Literally Offed Read online

  I snuggled closer to him as we continued to walk. There were many times I wondered if he and his father would ever want to move back to California. As much as I wished him enough closure about his mother’s death, that he wouldn’t look like someone had sucker punched him in the gut every time he thought of her, I also secretly hoped he would never forgive California enough to move back.

  Walking over the stone bridge arching over Campus Creek, we took a sharp right and headed down a small hill down toward the bank. Next to a beautiful willow tree was a bench. Ever since I’d been a kid, walking through campus with only dreams of attending the local university, it had been one of my favorite places to come and read or think.

  Alex and I sat, Hammy jumped in between us, settling on Alex’s lap, her tongue lolling out of her mouth as she dog-smiled up at him. I would’ve been slightly jealous if I didn’t completely share in her infatuation.

  “Remember when we both ended up here one evening after we first met?” Alex said, pulling in a deep breath of the cool breeze kicking up off the creek.

  I scoffed. “Uh, yeah. I thought you completely hated me and then the next second I thought you were going to kiss me, but you really were just leaning forward to pick a leaf out of my hair.”

  Alex chuckled. “I was totally going to kiss you, but I thought you hated me and I chickened out. That leaf wasn’t even in your hair. I picked it up off the bench and just pretended it was why I was leaning in.”

  I smiled at the memory. My attraction to Alex after he started working in the library had been hard to deny, even when he’d been mostly mad at me for trying to get involved with his dad’s murder investigation. That day on this bench had been one of the first times I’d actually thought he might not despise me as much as he pretended to up until that point.

  As if to prove how much things had changed since then, Alex leaned over and kissed me.

  “And here we are again,” I said after his lips left mine. “Dealing with another dead body.”

  “Some things never change.”

  Campus Creek trickled happily by, setting the perfect relaxing background music.

  “What else did you find out from your reading last night?” Alex asked after a few silent moments, calling to mind the reason I must’ve woken early with the case on my mind: I’d gone to bed reading all about the drama between the TriAlpha members.

  “Like I told your dad, the frat seems to be completely Thoreau-crazy.” I thought back to the many tirades James went on about in the journal regarding the “establishment.” The journal had gone into great detail about the fight the founding members had gone through with the university decades earlier when they’d banned the Greek system on campus.

  “If I don’t have to hear anything more about Thoreau ever again, it’ll be too soon.”

  “Well, the TriAlphas definitely seem to support more of the Civil Disobedience ideals from Thoreau, not as much the environment-loving transcendentalist we see through the pages of Walden.”

  “There didn’t seem to be a difference to me,” Alex snorted.

  I tipped my head in concession. He had a point. Though there was a lot about the beauty of nature within the Walden ideals, there was still quite a lot about shirking the status quo. “Thoreau certainly knew what he believed, and so does this secret frat.” When Alex raised his eyebrows in question, I added, “They believe the university banning fraternities was the best thing that could’ve happened, because now they didn’t have to play by its overbearing rules. Without regulation, they could finally take care of their own, that secrecy allowed them to do even more for their members than they were able to as a university supervised entity.”

  Alex cleared his throat, in full police officer mode now. “I don’t know. Rarely are the things people do in the shadows, outside of the law, good.”

  “Right? Reminded me a little of The Godfather as I was reading. Everything’s corrupt, but at least we can win at the corruption game.”

  “I think you’re giving them a little too much credit there. The mob is pretty complex. These guys are supposed to be running a secret fraternity, yet their president wrote everything down in a journal.”

  I continued. “That’s part of it, I think. They want to seem like stupid meatheads. It makes it much more difficult to believe they took out James on purpose.”

  “If they did,” Alex said, reminding me nothing was for sure. “His brakes having been cut shows that someone was trying to get rid of James any way they could.”

  Widening my eyes, I said, “Oh, you have no idea.”

  Intrigued, Alex leaned in.

