She heard male voices down the hall as the doors hummed open, but no one was standing in front of her to get on. She glanced over her shoulder in the direction of the voices as she made her way to her room and saw a pair of roommates at the end of the hall, gesticulating wildly. Sheridan paused.
Their names were Matt Nicol and David Hansard, both freshmen from Cody. They’d each started the year paired with a roommate they didn’t get along with and found each other. They occupied the corner room at the end of the hall, one of the larger dorm rooms, and they seemed to Sheridan to be normal, red-blooded Wyoming boys who wore hoodies, caps cocked sidewise, and baggy jeans. They liked to hunt, fish, and drink too much. And they were having a loud argument of some kind. She’d never heard them raise their voices before.
It wasn’t Sheridan’s role to intervene, but at the same time she didn’t want the argument to escalate. She thought that by standing in the hallway looking in their direction she would send the signal they were being observed. Often, that alone cooled things down.
Nicol saw her, mid-rant, and went suddenly quiet.
She waved at him.
Hansard, who had stomped away from Nicol into the room and couldn’t be seen, suddenly appeared around the doorjamb to see what had made Nicol stop speaking.
She waved at him, too. “You guys okay?”
Nicol looked to Hansard instead of answering, but Hansard grinned and said, “Oh, yeah. Everything’s fine,” and reached out and shut their door.
Sheridan gave it another half-minute. If they were still having a conflict, they were doing it quietly. That was good enough, she thought.
Then she heard a shuffle of feet directly in front of her. The sound would have been masked by the yelling if the yelling was still going on, and when she looked up she realized she was standing less than two feet from Erik Young’s door. There was a thin stripe of light beneath the door, punctuated by the shadows of two feet.
He was right there, she thought, standing on the other side of the door. Listening to her, listening to what was going on in the hallway. There were no other sounds from behind the door — no video games, no television, no music. If it wasn’t for the door itself, she realized, she’d be eighteen inches from him.
Quietly, she said, “Erik?”
No response.
A little louder: “Erik?”
The shadows vanished from beneath the door. He’d backed quietly away.
She shuddered and turned for her room, and it felt good to her to close and lock her door.
She dumped her books on her desk and scrolled to a Pandora classic country channel she’d created on her computer. For reasons she couldn’t really explain — maybe it had to do with where she came from — the twang of George Strait, Chris LeDoux, and Patsy Cline always made her feel comfortable when she was trying to sort out her feelings. As if Pandora could read her mind, Chris LeDoux’s “Look at You Girl” came on. She never listened to that channel with anyone else around, though. Too uncool.
On her wall was a collage of framed photos, most of them selfies with her and her girlfriends mugging for a camera phone. Then there were family photos — a formal one with everyone wearing stiff clothing where she looked particularly photogenic — and an informal one taken two summers before by a friend near their corrals. Her dad, mom, Lucy, and she glanced toward the camera from where they perched on the corral rails behind their house on Bighorn Road. Her mom was in jeans — her riding outfit — and had just ridden Rojo. April stood off to the side, looking annoyed. And in the background, looking out from behind the barn like some kind of burglar, was Nate Romanowski. She loved this photo for its candid nature. No one was posing, and Nate had been caught by surprise. It was the only photo she had of Nate, her mentor in falconry. She was sure he would rather it had never been taken.
When there was a knock on her door, she quickly doused the music on her computer and leaned into the peephole. If it was Erik Young, she wasn’t sure what she would do.
But it was Matt Nicol and David Hansard, both with their hands jammed into their pockets, both looking at their feet.
“Hi, guys,” she said, opening her door.
They grumbled a hello.
“What can I do for you? I’ve got a few minutes before I head to lunch.”
Nicol looked to Hansard to take the lead, and Hansard did. “Can we talk to you for a minute?”
“Of course.”
“Can we come in and close the door?”
She hesitated for a few seconds, then backed up and stepped aside. Neither had been in her room before — they weren’t the type to share concerns with her. Both entered cautiously, looking around at the photos and decorations. She was glad she didn’t have any underwear lying around.
“We can trust you, right?” Hansard said. “Everybody says you’re cool.”
She shrugged and said, “It sort of depends. If it’s something really bad—”
“It is,” Nicol said gravely.
“Maybe,” Hansard countered, shooting a shut-up look to his roommate.
“What is it?” she asked.
“You said during orientation that your door was always open. I remember that. If we can’t trust you, we might get kicked out of school.”
It was a dilemma. She wanted to know, but she didn’t want to know something that would put her — and them — at risk.
“All I can tell you is I’ll be fair,” she said. “If you guys tell me you committed a felony or something, well, I can’t just not report it. But if it’s something else—”
“See?” Nicol said to Hansard. “I told you we shouldn’t have come here.”
Hansard said, “She isn’t a dorm Nazi, like some of the others.”
“What is it?” she asked.
Hansard and Nicol exchanged looks again, and Hansard said, “Our guns are missing.”
She gasped and covered her mouth with her fingertips. She didn’t want to, but she did. “What do you mean? From where?”
“We had them under our beds,” Hansard said. “We know you’re not supposed to have them in the dorm. We’re not idiots — we know how to handle guns, and they weren’t loaded or anything.”
“Mine was,” Nicol corrected.
“Except for his, I guess,” Hansard said, looking anywhere but at her face.
“Okay,” she said, leaning back on her desk. “You know you aren’t supposed to have them in university housing. You signed a resident agreement saying you wouldn’t bring any firearms into the dorm, and we talked about it at orientation.”
Nicol and Hansard grumbled in agreement. Guns were allowed at the university, but only if they were stored at the UW Police Department. Every student was allowed up to three weapons plus a bow on campus as long as they were checked in and left in storage. A photo ID was required to store them or check them out.
“We screwed up,” Hansard said. “We went out target shooting a few weeks ago and got back late at night. We meant to take them to the station, but we never got around to it.”
“How many guns are we talking about?” she asked.
“Four,” Hansard said. “My 12-gauge shotgun and Ruger .357 Magnum revolver. Matt has a .223 Bushmaster and a 9-millimeter semiautomatic pistol.”
“The pistol was the one that is loaded?” she asked.
Nicol nodded sheepishly.
“How long have they been missing?”
“Who knows?” Hansard said. “Anytime in the last three weeks. Neither one of us even checked until just a few minutes ago — that’s what we were arguing about. I wouldn’t have even realized they were gone except I dropped a can of Copenhagen and it rolled under the bed. When I went down to get it, all I could see was dust bunnies.”