Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 104, Nos. 4 & 5. Whole Nos. 633 & 634, October 1994

Fox in the Briars by Kate Wilhelm

© 1994 by Kate Wilhelm

Kate Wilhelm is an author who crosses effortlessly from genre to genre, hut as the Washington Post put it, “A taste for horror or science fiction or fantasy or contemporary fiction is not necessary to appreciate Kate Wilhelm. Her work transcends genre.” Recently Ms. Wilhelm has been devoting much of her time to crime fiction. In this novella-length work she demonstrates her ability to weave a tale complex not only in plot but in psychology...

The tangle of blackberries looked impenetrable, canes as thick as a man’s arm, arching branches fifteen, twenty feet long. Jordan Langford stopped to wipe his face, cursed the leather glove, took it off, and wiped again. He motioned to Will Magnusson to move ahead a few more yards with the tractor. The sickle bar, lowered almost to the ground, cut through the tangled mass very slowly because no one knew if boulders lurked, hidden beneath the greenery, and a boulder would tear up the blade.

He tugged a long, many-branched cane up from the bank of the creek. They couldn’t let the canes fall into the water, dam it, cause a flood, wash out the newly planted grapes on the other side of the creek.

It started to rain. For a moment Jordan stopped with his face lifted, mouthing curses; then he ducked his head and weaved his way through brambles to the tractor. “What do you think?”

Will shrugged. “Not much of a rain yet. How about if we just finish the stretch to the bridge?”

The bridge was two hundred feet away, a little wooden span level with the gravel road that bordered the acreage. Last summer Jordan had uncovered it, but the brambles had reclaimed this side, making it appear that the bridge led only to the thicket to vanish there. He grinned at Will, and they went back to work.

Little Agate Creek was three feet deep and four feet wide, with steep banks, and as Will liked to say, she was a good runner; she had cut a seven- or eight-foot gorge in her race down the mountain.

After a while, the two men changed places. Then Will was signaling with both hands, and Jordan stopped, a few yards short of the bridge. On the gravel road on the south side Ellen Blair grinned and waved from her Mazda. Her short curly hair was frizzy from the damp; she looked like a kid joyriding in a hot car.

Will motioned for him to come. Jordan raised the sickle bar, backed up to more level ground, and turned off the key. Will was at the top of the bank; Ellen, under a bright red and white umbrella, had left her car and was coming toward them.

“Look,” Will said, pointing, when Jordan drew near.

Where they had cut the brambles on the bank, the dirt had been loosened enough to uproot branches. In the newly exposed dirt Jordan saw a flash of gold being washed by the rain, and then he saw that the gold was on a bone, a finger bone. He leaned over and picked it up, a finger bone with a ring on it.

“What is it?” Ellen called from the bridge.

He held it up for her to see, and he thought for a second that she was going to faint. The color washed from her face; she swayed and backed up a step, another.

“There’s more,” Will said. “Leg, ribs...”

Ellen ran back to her car, and Jordan yelled after her, “Go to the trailer and call the sheriff.”

He looked again at the finger bone, gray with encrusted mud, pitted, a man’s finger. The ring was heavy, solid gold maybe, it was fashioned into a coiled snake, its head up and back in striking position, with emerald eyes and a red tongue.

Ellen’s hands were shaking too hard to dial the first time she tried. She took a deep breath, and this time placed the call. Then she dug in her purse for her small address book and found the number for the McMinnville library and dialed. Patty Westwood answered.

“They found some bones,” Ellen whispered hoarsely. “With his ring. The sheriff’s on his way here. Patty, I’ll have to tell him about that night.”

“For God’s sake! Ellen? Is that you? What are you talking about?” Patty’s voice sounded distant and strange.

Ellen started over. “I’m at Jordan’s, in his trailer. I just called the sheriff. Jordan and Will uncovered bones, a finger bone with Philip’s ring. I saw it, Patty! Philip’s ring! They’ll ask questions.”

There was a pause, and when Patty’s voice was back it was cool and forceful. “Listen to me, Ellen. Get out of there. Go home. I’ll come over as soon as I can — fifteen minutes. Don’t wait for the sheriff, just go on home.”

Ellen nodded. “All right. But hurry, Patty. Please. I saw the finger, just a bone, with his ring on it!” She was shaking again; she hung up and stood watching the nearly spastic movements of her hands for a second or two before she hurried out to her car and started back to town, five miles away. In her mind’s eye she saw the finger bone and the ring with the emerald eyes and the darting ruby tongue.

Suddenly the bone was flesh and blood, and there was another hand with an identical ring, both hands moving back and forth over a shallow pottery bowl, and above the hypnotic motions of the hands, a bare torso with snakes painted on it and a gold necklace made of twined snakes with raised heads, emerald eyes, long red tongues. The gold and the gemstones caught the flashing firelight and gleamed, came alive, writhing...

She felt her car swerve, planing, and fought to hold it on the wet road. With the car under control again, she drove more slowly, paying attention now. She entered Crystal Falls on a back street and drove to her apartment, parked, and ran inside.

Her apartment was the ground floor of a three-story house, once an elegant private residence, now three apartments. Inside her door was a foyer with a large mirror on the wall, a closet opposite it. She took off her jacket and hung it up; when she turned she was stopped by her reflection in the mirror. She was ashen, with staring eyes. She hurried to the kitchen, found a bottle of bourbon in the cabinet, and poured some, added water, and drank it down.

After that, she sat at the dinette table and tried to think. It was Philip’s finger, she heard herself saying in her head. She could get no further than that. The doorbell rang, and she ran to admit Patty Westwood.

Patty was thirty-five, five years older than Ellen and twenty pounds heavier, a handsome woman with long black hair and brown eyes. Her normally ruddy face was pale; she looked cold. “Tell me,” she demanded, as she entered the foyer and pulled the door shut.

“I was out at Jordan’s. They’re clearing the upper section of the land, and Will found a bone, a finger bone, with a gold ring that’s like a snake. Philip’s ring.”

“You don’t know that.”

“It’s Philip’s ring,” Ellen repeated.

They had gone into the kitchen where Patty tossed her coat over a chair, went to the sink, and started to make coffee. She was within arm’s reach of Ellen at the table. The kitchen was small, a table and two chairs made it crowded; the other rooms were large and so sparsely furnished they looked barren.

“Look, Ellen, be reasonable,” Patty said, measuring coffee. “You can’t be sure. You saw something and got spooked. Maybe it isn’t even a bone.”

“We’ll have to tell them about that night,” Ellen whispered.

“You’re out of your mind!”

“He didn’t just leave.”

“Honey, sit down and listen to me.” Patty pushed Ellen into a chair and sat opposite her at the small table. “If you even mention that night, and if they really have found bones, and if they identify them as Philip’s bones, you’re as much as confessing that you know what happened to him. They’ll want to know what you were doing out there, what you did after you two left, where you went, everything.”

“I didn’t leave with him. He sent me away.”

“That’s not how we remember it,” Patty said harshly. “He took you away and never came back.”

Ellen shook her head. “He didn’t go with me. He gave me his keys and told me to go home, and I did.”

Patty stood up and turned back to the counter with the coffee maker; she tapped her fingers impatiently while the water trickled down. “Six people will swear he left with you,” she said.

Ellen stared at her in disbelief. She had known Patty all her life, they had worked together in the Blair farm and garden store when Ellen was in high school and Patty at Mount Crystal College. Philip had been one of Patty’s instructors, and she had fallen in love with him, just as Ellen had. They had talked about him for hours.

She remembered the first time she met him. No one ever had treated her the way he had, with respect, as if she were important; she had been sixteen. “Ms. Blair, I need a gift for a very special person, flowers, a blooming plant, something of that sort. What do you recommend?” He had been hired on a two-year contract at the college; everyone in town had known that. In a town of eighteen hundred people there were no secrets. He was rich, they said, and he was handsome, with black wavy hair, a moustache like Burt Reynolds’s, a blue and silver customized van. He had been around the world, they said. A doctorate in psychology by twenty-nine, brilliant. He had been thirty when he arrived to teach at the college, and two years later he had left.

Ellen remembered the afternoon Patty had come to the store, so excited she could hardly talk. She had just graduated from Mount Crystal, and Ellen from high school. “This Saturday night,” Patty had whispered, “Philip’s going to show some of us a Sacred Mushroom ritual!” Six students who had now graduated, she had continued. He had sworn them to secrecy; they were to meet up Crystal River at a campsite, take sleeping bags, be prepared to spend the night... Her voice had shaken with excitement.

Ellen had begged and pleaded until Patty had said she could come, too, but she had to stay way back and not make a sound.

Patty was still waiting for the coffee, getting out cups, half and half, sugar, and Ellen was back there, thirteen years ago.

Patty picked her up at her folks’ house; it was dusk when they reached the campgrounds. Two other cars were already there. They made their way to the clearing by the river where the others were nursing a small fire in a rock enclosure. The forest was dense and silent and little light filtered through; the rush of the river splashing against rocks was the only sound.

“Why’d you bring her?” John Le Croix demanded angrily, staring at Ellen.

“She’s okay,” Patty said. “She’ll stay back in the trees. I didn’t want to come alone.”

“Shit,” someone else muttered. “Anyone got any matches?”

Someone began to pass a roach around. John and Les Prell had beer, Burt Craxton and Sheila Baum were sharing a bottle, and Beverly was huddled in a blanket humming monotonously; slowly the darkness deepened until there was no light beyond the fire. The rush of water got louder as the night grew darker. Ellen didn’t know how long they had been there; they smoked and drank, some of them vanished into the woods, reappeared; there was giggling as they slipped in and out of sleeping bags. She watched the fire, frightened because it flared and roared, died to a spark, flared.

Then he was there. She had not seen him arrive, but suddenly he was standing at the far end of the group, a towering figure in a dark cloak that swept the ground. Silently he unfastened it at his neck and let it drop. She bit her thumb to keep from crying out. He was wearing a short skirt and sandals, and was covered with snakes, painted on his bare torso, on his thighs, his arms. Golden snakes gleamed on his chest, a necklace of twined snakes with emerald eyes that reflected the fire, scarlet tongues that caught and threw back flames. Golden snakes gleamed on his fingers; he was carrying a shallow bowl in both hands. She had never seen anyone so beautiful, or so terrifying.

Silently the others began to move, to crawl out of the sleeping bags, form a ragged circle around the fire. Ellen shrank back against a tree trunk. He didn’t stir until they were all motionless again, and then he melted down gracefully to a cross-legged position on the cloak. Carefully he placed the bowl on the ground, and began to move his hands over it, chanting in a low voice. She could make out nothing of what he said, neither could she turn away from the sinuous motions of his hands. The painted snakes rippled; the golden snakes began to writhe, to flex and draw back...

She forgot that her legs had started to cramp, that the tree was gouging her spine, that her eyes were burning. Then he stood up and came to her; she was paralyzed until he reached out and took her hands, drew her up to her feet. He walked her away from the others, out of the firelight to the parking area, his arm around her shoulders, guiding her, supporting her. Her gaze was on the pale disk of light that flowed on the trail before them, over stones, up and over a tree limb. At his van he stopped and opened the door, took keys from the seat, and handed them to her.