  “Tell me, what’s the most important thing to a fraternity, especially one like this?” I asked.

  “Loyalty? Tradition?” Alex guessed.

  I touched my pointer finger to my nose. “And so James’s plans to move the frat to SWU and take it public would’ve been a pretty big problem to the TriAlphas. Worth killing him over.”

  9

  Alex’s eyebrows rose at the implications of the information I’d just shared with him. The wind picked up and rushed through the long, lazy branches of the willow tree to our left. I took a moment to take a deep breath of the fresh breeze.

  I knew I needed to consider suspects outside of the fraternity, but if the guys knew of James’s plans to uproot an organization that’d been in one place for decades, it was a pretty good motive for murder, and one only the members of the fraternity would’ve cared about. It was something I hadn’t shared with Detective Valdez earlier, wanting to get a little more information before I decided what it meant.

  Not to be outdone, Alex said, “I may not have found something as good, but I still think we need to add a few names to this suspect list.” He pulled out his phone and started typing something into a browser. “When I searched for TriAlphas or even their symbol, all I could find was from when they were a fraternity here thirty years ago, nothing new. But when I looked up secret fraternity at NWU, I got a hit.”

  Intrigued, I leaned closer to Alex on the bench to see what he found. While my job had been to read through as much of the journal pictures as I could last night—I’d gotten through a good half of them before I’d fallen asleep, thank you very much—Alex’s job had been to see if the internet held any more information than we’d gotten in the journal.

  Alex pulled his phone away for a moment, meeting my gaze with his. “I know The Frond isn’t necessarily your favorite…”

  I scoffed. Okay, that might be the understatement of the year. The Frond was the university’s unofficial periodical, the tongue-and-cheek alternative to the serious Campus Chronicle. I’d been happy to laugh at their silly stories and often undocumented sources with everyone else on campus until they’d pointed the finger at my favorite professor a couple years ago as the most likely suspect in an ongoing murder investigation. Since then, I’d held a huge grudge against the organization.

  Ignoring my unapologetic feelings, Alex continued. “But, if it’s any consolation, she only used to work there, probably hates them too. Get this, her name is Chloe,” Alex said.

  Eyes wide, I asked, “Chloe, as in one of the cracks?” My nose wrinkled at my word choice. “I mean, you know… the journal. James’s ‘Internal and External Cracks.’”

  Alex laughed. “I think so. Chloe French used to write for The Frond, but before summer break she wrote a story on a secret fraternity, thinking her editor would be pleasantly surprised by her initiative and the inside scoop she’d gotten. But when she brought the finished story to them, her editor wouldn’t publish it no matter what. She eventually ended up publishing the content on a blog of hers in the wake of her frustration with the paper.”

  “I can’t imagine they liked that.” I cringed.

  “They didn’t. Fired her and refused to give her a reference for other papers. But that wasn’t even the worst of it. Within hours of her publishing the story, Chloe started getting anonymous warnings to take it down. When she didn’t take them seriously
, they morphed into death threats, she says.”

  “She says?”

  “There isn’t any actual proof of these threats anymore. She’s been documenting everything on her blog. When she took her computer in to show one of the deans and campus security, they told her they didn’t see what she was talking about. She took her laptop back and the threats were gone.”

  “Erased?” I asked.

  “Or they never existed in the first place and she’s crazy. It’s what she claims, at least. Since then, the problems have been less direct. Her name is mud; she hasn’t been able to get a job at any other paper within twenty-five miles, and when she even looked into moving to another university, they told her some of her writing credits wouldn’t transfer.”

  I shivered, the welcome breeze from minutes ago now feeling like an eerie chill with this new information.

  “This feels like a movie or something. Either the girl is crazy or someone is working very hard to make it appear that she is.”

  “Not just someone.” Alex arched an eyebrow. “There are at least twenty calling her out as a liar and a lunatic.”

