Vanishing Act

by Barbara Block

  “I understand from her roommate Beth that Melissa liked you a lot.”

  “And I liked her. She was a pleasure to work with. Melissa was a rare commodity these days—a good student. She had a genuine interest in psychology. She was thinking about becoming an industrial psychologist,” he added. “It was a good choice, a bankable one in today’s market. Most of my students want to go into clinical work. But that field is dead.”

  “HMOs.”

  “Exactly.” There was a loud boom. Fell winced at the noise. “The building was supposed to be finished a month ago, but what’s the good of complaining. No one around here listens anyway. If you don’t bring in contracts, they’re not interested.” He went back to talking about Melissa. “She was thinking about doing an internship, and I was trying to help her set one up.”

  “It was good of you to give up your time like that,” I observed.

  “Not really.” Fell smiled warmly. “I know other professors don’t feel this way, but I love teaching. I love the students. To me, they’re the best part of my job. In fact, they’re the only reason I’m still here. I look upon them as the children I never had.”

  “That’s nice,” I said. And I meant it. Most of the professors I’m acquainted with see teaching as, at best, a necessary evil, and at worst an activity to be avoided at all costs. “What I’m hoping is that during the time you and Melissa spent together, she also talked to you about more personal matters.”

  “You’re asking if she confided in me?”

  “Hoping would be a more accurate word.”

  Fell nibbled on a corner of his mustache. “And you want what from me? Exactly.”

  I pushed a lock of hair out of my eyes and tucked it back behind my ear. One of these days I was going to get it cut short. “Some insight into Melissa’s state of mind. Was she depressed? Anxious? Was she fighting with her boyfriend? How did she feel about her brother? Her roommate. That kind of thing.”

  “I see.” Fell slowly chewed another cookie while he considered my questions.

  I resisted the temptation to fan myself with my notepad while I waited for his answer. Fell was right. This room did heat up fast.

  “The funny thing,” he finally said after he’d finished eating, “is that we really didn’t talk much about Melissa’s personal life. She was someone who kept herself to herself. She wasn’t self-revelatory in any sense of the word.”

  “Her roommate said that if Melissa had talked to anyone, she would have talked to you.”

  Fell shook his head slightly. “How sad. Some of my other students discuss personal matters with me, but Melissa never really did.” He absentmindedly slid his gold wedding band up and down his finger. “I made myself available. I even, although I don’t usually do this kind of thing, since I’m not in private practice anymore, tried to initiate a conversation with her on more than one occasion.”

  I began to hope I was finally going to get some information. “Why did you do that?”

  “I had a feeling something was bothering her, especially in the last few months, something other than her mother’s ill health. But when I approached the subject, she became very defensive, so, naturally, I eased off. I was hoping that in time we’d be able to talk.” Fell began chewing on the tips of his mustache again. “In retrospect, what I should have done was called Roberts at the health center.”

  “Would you characterize her as depressed? Stressed?”

  Fell sighed and swiveled his chair an eighth of a turn to the right, and then did an eighth of a turn to the left. “She was anxious. Although she could have been depressed and been compensating. Lots of times people do that. They can be in the depths of despair and give no indication of that at all. That’s one of the things that makes depression so tricky. Did her roommate say she was?”

  “As a matter of fact, she did.”

  “What a pity,” said Fell.

  “Then I guess you also didn’t know that at one point she’d been planning on getting married.”

  Fell looked incredulous. “To Tommy?”

  “You know him?”

  “He was in one of my classes. I just never thought ... I’d never have put those two ...”

  “It didn’t go through because the boy’s father objected.”

  “It seems as if I really didn’t know Melissa at all,” he observed sadly.

  “I’m getting the feeling no one did.” From where I was sitting, it looked as if Melissa Hayes was one of those people who told different people parts of the truth but didn’t tell one person the whole truth.

  Fell pressed his lips together. “I’m sorry I couldn’t have been of more help.”

  “Maybe you still can.”