“Go home, Ms. Blair. Go home and forget all this.” He took her face in his hands and said softly, “The ceremony isn’t for children.” He kissed her forehead and half lifted her to the van seat; he reached past her to turn on the headlights and then closed the door.

Burning with humiliation, she turned the key, engaged the gear, and sped away. She stopped at the first curve in the road to wipe her eyes, and had to stop to do it again a moment later. She realized that it was not only tears making the drive seem impossible; the road was expanding, contracting to a line, expanding again... She stopped driving, started, stopped again; the ten-mile drive was an eternity.

She felt the fire on her cheeks at the memory, and turned away from Patty who was bringing two mugs of coffee to the table.

“Listen, Ellen,” Patty said carefully, as if she had been thinking hard. “There’s no point in talking about that night. Six other people involved, all brought down in the dirt... Honey, you can’t get away with that story, that he handed you his keys and you took off. It just won’t wash.”

Ellen started to protest, but Patty held up her hand. “Let’s say he drove you home and was heading back, but he picked up someone along the way. That makes sense. He would have picked up a woman, you know. And after that, God knows what happened. But it doesn’t involve you or any of us.”

“You never asked me what happened,” Ellen said after a moment. “I would have told you exactly what I’ve just said. I drove myself home.”

“You were so high you don’t know what you were doing!”

“I was high, but not as high as the rest of you, and I wasn’t drinking. What happened out there? What did you do with the mushrooms?”

Patty shrugged. “We ate them and went to sleep. Let me tell you what Les said, honey. When you two disappeared and didn’t come back, he said, so the littlest pussy swallowed the king snake. Sheila tried to climb over the fire to clobber him.”

“He was probably standing behind the trees watching you all make fools of yourselves, and laughing,” Ellen snapped.

“And walked home practically naked and covered with snakes?”

“Why didn’t you ever bring it up, ask me about it if you thought I went with him?”

“I was mad at you. Everyone else was mad at both of us. I’ve never talked about that night with anyone.”

Ellen sipped her coffee.

Patty leaned across the table and put her hand on Ellen’s arm. “One more thing, honey. We have to think this through. No one’s going to accuse you of anything, you were only seventeen, but if the sheriff thinks you went off with a naked man and your father saw him, what conclusion do you suppose he’ll come to?”

Ellen nearly dropped her mug; coffee splashed across the table. The sheriff’s son, Burt Craxton, had been one of the students. If the sheriff’s son said she left with Philip, and the others said that, the next step, she admitted, could drag her father into it.

Patty was scowling into the distance. She said, “When they investigated thirteen years ago, did anyone ask you a single question?”

“No.”

“And no one will now. Why would they? You were a kid. So just sit tight. Don’t volunteer anything. You don’t have to lie. Just keep your mouth shut, it’s that simple.”

Silently Ellen nodded. What she had thought back then was that he had returned to the group at the fire, that they had had an orgy of some kind, and afterward he had left town, left the state, satisfied. A month later, when they discovered some of his things in his apartment, she had continued to believe that; he had taken what he wanted, left everything else. She had been relieved as day after day passed without his appearance; she would have died of mortification if he had walked into the store.

She still believed he had gone back to the group at the fire, and something terrible had happened there. Of the six, Patty was the only one she had known well, who was her friend; the others were no more than acquaintances. If this was Patty’s story, she felt there was no need to ask the rest of them anything at all. She stood up. “You’d better go. Jordan’s coming over, and I need a shower.”

For a moment Patty hesitated, then she got up. “It might not even be Philip, honey, remember that.” She pulled on her coat and left without saying anything else. Ellen locked the door behind her.

She wiped up the spilled coffee and then remained indecisively at the table. She had to shower, she told herself; Jordan was coming. She wished suddenly that he had never come to Crystal Falls, that he had stayed down in California. They had met eighteen months earlier, a few months after she had returned home. Maria Cutter had told Ellen’s father about a newly vacant apartment, and Ellen had gone to Papa’s Pasta House to have dinner and ask Maria about it. Then Maria had spotted Jordan and rolled her eyes, muttering about another single. She couldn’t seat two more singles on a Saturday night, how about if they shared a table instead. Ellen had glanced at him and said, sure, she didn’t mind, and he had nodded after a slight hesitation.

“I’m Ellen Blair,” she had said as soon as they were seated. “And you’re Jordan Langford. You bought Jesperson’s sheep pasture in order to plant grapes. You live in a trailer, but you’ll build a house up on Crystal River Road, and you work from dawn to dark.” She had laughed, and added, “Welcome to Crystal Falls, population eighteen hundred, and no secrets.”

How easily they had talked that evening. He had said, “Thirty-five. I went to school, got married, got unmarried, worked the vineyards in California, went to Italy and worked vineyards there. Inherited a little from grandparents and came looking for land. Winemaker.”

She had nodded. “Twenty-eight. School, married, unmarried, job, laid off, home again. New job at the college. Flunky to the president.”

“Now we know each other,” he had said.

He had walked her to her parents’ house next to the farm and garden store they owned. Over the next month she walked him all over town, to the waterfall that gave the town its name, to her old high school, the Mount Crystal College campus where Little Agate Creek tumbled over rocks to join Crystal River in a cauldron of foam.

They drove to the coast, twenty-five miles away, and on a clear day they hiked to the top of Mount Crystal, from where they could see the ocean in the west and the high Cascades in the east. He helped her move; she offered him the use of her bathtub, and they went to bed together.

“No commitment,” she had whispered. “No ties. We’re both still free.”

He had nodded then, but more recently she had started to feel pressured, not so much by his insistence on a commitment, but rather by his apparent belief that such a commitment already existed.

Her marriage had started out in the prescribed perfect bliss and ended in a predictable hellish discord; she was not ready to try it again. Knowing they both had been too young, too immature, did not ease the hurt; her problem was that she was not at all certain she was much more mature now than she had been five years earlier.

If only Jordan had never come here, she thought, then sheep would still be grazing in the pasture, the blackberries would still be growing thicker and thicker each year. Philip’s bones would still be buried.

That night she asked Jordan not to talk about it, knowing they were the only people in town not talking about it, and she sent him away early.

Five weeks later, Ellen was working in Hilde Melton’s office when the secretary buzzed Hilde to say the sheriff was there.

“Well, let him come in,” Hilde said, getting up from her desk.

Hilde Melton was generally considered to be a good-looking woman; Ellen thought she was beautiful. She rode a bicycle, hiked, walked for miles, ate properly, and at fifty-three she was envied by many of the students in their twenties. Her dark hair was starting to show gray in streaks. Janice Ayers, head of the psychology department, had said with a sigh, “Even getting gray is glamorous on her.”

“Hilde,” the sheriff said, entering with another man, “we have to talk to you.”

Ellen hurried to the door. “I’ll start on some of that right away,” she said, and left.

“They identified the bones,” the secretary, Rita, whispered in the outer office.

“How do you know?”

“Wanna bet?”

Ellen shook her head and went to her own tiny office where she was supposed to make phone calls to try to find someone who would maintain the school’s bicycles for less than Homer Wylie was charging. Instead, she stared at the wall with her hands clenched on her desk. After they found the bones, enough to say it had been a man, and a ring and the necklace, she had pretended nothing else would happen, that they wouldn’t identify him, that no one would admit recognizing the jewelry they had displayed on television, in newspaper photographs. An investigation was ongoing, but it had nothing to do with her. It would all pass, she had told herself as the talk died down; people would forget.

She had lived her life exactly as always, work, dinner with her parents once a week, dates with Jordan, and if her sleep was restless and her appetite gone, no one had noticed. Now and then she had found herself in front of the television with no awareness of what she had been watching, or she had found a book in her hands with no memory of having read anything in it. No one suspected anything unusual about her, she told herself; she was handling it.

But what had happened when Philip went back to the group at the fire? The question formed and re-formed through her daylight hours, and woke her with its persistence during the night. Patty had called several times, left messages; Sheila Baum Craxton had called; Beverly Kirchner had called, and Les Prell. She had returned none of the calls.

“Hey, Ellen, you asleep or something?”

Ellen jerked her eyes open to see Rita in the doorway. “Headache,” she said.

“Dr. Melton wants you, like pronto.”

When Ellen returned to the president’s office, Hilde was sitting behind her desk, grim-faced. The sheriff was studying the titles of books in a glass case; the other man stood up, regarding her with interest.

“Ellen, you know Sheriff Craxton, don’t you?” The sheriff was tall and thin; he looked tired. They nodded politely to each other.

“And this is Lieutenant Haliday from the state police special investigation unit. Ellen Blair, my administrative assistant,” Hilde said.

Haliday was about forty, with black hair, dark eyes. He was dressed in a dark suit, with a bright blue tie. He smiled at her in a friendly way and turned back to Hilde.

As if cued, Hilde said, “Lieutenant Haliday is in charge of the investigation into the death of Philip Seymour, who taught here fifteen years ago. He will require help in locating files. For the time being, you will be the liaison between the lieutenant and the college, assist him in any way you can. He’ll tell you what he wants. And see what conference room is available for him to use as an office for the next few days.” She looked at the lieutenant. “Is that sufficient?” she asked bitterly.

“Yes, ma’am. I think so.” He seemed to be the only one in the room at ease.

“Very well, then,” Hilde said, nodding to Ellen. “When you finish, will you drop by the house? We’ll have to go over whatever other tasks you have to abandon, see if they can be put off for the present.” She drew her phone closer. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to start calling the trustees.” She looked fierce. Hers would be the hardest job, it was clear.

Walking with the sheriff and the detective down the wide corridor to the marble stairs to the second floor, Ellen was aware of the curious looks from work-study students at the front desk, from several people who just happened to step out of their offices as the trio passed. A cluster of students fell into silence at the foot of the stairs and stared at them frankly.

“Pretty building,” Haliday said. “Looks like a pretty campus, from what I’ve seen of it. Maybe you can show me around later.”

Ellen nodded. Conference Room A was too big, Haliday said when she opened the door to it. She went on down the hall to Conference Room D, and he said fine, just fine. The sheriff glanced around it, seemed to be waiting for something, and when it was not forthcoming, he shrugged. “HI be at the mayor’s office, you need anything.” He hesitated another second and left.

Haliday closed the door after him. He began to move about the room. He was compact; although his movements were quick and decisive, they also were fluid, like a cat’s. He regarded the long conference table with ten chairs, and extra chairs along one wall. Cabinets under the windows were empty, but there was a coffee maker on a table. He pointed at it inquiringly. “Fixings go with this?” he asked.

“I can have coffee brought in,” Ellen said.

“Relaxes people sometimes, having something to do with their hands,” he said amiably. He picked up a chair, carried it across the room to the wall with the other extras. “Did you know him?”