  Pulling up the pictures of James’s journal on my phone and holding it in front of him, I asked, “Switch? I know you want to get into these, and I need to read whatever got this Chloe chick death threats.”

  Swapping phones with me, Alex was immediately absorbed into the world of the TriAlphas and James’s intense paranoia about everyone and everything threatening his precious fraternity. I focused on Chloe’s story. The title read, “Fraternizing with Fear.” I began reading, stopping to snort at her commentary on how Pine Crest was a nice town, but the locals were a little intense, when she was setting the scene for her story. I heard Alex exhale in disbelief at something in James’s journal at the same moment. Regardless of my disagreement with her statement, I dove back in. The peaceful sounds of Campus Creek in the background felt so oddly matched with the dark material I found in the article.

  Chloe went on and on about odd happenings on campus, people getting grades they didn’t seem to deserve, disciplinary action which simply disappeared, and a few other things which were probably pure coincidence. Honestly, this whole thing sounded a lot like a gossip column. But I knew Alex wouldn’t have taken it seriously without good reason, so there had to be something in here that had caught his eye. I kept reading and I found it.

  I was alerted to the existence of this fraternity when Dylan Oakes, a student here at NWU and a member of the varsity baseball team came to me, hoping I’d help tell his story. You see, he’d participated in the spring “rush” in an attempt to gain acceptance into the fraternity. “It was terrible,” Dylan told me. “They locked us in a basement for hours without food or water. When they finally let us out—they made us play a trivia game and each time we got something wrong, we had to take a shot. Apparently, I passed out. Another pledge had taken me to the hospital when I wouldn’t wake up. My blood-alcohol level was almost four times the legal limit,” Dylan recounted when I interviewed him, only weeks after his accident. “If he hadn’t brought me in, I would’ve died. As it was, it took me two days to recover.”

  When Dylan made it out of the hospital, the members of the fraternity found him and told him that he was never to talk about what happened or they would ruin his life. He was denied acceptance, as was the pledge who saved him. Dylan didn’t listen, however, telling everyone from the school counselors to the dean of students. But after news of a failed routine sports drug test surfaced from weeks earlier, Dylan’s account was quickly thrown out as an attempt to save his scholarship and spot on the team. “I’ve never done drugs in my life,” Dylan assured me. “And I definitely didn’t fail any of my tests. They planted it to discredit my story. I was kicked off the team and I lost my scholarship.”

  One has to wonder if the mysterious death of Ethan Emsworth three years ago has anything to do with the existence of this secret fraternity. If so, Dylan’s story could be only one of many, but the others are too scared to speak up, like the pledge who saved Dylan’s life. He has remained silent and has refused any attempts I’ve made to contact him.

  It is because of this danger that I don’t name the fraternity here. I believe they’ve killed before and wouldn’t be above killing again. As it is, I think I’m putting myself in grave danger by posting even this.

  I let out a long breath as I finished reading. A quick scan of her other posts seemed to confirm what Alex had told me about her mental stability being called into question after the “threats” she received turned out to be nonexistent.

  Indecision made me chew on my bottom lip while I thought. On one hand, I could see where her editor was coming from. The piece was full of wild speculations, unsubstantiated conjectures, and only one discredited witness. If I hadn’t spent the last twenty-four hours completely consumed with James’s death, finding his journal, and trying to get information out of his campmates, I probably would’ve written her off as certifiable, too.

  But between the tight-lipped keg-stand crew, the mysterious journal, and the cut brake line on James’s truck, I was beginning to see some glimmers of truth within the madness.

  Alex, sensing I’d finished, glanced up from my phone. There were far more journal entries than there were of Chloe’s blog posts.

  “So?” he asked.

  I shared with him my observations and my hesitations, ending with, “We definitely need to add both Chloe and Dylan to our suspect list. If what she says is true, either of them would have motive to get revenge on the frat, or James in particular, being the president.”

