Where She Went

by Kelly Simmons

  Emma thought of how girls often went out in clusters. Fiona didn’t go out as often, but sometimes. And never alone. Everyone had other friends; who were they, really? If she could figure it out, maybe she could convince them to talk. She thought of Samantha, the girl from their hall who she’d seen shopping at the B boutique. Had they recruited her, maybe? And how could she get her to talk—threaten to tell her parents, boyfriends?

  “But in the meantime, lie low. Stop going to Beck’s, stop trying to follow the men. The men are dangerous, Emma.”

  “And the girls are not?” She sighed. “My roommates completely turned on me.”

  “Because you made mistakes. You shouldn’t have gone through their stuff. That was not the way to do it. That’s what journalists do in the movies but not in real life.”

  “Okay.”

  “So just stop,” Cara said. “I’ll talk to a few people still at the Inquirer, see if they know anything new about these guys, if they can help. But in the meantime? Stop. Observe. Try to rest. Let the story come to you.”

  Emma repeated those words to herself as she paid the cabbie. That was what Jason had said, too. She could let the story come, but how the hell was she going to rest on that stiff sofa while her roommates threw away her stuff?

  She headed for her dorm, because it was better than sleeping in a classroom or hiding on the floor in the library. She knew better than to go to her RA, who would either try to mediate things or tell her to fill out paperwork for a transfer. And transferring only took her away from Fiona—and if there was anything else to get out of Fiona, Emma needed to stay close. She thought about asking Sarah Franco if she could crash with her, but that was her backup plan. She might need her more later than she did right now, and the thought of explaining all this to someone else was exhausting, defeating, and, let’s face it, embarrassing. To some degree, she’d screwed up at almost everything—being a roommate, being a reporter, being a student, being hot enough for Jason. What else was she going to screw up?

  And if she was being totally honest? She knew Sarah would simply tell her to stop. Stop the story, go to the housing board with a complaint, transfer schools, whatever. Going to Sarah would be almost as bad as going to her mother.

  So for now, sofa. As she approached the door, her RA came out, held the door for someone behind him. She held her breath, ducked behind a shrub. Fiona.

  She came out, and he lit a cigarette for her. She looked up and down the street, as if waiting for someone else. He looked at his watch, pointed in the opposite direction. A pair of boys in blazers walked up to her, and they all shook hands. Great, she thought. Now she’s available on campus. For three-ways? One of the boys reached in his pocket and held an envelope aloft. Manilla, the kind that closed with metal clasps. But Fiona didn’t take it. The RA did.

  Oh boy. Part of the story had just come to her. She almost laughed. And she wondered why on earth she hadn’t seen it before. Good old Tim. Always on call. Knew everybody. Had a key to everyone’s room in case they wanted to kick out their roommate or use someone else’s bunk bed for sex transactions.

  Right under her nose. Right down the hall. But then, she’d slept in a bed next to a paid escort for two months and thought she just liked to be clean at night, so what did she know? Chasing after people and it was here, right here all along.

  She waited until Fiona left with the boys. Her high heels, her short stride, her struggling just a little to keep up, them holding back just a little to be nice.

  She watched them go off into the night like this was all completely normal, being dressed up and going somewhere for paid group sex. A fraternity? Probably. A wealthy fraternity. Something about the blazers just screamed fraternity to her. Now that was an angle she hadn’t considered. She made a mental note to research Professor Grady, the Beck Brothers, and Mr. Maserati to see if there was any overlap. Maybe this was just as much about Greek life as it was about Semper.

  But she couldn’t move, couldn’t leave, until Tim Trenton did. She watched him watching Fiona walk away. He lit a cigarette, too, completely breaking the rules of having to be two hundred feet away from a building before doing so. Tsk, tsk. Still, she supposed he could be watching after Fiona in a brotherly way. Not just a meal ticket way.