She started. “No. I knew who he was, that’s all.”

He picked up another chair. “What did you know about him?”

“Nothing. I mean, he was a teacher here, people said he was rich. He was handsome. He came to the store a few times.”

“He wasn’t a gardener, was he?” He continued to rearrange the furniture.

Ellen shook her head. “He bought cut flowers, or potted plants.”

“Did he have them delivered?”

“We didn’t deliver. He just took them with him.”

“Talk to you?”

“No.”

He surveyed the table; he had left four chairs, one at the head. “That’s better. Now the windows.” He went to the wide windows and gazed out. Beyond and below was a view of the rhododendrons in bloom, and massive fir trees that towered over the building. “Don’t know,” he said. “Might be distracting, but it’s familiar. What do you think?”

“About what?”

He grinned at her. “Would you rather look at the trees or at me if I’m asking you questions?”

She stared at him.

He laughed and returned to the table and pulled out a chair. “Sit down, let’s talk a minute.” She sat down and he took a chair opposite her; she was facing the windows. He nodded. “I’ll leave the drapes open, I think. See, Blair, by the time you get out of here today, everyone in town will know I’ve recruited you. You’re going to be hit with a zillion questions. Rumors will be thicker than bees in a swarm. Maybe you’re the only one who’ll have the straight story, so I thought I might as well give it to you. They’ll believe what they want, regardless of what you say.” He shrugged. “I’m from a small town myself, I know how that works. Okay. First, why me and why not the sheriff. The Seymour family is very wealthy, richer than you’d believe a family could be. And they know everyone; they’ve been on the phone to the governor, the FBI, Congress... They are not happy with the sheriff. They say if he hadn’t bungled his investigation thirteen years ago, this would have been settled then. They seem to believe the sheriff and the college have a cozy arrangement whereby he never makes trouble for a student, and his sons get scholarships, something like that.” He spread his hands. “Me, I don’t know from nothing. Everyone believed Philip Seymour left under his own power in his own van, and you can’t fault them. No signs of violence, nothing was there to indicate otherwise. Anyway, I’m in charge.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Ellen asked. “I can’t repeat anything like that.”

“You don’t have to. But there will be rumors, and they’ll be nasty before this is all over. If you’re going to help out, it will be easier if you know my position. You didn’t go to school here, did you?” He waited for her to shake her head. “See, no old loyalties to get in the way. Next thing, the forensic lab guys say Seymour was naked when he was killed. That’s going to be all over town, too.”

She swallowed hard and felt her stomach spasm. “He was killed? How?”

“His head was bashed in.” He regarded her for a moment, then said, “Stretch out your hand, Blair, this way.”

He was mad, she thought then. They had put a madman in charge. He nodded at her and reluctantly she stretched her arm out across the table; she could not reach the other side.

“My point,” he said softly. “Out of reach. Someone was close enough to a naked Philip Seymour to hit him over the head.” He touched his own temple. “Right about here. I’m afraid the rumor mill will run overtime with this one.” He stood up. “Let’s take a walk. The psychology building, dorms, faculty housing, archives storage... I’ll think of the rest while we’re walking.”

It was after five when he walked with her through the terraced gardens to the president’s mansion. At the top of a flight of brick steps he paused to look back over the campus. “Don’t they get younger every year.”

All afternoon more and more students had appeared on the grounds until now it seemed that most of the student body was visible, moving without too much obvious purpose toward the student union building and the cafeteria in the basement. A few months ago she would have been more comfortable down there with them than up here. Today they looked like children.

He started to walk again. The campus was terraced throughout; up here the terraces were gardens, a rose garden, spring bulbs in full bloom, rhododendrons, azaleas...

At the entrance to the house, he stopped and said, “Thanks for the tour, Blair. Bright and early tomorrow. Go on in for your grilling now.” He grinned.

Hilde opened the door. “Come in, Ellen.” She nodded coolly to the lieutenant. He turned and walked away.

“Ellen, I can’t tell you how sorry I am to saddle you with his work,” Hilde said as she led her through the wide entrance foyer, past the formal rooms to a small sitting room in the rear of the house.

The parts of the house that Ellen had seen before were all formal interior-decorator rooms; this was personal. Shelves were cluttered with artifacts from around the world, Indonesian dolls, African masks, pottery... Walter Melton had been an archaeologist, had traveled extensively, and had collected whatever took his fancy. One wall was covered with diplomas, certificates, plaques. Tables were laden with books; wall hangings from Brazil, silk prayer rugs... It was like walking into an eclectic museum.

Janice Ayers was seated in a leather-covered chair holding a drink. She smiled at Ellen and mouthed, “Sit down,” pointing to another chair.

Janice Ayers was in her forties, tall and graceful, with long pale hair that she wore in a loose chignon at the nape of her neck. She lived with Michael Wyland when he was in town and rumor had it that when the former president of the college had suggested that she either marry the man or give him up, she had laughed. Most of the time Wyland was in Seattle, where he had a computer business.

“That lieutenant,” Hilde was saying, “said he would bring in people to go through the files, and he would interview all of us down in City Hall. The idea of going to town one by one to be questioned! To have strangers pawing through files...” She went to a table with liquor, wine, glasses. “What would you like, Ellen? Wine? Something stronger?”

Ellen said wine.

“We’re mapping our strategy,” Hilde said, pouring white wine. “No statements to the press, first of all. I already posted that. All statements come from the president’s office.” She handed the glass to Ellen. “I’ll want a record of everything he copies. I already told him copies only; he can’t have originals of our files.”

Janice laughed. “Hilde, forget it. You’re not in charge. I think the police will take what they want.”

Hilde’s mouth tightened. “We’ll see. He intends to drag the college into whatever mess he stirs up; I intend to limit the damage.” Janice laughed again.

Ellen felt as if she had intruded on an ongoing argument between two old friends. Janice was mocking and sardonic, Hilde was angry, but there was a deep understanding between them. Ellen avoided looking at either of them, looked instead at the commemorative wall ahead.

Janice took a sip of her drink. “What we really want, Ellen,” she said, “is a blow-by-blow account. Tell.”

Ellen glanced at Hilde, who nodded, and she repeated everything the lieutenant had said to her, and described the tour. “Stuff is in boxes, as well as the files, it’s a mess in archives. He said someone will be there to help me. I suppose he really means to keep an eye on me, make sure I don’t hide anything.”

“Family influence,” Hilde murmured when Ellen finished. “That explains why Roy is cooling his heels.”

“He botched it,” Janice said flatly. “The sheriff didn’t want to make waves. I told him Philip wouldn’t have gone off and left the stuff he did. Expensive clothes, a thousand-dollar typewriter, television. Philip had money, but he wasn’t irresponsible about it. There weren’t any personal letters, and his manuscript was missing. Just the wrong mix of what was there and what was missing.”

“How do you know that?” Hilde asked.

“I saw the inventory the sheriff made. Seems I’m the only one who’d admit to having been in Philip’s apartment.” She set her glass down on a table. “We arrived here a week apart fifteen years ago, had our little fling early on, and went our own ways, but I knew he was writing a book, and I knew there should have been letters. I told the sheriff. Pryor was riding him harder than I was, it’s that simple.”

Warren Pryor had been the president until his retirement eight years earlier, when Hilde was appointed to replace him. Ellen had never met Pryor. She said slowly, “I don’t see how anything can come of an investigation now, after so many years. Too many people have left, or died.”

“Exactly,” Hilde said. “It’s obvious that he picked up a woman somewhere, parked with her, and they fought. She killed him, panicked probably, and just drove away in his van after she dumped his body. A hitchhiker, someone here for the commencement, a transient... We’ll never know.”

Patty’s version of what happened, Ellen thought. She had hardly touched her wine. Now she drank it all, wanting to be gone, wanting to be at home.

“And she just left all that gold behind,” Janice said. “Not terribly likely, is it? I hear it’s worth thousands as jewelry, and if it’s authentic antiquity, it’s priceless.” She stood up. “Well, we have things to think about. Hilde, go with the flow. Okay? The school can weather a little scandal. The sky won’t fall. You ready, Ellen? I’ll walk to your car with you.”

They walked in silence through the gardens now lighted with warm yellow lanterns; as they were drawing near the Mazda in the parking lot Janice put her hand on Ellen’s arm. “If this really bugs you, bow out. You don’t have to work for the police, you realize. Not in your job description.”

Ellen’s mouth was dry. “What do you mean?”

“Look how you’re shaking. Your hands were shaking back in the house. Something’s under your skin, and if it’s Philip Seymour, call in sick. Or, you know how it goes, just say no.” She withdrew her hand. “See you.” Her hair gleamed like gold under the brilliant lights in the parking lot as she walked away.

In her car Ellen sat watching her hands, which had become quite steady. But they had noticed. She bit her lip and turned the key. She could handle it, she told herself. Overactive imagination, she would say; this was her first murder, after all. She would laugh. Her hands were too tight on the steering wheel; she forced them to relax.

Her apartment was a mile from the school, usually a pleasant walk, but today she had driven in order to go to the Safeway to shop for dinner. Instead, she drove straight home; she knew everyone in the market, knew the people who would be shopping there, and they would all be full of questions. Parked in front of her apartment house was Jordan’s car; he was leaning against it, talking to a woman. He waved when Ellen pulled into her driveway. The woman turned and now Ellen could see her: Beverly Kirchner. She gritted her teeth.

They came forward as she got out of her car. “Hi, Ellen,” Beverly said. “I’m covering this story for my paper. Ask you a few questions?”

“Sorry,” Ellen said. “Comments will come from the president’s office only. Or the police.” She started to walk.

“Hey, Ellen, come on.” Beverly caught Ellen’s arm. “It’s me. Tomorrow there’s going to be a million outsiders asking questions. Give me a break, okay? What’s the lieutenant after at the school? Are they trying to link the death to someone there? Why are you working for the police? Is it true that Seymour was naked?”

“Can’t comment,” Ellen said, shrugging away from her hand.

For a moment Beverly dug in, her eyes narrowed; then she grinned and moved back a step. “Did you volunteer to help, or were you drafted?” Ellen moved toward her door. “Well, if you aren’t talking, I guess that’s my story. Who gagged you, Melton or the police?”

Beverly had always been insistent, Ellen remembered; being a reporter had not given her that trait, merely sharpened it. Beverly was watching her with an intense look. Slowly Ellen said, “I’m not talking, Bev.” For an instant Ellen saw her as she had been that night, knees drawn up with her chin on them, her arms wrapped around her legs, a blanket over her shoulders, rocking back and forth, humming tunelessly.

Beverly nodded. “I’ll be around town for a while. Be seeing you, I guess. Nice meeting you, Jordan. So long.” She strode away down the street.

“Just a second,” Jordan said then and hurried to his car, brought out a grocery bag, and joined her at the door. “Thought I’d make us some dinner,” he said. “Okay?”

Inside, he went to the kitchen with his groceries, and she went to the living room, where it appeared that her answering machine was stuck on blink. She knew who had made six of the calls, she thought, and her parents would have called, and then many more people. She sat on her sofa and called her mother.

