A Kiss Before Dying

Part One DOROTHY

His plans had been running so beautifully, so goddamned beautifully, and now she was going to smash them all. Hate erupted and flooded through him, gripping his face with jaw-aching pressure. That was all right though; the lights were out.

And she, she kept on sobbing weakly in the dark, her cheek pressed against his bare chest, her tears and her breath burning hot. He wanted to push her away.

Finally his face relaxed. He put his arm around her and stroked her back. It was warm, or rather his hand was cold; all of him was cold, he discovered; his armpits were creeping with sweat and his legs were quivering the way they always did when things took a crazy turn and caught him helpless and unprepared. He lay still for a moment, waiting for the trembling to subside. With his free hand he drew the blanket up around her shoulders. "Crying isn't going to do any good," he told her gently.

Obediently, she tried to stop, catching her breath in long choking gasps. She rubbed her eyes with the worn binding of the blanket. "It's just... the holding it in for so long. I've known for days... weeks. I didn't want to say anything until I was sure..."

His hand on her back was warmer. "No mistake possible?" He spoke in a whisper, even though the house was empty.

"No."

"How far?"

"Two months almost." She lifted her cheek from his chest, and in the dark he could sense her eyes on him. "What are we going to do?" she asked.

"You didn't give the doctor your right name, did you?"

"No. He knew I was lying though. It was awful..."

"If your father ever finds out..."

She lowered her head again and repeated the question, speaking against his chest. "What are we going to do?" She waited for his answer.

He shifted his position a bit, partially to give emphasis to what he was about to say, and partially in the hope that it would encourage her to move, for her weight on his chest had become uncomfortable.

"Listen, Dorrie," he said, "I know you want me to say we'll get married right away-tomorrow. And I want to marry you. More than anything else in the world. I swear to God I do." He paused, planning his words with care. Her body, curled against his, was motionless, listening. "But if we marry this way, me not even meeting your father first, and then a baby comes seven months later... You know what he'd do."

"He couldn't do anything," she protested. "I'm over eighteen. Eighteen's all you have to be out here. What could he do?"

"I'm not talking about an annulment or anything like that."

"Then what? What do you mean?" she appealed.

"The money," he said. "Dorrie, what kind of man is he? What did you tell me about him-him and his holy morals? Your mother makes a single slip; he finds out about it eight years later and divorces her, divorces her not caring about you and your sisters, not caring about her bad health. Well what do you think he would do to you? He'd forget you ever existed. You wouldn't see a penny."

"I don't care," she said earnestly. "Do you think I care?"

"But I do, Dorrie." His hand began moving gently on her back again. "Not for me. I swear to God not for me. But for you. What will happen to us? We'll both have to quit school; you for the baby, me to work. And what will I do?-another guy with two years' college and no degree. What will I be? A clerk? Or an oiler in some textile mill or something?"

"It doesn't matter..."

"It does! You don't know how much it does. You're only nineteen and you've had money all your life. You don't know what it means not to have it. I do. We'd be at each other's throats in a year."

"No. . . no... we wouldn't!"

"All right, we love each other so much we never argue. So where are we? In a furnished room with- with paper drapes? Eating spaghetti seven nights a week? If I saw you living that way and I knew it was my fault..."-he paused for an instant, then finished very softly-"... I'd take out insurance and jump in front of a car."

She began sobbing again.

He closed his eyes and spoke dreamily, intoning the words in a sedative chant. "I had it planned so beautifully. I would have come to New York this summer and you would have introduced me to him. I could have gotten him to like me. You would have told me what he's interested in, what he Ekes, what he dislikes-" He stopped short, then continued. "And after graduation we would have been married. Or even this summer. We could have come back here in September for our last two years. A little apartment of our own, right near the campus..."

She lifted her head from his chest. "What are you trying to do?" she begged. "Why are you saying these things?"

"I want you to see how beautiful, how wonderful, it could have been."

"I see. Do you think I don't see?" The sobs twisted her voice. "But I'm pregnant. I'm two months pregnant." There was silence, as though unnoticed motors had suddenly stopped. "Are... are you trying to get out of it? To get away? Is that what you're trying to do?"

"No! God no, Dorrie!" He grabbed her by the shoulders and pulled her up until her face was next to his. "No!"

"Then what are you doing to me! We have to get married now! We don't have any choice!"

"We do have a choice, Dorrie," he said.

He felt her body stiffen against his.

She gave a small terrified whisper-"No!"-and began shaking her head violently from side to side.

"Listen, Dorrie!" he pleaded, hands gripping her shoulders, "No operation. Nothing like that." He caught her jaw in one hand, fingers pressing into her cheeks, holding her head rigid. "Listen!" He waited until the wildness of her breathing subsided. "There's a guy on campus, Hermy Godsen. His uncle owns the drugstore on University and Thirty-Fourth. Hermy sells things. He could get some pills."

He let go of her jaw. She was silent.

"Don't you see, baby? We've got to try! It means so much!"

"Pills..." she said gropingly, as though it were a new word.

"We've got to try. It could be so wonderful"

She shook her head in desperate confusion. "Oh God, I don't know..."

He puts his arms around her, "Baby, I love you. I wouldn't let you take anything that might hurt you."

She collapsed against him, the side of her head striking his shoulder. "I don't know... I don't know..."

He said, "It would be so wonderful..."-his hand caressing;-"A little apartment of our own... no waiting for a damn landlady to go to the movies..."

Finally she said, "How... how do you know they would work? What if they didn't work?"

He took a deep breath. "If they don't work,"-he kissed her forehead, and her cheek, and the corner of her mouth-"If they don't work well get married right away and to hell with your father and Kingship Copper Incorporated. I swear we will, baby."

He had discovered that she liked to be called •baby.' When he called her 'baby' and held her in his arms he could get her to do practically anything. He had thought about it, and decided it had something to do with the coldness she felt towards her father.

He kept kissing her gently, talking to her with warm low words, and in a while she was calm and easy.

They shared a cigarette, Dorothy holding it first to his lips and then to hers, where the pink glow of each puff would momentarily touch the feathery blonde hair and the wide brown eyes.

She turned the burning end of the cigarette towards them and moved it around and around, back and forth, painting circles and lines of vivid orange in the darkness. "I bet you could hypnotize someone this way," she said. Then she swung the cigarette slowly before his eyes. In its wan light her slim-fingered hand moved sinuously. "You are my slave," she whispered, lips close to his ear. "You are my slave and completely in my power! You must obey my every bidding!" She was so cute he couldn't help smiling.

When they finished the cigarette he looked at the luminous dial of his watch. Waving his hand before her, he intoned, "You must get dressed. You must get dressed because it is twenty past ten and you must be back at the dorm by eleven."

He was born in Menasset, on the outskirts of Fall River, Massachusetts; the only child of a father who was an oiler in one of the Fall River textile mills and a mother who sometimes had to take in sewing when the money ran low. They were of English extraction with some French intermixed along the way, and they lived in a neighborhood populated largely by Portuguese. His father found no reason to be bothered by this, but his mother did. She was a bitter and unhappy woman who had married young, expecting her husband to make more of himself than a mere oiler. At an early age he became conscious of his good looks. On Sundays guests would come and exclaim over him-the blondness of his hair, the clear blue of his eyes-but his father was always there, shaking his head admonishingly at the guests. His parents argued a great deal, usually over the time and money his mother devoted to dressing him.

Because his mother had never encouraged him to play with the children of the neighborhood, his first few days at school were an agony of insecurity. He was suddenly an anonymous member of a large group of boys, some of whom made fun of the perfection of his clothes and the obvious care he took to avoid the puddles in the schoolyard. One day, when he could bear it no longer, he went up to the ringleader of the hazers and spat on his shoes. The ensuing fight was brief but wild, and at the end of it he had the ringleader flat on his back and was kneeling on his chest, banging his head against the ground again and again. A teacher came running and broke up the fight. After that, everything was all right. Eventually he accepted the ringleader as one of his friends.

His marks in school were good, which made his mother glow and even won reluctant praise from his father. His marks became still better when he started sitting next to an unattractive but brilliant girl who was so beholden to him for some awkward cloakroom kisses that she neglected to cover her paper during examinations.

His school-days were the happiest of his life; the girls liked him for his looks and his charm; the teachers liked him because he was polite and attentive, nodding when they stated important facts, smiling when they attempted feeble jokes; and to the boys h6 showed his dislike of both girls and teachers just enough so that they liked him too. At home, he was a god. His father finally gave in and joined his mother in deferent admiration.

When he started dating, it was with the girls from the better part of town. His parents argued again, over his allowance and the amount of money spent on his clothes. The arguments were short though, his father only sparring half-heartedly. His mother began to talk about his marrying a rich man's daughter. She said it jokingly, of course, but she said it more than once.

He was president of his senior class in high school and was graduated with the third highest average and honors in mathematics and science. In the school yearbook he was named The Best Dancer, The Most Popular, and The Most likely to Succeed. His parents gave a party for him, which was attended by many young people from the better part of town.

Two weeks later, he was drafted.

For the first few days of Basic Training, he coasted along on the glory he had left behind. But then reality rubbed off the insulation, and he found the impersonal authority of the Army to be a thousand times more degrading than his early schooldays had been. And here, if he went up to the sergeant and spat on his shoes, he'd probably spend the rest of his life in the stockade. He cursed the blind system which had dropped him into the infantry, where he was surrounded by coarse, comic-book-reading idiots. After a while he read comic-books too, but only because it was impossible to concentrate on the copy of Anna Karenina he had brought with him. He made friends with some of the men, buying them beers in the PX, and inventing obscene and fantastically funny biographies of all the officers. He was contemptuous of everything that had to be learned and everything that had to be done.

When he was shipped out of San Francisco, he vomited all the way across the Pacific, and he knew it was only partly from the lift and drop of the ship. He was sure he was going to be killed.

On an island still partially occupied by the Japanese, he became separated from the other members of his company and stood terrified in the midst of a silent jungle, desperately shifting this way and that, not knowing in which direction safety lay. A rifle slapped, sent a bullet keening past his ear. Jagged bird screams split the air. He dropped to his stomach and rolled under a bush, sick with the certainty that this was the moment of his death.

The bird sounds fluttered down into silence. He saw a gleam in a tree up ahead, and knew that that was where the sniper waited. He found himself inching forward under the bushes, dragging his rifle with one hand. His body was clammy cold and alive with sweat; his legs were trembling so badly that he was sure the Jap would hear the leaves rustling under them. The rifle weighed a ton.

Finally he was only twenty feet from the tree, and looking up, he could discern the figure crouched in it He lifted his rifle; he aimed, and fired. The bird chorus shrieked. The tree remained motionless. Then suddenly a rifle dropped from it, and he saw the sniper slide clumsily down a vine and drop to the ground with his hands high in the air; a little yellow man grotesquely festooned with leaves and branches, his lips emitting a terrified sing-song chatter.

Keeping the rifle trained on the Jap, he stood up. The Jap was as scared as he was; the yellow face twitched wildly and the knees shivered; more scared, in fact, for the front of the Jap's pants was dark with a spreading stain.

He watched the wretched figure with contempt. His own legs steadied. His sweating stopped. The rifle was weightless, like an extension of his arms, immobile, aimed at the trembling caricature of a man that confronted him. The Jap's chatter had slowed to a tone of entreaty. The yellow-brown fingers made little begging motions in the air.

Quite slowly, he squeezed the trigger. He did not move with the recoil. Insensate to the kick of the butt in his shoulder, he watched attentively as a black-red hole blossomed and swelled in the chest of the Jap. The little man slid clawing to the jungle floor. Bird screams were like a handful of colored cards thrown into the air.

After looking at the slain enemy for a minute or so, he turned and walked away. His step was as easy and certain as when he had crossed the stage of the auditorium after accepting his diploma.

He received an honorable discharge in January of 1947, and left the Army with the Bronze Star and the Purple Heart, and the record of a shell fragment traced in a vein of thin scar tissue over his dextral ribs. Returning home, he found that his father had been killed in an automobile accident while he was overseas.

He was offered several jobs in Menasset, but rejected them as being of too little promise. His father's insurance money was sufficient to support his mother and she was taking in sewing again besides, so after two months of drawing admiration from the townspeople and twenty dollars a week from the federal government, he decided to go to New York. His mother argued, but he was over twenty-one, if only by a few months, so he had his way. Some of the neighbors expressed surprise that he did not intend to go to college, especially when the government would pay for it. He felt, however, that college would only be an unnecessary stopover on the road to the success he was certain awaited him.

His first job in New York was in a publishing house, where the personnel manager assured him there was a fine future for the right man. Two weeks, however, was all he could take of the shipping room.

His next job was with a department store, where he was a salesclerk in the men's wear department. The only reason he remained there an entire month was that he was able to buy his clothes on a twenty per cent discount.

By the end of August, when he had been in New York five months and had had six jobs, he was again prey to the awful insecurity of being one among many rather than one alone; unadmired and with no tangible sign of success. He sat in his furnished room and devoted some time to serious self-analysis. If he had not found what he wanted in these six jobs, he decided, it was unlikely that he would find it in the next six. He took out his fountain pen and made what he considered to be a completely objective list of his qualities, abilities and talents.

In September, he enrolled in a dramatic school under the G. I. Bill. The instructors expressed great hopes for him at first; he was handsome, intelligent, and had a fine speaking voice, although the New England accent would have to be eliminated. He had great hopes too, at first Then he discovered how much work and study were involved in becoming an actor. The exercises the instructors gave-"Look at this photograph and act out the emotions it brings to mind"-struck him as ridiculous, although the other students seemed to take them seriously. The only study to which he applied himself was diction; he had been dismayed to hear the word 'accent' used in relation to himself, having always thought of it as something someone else had.