  He turned right, away from her, headed off in the general direction of the gym, and based on how he was dressed, in long shorts and a long-sleeved T-shirt, she supposed he could be going there. Impossible to know, since boys wore shorts to class, to go out to bars, to walk in the snow. And yes, he was a senior, but in her mind, in those shorts, he was still a boy. Still an asshole, good-for-nothing college boy.

  She knew this time of night, the gym would be packed. No treadmills available, a wait for every machine except the recumbent bike, which carried a kind of shame around it. Only injured people used that. And only pussies who hated cardio used the treadmill. Real runners, she knew, ran outside, except when it was pitch-dark or pouring rain. Then, reluctantly, they made do at the gym. You could tell who they were from how fast they ran and how grim their faces were.

  There was a whole section in the welcome packet about the dangers of running in a city school at night. Was there any parent who hadn’t pointed that out to their daughter? They all held tight to their beliefs of the real danger, of city criminals ringing the campus, breaching the lines. Nowhere in the brochure was there mention of how laws, bones, and hearts could be broken on campus. No, nothing.

  Tim walked a hundred feet, then stopped. She thought he was taking a phone call, but no. He patted his pockets as if he’d lost something. Even in the low light, she could see the pulsing yellow of the tiger head logo on his gray shirt. Semper Sabres. The menacing teeth. The narrowed eyes of a predator. A warning to the other teams.

  Her feet were getting damp. The sprinklers must have been on earlier. She took a step to the left and forward, trying to hit drier ground, and something snapped. A twig. An acorn. A pigeon cooed near her elbow, suddenly aloft, and she shrieked. What the hell was a pigeon doing here at dusk? Didn’t birds, like, sleep?

  He turned left in her direction, squinting. Crack, coo, yelp. Small sounds that added up. She had no idea how visible she actually was from that angle. Dark jeans and shirt. She turned her face away, gave him only a view of her backpack, and started to walk. A breeze blew up, lifting her hair, blowing it back. She passed under a security light, and it went on with her motion. She blinked beneath the light, felt the heat on her hair, illuminating her.

  “Emma?” he called out, and she could have frozen, could have circled back to talk to him, to accuse him, to ask him what the hell he was doing. But no. She walked faster, as fast as she could without running, straight to the liberal arts center. A class or meeting running late on the second floor, lights on. The door was still open. She took a pair of scissors from one of the classrooms and headed to the large, empty, well-lit bathroom. It was easy enough to stop following the men. But she needed to make sure they’d stop following her.

  Thirty-Seven

  Maggie

  Maggie stood outside Salt’s apartment building, looking one way, then the other. A crossroads. In one direction, home, rest. In the other, school, her daughter. But it was time to consider that Emma was not there anymore. Someone had taken her, was hiding her. Her hair was gone, her appearance changed. Why? And by whom? Frank had always told Maggie, when she worried about their daughter being out late or traveling in a car, that being forced into prostitution, sold into sexual slavery was a rare occurrence. He’d said it simply didn’t happen to white girls in their zip code. He’d told her to worry about the preppy boys in Emma’s class maybe, but not about a van stealing her off the street. But Maggie knew it happened in the United States. She’d seen the stories, the articles, the shows. Who else would take those scissors to Emma’s hair? Who else would change her appearance? Emma was an eighteen-year-old college virgin who looked years younger. Maggie
had to consider this possibility even as she heard Frank’s voice from the grave telling her she was nuts. She knew these trafficked girls often went to truck stops, to houses where they were held, or motels where the owners turned a blind eye. She would research nearby motels. She would go to the truck stops on the turnpike. It was time to get those flyers off campus and out into the world.

  She was texting Sarah Franco to see if she could help her with that when the call came in from Kaplan.

  “Hope I didn’t wake you.”

  “You didn’t, and you know I don’t care if you do.”

  “Just keeping you in the loop on something.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The gentleman in Emma’s phone named Mr. Maserati?”

  “Yes,” Maggie said. “She was interviewing him.”

