Lost Souls. Lisa Jackson
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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 unit when she’d disappeared. Kristi had become adept at finding information on the net, but this time, she came up with very little, just a few articles that mentioned Tara Atwater. There wasn’t much on the other missing girls either, she decided, as she scanned articles on the Web version of the local paper. But this felt like a story. Maybe the one she’d been looking for. Maybe she’d ended up with this apartment because this was the true-crime book she was supposed to research and write.
Something had taken the coeds away.
Girls didn’t go missing for no reason. Not four from the same small college within an eighteen-month period. Not four enrolled in the same classes.
Kristi bookmarked a page as she heard steps on the staircase. A second later the doorbell rang, and she rolled her secretary’s chair away from the desk, crossed the small room to peer through the peephole. Through the fish-eye she saw a scruffy man in his early twenties or late teens standing under the single dim light mounted on the landing of the staircase meant to be her porch. Damp and dripping, his dishwater blond hair was plastered to his head. He was carrying a toolbox in one hand and wearing an I’m-pissed-as-hell expression that was meant to suggest authority.
No doubt the missing Hiram.
“Who is it?” she called just to be certain.
“The manager. Hiram Calloway. I need to check your locks.”
Oh, now he needed to check the locks? Way to be on it, Hiram.
He looked as pathetic as she’d expected with his thin beard, ancient bad-ass T-shirt from a Metallica concert, grungy camouflage pants, and sullen ask-me-if-I-give-a-shit attitude.
She opened the door a crack, leaving the chain in place. “I already took care of the locks.”
“You can’t just go doing all kinds of stuff to the place, y’know. You don’t own it. I’m supposed to fix things around here.”
“Well, I couldn’t find you, so I handled it myself,” Kristi stated with finality.
He frowned. His lips, half hidden in what he clearly was hoping would be a beard someday, curved petulantly over slightly crooked teeth. “Then I’ll have to have the key. I mean a copy. My grandma…Mrs. Calloway owns this place. She has to have access. It’s in the lease.”
“I’ll see that she gets one.”
“That’ll just take more time. She’ll give me a copy anyway. I have to have a key to every apartment in this building. I might have to get into the unit, you know, if something goes wrong or you lose your key or—”
“I’m not going to lose my key.”
“It’s for your protection.”
“If you say so.” She wasn’t counting on it.
“Jeez, why are you being such a—” He bit off the epithet at the last moment.
Kristi’s temper flared. “I called you and it took you three days to respond. All the locks in the unit were broken or loose and I heard that one of the girls who went missing from the campus lived here, so really, I thought I’d better take the situation into my own hands.”
His mouth dropped. “Anyone ever tell you to lose the attitude?”
“Like they’ve told you?” she snapped back.
He actually blushed and she felt