Vanishing Act by Barbara Block

window and cracked her head open.”
    I raised an eyebrow. “Fell?”
    â€œShe was drinking too much. It happens.” Marks shook his head again. “Must be a hell of a thing for her family. Send your kid off to college, pay all that money, and she comes home in a box. She and Melissa were real tight. According to her roomie, Melissa never got over the death.” He took a puff of his cigarette and flicked the ash into his water glass. “Some of the guys said those two had something going. You know,” he went on when I didn’t say anything. “Some kind of lesbo thing.”
    â€œJill and Melissa or Melissa and her roommate.”
    â€œJill and Melissa.”
    â€œWhy would they say that?”
    â€œJust a feeling.”
    â€œThere had to be a reason for the feeling.”
    Marks gave me a blank look. “Maybe they were jealous. You know, they couldn’t get into their pants.” He began tapping his fingers on the pitted Formica tabletop. Then he looked at his watch. I glanced at the clock on the wall. We’d been there for almost thirty minutes. My time was up.
    â€œIs there anything else you can tell me, anything at all?”
    Marks stubbed his cigarette out on his plate and reached for his jacket. “You want my opinion?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œDon’t knock your brains out on this one.”
    â€œWhy not?”
    Marks stood up. “I’ve worked cases like this before. Either these people show up on their own or someone finds them five years from now when they start building their house.”
    He turned and walked out the door. I got the bill.
    Not bad, I thought when I looked at it. At least he and Calli were cheap dates.

Chapter 7
    I t was now a little after two in the afternoon. I’d told Tim I’d come right back to the store after my meeting with Marks, but I’d driven over to Schaefer, the dorm where Melissa had been living when she disappeared, instead. Talking to Marks had heightened my desire to see the place from which Melissa had vanished. I hoped it would help me put what I had been told and what I was going to be told into context.
    I’d passed Schaefer a fair number of times on my way to this or that place over the years, but I’d never paid close attention to the building. I’d never had any reason to. Now I did. The dorm was perched up above the campus, across the street from Tyler Park. The building was a nondescript three-story, modern rectangular structure, commonplace to the point of invisiblity. You could walk by it a hundred times and not be able to recall its details if asked. In the fall, when Melissa had disappeared, the lawn surrounding it would have been littered with Frisbee-tossing students. Now the space was empty, the remaining couple of inches of snow cross-hatched by footprints.
    I found a parking place about twenty feet down from the entrance, maneuvered the cab in, lit a cigarette, and sat and thought. Had Melissa walked out of the dorm, down the two steps that led to the walkway, and then into the park? Tyler was fairly safe in the daytime, but maybe she was unlucky and met up with someone who wasn’t very nice. Or had she gotten into someone’s car and driven off? I tapped the ash from my cigarette out the window. Then there was the question, what was she doing outside anyway?
    According to Bryan, he’d met his sister for lunch, then dropped her off at the entrance to Schaefer at two in the afternoon. She was going to do some work, then he was going to pick her up at four and they were going to go to the hospital to visit their mother, only Melissa wasn’t in her room when he got there, though the door was ajar. Her books were lying open on her desk. A pen and notebook were nearby, one page half filled with notes on the psych text she’d been reading.
    Bryan said it looked as if she’d just gone down the hall to get something, so Bryan had sat down and waited.