The Sixes

The girl clearly hadn’t expected Phoebe to go there, and, caught off guard, she looked briefly away. Phoebe could tell Blair’s mind was racing, trying to figure out how to play it. The girl looked back at Phoebe.

“The Sixes?” she asked slyly. “I’m not following.” Her tone suggested she was up for a little game.

“It’s a secret society of girls here,” Phoebe said. “Though it’s hardly much of a secret anymore. I would have thought you’d heard of them.”

“Oh, that’s right,” Blair said, and briefly touched the tip of her tongue to her pillowy upper lip. “There have been a few rumors about them.”

“And what exactly have you heard?” Phoebe asked.

“Nothing really very specific,” Blair said, staring straight at Phoebe. “Just that they’re very, very powerful.”

Phoebe’s heart skipped. The last comment hadn’t just been part of the game. It had been a threat, of course. I’m being warned off, Phoebe thought anxiously, just like I was years ago.

“Is there anything else?” Blair asked. “I really have to go.”

“No,” Phoebe said. “Thank you for your time.”

Phoebe turned toward Bridge Street, and behind her, she heard Blair walk briskly off in the opposite direction, her boots tapping hard against the sidewalk.

As soon as she was at Berta’s, Phoebe ordered a glass of wine. She had envisioned a quiet hour by herself, a chance to unwind, but she felt totally on edge. Phoebe had no doubt now that the Sixes existed, and that Blair was in the thick of it. There was something truly unsettling about the girl.

By the time Phoebe finally headed back to campus, it was dark and she was later than she’d planned to be. Reaching the plaza, she saw that a huge crowd of students and faculty was already milling around. Many of the students held candles, cupping the wildly flickering flames with their hands. Phoebe’s eyes scanned the crowd. Far off to the left, she spotted Pete Tobias talking to a bunch of students, obviously coaxing information from them like a con artist. She headed to the opposite side of the plaza, aiming to steer as clear of him as possible.

Toward the edge of the crowd, a long rectangular table had been set up to sell coffee, and Phoebe bought a cup. Just ahead of her she spotted Craig Ball weaving through the crowd. She realized he had never gotten back to her.

A few minutes later, Tom Stockton opened the service and introduced Glenda. Her remarks weren’t long, but they were sincere and moving. “The way we can remember Lily,” she told the crowd, “is to take pieces of her spirit into our own lives.”

Phoebe noticed that Mark, Glenda’s husband, was standing near the front of the crowd. But rather than listening intently, he was glancing down into something in his hand. Probably his BlackBerry, Phoebe realized. She felt that nervous twinge again, like she’d experienced when she heard the shout last night. She was going to have to talk to Glenda about what was going on with her friend’s marriage.

Two students spoke next, girls who choked back tears as they described Lily and paid tribute to her. It seemed that each knew her not so much as a good friend, but as someone they had interacted with in the course of a school activity—one had been on the volleyball team with Lily, another was a coeditor of the school magazine. Did that mean Lily didn’t have many close friends? Phoebe wondered. Because she’d joined the Sixes? Because there was a new guy in her life? Phoebe glanced around at the faces of kids in the crowd. The students seemed somber, definitely upset, and some of the girls had tears streaming down their faces. There was no sign, interestingly, of Blair or Gwen.

The ceremony closed with a blessing from the school chaplain and a haunting song from the choral society. The crowd began to disperse into the darkness, though some students hung back, hugging or talking listlessly to each other. Phoebe thought of making her way up to Glenda, but she saw that her friend was surrounded by members of the administration. Time to head home, then, Phoebe thought, and the idea made her slightly uneasy.

“Excuse me, Phoebe?” Phoebe turned to see that it was Jan Wait from the English department, the lenses of her big red glasses fogged from the cold. “Miles and I are having people over for a glass of wine—we’re just parallel to Bridge Street on Morton. Twenty-six. Would you like to join us?”

Phoebe almost said no, and then caught herself. Jan had always been pleasant to her, and Phoebe appreciated the invitation. It would be a relief to have company tonight.

“That sounds lovely,” Phoebe said.

Before leaving the plaza, Phoebe spent a few minutes studying the thinning crowd. Still no sign of Blair. Or Duncan either. But maybe he’ll be at the Waits’s, Phoebe thought. Miles Wait was in the psych department, too.

Their place turned out to be one of the restored wooden houses from the 1700s that dotted the town, especially closer to the river. As Phoebe shrugged off her coat in the small entranceway, she peered through the door into the living room, checking out the scene. There were already about a dozen people inside, sipping wine and chattering. And Duncan was there, at the far end of the room. He stood by the bookcase with a white bust of Freud on the top shelf, talking to a woman. Phoebe could only see the edge of her through the crowd.

She stepped into the living room, welcomed warmly by the tall, affable Miles. She glanced back toward Duncan and decided to approach. Suddenly the crowd around him shifted slightly, and she saw that it was Val Porter who was standing next to him, talking animatedly. And then, to her surprise, Val reached up and ran her hand down Duncan’s back.

It was the kind of possessive gesture that only a lover would make.

10

BUSY BOY, PHOEBE thought irritatedly. When Duncan had first asked her out to dinner, she’d assumed he was unattached, but he was clearly spreading his charms around. At least this solved one problem for her, she decided. She hadn’t wanted to get involved with anyone, and this guaranteed she wouldn’t. She had no interest in being part of someone’s campus harem.

She made her way to the bar, a drop-leaf table set up with a hodgepodge of wine bottles and half a quart of Skyy vodka. To the left of it was one of those big brick fireplaces that must have been used for cooking centuries back and now featured a gas fire. The flames danced, repeating the same frantic pattern again and again, and the gas made a popping noise like a flag being whipped by the wind. Phoebe poured herself a glass of cheap Shiraz. Just to her left was a cluster of three people—a man and two women—and she sensed, by the quick pause in their conversation, that they had noticed her and exchanged looks. Many of the faculty would know who she was, the famous plagiarist in their midst.

“Phoebe, have you met Bruce Trudeau?” It was Jan bearing gifts, a man with a potbelly so big it looked as if he was carrying a basketball beneath his shirt. “He’s in Miles’s department.”

“No, I haven’t. How do you do?” Phoebe shook Trudeau’s hand and then turned back to Jan. “This was so nice of you to do tonight. And your home is charming.”

“I thought everyone could use a drink,” Jan said. “We’re all churned up. Miles had Lily in a class last term, and she was in one of Bruce’s this fall.”

“Oh,” Phoebe said, surprised. “I assumed she was an English major.”

“Yes, but a psych minor,” Bruce said. “And very smart.”

“From what you know of her, do you think she might have committed suicide?” Phoebe asked.

“My gut says no,” Trudeau said. “She was a little distracted these past weeks, but not morose in any way. And yet it’s so hard to tell with kids this age. They hide it very, very well.”

“Were you aware if she was dating someone?”