Except that night.
Charlie refused to let that happen.
“I’m walking home now,” she said. “You can join me or not.”
Maddy pretended to consider it. She took a tentative step in Charlie’s direction, a hand raised ever so slightly, as if reaching out for her. But then someone left the bar and music blasted out the open door into the alley. A rackety version of “Just Like Heaven.” Hearing it, Maddy turned her gaze to the bar, and Charlie knew she’d made her decision.
“You’re an awful friend,” she told Maddy. “I hope you know that.”
Charlie turned and marched away, not even pausing as Maddy called out, “Charlie, wait!”
“Fuck off,” Charlie said.
It ended up being the last thing she ever said to Maddy.
But that wasn’t the worst part of the night.
Far from it.
The worst came twenty steps later, when Charlie turned around, hoping to see that, despite the fight and the “Fuck off,” Maddy was right behind her, struggling to catch up. Instead, Charlie saw her still outside the bar, her cigarettes finally freed from her purse, standing with a man who’d seemingly come out of nowhere.
Charlie couldn’t see him clearly. His back was partly turned to her, and his head was lowered. The only part of his body visible to her was his left hand, which was cupped around the small flame of Maddy’s lighter. Everything else about him was shadow, from his shoes to his hat.
That hat—a basic fedora that all men used to wear until suddenly they didn’t—tipped Charlie off that something about the scene wasn’t right. It was 1991. No one wore a fedora anymore. Also, everything was too stark, too stylized. A single shaft of white light slanted between Maddy and the man in the fedora, splitting them into two distinct halves: Maddy glowing in the light, the man swathed in darkness.
It was, Charlie realized, a movie in her mind, brought about by her fight with Maddy.
Rather than watch the scene return to normal, which is what she should have done, Charlie turned around and kept walking.
She didn’t look back.
When Maddy didn’t return to the dorm that night, Charlie had assumed she’d hooked up with someone from the bar. Fake Bon Jovi, maybe. Or the guy in the fedora. If he existed at all. Charlie had her doubts.
Worry didn’t set in until noon, when Charlie returned from class to find the dorm room still untouched by Maddy’s presence. Charlie couldn’t help but think of the day her parents died. How she had remained unconcerned as time slipped by, oblivious to the fact that she had become an orphan. Refusing to let history repeat itself, Charlie spent the rest of the day going from dorm room to dorm room, asking everyone in the building if they’d seen Maddy. No one had. Charlie’s next move was to call Maddy’s mother and stepfather, asking if they’d heard from her. They hadn’t. Finally, at midnight, exactly twenty-four hours since she’d last seen her, Charlie called the police and reported Maddy missing.
She was found early the next morning.
A cyclist had discovered her on his daily ride, drawn by an unusual sparkle in the middle of a field nine miles outside of town. It was Maddy’s purse, its sequins glinting in the morning sun.
Maddy lay next to it, facedown in the dirt, dead for at least a day.
At first, everyone—the police, the town, the university—had hoped it was a normal murder, as if such a thing existed. Foul play that could easily be solved. A jealous ex-boyfriend. An obsessive classmate. Something that made sense.
But there were the multiple stab wounds to contend with. And the fact that her wrists and ankles had been bound with rope. And the missing tooth, an upper canine that dental records indicated hadn’t been missing before she disappeared.
It was the tooth that led police to conclude the worst: Maddy was another victim of a man who had struck twice before.
The Campus Killer.
Charlie grudgingly admired the authorities’ restraint in the nickname. The Silence of the Lambs had hit theaters seven months earlier, entering Buffalo Bill and Hannibal the Cannibal into the pop cultural lexicon. Instead of going for something in that same morbidly catchy vein, the police opted for simplicity.
He was a killer.
He prowled Olyphant University’s campus.
He snatched women and tied them up and yanked out a tooth after stabbing them to death. That was attention-grabbing enough for most people—and the general public didn’t even know about the missing teeth. Only the victims’ families were told that gruesome detail. Charlie had found out simply because she was the first person the police talked to after finding Maddy’s body, and they needed to know immediately if she’d been missing a tooth. The detectives begged her not to tell anyone else, and she hadn’t. Not even Robbie. She understood it was something the cops needed to keep to themselves to differentiate between a random stabbing and the work of the Campus Killer.
Charlie had learned the nickname the day she arrived at Olyphant. The Campus Killer had struck a month earlier, sending the whole university into a panicked frenzy, even though the victim was a townie and not a student. Her freshman orientation included a lesson in self-defense. Rape whistles were distributed with ID cards. On campus, girls never walked alone. They moved in packs—great, unwieldy groups of nervous giggles and shining hair.
During campus-sponsored mixers or late-night chats in the dorm lounge, the murders were talked about in hushed tones, like urban legends whispered around a campfire. Everyone knew the names of the victims. Everyone claimed to have some tangential connection. A shared class. A friend of a friend. A glimpse on the street two nights before they were killed.
Angela Dunleavy was the first, murdered four years earlier on a rainy night in March. She was a senior who worked part-time at a bar downtown. One of those places that made its waitresses wear tight T-shirts in the hope the college boys would leave bigger tips. She went missing shortly after last call and was found the next morning in a patch of woods on the edge of campus, bearing the then-novel signs of the Campus Killer’s handiwork.
Tied up.
Stabbed.
Tooth pulled.
There were no leads, no suspects. Just a horrific murder that police had stupidly assumed was a onetime thing.
Until the second victim was found a year and a half later. Taylor Morrison. The townie killed a month before Charlie’s freshman year, her body dumped on the side of a maintenance road two miles away. She worked in a bookstore two blocks from Olyphant, which was close enough to campus for her death to be lumped in with Angela Dunleavy’s.
When a year passed without another murder, people started to breathe a little easier. After two years, the rape whistles stopped but the self-defense classes remained. By the start of Charlie’s junior year, no one roamed campus in groups and the Campus Killer was barely mentioned.