It was an unsatisfactory call in every way. Her mother put her on conference call, but her father never had any small talk, and all her mother wanted to talk about was “the case.” After Ellen said she couldn’t discuss it, her mother was silent for a moment, but recovered with a rush of inconsequentials about weather, the store, her new glasses...

“Mom, Jordan’s cooking, and I’d better go help,” Ellen said finally. “I’ll be over Friday. Don’t worry. I’ll just be looking up old files. Dirty work, that’s all.”

After they hung up, she sat without moving, thinking what her father would have done if he had caught her with an older, naked man. He would not have hit him over the head and dumped his body in a thicket of blackberries. He would have beat the crap out of him on the spot. But who else would believe that?

Dinner was steaks and potatoes and salad, all very good. And Jordan was almost aggressively cheerful, to the point where Ellen wanted to yell at him to stop smiling, stop chattering. Neither mentioned Beverly Kirchner until the table was cleared and they had coffee.

“Old friend, she said,” Jordan commented. “But if you two are friends, I don’t ever want to see you with an enemy.”

“Old acquaintance is more like it,” she muttered. “Did she get a story from you?”

“Just what’s been in the news for a month now. That’s all I know.” He hesitated and then said, “Ellen, you can’t talk about it. Understood. But something’s bugging the bejesus out of you. Maybe you need to talk to someone about it.”

She felt herself grow tense with his words. How transparent she must be to everyone — Janice Ayers, Jordan... who else? “Thanks,” she said. “I’m just jumpy. Not used to seeing bones dug up. My first murder, after all.” It sounded as faked as it was. She couldn’t manage the laugh.

Although he did not move, she knew he recoiled as if she had rejected him physically. Where he had been excessively cheerful a few minutes earlier, he now became excessively polite, and she felt powerless to remove the barrier she had erected. They stood up and finished clearing the table, washed the few dishes, and then faced each other awkwardly.

“You’d better go,” she said. “Someone probably will make a note of how long you stay. You know, if there’s no real story, create one.”

“I expect your machine will go into overtime mode; I won’t add to it. Will you call me?”

She felt they had come to a crisis of some kind, that it had to do with trust, and hurt, and his new awareness of the fragility of their relationship. She would deal with it later, not now. “I’ll call,” she said. “Thanks. For dinner, for... Just thanks.”

He shrugged and went to get his jacket, and then paused at the door. “Call me,” he said, and left.

Later, soaking in the long deep tub, she regretted that he had not had his usual bath. He always liked to bathe in her old-fashioned tub that let him stretch out and relax. She thought of his words: maybe you need to talk to someone about it. In a town of eighteen hundred people, most of them familiar, some of them lifelong friends, there was not a single one she could talk to about that night.

She could imagine the questions: Six people saw you leave with him; where did you go? Did he seduce you? Have sex? Did he hit you? Did you hit him? Did he drive you home afterward? Did your father see you messed up, bloodied maybe?

What happened back at the fire? She closed her eyes against the pictures that surged in, and after a moment she thought, what happened to his van? Someone must have driven it away; someone else followed in a different car. They must have driven it off a cliff, into a gorge, maybe up the Columbia River, into the river somewhere. Then they came back.

They would get away with it, she thought dully. They wouldn’t tell on each other, and she couldn’t tell. Eventually the police would have to accept the idea that Philip had picked up a woman, fought, got killed, and she had driven his van away. What else could they think?

Lists of instructors who had been at the school the two years Philip had taught, follow-up lists: when they left, where they went, who was still here. Lists of his students, more follow-up lists. Lists of his subjects, course descriptions.

“What about the maintenance people, the cafeteria workers?” Ellen had asked bitterly, and Haliday had grinned. “Them, too.”

Now she stood in the doorway to the archives room with Winona Kelly, who was to assist her. She was a middle-aged woman with dyed black hair and gold-rimmed glasses. Earlier, Haliday had given the orders: When they found the files, Kelly would copy them, Blair would double-check, initial them, and restore the originals to their proper place. “That should satisfy your Dr. Melton,” Haliday had said. He had waved them out as Janice Ayers entered the conference room. The drapes were open.

“Okay,” Winona Kelly said. “Let’s get at them.” She chewed gum.

The recent files were in good order, Hilde Melton would have seen to that, but Dr. Pryor had been lax in his oversight, or had had inept help in archives. Ellen was sitting on the floor scanning one paper after another from a cardboard carton, laying them aside one by one. Winona Kelly was at a file cabinet pulling personnel files. Ellen glanced up to see Lieutenant Haliday in the doorway.

“How’s it coming?”

“Slowly,” Ellen said.

“Well, let’s break for lunch,” he said. “I thought that down here in the catacombs, you might not realize what time it’s getting to be.” He said to Winona Kelly, “You can go over to the cafeteria, no one’s going to pester you with questions. And you,” he said to Ellen, “can come up to the conference room with me. I’m having stuff sent in. They’re lying in wait for you, I’m afraid. Reporters.”

She saw what he meant as soon as they emerged from the library building. A clump of strangers rushed forward, along with Beverly Kirchner. A few flashbulbs flared. “Hey, Ms. Blair, what are you looking for down there?” “Did he really teach witchcraft?” “Are the files intact?”

Haliday took her arm firmly and walked through them.

“Is she a suspect?”

His hand tightened and his pace quickened as they moved along the path toward the administration building. She was out of breath when they reached the building and went inside. An officer at the door barred the reporters.

“See what I mean?” Haliday said cheerfully. “You’ll want to wash up a bit. See you upstairs.”

Hilde Melton appeared at her door. “Come use my washroom, Ellen.” She moved aside to let Ellen pass.

Ellen thought Hilde was going to question her again, and steeled herself, but all Hilde said was, “We’ve brought in security to keep them out of the buildings and away from the dorms, but we can’t keep them off the grounds altogether.” She looked very tired. Her phone was ringing. “It’s been like that all morning,” she said, going to pick it up. “Parents.”

Rita would be shunting other calls to other departments, Ellen knew, but only Hilde could deal with upset parents. She nodded sympathetically and went into the washroom.

When Ellen got to the conference room, Haliday was eating a sandwich. He waved toward a tray with more sandwiches, a carton of milk with glasses, and fruit. She helped herself to a sandwich and sat down opposite him.

They ate in silence. He poured milk, poured for her when she nodded, and then he said, “Problem here is there’s just too much coming and going. Take a corporation now; people get hired and they stay put. But here you’ve got a couple hundred new students year after year, couple hundred old ones hitting the road, gone. Besides those who drop out. And the teachers drifting in and out on one- or two-year contracts. Makes for a real problem.” He looked at her appraisingly. “I take it the files are another problem.”

“The old ones are,” she said. “And the old temporary-instructor files are jammed into boxes every which way. I don’t think they were sorted at all.”

“When you come across his student lists, think you’ll recognize names of locals?”

“Maybe. Some of them anyway. But I’d have to double-check. Thirteen years is a long time; most of them have left the area. Besides, I don’t really know everyone from around here.”

“Dr. Melton seems to think you do,” he commented. “She thinks pretty highly of you. Grooming you to take her place when she retires?”

Ellen felt her face grow hot. “No, of course not. I’m nothing more than her gofer.”

“Isn’t that what she was for the last president?”

“It’s not the same. She had a doctorate already, and I have a bachelor’s degree. She was more like a vice president.”

“So how’d you land your job here?”

Ellen curbed her exasperation. “I happened to be in the right place at the right time. She mentioned in the store one day that she was looking for an assistant. I had just lost my job, and I was available. She hired me. Since it’s a private school they don’t have to go through the procedures the public universities do. It was that simple.”

He held up his hand, grinning. “Peace, Blair. I’m making polite conversation like they taught me in charm school. Not looking for sore toes to step on.”

Unexpectedly she laughed. “I think you must have flunked the course.” Then she watched as he reached into his pocket and took out a dollar and transferred it to a different pocket. “What are you doing?”

“Made a bet with myself that I’d get a laugh out of you before you went back to work.” He bit into an apple. “What do you think about the hitchhiker theory?”

He was working all the time, she told herself. She had to remember that, no matter how much fooling around he did. She said slowly, “I don’t see any other way to account for the missing van.”

“Yeah, that’s the problem. The goddam van. But you see, it compounds the other problem. The missing personal stuff. And the fortune in gold. Tell me, would a hitchhiker go to his apartment and steal a manuscript and private letters, and leave that gold behind?” He shook his head. Then he asked, “What’s it like around graduation? What’s the usual schedule?”

She told him. Finals week, senior dance, parties, the commencement exercises on Wednesday.

“And they take off right after Wednesday?”

“Most of them. All the parties are the week before, then the parents show up, and they leave.”

“How about the teachers?”

“They have their celebration on the Friday night after commencement. A dinner dance. Some of the trustees attend. It’s a big formal event.”

He nodded. “Yeah, that’s what I keep hearing. So Seymour was at the party Friday night, and no one ever saw him again. And no one gave it a thought that they didn’t see him again. Does that make sense?”

“I think so,” she said. “He would have cleaned out his office, ready to leave any time. The permanent staff hang around another week or so usually, or even year-round, but the temporaries just take off.” She frowned. “But you’d think someone would have noticed if he didn’t tell them goodbye.”

“Exactly,” Haliday said approvingly. “Dr. Melton says she and her husband went to the coast early Saturday, and when she got back on Thursday or Friday, he was gone. So she didn’t even think about a goodbye. Pryor and his wife went to Hawaii on Saturday, stayed three weeks. So far that’s all I’ve been hearing; they took off for a little vacation, or went fishing or something. So no one told him so long and no one thought it was strange.”

There was a tap on the door. He called out, “Come on in.” Winona Kelly and a uniformed officer entered. Haliday glanced at his watch and stood up. “Back to the grind,” he said. “See you later, Blair.”

She walked back to the library between the uniformed officer and Winona Kelly, with reporters shouting questions every step of the way. She felt like a prisoner.

That afternoon Winona Kelly delivered several packets of copied files to the lieutenant, and Ellen began to feel that perhaps the job was not as hopeless as it had appeared.

When they quit for the day the archivist, Mr. Rosenthal, was waiting for Ellen. “He questioned me,” he said. He sounded quite happy. He had been on the spot here when the first brick was laid, Ellen thought; of course he would be questioned. “Not that I had anything to contribute,” Mr. Rosenthal said. “Frankly, I don’t even remember the man.” He started to walk away, then stopped. “Oh, the reason I interrupted you. Dr. Melton sent word for you to report to her office. That’s it.”

Shit, Ellen muttered under her breath. When they left the library no reporters were in sight among the swarm of students on their way to the cafeteria. A light rain was falling. It was the kind of rain that locals paid no attention to; if they carried umbrellas, they usually didn’t bother to unfurl them for this kind of mist, but Winona began to run with her purse over her head. Maybe her dye would wash out, Ellen thought sourly. Suddenly Beverly Kirchner fell into step beside her.

