The Sixes

She reached for the call button, but before she pressed it, a man with a stethoscope draped around his neck entered the room and introduced himself as Dr. Awad, part of the same “team,” he said, as the doctor who’d treated her last night.

“You feeling a bit better today?” he asked. He was good-looking, Phoebe thought, and no more than thirty- five.

“Yes, much better,” Phoebe said. “I’d like to be able to go home today.”

“Well, let’s see how you’re doing first,” he said. “You did have a mild concussion, and we like to keep an eye on those. How’s the pain on a scale of one to ten?”

“No more than a one or a two,” she told him, which wasn’t exactly the case. But she thought she could manage if they sent her home with painkillers.

After scanning her chart, he listened to her heart, asking her to take quiet breaths. Next he drew a penlight from his pocket and examined her eyes with it. Then he explored her skull with his hands—searching for swelling, she assumed. When he was finished, he stepped back and studied her.

“Your elbow has just a hairline fracture, but you need to keep your arm in a sling for six weeks. As for your head, your tests were all good, and you seem fine now. Why don’t we let you enjoy our fabulous lunch here, and then send you home in the afternoon. It will give us a bit longer to monitor you.”

As soon as the doctor left, Phoebe felt suddenly ambushed again by fatigue, and within moments she was asleep. She had a dream, an endless, irritating one in which she was overheated and sweaty, stuck in a room where people were making too much noise. “Please transfer me,” she told someone who refused to listen to her. She woke to her good arm being lightly touched. Forcing open her eyes, she found Glenda hovering over her.

Phoebe grinned before memory caught up with her. She was still pissed at how Glenda had handled the fake blog incident; her friend had sandbagged her.

“Hey,” Phoebe said neutrally.

“Fee, tell me you’re okay,” Glenda said.

“Yeah,” she said, struggling. She pulled out one of the pillows from behind her and tucked it under her injured arm for support. “Unless you count the fact that I look like I fell face-first into a briar patch.”

“I feel totally to blame—I dragged you into this awful mess.”

“Neither of us could have predicted anything like this. When did you hear the news?”

“I heard about Hutch last night. At first I assumed he’d been killed during a break-in. This morning Craig told me that he’d heard from his contacts in the police department that someone else had been injured at the scene—a woman. But I had no clue it was you. I knew you’d talked to Hutch that one time, but I would never have guessed that you were out there on a Sunday night. And then, late this morning, Dr. Parr’s office called to make sure I knew you were in the hospital, and suddenly I put it together.”

“Sorry not to call you myself. My phone ran out of battery.”

“I figured you didn’t call because you were still livid with me.”

“Well, that too.”

Glenda slipped out of her dark red coat and folded it across the arm of the chair near the bed. She was wearing a long-sleeved black dress with a flattering high waist. On her neck was a pearl choker. Glenda’s motto had always been: If you look cool in a crisis, people’s first impression will be that you are. And yet Glenda’s face told another story. It was drawn, and she had deep circles under her eyes.

“Fee,” Glenda said, settling into the chair. “I never for a second thought you’d concocted that blog site or lifted that kid’s essay. You’ve got to believe me.”

“Then why not discuss it with me alone and hear my take? Why subject me to an inquisition in front of Stockton and Ball?”

“It was all coincidental. Tom had a number of urgent things to discuss with me, so I asked him over before our lunch. While we were talking, Ball burst into the house with the laptop. He’d told us about the blog seconds before you arrived. I should have demanded they leave and talked to you myself. I wasn’t in any way accusing you, though. I was just shocked by it, and concerned.”

Glenda was right, Phoebe thought—she should have asked the men to beat it before discussing the matter with Phoebe. But it wasn’t such a big infraction that Phoebe couldn’t let Glenda off the hook now.

“Have the tech people made any progress tracing it?” Phoebe said, her voice softening.

“Yes and no. They traced it to a fake e-mail account, but it’s a dead end from there.”

“Well, the New York Post has already posted an item. I need the school to release a statement saying I’m completely in the clear.”

“It’s already in the works. Now tell me about last night.”

Phoebe shared the story, as well as the conversations with Hutch that had led up to it. When she’d finished, Glenda slumped back in her chair and let out a ragged sigh. Phoebe could see her friend felt truly anguished by what she’d heard.

“I just have such an ache in my heart about Hutch,” Glenda said. “He was a good, good man—and it’s horrible that he died in such a brutal way.”

“This must be making things even worse on campus,” Phoebe said.

“You bet. Everything up to now seems like one big May Day festival. Two girls have actually withdrawn— forced to, I’m sure, by Mommy and Daddy.”

Glenda pinched her lips together. “I’ve got to ask you,” she said. “Do you think the Sixes killed Hutch?”

It was a question Phoebe had asked herself more than once as she lay in her hospital bed—both in her drugged stupor and later with a clearer head.

“My answer’s probably going to surprise you,” she said. “Because for days I’ve been trying to figure out if they were behind the drownings. And yet my gut tells me they didn’t do this.”

“Are you thinking it seems off-brand for them?” Glenda asked. “That they may run around in their Frye boots pushing students into rivers, but they wouldn’t beat an old man to death?”

“I’m not saying they didn’t do it. Wesley remembers Blair being at Cat Tails the night he went into the river, and it could be she drugged him as part of this pattern of targeting so-called loser guys. There’s a chance that as Hutch looked back into the river incidents, he saw something that clearly implicated the Sixes and he called Blair, tipping her off. She then showed up at his house—alone or with other members—and killed him.

“But there’s a flaw to that theory,” Phoebe continued. “I keep coming back to the fact that Hutch told me that a big clue lay in the notes about Wesley. And there was nothing in those notes about either Blair or, for that matter, any girls from Lyle College.”

“If the Sixes didn’t kill Hutch, who did? Are we back to the serial killer theory then?”

“Possibly,” Phoebe said somberly. “But with a twist.”

“Explain,” Glenda said.

“Stockton talked about drownings in the Midwest and north of here and how those deaths might be related to the ones in Lyle—that they could be all the work of a killer who moved around the country. But I’m thinking the killer may be someone local. In the notes, Hutch heavily underlined a part about this guy who tried to chat Wesley up at the jukebox. That could have sounded familiar to Hutch for some reason. He mentioned to me that he had pals on the police force here. Maybe in the last year he’d heard tales of a local predator that operates this way but hadn’t connected it back to Wesley until he reread the notes.”

“You’re scaring me big-time,” said Glenda.

“I know, it’s a sickening thought, but if Hutch figured it out, I might be able to too.”

“You? Phoebe, you cannot take this on, especially after what happened. Do you hear me?”

Phoebe reassured Glenda that she wouldn’t do anything that put herself in more danger. Before Glenda left, Phoebe asked that she track down the number for Hutch’s nephew in Allentown.

The next few hours were interminable. A patrol cop stopped by to return Phoebe’s house key, but that was her only visitor. After lunch an elderly woman rolled in a cart, offering the local newspaper, which Phoebe snatched eagerly to see the murder coverage. There was a small box on the front page about it, likely squeezed in at the last minute because the paper wouldn’t have had time for a longer report. As guaranteed by Michelson, there wasn’t a word about her.