  “So they both say.”

  “Did he give you any reason to believe that wasn’t true?”

  “Not really. He struck me as a nice guy. Straight shooter. Around your age, I would guess.”

  “Great. Maybe I’ll date him after all this is over.”

  “He gave us a couple leads we’re trying to verify.”

  “Such as?”

  “That there might be video of her outside London, which is a private supper club where escorts are known to work. We pulled the video from across the street, and she’s on it. So I have to ask—”

  “My daughter was not an escort!”

  “Well, she’s meeting with an older guy. She’s on camera—”

  “She was writing a story.”

  “Well, maybe the story went too far, and she—”

  “No. That can’t be it.”

  “He also said that during their interview, they were followed by someone.”

  “Did he describe that someone?”

  “Vaguely. Balding, wearing a light jacket. But he gave me plenty of detail on the car. Make, model, color. A new Audi, gray.”

  “License plate?”

  “Spoken like a cop’s wife.”

  “That’s a compliment, I suppose.”

  “No license plate, but there was a Semper decal.”

  “A student?” Dear God, she thought, are we living in a world where kids bring new Audis to campus?

  “Actually, we’re thinking faculty or alumni, based on the description.”

  “Alumni could take forever.”

  “Yes, but we got a hit in the faculty lot. Two Audis, the attendants say. Both gray. One a couple years older than the other. And the witness was adamant, this was a brand-new car. Car guys, you know?”

  “Yes,” Maggie said, although she didn’t know, didn’t know at all. But she thought of Michael, his knowledge, his specificity. So she could imagine.

  “Well, this is delicate but—our guy was worried that this was a jealousy situation.”

  “What?”

  “I know this is truly awkward, but is there any possibility that Emma was involved with one of her teachers? Because the new Audi is reg—”

  “No,” she said automatically. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, do you have any theories that actually make sense? Anything that doesn’t insult my intelligence and ruin my daughter’s reputation?”

  “Video doesn’t lie.”

  “Well, video doesn’t explain either!”

  “How about her psychology teacher? Someone persuasive, who understands the way the mind wo—”

  “No! You have it all wrong. Did you lift any prints off those scissors yet? And check them against faculty? Because I th—”

  “With all due respect—”

  “You know, whenever anyone says that to a woman, it means the opposite. It means no actual respect. None at all.”

  “Maggie, we’re on the same side here.”

  “Grady, that’s the psychology prof’s name, right?”

  She pictured her daughter’s class schedule in her head, pinned to the bulletin board. She’d put it there so she could envision Emma moving through her day, yawning in an early morning class, enjoying her lunch, going to the library for a free period.

  “Actually, the car was registered to his wife.”

  “Same last name?”

  “Look, we are interviewing him this afternoon. We are on it. You do not need to think any harder about this. I just wanted your perspective on the possibility of the relationship—”

  “There is no possibility of a relationship! This has to be connected to the story!”

  “Well, the editor says the story was killed. Not enough sources to make it a story.”

  “The editor who was fucking one of the girls in the story?”

  “I don’t know if she’s in the story.”

  “You’re absolutely right. You don’t know a damn thing.”

  Thirty-Eight

  Emma

  Emma wasn’t sure what made her do it, exactly. Maybe it was another sleepless night on the dorm sofa, a night in which exactly none of her roommates even came home. She woke up whenever she heard a noise in the hall, thinking they were coming in. Slumber-party vigilant, in case they wrote bitch on her face with Sharpie or waxed one of her eyebrows off, the crap you saw on YouTube. But no. Five beds, all remaining empty, locked up and unavailable to her. Maybe it was the fact that she hadn’t slept more than three hours at a time for almost a week. Or that every morning she pumped herself full of way too many espresso shots at the Morning Grind and couldn’t concentrate in her classes. She carried far too much information in her brain to take everyone’s advice. Just let it go. Let it come to you. Fuck that.

