BLUE BLOOD RUNS COLD (A Michael Ross Novel Book 1) (2 page)

              She said, “Clear my schedule for the day. A student has died. I want to see all the administrative staff and the board of trustees together all at once.”

              The secretary's eyes widened. She said, “All of them? As in, all of them?”

              “All of them. As soon as possible. As in, five minutes ago. Tell them to meet me down in Shanks. It's the only place large enough to hold everyone.”

              As she headed out of her third-floor office in the oldest building on campus, she tried to think of what she would say to all those people. She knew that some of them wouldn't come. Those who didn't, she thought, might not have a job after the semester. But then, as she began descending the stairs to the employee cafeteria, she wondered if anybody in the university would have a job come January.

3

              Though the residents on the third floor of Ravney Hall had all been woken up by the roof collapsing, no one thought to look in on Jolanda. It was known throughout the building that she made a habit of getting up early, even on Fridays. She had an 8 a.m. chemistry class. Prior to that, she often showed up outside the doors of the dining hall, waiting for it to open at seven so she could be the first to eat chocolate chip pancakes. No one thought it suspicious when she didn't answer her door. The blinds over her window had always been closed, preventing anyone from looking in. She did not answer her cell phone, which was also not unusual for her, as she never took calls or responded to messages until noon. Her friends had always told her that she should be more attentive to her phone; she had always ignored their advice. There were simply too many calls and too many messages to cope with. Jolanda answered only her three closest friends regularly, and got to the rest whenever she felt like it, which wasn't often. She was not a phone person.

              Consequently, the maintenance workers discovered her body first. Then, as students came out of their rooms to see what the matter was, they saw Jolanda's body.

The students at Shippensburg University used a smartphone app that allowed people to post messages anonymously on a board that everyone in the area could see. For the majority of the fall semester, the students had used it to complain about conditions at Ship. They had invented derogatory hashtags to make fun of the university, the administrators, and the food. No one and nothing was spared from their criticism. The app became more popular on campus than any other social media site, for it was only way that people could hear authentic voices speaking out on a daily basis.

              The voice that spoke out at 8:32 a.m. belonged to Matthew Fullminster. Matthew was a sophomore who had already been accepted as a transfer to Penn State for the spring semester. He took his cell phone out of his pocket, connected to the dorm's weak Wi-Fi signal, and typed in his message:
Jolanda is dead. Roof collapsed. Buried under snow.

              Within five minutes, everyone who used the app at that time of morning knew what had happened. With knowledge, came anger. With anger came the will to take matters into their own hands. It began with a support group called To Write Love on Her Arms, where people could let out all their private hurts and talk about their suffering. There were often cathartic experiences in the group, as young girls just out of high school talked about having been sexually assaulted. A senior getting ready to graduate in the spring often spoke of his sister, who had been on and off a suicide watch for a year while she was in and out of mental institutions, most of which kept her for sixty days then released her. The members of the group who lived on campus, even those who had not regularly attended, gathered for an impromptu meeting at 8:45. Tears were shed, stories were told, classes were forgotten.

              The meeting took place in the Planck Union building in a room that overlooked the new gym and the concert hall that sat beside it, and it began in shared misery. The end came at 9:02 when the club's president, Shannon Moore, vocalized her thoughts out loud. She had not intended for anyone to answer her question. She not even intended for anyone to take it seriously. What made her speak up, she could not have said. A momentary impulse drove her to speak. She knew no more than that.

              She said, “Are we going to do something about it?”

              The idea that they could do something—much less that they
would
do something—had never occurred to them. The more active members of the group had volunteered their time for the annual early November drag show, at the Halloween costume dance, and various other events. They organized free hug periods in which passersby could hug a member of the group, with no strings attached. None of them had ever challenged the administration. That idea was beyond comprehension. There had always been a hesitancy in their actions. They shied away from projects that appeared too controversial. They had always stayed within the realm of the safe, the secure, and the known.

              For the briefest of moments, everyone in the room who had come to talk about Jolanda, to come to terms with her sudden, unexpected death, considered that there were over seven thousand students on campus and only a handful of administrators. How many people would it take to bring the university's operations to a grinding halt? For every single student in the room had no doubt that the president not only did not listen, but made a point of ignoring students' concerns whenever possible.

              Zachary Tyler, a twenty-one-year-old senior who had already enrolled into a graduate program at Shippensburg, said, “We have to do something.”

              And thus it was decided by slow yet inexorable consent that, as one, the group would go down to the administrative building. They made no plans about what they would do, or what they would say. Some of them talked about staying until noon, then going together for lunch. Afterward, they would all go back to their respective classes. They did not imagine themselves as activists or crusaders for a specific cause. They merely wanted, for one day only, to have their voices heard, to have their concerns recognized, to have something done at last.

              It did not go unremarked that at 9:13 in the morning, twenty-one students walked together from the PUB across campus, chatting as they went. Most 8 a.m. classes lasted until 8:50. The next batch of classes started up at nine o'clock. During those times, students who had been stuck with the dreaded morning classes sleepwalked to class, often showing up late and in pajamas. What mingling did take place on cold mornings when the wind blew stronger than usual took place between 9 and 10. This was when students went to the PUB to have made-to-order breakfast food and overpriced sushi prepared the previous day. Though students and faculty alike tried to arrange their schedules so as to have nothing to do on Friday, there were thousands of students remaining on campus, all of whom rapidly learned the news about Jolanda. Many were curious to see how badly the college would screw up this time.

