Page 28 of The Lake of Lost Girls

“Not this time. It was my mom. She always calls to check I’m at work. Or at home. Or wherever I’m supposed to be.” I cringed at how that sounded.

“She worries. It’s understandable.” Again there was no judgment.

He was right, itwasunderstandable. It made me feel like a bad daughter for being irritated by her.

“So, listen,” Ryan began, thankfully not prying any further into my relationship with my mother. “I was typing some of my notes today, and something came up that I wanted to ask you about.”

“Off the record?” I asked.

Ryan looked at me uncertainly. “Does it have to be?”

“Depends on what you ask.”

He paused for only a second before answering. “I guess that’s fair. I want you to trust me, Lindsey.” He sounded so sincere.

“Okay then, what is it?”

“Have you ever heard the name Dr. Clement Daniels?”

I shook my head. “No. I don’t think so. Who is he?”

“He was a professor at Southern State University at the time Jess went there. He’s retired now,” Ryan explained.

“Okay …” My stomach twisted into knots in anticipation.

“It was common knowledge that he had multiple affairs with students. Including Tammy Estep.” Ryan looked at me closely. “Remember, she was the RA in Jess’s dorm.”

“Right, I remember,” I said.

Ryan’s eyes narrowed. “He was questioned about Tammy’s disappearance. By the time the local police department became involved, weeks had passed since she was last seen. And the lead investigator was useless. They dismissed Dr. Daniels as a potential suspect almost as quickly as his name entered the conversation, but everyone knows the college had a huge hand in that. They work hard to protect their reputation, and that includes the reputations of their faculty. I have sources at the school who said the president back then, Dr. Hamilton, made sure the police met nothing but dead ends.”

He sounded frustrated and I could see why. If the police had been more proactive, things probably wouldn’t have been overlooked. One only had to look at the recent discovery of the remains at Doll’s Eye Lake. Police ineptitude was everywhere you turned. I knew the department claimed their hands had been tied because an official report wasn’t made about Tammy until she was gone for weeks, yet no one can deny that it was their sloppy investigative work that was the greatest failure in these cases.

“What does this have to do with Jess?” I asked. I had never heard of Dr. Daniels. Mom and Dad had never mentioned her taking a class with him.

Ryan picked at his thumb nail. “I know for a fact that Dr. Daniels was also seeing Phoebe.”

“How are you so sure?”

“A journalist never reveals their sources, remember?” He flashed his oh-so-appealing smile before becoming serious again. “Did you know she was a friend of Jess’s?”

My entire body froze. “Jess knew Phoebe, too?” It came out as a broken whisper.

“They were both pledging the Pi Gamma Delta sorority. From all accounts, they got along.”

“That’s got to mean something right? That Jess was connected to not only Tammy, but Phoebe as well?”

“It may mean something or it may mean nothing at all. It’s a small college after all. People’s paths overlap constantly. But aside from that, we can’t overlook the fact that all these women went missing around the same time and no one didanything about it. One disappearance would have been awful. Four is a damn tragedy.”

Ryan was watching me closely.

I didn’t want to ask my next question, but knew I had to. “Was Jess seeing Dr. Daniels, too?”

“Jess audited one of his statistics classes during that spring semester. And yes, there were questions about what else was going on between the two of them,” Ryan said almost angrily.

“I find that difficult to believe. I can’t imagine Jess getting involved with her teacher—”

Ryan’s expression hardened. “People have secrets, Lindsey. We don’t always know everything that’s going on with them.”

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