Evelyn Wheatley was sitting next to an attractive blonde woman on one of the leather couches in the fraternity’s chapter room. They were gazing out at the storm through the massive picture window. When she saw me coming, she stood up to face me.
I’m sure my physical appearance didn’t inspire much confidence in my investigative capabilities. As I stood there dripping water on the floor, I saw the rage flaring in her eyes. It was obvious she had other issues on her mind.
“I placed my faith in you, Officer Cantrell,” she spat bitterly, “and you allowed Robin to be murdered just like my husband. You are evidently just as incompetent as that idiot sheriff.”
I noted that she hadn’t included Hoyt Palmer among the dead.
“Due to the hurricane, the AuCoin agency is unable to fly in their investigative team,” she went on, “but they’ll arrive here as soon as the storm passes over us. In the meantime, why don’t you go back to issuing parking tickets or harassing the students or whatever it is you do.”
“That will probably be too late,” I said.
“Too late for what?” she snapped back.
“To find and arrest your husband’s killer.”
The other woman hadn’t risen from the couch. She was in her late twenties, at least seven or eight months pregnant, and looked Scandinavian, with blonde hair and blue eyes.
“Are you Mrs. Palmer?” I asked.
She nodded.
“I believe your husband is the key to finding out who is responsible for these deaths and why, Mrs. Palmer.”
“I do not . . . speak English so very good,” she said.
“I believe your husband is still alive, and I think you both know where he is,” I said. “You have no reason to trust me at this point, but if I can talk to him right away, there’s a chance I can find the killer in the next few hours.”
“Trust you?” shouted Evelyn Wheatley in a mocking tone. “I would sooner trust the Pope to advocate for abortion.”
She still hadn’t bothered to deny that Hoyt Palmer was still alive.
“I’m convinced that this man plans to kill again,” I said, “and the victim will almost certainly be your husband, Mrs. Palmer. I don’t care how safely you think he’s hidden, this man will find him and kill him . . . if not today then next week or next month.”
“Frankly, we don’t care a goddamn bit about what you’re convinced of, Officer Cantrell,” said Evelyn Wheatley. “Go now.”
Her face had a new hardness to it, which was entirely understandable. I played the only card I had left.
“It’s possible that the man who committed these murders will never be caught,” I said. “These were revenge murders by someone who is unlikely to ever do it again. This could be the one chance we have to catch him and make him pay for what he has done.”
“Revenge? Revenge for what?” she demanded.
“That’s what Hoyt Palmer could tell us,” I said.
Her eyes dropped to the floor. Looking down, I saw that a small rivulet of blood had trickled down the length of my loose waterproof pants. The red drops had pooled together to form a puddle on the parquet tile.
“I believe you’re bleeding,” she said in a tone she might have used if her butler was wearing a soiled tie over his morning coat.
“I was shot, Mrs. Wheatley.”
That didn’t seem to impress her much either. I wanted to add that I hadn’t slept more than six hours over the last three nights, every muscle in my body was sore, I had a knife slash across my chest, my knuckles were barked and swollen, I had probably lost at least one tooth, my dog might be dying, and I had just killed a man.
“Was it in the course of investigating the murder of my husband?” she asked next.
I nodded back at her. Her hard brown eyes connected with mine and stayed there for several seconds. I don’t know what made her change her mind. Maybe she needed to find out for herself if revenge was the motive for her husband’s death, and if so, why. I’ll never know for sure.
“All right . . . I’ll take you to him.” Turning to Mrs. Palmer, she added, “It’ll be all right, Inge. Stay here and rest. I’ll be back in a little while.”
After retrieving a hooded slicker from her room, she joined me outside in the old pickup, pretending to ignore the coating of Bug fur that covered the passenger side of the seat.
As soon as we moved out from the protection of the covered entrance portico, the wind began buffeting the truck again as if we were inside a piñata. I was making my way around some fallen debris in the road when she said, “I knew that something was troubling Dennis. I assumed it had to do with a business matter. I never thought it might date back to something that happened in his college years.”
A moment later, a spasm of grief hit her. She began to rock back and forth on the seat, her eyes tightly shut, her hands squeezed together in her lap.
“I’ll be all right,” she said huskily.
I decided not to tell her that her husband had pancreatic cancer or what I had learned about the murders. If he was still alive, Hoyt Palmer would fill in some of those answers. And she would believe them coming from him.
