Sorority Sister by Diane Hoh Page B

enough. Not nearly enough proof that she was who she said she was.
    “Oh, Allie told me,” the hairdresser said breezily. “Clients tell me everything. You’d think I was their best friend or sister or something.”
    Maxie sat perfectly still, not even wincing when Tia Maria, began pulling the hot rollers from her hair and had to pull sharply on one that had become slightly tangled. That explanation made sense. Allison Barre might very well have told her hairdresser everything that had happened lately at her daughter’s sorority house.
    There was only one problem with that explanation. There was only one reason Maxie still hadn’t relaxed, her stomach hadn’t stopped churning, her hands trembled in her lap.
    She hadn’t relaxed because she knew, she knew that Candie had never told her mother about any of that stuff. She wouldn’t have. Candie had said that her mother would never believe her, never. That her mother would more readily believe that Candie, a straight-A student, was suddenly flunking all of her courses before she’d believe anything negative about Omega Phi.
    Then how … if that were so . . . how did Tia Maria know … ?
    The last hot roller had been removed. Tia Maria began to brush, swiftly and thoroughly, Maxie’s shoulder-length brown hair. One hand held the brush, the other firmly held Maxie’s head still.
    Would a woman whose profession was making other women beautiful really do such an inexpert, outlandish job when she made up her own face?
    Was the garish makeup Tia Maria was wearing really just her style?
    Or …was it a disguise? No one could possibly figure out what the woman really looked like underneath all that makeup.
    Maxie’s heart thudded down into her kneecaps. Oh, God, she thought miserably, I fell for it. I fell for her whole stupid routine. I don’t believe this. How could I be so dumb ? Now I’m alone in the house with someone who should not know anything about what’s been going on here. … but does. Someone who isn’t who she says she is. There is only one way this person could know what happened in this house. She had to have something to do with all of it. What am I going to do?
    What she wasn’t going to do, she decided when her brain finally roused itself enough to think clearly, was let on that she suspected anything. All she had to do was make up some excuse to leave the room, slip down the stairs and run outside. Whoever this was, standing behind her brushing her hair, still prattling on and on about how awful it must have been for all of them, wouldn’t be dumb enough to do anything to her once she was outside, where people could see. If Tuttle’s truck was in the driveway, she’d race over there and use his phone to call the police. If he wasn’t …
    She’d worry about that when she got outside.
    “Tia Maria,” Maxie said, willing her voice to remain perfectly steady, “could we take a break for a sec? I think that I forgot to lock the door when I let you in, and the rule now is that the door has to be locked at all times.” She forced a smile. “Since you know what’s been going on, I’m sure you’ll agree the rule makes sense, right?”
    “Absolutely, hon.” The hand on the side of Maxie’s head didn’t ease. “But you did lock it. I saw you. So relax.”
    “No, I …”
    The hand tightened. “It’s locked.”
    She knows, Maxie thought. She knows that I know. Now how am I going to get away from her?
    The person behind her had made Cath fall off the fountain wall. She couldn’t have known that Cath wouldn’t be killed in that fall. And she had, by her own admission just now, done something with insecticide, whether the police had found evidence of that or not, that had sent many of Maxie’s friends to the hospital writhing in pain. Again, she couldn’t have known that they wouldn’t die. Maybe she had even been hoping that they would.
    So, although Maxie didn’t add the word “alive” to her question, it was there, dancing around