  “I don’t see how.”

  “You said earlier that you thought something was bothering Melissa.”

  Fell nodded.

  “But you have no idea what it was?”

  He hesitated for a fraction of a second before replying. “Not really.”

  I looked him in the eye. “Are you sure?”

  He looked away. “Yes.”

  “You don’t even want to hazard a guess?”

  “I don’t think I do.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Because I don’t like making statements I can’t back up.”

  “I’m not asking you to back things up, I’m just asking for your opinion.”

  “Believe me, I understand.” Fell began twisting a few strands of his mustache between his fingers. “But what you have to understand is that I can’t say certain things. Especially when I have no proof. Especially when I just have a gut feeling to go on. I’m talking about libel here.”

  I sat back. “You know Melissa’s mother is dying.”

  “I’m aware of that.”

  “And that she desperately wants to find out what happened to her daughter.”

  Fell didn’t say anything.

  “Only she can’t get out of her hospital bed.”

  He looked down and began fiddling with the knobs on his desk drawer.

  “Look,” I continued. “This is all going to be off the record. As you can see, I haven’t been writing anything down.”

  “I noticed.”

  “I’m at a dead end. I need some help. Anything you can tell me, anything at all, would be a great plus. Please.”

  “I’m sorry, but I can’t.”

  I sat forward. “Mrs. Hayes probably has less than a month to live. Are you going to deprive a woman of a dying wish?”

  “That’s not fair,” Fell protested. “That’s a terrible thing to say.”

  “But true.”

  “The reason I’m not telling you is to protect her,” Fell shot back.

  I saw Mrs. Hayes lying in her hospital bed. I saw the pain in her eyes when she asked me to protect her son. I remembered what she didn’t say. I felt the lightness of her hands as she clasped mine.

  “I think she already knows.”

  Chapter 17

  Professor Fell folded his hands over his belly again, sat back in his chair, and raised an eyebrow. “What, exactly, does Mrs. Hayes know?” he asked.

  “She asked me to protect her son.”

  “She used those words?”

  “Yes.”

  “From what?”

  “From the police. In regards to his sister’s disappearance.”

  “Why should they?”

  “She wouldn’t say.”

  “I see,” he murmured.

  “Obviously, you’re not going to tell me anything I haven’t been thinking of already,” I added.

  “So it would seem.” He leaned forward, picked up a pen, and jotted something down on the yellow pad in front of him. Then he put the pen down and made a clicking sound with his tongue.

  I waited. Finally he cleared his throat and began to speak.

  “What I want to emphasize,” he said. “Is that what I’m about to tell you is nothing more than a gut feeling. And that it might not have anything to do with Melissa’s di
sappearance. In fact, it probably doesn’t.”

  “So you said.”

  “Have you talked to Melissa’s brother?” Fell asked.

  I nodded. “He’s the one who hired me.”

  “What did you think of him?”

  I answered without considering. “He’s got a quick temper.”

  “What else?”

  “He’s been in trouble in the past.”

  Fell nodded. “Go on.”

  “He became very upset when his sister was only an hour late.”

  “Perhaps overly so?”

  “What are you implying?”

  “I’m just asking, why the overreaction? Did he know something? Was he overcompensating?”

  “Are you saying Bryan killed his sister, hid the body, and sounded the alarm?”

  Fell looked at me impassively.

  “That doesn’t make sense. If that were true, then why go to the trouble to hire me? A little over four months have passed since his sister has disappeared. For all intents and purposes, he’s free and clear.”

  “Guilt is a powerful emotion. It makes people do strange things.”

  I thought about what Fell had just said to me about Bryan as I leafed through the pages of the Melissa Hayes file. According to Duffy Warner, the rent-a-cop who’d caught Bryan’s call, Bryan had appeared frantic, pacing back and forth, when Duffy had arrived at Melissa Hayes’s room. He’d then shown himself to be extremely unwilling to take Duffy’s advice, yelling, “We have to look now” over and over until Melissa’s roommate, Beth, had calmed him down.

