Lost Souls. Lisa Jackson

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      Hands delved deep inside the pockets of her raincoat, Portia Laurent walked along the sidewalks that crisscrossed the quad at All Saints. It was New Year’s Eve and she was on her dinner break. Already, the night was closing in and the promise of revelry was evident in groups of students laughing and talking and hurrying to the local restaurants and bars to ring in the new year.

      At least four students wouldn’t be among the partiers. Dionne Harmon, Monique DesCartes, Tara Atwater, and now Rylee Ames, whom, Portia believed, had all met with the same bad end. There could be others as well, she thought, though none from All Saints. She’d checked. In three years no other students had been reported missing.

      “No bodies, no homicides,” Vernon had insisted in their most recent conversation, but Portia didn’t believe it. True, there was no proof that anything suspicious had happened to the girls, and while Dionne was African American, the other three girls were white. Serial killers usually didn’t cross racial lines, but that wasn’t always the case.

      She thought about Monique DesCartes, from South Dakota. When Monique was fourteen her father had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease and Portia knew firsthand how that could ruin a family. Monique’s mother had been straight-up pissed that Monique had applied for scholarships and taken off, leaving the mother to deal with a rapidly failing husband and two younger daughters, one of whom was still in grade school. Monique, ever rebellious, had run away twice in high school and so, now, was chalked up as a girl who gave up easily and took off. She’d been known to drink and smoke dope and had broken up with her most recent boyfriend a few weeks before her disappearance. The boyfriend, already in an “intense” relationship with a new girlfriend, hadn’t given a rat’s ass what had become of Monique.

      It seemed as if no one did. Except Portia.

      She walked past the library, where three stories of lights glowed bright in the night. The rain had let up but the air was heavy and damp, leaves of some of the bushes still dripping as they shivered in the rain. The outdoor lights glowing throughout the campus had the appearance of old gaslamps, a nod to the era in which the school was founded.

      As she headed to Cramer Hall, where she had lived years ago as a first-year student, she thought about the missing girls. All English majors. All enrolled in some basic classes as well as a class in the newer controversial curriculum. They’d each been enrolled in Writing the Novel, Shakespeare 201, and The Influence of Vampyrism in Modern Culture and Literature. There was no evidence that the girls had known each other and they’d not taken the classes during the same terms, but they had enrolled and passed each of those three classes. Maybe it was nothing. But maybe it was….

      She found herself directly in front of the dormitory. The brick edifice looked very much the same, and she stared up at the room on the second floor that had belonged to Rylee Ames. Rylee, like the other girls, was estranged from her family but her mother’s remarks hadn’t rung true. Nadine Olsen had simply said in her west-Texas drawl, “You know how it is with some girls, when the going gets tough, the tough hitchhike to Chicago and get knocked up.” Portia had found no evidence that Rylee had ever given birth, but she had dabbled in drugs—ecstasy, marijuana, and cocaine—and run away several times as a teenager while Nadine tried to hold her brood of three sons together on a cannery worker’s salary. Rylee’s father, the first of Nadine’s five husbands, had only said, “Always knew that kid would come to no good. Takes after her mother.”

      Great, Portia thought grimly. No one seemed to care what had happened to Rylee Ames.

      Which was the same apathy that surrounded the other victims.

      “They’re not victims until we prove that some crime has been perpetrated against them,” Del Vernon had insisted, but Portia knew better. Those girls had been victims from the day they were born. That much they had in common. Along with the fact that they had been English majors at All Saints College and as such, had taken some of the same required and elective courses.

      Coincidence?

      Portia doubted it.

      A cold wind blew across the grounds, rattling the branches of the pines and causing the Spanish moss hanging from the live oaks to dance and sway, like ghosts in the lamplight.

      If Portia had been a superstitious woman, she might have felt a chill in her soul or cared when she spied the black cat scurrying across her path. However, she didn’t believe in ghosts or demons or vampires. She wasn’t even really sure about God, though she prayed regularly. But she did believe in evil. The dark rotting of the soul where malevolence and cruelty resided in a human form.

      And she was scared to death that the four girls missing from All Saints had encountered a homicidal maniac of the worst order.

      She hoped to God that she was wrong.