“Sera didn’t fit in, is what I’m trying to tell you I got out of talking to Michelle.” Which to Darren had seemed obvious from the start, confirmed for him after her classmate Ella revealed that joining Rho Beta Zeta hadn’t even been Sera’s idea.
Sera was pressured into going to the Labor Day party, into a lot of things around the house. Socials and committee meetings, several times a week. Sera was studious and didn’t want to do all that. Would just flat out tell Kelsey no, Michelle told Bell. And it drove Kelsey crazy that the girl wouldn’t follow the rules, and that weekend she put her foot down. Kelsey said Sera had to go to the first RBZ–Pi Xi party of the year.
Bell finally shut off the windshield wipers as the rain stopped.
She was so quietly thrilled to have him hanging on her every word, so proud of herself to have brought valuable information to her son, the Ranger. As Bell switched lanes again, she took him back to the night of the party, what Michelle knew about it and what had led the senior to slip a note under Sera’s door to see if she was okay the day after. Bell told Darren, “There had been a lot of drinking, like it is with most of these kids’ parties nowadays. My time, maybe you’d sneak one or two beers. Your daddy and me, we never needed nothing to drink to have a good time. He was only at SFA a month or two, but he took me to a couple of parties with the few other black students enrolled back then, and we had a good time. But I ain’t really start drinking until he was gone. I got through nine months clean with you.”
What was she talking about?
His father had never been at Stephen F. Austin.
“No,” Darren said. “Duke went to Prairie View, like his brothers.”
“Well, he did,” Bell said. “Until he didn’t.”
Darren had heard Pete say something about Duke being at SFA, but he assumed Pete had it wrong, was confused about the history. But here was his mother, her voice as clear as her name, saying his father had been a student at Stephen F. Austin University. He stamped his boot into the floorboard. “No. Duke, my dad, he went to PV and then got sent to Vietnam, near the end of the war —” It was the story he’d always been told, but even as the words poured out now, he felt a strong wind blow through the holes in it. How had Duke Mathews ended up in Vietnam if he was in school and surely up for a draft deferment? Randie had posed the same question, but Darren hadn’t been able to take it in, had simply pushed away any details that didn’t fit what his uncles had told him about his dad. Bell gripped the steering wheel and clenched her teeth. It stoked her pique with the men who had raised her son. Every detail of Darren’s life story that she had to explain to him was another poor mark in her assessment of William’s and Clayton’s parenting. “I thought you knew some of this,” she said. “Would have thought your uncles had told you at least a little about how you came into this world.” She sighed and shook her lowered head. “Found out I was pregnant with you just two weeks after I graduated from high school, whole life in front of me. Your daddy transferred to SFA that fall so he could be here when you came. I’d get in as much school as I could till you was born. We’d set our schedules around taking care of you. Don’t know why they thought we didn’t have a plan.”
She was having this argument with his uncles, men who had spurned her after Duke’s death, but she was also angry with Darren for favoring their version of events.
“I don’t believe you,” he said.
Bell cut her eyes at him. She looked hurt, flushed with irritation.
“Why, Darren? Why would I lie about this?”
Stunned that she could even make her mouth form the question, he said, “I don’t know, Bell. Why do you lie about everything?”
She swallowed hard, and then in a near whisper she said, “Not everything.”
They were, after all, chasing a lead about a missing girl that Bell Callis had most certainly not lied about, as evidenced by her son in her car with her now. And then, as if to prove her point, she slowed at the highway median, turning left across the two lanes heading north on 59 and steering her car onto a narrow, unpaved road behind a wall of pines and sugar maples, some of whose leaves had blushed to a ruddy red, the edges lit in a burning gold. She kept her gaze locked in front of her as they drove deeper into a wooded area. It was hard to understand where the dirt road was taking them as they ventured further into tangled thicket. Darren fidgeted in the car, feeling overheated and trapped inside the cramped space, his knees up near his armpits. Finally, the road deposited them in front of an enormous, multi-winged property in an English Tudor style, a structure that reminded Darren of the fairy tales his grandmother had read to him as a child. The house had two Greek letters, each over three feet tall, above the front door.
It was the Pi Xi fraternity.
Though the house was impressive, the parking lot was unfinished. It was a rough circle of dirt and gravel on which Darren might have thought twice about parking the late-model Cadillac Escalades, the BMWs, and the eighty-thousand-dollar trucks. Oh, there was a Kia here and there, but for the most part the residents of the Pi Xi house had a little change in their pockets. Darren heard music now, coming from the house. The hypnotic bass of rap, plus voices from around the back of the house, laughter and splashing water. Darren caught a whiff of chlorine in the air. The Pi Xi house had a pool somewhere on its sprawling acreage. Bell tucked her Nissan inside a stand of cedar oaks far enough at the edge of the parking lot that they had a clear view of the front door of the fraternity but also cover from the hanging branches, which swung low and wet over the car, making for a decent stakeout spot, Bell proposed.
“Stake out what, exactly?” Darren asked.
“The party was here, Michelle said. And Kelsey’s boyfriend lives here.”
Bell shut off the engine and picked up the story that she’d heard earlier.
“Michelle said Sera had a lot to drink that night, more than she’d ever seen Sera drink before. In fact, Michelle said she wasn’t sure she’d ever seen her drink. She knew the girl took medicine, knew Sera was sometimes so tired she missed class for days. She told Sera she shouldn’t do anything she wasn’t comfortable with.” Here, Michelle had gotten up and closed the door to her room so they wouldn’t be overheard.