  She woke up with a start, thinking about Professor Grady. The missing piece. She knew that was his freaking car. She knew he taught his last class at eleven, had office hours afterward, and then went home. She’d thought he took the train because of the two passes that clicked around his neck, but maybe she was wrong. Maybe some days, he drove that Audi to school and just didn’t bother to unclip the train pass from his lanyard.

  So when she went to the faculty lot after lunch and saw two gray Audis, one with a decal and one without, she was not at all surprised. And when she snuck by the parking attendant and the back door opened at her touch, she was not surprised either. Michael was right about parking lots—they didn’t always lock the doors unless they left the lot, or maybe unless the owners tipped them mightily. And Bill Grady, she had a feeling, was cheap.

  She saw the Semper blanket in his back seat and didn’t think twice about what he used it for. She curled up underneath it on the floor. She was counting on him never even looking there, and she was right. He came out after his office hours and climbed in front without a single glance to the rear. After a few minutes, she risked a quick peek out the window and saw he was heading down the same route he’d taken when he’d followed Mr. Maserati. The back way, along the river, avoiding the highway.

  It was a long drive to Wayne, longer than she’d realized. He had a jazz station playing, and though she hated jazz, she was grateful for the background noise, since her stomach growled loudly.

  Finally, he pulled into his driveway, got out. She lifted the blanket an inch, dared a glance out the window. Yes. It was the house she’d seen on Google Earth. Even smaller than she’d imagined from the front, but then she knew what secrets were held in the back, the spectacular landscaping, the second level. It was a beautiful day, sunny and probably warm enough to sit outside and enjoy the panorama of maples, oaks, evergreens. The kind of fall day that made you think winter was never coming.

  The reds and golds against the blues of the pool. If it was heated, she was sure it was warm enough to consider a swim. She had a feeling he was heading for his pool house, his man cave. She got out and followed just far enough to see him heading down the path in his backyard. Yes, there he went. She watched as his shape grew smaller and smaller, till he was almost nothing. His eyes fixe
d on the slope ahead, not the flat, cool grass behind.

  Good, she thought. That would leave her plenty of time to wait for his wife.

  Thirty-Nine

  Maggie

  The house was pretty, well cared for. A Cape Cod with brown wood shutters softened to gray and a bright-yellow front door. His wife’s idea, stolen from a magazine? Or a nod to the school colors? Either was possible. The property it sat on wasn’t particularly large, and it sloped downward precariously, backing up on a public walking trail. The neighbors’ houses were fairly close by. People walked dogs up and down the sidewalks, heading to or from that trail, swinging small blue bags that were either empty or full of shit. It wasn’t, Maggie decided, a good neighborhood to house sex slaves. No. The houses were far too close together for trafficking underage girls, and there were too many stay-at-home moms to not notice something was amiss. If her daughter was being held somewhere, her appearance changed, Maggie certainly didn’t think it was here, but she hoped it would lead somewhere. Let Kaplan handle his angle; she would handle hers.

  No Audi in the driveway, just a Subaru wagon. Green. A little muddy on the wheels, like it had just been driven up a dirt road. She glanced inside. No rope. No duct tape. No ball-peen hammer. She let out the breath she’d been holding, and it felt ancient, stale as a tomb. How long had she been holding that breath? How long since she’d brushed her teeth, combed her hair, slept?

  She rang the doorbell, listened to it echo. Tile floors, she thought. Marble kitchen. Beautiful-looking but tinny and cold, the acoustics all wrong, and you didn’t realize it until after installation when you had people over and they started talking all at once, and your ears rang. Maggie had been in so many kitchens like that. She’d go back to her small, snug kitchen, with its butcher-block counters and rugs and cheerful lined curtains on the windows and be glad for all the softer, kinder surfaces. When people came to Maggie, she could hear them.

  The woman who answered the door was pretty but ordinary. No makeup, blue eyes. Slight, small as a bird. Her smile was automatic but also miniature.