In December, on his twenty-second birthday, he met a fairly attractive widow. She was in her forties and she had a good deal of money. They met on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-Fifth Street,-quite romantically, they later agreed. Stepping back onto the curb to avoid a bus, she tripped and fell into his arms. She was embarrassed and terribly shaken. He made some humorous comments on the ability and thoughtfulness of Fifth Avenue bus drivers, and then they went down the street to a dignified bar where they had two Martinis each, for which he paid the check. In the weeks that followed they attended small East Side art movies and dined in restaurants where there were three or four people to be tipped at the end of the meal. He paid many more checks, although not again with his money.

Their attachment lasted for several months, during which time he weaned himself away from the dramatic school-no painful process-and devoted his afternoons to squiring her on shopping tours, some of which was for him. At first he was somewhat embarrassed at being seen with her because of the obvious discrepancy in their ages, but he soon found himself getting over that. He was, however, dissatisfied with the relationship on two accounts; firstly, while her face was fairly attractive, her body, unfortunately, was not; secondly, and of greater importance, he learned from the elevator operator in her apartment house that he was only one of a series of young men, each of whom had been replaced with equinoctial regularity at the end of six months. It seemed, he reflected humorlessly, that this was another position with no future. At the end of five months, when she began to exhibit less curiosity about how he spent the nights he was not with her, he anticipated her move and told her that he had to return home because his mother was deathly ill.

He did return home, after reluctantly excising the custom tailor's labels from his suits and pawning a Patek Philippe wristwatch. He spent the early part of June lounging around the house, silently lamenting the fact that the widow had not been younger, prettier, and open to a more permanent sort of alliance.

That was when he began to make his plans. He decided he would go to college after all. He took a summer job in a local dry goods store because, while the G. I. Bill would cover his tuition, his living expenses would be quite high; he was going to attend a good school.

He finally chose Stoddard University in Blue River, Iowa, which was supposed to be something of a country club for the children of the Midwestern wealthy. There was no difficulty in his gaining admission. He had such a fine high school record.

In his first year he met a lovely girl, a senior, the daughter of the vice-president of an internationally organized farm equipment concern. They took walks together, cut classes together, and slept together. In May she told him that she was engaged to a boy back home and she hoped he hadn't taken it too seriously.

In his sophomore year, he met Dorothy Kingship.

He got the pills, two grayish-white capsules, from Hermy Godsen. They cost him five dollars.

At eight o'clock he met Dorothy at their regular meeting place, a tree-shrouded bench in the center of the wide stretch of lawn between the Fine Arts and Pharmacy buildings. When he left the white concrete path and cut across the darkness of the lawn he saw that Dorothy was already there, sitting stiffly with her fingers locked in her lap, a dark coat cloaking her shoulders against the April coolness. A streetlamp off to the side cast leaf shadows on her face.

He sat down beside her and kissed her cheek. She greeted him softly. From the rectangle of lighted windows in the Fine Arts Building drifted the conflicting themes of a dozen pianos. After a moment he said, "I got them."

A couple crossed the lawn towards them and, seeing the bench occupied, turned back to the white path. The girl's voice said, "My God, they're all taken."

He took the envelope from his pocket and put it into Dorothy's hand. Her fingers felt the capsules through the paper. "You're to take both of them together," he said. "You're liable to get a little fever, and you'll probably feel nauseous."

She put the envelope in her coat pocket. "What's in them?" she asked.

"Quinine, some other things. I'm not sure." He paused. "They can't hurt you."

He looked at her face and saw that she was staring off at something beyond the Fine Arts Building. He turned and followed her gaze to a winking red light miles away. It marked the local radio station's transmitting tower, which stood atop Blue River's tallest structure, the Municipal Building,-where the Marriage License Bureau was. He wondered if she were staring at the light because of that, or only because it was a winking red light in a sky of darkness. He touched her hands and found them cold. "Don't worry, Dorrie. Everything will be all right."

They sat in silence for a few minutes, and then she said, "I'd like to go to a movie tonight. There's a Joan Fontaine picture at the Uptown."

"I'm sorry," he said, "but I've got a ton of Spanish homework."

"Let's go over to the Student Union. I'll help you with it."

"What are you trying to do, corrupt me?"

He walked her back across the campus. Opposite the low modern shape of the Girls' Dormitory, they kissed goodnight. "See you in class tomorrow," he said. She nodded, and kissed him again. She was trembling. "Look, baby, there's nothing to worry about. If they don't work we get married. Haven't you heard?-love conquers all." She was waiting for him to say more. "And I love you very much," he said, and kissed her. When their lips parted, hers were pressed into an unsteady smile.

"Good night, baby," he said.

He returned to his room, but he couldn't do his Spanish. He sat with his elbows planted on the bridge table, his head in his hands, thinking about the pills. Oh God, they must work! They will work!

But Hermy Godsen had said: "I can't give you no written guarantee. If this girlfriend of yours is two months gone already..."

He tried not to think about it. He got up and went to the bureau and opened the bottom drawer. From under the neatly folded pajamas he took two pamphlets whose supple covers gleamed with a copper finish.

On first meeting Dorothy and discovering, through one of the student-secretaries in the Registrar's office, that she was not merely one of the 'Kingship Copper" Kinships but actually a daughter of the corporation's president, he had written a businesslike letter to the organization's New York office. In it he represented himself as contemplating an investment in Kingship Copper (which was not entirely an untruth), and requested descriptive brochures of its holdings.

Two weeks later, when he was reading Rebecca and pretending to love it because it was Dorothy's favorite book, and when she was doggedly knitting him bulky argyle socks because a previous boyfriend had liked them and so the knitting of them had become the badge of her devotion, the pamphlets arrived. He opened their envelope with ceremonial care. They proved wonderful-Technical Information on Kingship Copper and Copper Alloys and Kingship Copper, Pioneer in Peace and War they were called, and they were crammed with photographs: mines and furnaces, concentrators and converters, reversing mills, rolling mills, rod mills and tube mills. He read them a hundred times and knew every caption by heart. He returned to them at odd moments, a musing smile on his lips, like a woman with a love letter.

Tonight they were no good. "Open-cut mine in Landers, Michigan. From this single mine, a yearly output..."

What angered him most was that in a sense the responsibility for the entire situation rested with Dorothy. He had wanted to take her to his room only once -a down-payment guaranteeing the fulfillment of a contract. It was Dorothy, with her gently closed eyes and her passive, orphan hunger, who had wished for further visits. He struck the table. It really was her fault! Damn her!

He dragged his mind back to the pamphlets, but it was no use; after a minute he pushed them away and rested his head in his hands again. If the pills didn't work... Leave school? Ditch her? It would be futile; she knew his Menasset address. Even if she should be reluctant to seek him out, her father would hasten to do so. Of course there could be no legal action (or could there?), but Kingship could still cause him plenty of trouble. He imagined the wealthy as a closely knit, mutually protective clan, and he could hear Leo Kingship: "Watch out for this young man. He's no good. I feel it my duty as a parent to warn you..." And what would be left for him then? Some shipping room?

Or if he married her. Then she would have the baby and they'd never get a cent out of Kingship. Again the shipping room, only this time saddled with a wife and child. Oh God!

The pills had to work. That was all there was to it. If they failed, he didn't know what he'd do.

The book of matches was white, with Dorothy Kingship stamped on it in copper leaf. Every Christmas Kingship Copper gave personalized matches to its executives, customers and friends. It took her four strokes to light the match, and when she held it to her cigarette the flame trembled as though in a breeze. She sat back, trying to relax, but she couldn't tear her eyes from the open bathroom door, the white envelope waiting on the edge of the sink, the glass of water...

She closed her eyes. If only she could speak to Ellen about it. A letter had come that morning-"The weather has been beautiful... president of the refreshment committee for the Junior Prom... have you read Marquand's new novel?..."-another of the meaningless mechanical notes that had been drifting between them since Christmas and the argument. If only she could get Ellen's advice, talk to her the way they used to talk...

Dorothy had been five and Ellen six when Leo Kingship divorced his wife. A third sister, Marion, was ten. When the three girls lost their mother, first through the divorce and then through her death a year later, Marion felt the loss most deeply of all. Recalling clearly the accusations and denunciations which had preceded the divorce, she recounted them in bitter detail to her sisters as they grew up. She exaggerated Kingship's cruelty to some degree. As the years passed she grew apart, solitary and withdrawn. Dorothy and Ellen, however, turned to each other for the affection which they received neither from their father, who met their coldness with coldness, nor from the series of odorless and precise governesses to whom he transferred the custody the courts had granted him. The two sisters went to the same schools and camps, joined the same clubs and attended the same dances (taking care to return home at the hour designated by their father). Where Ellen led, Dorothy followed.

But when Ellen entered Caldwell College, in Caldwell, Wisconsin, and Dorothy made plans to follow her there the next year, Ellen said no; Dorothy should grow up and become self-reliant. Their father agreed, self-reliance being a trait he valued in himself and in others. A measure of compromise was allowed, and Dorothy was sent to Stoddard, slightly more than a hundred miles from Caldwell, with the understanding that the sisters would visit one another on weekends. A few visits were made, the length of time between them increasing progressively, until Dorothy austerely announced that her first year of college had made her completely self-reliant, and the visits stopped altogether. Finally, this past Christmas, there had been an argument. It had started on nothing-"If you wanted to borrow my blouse you might at least have asked me!"-and had swollen because Dorothy had been in a depressed mood all during her vacation. When the girls returned to school, the letters between them faded to brief, infrequent notes. . . There was still the telephone. Dorothy found herself staring at it. She could get Ellen on the line in an instant. . . But no; why should she be the one to give in first and chance a rebuff? She squashed her cigarette in an ashtray. Besides, now that she had calmed down, what was there to hesitate about? She would take the pills; if they worked, all well and good. If not; marriage. She thought about how wonderful that would be, even if her father did have a fit She didn't want any of his money anyway.

She went to the hall door and locked it, feeling a slight thrill in the unaccustomed and somewhat melodramatic act.

In the bathroom, she took the envelope from the edge of the sink and tilted the capsules into her palm. They were gray-white, their gelatin coating lustrous, like elongated pearls. Then, as she dropped the envelope into the wastebasket, the thought flashed into her mind-"What if I don't take them?"

They would be married tomorrow! Instead of waiting until the summer, or more likely until graduation-over two years-they'd be married by tomorrow night!

But it wouldn't be fair. She had promised she would try. Still, tomorrow..."

She lifted the glass, clapped the pills into her mouth, and drained the water in a single draught.

The classroom, in one of Stoddard's new buildings, was a clean rectangle with one wall of aluminum-framed glass. Eight rows of seats faced the lecturer's platform. There were ten gray metal seats to a row, each with a right arm that curved in and fanned to form a writing surface.

He sat in the back of the room, in the second seat from the window. The seat on his left, the window seat, the empty seat, was hers. It was the first class of the morning, a daily Social Science lecture, and their only class together this semester. The speaker's voice droned in the sun-filled air.

Today of all days she could have made an effort to be on time. Didn't she know he'd be frozen in an agony of suspense? Heaven or hell. Complete happiness, or the awful mess he didn't even want to think about. He looked at his watch; 9: 08. Damn her.

He shifted in his seat, fingering his keychain nervously. He stared at the back of the girl in front of him and started to count the polka dots in her blouse. The door at the side of the room opened quietly. His head jerked around.

She looked awful. Her face was pasty white so that the rouge was like paint. There were gray arcs under her eyes. She was looking at him the instant the door opened, and with a barely perceptible motion, she shook her head.

Oh God! He turned back to the keychain in his fingers and stared at it, numb. He heard her coming around behind him, slipping into the seat on his left. He heard her books being put on the floor in the aisle between them, and then the scratching of a pen on paper, and finally the sound of a page being torn from a spiral-bound pad.

He turned. Her hand was extended towards him, holding a folded piece of blue-lined paper. She was watching him, her wide eyes anxious.

He took the paper and opened it in his lap: I had a terrible fever and I threw up. But nothing happened.

He closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them again and turned to her, his face expressionless. Her lips made a tight nervous smile. He tried to make himself return the smile, but he couldn't His eyes went back to the note in his hand. He folded the paper in half, then folded it again and again, until it was a tight wad, which he placed in his pocket. Then he sat with his fingers locked firmly together, watching the lecturer.

After a few minutes, he was able to turn to Dorothy, give her a reassuring smile, and form the words "Don't worry" with silent lips.

When the bell sounded at 9: 55, they left the room with the other students who were laughing and pushing and complaining about coming exams and overdue papers and broken dates. Outside, they moved from the crowded path and stood in the shadow of the concrete-walled building.

The color was beginning to return to Dorothy's cheeks. She spoke quickly. "It'll be all right. I know it will. You won't have to quit school. You'll get more money from the government, won't you? With a wife?"

"A hundred and five a month." He couldn't keep the sourness out of his voice.

"Others get along on it. . . the ones in the trailer camp. We'll manage."

He put his books down on the grass. The important thing was to get time, time to think. He was afraid his knees were going to start shaking. He took her by the shoulders, smiling. "That's the spirit. You just don't worry about anything." He took a breath. "Friday afternoon we'll go down to the Municipal-"

"Friday?"

"Baby, it's Tuesday. Three days won't make any difference now."

"I thought we'd go today."

