They’d stopped at a McDonald’s near campus for lunch, but Selma had picked at her Big Mac, barely touching it in favor of a Diet Coke and cigarette. Afterward, they had talked to a few of the girls’ friends who lived nearby and confirmed that their last contact with Zoe or Chloe had been around nine in the evening.

“I thought they were going to meet us at the Watering Hole,” Annie Rolands had told them. “I mean, it’s our place. All the students kick it there.” A petite brunette in frayed denim shorts and a tight sleeveless T-shirt, Annie had come out on the porch of her apartment, blingy cell phone in hand. “I was, like, ‘Come on, let’s go to the Watering Hole now,’ and they were, like, ‘No way, we want to party on Bourbon Street,’ and I was, like, ‘Whatever.’ I thought they’d show up at the Hole after a bit, but no.” She shrugged, checked the phone’s screen. “But they’re okay, right?”

“We hope so,” Brianna had said, and Annie had promised to text everyone she could think of to locate the girls.

“Social media, too,” Brianna had instructed. “Facebook, or whatever it is you guys connect on.”

“Sure.” Annie had bobbed her head. “I’m all over it.”

Once they were back in the car, Selma had confided: “I don’t think I can trust her to find the twins.”

“It’s a start,” Brianna had assured her. “It’s good to put the word out with someone tied in to their social network.”

Now, at last, the dean of students appeared in the reception area, his hands clamped to his chest, as if in prayer.

“I apologize,” he said with the barest hint of a brogue hinting at his Irish roots. “Summer is our season of retreats, and that keeps me busy. But come in, come in.” A fortysomething priest dressed in black slacks and shirt and a stark white clerical collar, Father Crispin was friendly, though harried, as he guided them up a curved staircase and into an office with tracery windows, coved ceiling, and a carved bookcase filled with well-worn tomes. Checking his watch, he waved Selma and Brianna into side chairs before taking his seat at the massive table serving as his desk.

“Now, then, what can I do for you?”

“It’s about my daughters. They’re students here. Zoe and Chloe Denning,” Selma said. As the priest listened, she explained about the twins’ disappearance, her worries for her girls, and her fears that a monster serial killer was at large in Louisiana.

As her story went on, the dean’s cocked head rose to alert, and his ruddy face clouded. “Murder?” Caution flared in his eyes. “Here?”

“I . . . I don’t know,” Selma answered. “All I’m sure of is that my daughters are missing.”