“According to Mom.”
He scratched his chin. “Yeah, as a parent that would worry me.” Placing his feet on the floor and his hands on his knees, he looked at me over the rims of the half-glasses. “It’s funny—actually it’s anything but funny—your coming around about a missing student. When you first told me, it gave me a start. Because something like this happened last year. Another girl—some kind of campus beauty queen. Shane something, or Shana . . . Shanna—I don’t recall her exact name. Left her dorm room one night and never came back. Big stir on campus for a few days, then nothing. It affected me more than it might’ve because Jan and I had just sent our Lisa off to Oberlin. She was fine in the separation-anxiety department, but we weren’t doing so well. I’d just started to settle down—had stopped phoning the poor kid twelve times a day—and this Shanna thing happens.”
“She was never found?”
He shook his head. “Talk about the ultimate parent’s nightmare. There’s no word I despise more than closure—pop-psych crapolsky. But not knowing’s got to be worse. I’m sure it has nothing to do with the Teague girl—it just reminded me.”
“Gene, in terms of the research job, is there something I might’ve missed? I checked federal, state, and private grants, including part-time positions.”
He thought awhile. “What about something off-campus? Paid subject positions. You see ads in the Daily Cub. ‘Feeling low or moody? You may be clinically depressed and qualify for our cool little clinical trials.’ Pharmaceutical outcome studies, obviously the FDA or whoever’s in charge doesn’t see a problem using paid participants. The Cub’s out ofcirculation till next quarter, but maybe you can find something. Still, what would that tell you about where she is?”
“Probably nothing,” I said. “Unless Lauren signed up for a study because she had a specific problem—as in depression. Depressed people drop out.”
“Her mother wouldn’t know if she was that low?”
“Hard to say. Thanks for the tip, Gene—I’ll look into it.”
I got up, placed the coffee on a table, and headed for the door.
“You’re really extending yourself on this, Alex.”
“Don’t ask.”
He stared at me but said nothing.
No longer a clinician, but he knew enough not to press it.
7
THE STORY WAS easy to find.
Shawna Teaser.
Beautiful face, heart-shaped, unlined, crowned by a tower of pale ringlets. Almond eyes, shockingly dark. Pixie chin, perfect teeth, beauty undiminished by grainy black-and-white miniaturization, the cold, metal frame of the microfiche machine, the stale air of the research library microfilm vault.
I stared at lovely glowing shoulders exposed by a strapless gown, sparkly things dotting the bodice. The gown Shawna Yeager had worn at her coronation as Miss Olive Festival. Silly little rhinestone crown pinned to the luxuriant curls, happiest-girl-in-the-world grin.
The contest had taken place two years ago in her hometown, an aggie community east of Fallbrook named Santo Leon. Shawna Yeager held a scepter in one hand, a giant plastic olive in the other.
The Daily Cub article said she’d graduated fifth in her class at Santo Leon High. A single paragraph summed up her precollege history: smalltown beauty queen/honor student travels to the city to attend the U. Shawna had surprised her friends by not pledging a sorority, choosing instead to live in one of the high-rise dorms. Turning into a “study grind.”
She’d majored in psychobiology, talked about premed, used her beauty contest winnings and income from a summer teacher’s aide job to pay her bills. She’d been enrolled for only a month and a half when she left the dorm on a late October night, informing her roommate that she was heading to the library to study. At midnight the roommate, a girl named Mindy Jacobus, fell asleep. At eight A.M. Mindy woke, found Shawna’s bed empty, worried a bit, went to class. When Shawna still hadn’t returned by two P.M., Mindy contacted the campus police.
The unicops engaged in a comprehensive search of the U’s vast terrain, notified LAPD’s West L.A. and Pacific Divisions, Beverly Hills and Santa Monica Police, and West Hollywood sheriffs of the girl’s disappearance.
No leads. The campus paper carried the story for a week. No sightings of Shawna, not even a false report. Her mother, Agnes Yeager, a widowed waitress, was driven to L.A. from Santo Leon by a representative of the chancellor’s office and provided living quarters in a graduate student dorm for the duration of the search.