Best Laid Plans(136)
While she drove the thirty minutes to the Cheyenne College campus, she got two calls, which she sent to voice mail. The first from Ben. She wasn’t going to talk to him about the television show until after this case, and she was already thinking of more ways she could tell him no—since the blunt no she’d already given him didn’t work. The second call came from her editor. Max didn’t have anything good to tell her, and Emma was going to be disappointed.
Max had written four true crime novels, the first about Karen’s disappearance and the subsequent investigation. The latest book was coming out this summer, and Emma wanted another proposal. But Max didn’t have a case that excited her. She read the crime blotters, tracked the news—there were a lot of interesting cases, some even more interesting than Scott Sheldon’s disappearance. But nothing jumped out at her as thrilling enough to invest several months of her life into research and interviews, then another six to nine months verifying facts and writing the book. Writing the last book had nearly gutted Max. She’d investigated claims of elder abuse in a Miami facility and uncovered a ten-year reign of terror by the director she had dubbed the Wicked Nurse of Miami. Not very creative, and her editor had cut all but two references to the nickname from the book, but it was still the way Max thought of the bitch who seemed to take pleasure in making sick, old people suffer.
She didn’t want to go through that again, not yet. She briefly considered the Scott Sheldon case, and maybe there was something here that would warrant a full-length book, but Max didn’t see it yet. She first needed to talk to the people involved—maybe shining a new light on the matter would get them to talk—or slip up, if they were harboring a violent secret.
It was nine when she arrived in the visitors’ parking lot. The campus was small, at least by Max’s standards—three thousand undergraduates, half of whom commuted to the campus, and an even smaller graduate program. A typical liberal arts college, where students predominately majored in the humanities and arts, though there was a new earth science building and a recent influx of students majoring in environmental science and conservation. Not a surprise, considering the campus was in the Rocky Mountains.
The grounds may have been modest, but they spread out and up the mountainside, with tree-lined cement trails winding around the perimeter. A quad, of sorts, was built around a possibly natural waterfall, which filled a small lake. A stream meandered out, and judging from the marks in its banks, it was lower than it had been in the past. Still, the campus seemed like a rather idyllic place. No towering redwoods and pines as in California and much of the Rocky Mountains, but this place still had the fresh clean air and crisp cold Max loved.
She used to go skiing all the time—in far colder weather than this. She still skied when she could, but more and more she spent her hours investigating or planning an investigation. This was the first winter she hadn’t spent time at her cousin’s resort in Vail. Too many cold cases had grabbed her interest, and she’d also been finishing the book about the Wicked Nurse of Miami.
Her work—vocation, really—consumed her, and taking time off to have fun just hadn’t seemed important after the tragedies she immersed herself in. And as her editor, who was probably her closest friend in New York, had told her, Max was a workaholic.
Max had downloaded a campus map, but each path was well marked with signs and arrows directing her. She was looking for Rock Creek dorm, where Scott Sheldon had lived for the two months before his disappearance. His roommate had been Ian Stanhope, an environmental science major from Denver. Scott had been an environmental science major as well—and in fact, Scott and Ian seemed to have lived parallel lives.
Both were strong but not straight-A students; both were at Cheyenne on partial merit scholarships. Both had one younger sibling—Scott, a sister; Ian, a brother—and parents who divorced while the boys were in junior high school. Had they become close friends or bitter enemies? Sometimes, similarities made you hate a person because they highlighted—often unintentionally—your own flaws.
She didn’t have a sense of who they were as people, only who they were on paper. Scott hadn’t been involved with athletics; Ian was on the baseball team for the college, a D-III school. Through social media, it appeared that Ian had many friends, lots of direct and indirect connections to college, his high school, and Denver. Scott’s profile had been taken down, probably by his mother or sister, but his mother told her that he’d been soft-spoken and reserved, with only a few friends growing up.
How few? Had he made friends during his two months at Cheyenne before he disappeared? Was he homesick? Did he like college? Were his grades okay or was he struggling? Was there a girlfriend his mother didn’t know about? Ex-girlfriend? His mother said he didn’t have a history of depression, but a family might miss that, especially if the depressed person tried to keep it from them. Or if the onset was sudden. These were all things she would find out.
She knocked on Ian Stanhope’s door again and considered that he might not be there. Classes, socializing, studying.
A small guy came out of the room next door, backpack over his shoulder. “If you’re looking for Ian, he’s probably at the gym if he doesn’t have class.”
“Can you point me in the right direction?”
“South exit, right, and follow the signs to Cougar Stadium.”
Max followed the directions and less than five minutes later was standing in the lobby of a rather impressive athletics facility for a small college. The gym portion was well equipped with several weight machines, treadmills, and an area for free weights. It was clean and bordered on two sides by windows, which looked out into trees. Half the machines were being used.