Sorority Sister (6 page)

When he reached the doorway, the man fastened pale, watery eyes on Maxie and said sullenly, “I wasn’t stealin’ nothin’. You can ask Miz Booth.” He held up the red-labeled can of beans. “She
said
I could have this. Go ahead,
ask
her if you don’t believe me.”

He had a mean set to his mouth, Maxie thought, and he needed a shave. “I believe you,” she said, anxious to be rid of him. “Why wouldn’t I?”

He lowered his grizzled head. “I know what goes on here. I know some things been missin’. I seen the way you people look at me, like I’m not as good as you.”

“That’s not true,” Maxie protested feebly. But she thought maybe it was.

“But I didn’t take nothin’,” Tom Tuttle said vehemently, his eyes still on the floor. “Only the stuff Miz Booth says I can have. And I don’t want nobody sayin’ nothin’ different.” And without lifting his head, he shuffled away from the two girls and went out the back door, slamming it loudly behind him.

“I don’t think I’d want him really mad at me,” Candie said softly. “He has mean eyes.”

Maxie nodded. Then she added slowly, “We don’t really look at him like he said, do we? Like we’re better than he is?”

“Probably.” Candie switched on the pantry light. It wasn’t very bright, providing only a dim yellowish glow. “But if we do, it’s just because he’s, well, he’s not very clean and he’s a grouch. And he peeks in the windows sometimes, we all know that. We should get rid of him, but Erica says he’s been here forever. Like Mildred.”

Maxie and Candie moved on into the pantry, grateful that it was no longer pitch-black inside. It took only a second or two to locate the things they’d need for dinner. Maxie reached out a hand for one of the boxes.

It moved.

Maxie gasped. “What … ?” she murmured, staring at the round container.

And then she saw that the container wasn’t actually moving at all. Something
… a lot of
somethings … were moving
on
it. Black things. Large, elongated, dark things …
living
things, were crawling all over the box.

Maxie’s arm flew back to her side. “
Candie,
” she whispered. “
Look
…”

Candie looked. And cried out. “
What? What is that?”

Maxie’s heart rose into her throat as her horrified eyes went from the rice container to other shelves, other boxes, other canisters.
Many
of them seemed to be moving. Many were covered with a thick layer of dark, scurrying, living creatures.

Ants.

Big, fat, black, disgusting ants.

N
OW
M
AXIE, HER EYES
slowly, slowly, circling the room, wondered how they could
not
have noticed the ants before.

What was really frightening was how
many
there were. They were everywhere, marching up and down the white walls in long, thin lines like soldiers, covering the food containers with thick coats of black, layering the white shelves with sooty streams. As Maxie and Candie looked down in horror, the fat black ants trailing across the floor in determined columns began to march up Candie’s black heels and across Maxie’s beige flats.

Candie shrieked and bent to swat at the invaders.

Something moved in Maxie’s hair. Stomping her feet to shake the creatures from her feet, she lifted a hand to her head. Her hand came away covered with ants.

She screamed. Her head came up, her eyes darted toward the ceiling, and she screamed again. The surface overhead was covered with moving black trails.

She wanted to run, but she couldn’t. Her legs seemed frozen in place.

They’re just
ants,
she tried to tell herself, but it was no use. There were so
many.

Something moved in her hair again.

Her legs thawed, and reaching down to yank Candie upright, Maxie ran for the door, dragging Candie with her.

The door was closed.

“I didn’t close the door,” Maxie gasped, reaching for the doorknob, “did you?”

“No! Open it, hurry!”

It was darker by the door, the light not quite reaching. Maxie, one hand shielding the top of her head, reached with her other hand for the doorknob. Her fingers closed around soft, living things, and she screamed.

“They’re on the knob,” she gasped, yanking the hem of her skirt upward to swat furiously at the doorknob. “They’re all
over
it!”

Candie reached out a hand to help Maxie swat, and when the doorknob seemed free of crawling insects, Maxie yanked on it. Hard.

It didn’t open.

“Oh, God, they’re falling into my hair!” Candie cried, batting at her head with both hands. “Maxie,
get
the
door
open!”

The knob turned under Maxie’s forceful grip, but the door remained stubbornly closed.

