Vanishing Act (12 page)

“You are summoned,” she intoned, capitalizing each word with her voice.

When I entered, Morrell was glancing through a folder I assumed to contain the Melissa Hayes case. “There isn't much to tell,” he said as I sat down.

“That's all right. I'll take whatever you can give me.” I got my pad and pen out of my backpack and prepared to take notes.

“We received a call at four-thirty on Friday, November twenty-second from her brother, Bryan Hayes. A member of our security team responded, and after ascertaining what the problem was, advised Mr. Hayes to wait until twenty-four hours had passed before recontacting us.” Morrell looked up from the paper he'd been reading from. “That's standard policy everywhere when the subjects are above sixteen,” he explained, emphasizing the word
everywhere.

I told him I was aware of that.

Morrell ignored me and kept talking. “In ninety-eight percent of the cases, we find students reported missing turn up within twelve hours. Usually, they've taken a road trip with their friends and failed to inform their family of their plans or they've become intoxicated and passed out somewhere.”

“Interesting,” I murmured even though he wasn't telling me anything I didn't already know. I doodled an M on my pad. “What did you say the name was of the guard that caught the call?”

“I didn't.”

“Could you give it to me?”

“The gentleman has moved on. Anyway, it's against university policy.” The way Morrell pronounced the words
university policy,
you would have thought he was talking about the National Security Act.

“Why is that?”

“Experience has shown us that it's more efficient to funnel our communications through one person. That way we avoid miscommunications and misunderstandings.”

“Very commendable.” What was even more commendable was that I managed to make the comment with a straight face.

“We like to think so.”

“Is that the royal we?”

A tic of annoyance traveled across Morrell's face. “People I've spoken to told me you had quite a mouth on you.”

“What people?” I asked, though I really didn't care. Not being well liked has a certain freeing power.

“Would you like me to continue or not?”

“By all means.” I went back to taking notes. I could always get the guard's name if I needed it. “Fine. I can live with that. What happened next?”

“The brother contacted our offices again twenty-four hours later. When we ascertained that Melissa Hayes was indeed missing—”

I interrupted. “How did you do that?”

“We spoke to her roommate, her boyfriend, her suitemates, interviewed students in the dormitory, talked with her teachers, as well as conducted a visual examination of the grounds.”

Morrell gave me the information in a flat tone of voice. As he scanned the report in front of him and precised it for me, I was thinking about how much I would have loved to have seen the file, but that, I knew, was out of the question. Unless, of course, I paid a visit to the office when he wasn't there. Lots of times, people in security aren't as tight about that kind of stuff as one would think.

Morrell lifted his eyes from the paper and looked at me again. “Once we had concluded our search and come up empty-handed, we immediately got in touch with the Syracuse Police Department and turned the matter over to them. From that point on we have rendered every available assistance asked.”

“I'm sure you have.”

“Unfortunately the gravity of the situation was obscured by the fact that Miss Hayes disappeared right before Thanksgiving break. I fear we all assumed she'd decided to take her holiday early.”

“With her mother in the hospital?” I asked incredulously.

“She was having trouble with her academics as well.”

I stopped doodling. “No one told me that.”

Morrell gave me a tight little smile. “Maybe they didn't know. Maybe she was too embarrassed to tell them. Over the years, I've found that good students don't take failure well. That and her mother's illness. Her friend's death ...” Morrell's voice drifted off. “Frankly, given the circumstances, I'm surprised she elected to return in September. She should have taken the semester off. I don't know why she didn't.”

Here was something Morrell and I could both agree on. “Anything else I should know?” I asked.

Morrell shook his head.

“Unoffically, what do you think happened to her?”

He spread his fingers out on the desk's surface. “Given the circumstances, your guess is as good as mine.”

“You must have some idea,” I insisted.

He studied the onyx pen holder on his desk while considering his answer. “In this job, I've found that college students don't seem to be very good at processing stress. They tend to overreact to life's setbacks.”

I translated to English. “Are you saying you think Melissa killed herself?”

Morrell picked up his pen and put it back down. “I don't think we can rule out the possibility.”

“S
uicide,” Fell said reflectively, combing his mustache with his fingers. “I can't say the thought hasn't crossed my mind.”

He had to raise his voice to be heard over the construction noises. I looked out the window. A building was going up not more than fifty feet away from Fell's office.

“They started building in November.” He got up and closed the window a little harder than necessary. “It's making me crazy. When I leave the window open, it's so noisy I can't think, and when I keep it closed, it gets so hot I feel as if I'm in a sauna.”

“What's it going to be?”

“A new computer center. God forbid they should put any money into the humanities and the social sciences.” He raised his eyebrows in disgust. “Look at this place.” He waved his hand around to indicate his office. “Could it possibly be any smaller?”

“Not really.”

The room was cramped and narrow, the height almost double the width of the room. It reminded me of an elevator shaft. If you could have magically tipped the room on its side, it would have been spacious, but as it was, there was barely enough space for a desk and two chairs. Add a love seat, bookshelves overflowing with textbooks and professional journals, and an aggressively large ficus, and the effect was claustrophobic in the extreme.

“But that's the university for you.” Fell took a chocolate chip cookie out of a Tupperware container. “They've got plenty of money. They're just not putting it in the right place. If it doesn't have an immediate payoff, they're not interested. The humanities have become the stepchildren of higher education.” He stopped and laughed. “God, listen to me. My wife said I'm becoming a certifiable old fogy. I think she's right.” He took a bite of his cookie. “Here. Have one.” He pushed the container across the desk. “I made them from scratch. Good, aren't they?” he asked after I'd eaten one.

“Very.” I brushed a crumb off my notebook.

Fell reached for another, leaned back in his chair, and rested his hands on his belly. With his slight double chin, unkempt mustache, and his plaid shirt, he had a homey, rumpled appearance, and I could see where Melissa would have felt secure confiding in him.

I shifted around in the chair in front of his desk, trying to get comfortable, but it was no use. The seat was lumpy and there were small cracks running along its arms. It reminded me of the chair in my office that I'd taken to piling old newspapers on. No wonder Fell was annoyed by the new building going up. Not only was the noise a constant irritant, but here they were, spending millions of dollars, and he couldn't even get a new chair for his office.

Fell took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose before putting them back on. Black-rimmed, with Coke-bottle lenses, they were the glasses of someone who either couldn't afford or didn't care about buying better. “Melissa disappearing like this almost makes me glad I didn't have children.” His voice was reflective.

“Me too.”

He smiled wryly. “Well, now that we're agreed on that, how I can help you? We have a half hour before my next class.”

“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.”