“Slow down, Ellen. A couple of us want to talk to you. Tonight. About nine or a little after, your place.”

“There’s nothing to say,” Ellen said. “I told you, I’m not talking. Not to anyone. You think I’m crazy?”

“Why are you spending so much time with the cops? Are they putting pressure on you?”

“I’m an acting file clerk, for God’s sake! Leave me alone, Bev. You, all of you. Just leave me alone!”

Beverly clutched her arm. “You realize that some of them are desperate? If they thought you’d wreck their lives... They’re really desperate, Ellen. Believe me!”

Ellen stopped walking, pulling Beverly to a halt with her. Students moved around them on both sides. “Do you think I’m not desperate?” she demanded. “I’m not crazy, and I’m not stupid. Now bug off.”

She began to walk again, swiftly this time. Bev did not keep up. And no nine o’clock rendezvous, she should have said.

Winona was waiting for her at the administration building entrance. “They’re in the president’s office,” she said. “And I’m off. See you tomorrow.” She had found an umbrella somewhere. It was the only one in sight when she left.

Ellen knocked on Hilde’s door. Rita was already gone from the outer office, her computer covered. The door opened and Janice Ayers stepped aside to admit her.

Hilde was standing behind her desk, both hands palm down on it. She was speaking in a low, vehement voice. “Lieutenant, this is lunacy. What difference will a few days make now? You have to take your people off this campus, at least until next week when the students will be gone for spring break. Everyone knows what must have happened to Philip Seymour, and it has nothing to do with this school. Mary Grayling was in tears this afternoon. She had to cancel her classes. The students are in a turmoil. Parents are threatening to remove them entirely. And for what? A senseless disruption that is utterly fruitless.”

Haliday had glanced at Ellen when she arrived, then turned his attention back to Hilde. Now he said in a respectful tone, “I understand, Dr. Melton. Believe me, I do. We’ll be as discreet and fast as we can, I assure you.”

Hilde slapped the desk hard and turned to Ellen. “Is that what you’ve been pulling from the files?”

“Yes,” Ellen said. She crossed the room and handed Hilde a file folder. “If that’s all, I’d better be going.”

Hilde waved her away and started to scan the notes Ellen had prepared. “For God’s sake! His entire student roster from fifteen years ago!” She closed the folder and sat down.

“Is this the student newspaper?” Haliday asked suddenly. He picked up the newspaper from a table. “How often does it come out?”

Hilde glared at him. “Biweekly.”

Haliday said to Ellen, “When you finish in the archives, think you could round up copies of the paper for the time Seymour was teaching here?”

This time Ellen glared. “I don’t know.”

“Try,” he said placatingly. “That’s all we can do, isn’t it? Try.”

“They’ll be on microfiche,” Janice said then. “In the journalism department. They keep everything.”

Ellen could feel rebellion rising — microfiche! — but before she could voice it, Haliday said, “You ready to leave? I’ll walk you to your car. You did drive, didn’t you?”

She darted a glance at Hilde, who was pale with fury. It was very clear who was in charge, who was deciding when to call a halt to the meeting, when to dismiss Ellen. She had never seen Hilde so angry, and was relieved to escape before she gave voice to her anger. Janice could take it, she thought, but at that moment she didn’t think she could. It was all just too much, she decided, hurrying to the door. Too damn much.

At the entrance to the building they paused. It was raining harder. “What were you so hot about when you came in?” he asked.

“A reporter,” she snapped, and zipped up her jacket.

“Ah. Well, let’s do it.”

He intended to go to the car with her, she realized, and began to run across the parking lot. When they reached the Mazda, he said, “You have time to do me a little favor?” He had stopped at the passenger side; she ran on to the driver’s side and opened the door.

“What?”

“A little spin around the campus, that’s all.” He pulled the other door open and got inside before she could respond. She slid in behind the wheel. “See, I’ve been all over it in daylight, but not at night. I thought it might be a good idea to do it with someone who knows what the different buildings are. Okay?”

Silently she started the car. She drove slowly on the narrow road that wound through the campus; many students were walking here and there, many with umbrellas now. Each building was screened by trees and bushes; paths with yellow lamplights led up and down from the road. There were many terraces, many stairs. She pointed out the buildings they passed; the science building, the library, gym. The math building showed many lights. “Computer freaks,” she said. She drove past the dorms, the highest buildings on campus, and on to College Road.

“Left,” he said.

With resignation she made the turn, and almost instantly there were deep woods on both sides of the blacktop road. When they came to the juncture with Staley Road that led to Jordan’s property, he told her to turn left again, and she realized he wanted to make a circuit of the perimeter of the college grounds. The deep woods continued on the left; there were fields on the right now. At Washington Street she turned again without waiting for his instructions, but she came to a stop when they reached Crystal River Road. Town was to the right, the campus to the left. He said left, but then he had her turn again at the first road, which curved around the faculty housing.

“Who actually lives there?” he asked.

“Temporaries, visiting lecturers; some of the instructors stay on even though they’re permanent. They’re cheap and they’re convenient.”

The houses, like the other buildings, were well separated, surrounded by mature trees and shrubs; the school brochure described them as “modest,” but in fact they were tiny with tiny garages, but very private and quiet. There were nine of them.

“I understand Philip Seymour turned them down,” Haliday said. “He opted for privacy, an apartment in town, just a few blocks from your dad’s place, I understand. Ayers lived here a while; Melton lived here with her husband for nine years.”

“They had a house on the coast,” Ellen said. “Since he was gone so much, I guess this was a good deal for her.”

“Okay,” he said then. “Good job, Blair. Let’s go to town. You can drop me at your place and I’ll walk.”

What was he after? she asked herself later. She had taken a shower, put on a warm robe, and was scrounging in her refrigerator. Just what was he after? Why was he focusing on the college and not the town? There must have been a dozen women in town then who were still around, and who might have been involved with Philip. Only those between twenty-one and forty, she recalled Patty’s saying years before. Those between the age of consent and the age of desperation. Plenty of women in town would have fallen in between, she thought bitterly, remembering his chaste kiss on her forehead. She scowled and slammed the refrigerator door. Such arrogance! Such egotistical arrogance! She had loved him at seventeen, and two weeks later she had hated him at eighteen. How many other women had done the same kind of abrupt about-face?

Later, she watched the clock hands edge to nine, nine-thirty, a quarter to ten... At ten-thirty she went to bed. Bev had not come by; no one had come by. If they had called, she didn’t know it because she had not listened to the calls. She realized she had not checked her mailbox since Monday, had not read a newspaper all week. Neither had she called Jordan, she remembered, still wakeful and twitchy after midnight. There had been nothing to say to him.

Thursday was a repeat of Wednesday; she and Winona Kelly pulled files until noon. She was invited to lunch in Conference Room D again, but today Janice Ayers was there, too.

Haliday was at the end of the table, Janice at his elbow, with papers spread out between them and on down the table.

“Help yourself,” Haliday said, waving toward the tray at the other end of the table. She took a sandwich and sat down at that end.

“Okay, this one,” Haliday said, pointing to a paper.

“Psychodrama and Other Games,” Janice said. “Easy. He taught personality types out of Jung, had them role-play characters, and go into the fallacies of the method, and the strengths.” She straightened up. Apparently they had been at this for some time. “That’s how he taught. By involving them in every possible way. Demonstrations, role playing, participation.” She pointed to the same paper. “Like this one, Psychohistory and Myth. He had them choose an historical subject from a list he provided and then research that person thoroughly and psychoanalyze him or her. Afterward, he extracted quotes from their papers, ran the list down the side, and had them try to link the quoted words to the proper name. Most of them failed entirely, which was his point. What people do and what they say are often at variance.”

“Good teacher. That’s your point?” Haliday said.

“Good! My God, I’m good, everyone who stays here is good. Philip was the most brilliant teacher I ever knew.” She leaned back in her chair. “Do I get to eat?”

Haliday laughed. “Sorry. I forgot. Let’s, before Blair finishes it all off.”

They got up and took sandwiches from the tray; Haliday poured milk. Janice got coffee from the automatic machine on the other table. Eating, Haliday returned to the list. He put his finger on an item, glanced at Janice, who was taking a bite, waited, and then said, “What about this one, Shamanism and Modern Cult Figures?”

She finished chewing and took a swallow of coffee. “What it says. He was convinced that with the proper buildup, normal healthy people would believe whatever the cult leader wanted them to believe.” At the other end of the table Ellen stopped eating. “He had an experiment he was anxious to try and couldn’t, for obvious reasons. He believed he could convince a group of pretty random people that a totally inert substance was a powerful hallucinogenic, and that they would then hallucinate exactly as if they had ingested LSD.”

“You believe that?” Haliday asked.

Ellen got up to pour coffee that she didn’t want, and stood at the window with her back to them. It was raining again. She was remembering Patty’s answer to her question, what had they done with the mushrooms. We ate them and went to sleep. He had been playing a game with them, she thought, and listened to what Janice was saying.

“I didn’t, but now I’m not so sure. Some people have power naturally, we call it charisma. Philip had it. I’m sure every good shaman had it.”

“Why couldn’t he try it?”

“It’s a very dangerous game to put anyone under your spell, Lieutenant. It’s dangerous to teach anyone how to hallucinate, to start a process you may not be able to control.”

There was a long pause; Ellen didn’t turn from the window to look at them. He had been playing a game that he had known could be dangerous...

“What about the book he was writing? Did he show you the manuscript? You know what it was about?”

“I never saw it,” she said, “but he talked about it from time to time. Part was about his work with his students. He was very innovative, and honest about his failures and his successes. He said I was in it, and did I mind? He wanted a reaction. I laughed and said if he used my name, I’d get a hefty cut of the Seymour millions.”

“He was using his love affairs as material?”

“Everything he did was material one way or another. What you have to understand, Lieutenant, is that the whole world was a petri dish for Philip, and he found everything in it interesting.”

“While he stayed on the outside,” Haliday said. “Did you love him, Dr. Ayers?”

She laughed. “No. I might have come to love him, but I woke up. Have you ever watched a snake feed?”

Ellen felt her whole body tense with the words. Why was she talking about that particular experiment, talking about snakes?

“It unhinges its jaw and swallows its prey whole,” Janice was saying. “You can watch the lump that was a living creature as it moves down the body, slowly diminishing. I was fascinated by Philip, but after you’ve seen the snake feed a time or two, the fascination also diminishes. I preferred to stay on the outside, and after a time I didn’t care to remain a Philip watcher; we became friends in a way, I suppose.” There was a rustle of motion. “Now I’m going back to my own world. It’s been fun.”

Ellen heard her movements, then her steps, the door opening, closing.

“You can come back now, Blair,” Haliday said. “You haven’t finished your sandwich.”

She made sure her hands were steady before she left the window and returned to the table.

“How’s it coming in the catacombs?”

“We’ll finish this evening, I think. Then there will be the current files in the records office downstairs. They won’t take long.”

