As Marley Phillips was making her way across courtyard of Georgetown University she heard a noise, her head snapped around, flicking her loose strawberry blonde ponytail behind her. As she peered through the darkness she scolded herself for staying in the library so late and for being such a baby. She turned back around and hurried towards her dorm room. She heard footsteps and moved quicker, the footsteps were getting closer, using all her courage she turned around and was relieve by the figure she saw. "Oh my goodness I nearly had a heart attack" she said breathlessly. "What are you doing here so late?" she asked
"That's all we have time for today" announced Alex Blake to her Forensic Linguistics 402 class. "I'll see you all on Thursday." During her lecture Blake had been distracted by the empty seat in row 3, it belonged to Marley Phillips who had never missed a class. On her way out Blake was stopped by Allie Stevens who sat in the seat next to her "Professor Blake, I know it sounds crazy" Allie began "But I'm worried something has happened to Marley." "Why do you say that?" Blake asked. "We have Theoretical Linguistics together too and she wasn't there yesterday, I know I shouldn't be worried about one class, but Marley has never missed a lesson, not even when she had the flu and was running a 104 temperature. So I asked some people in her other classes and no one had seen her all day. So I swung by her dorm room and her room-mate said she had been asleep before Marley got back on Sunday night and that Marley had left before she'd woken up yesterday morning. How does she know that Marley even came back? She could have been missing since Sunday night, It's now noon on Tuesday, she could have been missing for 36 hours already." "Have you told anyone else about this?" Blake questioned. "Yes" Allie responded "After I spoke to her room-mate I went to Mr Collins the head of security and told him everything, but he just laughed and said that I had no proof that anything had happened to this girl so there was nothing he could do. So I went to Professor Burke and asked him to talk to Mr Collins, cause he knew that Marley would never miss a class, but he said that Marley was probably just stressed out and decided to take a break for a few days and that I'd been reading too many of my forensic textbooks and they were making me paranoid." "And, do you think that could be the case?" Blake asked. "No" stated Allie "Marley would never disappear without telling anyone where she was going and I am not paranoid, No one has seen her since Sunday night, you have to help me." "Ok, I'll run it by my team and see what we can do." Blake responded honestly.
Robin Sloan wrote "All the secrets of the world worth knowing are hiding in plain sight."