Opening her eyes again, she told me to drive to the college bell tower, which stood next to the library on the arts quadrangle. The bell tower housed the chimes that rang on the quarter hour.
I had been up in the tower only once, and that was as a student. As well as I could remember, it was about a hundred feet high. The bell chimes rested in wooden racks just below the clock in the belfry, each one controlled by a bell clapper from the room below. The chime masters could play everything from Mozart to the Beatles during their Sunday afternoon concerts.
Six inches of standing water covered the promenade between the library and the bell tower. I drove over the curb and parked on the grass next to the door that led to the iron staircase inside the tower. The solid oak door was locked, but I had a master key on my ring that opened most of the entry doors on the campus. It worked.
Inside, the noise of the wind was muted by the stone walls. I told Evelyn Wheatley to stay behind me, and we began to climb the steep narrow stairway. My joints and muscles were silently screaming at me, and I had to rest about halfway up, sitting down on one of the cold iron steps. Evelyn Wheatley glared at me with obvious impatience. I asked her if we were going up to the room where the chime masters operated the bells. She shook her head.
“Have you ever heard of the Plume and Dragon Society?” she asked.
“No,” I grunted, standing up to resume the climb.
“It’s made up of the most extraordinary students at St. Andrews. Dennis was a member. So was Hoyt Palmer. You can’t ask to join it. The seniors in the society vote each spring on who will be tapped to carry on their sacred traditions. Its very existence is a secret from the rest of the student body.”
I could imagine the sacred traditions. The new initiates bent over bare-assed while the rest of them used the sacred paddle. I was glad that no one had ever tapped me on the shoulder, but I wondered if Jordan Langford had been a member.
“They have a secret chamber up here,” she said, starting to breathe as heavily as I was. “It’s where Hoyt thought he would be safe until the murderer was caught.”
The wind was whistling through hairline cracks in the mortared stone walls when we finally reached the landing below the chime masters’ room. Evelyn Wheatley motioned for me to stop. Glancing around the landing, I saw no indication of a door or entryway in the stone facade.
She walked over to a heavy bronze lighting fixture that was mounted on the far wall. Rotating it to the side, she gripped the fixture in both hands and pulled hard on it. It must have been some kind of latch key, because a three-foot-square section of the lower wall suddenly slid open.
The door panel had a stone facade to match the rest of the wall. Its frame was made of wood and hinged on one side. We had to get down on our hands and knees to pass through the opening. I went first, carrying my flashlight in one hand and my cocked .45 in the other. Evelyn Wheatley shut the portal door behind us, and I heard it lock into the closed position.
Four candles were guttering on an elaborately carved table in the middle of the chamber. Against one of the walls, two stone gargoyles flanked an enormous upholstered throne chair. A leather couch sat along another wall surrounded by leather club chairs and floor lamps, none of them lit.
Above our heads, heavy oak beams vaulted across the ceiling. A single leaded casement window provided the only natural light. It was too small for a man to climb through, even if he had scaled the hundred feet of stone to reach it. The room was cold and damp.
“Hoyt?” Mrs. Wheatley’s voice rang out.
On the other side of the room, a heavy oak door led into a second chamber. The door stood ajar, but there was no light coming from beyond it. I shined my flashlight into the room. It was smaller than the main chamber and contained a clothing rack holding Druid-like blue velvet cloaks.
I heard a sudden movement and shined my flashlight toward it. The beam found Palmer cowering on his knees behind the clothing rack.
“Why did you bring him here?” he whispered angrily. “You promised not to tell anyone, Evelyn.”
As he came toward us, I saw that he was still dressed in his green medical center pajamas and bathrobe.
“I thought it best,” she said.
Palmer had the beach-boy looks of an aging surfer, with a thick helmet of grayish-blond hair and blue eyes like his wife.
“Officer Cantrell has promised to protect you, Hoyt,” she said.
“No one can protect me,” he groaned. “He’ll find me no matter where I go.”
“Who will find you?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s over the boy.”
“What boy?” she demanded. “What are you talking about?”
Palmer plodded in his slippers back into the first chamber, heading straight toward the burning candelabra like a moth seeking the flame. We followed after him, and I eased myself into one of the club chairs.