“Good. What do you think, Blair? Did Ayers love him?”

Ellen set her cup down hard. “She said not, Haliday. What else can I tell you?”

He chuckled. “She can’t recall the name of a single woman he had an affair with. Curious, isn’t it?”

“I don’t think so.”

“I didn’t think you would,” he said mildly. “Eat your lunch.” But before she could take another bite, he pushed a paper toward her. “Have a look at that. Tell me, as a reasonable person, if you saw an apartment with all that stuff in it, would you assume the occupant intended to come back?”

Philip’s apartment, she realized. This was a list of what had been found. She had thought it was just a few odds and ends at the time, but this was a long list. Suits, outdoors clothes, other clothes, books, the typewriter, a stereo and records, television, photographs... She read it over again and shook her head. “I’d think he was coming back,” she said. “I never realized it was this much.”

“I’m getting that from everyone except Ayers. Seems word went out that he left a few things and took off.”

“But his family should have raised objections,” Ellen said.

“Sheriff Craxton says there was a lot of infighting going on at the time. They seemed to accept that he took off to annoy them. They deny anything of the sort now.”

She pushed her unfinished sandwich away and drank the rest of her coffee. It was bitter and cold. “Why do you keep telling me things like that? You’re implying that the sheriff knew, or should have known, it wasn’t a case of a man driving away. Why are you doing this?”

“You think the sheriff would deliberately hide something like this?”

“No. I think he’d bend a lot in little ways. No students get arrested for drunken driving, or searched for possession of substances, things like that. This serious? No.”

“That’s why I tell you stuff, Blair. I’m sort of using you as a sounding board, find out what people around here are thinking. You do just fine.”

That was part of it, she thought, but not the whole truth. She stood up. “I’d better get back to work.” At the door she paused and looked at him. “Why are you concentrating on the college? There are a lot of town women who might have become involved with him.”

He reached for the last sandwich. “I have people asking questions all over town, believe me. But, Blair, this started and ended right here on this campus.”

“Thanks, Haliday,” she said. “That’s really reassuring.” She could hear his chuckle as she left.

It was after four-thirty when she and Winona Kelly finished the files in the archives. “You can go on ahead if you want,” Ellen said when she finished checking the last batch of copied files. “I’ll just put this stuff back first.”

“I’ll wait,” Winona said.

Ellen shrugged and began to refile the records. “Did he tell you not to leave me here?”

“Not just like that. He was sore because a reporter or someone got to you yesterday.”

Ellen bit her lip and continued to replace the records. That bastard, she thought savagely. He was keeping an eye on her. But why? There wasn’t anything to connect her to Philip Seymour. Someone surely had told him about the age parameters Philip had set; he must know she had been well out of them. Or maybe he believed Philip had made an exception in her case.

Today Winona held an umbrella over both of them as they walked back to the administration building. “Can’t wait to get to my motel and get a shower,” Winona said. “You wouldn’t believe files could be so dirty, would you?” She chattered and popped her gum, never expecting a response apparently. “I grew up over in Bend,” she said. “Just can’t get used to this rain. Everything I have on feels clammy.”

Ellen nodded. Shower, change of clothes, something hot to eat and drink... Her needs seemed very simple at the moment. Then she began to think about the list of things Philip had left in his apartment. Clothes, outdoor wear... She was frowning slightly when they entered the administration building, where many people were milling about, students, work-study students, office workers. She saw Rita coming from the records room and went to her.

“Will you give this to Dr. Melton?” she asked, handing her the list of files they had copied that day. “I have to see the lieutenant. She may be gone before I’m through upstairs.” It was close to five; she hoped Hilde would go on home at five.

Rita said sure, no problem, took the list and headed back toward her own office. Ellen went up the stairs with Winona. When they passed the door of Conference Room A she saw with surprise that the furniture had been rearranged in there, and several groups of people sat at tables separated from one another. She recognized John Wooster from maintenance at one of the tables, and two cafeteria workers at others. He really was having everyone questioned, she thought in wonder.

When they reached Conference Room D the door was open and Haliday was reading a typed sheet of paper.

“Finished?” he asked.

“Pretty much,” Ellen said. “Just one question. On that list of stuff in Philip Seymour’s apartment, there wasn’t a tuxedo mentioned, a powder-blue tux. Would anyone have just included it among the other clothes?”

“Philip watchers saw him in a light blue tux? The night of the big party?”

She nodded. “That’s what I heard.” Patty had seen him in it, had raved that he looked like a movie star.

He glanced at Winona. “You can take off. See you in the morning. Come on in, Blair. Close the door. If Kelly stays, she goes on overtime,” he said. “You’re on straight salary, aren’t you?”

“Yes. But that’s all I wanted to bring up. I didn’t know if anyone had mentioned it.”

She remained at the door; he began to rummage through papers. He motioned for her to join him. “Have a look,” he said as he ran his finger down a sheet of paper he had extracted from a pile.

“I’d like to go home,” she said.

He paid no attention, merely beckoned again, and angrily she closed the door and joined him at the table.

“Would you say anything on that list looks like formal evening wear? Two sports jackets, gray suit, three pairs of jeans... Where do you suppose he changed after the dance?”

“I don’t know. In his van maybe.”

“That would be strange,” he murmured. “Five-minute drive to a closet full of clothes. Why change in the van?”

“Maybe he was more than five minutes away. Maybe he never went home after the dance.”

Haliday straightened up and slowly he nodded. “I think you’ve got it, Blair.”

The door opened and Hilde Melton came in. She stopped when she saw Ellen, and stood for a moment studying her. Then she continued into the room. “Lieutenant Haliday, I meant to speak to you alone. I thought Ellen had left, but perhaps it’s better this way. I want Ellen to return to her regular duties tomorrow. You have enough of your own people to conduct any further searches of our files. There are people in the current-records room to give you any assistance you may need.”

Good, Ellen thought, no microfiches.

“I don’t know,” Haliday said. “She’s really been helpful.”

“Lieutenant, look at her. She’s a nervous wreck over all this nonsense. Janice Ayers has mentioned that this is too much for Ellen, doing police work on such a ghastly case. People who have known her all her life have gone out of their way to comment. That awful woman reporter who seems to think she has privileges just because she was a student here, even she has commented. It was a mistake to offer you Ellen’s help. I wish to rectify my mistake.”

Ellen grasped the back of a chair. Beverly! Bev had threatened her by saying how desperate they were, and now she was adding weight to the threat through Hilde Melton.

Hilde came to Ellen and put her arm around her shoulders. “I’m very sorry, dear. I shouldn’t have let you get this involved.” Then she said fiercely, “Ellen will return to my office tomorrow. She works for me and the college, after all, not for your office.” She tightened her arm for a moment and then released Ellen and patted her shoulder. “You go on home. It’s well past quitting time, and it’s been a long day.”

Ellen nodded. All she wanted to do was go home and try to think this through. They were desperate, afraid she would tell the police, threatening... Were the threats real? What happened that night back at the fire? She looked at Haliday, who was watching her. “I’m pretty tired,” she said.

“Come to my office when you arrive in the morning,” Hilde said. “All that work you’ve had to put off is still waiting.”

Haliday was stuffing papers into his briefcase. “Ms. Blair,” he said, “can you give me a lift to town?”

Hilde glared at him. Ellen nodded. They had to fight, she understood; Hilde had worked too hard to surrender her authority without a struggle, and Haliday acted like a man who was used to getting his way. Let them, she thought, she just wanted out.

No one spoke again until they got downstairs and said good night at Hilde’s office door. Ellen and Haliday left the building, dashed through the rain to her car, and got in. She began to drive.

“She doesn’t have any kids, does she?” he asked after a moment.

“Who? Dr. Melton? No.”

“Widow now for what, four years? You know the papers are writing more about the famous Walter Melton than about her? Died in Sumatra, didn’t he?”

“You know more about it than I do,” she said tightly. “I wasn’t here at that time.”

“Sumatra,” he said. “Had an accident, got bad care, infection set in, and he came home and died in a Portland hospital. Never even made it back to Crystal Falls. Tough. So all she has now is the college. See, Blair, I’m wondering why she’s come on so maternal about you. You sick or something?”

“I am perfectly well,” she said, clipping the words.

“I thought so,” he said. “Was that awful woman reporter Beverly Kirchner? Is she the one who cornered you yesterday?”

“Yes,” she snapped.

“And she was Seymour’s student,” he commented. “Such a small town, everything keeps coming back to home plate, doesn’t it?”

When had he had time to learn Bev’s name? She bit her lip and made no comment. As if reading her thoughts, he said, “In police work you train yourself to make connections, to notice things and remember them, things that relate to the case in hand, at least. I saw her name on the list of people still around. Burt Craxton, the sheriff’s son, is another one. Interesting, isn’t it? Anyway, like I was saying, when you get in the right mode you notice things, like you noticing no blue tux was on that list, and dredging up a memory.”

“Where should I drop you?” she asked, stopped at the corner of Main and Adams. Her apartment was a block away.

“Your place, I’ll walk from there.”

“You’ll get soaked.” The hotel was five blocks away, city hall three, nothing farther than six blocks, but he would get soaked.

“Got an umbrella,” he said cheerfully, and opened his briefcase to pull out a collapsible umbrella.

She turned the comer and suddenly she thought, he wanted to make sure she went home; he was keeping her under observation, just as Winona Kelly had kept an eye on her, and the uniformed officer... She jerked to a stop at her driveway.

He got out and snapped his umbrella open. “See you tomorrow, Blair.” He started down the street toward town.

Inside her apartment she stared at the blinking answering machine and finally started to listen to the calls: Patty, an old friend or two, her mother, and then Bev’s voice: “Remember, Ellen, I get the story first. For old-time’s sake.” She hit the stop button and erased the tape.

They were using Bev to keep the pressure on her, she understood, because Bev had a legitimate excuse for hanging around. She tried to remember what the others were all doing now: John Le Croix had married money, had a dairy farm in Tillamook; Burt Craxton was in state government, a man with a future, they said; Sheila had married him, they had two children; Les had a car dealership in Salem, other businesses; Patty was a librarian. They all had a lot to lose.

Why didn’t Bev tell them that Ellen would not talk about that night? Why didn’t Patty? Then she thought of it from their viewpoint. She was working for the police, was closeted with the lieutenant for long stretches of time, went driving with him... If he had set out deliberately to make it look as if she would talk, he couldn’t have done a better job of it. She felt a rush of gratitude toward Hilde Melton for demanding an end to it, for demanding Ellen’s return to her own work. The word would get out. Bev would know, she would tell the others.

Philip would have had them hallucinating, doing crazy things maybe, and then if he told them the mushrooms were plain mushrooms, not hallucinogenic, what would they have done? She remembered what Janice Ayers had said: It’s dangerous to start a process you can’t control. How much did Janice know? What happened hack at the fire? How far would they go to make sure no one ever found out? Then she realized that they would never feel safe as long as she lived.

She should tell Haliday, she thought wildly. At least she would have police protection. She shook her head. He would believe them, not her; her protection would be a cell.

