But he didn’t set off the kind of alarm bells in Darren that Joseph Fuller had, or Kelsey, the Rho Beta chapter president, for that matter. He felt there was some piece to Rey’s story that had not been divulged; he couldn’t understand why the kid was going on and on about wanting Sera’s schoolwork and her notebooks, for one. But there was also a tenderness in the way he spoke about Sera that Darren recognized as care and affection, maybe even love. That was mostly what he saw: love and fear. Rey was scared for her.
He told his mother to get dressed.
And reminded her they were on their own with this, without the weight of the Texas Rangers — worse still, they were actively blocked by Wilson’s warning. Darren acting in any official capacity, when he was a man with no badge, would only provide the district attorney in San Jacinto County with more damning evidence against him.
To find Sera, they had only each other.
“Go to work this morning like nothing is wrong. Smile and nod and all that business you were doing yesterday. But, Mama, look… see if you can get in that girl’s room. Sera’s. I trust you can come up with a lie about why you might need to get inside.” As he said it, he wondered why she hadn’t done this from the beginning — if there might be evidence in her bedroom that they would have at their disposal now.
Darren was heading to the campus. They had her schedule, after all. He wanted to visit her classes from the last week anyone ever saw her… he didn’t want to say alive. But the word hung between him and Bell nonetheless, the fear that they might be too late, if not today then tomorrow or the next day. If they didn’t move fast enough. It was why they needed Greg, who was already on his way. Darren hoped the former FBI agent could get Sera’s cell phone — and the bloody shirt — processed and mined for any information that might help. Darren knew it would take hard evidence to make Wilson and the Texas Rangers believe Sera Fuller was missing.
Despite the assertions of the two Rho Beta Zeta girls that she had moved out of the sorority house on the fourteenth of this month, Darren trusted only the visit from campus police the day before as the last known sighting of Sera Fuller. Which meant, according to her class schedule, her last class would have been the Wednesday before.
It was an intro to economics course, located in the Dugas building in the center of campus. Despite the quaint Victorian-style lampposts along the walkway to its front doors, Dugas looked very much like a suburban office building someone had plopped in the middle of the campus. The same warm sienna–colored brick as the rest of the campus structures but with sharp, hard angles and a pressing flatness in its facade. Inside, low-pile industrial carpeting and fluorescent lights contributed to a feeling that Stephen F. Austin University was not so much committed to the business of learning as they were to the learning of business. Though technically in a liberal arts building, Darren felt a seriousness of purpose here, the plan for where an SFA degree should lead: a good-paying job in the public or private sector with health insurance and a 401(k).
According to everything they’d found, it didn’t appear that Sera had declared a major yet, and Darren wondered what she imagined for her future, one very likely foreshortened by her condition. A glance at her classes suggested an interest in medicine, as Rey had said. There were courses in public health and a microbiology class whose title alone was beyond Darren’s understanding of the field. All together, they spoke of a young woman using her college education to make sense of the hand she’d been dealt, confronting head-on a blood disease that would require constant care for the rest of her life. It touched Darren to think of Sera wrestling with a legacy she hadn’t asked for, trying to make her own sense of the why and how of her fate, the caprice of human genetics.
He arrived at the economics lecture two minutes before the end of the session, slipping through the door in the back and into a hard plastic chair in the last row. He glanced around the room, hoping to see Sera packing up like the other students were, that this whole thing might still prove to be some wild misunderstanding. In the front of the classroom, the professor, a white woman who was barely older than the students she taught, did a double take when she saw him enter. She tripped over her next few sentences, having to repeat three times the reading assignment for the following class, so startled was she to see a strange man enter her lecture hall. Her shoulders tensed as students started filing out of the room, two of whom also shot looks at Darren on their way out. Both were black, an athletic-looking girl in a Lumberjacks school hoodie and a tall, lanky young man whose fade was in need of a touch-up. They were the only two black students in the whole class.
When the room thinned out, Darren approached the front of the lecture hall, where Rose-Marie Hammel was sliding papers into a pristine leather satchel, so smooth and un-scuffed as to give Darren the impression that this was maybe her first year as a university professor. She looked at him from behind curtain bangs wispy and thin, strands of her brown hair catching in her eyelashes as she blinked repeatedly and told him, before he could even introduce himself, that she had office hours to get to. He gave his name in a way he hoped conveyed both authority and due deference, hoping the combination would be a stand-in for the missing honorific Texas Ranger that would normally open doors, command obedience and prompt compliance. “I’d like to speak with you about a student of yours,” he said. “Sera Fuller. She’s in this class.”