He fingered the collar of her coat. "Dorrie, we can't. Be practical. There are so many things to be taken care of. I think I have to take a blood test first. I'll have to check on that. And then, if we get married Friday we can have the weekend for a honeymoon. I'm going to get us a reservation at the New Washington House..." She frowned indecisively. "What difference will three days make?"

"I guess you're right," she sighed. "That's my baby."

She touched his hand. "I... I know it isn't the way we wanted it, but... you're happy, aren't you?"

"Well what do you think? Listen, the money isn't that important. I just thought that for your sake..."

Her eyes were warm, reaching.

He looked at his watch. "You have a ten o'clock, don't you?"

"Solamente el Espanol. I can cut it."

"Don't. We'll have better reasons to cut our morning classes." She squeezed his hand. "I'll see you at eight," he said. "At the bench." Reluctantly, she turned to go. "Oh, Dorrie..."

"Yes?"

"You haven't said anything to your sister, have you?"

"Ellen? No."

"Well you better not. Not until after we're married."

"I thought I'd tell her before. We've been so close.

I'd hate to do it without telling her."

"If she's been so rotten to you the past two years..."

"Not rotten."

"That was the word you used. Anyhow, she's liable to tell your father. He might do something to stop us."

"What could he do?"

"I don't know. He would try anyway, wouldn't he?"

"All right. Whatever you say."

"Afterwards you'll call her up right away. We'll tell everybody."

"All right." A final smile, and then she was walking to the sun-bright path, her hair glinting gold. He watched her until she disappeared behind the corner of a building. Then he picked up his books and walked away in the opposite direction. A braking car screeched somewhere, making him start. It sounded like a bird in a jungle.

Without forming a conscious decision he was cutting the rest of the day's classes. He walked all the way through town and down to the river, which was not blue but a dull muddy brown. Leaning on the rail of the black-girded Morton Street Bridge, he looked into the water and smoked a cigarette.

Here it was. The dilemma had finally caught up with him and engulfed him like the filthy water that pounded the abutments of the bridge. Marry her or leave her. A wife and a child and no money, or be hounded and blackmailed by her father. "You don't know me, sir. My name is Leo Kingship. I'd like to speak to you about the young man you have just employed... The young man your daughter is going with... I think you should know..." Then what? There would be no place to go to but home. He thought of his mother. Years of complacent pride, patronizing sneers for the neighbors' children, and then she sees him clerking in a dry goods store, not just for the summer, but permanently. Or even some lousy mill! His father had failed to live up to her expectations, and he'd seen what love she'd had for the old man burn itself into bitterness and contempt. Was that in store for him too? People talking behind his back. Oh Jesus! Why hadn't the goddamned pills killed the girl?

If only he could get her to undergo an operation. But no, she was determined to get married, and even if he pleaded and argued and called her "baby" from now till doomsday, she'd still want to consult Ellen before taking such a drastic measure. And anyway, where would they get the money? And suppose something happened, suppose she died. He would be involved because he would have been the one who arranged for the operation. He'd be right where he started-with her father out to get him. Her death wouldn't do him a bit of good. Not if she died that way.

There was a heart scratched into the black paint of the railing, with initials on either side of the arrow that pierced it. He concentrated on the design, picking at it with his fingernail, trying to blank his mind of what had finally welled to the surface. The scratches had exposed cross-sections of paint layers; black, orange, black, orange, black, orange. It reminded him of the pictures of rock strata in a geology text. Records of dead ages.

Dead.

After a while he picked up his books and slowly walked from the bridge. Cars flew towards him and passed with a rushing sound.

He went into a dingy riverside restaurant and ordered a ham sandwich and coffee. He ate the sandwich at a little corner table. While sipping coffee, he took out his memorandum book and fountain pen.

The first tiling that had entered his mind was the Colt .45 he had taken on leaving the Army. Bullets could be obtained with little difficulty. But assuming he wanted to do it, a gun would be no good. It would have to look like an accident, or suicide. The gun would complicate matters too much.

He thought of poison. But where would he get it? Hermy Godsen? No. Maybe the Pharmacy Building. The supply room there shouldn't be too hard to get into. He would have to do some research at the library, to see which poison...

It would have to look like an accident or suicide, because if it looked like anything else, he would be the first one the police would suspect.

There were so many details-assuming he wanted to do it. Today was Tuesday; the marriage could be postponed no later than Friday or she might get worried and call Ellen. Friday would be the deadline. It would require a great deal of fast, careful planning.

He looked at the notes he had printed:

1. Gun

2. Poison

a) Selection

b) Obtaining

c) Administering

d) Appearance of (1) accident or (2) suicide

Assuming, of course, that he wanted to do it. At present it was all purely speculative; he would explore the details a little. A mental exercise.

But his stride, when he left the restaurant and headed back through town, was relaxed and sure and steady.

He reached the campus at three o'clock and went directly to the library. In the card catalogue he found listed six books likely to contain the information he wanted; four of them were general works on toxicology; the other two, manuals of criminal investigation whose file cards indexed chapters on poisons. Rather than have a librarian get the books for him, he registered at the desk and went into the stacks himself.

He had never been in the stacks before. There were three floors filled with bookshelves, a metal staircase spiraling up through them. One of the books on his list was out. He found the other five without difficulty on the shelves on the third floor. Seating himself at one of the small study tables that flanked a wall of the room, he turned on the lamp, arranged his pen and memorandum book in readiness, and began to read.

At the end of an hour, he had a list of five toxic chemicals likely to be found in the Pharmacy supply room, any one of which, by virtue of its reaction time and the symptoms it produced prior to death, would be suitable for the plan whose rudimentary outline he had already formulated during the walk from the river.

He left the library and the campus, and walked in the direction of the house where he roomed. When he had gone two blocks he came upon a dress shop whose windows were plastered with big-lettered sale signs. One of the signs had a sketch of an hourglass with the legend Last Days of Sale.

He looked at the hourglass for a moment. Then he turned around and walked back towards the campus.

He went to the University Bookstore. After consulting the mimeographed booklist tacked to the bulletin board, he asked the clerk for a copy of Pharmaceutical Techniques, the laboratory manual used by the advanced pharmacy students. "Pretty late in the semester," clerk commented, returning from the rear of the store with the manual in his hand. It was a large thin book with a distinctive green paper cover. "Lose yours?"

"No. It was stolen."

"Oh. Anything else?"

"Yes. I'd like some envelopes, please."

"What size?"

"Regular envelopes. For letters."

The clerk put a pack of white envelopes on the book. "That's a dollar-fifty and twenty-five. Plus tax -a dollar seventy-nine."

The College of Pharmacy was housed in one of Stoddard's old buildings, three stories of ivy-masked brick. Its front had broad stone steps that led up the main entrance. At either side of the building were steps leading down to a long corridor which cut straight through the basement, where the supply room was located. There was a Yale lock on the supply room door. Keys to this lock were in the possession of the usual university functionaries, the entire faculty of the College of Pharmacy, and those advanced students who had received permission to work without supervision. This was the regular arrangement followed in all departments of the university which used enough equipment to necessitate the maintenance of a supply room. It was an arrangement familiar to almost everyone on campus.

He came in at the main entrance and crossed the hall to the lounge. Two bridge games were in session and some other students sat around, reading and talking. A few of them glanced up when he entered. He went directly to the long clothes rack in the corner and put his books on the shelf above it. Removing his corduroy jacket, he hung it on one of the hooks. He took the pack of envelopes from among his books, removed three of them and folded them into his hip pocket. He put the rest of the envelopes back with the books, took the lab manual, and left the room. He went downstairs to the basement corridor. There was a men's room to the right of the stairwell. He entered it and after looking under the doors to make sure the booths were empty, dropped the manual on the floor. He stepped on it a few times and then kicked it all the way across the tiled floor. When he picked it up it had lost its blatant newness. He put it on the ledge of a sink. Watching himself in the mirror, he unbuttoned the cuffs of his shirt and rolled the sleeves halfway up his arms. He unfastened his collar and lowered the knot of his tie. Tucking the manual under his arm, he stepped out into the corridor.

The door to the supply room was midway between the central stairwell and one end of the corridor. On the wall a few feet beyond it was a bulletin board. He walked down to the board and stood before it, looking at the notices tacked there. He stood with his back turned slightly towards the end of the corridor, so that from the corner of his eye he could see the stairwell. He held the manual under his left arm. His right arm was at his side, fingers by his keychain. A girl came out of the supply room, closing the door behind her. She carried one of the green manuals and a beaker half full of a milky fluid. He watched her as she went down the corridor and turned to climb the stairs.

Some people entered from the door behind him. They walked past, talking. Three men. They went straight down the corridor and out the door at the other end. He kept looking at the bulletin board.

At five o'clock bells rang, and for a few minutes there was a great deal of activity in the hallway. It subsided quickly though, and he was alone again. One of the notices on the board was an illustrated folder about summer sessions at the University of Zurich. He began to read it.

A bald-headed man emerged from the stairwell. He had no manual, but it was apparent from the angle at which he approached and the movement of his hand towards his keychain that he was coming to the supply room. There was, however, the look of an instructor.... Putting his back toward the approaching man, he turned a page of the Zurich pamphlet. He heard the sound of a key in the door, and then the door opening and closing. A minute later, it opened and closed again, and the sound of the man's footsteps diminished and then changed to a stair-climbing rhythm.

He resumed his former position and lighted a cigarette. After one puff he dropped it and ground it under his foot; a girl had appeared, coming towards him. There was a lab manual in her hand. She had lanky brown hair and horn-rimmed glasses. She was taking a brass key from the pocket of her smock. He lessened the pressure on the manual under his arm, letting it drop down into his left hand, conspicuous with its green cover. With a last casual finger-flick at the Zurich folder, he moved to the supply room door, not looking at the approaching girl. He fumbled wife his keychain as though the keys had caught in the pocket's lining. When he finally brought out. the bunch of keys the girl was already at the door. His attention was on the keys, shuffling through them, apparently looking for a certain one. It seemed as though he didn't become conscious of the girl's presence until she had inserted her key in the lock, turned it and pushed the door partially open, smiling up at him. "Oh... thanks," he said, reaching over her to push the door wide, his other hand rucking the keys back in his pocket. He followed the girl in and closed the door behind them.

It was a small room with counters and shelves filled with labeled bottles and boxes and odd-looking apparatuses. The girl touched a wall switch, making fluorescent tubes wink to life, incongruous among the room's old-fashioned fittings. She went to the side of the room and opened her manual on a counter there. "Are you in Aberson's class?" she asked.

He went to the opposite side. He stood with his back to the girl, facing a wall of bottles. "Yes," he said.

Faint clinkings of glass and metal sounded in the room. "How's his arm?"

"About the same, I guess," he said. He touched the bottles, pushing them against each other, so that the girl's curiosity should not be aroused.

"Isn't that the craziest thing?" she said. "I hear he's practically blind without his glasses." She lapsed into silence.

Each bottle had a white label with black lettering. A few bore an additional label that glared POISON in red. He scanned the rows of bottles quickly, his mind registering only the red-labeled ones. The list was in his pocket, but the names be had written on it shimmered in the air before him as though printed on a gauze screen.

He found one. The bottle was a bit above eye level, not two feet from where he stood. White Arsenic -As4O6-POISON. It was half filled with white powder. His hand moved towards it, stopped.

He turned slowly until he could see the girl from the corner of his eye. She was pouring some yellow powder from the tray of a balance into a glass cup. He turned back to the wall and opened his manual on the counter. He looked at meaningless pages of diagrams and instructions.

At last the girl's movements took on sounds of finality; the balance being put away, a drawer closing. He leaned more closely over the manual, following the lines of print with a careful finger. Her footsteps moved to the door. "So long," she said.

"So long."

The door opened and closed. He looked around. He was alone.

He took his handkerchief and the envelopes from his pocket. With the handkerchief draped over his right hand, he lifted the arsenic bottle from the shelf, put it on the counter and removed the stopper. The powder was like flour. He poured about a tablespoonful into the envelope; it fell in whispering puffs. He folded the envelope into a tight pack, folded that into a second envelope and pocketed it. After he had stoppered and replaced the bottle, he moved slowly around the room, reading the labels on drawers and boxes, the third envelope held open in his hand.

He found what he wanted within several minutes: a box filled with empty gelatin capsules, glittering like oval bubbles. He took six of them, to be on the safe side. He put them in the third envelope and slipped it gently into his pocket, so as not to crush the capsules.

Then, when everything appeared as he had found it, he took the manual from the counter, turned out the lights, and left the room.

After retrieving his books and his jacket, he left the campus again. He felt wonderfully secure; he had devised a course of action and had executed its initial steps with speed and precision. Of course it was still only a tenative plan and he was in no way committed to carry it through to its goal. He would see how the next steps worked out. The police would never believe that Dorrie had taken a lethal dose of arsenic by accident, It would have to look like suicide, like obvious, indisputable suicide. There would have to be a note or something equally convincing. Because if they ever suspected that it wasn't suicide and started an investigation, the girl who had let him into the supply room would always be able to identify him.

He walked slowly, conscious of the fragile capsules in the left-hand pocket of his trousers.

He met Dorothy at eight o'clock. They went to the Uptown, where the Joan Fontaine picture was still playing.