              For this reason, students gathered outside Ravney Hall. Yellow caution tape had been erected around the building. The chains that normally prohibited vehicles from entering the small strip of road that sat in front of the dormitory had been taken down. Three large white trucks, all parked in a row, sat in front of the dorm, a sure sign that something had gone wrong. In the distance, the distinct wailing of police and ambulance sirens could be heard. This drew even more students, especially the TWLOHA group, who stopped on their way to the administrative building to watch the emergency vehicles pull in. The police officers and EMTs discovered then what the college students had known for a long time; there was an abundance of grass and a shortage of pavement. The vehicles rolled up onto the snow-covered grass. Two police officers wearing heavy black jackets and black woolen hats strode into the old dorm, their heavy boots thudding on the stone steps up to the third floor.

              There, they entered Jolanda's room. Except for the snow that had been dug out, everything had been left as it was. The two officers took pictures of the room, including the collapsed ceiling and the body lying there, motionless. Within five minutes, they came to the conclusion that foul play had not been involved in her death. Though the final judgment would rest with the coroner, who had to take into account whether she had been drugged or unduly influenced by the atmosphere around her in a way that affected her physical health, the officers saw no way that the ceiling could have been tampered with. A quick interview with the maintenance personnel who had discovered the body revealed that her door had been locked. Further interviews would be required to determine if she had entertained any guests, or if any work had been done to the roof in the last few months.

              The officers anticipated a difficult assignment, for all the residents on the third floor were already in the process of moving out to new locations. It was not known whether other parts of the roof would collapse as well. The priority was to evacuate the students as quickly as possible. The officers would have to interface with administrative personnel to track down the students; both of them anticipated that this might mean paperwork and official requests. Added to that was the fact that they could not be certain how many students would leave campus for the weekend, or had left after Jolanda's death but prior to their arrival. Writing it off as an accident appeared the safest, most expedient course.

              When the ambulance came shortly thereafter, Shannon Moore broke down crying. She did not want to cry, for she feared that tears might freeze on her cheeks. Yet something inside her had broken. She remembered going with Jolanda to milkshake night every Wednesday at the local church just up the road from the university. Those milkshakes had always made Shannon sick, yet she had drank them because there had been laughter and good company during those nights. It never mattered to her that she had to take Pepto-Bismol medicine when she got back to her dorm room; what mattered was that she had been able to enjoy the company of people she enjoyed being with.

              Now, that company was gone, torn away from her without warning. There would be no more Wednesday night milkshakes, no more listening to Christian rock bands for which she had no interest. There would be no more Jolanda. Shannon considered then that an irreplaceable part of the world had been lost, and all too suddenly. There had been no reason behind it. Shannon had not even been able to say good-bye. That hurt more than anything else.

              She cried on Zachary's shoulder, who still felt a twinge of discomfort come over him. He felt uncomfortable when people got too close. He had never been able to express this to the group, even after three years of attendance. Hugging was expected there; Shannon was a person who hugged anyone at any time for any reason, often without even asking first. Zachary just endured it as best he could while two EMTs came through the open doorway.

              He reflected on the strangeness of it all. Every dorm on campus had to be entered by means of sliding an identification card through a scanner. Once inside the dorm, each room could be locked from the inside. Death had subverted the normal rules of privacy; a beeping sound went off from the doorway, indicating that the door had been left open too long. Jolanda's room—once her private, inviolate space—was now open to everyone who could pass by the hallway. She no longer had any secrets. In death, she could no longer hide anything, or prevent anyone from seeing her. The echoes of her existence had been placed in the hands of strangers she had never known.

              The crowd, which by then numbered over two hundred students, together walked towards the administrative building, which lay just beyond a hill a short distance from Ravney Hall. Once Shannon forced herself to stop crying, she remembered her original determination. She wanted to make her voice heard. This desire trumped her need to lay in bed and sleep, her need to be alone, her need to also be with friends who could comfort her. Somewhere inside her, unconsciously, she suspected that more deaths might follow if she did not do anything. Shippensburg University had been put in charge of Jolanda's safety, and it had failed.

4

              The chief of the campus police at Shippensburg, Theodore Kenny, knew that he was not respected on campus by the students or in the town by the local police. The students on campus saw the university police as a group of people whose job it was to hand out extremely expensive parking tickets and break up loud parties during the early evening hours. Shippensburg tried its best to be an alcohol-free school—a notion that it used for advertisement purposes as much as possible while ignoring the reality of students carrying around vodka in sprite bottles, or hiding six packs of beer in extra backpacks they used just for that purpose. No one questioned a student carrying around a backpack; that was only to be expected. As a result, no one inspected any student's backpack at all. Beer got around campus by the gallons, even while Chief Kenny did his best to uphold the rules that had been established on campus.

              More than that, the small, squat police station was a place where students paid their expensive fees to acquire parking passes when they could just as easily park a short distance away in town with the added inconvenience of walking into town every time they needed to drive somewhere. The police station had very limited evening and overnight shifts; students who lost their ID cards had to make do without it until the station opened up again and a replacement could be provided. This meant that the dining hall and the PUB had to keep records of students who had lost their cards and then charge those cards manually later, if that were possible.