16
Strolling across the courtyard, Blair said, “She was seeing someone, and I figured she’d gone dancing at Cindies, but when she texted to tell me where she’d left my bike, it wasn’t anywhere near there. That was the last thing I heard from her.”
I said, “Wait a minute. One step at a time. What makes you think she was seeing someone?”
“She just was. She was very secretive about it, but I could tell. She spent too much time getting ready. Too much time trying to look nice. It was for a man.”
“So she never told you who it was?”
“No. Like I said, she kept it a big secret. I mean, she wouldn’t even admit to going out with someone. I think she was afraid of being labeled a slut or something.”
Jennifer said, “What’s Cindies?”
“It’s a local dance club. It’s actually changed names from Cinderella to Ballare, but everyone still calls it Cindies. But she didn’t go there. Well, at least that wasn’t the last place she went.”
We turned the corner, walking through an arch in a building older than our entire nation. A wooden bridge spanned a canal, and Jennifer said, “Oh my God, is that the Mathematical Bridge?”
Blair nodded and started to say something about it when I interjected, “Can we stay on point here?”
Jennifer glared at me, and Blair went back and forth between us. I stepped onto the bridge and said, “How do you know where she stopped last?”
“I don’t know exactly where, but she sent me a text telling me where to get my bike—she’d broken the chain on hers and I’d loaned her mine. I needed it later in the night . . . I mean, I was going out as well . . . and she texted where she’d left it locked up. It was nowhere near Cindies, so that’s not where she went.”
We reached the dorm, which wasn’t nearly as old as the original school buildings. It was modern, maybe built in the eighteenth century as opposed to the fifteenth. She led the way up the stairs to the second floor, and I wondered how many people had trodden the same path. I found it a little creepy, with everything built in dark wood and shadowed in a gloomy light.
She unlocked the door to their small apartment and said, “Here’s home. Her stuff is through the kitchen on the left. All of it is still there; her computer is on the desk.”
I said, “Is there Internet in here, or are you guys supposed to learn like the forefathers?”
Blair laughed and said, “Yeah, there’s Wi-Fi. She should already be hooked up, but I can’t help you if she has any passwords on her stuff.”
I pulled a slip of paper out of my pocket and said, “I got that. Jennifer, see what else Blair knows. I’m going to hit the room.”
I left them in the kitchen, walking to the doorway of Kylie’s dorm. It was small, with a simple wood desk and a double-size bed, and had a faint musty smell, reminding me of old drapes left hanging way past their service life. It was clean and tidy, with only a single pair of socks on the floor. A MacBook Pro was on the desk, an open notebook next to it, as if Kylie were coming home any minute. For some reason the scene brought about a melancholy feeling, a sad reminder of how fragile life can be.
I shook those thoughts from my head. There was no indication that something bad had happened to Kylie. Not yet anyway.
I went through the desk first, hoping to find a journal or calendar. From the third drawer I pulled out another notebook. Inside was nothing more than a school assignments list, with most of the notebook pages blank. I pulled out a syllabus from a pocket and a small piece of folded paper fluttered to the ground. I opened it and found a visitor’s pass made out to Kylie Hale for RAF Molesworth. The escort name was TSgt Nicholas Seacrest of the NATO Intelligence Fusion Centre, with the destination being some pizza joint on the post.
What on earth would she be doing at a British air base? How good could that pizza be?
I put the pass away and turned on the Mac, logging in and going straight to her social media. There were a ton of new posts to her Facebook page, but no comments or posts by her since she’d disappeared. I opened her private messages, feeling a little slimy. I went through them as fast as possible, not wanting to pry, scanning the initial sentences and moving on. I found nothing of interest. The same for her Twitter feed. Just innocuous posts about college life.
I moved on to Instagram and found nothing on her public profile. I went to direct messages and finally got a hit. A picture of a man’s hand pointing to a brochure for some place called the Eagle, with a time and date written in blue ink on the border. The date was the day she disappeared. The caption said, Shhh . . . loose lips sink ships. I clicked on the profile that had sent it, someone called StNick762, but it went to a dead link. I hollered out of the room, “Blair, could you come here?”
Jennifer entered first, saying, “What did you find?”
I showed her the visitor’s pass, then the Instagram picture, saying, “The profile is deleted.”
Blair came in and I showed her the pass, asking, “Is this close by?”
“Well, the town of Molesworth is about twenty minutes away. I don’t know anything about the military bases, though.”
“Why would Kylie go there?”
“I have no idea. She certainly couldn’t have ridden her bike there, and we don’t have a car.”
I looked at Jennifer, frustrated at the lack of answers.
She pointed at the screen and the Instagram picture, saying, “How about this? Do you know where it is?”
Blair took one look and smiled. “Oh yeah, it’s a historical landmark. And it’s right near where she left my bike.”