  Was Bryan just scared for his sister? Was his reaction a case of nerves? Had he known something? Or was this, as Fell had said, a case of guilt made manifest? It would be interesting to hear what he had to say, I decided as I was about to turn to the next page. Then I heard footsteps in the hallway outside and stopped thinking about Bryan and started thinking about me. Even though Morrell’s secretary had assured me Morrell wouldn’t be back for a few hours, there was always the chance that his meeting had run short or that he’d come back for something he’d forgotten.

  And if he did and found me here, he’d be very unhappy.

  And so would I.

  Because if he walked through the door, here I’d be, big as the Statue of Liberty. Only instead of holding a lamp, I’d be holding a file, a file I had no business having. My eyes darted around the room as the footsteps got closer. I told myself the person outside was just another secretary on her way to somewhere else, but judging from the way my heart was hammering away in my chest, I didn’t believe me. There was no furniture I could hide behind. No back door to go through. But there was the window. I might be able to squeeze through that.

  I’d started toward it, when the footsteps passed. My heart rate slowed back down. I let out the breath I didn’t know I’d been holding and glanced at the clock on the wall. I had ten more minutes before Morrell’s secretary came back from lunch. I planned to be out of the office in five.

  “I’m going down to Didi’s,” she’d told me. “Today I’m going to have a hamburger. They cook them to order, you know. It usually takes about twenty minutes since I order it well done. I used to eat them rare, but not anymore. Not with that botulism thing going around. No, don’t say anything,” she’d said when I’d opened my mouth to speak. “Us ex-and soon-to-be-ex-secretaries have to stick together. Revolt of the working women. And anyway, I think the university should have done more. They should have tried harder. Instead of just covering their asses. Which is really, in my estimation, the only thing they care about. Besides money.

  “You know, I used to care about education. I used to think it meant something. I used to think these people knew something I didn’t. But that was before I started working at the university.” And she got up, slipped her coat on, and patted her pockets. Then she opened the door to the outside hall. “Now, when was your appointment with Mr. Morrell?” she asked in a voice designed to carry down the corridor.

  I glanced at my watch and gave her the present time.

  “Well, I’m sure he’ll be here soon. I’ll be right back. I’m just going to run out and pick up my lunch. He’s usually very prompt,” she added as she walked out the door, leaving me alone in the empty office.

  “I’ll just sit down and wait,” I called after her retreating back.

  Two seconds later I was in Morrell’s office, searching for Melissa Hayes’s file. Unfortunately, it wasn’t on Morrell’s desk. I’d been hoping it would be, but given the pristine appearance of his office, it didn’t surprise me that it wasn’t. Morrell had probably refiled it in one of the two cabinets decorating the place. I started with the closer one and moved on to the one on the left when I didn’t get any results. My fingers felt as if they’d been dipped in slurry, and I developed a bad case of the dropsies, something that always happens to me when I’m nervous.

  It took five minutes before I located Melissa’s folder, five minutes that felt more like twenty.

  I flipped through the pages.

  There weren’t any surprises.

  Not that I’d expected there would be.

  But I was hoping. Otherwise I wouldn’t have been in Morrell’s office.

  The truth is, I’m a closet optimist. To do the kind of work I do, you have to be. And anyway, I was due for some luck.

  Only it didn’t seem as if I was going to get any. Nevertheless, when I reached the last page, I turned back to the first and started in again.

  It turned out to be a good thing that I did.

  Not that I understood the importance of what I was reading at first.

  According to the page I had in front of me, security had logged two more incoming calls from Bryan Hayes that evening. One at ten at night, the second at two-thirty in the morning. In both, he had demanded that the campus cops conduct a full-scale search for his sister. He had also, according to the record, told them he’d called the city police. All three calls had led to the same advice: wait. Advice that Bryan Hayes had evidently found impossible to follow, since other security personnel reported seeing him and an unidentified female in places as diverse as Oakwood Cemetery, Tyler Park, and M Street. A fact that dovetailed with what Beth had told me about her and Bryan searching for Melissa throughout the night. Finally, at one o’clock the next day, following yet a third call from Bryan Hayes, security had begun canvassing the area.

