“How did you know?”
“I guess I’m just omniscient.”
“Yeah, right.” Kristi smiled faintly.
“And”—she lifted a slim shoulder—“I eavesdrop.”
“That’s more like it.”
Ezma laughed as she grabbed the dispenser handle for the water hose and filled the remaining glasses. “Actually, I had her for one of my classes, writing two twelve, I think it was.”
“She’s a professor?”
“Assistant.”
Kristi was stunned. She’d always known Lucretia was a perpetual student, but she’d never imagined she would actually stick around All Saints to teach.
“And I think she’s involved with someone at the university. Another professor.”
“Really?”
So much for Lucretia’s college boyfriend, whom she’d pined about for the year Kristi had known her.
“Well, I have to admit, if I weren’t a happily married woman, I might be interested. Some of the professors are hot!”
Kristi remembered some of her teachers from the past. Weird Dr. Northrup, edgy Dr. Sutter, and crusty, superior Dr. Zaroster. All of them were musty, slightly crotchety academics who suffered from superiority complexes. Definitely not “hot.” Not even lukewarm. At least not in Kristi’s vocabulary. “You’re kidding me, right?”
“Uh-uh. I’m tellin’ you, the staff at All Saints is something. At least the English Department. It’s as if whoever was recruiting was looking at Hollywood head shots.”
“Now I know you’re full of it.”
“Well, you’ll see soon enough.” Ezma added a slice of lemon to each glass. “Classes start next week. I bet you’ll agree.”
Kristi filled her tray. “And so you think Lucretia is dating one of these hotties?”
“Rumor has it. But I don’t know which one. Whenever I get too close, she clams up, like she’s hiding it or something.”
“Why?”
Ezma shook her head. “Don’t know. Maybe he’s married or engaged or there’s some rule about the staff fraternizing. Or maybe it’s Dr. Preston.” Her lips tightened at the corners. “He teaches writing and he’s bad news.”
“I think I have him for a class.”
“Oh, yeah? My friend Dionne took his writing class and was all about him, but he comes in here and he’s just plain rude. Then Dionne went missing.”
“Your friend is one of the missing girls?” Kristi asked. “And you think Preston might be involved?”
Ezma was about to say no. But she changed her mind. Kristi could see it in the way her chin slid to the side. “I don’t think so, but I wouldn’t put anything past that guy. The trouble is, no one really believes anything bad happened to Dionne. They think she just disappeared, probably took off with her boyfriend.” Ezma shook her head.
“Then why hasn’t anyone heard from her?”
“Exactly! The common theory is that she’s with Tyshawn and they’ve taken on new identities. Tyshawn Jones is also bad news. Into drugs, did time for robbery when he was still a minor. Personally, I never knew what she saw in him. Before Tyshawn, she dated a really great guy, Elijah Richards. Was going to school at a junior college, planning on being an accountant, but Dionne started seeing Tyshawn and that was the end of her relationship with Elijah. A shame.”
“What about Tyshawn? Is he missing, too?”
“No one ever mentions that, do they?”
Kristi swept around one of the line cooks as he tossed a handful of sliced potatoes into the fryer and the hot oil sizzled and bubbled. She pushed the swinging doors open with her back, then carried the drink tray to the women’s table and heard Lucretia’s voice over the piped in music.
“…I’m telling you, he’s amazing. Absolutely and undeniably amazing. I’ve never…not ever met anyone like him.”
Kristi had to fight from rolling her eyes. Even as a freshman Lucretia had been a hopeless romantic. It seemed as if things hadn’t changed. Lucretia was on the verge of adding something else, but quit gushing when she spied Kristi. She sent the other women a silent glance, which they understood, and everyone at the table went quiet.
Kristi got the message—Lucretia did not want her old roommate to know anything about her love life. As if Kristi cared.
As Kristi distributed the cold drinks and poured coffee, Lucretia eyed her old roommate. “So you’re enrolled at A. S.?”
“Uh-huh.” No reason to lie about it. Kristi poured coffee into a cup.
“Didn’t you graduate?”
Kristi wasn’t about to be baited. “Just a few credits shy.” Jesus, why did Lucretia care?
“I thought you had a thing about writing.”
“Mmm. Cream?” she asked the woman who had ordered coffee, ignoring Lucretia’s questions.
“Do you have no-fat milk?”
“Sure. Just a sec.”
“I’m teaching now,” Lucretia said proudly.
“That’s great,” Kristi forced out as she swept away, refilled half-empty cups at a nearby table, then hurried back to the kitchen, where she filled a small pitcher with skim milk and grabbed a dish with packets of sugar and artificial sweeteners. Tamping down her irritation with Lucretia, she returned to the table. “Here ya go.” She set the pitcher and dish onto the table near the coffee drinker. “Now, have you decided?” Forcing a smile, she took their orders without further incident and carefully wrote the instructions on the ticket. One woman wanted diet dressing on the side of her Julius Caesar salad, another insisted on no condiments whatsoever on her King Lear burger, and a third wanted a cup of the Cleopatra clam chowder with a side of fruit rather than coleslaw. Lucretia had recently developed allergies to all shellfish, so she wanted to insure that Tybalt’s tuna salad hadn’t been tainted with any of Ophelia’s oysters or Scarus’s scampi.
Hands delved deep inside the pockets of her raincoat, Portia Laurent walked along the sidewalks that crisscrossed the quad at All Saints. It was New Year’s Eve and she was on her dinner break. Already, the night was closing in and the promise of revelry was evident in groups of students laughing and talking and hurrying to the local restaurants and bars to ring in the new year.
At least four students wouldn’t be among the partiers. Dionne Harmon, Monique DesCartes, Tara Atwater, and now Rylee Ames, whom, Portia believed, had all met with the same bad end. There could be others as well, she thought, though none from All Saints. She’d checked. In three years no other students had been reported missing.
“No bodies, no homicides,” Vernon had insisted in their most recent conversation, but Portia didn’t believe it. True, there was no proof that anything suspicious had happened to the girls, and while Dionne was African American, the other three girls were white. Serial killers usually didn’t cross racial lines, but that wasn’t always the case.
She thought about Monique DesCartes, from South Dakota. When Monique was fourteen her father had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease and Portia knew firsthand how that could ruin a family. Monique’s mother had been straight-up pissed that Monique had applied for scholarships and taken off, leaving the mother to deal with a rapidly failing husband and two younger daughters, one of whom was still in grade school. Monique, ever rebellious, had run away twice in high school and so, now, was chalked up as a girl who gave up easily and took off. She’d been known