The night before, Dorothy had been anxious to go; her world had been as gray as the pills he had given her. But tonight-tonight everything was radiant. The promise of immediate marriage had swirled away her problems the way a fresh wind swirls away dead leaves; not only the looming problem of her pregnancy, but all the problems she had ever had; the loneliness, the insecurity. The only hint of gray remaining was the inevitable day when her father, having already been appalled by a hasty unquestioning marriage, would learn the truth about its cause. But even that seemed of trifling importance tonight. She had always hated his unyielding morality and had defied it only in secrecy and guilt. Now she would be able to display her defiance openly, from the security of a husband's arms. Her father would make an ugly scene of it, but in her heart she looked forward to it a little.

She envisioned a warm and happy life in the trailer camp, still warmer and happier when the baby came. She was impatient with the motion picture, which distracted her from a reality more beautiful than any movie could ever be.

He, on the other hand, had not wanted to see the picture on the previous night. He was not fond of movies, and he especially disliked pictures that were founded on exaggerated emotions. Tonight, however, in comfort and darkness, with his arm about Dorothy and his hand resting lightly on the upper slope of her breast, he relished the first moments of relaxation he had known since Sunday night, when she had told him she was pregnant.

He surrendered all his attention to the picture, as though answers to eternal mysteries were hidden in the windings of its plot. He enjoyed it immensely.

Afterwards he went home and made up the capsules.

He tunneled the white powder from a folded sheet of paper into the tiny gelatin cups, and then fitting the slightly larger cups that were the other halves of the capsules over them. It took him almost an hour, since he ruined two capsules, one squashed and the other softened by the moisture of his fingers, before he was able to complete two good ones.

When he was finished, he took the damaged capsules and the remaining capsules and powder into the bathroom and flushed them down the toilet. He did the same with the paper from which he had poured the arsenic and the envelopes in which he had carried it, first tearing them into small pieces. Then he put the two arsenic capsules into a fresh envelope and hid them in the bottom drawer of his bureau, under the pajamas and the Kingship Copper pamphlets, the sight of which brought a wry smile to his face.

One of the books he had read that afternoon had listed the lethal dose of arsenic as varying from one tenth to one half of a gram. By rough computation, he estimated that the two capsules contained a total of five grams.

He followed his regular routine on Wednesday, attending all his classes, but he was no more a part of the life and activity that surrounded him than is the diver in his diving bell a part of the alien world in which he is submerged. AU of his energies were turned inward, focused on the problem of beguiling Dorothy into writing a suicide note or, if that could not be contrived, finding some other way to make her death seem self-induced. While in this state of labored concentration he unconsciously dropped the pretense of being undecided as to whether or not he would actually go through with his plans; he was going to kill her; he had the poison and he already knew how he was going to administer it; there was only this one problem left, and he was determined to solve it. At times during the day, when a loud voice or the chalk's screech made him momentarily aware of his surroundings, he looked at his classmates with mild surprise. Seeing their brows contracted over a stanza in Browning or a sentence in Kant, he felt as though he had suddenly come upon a group of adults playing hopscotch.

A Spanish class was his last of the day, and the latter half of it was devoted to a short unannounced examination. Because it was his poorest subject, he forced himself to lower the focus of his concentration to the translating of a page of the florid Spanish novel which the class was studying.

Whether the stimulus was the actual work he was doing or the comparative relaxation which the work offered after a day of more rigorous thinking, he could not say. But in the midst of his writing the idea came to him. It rose up fully formed, a perfect plan, unlikely to fail and unlikely to arouse Dorothy's suspicion. The contemplation of it so occupied his mind that when the period ended he had completed only half the assigned page. The inevitable failing mark in the quiz troubled him very little. By ten o'clock the following morning Dorothy would have written her suicide note.

That evening, his landlady having gone to an Eastern Star meeting, he brought Dorothy back to his room. During the two hours they spent there, he was as warm and tender as she had ever wished him to be. In many ways be liked her a great deal, and he was conscious of the fact that this was to be her last such experience.

Dorothy, noticing his new gentleness and devotion, attributed it to the nearness of their wedding. She was not a religious girl, but she deeply believed that the state of wedlock carried with it something of holiness.

Afterwards they went to a small restaurant near the campus. It was a quiet place and not popular with the students; the elderly proprietor, despite the pains he took to decorate his windows with blue and white crepe paper and Stoddard pennants, was irascible with the noisy and somewhat destructive university crowd.

Seated in one of the blue-painted wall booths, they had cheeseburgers and chocolate malteds, while Dorothy chattered on about a new type of bookcase that opened out into a full-size dining table. He nodded unenthusiastically, waiting for a pause in the monologue.

"Oh, by the way," he said, "do you still have that picture I gave you? The one of me?"

"Of course I do."

"Well let me have it back for a couple of days. I want to have a copy made to send to my mother. It's cheaper than getting another print from the studio."

She took a green wallet from the pocket of the coat folded on the seat beside her. "Have you told your mother about us?"

"No, I haven't"

"Why not?"

He thought for a moment. "Well, as long as you can't tell your family until after, I thought I wouldn't tell my mother. Keep it our secret." He smiled. "You haven't told anyone, have you?"

"No," she said. She was holding a few snapshots she had taken from the wallet. He looked at the top one from across the table. It was of Dorothy and two other girls,-her sisters, he supposed. Seeing his glance, she passed the picture to him. "The middle one is Ellen, and Marion's on the end."

The three girls were standing in front of a car, a Cadillac, he noticed. The sun was behind them, their faces shadowed, but he could still discern a resemblance among them. All had the same wide eyes and prominent cheekbones. Ellen's hair seemed to be of a shade midway between Dorothy's light and Marion's dark. "Who's the prettiest?" he asked. "After you, I mean."

"Ellen," Dorothy said. "And before me. Marion could be very pretty too, only she wears her hair like this." She pulled her hair back severely and frowned. "She's the intellectual. Remember?"

"Oh. The Proust fiend."

She handed him the next snapshot, which was of her father. "Grrrrr," he growled, and they both laughed. Then she said, "And this is my fiancй," and passed him his own picture.

He looked at it speculatively, seeing the symmetry of the clear planes. "I don't know," he drawled, rubbing his chin. "Looks kind of dissolute to me."

"But so handsome," she said. "So very handsome." He smiled and pocketed the picture with a satisfied air. "Don't lose it," she warned seriously.

"I won't." He looked around, his eyes bright. On the wall next to them was a selector for the jukebox at the rear of the restaurant. "Music," he announced, producing a nickel and dropping it into the slot. He traced a finger up and down the twin rows of red buttons as he read the names of the songs. He paused at the button opposite Some Enchanted Evening, which was one of Dorothy's favorites, but then his eyes caught On Top of Old Smoky further down the row, and he thought a moment and chose that instead. He pushed the button. The jukebox bloomed into life, casting a pink radiance on Dorothy's face.

She looked at her wristwatch, then leaned back, eyes closed rapturously. "Oh gee, just think..." she murmured, sniffing. "Next week no rushing back to the dorm!" Introductory guitar chords sounded from the jukebox. "Shouldn't we put in an application for one of the trailers?"

"I was down there this afternoon," he said. "It may take a couple of weeks. We can stay at my place.

I'll speak to my landlady." He took a paper napkin and began tearing careful bits from its folded edges. A girl's voice sang: On top of old Smoky, All covered with snow, 1 lost my true loved one, For courtin' too slow...

"Folk songs," Dorothy said, lighting a cigarette. The flame glinted on the copper-stamped matchbook.

"The trouble with you," he said, "is you're a victim of your aristocratic upbringing."

Now courtin's a pleasure, But partin's a grief, And a false-hearted lover Is worse than a thief...

"Did you take the blood test?"

"Yes. I did that this afternoon too."

"Don't I have to take one?"

"No."

"I looked in the Almanac. It said 'blood test required' for Iowa. Wouldn't that mean for both?"

"I asked. You don't have to." His fingers picked precisely at the napkin.

A thief he will rob you, And take what you have, But a false-hearted lover Will lead you to the grave...

"It's getting late..."

"Just let's stay to the end of the record, okay? I like it." He opened the napkin; the torn places multiplied symmetrically and the paper became a web of intricate lace. He spread his handiwork on the table admiringly.

The grave will decay you, And turn you to dust. Not one man in a hundred A poor girl can trust...

"See what we women have to put up with?"

"A pity. A real pity. My heart bleeds."

Back in his room, he held the photograph over an ashtray and touched a lighted match to its lowest corner. It was a print of the yearbook photo and a good picture of him; he hated to burn it, but he had written "To Dorrie, with all my love" across the bottom of it AS USUAL SHE WAS LATE FOR THE NINE O'CLOCK class. Sitting in the back of the room, he watched the rows of seats fill up with students. It was raining outside and ribbons of water sluiced down the wall of windows. The seat on his left was still empty when the lecturer mounted the platform and began talking about the City Manager form of government.

He had everything in readiness. His pen was poised over the notebook opened before him and the Spanish novel, La Casa de las Flares Negras, was balanced on his knee. A sudden heart-stopping thought hit him; what if she picked today to cut? Tomorrow was Friday, the deadline. This was the only chance he would have to get the note, and he had to have it by tonight. What would he do if she cut?

At ten past nine, though, she appeared; out of breath, her books in one arm, her raincoat over the other, a smile for him lighting her face the moment she eased through the door. Tiptoeing across the room behind him, she draped the raincoat over the back of her chair and sat down. The smile was still there as she sorted her books, keeping a notebook and a small assignment pad before her and putting the remaining books in the aisle between their seats. Then she saw the book that he held open on his knee, and her eyebrows lifted questioningly. He closed the book, keeping his finger between the pages, and tilted it towards her so that she could see the title. Then he opened it again and with his pen ruefully indicated the two exposed pages and his notebook, meaning that that was how much translation he had to do. Dorothy shook her head condolingly. He pointed to the lecturer and to her notebook -she should take notes and he would copy them later. She nodded.

After he had worked for a quarter of an hour, carefully following the words of the novel, slowly writing in his notebook, he glanced cautiously at Dorothy and saw that she was intent on her own work. He tore a piece of paper about two inches square from the corner of one of the notebook's pages. One side of it he covered with doodling; words written and crossed out, spirals and zigzagging lines. He turned that side downward. With a finger stabbing the print of the novel, he began shaking his head and tapping his foot in impatient perplexity.

Dorothy noticed. Inquiringly, she turned to him.

He looked at her and expelled a troubled sigh. Then he lifted his finger in a gesture that asked her to wait a moment before returning her attention to the lecturer. He began to write, squeezing words onto the small piece of paper, words that he was apparently copying from the novel. When he was through, he passed the paper to her.

Traduccion, por favor, he had headed it. Translation, please Querido, Espero que me perdonares por la infelicidad que causare. No hay ninguna otra cosa que puedo hacer.

She gave him a mildly puzzled glance, because the sentences were quite simple. His face was expressionless, waiting. She picked up her pen and turned the paper over, but the back of it was covered with doodling. So she tore a page from her assignment pad and wrote on that.

She handed him the translation. He read it and nodded. "Muchas gracias," he whispered. He hunched forward and wrote in his notebook. Dorothy crumpled the paper on which he had written the Spanish and dropped it to the floor. From the corner of his eye he saw it land. There was another bit of paper near it, and some cigarette butts. At the end of the day they would all be swept together and burned.

He looked at the paper again, at Dorothy's small slanted handwriting: Darling, I hope you will forgive me for the unhappiness that I will cause. There is nothing else that I can do.

He tucked the paper carefully into the pocket on the inner cover of the notebook, and closed it. He closed the novel and placed it on top of the notebook. Dorothy turned, looked at the books and then at him. Her questioning glance asked if he were finished.

He nodded and smiled.

They were not to see each other that evening. Dorothy wanted to wash and set her hair and pack a small valise for their weekend honeymoon at the New Washington House. But at eight-thirty the phone on her desk rang.

"Listen, Dorrie. Something's come up. Something important."

"What do you mean?"

"I've got to see you right away."

"But I can't I can't come out. I just washed my hair."

"Dorrie, this is important."

"Can't you tell me now?"

"No. I have to see you. Meet me at the bench in half an hour."

"It's drizzling out. Can't you come to the lounge downstairs?"

"No. Listen, you know that place where we had the cheeseburgers last night? Gideon's? Well, meet me there. At nine."

"I don't see why you can't come to the lounge..."

"Baby, please.. "

"Is-is it anything to do with tomorrow?"

"I'll explain everything at Gideon's."

"Is it?"

"Well, yes and no. Look, everything's going to be all right. I'll explain everything. You just be there at nine."

"All right."

At ten minutes of nine he opened the bottom drawer of his bureau and took two envelopes from under the pajamas. One envelope was stamped, sealed, and addressed: Miss Ellen Kingship North Dormitory Caldwell College Caldwell, Wisconsin He had typed the address that afternoon in the Student Union lounge, on one of the typewriters available for general student use. In the envelope was the note that Dorothy had written in class that morning. The other envelope contained the two capsules.

He put one envelope in each of the inner pockets of his jacket, taking care to remember which envelope was on which side. Then he put on his trench-coat, belted it securely, and with a final glance in the mirror, left the room.

When he opened the front door of the house he was careful to step out with his right foot forward, smiling indulgently at himself as he did so.

Gideon's was practically empty when he arrived. Only two booths were occupied; in one, a pair of elderly men sat frozen over a chessboard; in the other, across the room, Dorothy sat with her hands clasped around a cup of coffee, gazing down at it as though it were a crystal ball. She had a white kerchief tied about her head. The hair that showed in front was a series of flattened damp-darkened rings, each transfixed by a bobby pin.

She became aware of him only when he was standing at the head of the booth taking off his coat. Then she looked up, her brown eyes worried. She had no make-up on. Her pallor and the closeness of her hair made her seem younger. He put his coat on a hook beside her raincoat and eased into the seat opposite her. "What is it?" she asked anxiously.