  After calling the local hospitals and checking with the university health center, the rent-a-cops had proceeded to question Melissa’s roommate, her two suitemates, the students on her floor, her boyfriend, and the guys in his fraternity. I read their statements. Tommy West said that he and Melissa had spoken the night before she’d disappeared. They were supposed to meet at the house the next day, but she hadn’t called or shown up. He, in the meantime, had been shopping and at the movies, a statement the report said the police had corroborated.

  As for the time between two and four, he’d been in an American history and a sociology course. These classes, the report dryly noted, held over three hundred people and attendance was taken by sign-in sheet. However, several classmates remembered seeing Tommy, although the report also leveled a certain amount of doubt at their veracity.

  I moved on to Beth. When questioned, she noted that Melissa had gone out the night before—she didn’t know where, she hadn’t asked, it wasn’t her business, thank you very much—and come in at ten-forty. Asked how she could be so certain, she explained that her watch was broken and she’d been looking at her clock radio to see how long she’d stayed at the Shake, a bar on the west side of town, when Melissa had walked in. They’d both done some studying and at one o’clock they’d ordered a small pizza from Pete’s on M Street, a fact the report confirmed. After eating it, both girls had gone to bed.

  Beth further stated, as she’d done with me, that Melissa had had a nine o’clock class and was gone by the time Beth got up and that she, Beth, had spent the day in classes, in the library, and hanging out with her friends,
movements the campus police had confirmed.

  Brandy Weinstein saw Melissa walking down the dorm hall on her way to the stairs at around eight-thirty that morning, and Melissa’s second suitemate had seen her in her ten o’clock English class on the postmodern implications of science-fiction. Whatever that was.

  God, I was glad I’d gone to school when I had, I decided as I turned to the next page. I’d had enough problems with American lit.

  Another girl on the floor, a Hayley Holliday, if you can believe it—what had her parents been thinking about, I wondered—had also seen Melissa in her next class, Soc. 206. Even though they hadn’t sat next to each other—Hayley was reserving that honor for her boyfriend—they’d exchanged a few words. Hayley had asked Melissa if she could borrow the notes from the psych course they were taking together—evidently she missed the last two classes—and Melissa had told her to come by her room that evening to get them.

  Hayley had knocked on the door around ten but left when she didn’t get an answer. Beth and Bryan must have been out searching for her.

  “I figured, she’d forgotten,” Hayley said. “Or something else had come up. No biggie. I went and got them from a friend in another dorm.”

  And that, aside from lunch with her brother, Bryan, was the last time anyone could be found who had talked to Melissa. The lunch had taken place at Green’s, a new health food place that had opened up six months earlier on M Street. The girl behind the counter remembered serving Melissa and her brother because she was in Bryan Hayes’s stat one course and thought he was kind of cute. She’d been happy when she’d overheard Bryan calling Melissa “sis” as she’d taken their order.

  “Maybe I’ll invite him for some coffee,” she’d told the security guard. “He must need cheering up.” A sentiment that would have been dear to my grandmother’s heart.

  As far as the girl knew, lunch between Melissa and Bryan had been uneventful. They’d eaten and talked, but she didn’t know about what. “Of course,” she allowed. “They would have had to be screaming at each other for me to have heard anything. At that time of the day we’re totally swamped.”

  As I turned the page, I felt a sharp pain and brought my finger up to my mouth. When I took it away, I watched a tiny droplet of blood from near one of my cuticles. Why are paper cuts so painful, I wondered as I went back to reading about where Bryan had gone after lunch. According to him, he’d gone to the library to study. The police were questioning selected witnesses to confirm that statement.