She carried the bowl to the desk and shoved aside her paper clip cup to make room for it. “I found the apartment over the Internet. I called and rented it before I even knew Tara had lived here, or that I was going to get so involved.” She plucked a few popped kernels from the bowl and plopped them into her mouth, holding the bowl toward Jay, silently inviting him to join in. He took a small handful. “At the time I didn’t even know Tara Atwater’s name, or that she was one of the missing coeds. I mean, I’d vaguely heard about them, of course. My dad had brought up the fact that some of the students might have disappeared, and there was a bit about them on the news, not a lot, or not a lot that I was aware of. At the time, I thought it was all conjecture. No one knew for certain they’d been abducted. I mean, no one still does. The fact that I ended up with one of the apartments is probably because most people already had their leases set for the school year. I signed up for January classes, so I was looking in December, when there weren’t a lot of apartments available.”

“You sound as if you’re trying to convince yourself.”

She smiled faintly. “Okay…it’s a little freaky, yeah. But if you think about it logically, it really is just a coincidence.”

“Uh huh. And then you just happen to end up living here in Tara Atwater’s apartment and then you just happen to assign yourself the duty of becoming Nancy Drew in The Case of the Missing Coeds?”

“I was interested anyway and then Lucretia asked for my help.”

“Lucretia? Lucretia….” He frowned, thinking back to place the name. “Didn’t you have a roommate you hated named—”

“Yep. She’s one and the same.” Kristi explained about running into Lucretia, how she was worried about the missing girls but was afraid to say anything because she’d just been hired by members of the administration who were taking the stance that nothing was wrong. “I told Lucretia I’d look into it,” she finished.

“I still don’t like you living here alone.” It felt to Jay like everything was slipping a little, “off” in a way he couldn’t define.

“It’s just an apartment. Sorry, the dog can’t stay. Neither can you. End of story.” She motioned to her charts again, then pointed to the poster dedicated to Tara Atwater. “Back to the colors. Tara’s in pink, Monique is green, and Rylee is in blue. You can see that I’ve listed places, people, and things that they might have in common, then connected them. The connections show two or three or four colors.”