Gideon, a sunken cheeked old man, came to their table.

"What's yours?"

"Coffee."

"Just coffee?"

"Yes."

Gideon moved away, his slippered feet dragging audibly. Dorothy leaned forward. "What is it?"

He kept his voice low, matter-of-fact. "When I got back to my place this afternoon there was a message for me. Hermy Godsen called."

Her hands squeezed tighter around the coffee cup. "Hermy Godsen..."

"I called him back." He paused for a moment, scratching the tabletop. "He made a mistake with those pills the other day. His uncle-" He cut off as Gideon approached with a cup of coffee rattling in his hand. They sat motionless, eyes locked, until the old man was gone. "His uncle switched things around in the drugstore or something. Those pills weren't what they were supposed to be."

"What were they?" She sounded frightened. "Some kind of emetic. You said you threw up. Lifting his cup, he put a paper napkin in the saucer to absorb the coffee that Gideon's shaking hand bad spilled. He pressed the bottom of the cup into the napkin to wipe it.

She breathed relief. "Well that's all over with. They didn't hurt me. The way you spoke on the phone, you got me so worried..."

"That's not the point, baby." He put the soggy napkin to one side. "I saw Hermy just before I called you. He gave me the right pills, the ones we should have had last time."

Her face sagged. "No..."

"Well there's nothing tragic. We're right where we were Monday, that's all. It's a second chance. If they work, everything's rosy. If not, we can still get married tomorrow." He stirred his coffee slowly, watching it swirl. "I've got them with me. You can take them tonight."

"But..."

"But what?"

"I don't want a second chance. I don't want any more pills..." She leaned forward, hands knotted white on the table. "All I've been thinking about is tomorrow, how wonderful, how happy..." She closed her eyes, the lids pressing out tears.

Her voice had risen. He glanced across the room to where the chess players sat with Gideon watching. Fishing a nickel from his pocket, he pushed it into the jukebox selector and jabbed one of the buttons. Then he clasped her clenched hands, forced them open, held them. "Baby, baby," he soothed, "do we have to go through it all again? It's you I'm thinking of. You, not me."

"No." She opened her eyes, staring at him. "If you were thinking of me you'd want what I want." Music blared up, loud brassy jazz.

"What do you want, baby? To starve? This is no movie; this is real."

"We wouldn't starve. You're making it worse than it would be. You'd get a good job even if you didn't finish school. You're smart, you're-"

"You don't know," he said flatly. "You just don't know. You're a kid who's been rich all her life."

Her hands tried to clench within his. "Why must everyone always throw that at me? Why must you? Why do you think that's so important?"

"It is important, Dorrie, whether you like it or not. Look at you,-a pair of shoes to match every outfit, a handbag to match every pair of shoes. You were brought up that way. You can't-"

"Do you think that matters? Do you think I care?" She paused. Her hands relaxed, and when she spoke again the anger in her voice had softened to a straining earnestness. "I know you smile at me sometimes, at the movies I like... at my being romantic... Maybe it's because you're five years older than I am, or because you were in the Army, or because you're a man,-I don't know... But I believe, I truly believe, that if two people really love each other... the way I love you... the way you say you love me... then nothing else matters very much... money, things like that, they just don't matter. I believe that... I really do..." Her hands pulled away from his and flew to her face. He drew a handkerchief from his breast pocket and touched it to the back of her hand. She took it and held it against her eyes. "Baby, I believe that too. You know I do," he said gently. "Do you know what I did today?" He paused. "Two things. I bought a wedding ring for you, and I put a classified ad in the Sunday Clarion. An ad for a job. Night work." She patted her eyes with the handkerchief. "Maybe I did paint things too black. Sure, we'll manage to get along, and we'll be happy. But let's be just a little realistic, Dorrie. We'll be even happier if we can get married this summer with your father's approval.

You can't deny that. And all you have to do for us to have a chance at that extra happiness is just take these pills." He reached into his inner pocket and brought out the envelope, pressing it to make sure it was the right one. "There isn't one logical reason why you should refuse."

She folded the handkerchief and turned it in her hands, looking at it "Since Tuesday morning I've been dreaming about tomorrow. It changed everything... the whole world." She pushed the handkerchief over to him. "All my life I've been arranging things to suit my father."

"I know you're disappointed, Dorrie. But you've got to think of the future." He extended the envelope to her. Her hands, folded on the table, made no move to accept it. He put it on the table between them, a white rectangle slightly swollen by the capsules inside. "I'm prepared to take a night job now, to quit school at the end of this term. All I'm asking you to do is to swallow a couple of pills."

Her hands remained folded, her eyes on the sterile whiteness of the envelope.

He spoke with cool authority: "If you refuse to take them, Dorothy, you're being stubborn, unrealistic, and unfair. Unfair more to yourself than to me." The jazz record ended, the colored lights died, and there was silence.

They sat with the envelope between them. Across the room there was the whisper of a chessman being placed and an old man's voice said "Check." , Her hands parted slightly and he saw the glisten of sweat in her palms. His own hands were sweating too, he realized. He eyes lifted from the envelope to meet his.

"Please, baby.. "

She looked down again, her face rigid.

She took the envelope. She pushed it into the handbag on the bench beside her and then sat gazing at her hands on the table.

He reached across the table and touched her hand, caressed the back of it, clasped it. With his other hand he pushed his untouched coffee over to her. He watched her lift the cup and drink. He found another nickel in his pocket and, still holding her hand, dropped the coin into the selector and pressed the button opposite Some Enchanted Evening.

They walked the wet concrete paths in silence, divorced by the privacy of their thoughts, holding hands through habit. The rain had stopped, but face-tingling moisture filled the air, defining the scope of each streetlamp in shifting gray.

Across the street from the dorm, they kissed. Her lips under his were cool and compressed. When he tried to part them she shook her head. He held her for a few minutes, whispering persuasively, and then they exchanged goodnights. He watched as she crossed the street and passed into the yellow-lighted hall of the building.

He went to a nearby bar, where he drank two glasses of beer and tore a paper napkin into a delicate filigreed square of admirable detail. When half an hour had passed, he stepped into the telephone booth and dialed the number of the dorm. He asked the girl at the switchboard for Dorothy's room.

She answered after two rings. "Hello?"

"Hello, Dome?" Silence at her end. "Dorrie, did you do it?"

A pause. "Yes."

"When?"

"A few minutes ago."

He drew a deep breath. "Baby, does that girl on the switchboard ever listen in?"

"No. They fired the last girl for-"

"Well listen, I didn't want to tell you before, but... they might hurt a little." She said nothing. He continued, "Hermy said you'll probably throw up, like before. And you might get a sort of burning sensation in your throat and some pains in your stomach. Whatever happens, don't get frightened. It'll just mean that the pills are working. Don't call anyone." He paused, waiting for her to say something, but she was silent. "I'm sorry I didn't tell you before but, well, it won't hurt too much. And it'll be over before you know it." A pause. "You're not angry with me, are you, Dorrie?"

"No."

"You'll see, it'll all be for the best"

"I know. I'm sorry I was stubborn."

"That's all right, baby. Don't apologize."

"I'll see you tomorrow."

"Yes."

There was a silence for a moment and then she said, "Well, good night."

"Good-by, Dorothy," he said.

Striding into the classroom Friday morning he felt weightless and tall and wonderful. It was a beautiful day; sunlight poured into the room and bounced off the metal chairs to spangle the walls and ceiling.

Taking his seat in the back of the room, he stretched his legs all the way out and folded his hands across his chest, watching the other students crowd in. The morning's radiance had inflamed them all, and tomorrow was the first Varsity baseball game, with the Spring Dance in the evening; there was chattering, shouting, grinning and laughter.

Three girls stood off to the side and whispered excitedly. He wondered if they were dorm girls, if they could possibly be talking about Dorothy. She couldn't have been found yet. Why would anyone enter her room? They would think she wanted to sleep late. He was counting on her not being found for several hours; he held his breath until the girls' whispering erupted into laughter.

No, it was unlikely that she would be found before one o'clock or so. "Dorothy Kingship wasn't at breakfast and she wasn't at lunch either"-then they would knock on her door and get no answer. They'd most likely have to get the house mother or someone with a key. Or it might not even happen then. Many of the dorm girls slept through breakfast, and some of them ate lunch out occasionally. Dorrie hadn't any close friends who would miss her right away. No, if his luck held, they might not find her until Ellen's phone call came.

The night before, after saying good-by to Dorothy on the telephone, he had returned to the dorm. In the mailbox on the corner he had posted the envelope addressed to Ellen Kingship, the envelope containing Dorothy's suicide note. The first mail collection of the morning was at six; Caldwell was only a hundred miles away and so the letter would be delivered this afternoon. If Dorothy were found in the morning, Ellen, notified by her father, might leave Caldwell for Blue River before the letter arrived, which would mean that an investigation of some sort would almost certainly be launched, because the suicide note would not be found until Ellen returned to Caldwell. It was the only risk, but it was a small one and unavoidable; it had been impossible for him to sneak into the Girl's Dormitory to plant the note in Dorothy's room, and impractical to secrete it in the pocket of her coat or in one of her books prior to giving her the pills, in which case there would have been the far greater risk of Dorothy finding the note and throwing it away or, still worse, putting two and two together.

He had decided upon noon as the safety mark. H Dorothy were found under twelve, Ellen would have received the note by the time the school authorities contacted Leo Kingship and Kingship in turn contacted her. If his luck realty held, Dorothy would not be discovered until late afternoon, a frantic phone call from Ellen leading to the discovery. Then everything would be neat and in its proper order.

There would be an autopsy, of course. It would reveal the presence of a great deal of arsenic and a two-month embryo-the way and the why of her suicide. That and the note would more than satisfy the police. Oh, they would make a perfunctory check of the local drugstores, but it would net them only a fat zero. They might even consider the Pharmacy supply room. They would ask the students, "Did you see this girl in the supply room or anywhere in the Pharmacy Building?"-displaying photograph of the deceased. Which would produce another zero. It would be a mystery, but hardly an important one; even if they couldn't be sure of the source of arsenic, her death would still be an indisputable suicide.

Would they look for the man in the case, the lover? He considered that unlikely. For all they knew she was as promiscuous as a bunny. That was hardly their concern. But what about Kingship? Would outraged morality inaugurate a private inquiry? "Find the man who ruined my daughter!" Although, from the description of her father that Dorothy had painted, Kingship would be more likely to think "Aha, she was ruined all along. Like mother, like daughter." Still, there might be an inquiry...

He would certainly be dragged into that. They had been seen together, though not as frequently as might be expected. In the beginning, when success with Dorothy had been in question, he had not taken her to popular places; there had been that other rich girl last year, and if Dorothy didn't work out as he planned there would be others in the future; he didn't want the reputation of a money-chaser. Then, when Dorothy did work out, they had gone to movies, to his room, and to quiet places like Gideon's. Meeting at the bench rather than in the dorm lounge had become a custom.

He would be involved in any inquiry all right, but Dorothy hadn't told anyone they were going steady, so other men would be involved too. There was the red-headed one she'd been chatting with outside the classroom the day he first saw her and noticed the copper-stamped Kingship on her matches, and the one she'd started knitting argyle socks for, and every man she'd dated once or twice,-they would all be brought into it, and then it would be anybody's guess as to who had "ruined" her because all would deny it. And as thorough as the investigation might be, Kingship could never be certain that he hadn't completely overlooked the "guilty" party. There would be suspicion directed at all the men, proof against none.

No, everything would be perfect. There would be no quitting school, no shipping clerk's job, no oppressing wife and child, no vengeful Kingship. Only one tiny shadow... Suppose he were pointed out around campus as one of the men who'd gone with Dorothy. Suppose that the girl who had let him into the supply room should see him again, hear who he was, learn that he wasn't a Pharmacy student at all... But even that was unlikely, out of twelve thousand students... But suppose the very worst happened. Suppose she saw him, remembered, and went to the police. Even then, it would be no evidence. So he was in the supply room. He could make up some kind of excuse and they would have to believe him, because there would still be the note, the note in Dorothy's handwriting. How could they explain...

The door at the side of the room opened, creating a draft that lifted the pages of his notebook. He turned to see who it was. It was Dorothy.

Shock burst over him, hot as a wave of lava. He half-rose, blood pushing to his face, his chest a block of ice. Sweat dotted his body and crawled like a million insects. He knew it was written on his face in swollen eyes and burning cheeks, written for her to see, but he couldn't stop it She was looking at him wonderingly, the door closing behind her. Like any other day; books under her arm, green sweater, plaid skirt. Dorothy. Coming to him, made anxious by his face.

His notebook slapped to the floor. He bent down, seizing the momentary escape. He stayed with his face near the side of the seat, trying to breathe. What happened? Oh God! She didn't take the pills! She couldn't have! She lied! The bitch! The lying goddamned bitch! The note on its way to Ellen... Oh Jesus, Jesus!

He heard her sliding into her seat Her frightened whisper-"What's wrong? What's the matter?" He picked up the notebook and sat erect, feeling the blood drain from his face, from his entire body, leaving him dead cold with sweat drops moving. "What's wrong?" He looked at her. Like any other day. There was a green ribbon in her hair. He tried to speak but it was as if he were empty inside with nothing to make a sound. "What is it?" Students were turning to look. Finally he scraped out, "Nothing... I'm all right..."

"You're sick! Your face is as gray as..."

