As Kristi distributed the cold drinks and poured coffee, Lucretia eyed her old roommate. “So you’re enrolled at A. S.?”

“Uh-huh.” No reason to lie about it. Kristi poured coffee into a cup.

“Didn’t you graduate?”

Kristi wasn’t about to be baited. “Just a few credits shy.” Jesus, why did Lucretia care?

“I thought you had a thing about writing.”

“Mmm. Cream?” she asked the woman who had ordered coffee, ignoring Lucretia’s questions.

“Do you have no-fat milk?”

“Sure. Just a sec.”

“I’m teaching now,” Lucretia said proudly.

“That’s great,” Kristi forced out as she swept away, refilled half-empty cups at a nearby table, then hurried back to the kitchen, where she filled a small pitcher with skim milk and grabbed a dish with packets of sugar and artificial sweeteners. Tamping down her irritation with Lucretia, she returned to the table. “Here ya go.” She set the pitcher and dish onto the table near the coffee drinker. “Now, have you decided?” Forcing a smile, she took their orders without further incident and carefully wrote the instructions on the ticket. One woman wanted diet dressing on the side of her Julius Caesar salad, another insisted on no condiments whatsoever on her King Lear burger, and a third wanted a cup of the Cleopatra clam chowder with a side of fruit rather than coleslaw. Lucretia had recently developed allergies to all shellfish, so she wanted to insure that Tybalt’s tuna salad hadn’t been tainted with any of Ophelia’s oysters or Scarus’s scampi.

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.