Chapter 5
CHAPTER FIVE
The Investigation
“So, this is where …”
“Where it happened,” she said. The girl,* short, with her hair dyed bright blue, was on work study, working as the resident assistant of House Torlaine.
She’d let us inside Maya’s room. “I wasn’t here at the time, so I didn’t hear the …
Well, um, there weren’t many people on campus at the time. It happened over Easter break.”
Maya’s dorm room was coated in the sharp, sterile scent of artificial lemon, probably a by-product of all the cleaning products they’d used to scrub the blood off the floor.
In the center of the room was a spot as long as my arm that was lighter than the surrounding areas.
If I focused on it, I could almost see the faint stain of blood, could almost smell its cloying, metallic scent. The room must have been filled with it.
On the bed, a pink-and-white quilt was layered over the plain white blanket supplied by the school, along with a matching pillowcase.
“We couldn’t bring ourselves to start packing her things up just yet.”
I reached for a stuff ed bear leaning against the pillow. The bed was covered with stuff ed animals and flowers, framed photos, handwritten notes folded into little triangles, and cards. There was clearly a lot of love here.
“The girls on the hall wanted to do something. She had a lot of people here who really cared about her.”
I picked up one of the pictures of Maya. The photos all showed a pretty, smiling girl, tall and tan, with light brown hair and a wide, angelic grin. On the other side of the room, the other twin bed was stripped of its linens. “What about the roommate?”
“She’s been moved to a new room. Obviously, it was pretty traumatic for her.” Her eyes traveled to the stain on the floor.
“Was she the one who found her?” Max asked.
“No, thank goodness. She was home for the holiday. Most students had cleared out, gone home to be with family. Dani and Maya were in here late. One of the staff heard screaming and ran in to find them. Dani had collapsed. They took her to Maritza’s straight away, where she …
Well, I don’t know for sure, but I heard she got pretty violent before becoming the way she is now. ”
“And she hasn’t moved since then?”
She shook her head. “Just been levitating for days. I heard from Dr. R they put an enchantment to keep her in the cottage, but I don’t see her getting down anytime soon.
To be honest, I don’t know how she manages it, with the state she’s in.
Barely conscious and can still hold the spell to keep herself up there.
I couldn’t even levitate more than two inches fully conscious, if I tried.
” She looked down guiltily. “A lot of the girls on the hall have tried.”
Over time and through questioning the girls on the hall, we were able to compose a fairly telling portrait of the two women.
Maya was from a wealthy family down South, where she’d lived in a big, antebellum-style house in Charleston with her parents and two older brothers.
They went boating a lot, and Maya had gone to a private girls’ school.
After not getting into her university of choice, she spent a couple of years at a trade school, but didn’t tell anyone she knew; we found this out by looking through her records.
Then she enrolled in the undergraduate program here.
* She wore pearl earrings, laughed loudly, hugged freely, and apparently “was really cool about lending her curling iron.”
Danica, according to the girls on the hall, was a thin girl from the Midwest with “fucked-up” eyebrows and stringy blond hair.
“I think she’s from Idaho,” one of the girls said.
“No, Kansas or something? Is that near Nevada? She said something about the Grand Canyon once.” We later confirmed via school records that she was from Ohio.
It was harder than I thought it would be finding someone—anyone—who actually knew Dani. Plenty of girls on the hall beckoned us into their rooms when we knocked, pulling us close to whisper some bit of gossip or scandal or their own theories.
“I heard she went to class once covered head to toe in animal blood—”
“Her hands turned to claws. That’s why there were so many marks on the body. The only reason they caught her was that, when she tried to get away, she couldn’t fit her hands around the doorknob.”
Or: “Dani and Strauss did it together. She promised if he helped her kill Maya, she’d finally sleep with him.”
“Dr. Strauss, the physics professor?” I asked. And her advisor, according to Robetresse. “Why do you think that?”
The girl lowered her voice, leaning closer. “It’s obvious, isn’t it? He’s a sexual deviant. Why else was he removed from the school’s Advisory Council?”
Her roommate came up behind her chewing a Twizzler. “He’s not a deviant, he’s a god. A certified sex god.”