"I'm all right. It's... it's this..."-touching his side where she knew he had the Army scar. "It gives me a twinge once in a while..."

"God, I thought you were having a heart attack or something," she whispered.

"No. I'm all right." He kept looking at her, trying for one good breath, his hands clutching his knees in rigid restraint. Oh God, what could he do? The bitch! She had planned also, planned to get married!

He saw the anxiety for him melt from her face, a flushed tension replacing it. She ripped a page from her assignment pad, scribbled on it and passed it to him: The pills didn't work.

The liar! The goddamned liar! He crumpled the paper and squeezed it in his hand, fingernails biting into his palm. Think! Think! His danger was so enormous he couldn't grasp it all at once. Ellen would receive the note-when? Three o'clock? Four? -and call Dorothy-"What does this mean? Why did you write this?"-"Write what?"-then Ellen would read the note and Dorothy would recognize it... Would she come to him? What explanation could he invent? Or would she see the truth-blurt out the whole story to Ellen-call her father. If she had kept the pills-if she hadn't thrown them away, there would be proof 1 Attempted murder. Would she take them to a drugstore, have them analyzed? There was no figuring her now. She was an unknown quantity. He'd thought he could predict every little twitch of her goddamned brain, and now...

He could feel her looking at him, waiting for some kind of reaction to the words she'd written. He tore paper from his notebook and pulled open his pen. He shielded his hand so she couldn't see how it was shaking. He couldn't write. He had to print, digging the point of the pen so hard that it shredded the surface of the paper. Make it sound natural.

Okay. We tried, that's all. Now we get married as per schedule.

He handed it to her. She read it and turned to him, and her face was warm and radiant as the sunlight. He pressed a smile back at her, praying she wouldn't notice the stiffness of it.

It still wasn't too late. People wrote suicide notes and then stalled around before actually doing it. He looked at his watch; 9: 20. The earliest Ellen could get the note would be... three o'clock. Five hours and forty minutes. No step by step planning now. It would have to be quick, positive. No trickery that counted on her doing a certain thing at a certain time. No poison. How else do people kill themselves? In five hours and forty minutes she must be dead.

At ten o'clock they left the building arm in arm, going out into the crystalline air that rang with the shouts of between-class students. Three girls in cheerleaders' uniforms pushed by, one beating a tin pie pan with a wood spoon, the other two carrying a big sign advertising a baseball pep rally.

"Does your side still hurt you?" Dorothy asked, concerned for his grim expression.

"A little," he said.

"Do you get those twinges often?"

"No. Don't worry." He looked at his watch. "You're not marrying an invalid."

They stepped off the path onto the lawn. "When will we go?" She pressed his hand.

"This afternoon. Around four."

"Shouldn't we go earlier?"

"Why?"

"Well, it'll take time, and they probably close around five or so."

"It won't take long. We just fill out the application for the license and then there's someone right on the same floor who can marry us."

"I'd better bring proof that I'm over eighteen."

"Yes."

She turned to him, suddenly serious, remorse flushing her cheeks. Not even a good liar, he thought "Are you terribly sorry the pills didn't work?" she asked anxiously.

"No, not terribly."

"You were exaggerating, weren't you? About how things will be?"

"Yes. We'll make out okay. I just wanted you to try the pills. For your sake."

She flushed more deeply. He turned away, embarrassed by her transparency. When he looked at her again, the joy of the moment had crowded out her compunctions and she was hugging her arms and smiling. "I can't go to my classes! I'm cutting."

"Good. I am too. Stay with me."

"What do you mean?"

"Until we go down to the Municipal Building. We'll spend the day together."

"I can't, darling. Not the whole day. I have to get back to the dorm, finish packing, dress... Don't you have to pack?"

"I left a suitcase down at the hotel when I made the reservation."

"Oh. Well you have to dress, don't you. I expect to see you in your blue suit."

He smiled. "Yes ma'am. You can give me some of your time, anyway. Until lunch."

"What'll we do?" They sauntered across the lawn.

"I don't know," he said. "Maybe go for a walk. Down to the river."

"In these shoes?" She lifted a foot displaying a soft leather loafer. "I'd get fallen arches. There's no support in these things."

"Okay," he said, "no river."

"I've got an idea." She pointed to the Fine Arts Building ahead of them. "Let's go to the record room in Fine Arts and listen to some records."

"I don't know, it's such a beautiful day I'd like to stay..." He paused as her smile faded.

She was looking beyond the Fine Arts Building to where the needle of station KBRI's transmission tower speared the sky. "The last time I was in the Municipal Building it was to see that doctor," she said soberly.

"It'll be different this time," he said. And then he stopped walking.

"What is it?"

"Dorrie, you're right. Why should we wait until four o'clock? Let's go now!"

"Get married now?"

"Well, after you pack and dress and everything. Look, you go back to the dorm now and get ready. What do you say?"

"Oh, yes! Oh, I wanted to go now!"

"I'll call you up in a little while and tell you when I'll pick you up."

"Yes. Yes." She stretched up and kissed his cheek excitedly. "I love you so much," she whispered.

He grinned at her.

She hurried away, flashing a smile back over her shoulder, walking as fast as she could.

He watched her go. Then he turned and looked again at the KBRI tower, which marked the Blue River Municipal Building; the tallest building in the city; fourteen stories above the hard slabs of the sidewalk.

He went into the Fine Arts Building where a telephone booth was rammed under the slope of the main stairway. Calling Information, he obtained the number of the Marriage License Bureau. "Marriage License Bureau."

"Hello. I'm calling to find out what hours the Bureau is open today."

"Till noon and from one to five-thirty."

"Closed between twelve and one?"

"That's right."

"Thank you." He hung up, dropped another coin into the phone and dialed the dorm. When they buzzed Dorothy's room there was no answer. He replaced the receiver, wondering what could have detained her. At the rate she had been walking she should have been in her room already.

He had no more change, so he went out and crossed the campus to a luncheonette, where he broke a dollar bill and glared at the girl who occupied the phone booth. When she finally abdicated he stepped into the perfume-smelling booth and closed the door. This time Dorothy answered. "Hello?"

"Hi. What took you so long? I called a couple of minutes ago."

"I stopped on the way. I had to buy a pair of gloves." She sounded breathless and happy.

"Oh. Listen, it's-twenty-five after ten now. Can you be ready at twelve?"

"Well, I don't know. I want to take a shower..."

"Twelve-fifteen?"

"Okay."

"Listen, you're not going to sign out for the week end, are you?"

"I have to. You know the rules."

"If you sign out, you'll have to put down where you're going to be, won't you?"

"Yes."

"Well?"

"I'll put down 'New Washington House.' If the house mother asks, I'll explain to her."

"Look, you can sign out later this afternoon. We have to come back here anyway. About the trailer. We have to come back about that"

"We do?"

"Yes. They said I couldn't make the formal application until we were actually married."

"Oh. Well if we're coming back later, I won't take my valise now."

"No. Take it now. As soon as we're through with the ceremony we'll check in at the hotel and have lunch. It's only a block or so from the Municipal Building."

"Then I might as well sign out now too. I don't see what difference it'll make."

"Look, Dorrie, I don't think the school is exactly crazy about having out-of-town girls running off to get married. Your house mother is sure to slow us up somehow. She'll want to know if your father knows. She'll give you a lecture, try to talk you into waiting until the end of the term. That's what house mothers are there for."

"All right. I'll sign out later."

"That's the girl. I'll be waiting for you outside the dorm at a quarter after twelve. On University Avenue."

"On University?"

"Well you're going to use the side door, aren't you?-leaving with a valise and not signing out."

"That's right. I didn't think of that. Gee, we're practically eloping."

"Just like a movie."

She laughed warmly. "A quarter after twelve."

"Right. Well be downtown by twelve-thirty."

"Good-by, groom."

"So long, bride."

He dressed meticulously in his navy blue suit, with black shoes and socks, a white-on-white shirt, and a pale blue tie of heavy Italian silk patterned with black and silver fleurs-de-lis. On surveying himself in the mirror, however, he decided that the beauty of the tie was a trifle too conspicuous, and so he changed it for a simple pearl gray knit. Viewing himself again as he refastened his jacket, he wished he could as easily exchange his face, temporarily, for one of less distinctive design. There were times, he realized, when being so handsome was a definite handicap. As a step, at least, in the direction of appearing commonplace, he reluctantly donned his one hat, a dove gray fedora, settling the unfamiliar weight cautiously, so as not to disturb his hair.

At five minutes past twelve he was on University Avenue, across the street from the side of the dorm. The sun was almost directly overhead, hot and bright. In the sultry air the occasional sounds of birds and footfalls and grinding streetcars had a rarefied quality, as though coming from behind a glass wall. He stood with his back to the dorm, staring into the window of a hardware store.

At twelve-fifteen, reflected in the window, he saw the door across the street open and Dorothy's green-clad figure appear. For once in her life she was punctual. He turned. She was looking from right to left, her pivoting glance overlooking him completely. In one white-gloved hand she held a purse, in the other, a small valise covered in tan airplane cloth with wide red stripes. He lifted his arm and in a moment she noticed him. With an eager smile she stepped from the curb, waited for a break in the passing traffic, and came towards him.

She was beautiful. Her suit was dark green, with a cluster of white silk sparkling at the throat. Her shoes and purse were brown alligator, and there was a froth of dark green veil floating in her feathery golden hair. When she reached him he grinned and took the valise from her hand. "All brides are beautiful," he said, "but you especially."

"Gracias, senor." She looked as though she wanted to kiss him.

A taxicab cruised and slowed in passing. Dorothy looked at him inquiringly, but he shook his head. "If we're going to economize, we'd better get in practice." He peered down the avenue. In the glittering air a streetcar approached.

Dorothy drank in the world as if she had been indoors for months. The sky was a shell of perfect blue. The campus, unfolding at the front of the dorm and stretching seven blocks down University Avenue, was quiet, shaded by freshly-green trees. A few students walked the paths; others sprawled on the lawns. "Just think," she marveled, "when we come back this afternoon, we'll be married."

The streetcar clattered up and groaned to a halt.

They got on.

They sat towards the back of the car, saying little, each enfolded in thoughts. The casual observer would have been uncertain as to whether or not they traveled together.

The lower eight floors of the Blue River Municipal Building were given over to the offices of the city and of Rockwell County, of which Blue River was the county seat. The remaining six floors were rented to private tenants, most of whom were lawyers, doctors and dentists. The building itself was a mixture of modern and classical architecture, a compromise between the functional trend of the thirties and resolute Iowa conservatism. Professors teaching the introductory architecture courses at Stoddard's College of Fine Arts referred to it as an architectural abortion, causing freshmen to laugh self-consciously.

Viewed from above, the building was a hollow square, an airshaft plunging down through the core of it. From the side, setbacks at the eighth and twelfth stories gave it the appearance of three blocks of decreasing size piled one atop the other. Its lines were graceless and stark, its window lintels were traced with factitious Grecian designs, and its three bronze and glass revolving doors were squeezed between giant pillars whose capitals were carved into stylized ears of corn. It was a monstrosity, but on alighting from the streetcar Dorothy turned, paused, and gazed up at it as though it were the cathedral at Chartres.

It was twelve-thirty when they crossed the street, mounted the steps, and pushed through the central revolving door. The marble floored lobby was filled with people going to and from lunch, people hurrying to appointments, people standing and waiting. The sound of voices and the surf of shoes on marble hung susurrant under the vaulted ceiling.

He dropped a pace behind Dorothy, letting her lead the way to the directory board at the side of the lobby. "Would it be under R for Rockwell County or M for Marriage?" she asked, her eyes intent on the board as he came up beside her. He looked at the board as though oblivious of her presence. "There it is," she said triumphantly. "Marriage License Bureau -six-oh-four." He turned towards the elevators, which were opposite the revolving doors. Dorothy hurried along beside him. She reached for his hand but the valise was in it. He apparently did not notice her gesture, for he made no move to change hands. One of the four elevators stood open, half filled with waiting passengers. As they approached it, he stepped back a bit, allowing Dorothy to enter first. Then an elderly woman came up and he waited until she too had gone in before entering. The woman smiled at him, pleased by his air of gallantry, doubly unexpected from a young man in a busy office building. She seemed a bit disappointed when he failed to remove his hat. Dorothy smiled at him also, over the head of the woman, who had somehow got between them. He returned the smile with an almost invisible curving; of his lips.

They left the car at the sixth floor, along with two men with briefcases who turned to the right and walked briskly down the corridor. "Hey, wait for me!" Dorothy protested in an amused whisper as the elevator door clanged shut behind her. She had been the last to leave the car, and he the first. He had turned to the left and walked some fifteen feet, for all the world as though he were alone. He turned, appearing flustered, as she caught up with him and gaily took his arm. Over her head he watched the men with the briefcases reach the other end of the corridor, turn to the right and vanish down the side of the square. "Where you running?" Dorothy teased. "Sorry," he smiled. "Nervous bridegroom." They walked along arm in arm, following the left turn the corridor made. Dorothy recited the numbers painted on the doors as they passed them. "Six-twenty, six-eighteen, six-sixteen..." They had to take another left turn before they reached 604, which was at the back of the square, across from the elevators. He tried the door. It was locked. They read the hours listed on the frosted glass panel and Dorothy moaned dejectedly.

"Damn," he said. "I should have called to make sure." He put down the valise and looked at his watch. "Twenty-five to one."

"Twenty-five minutes," Dorothy said. "I guess we might as well go downstairs."

"Those crowds..." he muttered, then paused. "Hey, I've got an idea."

"What?"

