Eventually she asked, “Was Jenna having any problems with another student studying the same curriculum? A lab-assistant position a fellow student didn’t get, an internship with only one slot—anything that might have put her in competition with others in her degree track?”
“That happens a lot when you get into the PhD programs, and Jenna was headed that route. She wanted to be a researcher at a biotech firm—it was a serious ‘major goal in life’ focus. She didn’t want to go the medical-degree route but wanted as much as she could learn about diseases, genetics, and research methods as she could cram into her schedule. She was insane to carry the course load she did, but she was impatient to get the knowledge.”
“Any reason for that?” Evie asked, curious. “Someone in her family was sick? She lost someone to a genetic disease?”
“Not that she ever said, and she would have. We were tight that way. It was more like, ‘I can be the Einstein of my generation in genetics, the Alan Turing of biology’—she would talk that way. She liked to discover things, understand things.”
Evie remembered an Alan Turing biography on a side table in a photo of Jenna’s living room—something she’d been reading before she disappeared. “Was she a music lover? Was a concert something she would put into her schedule, even overloaded with studies as it was?”
“Live music was a big deal for her,” Robin confirmed. “It was the only thing that would get her out of her serious study mode. She loved to sing, had a wonderful voice. I don’t know what happened to her music collection, but she had hundreds of songs in her playlists and knew all the lyrics to them. An interesting band, a musical—that was her entertainment, her reward for all the work she was putting in toward her degree. She didn’t have a lot of money, but her parents were good to her, slipping in a few extra dollars with her school fees for those kinds of evenings out.”
“Triple M, the band in concert that night—was that Jenna’s choice or simply the band playing that Friday?”
“The band playing that night. I don’t think she had a special interest in them, though Jenna loved the song ‘A Waiting Love.’ She sang along with it, gave us a solo on the walk home as she sang it again. Tiffany had gotten a block of tickets so we could go as a group, and when people heard it was Triple M, they cleared schedules to be able to go.
“Jenna was delighted with the concert that night. The fact she had a boyfriend, it was a serious thing, and Triple M’s music was focused on songs like that—the music was right up her alley. Jenna figured another year and Steve would ask her to marry him. She was anticipating it, dreaming big and loving life. Not just having a great personal life, it was also doing something great for the world at large, and that’s why the studies mattered so much to her. She wanted to make a big difference in the world. Me”—Robin shrugged—“I just wanted to dream up fashionable clothes that didn’t go out of style within one season. Sometimes it’s weird, realizing we were such good friends. And now she’s the one gone. . . .”
“She had a lot of photos of you in her albums,” Evie mentioned.
Robin brightened. “That’s nice. We were close—a college camaraderie of doing life together for a time. Jenna sat through all my failed boyfriend sagas, handed over the tissues and shared the ice cream. She made life fun, you know? She made it possible to sparkle. She was wickedly smart to have selected those courses, but she wasn’t making a big deal about it. She just buckled down and did the work and could figure out hard things. She was kind of quiet, really calm, when the rest of us in the group had big highs and lows. I think that’s why she was a good fit with Steve. He had that steadiness about him too.”
“How were things with her boyfriend? Was there a former boyfriend still in the picture who might cause her to rethink matters?”
Robin shook her head. “It was Jenna and Steve all the way. He was working one of the sign-up tables on the quad when she was a newbie freshman going through orientation, and they struck up a conversation about the school paper and what he did. She didn’t sign up to join the newspaper, but she started hanging around there some to see what he was doing.
“They clicked the first time they met, and it was Steve and Jenna pretty much thereafter—at least once he decided she wasn’t too young for him. That first year he was playing it very safe, just a friend, but you could tell he liked her, and he was wise enough to come back around and ask her out on that first date just before the year concluded. It was”—Robin crossed her fingers—“like that between them after that.”