The other rolled her eyes. “Please. You have not had sex with him. She has not had sex with him.”
But none of what the students said could be confirmed, and none was firsthand, only repeated second-or thirdhand, sometimes even fourthhand accounts.
“Did you, um, did you actually know Danica, though?” I asked more than one of the girls on the hall. The answer was the same every time.
A blank look followed by, “No. She never spoke to us.”
That didn’t stop the people we talked to from adding their own opinions on the matter. “She was a fucking freak,” one girl spat.
“Quiet and weird,” another girl agreed. “Maya was too good for her.”
“Maybe she was just shy,” I murmured, but then shook my head quickly at their outraged stares.
The only one we found who had a kind word to say about her at all was Maya’s roommate, Grace, and that had only been through a secondhand accounting of things Maya herself had said. We met Grace in her new room, sitting on the bed, her freshly washed hair wrapped in a towel.
I sat down at the desk across from her. Max settled against the opposing wall.
Despite how I tried to resist it, Max and I quickly fell back into a familiar dynamic, one we’d used for past case studies while interviewing people about their objects.
Max kicked off the questioning, working his charm to put subjects at ease while I observed them, their tics and nervous habits, their objects.
I tried to look for the truth behind it all, what they were really saying. Or trying to hide.
“What can you tell me about Dani and Maya?” he asked, voice rumbling and deep. “How was their relationship? Was there ever any indication that Dani wanted to hurt her?”
“They dated on and off for, like, the majority of junior and senior year, but I’ve never seen two people more different. As for why Dani did this,” Grace shook her head, voice shaking. “There was no indication. None. I thought she loved her. She had us all fooled.”
Grace stared at her hands, and I realized how hard this must’ve been for her. Maya was her roommate, someone she’d slept only feet away from every night. Someone she saw probably every day. She wasn’t even fully moved into her new room yet; there was a box in the corner of things left to unpack.
His voice softened. “You’ve never seen people more different—how so?”
“Dani had this stutter that came out sometimes that she was self-conscious of, so she didn’t, like, put herself out there, you know? And Maya was exactly the opposite. Always hugging everyone, kind of loud. Everyone liked her.”
“Lot of people knew her. She must have had some enemies,” Max said. “Can you think of anyone who would want to hurt her?”
Grace shrugged. “No. Stuff like that was really important to Maya, being liked.” She pulled out her phone and pulled up Maya’s Instagram.
“I mean look at this, not even one mean comment. Sometimes I think she spelled her page so people could only say nice things. If anything, people loved her too much.”
“Could I take a look at that?” I asked.
Pictures on Maya’s Instagram showed the same beautiful girl, light brown hair and startlingly blue eyes, artificially enhanced with some kind of filter. She had the same pose in most of her pictures, one that made her waist look thinner and hid the scar on her thigh.
“Over thirty-five thousand followers. Not bad for a college student.”
Grace nodded. “She collaborated with brands sometimes. Posted their content or recommended stuff.”
There were pictures with her various workout routines, some posts recommending vitamin supplements and tea infusers.
A quick skim of the comments showed a whole lot of heart eyes, “queen shit,” or creepy comments from guys.
I couldn’t figure out why she did the ads.
It was clear she’d come from money and wasn’t hurting for it.
A good portion of the photos and videos were her sailing or on boats with friends, a beer in one hand and a fish she’d caught in the other.
Pictures at school were similar. She and friends in the backs of trucks, laughing and dancing, drinking whiskey or what looked suspiciously like moonshine.
Photos from various parties, selfies with friends.
Something itched at me as I scrolled. I continued down, all the way down, finally finding what I was looking for.
There was one picture with Dani, only one.
I recognized the pale skin, though not as pale as now.
Even here, there was an uneasiness about her.
The people in the picture seemed to hover just around her, not quite comfortable in her presence, though I don’t know if this was because they simply didn’t know her that well.
Her blond hair fell in limp waves around her face, and though she was beautiful, the effect was unsettling.
There was a haunted look in her blue-gray eyes, like an ocean at midnight.
Already gone, even then? Or were the effects of whatever this was just starting to take hold?
Max teetered on the desk opposite us, offering Grace a gentle smile. “They were pretty different then, huh?”