College-Cut Kill

“One, two or three deaths might be written off as accident and coincidence. I think five can too, in this case. But outsiders don’t see it that way. They think it’s fishy.”

“Do the police?”

“Oh, no. I didn’t mean that responsible people consider it fishy. The kids in the other houses do. By next year, it will all be forgotten. The transient population will take care of that. But this year is going to be rough. It’ll affect our pledge total. There’ll be a lot of whispering. For those inside the group it’ll mean a stronger unifying force, I suppose. I thought you, as a senior transfer, should know all this.”

“Why did the Flynn boy kill himself?”

“We’ll never really know, I guess. His gal was really broken up. She was a junior last year.”

“Did she come back?”

“I saw her at registration. Her name is Mathilda Owen. Tilly. You’ll probably run into her sooner or later. This is a big school, but she’ll travel in our group, I imagine.”

“The five boys that died, Arthur. Outside of their being members of the fraternity, is there anything else to tie the five of them together?”

“No. Nothing.”

“Teddy Flynn hung, Tod Sherman shot, two sophomores killed in a car and one unnamed guy drowned.”

“That’s it. The boy who drowned was Rex Winniger. The sophomores were Harry Welly and Ban Forrith. It was... a pretty bad year here.”

“I can imagine.”

He leaned over and put on the desk lamp. Evil was thrust back into the far shadows. He smiled without humor and said, “There had better not be any accidents this term.”

I made myself laugh. “Hell, all the accidents for the next ten years are used up now. We’re over the quota.”

Chapter Two Axes to Grind

The creative writing deal met once a week for a two-hour session, Friday from ten to twelve. It was taught by a dry but pompous little man who, the year before, had hit one of the book clubs with a novel that had little to recommend it but the incredible size of the heroine from the waist up and the frenzy with which she met all emotional experiences.

Tilly Owen was in the class. I located her at the first session, a tallish dark-haired girl, almost plain. Her face showed nothing and I was disappointed in her. She took notes meekly, her dark head bent over the notebook. But when she walked out, I did a quick revision. The tall body had an independent life of its own. Her face showed a clear and unspectacular intelligence, an aloofness — but the body was devious and complicated and intensely feminine, continually betraying the level eyes. She went off with a few other girls before I could make an intercept.

During the week leading to the next session when I saw her again, I enlarged my circle of friends inside the fraternity. Brad Carroll thawed a great deal, particularly after I had a few of them out to the beach house for cocktails. I began to learn more about the insides of the brethren.

Step Krindall, with the baby blue eyes and the pink head, was as uncomplicated and amiable as a dancing bear. Arthur Marris had too deep a streak of seriousness in him, verging on self-importance. His touch was thus a shade too heavy. The better house president knows when to use a light touch. Every house has its types. Bill Armand, the dark, vital junior was the house skeptic, the cynic, the scoffer. Ben Charity, the shy blond Georgia boy was the gullible one, the butt of most practical jokes. The angel-faced redheaded sophomore named Jay Bruce was the house clown. There was the usual sullen, heavy-drinking kid on his way off the rails — one Ralph Schumann, a senior.

The rest of them seemed to merge into one composite type, a bunch of well-washed young men in a stage in their development when clothes, women, snap courses and hard-boiled books had a bit too much importance. They talked easily and well, made perhaps a shade too confident by their acceptance into one of the most socially acceptable groups on the campus. And, in many ways, they were exceedingly silly, as the young of any species is likely to be.

Their silliness pointed up the vast gulf that my two years out of college had opened up. I could see that in their group mind I was becoming rated as one hell of a fellow, a quick guy with a buck, a citizen who could handle his liquor, keep his mouth shut.

I found that I had not lost the study habit. Necessary research during the two intervening years had kept me from losing the knack. The courses were amazingly stimulating. I had expected boredom, but found intellectual excitement.

On Friday came the second writing class. As per instructions, the entire class had done a short-short apiece and dropped it off on the previous Wednesday at the instructor’s office.

He gave us a long beady stare and we became silent. “I should like to read one effort handed in,” he said. He began to read. I flushed as I recognized my own masterwork. I had banged one out with an attempt to give him the amateur stuff he expected.