sixes

Gwen continued to stand, Phoebe perched on the edge of a faded floral sofa. Above the mantel of the walled-in fireplace hung another Pennsylvania Dutch hex symbol. When you were this age, weren’t you supposed to have Twilight movie posters plastered on your walls? Phoebe wondered.

“I love how you’ve fixed up your apartment,” Phoebe said, smiling. “This reminds me a little of my college apartment, but ours didn’t look nearly as nice.”

“Thanks,” Gwen said, unmoved.

“I’m so sorry about Lily’s death. Were you friends with her too?”

“I knew her. But she was really Blair’s friend.”

“I heard she was thinking of staying here the night she disappeared.” She let the comment hang there.

“You’ll have to ask Blair that,” Gwen told her after a moment. “I really have no idea.”

“So you hadn’t heard that?”

Gwen rolled her dark green eyes back and sighed in exasperation.

“Yeah, I heard that—after the fact. To be perfectly honest, she hadn’t really been staying here much anymore.”

“Did Lily ever seem depressed or worried to you lately?”

Another sigh. “I just told you, I really never saw her.”

Phoebe didn’t even consider broaching the subject of the Sixes. Gwen would only tip Blair off, and Phoebe would lose her edge when she spoke to the girl directly.

“Understood,” Phoebe said. She let her eyes roam absently, as if she was gathering her thoughts, when she was really checking out the space.

“Could you ask Blair to call me, then?” she said finally. She took out a pen from her bag and scribbled the information on a piece of paper.

“Sure,” Gwen said, taking the paper limply, as if she planned to let it flutter to the floor the moment Phoebe departed.

As Phoebe started on her way back home, she found it hard to judge whether Gwen’s attitude was just the general sullenness that Phoebe often witnessed in girls that age or something else—a defensiveness because she had something to hide.

The apartment had surprised Phoebe. Its tidiness, its pretty decor. And then there were the hex signs. Such an odd choice for college girls. One would have said a gift from Mom; two said something more intentional.

Phoebe herself had never liked hex signs. She’d first seen them on a trip to Pennsylvania Dutch country with Alec. The Amish farmers didn’t display them, but other people in the area did, and they popped up everywhere—on barns, houses, calendars, and half the souvenirs at the various tchotchke shops. She had almost bought note cards designed with them, just for something to take back, but she realized that she found them creepy. Maybe it was because of the flat, two-dimensional design—or the fact that they were supposed to ward off evil, hinting at witchcraft.

Could that be what the Sixes were about? Phoebe wondered, stopping abruptly on the sidewalk. Didn’t the word hex mean to put a spell on something? Maybe the girls in the Sixes pretended to be witches and threatened to cast evil spells on girls they didn’t like or who broke their code. If so, that could explain Alexis Grey’s hysteria. Nothing like finding out that a witch’s curse has been placed on you to send you over the edge.

And then with a start Phoebe thought of something else. The word hex also meant “six.”

6

BACK HOME PHOEBE flipped open her laptop and did a Google search for hex signs. She discovered that they’d been introduced by German settlers in the 1600s, though there wasn’t a consensus as to why. The most common theory, as Phoebe had suspected, was that they were used to ward off evil. The word hex was actually derived from the German word for witch. So wait, Phoebe thought, does it not have anything to do with the Greek word for six? It seemed it didn’t, but as she read more, she learned that many early hex signs had six-pointed stars, and surprise, surprise, one theory held that the name hex had evolved from a mispronunciation of the German word seches—meaning “six.”

So maybe the hex signs in Blair and Gwen’s apartment had nothing to do with witchcraft, but were simply a way for the girls to sneakily announce that they were part of the Sixes. Funny, she thought, how secret organizations always had to make sure they had their damn symbol down, to give members a way to show that they belonged. Because what secret societies invariably wanted was to not be a total secret—they wanted people to whisper about them, to yearn to belong, and in some cases, to be very afraid of them. Phoebe had learned that all too well.

Next, she Googled information about drowned bodies. When a person drowned, she read, the body generally sank at first, but as it decomposed, the resulting gases forced it to the surface. The colder the water, the longer it took for those gases to form. At this time of year it might take well over a week for a body to rise to the surface, even if the weather was as warm as it had been. But a body didn’t always sink to the bottom. Sometimes it got caught on tree roots or wrapped in nautical rope along a dock. Maybe that’s what happened to Lily’s body, Phoebe thought, which would explain why it had been found so quickly.

Then she checked out the story Stockton had mentioned about students dying in the Midwest. He hadn’t exaggerated. In the past five or six years a dozen young men in just a few states had been found drowned after a night out. In all the cases, authorities had declared the deaths accidental, though some family members bought into the notion of a serial killer. Again, Phoebe felt her skin crawl. She instinctively glanced up to the window above the table. How horrible to even consider, she thought. But serial killers did move around. She’d read enough about Ted Bundy to know that he had begun his deadly spree in Oregon, moved on to Colorado, and killed his last victims in Florida. Stockton might be right.

Thinking of Stockton made her remember to check her e-mail. As promised, there was a message from him with the names of the two girls who’d exchanged the look during the committee meeting: Molly Wang and Jen Imbibio.

Bingo, Phoebe thought. Jen Imbibio was in one of the sections of her writing class. It would be easy to find an excuse to talk to the girl after class tomorrow.

She opened the file she kept on her students on her laptop and scrolled down to Jen Imbibio’s name. Jen had earned B-, C, and C+ on her three assignments so far. Phoebe had yet to review and grade Jen’s most recent assignment. She’d asked her students to write a reported article on any topic they wanted, and also a separate, first-person blog on the same subject, done in a much chattier, breezier style. Jen had chosen reality TV as her subject.

Phoebe reached across the table to a stack of papers, located Jen’s two pieces, and read through them. Her research for the reported piece had been decent enough, but the writing was stilted. For the blog, Jen had gone off on a total tear about the girls who were on the shows, girls who flaunted their fake breasts and were famous for nothing. The writing here was sassy and provocative in parts, a refreshing surprise.

Phoebe glanced at her watch. It was close to four o’clock, and she’d done nothing yet for dinner with Duncan. She jumped up from her desk and hurried into the kitchen. She’d decided earlier that she’d make spaghetti carbonara, which she’d planned to prepare for herself that night anyway. There were arugula and lemons in the fridge, which meant she could put together a salad with lemon vinaigrette. What about dessert, though? she wondered. There was still time to make a mad dash to the supermarket before it closed. But that would be trying too hard, turning the evening into more than it should be. There was fruit in the fridge, she realized—grapes and tangerines—and she could get away with serving those.