"Pretty sure that's considered stalking," Nettie - law enforcement major from Reno - said. "I mean, if we're talking about actual law, that's, like, pretty damn illegal, Kat."

Kathy's dorm room was a haven for various girls from the university's Criminal Justice department, so illegal behaviour was probably not wise, but she really wanted to know who this woman was. So she could ask her out, possibly.

Although, yeah, the stalking was pretty creepy. Still, you crash someone's wedding, of course you're gonna get tracked down. Right?

"She liked my hypothesis, Nettie," said Kathryn.

Nettie bit her lip, and then sighed. "Okay, fine, but only because it's a mystery. LUCY!"

Lucy - computer forensics major from Brooklyn - tugged her headphones off and half-turned away from her laptop. "Yeah?"

"Can you hack the ABA and get a list of women who passed the most recent bar exam in New York?"

"Sure," said Lucy, unperturbed. At least half of the cyber security students Kathy knew were hackers in their free time, and Lucy was probably the most shameless about it. "Any other criteria to narrow it down?"

Kathy cleared her throat. "Uh, non-Caucasian, under thirty, criminal law."

"Gimme twelve hours and a lot of root beer," Lucy said, and put her headphones back on.

"I'm getting serious How I Met Your Mother vibes from this story," Nettie said. Then, looking around for Kathy's roommate before lowering her voice, she added, "Tell Kara the coat was red, I can't take another marathon."

"Come on," said Kathy, "It was only as bad as all that because you insisted you wanted to watch the gods-awful finale."

Nettie nodded solemnly. "And I've regretted it since. Kara!" She said brightly, when Kathy's roommate swept into the room that very moment with their pizzas.

They used to order just the one pizza, because there were only four of them at the start, but then someone discovered that the girls in 41B had pizza nights on Mondays, and now they had to have five, or resort to murdering their classmates to defend their pizza.

"You need to talk to all the other guests," Nettie said, when she'd fended off someone trying to get the last slice of veggie delight. "Ask them whether they know her."

"I'll draw her," suggested Kara. She was building with the little plastic table-things meant to keep the lid off of the delicious, delicious cheese, because Kara went crazy without

Kathy perked up. "Like a police sketch?"

"That's totally unnecessary," said Lucy. "I'll be able to hack into this, I'm sure of it." She didn't stop typing as she spoke, still staring at a wall of command text.

"I'll go through the guest book and make a list of names, numbers, and addresses for our investigation, you guys work on that sketch," Nettie said firmly.

-.-.-.-

By the time Kathy got to the first active day of her body farm internship, the half-formed idea of finding the woman again had solidified into an urgent need to make sure she hadn't imagined the entire thing.

So she somehow ended up explaining all of this to two of the other students from a different university, one a gorgeous black girl with an impeccable fashion sense, the other a stocky Canadian guy who had apparently missed his childhood tutorial on smiling.

"And then, she just disappeared!" Kathy finished, waving the spade around. "I swear, I'm starting to think she's a ghost."

"Why do you want to find her so badly?" Quidge asked.

Lissy pretended to swoon. "She's in love."

"Don't be deliberately obtuse," said Quidge, as he scooped soil into the sample tube. His lips twitched, the closest Kathy had seen him to smiling.

"It'd be so romantic! Falling in love with a ghost at your brother's wedding, trying to find her, only to discover she's been dead for a hundred years…"

"The first black woman to pass the bar exam in New York City was Jane Bolin, and she would've been 6 years old a hundred years ago," Quidge said.

Kathy opened her mouth to ask how he knew that, then closed it. She'd asked her brother Benton how he knew random facts too many times, she knew the dangers.

"Okay, so, maybe not a hundred years," said Lissy, sounding a bit put out. "Hey! Maybe it was Jane Bolin."

Quidge groaned, and Kathy laughed.