“How did you get past the policeman at the hospital?” I asked.
He forced a nervous grin at me.
“I was hiding in one of the other rooms when the two of you went to check on me. I waited for you to go past before I took off. Evelyn and Inge were waiting for me in the parking lot. That’s when I decided to head—”
“What did you mean about the boy?” interrupted Evelyn Wheatley. “I must know.”
Before he could respond, the bells above us suddenly started to toll.
“Oh, God,” Palmer cried out. “He’s up there . . . he’s coming for me.”
I looked at my watch. It was exactly one o’clock.
“The electricity must have been restored. The chimes are set to play automatically,” I said as they tolled.
My words didn’t erase the look of terror in his face. His fear was like a tangible thing in the room with us, abetted by the constant moan of the wind outside the stone walls.
“I don’t want to die,” he said. “I’m not a brave man, Evelyn.”
“Die for what?” she asked harshly. “Pull yourself together and tell me what you did.”
Hearing the tone of rebuke in her voice, he took in a deep breath. Running his hands through his blond hair, he said, “I . . . I’m not proud of what I’m about to tell you. I’ve spent my life trying to atone for it.”
“Just like Wheatley and Massey,” I said.
He nodded at me.
I suddenly felt the hair prickling up on the back of my neck. It was my extra sense checking in again. Pulling out my radio, I called Captain Morgo. She responded immediately. I told her that we had found Hoyt Palmer and exactly where we were. I asked her to send over at least three officers to protect the tower building until an escort could be arranged to take him to a secure place.
She told me that aside from Ken Macready and her two dispatchers, everyone was now deployed on the campus. She promised to send Ken right over and said she would call the sheriff’s office and ask that two deputies be dispatched immediately to escort Palmer back to the campus police building.
Evelyn Wheatley waited until I had turned off the radio again before saying, “Tell me about this boy right now, Hoyt.”
Turning to me with a grisly attempt at a smile, he said, “Did you join a fraternity in college?”
I shook my head no.
“Do you know what a closet case is?” he asked.
“Everyone knows what a closet case is,” snapped Mrs. Wheatley. “Get on with it.”
“Well . . . during our junior year, there was a bad drinking incident at Tau Epsilon Rho. Two girls were sent to the hospital, and we almost lost our charter over it. The following year, we were on probation . . . and our pledge class really suffered. We had to take guys who ordinarily would have been blackballed . . . you must know what I mean.”
I nodded again to keep him talking.
“Anyway, this one kid had showed up the first night with the rest of the herd . . . he was fat . . . and really clumsy. From the moment he arrived, he began bumping into furniture, knocking things over, spilling the punch . . . wherever he went, something happened. Another thing was that he couldn’t keep our names straight. He would call me Robin and he would call Robin Dennis. Maybe he was dyslexic . . . we didn’t know what dyslexia was in those days . . . he just seemed as dumb as a post. He would have been blackballed any other year, but because of the probation situation, the brothers ended up taking him.”
“Many men are clumsy,” said Evelyn Wheatley. “Dennis was clumsy.”
Palmer began to gnaw at the knuckle of his right thumb. I saw a spot of blood where his teeth had bitten hard. His eyes slowly became riveted on it.
“Hoyt,” barked Evelyn Wheatley.
“I . . . I was the one assigned to go to his room and tell him the good news,” he said, now unable to look at her. “When he opened the door and saw me standing there, he started beaming at me like it was Christmas morning. On the way back to the fraternity, he kept telling me it was the greatest thing to happen in his life.”
“But he didn’t live happily ever after,” I said.
“Looking back, I guess he wasn’t really a closet case . . . he was just a big gentle bear of a kid,” said Palmer, as if trying to make belated amends. “We started calling him Oaf. That became his pledge name. I don’t know . . . I guess some of the brothers hoped he would quit.”
He paused to look across at me again. It was obvious he was one of them.
“My mouth is very dry,” he said huskily, pointing at a bottle of water on the sideboard next to the table.
I reached over and grabbed the bottle, passing it across to him. He took several swallows. When he put it down, his hands were shaking. Evelyn Wheatley looked away.
“Eventually, even the other pledges didn’t want to have anything to do with him,” he said. “He was like that cartoon character who always had the rain clouds over his head. The brothers made him the butt of most of the hazing stunts. He always got the dirtiest pledge assignments.”