Michelle had told Bell, “I took a drink right out of Sera’s hand.”
She’d looked at Bell, who was standing awkwardly just inside the closed door of Michelle’s room, never having been inside one of the girls’ rooms without a specific task in mind, trash to take out, a feather duster to run over the baseboards and the girls’ desks. Michelle seemed to sense Bell wasn’t totally comfortable and she wanted Bell to know she wasn’t like the other girls. “I come out of Crockett,” she’d said, speaking of a poor town west of Lufkin. She was trying to make Bell understand something about herself, was trying to imply some fellow feeling — where money, or lack thereof, might cut across the racial divide, might stitch their circumstances closer together than others’. “My dad’s a part-time plumber. His biggest dream is to get a job down at the prison in Huntsville. Not saying there’s anything wrong with it, but you get into a sorority like this and meet girls like Kelsey Piper, whose family knows people, who can have just about any job she wants when she walks out of here, and you just hope some of that rubs off. The dues to be here and all that money, that’s what you’re really paying for — someone out there to give you a real shot at cutting to the front of the line once we graduate out of here, someone to offer something more than what my daddy could, which is, what, answering phones at Coonskin Plumbers.” She let out a low sigh, looked at Bell, and said, a forlorn note in her voice, “Yes, ma’am, that’s what it’s called. Coons for short.” She wore an apology on her face. “I want something better than that, better than what all I come from and the way folks there act and talk about certain people. Not all of us voted for Trump. It’s just easier not to get into it with the folks who did.”
A pickup truck pulled into the parking lot in front of Bell and Darren, finding a spot closer to the front door. Bell fell silent for a moment, holding her breath as she watched two young men climb out carrying tattered backpacks. She studied them, squinting, as if that would bring them into greater focus. “That’s not him,” she said.
“Kelsey’s boyfriend?”
Bell nodded. “I got his name and pulled it up on Facebook.”
She fished her cell phone out of her back pocket, turning its cracked screen to Darren. She was showing him a photo of a white man in his early twenties with dark blond hair in a mullet-ish cut. His name was Brendan, and his eyes were a deep brown. They were too small for a face that was swollen with beer or ’roids or cheeseburgers or a cocktail of all three. According to his page, he was a senior and a running back for the Lumberjacks, Stephen F. Austin’s football team. Darren felt a distant guilt about deciding that he hated the kid on sight. He looked like an asshole.
“And why would Michelle share all this with you?” he said.
“’Cause she feels like something weird went down at that Labor Day party.”
She told Bell that at one point during the party she actually grabbed Sera by the hand and tried to get her to go back with her to the sorority house because Sera was so drunk. But Kelsey intervened.
Beyond the pine tops, a snatch of blue sky could finally be seen, suggesting the worst of the rain was over. It had come through, made a great show, and was now winding down, a break before the next sudden storm. Texas weather was like a conjure woman’s magic, like that of a bored sorceress playing tricks for fun. Darren craned his neck to see the top window of the frat house, an attic eye looking out. He could have sworn he saw the curtain move. He wondered distantly if they were being watched. It sounded crazy, even to his overly suspicious mind, and yet he couldn’t shake the feeling that there were eyes on them. As he stared at the window, Bell turned to him. “Michelle got a feeling that Kelsey was setting up something between her boyfriend and Sera. It was a game of hers, letting girls she didn’t like think they had a chance with Brendan and then pulling the rug out when a girl got herself into a compromising position so Kelsey could publicly accuse the girl of trying to steal her boyfriend. Michelle had heard stories that it had gone too far a few times, Brendan actually having sex with these girls, and Kelsey would still find a way to twist it and blame them, using it as ammunition against them. Well, Kelsey wanted Sera out of the house, out of the sorority, and Michelle had a feeling she was going to try some shit.”
“And Michelle didn’t do anything to stop Kelsey?” Darren asked.
“Said she didn’t feel like dealing with Kelsey’s bullshit. Or pissing her off. She must have told me nine different ways that Kelsey is connected, someone she might need when she’s an alum, which was her whole reason for pledging in the first place.”
Bell reached past her son to the glove compartment. Inside was a half-full bag of cherry sours, the generic kind the Dollar General sold in bags with a crimped piece of chipboard stapled at the top. She popped a few in her mouth, then offered to pour some in his hand. He accepted them for the gift they were, knocking them back and feeling sugar shoot through his blood before he even swallowed. “I want to know what happened that night,” Bell said. “Michelle never saw Sera come home, didn’t see her leave her room Sunday or on Labor Day. And she never got a response to her note.”
Darren tongued the globs of gooey red sugar stuck in his back teeth.
“So, what is your plan here?” he said, gesturing to the frat house. “Corner this kid, the boyfriend —”
“And ask him what happened.”
He wasn’t sure it would work, wasn’t sure that it mattered. Rey still hadn’t returned any of his texts, and it would be a while before he heard anything from Greg. And he wouldn’t be able to get Iris Fuller alone until Joseph’s shift started this evening. This was as good a lead as any. “I know it,” Bell said, reminding him this was her case too.
And so they waited, watching frat boys arrive and leave, arrive and leave, none of them Brendan, none with quite the same almost-mullet. The same puddle-brown eyes. Darren also kept an eye on the top-floor window with the twitchy curtain.