"The roof. Let's go up on the roof. It's such a beautiful day, I bet well be able to see for miles!"

"Are we allowed?"

"If nobody stops us, we're allowed." He picked up the valise. "Come on, get your last look at the world as an unmarried woman."

She smiled and they began walking, retracing then-path around the square to the bank of elevators where, in a few moments, there glowed above one of the doors a white arrow pointing upwards.

When they left the car at the fourteenth floor, it happened again that they were separated by the other alighting passengers. In the corridor, they waited until these had hurried around the turns or into offices, and then Dorothy said "Let's go," in a conspiratorial whisper. She was making an adventure of it. Again they had to make a half-circuit of the building, until, next to room 1402, they found a door marked Stairway. He pushed it open and they entered. The door sighed closed behind them. They were on a landing, with black metal stairs leading up and down. Dim light sifted through a dirt-fogged skylight. They walked upwards; eight steps, a turn, and eight more steps. A door confronted them, heavy reddish-brown metal. He tried the knob.

"Is it locked?"

"I don't think so."

He put his shoulder to the door and pushed,

"You're going to get your suit filthy."

The door rested on a ledge, a sort of giant threshold that raised its bottom a foot above the level of the landing. The ledge jutted out, making it difficult for him to apply Ms weight squarely. He put down the valise, braced his shoulder against the door and tried again.

"We can go downstairs and wait," Dorothy said. "That door probably hasn't been opened in..."

He clenched his teeth. With the side of his left foot jammed against the base of the ledge, he swung back and then smashed his shoulder against the door with all his strength. It gave, groaning open. The chain of a counterweight clattered. A slice of electric blue sky hit their eyes, blinding after the obscurity of the stairway. There was the quick flutter of pigeons' wings.

He picked up the valise, stepped over the ledge, and put the valise down again where it would be clear of the door's swing. Pushing the door further open, he stood with his back to it He extended one hand to Dorothy. With the other he gestured towards the expanse of roof as a head waiter gestures towards his finest table. He gave her a mock bow and his best smile. "Enter, mam'selle," he said.

Taking his hand, she stepped gracefully over the ledge and onto the black tar of the roof.

He wasn't nervous at all. There had been a moment of near-panic when he couldn't get the door open, but it had dissolved the instant the door had yielded to the force of his shoulder, and now he was calm and secure. Everything was going to be perfect. No mistakes, no intruders. He just knew it. He hadn't felt so good since-Jesus, since high school!

He swung the door partly closed, leaving a half inch between it and the jamb, so that it wouldn't give him any trouble when he left. He would be in a hurry then. Bending over, he moved the valise so that he would be able to. pick it up with one hand while opening the door with the other. As he straightened up he felt his hat shift slightly with the motion. He took it off, looked at it, and placed it on the valise. Christ, he was thinking of everything! A little thing like the hat would probably louse up somebody else. They would push her over and then a breeze or the force of the movement might send their hat sailing down to land beside her body. Bam! They might as well throw themselves over after it. Not he, though; he had anticipated, prepared. An act of God, the crazy kind of little thing that was always screwing up perfect plans,-and he had anticipated it. Jesus! He ran a hand over his hair, wishing there were a mirror.

"Come look at this."

He turned. Dorothy was standing a few feet away, her back towards him, the alligator purse tucked under one arm. Her hands rested on the waist-high parapet that edged the roof. He came up behind her. "Isn't it something?" she said. They were at the back of the building, facing south. The city sprawled before them, clear and sharp in the brilliant sunlight. "Look"-Dorothy pointed to a green spot far away -"I think that's the campus." He put his hands on her shoulders. A white-gloved hand reached up to touch his.

He had planned to do it quickly, as soon as he got her up there, but now he was going to take it slow and easy, drawing it out as long as he safely could. He was entitled to that, after a week of nerve-twisting tension. Not just a week,-years. Ever since high school it had been nothing but strain and worry and self-doubt There was no need to rush this. He looked down at the top of her head against his chest, the dark green veiling buoyant in the yellow hair. He blew, making the fine net tremble. She tilted her head back and smiled up at him.

When her eyes returned to the panorama, he moved to her side, keeping one arm about her shoulders. He leaned over the parapet Two stories below, the red tiled floor of a wide balcony extended like a shelf across the width of the building. The top of the twelfth story setback. It would be on all four sides. That was bad; a two story drop wasn't what he wanted. He turned and surveyed the root It was perhaps a hundred and fifty feet square, edged by the brick parapet whose coping was flat white stone, a foot wide. An identical wall rimmed the airshaft, a square hole some thirty feet across, in the center of the roof. On the left side of the roof was a vast stilt-supported water storage tank. On the right, the KBRI tower reared up like a smaller Eiffel, its girdered pattern black against the sky. The staircase entrance, a slant roofed shed, was in front of him and a bit to his left Beyond the airshaft, at the north side of the building, was a large rectangular structure, the housing of the elevator machinery. The entire roof was dotted with chimneys and ventilator pipes that stuck up like piers from a tarry sea.

Leaving Dorothy, he walked across to the parapet of the airshaft. He leaned over. The four walls funneled down to a tiny areaway fourteen stories below, its corners banked with trash cans and wooden crates. He looked for a moment, then stooped and pried a rain-faded matchbook from the gummy surface of the roof. He held the folder out beyond the parapet-and dropped it, watching as it drifted down, down, down, and finally became invisible. He glanced at the walls of the shaft. Three were striped with windows. The fourth, which faced him and evidently backed on. the elevator shafts, was blank, windowless. This was the spot. The south side of the airshaft. Right near the stairway, too. He slapped the top of the parapet, his lips pursed thoughtfully. Its height was greater than he had anticipated.

Dorothy came up behind him and took his arm. "It's so quiet," she said. He listened. At first there seemed to be absolute silence, but then the sounds of the roof asserted themselves: the throbbing of the elevator motors, a gentle wind strumming the cables that guyed the radio tower, the squeak of a slow-turning ventilator cap... , They began walking slowly. He led her around the airshaft and past the elevator housing. As they strolled she brushed his shoulder clean of the dust from the door. When they reached the northern rim of the roof they were able to see the river, and with the sky reflected in it, it was really blue, as blue as the rivers painted on maps. "Do you have a cigarette?" she asked.

He reached into his pocket and touched a pack of Chesterfields. Then his hand came out empty. "No, 1 don't. Do you have any?"

"They're buried in here someplace." She dug into her purse, pushing aside a gold compact and a turquoise handkerchief, and finally produced a crushed pack of Herbert Tareytons. They each took one. He lit them and she returned the pack to her purse.

"Dorrie, there's something I want to tell you..." -she was blowing a stream of smoke against the sky, hardly listening-"... about the pills."

Her face jerked around, going white. She swallowed. "What?"

"I'm glad they didn't work," he said, smiling. "I really am."

She looked at him uncomprehendingly. "You're glad?"

"Yes. When I called you last night, I was going to tell you not to take them, but you already had." Come on, he thought, confess. Get it off your chest It must be killing you.

Her voice was shaky. "Why? You were so... what made you change your mind?"

"I don't know. I thought it over. I suppose I'm as anxious to get married as you are." He examined his cigarette. "Besides, I guess it's really a sin to do something like that." When he looked up again her cheeks were flushed and her eyes glistened.

"Do you mean that?" she asked breathlessly. "Are you really glad?"

"Of course I am. I wouldn't say it if I weren't"

"Oh, thank God!"

"What's the matter, Dorrie?"

"Please... don't be angry. I-I didn't take them." He tried to look surprised. The words poured from her lips: "You said you were going to get a night job and I knew we could manage, everything would work out, and I was counting on it so much, so much. I knew I was right." She paused. "You aren't angry, are you?" she beseeched. "You understand?"

"Sure, baby. I'm not angry. I told you I was glad they didn't work."

Her lips made a quivering smile of relief. "I felt like a criminal, lying to you. I thought I would never be able to tell you. I... I can't believe it!"

He took the neatly folded handkerchief from his breast pocket and touched it to her eyes. "Dorrie, what did you do with the pills?"

"Threw them away." She smiled shamefacedly.

"Where?" he asked casually, replacing the handkerchief.

"The john."

That was what he wanted to hear. There would be no questions about why she had taken such a messy way out when she had already gone to the trouble of obtaining poison. He dropped his cigarette and stepped on it.

Dorothy, taking a final puff, did the same with hers. "Oh gee," she marveled, "everything's perfect now. Perfect"

He put his hands on her shoulders and kissed her gently on the lips. "Perfect," he said.

He looked down at the two stubs, hers edged with lipstick, his clean. He picked his up. Splitting it down the middle with his thumbnail, he let the tobacco blow away and rolled the paper into a tiny ball. He flicked it out over the parapet "That's the way we used to do it in the Army," he said.

She consulted her watch. "It's ten to one."

"You're fast," he said, glancing at his. "We've got fifteen minutes yet." He took her arm. They turned and walked leisurely away from the edge of the roof. "Did you speak to your landlady?"

"Wha-? Oh, yes. It's all set" They passed the elevator housing. "Monday we'll move your stuff from the dorm."

Dorothy grinned. "Will they be surprised, the girls in the dorm." They strolled around the parapet of the airshaft. "Do you think your landlady'll be able to give us some more closet space?"

"I think so."

"I can leave some of my stuff, the winter things, in the attic at the dorm. There won't be too much."

They reached the south side of the airshaft. He stood with his back against the parapet, braced his hands on the top of it, and hitched himself up. He sat with his heels kicking against the side of the wall. "Don't sit there," Dorothy said apprehensively. "Why not?" he asked, glancing at the white stone coping. "It's a foot wide. You sit on a bench a foot wide and you don't fall off." He patted the stone on his left "Come on."

"No," she said. "Chicken."

She touched her rear. "My suit..." He took out his handkerchief, whipped it open and spread it on the stone beside him. "Sir Walter Raleigh," he said.

She hesitated a moment, then gave him her purse. Turning her back to the parapet, she gripped the top on either side of the handkerchief and lifted herself up. He helped her. "There," he said, putting his arm around her waist. She turned her head slowly, peeking over her shoulder. "Don't look down," he warned. "You'll get dizzy."

He put the purse on the stone to his right and they sat in silence for a moment, her hands still fastened upon the front of the coping. Two pigeons came out from behind the staircase shed and walked around, watching them cautiously, their claws ticking against the tar.

"Are you going to call or write when you tell your mother?" Dorothy asked.

"I don't know."

"I think I'll write Ellen and Father. If s an awfully hard thing to just say over the phone."

A ventilator cap creaked. After a minute, he took his arm from her waist and put his hand over hers, which gripped the stone between them. He braced his other hand on the coping and eased himself down from the parapet. Before she could do likewise he swung around and was facing her, his waist against her knees, his hands covering both of hers. He smiled at her and she smiled back. His gaze dropped to her stomach. "Little mother," he said. She chuckled.

His hands moved to her knees, cupped them, his fingertips caressing under the hem of her skirt.

"We'd better be going, hadn't we, darling?"

"In a minute, baby. We still have time."

His eyes caught hers, held them, as his hands descended and moved behind to rest curving on the slope of her calves. At the periphery of his field of vision he could make out her white-gloved hands; they still clasped the front of the coping firmly.

"That's a beautiful blouse," he said, looking at the fluffy silk bow at her throat "Is it new?"

"New? It's as old as the hills."

His gaze became critical. "The bow is a little off center."

One hand left the stone and rose to finger the bow. "No," he said, "now you've got it worse." Her other hand detached itself from the top of the parapet.

His hands moved down over the silken swell of her calves, as low as he could reach without bending. His right foot dropped back, poised on the toe in readiness. He held his breath.

She adjusted the bow with both hands. "Is that any bett-"

With cobra speed he ducked-hands streaking down to catch her heels-stepped back and straightened up, lifting her legs high. For one frozen instant, as his hands shifted from cupping her heels to a flat grip against the soles of her shoes, their eyes met, stupefied terror bursting in hers, a cry rising in her throat. Then, with all his strength, he pushed against her fear-rigid legs.

Her shriek of petrified anguish trailed down into the shaft like a burning wire. He closed his eyes. The scream died. Silence, then a godawful deafening crash. Wincing, he remembered the cans and crates piled far below.

He opened his eyes to see his handkerchief billowing as the breeze pulled it free of the stone's rough surface. He snatched it up. Wheeling, he raced to the stairway door, grabbed hat and valise with one hand and pulled the door open, wiping the knob with the handkerchief as he did so. He stepped quickly over the threshold ledge, pulled the door closed and wiped its inner knob. He turned and ran.

He clattered down flight after flight of black metal steps, the valise banging against his legs, his right hand burning over the banisters. His heart galloped and the image of whirling walls dizzied him. When he finally stopped he was on the seventh floor landing.

He clung to the newel post, gasping. The phrase "physical release of tension" danced in his mind.

That was why he had run that way-physical release of tension-not panic, not panic. He caught his breath.

Putting down the valise, he reshaped his hat, which had been crushed in his grasp. He put it on, his hands trembling slightly. He looked at them. The palms were dirty gray from the soles of. . . he wiped them clean and jammed the handkerchief into his pocket After a few straightening tugs at his jacket, he picked up the valise, opened the door, and stepped out into the corridor.