Suddenly she was weeping, and furiously she swiped at her cheeks and then went to shower. The tears kept flowing as she cursed, “Damn them all. Just damn them all!”

On Friday the sun was shining, the forecast was for a high in the low seventies. The mood of the students on campus was festive; this was the last day before spring break. Frisbees had come out, and Rollerblades, and skateboards. People were already packing up their cars, ready to leave as soon as the last class was finished. When Ellen parked at the administration building, she could almost believe the last few days had been an illusion; this was how life was supposed to be. The uniformed officer at the entrance of the building brought her down again.

Rita met her in the corridor. “She wants you.” She hurried away on her own errand.

Hilde was on the phone. She looked worn, and for the first time she looked her age. She motioned to Ellen to wait, finished her conversation in a low voice, and hung up.

“I have a trustee meeting for Monday,” she said tiredly. “They want a complete list of the classes Philip taught here, his file, including his application and recommendations, and his evaluation file. They also want every article we have about this affair.” She indicated a large stack of newspapers on the low round table across from her desk. “They want a scapegoat,” she said. “Thank God I was just an errand girl.”

The phone rang. She closed her eyes briefly and said, with her hand on the telephone, “Take the newspapers to your office. Two folders, one of clippings, one of Philip’s files.” She lifted the phone and waved Ellen out.

In her own office, Ellen glanced through the stack of newspapers. They were from Bellingham down to Los Angeles, from Denver, Chicago... The Seymour name and the bizarre jewelry, the bones, a naked man... She hadn’t realized it had become a national sensation.

She retrieved the Seymour files first and then started on the newspapers. After the first few articles she stopped reading and simply scanned to determine if they were about the school or Philip. There were several long articles about Walter Melton, the honors he had accumulated, the degrees, the books he had written, where he had found various treasures... She broke for lunch and went to the cafeteria, where no one paid any attention to her. So much for Haliday’s fears of her being mobbed by reporters, she thought derisively, and returned to her office and the newspapers.

The Seymour family had many articles; she hesitated, then clipped them all. If Hilde didn’t want them, she would take them out later. More about Melton’s travels, an article about his accident and fatal infection. A history of the school. Her eyes were burning, and newsprint was smeared on her hands. She left black prints on whatever she touched. An article about Jordan. She clipped that one and put it in her purse.

“Hi, Blair.”

She looked up to see Haliday at her door. He surveyed the tiny office, scraps of paper everywhere, the disorderly heap of mutilated papers, the telephone on the floor where she had moved it to make more room on her desk.

“Your face is dirty,” Haliday said.

“And I’m busy.”

“Drop in upstairs before you take off, okay?”

“It’s beautiful outside, you can walk to town.”

He grinned. “And maybe I will, but drop in anyway. See you, Blair.”

She kept working, article after article. Late in the day Hilde came in.

“How’s it coming?”

“Okay, I guess. Here’s Philip Seymour’s files, and the newspapers aren’t as bad as you thought they might be. The one I’m doing now could have been written by a publicist from the school. Honors of graduates, high positions, art exhibitions, that sort of thing. Pretty nice.”

Hilde took the Seymour file and then said, “That many left to do?” There were a lot of newspapers Ellen hadn’t touched yet.

“I’ll take them home,” Ellen said. “I told my parents I’d have dinner with them, but it will be an early evening. I’ll finish them afterward and get them sorted by category, and bring them to you tomorrow.”

Hilde nodded. “Just don’t work too late. You look tired.”

Ellen started to cut again as soon as Hilde was gone. She wondered if the puff she was clipping had been written by a graduate, and then she stopped cutting. Art exhibitions, she thought; their art department was excellent, and Newton Bridges had been there fifteen years ago, and was now head of department. She started to cut again and stopped again. Something was nagging, she realized, and she closed her eyes a moment.

Then she heard a question in her mind: Who painted the snakes all over Philip’s body? It was followed by a second question: Where were the paints? Not listed in the stuff in his apartment. Would he have kept paints in his van? That time of year, the end of May, the interior would have been like a furnace.

She didn’t move as she thought through the night of the party. Philip had gone with someone, or followed someone home. And the next day had that same person painted the snakes on him? He couldn’t have done that alone. Then he went to the campsite and... What happened hack at the fire? She shook her head, trying to clear the question away. The important thing, she told herself, was that someone else knew what he had done, what he had been up to with his costume, his jewelry, the body paint. Janice? Would she have been able to resist watching his experiment?

She had not moved yet when there was a tap on her door and it swung open. “Good, you’re still here. I thought you’d ducked out on me.” Haliday did not enter, but regarded her with interest from across the tiny space. “Your face is still dirty.”

She stood up. It was ten past five. “I was just ready to leave,” she said.

He came into the room and closed the door. “Great. Look, I really need someone who recognizes names to have a look at those student newspapers from Philip’s days. Would you? Not on school time, but on your own time? I know it’s an imposition.”

She shook her head. “I have a dinner date. Sorry.”

“Not tonight, tomorrow. It won’t take long. We’ve pulled the right ones out; they’re all ready to view. Winona’s doing her best, but she doesn’t know anyone.”

“I have a job to finish tomorrow,” she said, gathering up newspapers into a manageable pile.

“After that.”

She stopped moving and looked at him. “What do you want from me, Haliday? Why me?” Suddenly she remembered something else and sat down hard. “You knew the first time you met me who I was, that Dad owns the garden store. I said Philip had come to the store and you asked if he was a gardener. You knew. What do you want?”

He smiled. “Good morning, Blair.” He held up his briefcase. “Look, I’m ready to split, too. Give me a lift? Maybe I’d better drive you this time, you shouldn’t touch anything with those hands.”

She gathered her things silently, and they walked out to her car. The sun was low now, but the day was still warm and pleasant. The campus was nearly deserted. She felt numb with fear.

At her apartment he went to the door with her and followed her inside. “You wash up a bit and I’ll show you something,” he said, glancing about.

She put her things down on the kitchen table and went into the bathroom to wash her hands. Her face was filthy; she scrubbed it fiercely until her cheeks showed color again.

He was sitting at the table when she returned. She took the chair opposite him. The table was so small that the newspapers and other things she had put down covered it almost entirely. Haliday handed her a sheet of paper that was creased from folding.

She read: Ask Ellen Blair who killed Philip Seymour.

She stared at it so long the words began to dance. Finally she looked up. “Why didn’t you?”

“Who killed Philip Seymour?”

“I don’t know.”

“That’s what I thought you’d say. That’s why I didn’t ask you before. But someone seems to think you know something.”

“Where did it come from? Who gave it to you?”

“Mail. In my box bright and early Tuesday morning. Postmarked Salem. Of course, that’s just a fifteen-mile drive, not difficult to run over, drop a letter in a box, and scoot back home.”

“But that’s the day you came. No one knew about you.”

“Someone did. See, I got on the case on the Friday before that, reviewed everything over the weekend, came up here on Monday, and checked into the hotel. Your sheriff knew by Friday, and he called one or two of the trustees, who no doubt called a number of people including your Dr. Melton, who might have told her own confidantes. Word gets around in a small town, Blair. You should know that.”

“You’ve been playing a game with me, watching me.”

“Someone thinks you know something, and maybe you do. I tried making you a killer and it just didn’t work, not now, not at seventeen. I mean, if you’d had anything going with Philip Seymour everyone in town would have known about it, and no one did. But did you see something, overhear something, get told something? Maybe. Did you?”

He was still playing his game, she thought. Carefully she put the sheet of paper down on top of the newspapers. He ignored it, watching her. What did he expect? That she would break down and blurt out a confession? She stood up.

When she spoke, her voice sounded as if she had rehearsed this scene. “I have to get cleaned up. I have a dinner date.”

“Will you help out with the student newspapers?”

She couldn’t hide her incredulity. “Me? Aren’t I a suspect now?”

He laughed. “Well, you’re the only one anyone’s fingered. On the other hand, you’re the only one to bring up the blue tux. After lunch tomorrow?”

Helplessly she nodded. He picked up the sheet of paper and returned it to his briefcase, and got up from the table.

“See you in the administration building. Around one?”

She nodded again.

Time spent with her parents usually was a good time; she loved them very much, and they made no attempt to hide their love for her. Her father never had a lot to say, but he smiled at her from the moment she arrived until she left, and her mother always made the things Ellen had loved as a child, and still did. That night she probably had made Ellen’s favorite dishes, but Ellen was not aware of it. She left before nine.

Her father’s store fronted North Main; the residence was behind it, facing First. She kept off Main, where she was likely to run into people she knew; at least on the back streets they were all inside their houses. She knew every house, every occupant, what the kids were up to, where the adults worked, where they had gone to school... The houses were big, with well-cared-for yards and gardens. Where the houses had started out small, they had been added to over the generations until they were an architect’s nightmare, but they were comfortable, suitable for people who preferred the small town to anything else. She could go to any door, knock, be invited in, given a cup of coffee or a glass of wine; they would chat, gossip, be at ease. They were all people who had babysat her, whose kids she had babysat. Kids she had gone to school with, she thought then, had grown up, married, moved. Changed. And there was not a person in town she could talk to.

With some bitterness she thought of the phrase she had grown up believing: a town of eighteen hundred people and no secrets. But how many of these pleasant houses sheltered people as desperate as she was, with secrets as devastating as hers?

Listening to her mother rattle on and on about nothing in particular had made her realize how much she needed to talk to someone, to tell someone about that night, to try to sort it out by talking it out.

Nothing had changed, she thought in wonder. Everything kept getting more complicated, but nothing changed. She had driven off in his van, and he had gone back to the group at the fire.

But what if he hadn’t gone back? What if Patty had told the truth, he never returned? She slowed her pace, no longer noticing the houses or gardens or the scant traffic until she reached Main and had to stop for several cars. She had told the truth, and maybe Patty had told the truth, too. And that meant that someone else had been there, and that person had seen Ellen, and that’s what the note to Haliday was about. She began to hurry, wanting to be home where she could think of what that meant, to think of Janice Ayers, who had known about Philip’s experiment. As a psychologist, would Janice have found that experiment irresistible?

She heard Jordan calling her name and looked around to see him trotting down Main. Not now, she thought, but she stopped and waved, and he crossed the street to catch up.

“I was watching for you to pass Papa’s,” he said. “Good ravioli tonight. Your mom said you’d left already, or I’d have gone by their house. Walk you home?”

“Sure. I had to leave early because I have homework. Hilde loaded me up for tonight and tomorrow.”

He caught her hand and held it as they walked. “Not even Hilde expects you to work twenty-four-hour days,” he said lightly, but his grasp of her hand was hard.

“Just this once. For a special meeting of the trustees on Monday. They’re driving her crazy.” They had reached her building.

“Can I come in?” he asked at the door. When she hesitated he released her hand “I really do have an awful lot of work,” she said, “This won’t go on much longer, and everything will get back to normal.”

