Page 1 of No Safe Place

PROLOGUE

GIRL GONE

1

The place that everyone at Beckford College just called The House was an off-campus dive bar in some old run-down clapboard structure on Route 4.

It had popped up the year before. It was the track team guys who had found it, they said. One of the sketchy older brothers of a townie cross-country runner was supposedly the owner of it, and more and more people had started coming and now it was THE spot.

The inside of the hundred-plus-year-old house had wide plank pine floors and huge exposed walnut beams that gave it a barnlike feel. But it was a cozy barn that was low lit at night and warm with the bodies of young people buzzing before the music got going.

Girls got dressed up, put on makeup. Guys got fresh haircuts and ironed their preppy shirts. Around eleven, the lights would drop and the DJ’s laser light setup would start flashing and there would be an energy to the place, a real glow and electric excitement of healthy nice-looking college kids ready to blow off some steam as they checked each other out across a music-filled barroom.

At eleven this Thursday night, the DJ was starting out with some late 2000s pure nostalgia. Real fun stuff, Flo Rida, Ne-Yo, 3 Doors Down. Standing in the middle of the crowded bar, Olivia Ramos took a sip of her watery rum and Coke as the first jangly strains of Taylor Swift’s “Our Song” started up.

Back when Taylor was still country, she thought, shaking her head. Those were the days.

“Woo-hoo,” she called out as somebody else shrieked out a huge whistle.

Fake IDs, Thursday night bar crawls, Olivia thought as she smiled at herself in the mirror behind the bar. Now she was actually woo-hooing at random.

Olivia stirred her drink and took another sip.

If she kept up this amount of IQ drainage, soon she’d be dancing on the bar like some of the senior girls did every once in a while. Of course, that wasn’t the purpose for Olivia coming up to the boonies in Connecticut. On the contrary. When she was offered the Beckford scholarship, she’d told her friends back in New York it was solely the famous writing and journalism program of the nationally top-ranked liberal arts school that had gotten her to accept. Beckford was going to be strictly business, she had said, a necessary way station between either Columbia Journalism School or the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

But now here in her second year, she had to admit she really loved Beckford. The school wasn’t big but at the core of it was an actual genuine good vibe.

Maybe because it was so isolated up near the western border of Massachusetts or something, but it really did have, corny as it sounded, a school spirit, a sort of primal sense of “we are a family, we are a tribe.”

Especially at the basketball games. The men’s basketball team, the Redhawks, hadn’t missed a bid into the NCAA Tournament in fifteen years and no one blew up a basketball arena like they did. Home or away. Her actual ring tone was the booster club song, “We Are Small but We Are Mighty.”

Like me, Olivia thought, taking a bracing sip of her Cuba libre as her roommate and BFF, Naomi, walked into the bar.

2

How the blonde, stick-thin, tall Naomi Dalton, the premed volleyball player, and the petite not-so-stick-thin half Italian, half Puerto Rican, English major Olivia made their friendship work, Olivia wasn’t exactly sure.

Was it because they were opposites? she sometimes thought. A mutual sense of the absurd?

Whatever it was, it just worked. Ever since freshman orientation the year before, they’d been finishing each other’s sentences like twin sisters and had become as thick as thieves. The entire school was still talking about Halloween last year when they had hilariously shown up to the big track party together as Barbie and Dora the Explorer.

“You’re going to kill me,” Naomi said now as she huddled in beside her.

“What? Why?” Olivia said.

“They’re calling a meeting,” she said.

Olivia rolled her eyes. Naomi was rushing the campus’s snootiest sorority, Lambda Kappa Delta. Olivia wasn’t. She called it the Lamb Duh Society.

“Now? On a Thursday!” Olivia said. “THE hot party here is just getting started and now you have to leave to swallow goldfish or something? You of all people don’t need friends, Naomi. Why don’t you just drop it?”

“You know why,” Naomi said, lifting her vodka and pineapple with a frown.

Olivia actually did know. It was her mother. Naomi’s mother was a Beckford alumna and a former Lamb Duh Society debutante herself. She was also a dopey, prying desperate housewife type from Greenwich who liked to run Naomi’s life like she was her life-size flesh-and-blood personal Barbie doll instead of her daughter.

“Mommie Dearest strikes again,” Olivia said. “Why did you even room with me? You should have just brought mumsy with you. She would have loved that.”

“This really sucks,” Naomi said. “I hate this. The music is just getting started and we were planning tonight all week and—”

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