“Pound on it!” Candie shrieked, “pound!”

They both began pounding with their fists, and shouting, “Help! Open the door,
hurry
!”

Footsteps outside the pantry, then the door was pulled open, and Erica stood there, staring at them and saying, “What on earth … ?”

Maxie and Candie, their hands still protectively reaching for their hair, fell out into the kitchen.

Erica alerted the rest of the house to this new, latest emergency. Tinker tried to calm down Maxie and Candie, both trembling and white-faced. Then several other girls in the house, including Cath Devon, attacked the pantry with rolled-up newspapers, brooms, and cans of spray insecticide.

“I don’t understand,” Mildred said in a bewildered voice when the pantry was finally relatively free of pests. She leaned against the kitchen counter. “We have
never
had ants in this house. And the exterminator was just here in February, checking. There was no sign of an ant colony then. He would have said something. “ She sighed heavily. “I’ll have to call him first thing tomorrow morning.”

“There weren’t any ants in there when I went in earlier,” Erica said firmly. “I would have noticed.”

Maxie and Candie, both still white-faced, exchanged a glance. “Tuttle was in there,” Maxi said hoarsely. “Earlier. Before us.”

“Tom?” the housemother said blankly. “Yes, I know. But … you don’t think … ? Oh, Maxie, that’s ridiculous. Why would Tom … ?”

Maxie shrugged. “He doesn’t like us. Any of us. Haven’t you noticed?”

Cath Devon, standing quietly in a corner, her face as pale as Maxie’s, said hesitantly, “He’s not dangerous, is he? I mean, he wouldn’t really
hurt
anyone, would he?”

Maxie guessed that Cath was remembering the weird, disturbing things that had gone on when she’d lived at Nightmare Hall. She must feel right now like she’d jumped out of the frying pan into the fire.

Hastening to reassure Cath, Mildred said quickly, “No, of course not. Tom’s an old crank and more than a little paranoid, I suppose, but he’s never given me any reason to believe he would ever harm anyone.”

Not
yet,
Maxie thought.

It seemed too much of a coincidence to her that they’d discovered Tom Tuttle in the pantry right before they discovered the ants.

“Was anyone else in the house today who doesn’t belong here?” she asked Mildred. Then she remembered. “Except for that doctor, I mean?”

Mildred looked blank. “What doctor?”

“The one whose car broke down. Big man, graying hair, handkerchief over his bloody nose? He needed to use the phone.”

“Maxie, you let a stranger into the house? With everything that’s been happening?” Erica demanded.

Maxie flushed. “He was
a doctor.
Had his black bag with him. He was on his way to the infirmary for a consultation. Besides, he was
hurt.
I couldn’t very well just let him stand there on the front porch bleeding, could I? He was on the phone when I left. You didn’t see him?”

“No, I didn’t see the man,” Mildred said.

“That must have been when I was out back talking to Tom about the peephole and the chain lock. When I came back inside, the house was empty.”

“His name was Clark,” Maxie said. “Michael Clark.” Desperate to be sure that she hadn’t done anything foolish or dangerous, she ran to the phone and dialed the infirmary.

And was told a moment later that no Dr. Michael Clark had been expected there for a consultation or anything else.

“I don’t believe it,” Maxie said when she’d hung up. “I never should have let him in. It won’t happen again, I promise.”

“Who
was
this person?” Candie asked, a bewildered look on her face. “If he wasn’t really a doctor, who
was
he and what was he doing here?”

“I don’t
know
who he was,” Maxie answered, “but has it crossed anyone’s mind that his black bag could have been filled with …
ants
?”

A heavy silence followed her words.

“Mrs. B.,” Maxie said shakily. “I think we need to call the police.”

“No!” Erica cried. “Come on, Maxie, it was just
ants
! No one was hurt. It was a joke, a gag, a prank … maybe one of the other sororities did it. The police will laugh at us if we call them and tell them you were trapped in the pantry with a bunch of ants.”

“Anyway,” Candie reassured Maxie, “Mildred just said, Tuttle’s going to put a chain lock on and a peephole in. So what happened today can’t happen again, right?”

