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 to drink and smoke dope and had broken up with her most recent boyfriend a few weeks before her disappearance. The boyfriend, already in an “intense” relationship with a new girlfriend, hadn’t given a rat’s ass what had become of Monique.
It seemed as if no one did. Except Portia.
She walked past the library, where three stories of lights glowed bright in the night. The rain had let up but the air was heavy and damp, leaves of some of the bushes still dripping as they shivered in the rain. The outdoor lights glowing throughout the campus had the appearance of old gaslamps, a nod to the era in which the school was founded.
As she headed to Cramer Hall, where she had lived years ago as a first-year student, she thought about the missing girls. All English majors. All enrolled in some basic classes as well as a class in the newer controversial curriculum. They’d each been enrolled in Writing the Novel, Shakespeare 201, and The Influence of Vampyrism in Modern Culture and Literature. There was no evidence that the girls had known each other and they’d not taken the classes during the same terms, but they had enrolled and passed each of those three classes. Maybe it was nothing. But maybe it was….
She found herself directly in front of the dormitory. The brick edifice looked very much the same, and she stared up at the room on the second floor that had belonged to Rylee Ames. Rylee, like the other girls, was estranged from her family but her mother’s remarks hadn’t rung true. Nadine Olsen had simply said in her west-Texas drawl, “You know how it is with some girls, when the going gets tough, the tough hitchhike to Chicago and get knocked up.” Portia had found no evidence that Rylee had ever given birth, but she had dabbled in drugs—ecstasy, marijuana, and cocaine—and run away several times as a teenager while Nadine tried to hold her brood of three sons together on a cannery worker’s salary. Rylee’s father, the first of Nadine’s five husbands, had only said, “Always knew that kid would come to no good. Takes after her mother.”
Great, Portia thought grimly. No one seemed to care what had happened to Rylee Ames.
Which was the same apathy that surrounded the other victims.
“They’re not victims until we prove that some crime has been perpetrated against them,” Del Vernon had insisted, but Portia knew better. Those girls had been victims from the day they were born. That much they had in common. Along with the fact that they had been English majors at All Saints College and as such, had taken some of the same required and elective courses.
Coincidence?
Portia doubted it.
A cold wind blew across the grounds, rattling the branches of the pines and causing the Spanish moss hanging from the live oaks to dance and sway, like ghosts in the lamplight.
If Portia had been a superstitious woman, she might have felt a chill in her soul or cared when she spied the black cat scurrying across her path. However, she didn’t believe in ghosts or demons or vampires. She wasn’t even really sure about God, though she prayed regularly. But she did believe in evil. The dark rotting of the soul where malevolence and cruelty resided in a human form.
And she was scared to death that the four girls missing from All Saints had encountered a homicidal maniac of the worst order.
She hoped to God that she was wrong.
Kristi couldn’t stand it. So what if it was New Year’s Eve? So what if everyone she knew was out celebrating. She’d had offers, of course. From Mai, just yesterday, which she had no intention of accepting, but also from friends in New Orleans, friends she’d grown up with, friends she’d worked with, and even from her new-found sister, Eve. She’d turned them all down. She wanted to get settled, here, in Baton Rouge, and when it came to the woman who was her half-sister, that was just too weird to think about. For most of her twenty-seven years she’d thought she was an only child and then…out of the blue, Eve Renner turns out to be related to her. It was just too bizarre to be contemplated and all wrapped up in a time she’d rather forget.
“One step at a time,” she told herself as she lit a few candles and turned on her notebook computer. Besides, she was on a mission. She had no intention of schlepping tables at the Bard’s Board forever and she was back at school for a reason—to hone her craft.
She’d found some success writing for Factual Crime magazine and had done a few articles for a similar e-zine, but she wanted to write a full-blown book. Since her father had refused to give her access to any of his cases, she’d have to locate her own.
The laptop whirred to life and, with little difficulty, she found an open wireless connection that she could use. Seated at her little writing alcove in the dormer, its pane window overlooking the wall surrounding campus, Kristi began scouring the Internet for information on Tara Atwater, the girl who had lived in this very
