Laura Kasischke - The Raising

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Last year Godwin Honors Hall was draped in black. The university was mourning the loss of one of its own: Nicole Werner, a blond, beautiful, straight-A sorority sister tragically killed in a car accident that left her boyfriend, who was driving, remarkably—some say suspiciously—unscathed.
Although a year has passed, as winter begins and the nights darken, obsession with Nicole and her death reignites: She was so pretty. So sweet-tempered. So innocent. Too young to die.
Unless she didn’t.
Because rumor has it that she’s back.

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Mira’s own lawyer had said, “No one has a right to establish these restrictions. Last time I checked, this was a pretty free country. If you want to write a book about it, write the book and we’ll stick it to them then.”

But as it turned out, Mira had no interest in writing about death, ever again.

Over the years, until he died one Christmas morning, Mira had kept in close touch with Ted Dientz. He’d become obsessed, as she’d known he would. (She’d thought they were alike that way, but as it turned out he was much more passionate than Mira had ever been.)

The DNA test had proved (“Incontrovertibly!” he’d shouted over the phone) that the body he’d buried in Nicole Werner’s coffin, the one from which he’d taken the sample for his bloodstain card, was in no way related to anyone whose hair strands had been found in the brush Perry Edwards had taken from the Werners’ house.

“Unless Nicole Werner was adopted, or that hairbrush was used by someone other than Werner women, there is no way the girl I buried in that coffin was a daughter or a sibling of any female in that family.”

By then, Mira didn’t care about Nicole—where she might have been, who might have been buried under her headstone instead of her. Perry was dead, her husband had left her, and she’d lost her job in an explosion of accusations and suspicion and hatred.

Still, she told Ted to call her after the exhumation. There would be, she knew, no talking him out of this. He was determined to dig her up. When Nicole’s parents couldn’t be located, permission had to be granted by Etta Werner, Nicole’s grandmother, to exhume the grave. (Etta was a feisty old woman who’d attended nearly every funeral in Bad Axe for the past eighty years, and the idea of digging up a grave didn’t seem to bother her at all. She never even asked for an explanation.) And, afterward, when Ted called Mira with the news, she had to sit down to keep herself from passing out when he told her that there was no one, nothing, in that coffin at all.

“Empty,” he’d said, sounding empty himself. “And no one anywhere to explain that fact to me, or with the vaguest interest, it seems, in investigating it—except for me.”

And although Ted Dientz devoted all the last years of his life to solving that mystery, he never managed to uncover the truth about anything. He closed down his funeral home, wrote letters to newspapers, called authorities and experts everywhere in the world. He became possessed by the empty grave, by Nicole Werner’s DNA, by other missing sorority girls all over the state. And then all over the country.

It was amazing how many there were!

They could have formed their own private sorority house somewhere: some large old mansion hidden behind a shadowy hedge, where they built floats out of tissue paper flowers and styled one another’s hair and sang songs and took secret oaths for all of eternity.

Ted believed that someone from the university, or from the sorority, or both, had been trying to hide a hazing death and had come in the night and spirited away the remains of the dead girl so that her identity could never be determined. They were professionals. They’d done it with surgical precision. The grass over “Nicole’s” grave, the crucifix, the stuffed animals—all appeared to the naked eye never to have been disturbed.

But, later, when none of the hundreds of relatives of the Werners’ in Bad Axe were able, or willing, to reveal the whereabouts of Nicole’s parents so that they might be told the news that their daughter’s grave was empty, Ted came to suspect not only Nicole’s parents but the entire Werner clan. (Even Etta: Hadn’t there been something almost gleeful in the way she’d given her permission to exhume her granddaughter’s corpse?)

He thought most of them knew exactly where Nicole was, and that she hadn’t been the girl in that grave.

But there were other possibilities Ted Dientz was willing to consider, especially as the years passed. He had worked with the dead long enough, he told Mira, to know that strange things happened. This world was more than a material thing. Was it impossible that he had buried Nicole Werner on her funeral day, and that, somehow, she had escaped from her grave?

What could Mira say?

Ted Dientz died without answers, and Mira had no idea what his wife and children might have done with the bloodstain cards he’d kept all those years in the basement. All those souls he’d wanted to bring back, that army of his dead he’d been waiting to raise—he was with them now, she supposed. There were so few answers in this life, and what few there were often scattered with winds. And only now and then little bits of belated justice.

It took a decade, but eventually some sharp sophomore who wrote for the university newspaper dug up the story of Denise Graham, of Nicole Werner. The student managed to pass herself off as an Omega Theta Tau pledge for six months, and then to expose the rituals for what they were.

The sorority sisters were not, as it happened, drinking tequila and hyperventilating and passing out before their raisings in the coffin. They were being injected by an EMT from the local ambulance service with Scopolamine, the zombie drug.

At the right dosage, the sophomore reported, as Mira already knew, the drug causes you to sleep and then awake feeling born again. At higher dosages, it makes it impossible to form memories of anything that has happened in the hours before and after the injection. At the wrong dosage, it kills you.

Mira followed the story on the Internet from Texas. She would have been lying if she hadn’t admitted that she wanted to see some administrators fired, but they never were. She’d hoped at least that the Omega Theta Tau chapter would be shut down. But it wasn’t—receiving, instead, a hefty fine, and its members, counseling.

Mira hoped they might be able to prove that Craig Clements-Rabbitt had been injected, himself, with Scopolamine, and that’s why he remembered nothing of the accident. She was herself convinced that the car he’d been driving with Nicole in it had been chased off the road by someone trying to cover up for the sorority, someone who knew that Nicole and Craig had the dead, or dying, Denise Graham in the backseat. Someone who knew that they were trying to get her to a hospital and who was trying to keep them from getting her there.

Craig and Nicole were run off the road, and the car was burned later by those trying to cover up the hazing, the overdose.

Nicole’s death was faked. Denise had been her stand-in. Being a good sorority girl, Nicole went along with it.

Craig Clements-Rabbitt was blamed, and he’d taken the blame. He’d been drugged, and he’d been in love, which is its own zombie drug, especially when mixed with guilt and grief.

You could still Google Nicole Werner , and still find bloggers who claimed to see her ghost at Godwin Hall.

And there was evidence to be found on the Internet, too, that students had never managed to squelch the fascination with Alice Meyers, either. Every year, there were the cutters. Every year there were fewer and fewer applicants to Godwin Honors College—a fact that would have been officially blamed on the laziness of today’s students, Mira knew, but which she suspected was because parents didn’t want their kids, especially their daughters, living in Godwin Hall.

But there was always one such hall on every campus, wasn’t there? It used to be Fairwell Hall they shunned, as Mira recalled.

Here at South Plains College there was an Alice Meyers, too—a girl who haunted the auditorium where, it was said, she’d hanged herself from the rafters.

And there was also a Nicole Werner:

Here her name was Sara Bain. One day she’d been holding on to her boyfriend’s back on his motorcycle, and they’d hit—who knows? A squirrel? A rabbit? A rock in the road? The details didn’t matter. Sara Bain was thrown from the back of the motorcycle. She landed in the median, where her boyfriend, dazed and bloody, had rushed to her side.

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