Maxie gave in reluctantly. She didn’t like the idea of police officers invading Omega house any more than anyone else did. But the uneasy feeling in her stomach remained.

“What about the ceremony?” Tinker asked no one in particular. Turning to Cath, she asked, “You haven’t changed your mind, have you?”

Cath laughed softly, the color returning to her face. “No, I haven’t changed my mind, Tinker. Anyway,” she added more soberly, “compared to what we went through at Nightmare Hall, ants are nothing.”

Erica and Mildred put their heads together to figure out what to serve after the ceremony, assuming that most of the boxes in the now closed and locked pantry were ant-infested. When they had settled on ordering out for Chinese from Hunan Manor in town, preparations began again for Cath’s wall-walk.

There wasn’t that much to prepare. Tinker checked to make sure there was no debris lying on the top of the low brick wall. Maxie turned on the overhead lanterns strung across the lawn, while Candie and Erica sat down on the back porch and went over the routine, Cath’s blindfolded walk around a low fountain wall.

Maxie was replacing a burned-out bulb in one of the lanterns when she spotted movement in the thick, tall bushes off to her left, and heard a scuttling sound. Normally, she would have dismissed the sound as a wandering cat or dog, maybe a squirrel out for a late-evening forage.

But not now.

She climbed down from her ladder and moved closer to the bushes. “Is anybody there?” she called. Candie, Cath, and Erica looked up from their bench on the porch.

“Maxie?” Erica called, standing up. “What’s the matter?”

There was no answer from the bushes. Not a leaf moved, and the scuttling sound was gone.

I’m freaking, Maxie told herself, turning away. There isn’t anybody there, and there never was. If I’m not careful, I’ll be seeing little green men in the shadows any second now.

But she saw again the long, thick trail of ants moving across the ceiling, dropping into her hair, and began to tremble. Someone had deliberately brought those ants in from outside.

Probably in a doctor’s black medical bag.

Why would someone do that?

When everything was ready, the girls gathered around the fountain under the softly glowing lanterns.

While Erica wrapped a thick, soft white cloth around Cath’s eyes and tied it at the back of her head, Tinker put an audiotape into a portable cassette player. The sound that came out when she switched it on was an eerie, haunting melody played on an organ.

Horror movie music, Maxie thought to herself. Erica helped Cath up onto the low brick wall surrounding the empty concrete fountain, and the other girls formed a wide circle around the edges.

“Catherine Devon,” Erica intoned in an unnaturally deep voice, “complete the circle once without faltering, and you will prove your courage and determination. This you must do for your sisters. If you succeed, we will pledge to you our eternal loyalty, as you pledge yours to us.”

Cath lifted her arms straight out from her shoulders for balance and took one faltering step, then another. A light breeze ruffled her dark hair as she became more sure of her footing and began to move with confidence around the low brick wall. The music in the background filled the cool night air.

Maxie recalled her own walk, and the relief she’d felt at the end when the other sisters had removed her blindfold and hugged her, officially welcoming her to the group. Now she enjoyed the ritual again. She and Tinker on one side and Candie on the other joined hands. After dinner, she would call Brendan. Maybe they could get together that night. But she probably wouldn’t tell him about the ants … not just yet, anyway. He’d given her a hard time about the things being stolen. Better not give him any more fuel for his argument that she should flee back to Lester.

That night, out there on the lawn under the glowing lanterns, joining hands with her sisters as they made room for a new member, she felt more at home than she ever had in the dorm.

This was the best place to be.

Until Cath fell.

Perhaps because she’d been thinking about Brendan, Maxie couldn’t be sure exactly how it happened.

One minute, Cath was walking lightly, agilely, along the brick wall, and the next minute, one ankle turned sharply, she let out a soft “Ooh” and teetered slightly, her arms struggling to maintain an even balance. And then, realizing she was losing the battle, she gasped. A second later, she toppled heavily sideways.

But in the wrong direction. Had her body tipped to the right, she would have fallen onto the soft, thick grass, and been uninjured.

Instead, she fell to the left, into the fountain.

The
empty
fountain, with no cushion of water to soften the impact.

There were gasps, and then screams and shouts of horror, as Cath toppled off the wall and headed straight for the bare cement lying at the bottom of the fountain.