We don't know that the second accident (or the first, for that matter ) was caused by drinking.
Maura had a private room; all she would need to do is stay in bed, if she needed to. Students get "the flu," "stomach virus," "migraine," "bad cramps," "pink eye," "mono," "strep throat," and any number of other maladies. If I had a dollar for every bogus excuse I've ever had, I'd be rich. So I don't see any reason to leave for an abortion; if she wanted to be away from the college area and peoples's questions, she could just try a different nearby town or neighborhood.
And if she loved her boyfriend, why would she need an abortion, anyway? They could get married. Lots of people take a semester off, have a baby and then return to finish. It's of course not impossible that she went up there for an abortion, but it is an odd choice when there are big cities where a woman
would be anonymous and where no one would know here at all. The last place i would choose for such a procedure would be a rural resort area where I had gone with my family.
Maura may well have had just normal college kid issues, that, if her time-out had ended with her return to college, would be very unremarkable. Or she might have experienced something we don't think about--some kind of harassment from a professor or other authority figure, maybe a near-sexual assault from someone on campus, maybe some hurtful words from her sister or another friend. Maybe a confrontation about her drinking from family or friends. Maybe she heard a rumor about her boyfriend cheating. Who knows? We surely can't, so long as she is missing. Or maybe she was like a student I taught years ago, who was engaged to a great guy but DATING someone else and getting a lot of flak from the person who knew she was cheating. She married the fiance, and by all accounts has a great marriage, and her secret is
still a secret. My point: Maura was a college kid, with what seems to me to be normal college kid problems, including drinking too much and crashing cars, and playing hooky.