He looked around the now empty classroom.
“I mean, usually,” he added. “I didn’t see her here today.”
Outside, he could hear voices muffled by the carpeted hallway, laughter, and the ring of a cell phone. “When was the last time she attended your lecture, Ms. Hammel?”
“Stein.”
“Excuse me?”
“It’s Professor. And it’s Stein. I got married earlier this month,” she said, lifting the strap of the leather satchel onto her shoulder. She was wearing what looked like a homemade sweater or maybe it was vintage. It was dotted with kelly-green pills, like little trees sprouting all over her torso. “The university sent out word of the name change.” She pressed the body of her bag against her chest, using it almost as a shield against someone she took as an interloper — or else he would have known about her name change. “So I’m not sure who you are or what this is, but —”
“Darren Mathews, ma’am. I’m concerned about a student of yours —”
“Are you from the town?” Professor Stein said.
The question surprised Darren. “Thornhill?”
That he rattled off the name so quickly, she took as confirmation.
She grew more rigid, further unnerved by his presence in her classroom. She immediately started for the door of the lecture hall. “I have to get to my office.” She sounded, if not frightened, then wary and disturbed. Darren followed closely behind, mindful of his height, of towering over her. He didn’t want to make her any more uncomfortable than she already was.
“Has someone from Thornhill contacted you about Sera?”
“I’m sorry, but like I said, I have office hours,” she said. “Please.”
Together they passed over the threshold of the door to the hallway, just a few steps between them. She picked up speed and made it out of the building’s front door and onto the campus. Moving so fast that Darren would have had to break into a sprint to catch up to her… and then what? Grab her by the arm? Manhandle a white female professor in broad daylight? He stopped on a dime, halting his pursuit right outside the doors of the Dugas liberal arts building, where the two black students he’d seen inside were talking. They too had been in Sera’s economics class.
Darren introduced himself and pulled from his pocket the picture of Sera in the woods, her face angled up to the sun. But, still, you could tell it was her.
The boy — Mehki, he told Darren his name was — turned up his nose in a faint sneer, said, “What are you asking about her ass for?”
The girl — Ella, she said — elbowed the boy in the ribs. “Why you say it like that?”
Mehki said Sera was phony and “weird,” newly coming around to the Black Student Caucus meetings even though she pledged a white sorority, lived all the way out on Steen Drive. He had never seen her at an Alpha party, Kappa, or Omega Psi Phi, not a step show or pregame tailgates, none of the black social events on campus. “But here she come around, suddenly wanting to attend meetings, asking about maybe becoming an officer,” he said, pursing his lips. “I swear I thought she was a plant.”
“Fool, what?”
Ella rolled her eyes.
Then she stepped to the side as two Latino students walked between them to enter the building. “Don’t listen to his paranoid ass,” she told Darren. “It’s been some drama on the other side of Trump, but that’s been every-damn-where. Conservative groups on campus were making noise, talking ugly, trying to get us kicked off campus for not allowing whites. But the school supports the caucus. They’ve backed our play. We are a safe space. Of course Sera was welcome. And not that she has to defend herself, ’cause blackness don’t gotta look one type of way, but she’s only living at the Rho Beta house, only pledged them because her daddy made her do it, she said.”
“Her father?” Darren asked.
Ella nodded, running a long fingernail through the part between two of her burgundy-colored braids. “It made her mad, the fact that he wouldn’t let her pledge a black sorority. They had some words about it, she told me. I got the feeling she grew up pretty sheltered, with a daddy who turned up his nose at a lot of black culture. One of them that want to be loved by white folks more than they want to be equal to them.”
“Just say Trump supporter,” Mehki said.
“Sera didn’t even know there was such a thing as black sororities till she got on campus,” Ella said. “She didn’t learn about the Black Student Caucus until this year. I get the sense that her eyes were opening to a lot of things, that she was breaking away from her parents a little bit. It’s some kids here who ain’t had a lot of life experience.”
Darren started to ask if Ella knew Sera was sick, that she had sickle cell.
But he felt protective of her.
If she hadn’t mentioned it, it wasn’t for him to tell.
“And when was the last time either of you saw her?”
