The Bellbottom Incident by Neve Maslakovic Page A

only dissatisfied with himself. “I should have instigated a search of the premises last night. My lack of sleep contributed to a poor handling of the problem. I apologize. I assumed she’d go back to the cafeteria restroom to sleep. It seemed logical.”
    I didn’t bother reminding him that like he himself had pointed out, people rarely act on logic and more often on what feels right . Coming to St. Olaf had felt right to Sabina.  
    Xave’s white Einstein wig had slid over his forehead to the bridge of his nose. His head was down on the back of his chair again. I thought I detected the faint sound of snoring from underneath the wig.
    “It doesn’t matter,” I said to Dr. Little. This was no time to coddle his bruised academic ego. “Let’s go get her. Room 104, you said?”  
    He shook his head. “You’re not understanding.”
    “What are we not understanding?” Abigail asked.
    Xave gave a half snore, which woke him up. He mumbled from under the Einstein wig, “They’ve all gone…Udo’s book club.”
    He wasn’t making any sense. More worrisomely, neither was Dr. Little. I looked from one to the other. “What book club? What are you two talking about?”  
    Dr. Little draped his towel over the bathroom doorknob. “The students in the dorm’s book club—they’ve gone away…and Sally left with them.”
    “Where did they go?”
    Xave’s Einstein wig slid to the floor and his head shot up. He said quite lucidly, “Udo, Gilberte, and the others left bright and early this morning on a midterm break to parts unknown. Your Sally is not on campus anymore.”

11

    “We’ll just have to get a car ourselves and go after her. Dr. Mooney—I mean Xave—do you own a car?” I turned to him before remembering that he had already mentioned that he didn’t. “Well, we’ll have to get one somehow. Or a bus or taxi, if we can catch—”
    “That’s linear thinking,” Dr. Little cut me off. He still looked pained that he had failed to discover that Sabina had been so close, only four floors down, and angry at himself for having missed something obvious—for the second time in as many days. I guessed that he was worried about looking foolish in front of Xavier Mooney, who would one day have a vote as to whether tenure would be offered to our young professor from California. I doubted Xavier would judge Dr. Little on an incident that had happened thirty-some years in the past and which he had never once mentioned. But it did make me wonder yet again why he’d never said anything about meeting the three of us.
    “You have a better idea?” I asked Dr. Little as I joined Abigail and him by the window, where he was rolling up his sleeping mat.  
    “Obviously we have to go after her,” Dr. Little said, maneuvering the mat into the duffel. “Just not in a car or bus.”
    For a moment I thought he was suggesting that we find a helicopter or plane, but Abigail caught on to his meaning. “The Slingshot.”
    “The what?” Xave asked from across the room.
    Dr. Little shot him a look, and Xave met his stare through half-closed eyelids. “I do believe I’ll go downstairs in search of that cup of coffee. I can tell when I’m not… wanted .”  
    Once the door had swung shut behind him, I nodded. “I get it. We’ll jump ahead and catch up with—did you say it was a book club?—wherever they have gone.” Xave had said parts unknown , but I assumed it was just a figure of speech.With Slingshot 2.0, we could instantly meet up with the book club; it would only be a matter of calculating the coordinates. We had located Sabina; we just needed to jump ahead to meet her. Only…
    “What is it, Julia?” Abigail asked.
    “Don’t you two think it’s odd that Sabina was able to hitch a ride?”
    “You’re worried she’ll never be heard from again because she got into a strange car? What could be safer than being in the company of a book club, for heaven’s sake?” Dr. Little said.
    “It’s just…a bad