The brothers, I thought, shaking my head in disgust.
“But no matter what we did to him, he seemed to take it in stride. It was crazy. I mean, he was a big guy . . . like in Of Mice and Men. He was so naïve that he never even knew we were tormenting him. I guess it was actually kind of endearing in a way . . . but of course, we never saw it like that at the time. So he came in for even more special attention.”
His lips were barely moving when he said, “I regret to say we did all kinds of things to him.”
“What things?” demanded Evelyn Wheatley.
“You don’t want to know,” he said, shaking his head. “But Creighton went along with it all like it was part of the wonderful bonding process you went through to become our brother.”
It was the first time he had used the boy’s name.
“On pledge night, someone . . . I think it was Dennis . . . came up with an idea to make him quit. While the other pledges were all gathered down in the chapter room, we took him up to our suite on the top floor.”
“Who took him?” I asked.
“Dennis . . . and Robin . . . and me,” he said, his voice trailing off to barely a whisper.
“It started with a bottle of whiskey. There was about half a bottle left. We told him to chug the whole thing. All the other pledges were still celebrating down in the chapter room when we led him outside and over to the bridge.”
I could see it all in my mind’s eye.
“He was having trouble walking straight,” went on Palmer. “Dennis had brought a length of stout cord with him that he had found in the chapter room. It was braided with a lot of colors and was used on ceremonial occasions. He tied one end loosely around Creighton’s waist and the other end around one of the bridge stanchions. Then someone said, ‘It’s time for you to walk the line, Oaf.’”
It was obvious from the pathetic expression on Palmer’s face that he had been the one.
“Even as drunk as he was, Creighton started to shake. He looked at the three of us in turn and said, ‘Please don’t. I’m really afraid of heights.’
“‘A big guy like you?’ someone shouted back at him.”
Palmer’s voice caught in his throat, and he had to pause again. Tears appeared in his eyes, and he didn’t bother to wipe them away.
“Truly . . . none of us expected him to get up there. We thought he would chicken out, and then we would tell him he didn’t pass muster to join the fraternity . . . And then he actually climbed up on the railing. ‘Walk the line, Oaf, and you can be our brother,’ someone shouted up at him. But he didn’t . . . he was just like . . . paralyzed . . . he kept his arms rigidly at his sides . . . like he was standing at attention.”
Evelyn Wheatley was staring at him with absolute scorn in her eyes.
“And then what?” she demanded.
“He . . . he was actually sobbing . . . and then, oh, God . . . and then . . . he went over.”
It was almost exactly as I had pictured it.
“We . . . we all thought he would be saved by the rope Dennis had tied around him, but the rope was loosely tied . . . it just swept up over his shoulders. At the last second, he managed to get one hand inside the rope as it pulled tight around his neck . . . but it was . . . too late.”
He was staring at his bloody knuckle again.
He let out a long sigh and said, “When we pulled him back up, he was dead . . . his neck had been broken.”
As if almost dreading what he would see, Palmer turned to look at Evelyn Wheatley again, his shoulders slumped.
“And you just left him there like that?” she asked, her voice full of contempt.
She seemed to ignore the fact that her husband and Massey had been fellow conspirators.
“Jake,” I heard someone yell out from the stairwell, and Palmer bolted upright. I recognized Ken Macready’s voice. Going to the hidden passageway, I found the mechanism to slide the portal open.
Ken was standing there, his parka covered with mud. He looked a lot more self-assured since I had last seen him. He had obviously come through the storm a better officer.
“You look like hell, Jake,” he said, staring at my bloodstained waterproofs. “Do you need to go to the hospital?”
“I was already there,” I said, asking him to remain in the stairwell and to be prepared for a possible intruder. As I went back inside, Ken drew his Glock 17 and checked it to make sure there was a round in the chamber.
“Evelyn, we spent our lives atoning for it,” Palmer pleaded in a beseeching tone.
“How did Taylor’s father find out the truth?” I asked him.
“It’s his father?” asked Palmer.
“I think so.”
“I have no idea,” he said. “Only the three of us knew what happened, and none of us has ever breathed a word of it.”
He looked over at Evelyn Wheatley, his eyes silently begging for forgiveness. Without another word, she stood up and left the secret chamber.
Palmer stared down at his hands again and began to sob.