AN HOUR LATER, when the doorbell rang, the ladies of the chapter gathered eagerly in the front hall, expecting perhaps some firefighters with big hoses or EMTs delivering mouth-to-mouth. There was an audible sigh of disappointment when the door opened, and it was not a crew of off-duty shirtless Marines, but Alexandria Von Douton with her sleek platinum French twist instead.
“Ms. Blythe,” she greeted me coolly but with a feral glint in her eyes. “I have the pleasure of delivering this to you in person.”
I accepted the envelope, and asked, “Has the stay been lifted? Is rush restarting?”
Her cold smile faltered. “No. Which I’m sure you’re quite pleased about.”
“No one wants rush to continue more than I.”
“I have a hard time believing that considering all the illegal acts you’ve been promoting this week.”
“Illegal?” I sputtered. Was Callie’s mom’s lawyer friend wrong about North Carolina surveillance laws? How had Von Douton heard about that?
“Don’t play innocent with me. You Debs have gone far too long without consequences.” Her lips twisted in satisfaction. “Until now.”
She turned and left with quite a dramatic flair. I had to give her credit for pulling it off at her age, in those shoes. My begrudging appreciation for a well-executed flounce aside, I opened the envelope with trepidation.
The paper inside was worse than anything I had expected. I headed straight into my apartment, where Zoe was at the computer, and Callie was posting fake pictures on Casey Fenner’s Instagram account.
I showed them the letter from Panhellenic.
“Not rule number five,” Callie groaned.
“Probation,” I muttered, shaking my head. I couldn’t believe it. We were getting probation for having men in the house during rush. We were on a break!
“Not double-secret probation?” Zoe asked.
“No,” I sighed. “Not this time.”
“How did they find out?” Callie asked.
“Clearly, someone posted something about it,” I said. I should have known this was going to happen when all the women’s cell phones were being held up, capturing the day’s almost-nude entertainment. But maybe they just wanted to relive the moment later, in the privacy of their own rooms. I couldn’t say.
“On it,” Zoe said, sliding Callie out of the desk chair and pulling up Casey Fenner’s accounts. This might be one thing I felt actually guilty about. When we were putting the Casey Fenner scheme together, Callie (the standards and morals director, after all), suggested that Fake Casey request to be friends with everyone in the chapter, as well. It would look odd if Fake Casey was only friends with other freshmen, she argued; and this way, we could see whether the chapter sisters were behaving themselves on social media, as well. I felt a little funny about basically spying on my own sisters, but it was for their own good.
In a few quick clicks, Zoe had reviewed everyone’s postings from the past hour. No one had posted anything about our surprise strippers. And they were a surprise, which made the whole probation thing superunfair. We hadn’t arranged for mostly naked men to appear on our doorstep—Casey had. Hadn’t he?
I double-checked with Callie and Zoe and confirmed that as far as they knew, no one in the house had scheduled this visit. I almost smacked my forehead. Of course. How could I have been so stupid? This hadn’t been Casey at all. Even though he would have appreciated the dancers’ artistry, he knew Panhellenic rules too well to do something like this.
“We were set up,” I said. “This was a setup. One of the other houses called the strippers in, then ratted us out to Alexandria Von Douton.”
Zoe frowned. “Von Douton? She’s the Tri Mu, right? The one that looks like Cruella De Vil?”
Now that I thought about it, Von Douton’s fur coat had looked very puppylike that morning.
Zoe moved the mouse and one of the surveillance camera feeds popped up on the screen. Footage of the Tri Mu house sped backwards for a few seconds, then it stopped. “I noticed this a little while ago,” Zoe explained. “But I thought it was just some Panhellenic thing going on.”
A large black Mercedes pulled up in front of the Tri Mu house. Nothing happened for a few seconds, then a familiar figure approached the driver’s side window. It was Ginnifer. She handed a cell-phone-shaped object through the window, then the object was passed back. The conversation looked short, and Ginnifer soon walked away, in the opposite direction from the Deb house. A few seconds later, the figure who emerged from the Mercedes was clearly Von Douton, her confident stride leading her toward the Deb house.
“When was this?” I asked, unable to decipher the numbers at the bottom.
Zoe checked her watch. “Just about ten minutes ago.”
Von Douton’s next stop had been to drop off the probation paperwork in my hand.
“The Gineral sold us out,” Callie exclaimed.
“We don’t know that,” I reasoned uncertainly though it was hard to explain why Ginnifer had given Von Douton something through that car window. I had to use common sense. “Von Douton didn’t print the paper in her car. She had it before she ever saw Ginnifer.”
“The Gineral has had it in for us from the beginning,” Callie insisted. “She’s always looking for something wrong with us.”
Which was true, but . . . “She’s also insisted that we follow every single rule,” I said. “Why would she do that if she’d just rat us out for accidentally having strippers over?”
“Because we haven’t broken any other rule,” Callie said.
“Well . . .” Zoe tilted her head toward the computer monitors.
“We did get written up for disobeying the Rush Council,” I added sheepishly.
Callie wasn’t having any of it. “The Gineral set us up. I bet she called the strippers, then gave Von Douton pics.”
I understood Callie’s theory, but there was one thing she was forgetting. “Ginnifer is a Delta Beta,” I said sternly. “She is your sister, and mine, and she has said sacred vows to uphold our sorority. Accusing her of violating those without proof is just as serious as if she did rat us out to Von Douton.”
Taking a deep breath, I looked at the paper in my hand again. It wasn’t dated, and it only held the one sentence. “For violation of rule five of the Sutton College Panhellenic Recruitment Code, the Delta Beta chapter is hereby put on probationary status.”
Probation wasn’t that serious. It was one of those consequences that sounded worse than it was. Like “house arrest.” And since I knew that the Debs were one hundred percent following all the rules that anyone cared about, I was confident that this decision wouldn’t ultimately affect our chapter negatively.
“I’ll talk to Ginnifer,” I told the girls, mostly to calm them down and make them feel better that I had everything under control. “I’m sure she was just giving Von Douton directions or something.”
“With her phone? Von Douton’s Mercedes doesn’t have GPS?”
I ignored Callie’s well-reasoned and logical points. Now wasn’t the time for logic. Maybe I was biased because of my own recent tenure of being the (sometimes) unpopular visiting sisterhood mentor at various chapters, but my intuition still told me that however sketchy Ginnifer’s actions were, she was only looking out for the Delta Beta good. “Zoe?” I turned my attention to my adorable tech genius. “Do you have everything ready for the police?”
She unplugged a thumb drive from the CPU and gave it to me. “I found something I wasn’t expecting when I was going over Daria Cantrell’s social-media accounts. When she told me, I must have looked as sick as I felt because she asked me with wide eyes, “This is okay, right? We’re not getting in trouble?”
“Of course not,” I assured her. What else could I say? When it came to Delta Betas at Sutton College, it seemed like trouble was always a possibility.