Every door was open. People rushed across the corridor from offices on the outer circumference to those on the inner, where windows faced the airshaft. Men in business suits, stenographers with paper cuffs clipped to their blouses, shirt-sleeved men with green eyeshades; all with jaws clenched, eyes wide, faces bloodless. He walked towards the elevators at a moderate pace, pausing when someone darted before him, then continuing on his way. Passing the doorway of each inner office, he glanced in and saw the backs of people crammed around the open windows, their voices a murmur of excitement and tense speculation. Shortly after he reached the bank of elevators, a down car came. He squeezed in and faced the front of the car. Behind him the other passengers avidly exchanged fragments of information, the customary elevator coldness shattered by the violence at their backs.

The easy bustle of normality filled the lobby. Most of the people there, having just entered from outside, were unaware of any disturbance. Swinging the valise lightly, he made his way across the marbled expanse and out into the bright noisy afternoon. As he jogged down the steps that fronted the building, two policemen passed him, going up. He turned and watched the blue uniforms vanish into a revolving door. At the foot of the steps he paused and examined his hands once again. They were steady as rocks. Not a tremor. He smiled. Turning, he looked at the revolving doors, wondering how dangerous it would be for him to go back, mingle with the crowd, see her... He decided against it A University streetcar rumbled past. He walked doubletime to the corner, where the car was detained by a red light. Swinging himself on. He put the dime in the box and walked to the rear of the car. He stood looking out the window. When the car had gone about four blocks, a white ambulance clanged by, the pitch of its bell dropping as it passed. He watched it grow smaller and smaller and finally cut through traffic to pull up in front of the Municipal Building. Then the streetcar turned onto University Avenue, and he could see no more.

The baseball pep rally began at nine that night, taking place on an empty lot next to the stadium, but the news of a student's suicide (for how could she have fallen when the Clarion clearly stated there was a three and a half foot wall?) put a damper on the entire affair. In the orange glow of the bonfire, the students, the girls especially, spread their blankets and sat huddled in conversation. The business manager of the baseball team and the members of the cheerleading squad tried vainly to make the rally what it should be. They spurred the boys to the gathering of more and more fuel, throwing on crates and cartons until the flaming pillar was so high it threatened to topple, but it was to no avail. Cheers wavered and died before half the school's name was spelled out.

He had not attended many of the pep rallies before, but he attended this one. He walked the dark streets from his rooming house at a slow liturgic pace, bearing a carton in his arms.

In the afternoon he had emptied Dorothy's valise, hiding her clothes under the mattress of his bed. Then, although it was a warm day, he had donned his trenchcoat, and after filling its pockets with the bottles and small containers of cosmetics that had been lodged among the clothes, he left the house with the valise, from which he had stripped the tags bearing Dorothy's New York and Blue River addresses. He had gone downtown and checked the valise in a locker at the bus terminal. From there he had walked to the Morton Street Bridge, where he dropped the locker key and then the bottles, one by one, into the umber water, opening them first so that trapped air would not keep them afloat Ghosts of pink lotion rode the water and thinned and faded. On his way home from the bridge he stopped at a grocery store, where he secured a tan corrugated carton that had once contained cans of pineapple juice.

He carried the carton to the rally and picked his way through the mass of squatting and reclining figures orange-sketched in the darkness. Stepping gingerly between blanket corners and blue-jeaned legs, he advanced to the flaming center of the field.

The heat and the glare were intense in the clearing that surrounded the roaring twelve foot fire. He stood for a moment, staring at the flames. Suddenly the baseball manager and a cheerleader came dashing around from the other side of the clearing. "That's it! That's the boy!" they cried, and seized the carton from his hands.

"Hey," the manager said, hefting the box. 'This isn't empty."

"Books... old notebooks."

"Ah Magnifico!" The manager turned to the encircling crowd. "Attention! Attention! The burning of the books!" A few people looked up from their conversations. The manager and the cheerleader took the carton between them, swinging it back and forth towards the rippling flames. "AH the way to the top!" the manager shouted. "Hey..."

"Don't worry, friend. We never miss! Book-burning a specialty!" They swung the carton; one... two... three! It sailed up parallel to the cone shaped pyre, arced over and landed with a gush of sparks at the very top. It teetered a moment, then held. There was a spattering of applause from the on-lookers. "Hey, here comes Al with a packing case!" cried the cheerleader. He dashed around to the other side of the fire, the manager running after him.

He stood watching as the carton turned black, sheets of flame sliding up past its sides. Suddenly the foundation of the fire shifted, pushing out showers of sparks. A flaming brand hit his foot He jumped back. Sparks glowed all over the front of Ms trousers. Nervously he slapped them out, his hands coppery in the fire's glare.

When the last sparks were extinguished, he looked up to make certain that the carton was still secure. It was. Flames ripped up through its top. It's contents, he thought, were probably completely burned by now.

These had included the Pharmacy lab manual, the Kingship Copper pamphlets, the tags from the valise, and the few articles of clothing that Dorothy had prepared for their brief honeymoon; a cocktail dress of gray taffeta, a pair of black suede pumps, stockings, a half slip, bra and panties, two handkerchiefs, a pair of pink satin mules, a pink negligee, and a nightgown; silk and lace, delicate, scented, white...

From the Blue River Clarion-Ledger; Friday, April 28, 1950: STODDARD COED DIES IN PLUNGE MUNICIPAL BUILDING TRAGEDY FATAL TO DAUGHTER OF COPPER MAGNATE Dorothy Kingship, 19-year-old Stoddard University sophomore, was killed today when she fell or jumped from the roof of the 14 story Blue River Municipal Building. The attractive blonde girl, whose home was in New York City, was a daughter of Leo Kingship, president of Kingship Copper Inc.

At 12: 58 PM, workers in the building were startled by a loud scream and a crashing sound from the wide airshaft which runs through the structure. Rushing to their windows, they saw the contorted figure of a young woman. Dr. Harvey C. Hess, of 57 Wood-bridge Circle, who was in the lobby at the time, reached the scene seconds later to pronounce the girl dead.

The police, arriving shortly thereafter, found a purse resting on the 3 foot wall that encircles the airshaft. In the purse were a birth certificate and a Stoddard University registration card which served to identify the girl. Police also found a fresh cigarette stub on the roof, stained with lipstick of the shade Miss Kingship wore, leading them to conclude that she had been on the roof for several minutes prior to the plunge which ended her life...

Rex Cargill, an elevator operator, told police that he took Miss Kingship to the 6th or 7th floor half an hour before the tragedy. Another operator, Andrew Vecci, believes he took a woman dressed similarly to Miss Kingship to the 14th floor shortly after 12: 30, but is uncertain of the floor at which she entered his car.

According to Stoddard's Dean of Students, Clark D. Welch, Miss Kingship was doing satisfactory work in all her studies. Shocked residents of the dormitory where she lived could offer no reason why she might have taken her own life. They described her as quiet and withdrawn. "Nobody knew her too well," said one girl.

From the Blue River Clarion-Ledger; Saturday, April 29, 1950: COED'S DEATH WAS SUICIDE SISTER RECEIVES NOTE IN MAIL The death of Dorothy Kingship, Stoddard coed who plunged from the roof of the Municipal Building yesterday afternoon, was a suicide, Chief of Police Eldon Chesser told reporters last night. An unsigned note in a handwriting definitely established to be that of the dead girl was received through the mail late yesterday afternoon by her sister, Ellen Kingship, a student in Caldwell, Wisconsin. Although the exact wording of the note has not been made public, Chief Chesser characterized it as "a clear expression of suicidal intent." The note was mailed from this city, postmarked yesterday at 6: 30 AM.

On receiving the note, Ellen Kingship attempted to reach her sister by telephone. The call was transferred to Stoddard's Dean of Students, Clark D. Welch, who informed Miss Kingship of the 19-year-old girl's death. Miss Kingship left immediately for Blue River, arriving here yesterday evening. Her father, Leo Kingship, president of Kingship Copper, Inc., is expected to arrive some time today, his plane having been grounded in Chicago because of bad weather.

LAST PERSON TO SPEAK TO SUICIDE DESCRIBES HER AS TENSE, NERVOUS by La Verne Breen "She laughed a lot and was smiling the whole time she was in my room. And she kept moving around. I thought at the time that she was very happy about something, but now I realize that those were all symptoms of the terrible nervous strain she was under. Her laughs were tense laughs, not happy ones. I should have recognized that right away, being a psychology major." Thus Anna-belle Koch, Stoddard sophomore, describes the behavior of Dorothy Kingship two hours before the latter's suicide.

Miss Koch, a native of Boston, is a petite and charming young lady. Yesterday she was confined to her dormitory room because of a severe head cold. "Dorothy knocked on the door around a quarter past eleven," says Miss Koch. "I was in bed. She came in and I was a little surprised, because we hardly knew each other. As I said, she was smiling and moving around a great deal. She was wearing a bathrobe. She asked if I would loan her the belt to my green suit. I should mention that we both have the same green suit. I got mine in Boston and she got hers in New York, but they're exactly the same. We both wore them to dinner last Saturday night, and it was really embarrassing. Anyway, she asked if I would loan her my belt because the buckle of hers was broken. I hesitated at first, because it's my new spring suit, but she seemed to want it so badly that I finally told her which drawer it was in and she got it. She thanked me very much and left."

Here Miss Koch paused and removed her eyeglasses. "Now here's the strange part. Later, when the police came and searched her room for a note, they found my belt on her desk! I recognized it by the way the gold finish was rubbed off the tooth of the buckle. I had been very disappointed about that, because it was an expensive suit The police kept the belt.

"I was very puzzled by Dorothy's actions. She had pretended to want my belt, but she hadn't used it at all. She was wearing her green suit when... when it happened. The police checked and her belt buckle wasn't the least bit broken. It all seemed very mysterious.

"Then I realized that the belt must have been just a pretext to talk to me. Laying out the suit probably reminded her of me, and everyone knew I was incapacitated with a cold, so she came in and pretended she needed the belt. She must have been desperate for someone to talk with. If only I'd recognized the signs at the time. I can't help feeling that if I had gotten her to talk out her troubles, whatever they might have been, maybe all this wouldn't have happened."

... As we left Annabelle Koch's room, she added a final word. "Even when the police return the belt to me," she said, "I know I won't be able to wear my green suit again."

He found the last weeks of the school year disappointingly flat. He had expected the excitement created by Dorothy's death to linger in the air like the glow of a rocket; instead it had faded almost immediately. He had anticipated more campus conversations and newspaper articles, allowing him the luxuriant superiority of the omniscient; instead- nothing. Three days after Dorothy died campus gossip veered away to pounce on a dozen marijuana cigarettes that had been discovered in one of the smaller dormitories. As for the newspapers, a short paragraph announcing Leo Kingship's arrival in Blue River marked the last time the Kingship name appeared in the Clarion-Ledger. No word of an autopsy nor of her pregnancy, although surely when an unmarried girl committed suicide without stating a reason, that must be the first thing they looked for. Keeping it out of the papers must have cost Kingship plenty.

He told himself he should be rejoicing. If there had been any kind of inquiry he certainly would have been sought for questioning. But there had been no questions, no suspicion,-hence no investigation. Everything had fallen into place perfectly. Except that business of the belt. That puzzled him. Why on earth had Dorothy taken that Koch girl's belt when she hadn't wanted to wear it? Maybe she really did want to talk to someone-about the wedding-and then had thought better of it. Thank God for that. Or maybe the buckle of her belt had really been broken, but she had managed to fix it after she had already taken Koch's. Either way, though, it was an unimportant incident. Koch's interpretation of it only strengthened the picture of a suicide, added to the flawless success of his plans. He should be walking on air, smiling at strangers, toasting himself with secret champagne. Instead there was this dull, leaden, letdown feeling. He couldn't understand it.

His depression became worse when he returned to Menasset early in June. Here he was, right where he'd been last summer after the daughter of the farm equipment concern had told him about the boy back home, and the summer before, after he had left the widow. Dorothy's death had been a defensive measure; all his planning hadn't advanced him in the slightest.

He became impatient with his mother. His correspondence from school had been limited to a weekly postcard, and now she badgered him for details; did he have pictures of the girls he'd gone out with?- expecting them to be the most beautiful, the most sought after-Did he belong to this club, to that club?-expecting him to be the president of each- What was his standing in philosophy, in English, in Spanish?-expecting him to be the leader in all. One day he lost his temper. "It's about time you realized I'm not the king of the world!" he shouted, storming from the room.

He took a job for the summer; partly because he needed money, partly because being in the house with his mother all day made him uneasy. The job didn't do any good towards taking his mind off things though; it was in a haberdashery shop whose fixtures were of angular modern design; the glass display counters were bound with inch wide strips of burnished copper.

Towards the middle of July, however, he began to slough off his dejection. He still had the newspaper clippings about Dorothy's death, locked in a small gray strongbox he kept in his bedroom closet. He began taking them out once in a while, skimming through them, smiling at the officious certainty of Chief of Police Eldon Chesser and the half-baked theorizing of Annabelle Koch.

He dug up his old library card, had it renewed, and began withdrawing books regularly; Pearson's Studies in Murder, Bolitho's Murder for Profit, volumes in the Regional Murder Series. He read about Landru, Smith, Pritchard, Crippen; men who had failed where he had succeeded. Of course it was only the failures whose stories got written,-God knows how many successful ones there were. Still, it was flattering to consider how many had failed.

Until now he had always thought of what happened at the Municipal Building as "Dome's death." Now he began to think of it as "Dome's murder." Sometimes, when he had lain in bed and read several accounts in one of the books, the enormous daring of what he had done would overwhelm him. He would get up and look at himself in the mirror over the dresser. I got away with murder, he would think. Once he whispered aloud: "I got away, with murder!"

So what if he wasn't rich yet! Hell, he was only twenty-four.