  Alex—ever-rational—said, “If what she says is true, you’re right. Her later posts have a very manic feel to them and that doesn’t quite sit right with me.”

  “Yeah, I’m worried it could be a case of the hound, bay horse, and turtledove.”

  Squeezing his eyes shut, Alex rubbed them with the heels of his palms. “That sounds vaguely familiar. Why do I have a terrible feeling it has to do with Thoreau?”

  Ignoring him, I continued. “In Walden, Thoreau mentions how he lost his hound, bay horse, and turtledove. When he describes them to the locals, some say they’ve heard the hound baying or the distant clomp of the horse’s hooves. Some people even mention having seen the dove fly away, disappearing behind a cloud. Thoreau mentions these people often spend the rest of their lives searching for his lost animals, growing to care about them as if they’d been the ones to lose them. There’s a large group of scholars who believe the animals never existed, they were merely analogies for friendship, passion, and escape. They believe the people Thoreau asked to help only took up his search because they too were looking for those same amorphous ideals, not physical animals.”

  Alex blinked, obviously running on too little sleep to dive into literary analysis with me this early.

  “What if Chloe heard Dylan’s fabricated story and turned it into her own? She’s obviously holding on to issues where the university is concerned, expressing angst over people passing classes they didn’t attend and others getting away with illegal activities. What if Dylan’s story about the frat spoke to an ideal she was already searching for?”

  Alex glanced down at Hammy, curled up in between us, scratching behind her ears as he pondered my words. “Okay, but what if Thoreau actually did lose those animals? The guy didn’t seem to be particularly with it, to me.”

  I chuckled, but let Alex continue.

  “What if Chloe had, in fact, seen the dove, heard the hound and the horse, but didn’t know they were important until Dylan came along and made her aware? Our brain doesn’t like to be confused, so when something unaccountable happens, it will latch onto the easiest explanation we’re given. Especially if there’s a group of people feeding us these easy stories, bent on the general public not asking questions, not looking deeper. A person can see something, but not know its importance until someone else gives it a name or a purpose.”

  My mouth dropped open as I listened, lips finally quirk
ing up into a smile as he finished. Okay, maybe he was ready for literary analysis. “Have I told you lately that I absolutely love you?” I said, leaning over to kiss him.

  “Not nearly enough,” he said with a wink.

  “So,” I said through a long exhale. “We need to figure out if Chloe is chasing real animals or the idea of animals.”

  “Sure,” Alex said. “We now know there is a secret frat on campus, so that’s one point in her court.”

  “And James was worried enough about her to write about her in the journal. She’s sounding more and more credible by the second. She still goes to NWU, then?” I asked, not having missed the fact that she’d been trying to transfer elsewhere.

  “I think so,” Alex said. “Based on what I could glean from her blog.”

  “Well we’ve got to meet with this girl, then.” I opened up a new email under her “Contact Me” section and began to type in my information and then my message.

  Chloe, My name is Pepper Brooks. I just read your article. I believe you and I want to talk. Can we meet? I own Brooks’ Books in town if you feel more comfortable talking in person instead of responding through your site. Hope to hear from you soon.

  I passed the phone to Alex, letting him read what I’d written.

  “Good call acknowledging her fears so you’re already on her side.” He read through the rest and handed the phone back to me.

  Satisfied, I sent my message. “And now we wait.” I sighed, blinking up happily at the sun as its rays blanketed my face.

  I knew we were still investigating a murder and there was a killer out there, but it felt so different being back home. It felt safer than the quiet woods, ironically more peaceful when we didn’t have to look over our shoulders every other moment, worried there might be a killer searching for another unsuspecting throat.

  And it wasn’t just the killer we had to worry about, either. Fueled by the stories and the journal, this fraternity was growing into a looming presence in my mind. An evil power bent on quieting anyone who threatened its anonymity. If Chloe and Dylan were to be believed, the TriAlphas had the means and connections to ruin lives.