“It’s been going on for more than a month,” he said evenly. “It just gets worse. Ellen, I don’t care what happened years ago, what you did, what anyone else did. I simply want you back.”

“Please, let’s talk about it later, next week, not now. I’m tired and I have work to do and I have to get some sleep...” Her voice faltered and she inserted her key in the lock.

“Right,” he said. He walked away.

She looked after him, started to call him back, then bit her lip and went inside Why not? she demanded at the mirror. There was no real answer until she had hung up her jacket and gone to the table to stand regarding the newspapers with loathing. Then she knew why not If he had come in, he would have pressured her to tell him what was wrong, and she probably would have done so, because she was desperate to talk to someone. She realized she had known from the start what he would say: don’t say anything, don’t get any more involved than you already are. It will blow over.

That wasn’t fair, she thought almost wildly, and anyway that was exactly what she had been doing, what she intended to keep doing. Even if that was the only sensible thing to do, she did not want to hear it from him. But what else was there to say?

Angry at the impasse, she sat at the table, ignored the papers, and thought about that night. Whoever painted Philip must have gone either with him or after him to the campsite, and must have been there when he put Ellen in the van and she drove away. And then what? There was no answer, but it no longer was a certainty that Philip had returned to the fire. Also, that person wanted Ellen to talk about it, implicate the others. And that observer, she added, feeling icy, could in apparent innocence mention to any of the six that Ellen was talking to the police, or intended to talk, or that she had hinted she knew something vital. How much of a nudge would it take to goad desperation into action?

If she told Patty or Bev what she suspected, then what? She shook her head. To them it would be the same problem: if Ellen talked, they would be dragged into a police investigation of a sensational murder case that included drugs, an orgy in the woods, a naked teacher and his students... Would they even believe her? As far as they were concerned, she had left with Philip.

“All right,” she said aloud and stood up, knocking some of the newspapers off the table. She had forgotten them. She put on coffee to get her through the next several hours of work, and she was glad that she would have a crack at the microfiches after all. If there were any gossipy items linking any of the current staff to Philip, she wanted to see them. She did not even question her assumption that a woman had painted Philip and later killed him. She didn’t believe it had been a student; it had been someone with a house or an apartment where he could hang out all day and his van not be seen by a passerby.

She assembled the clippings in the morning, sorting them by category, labeling them. By ten she was finished, but it was too early. Haliday had said after lunch. She didn’t need him, she decided; she would deliver this stuff to Hilde and start on the microfiches by herself.

She found Hilde in her office in the administration building and handed her the folder of clippings. The building was deserted. Hilde was dressed in jeans and a sweater, running shoes. The telephone was off the cradle.

“As soon as I wrap up a couple of things here,” Hilde said, “I’m taking off for the cottage. My God, the phone has driven me crazy this week.” She lifted the phone, grimaced, and put it down again on its side. “Thanks, Ellen. You get some rest this weekend. I won’t be in Monday. I’ll just go straight up to Portland, be back in the evening sometime. Maybe if things are settled down here, we can get some real work done.”

They talked briefly about what needed doing on Monday; then Ellen left and headed for the back door and the path to the journalism building.

The path led among shrubs to the Little Agate Creek footbridge, wound among more shrubs and trees to the journalism building, where she cursed under her breath. Locked. She hadn’t even thought of its being locked. She glared at the building, walked around it and up a dozen steps to try a different door, also locked. Haliday must have made arrangements to have it opened for him later. The building was ivied brick, as they all were, and very quiet. There would be some students on campus, she knew, but not up and around much before noon on a Saturday of spring break. From where she stood no other building was visible, no voices audible, just an eerie silence, and deep moist shadows. She shivered and started to retrace her steps, resigned to waiting until one to return and work under the watchful eye of Haliday or one of his flunkies. Then she heard the other door close. Someone had gone in.

Maybe he was early, she thought, heading back to the main entrance. Before she got there, she reconsidered. She had not heard him approach, had not heard voices. She stopped again, then turned and hurried back to the administration building by a different path. The parking lot was empty. She didn’t enter the building, just got in her car and drove away, thinking it could have been anyone, a maintenance person, the head of the department, an instructor, anyone. She realized her fear was becoming paranoia.

She had been avoiding everyone in her own town all week, and had no idea if reporters were still hanging around, but she drove to the outskirts of Salem to shop. At home again she put away the milk and eggs, fruit and bread, and it was still too early, not yet twelve-thirty. She began to gather up the cut-up newspapers, remembered the clipping about Jordan, and retrieved it from her purse. After regarding it for a moment she added it to the papers to be bundled up for recycling. The only emotion she felt was surprise at feeling so little, even though by the act she had decided it was over with Jordan. If she let him, he would forgive her lack of trust, she knew, but the fact remained that she had not trusted him enough to confide the most dangerous secret she ever had. She wondered if Hilde would discard the clippings that concerned her former husband. Probably Hilde would keep them, she thought, remembering the wall of plaques, citations, certificates.

Then she frowned, trying to recall something she had noticed and forgotten again. Janice had been in the leather chair, Hilde pouring wine, Ellen looking around the personal collection that made the room human. Abruptly she went to the other room and rummaged in a desk drawer for a file folder. She hurried back to the kitchen and found several articles she had tossed because they had appeared in more than one newspaper; she put them in the folder.

Then she drove back to the college, this time to the president’s mansion. She rang the bell. The housekeeper, Mrs. Lawrence, opened the door.

“Has Dr. Melton left yet?” Ellen asked.

“A couple of hours ago.”

“I was afraid of that. I have some papers she wants to have on hand the minute she gets back home Monday. She told me to put them in the private sitting room if I missed her.”

Mrs. Lawrence nodded and stepped back. “Come on in, Ellen.”

“I won’t be a minute.”

Mrs. Lawrence walked with her. “That poor woman,” she said. “All this business has her beside herself, I’m sure. She can use a rest from the telephone.” She remained at the door of the sitting room when they got there.

Ellen crossed to a low table and put the folder down, remembering. Janice over there in the leather chair, Hilde at the table, Ellen trying to avoid both of them, gazing straight ahead at the diplomas, certificates, plaques, one a handsome bronze inscribed, “President American Archaeology Society, May 31, 1980 — May 31, 1986.”

Mrs. Lawrence was still talking, she realized, after they left the room and were back at the entrance. She was only vaguely aware of the puzzled look the housekeeper gave her when she said, “Thanks,” and hurried to her car.

She sat thinking for several minutes and then started her engine and drove out to the road and turned toward the campsite. One more thing, she thought.

She had not been back since that night, although she had driven past countless times on her way to the coast. Today she pulled into the gravel parking area. Few people used the site for camping overnight and only infrequently did anyone use it by day. People stopped to rest a minute, to take a walk, use the toilets, or maybe eat lunch, but it was fifteen miles to the coast from here and that was the destination of most people heading west on Crystal River Road. Today no one was in sight.

She pulled into the same spot Patty had used that night. Two other cars had been there, both of them in the center parking area, facing west, as her car was facing now. She nodded and got out of her car, and slowly walked the trail through the woods to the spot where they had made the fire near the river. The fir trees here were old growth and mammoth; the trail was like a tunnel, in perpetual dusk with glowing green mosses on rocks, trunks, fallen branches. The moss colored the dim light with its green reflection; it was like walking under water, without the water. She reached the clearing and looked all around it. The trail she had used was the only trail; the woods closed in on three sides, the river made up the fourth. Then she retraced her steps. The trail curved around trees; it was hard to find a straight line in the forests here. She remembered how his light had led the way like a living thing moving up and over rocks, a fallen tree trunk... She had been unable to look away from it. If anyone had been ahead of them with another light, she would not have seen it.

The little disk of light had led back to the parking area to his van, in line with the other cars, but facing the opposite way, toward town. If another car had been parked at the far end of the area, she would not have been able to see it. When the van lights came on, only the woods she had just left had been lighted, not the rest of the parking area.

“Blair, you’re playing hookey.” Haliday’s voice sounded close by.

She jerked around to see him leaning against a tree near the road. “Are you following me?” she demanded. Her voice was shaky.

“Yep. Nice day for a walk in the woods.”

She took a deep breath. “Haliday, I have something to tell you.”

He straightened, took the few steps to the road and motioned to someone; when a car pulled up with a strange man driving, he went to it and spoke briefly. The man nodded, turned, and left again.

“Told him I’d hitch a ride,” Haliday said, approaching Ellen. He pointed to a log. “Let’s sit down.”

On the log, plucking pieces of moss from the bark, not looking at him, she told him about that night, everything but names. For a long time he was silent. Then he said, “Show me the clearing.”

She led the way. While he looked at the fire enclosure and examined the woods encircling the space, she stood at the bank of the river gazing at the water. At this time of year it was full to overflowing with rapids, churning white water, falls; it sounded very loud.

“What time did you get here?” he asked, suddenly at her side.

“Nine-thirty or later. It was getting dark.”

“When did he show up?”

She shook her head. “At least two hours later, maybe more. I don’t know.”

He was scowling at the river below. “What made you tell me now?”

“I think someone will try to kill me,” she said.

He looked at her swiftly, then motioned toward the fire enclosure. “One of them?”

“No. The one who killed Philip, if not directly, then through them, by goading one of them to do it. I think I was supposed to break before now, tell the whole story with names, and then a lot of people would have been involved and I would have been the chief suspect and she would have been out of it.”

Very slowly Haliday said, “Who is she, Blair? Who are you talking about?”

Keeping her gaze on the frothy water below, she said, “Hilde Melton.”

He let out a breath. “Ah, Blair, how we’ve all underestimated you. Give. Why?”

“She lied about her husband being home that weekend. He was in New York being inaugurated as president of the American Archaeology Society. She lied about having days off after that weekend. If Pryor had gone to Hawaii, she would have had to stay on the job. There’s too much to do at the end of the school year for both of them to be gone. She would have known Philip had rented the apartment through the middle of June. That’s the kind of detail work we flunkies keep track of. She could have gone any night to get the manuscript and letters. So many little things, like the way the van was parked as if it had come from the coast, not from town.”

“What about the van?” Haliday asked.

“She talks about the cottage on the coast, but it’s a big house, with a two-car garage. I think she hid the van there until late one night when she drove down the coast somewhere and ran it off the road into the ocean. And her husband’s car was always kept out there, so she could have used that to get back to town. The faculty houses have small garages,” she added. “With glass panes. It would have been seen by the mailman or someone.”

He sighed. “We’re having the deep coves searched,” he said. “Nothing so far, but we’re still looking. I sure hoped something would turn up linking her to Seymour. No luck yet.”

This time she looked at him in surprise. “You suspected her? Why?”

“You,” he said. “I told her I wanted a crack at the files and she came on like a matchmaker, pushing you at me. After that note, it seemed curious. And I had to wonder why she hired you,” he said almost apologetically. “You said it yourself, you’re not presidential timber. A month or so after Langford bought that land and his plans became known, she hired you after getting along fine without an assistant for years. It seemed almost as if she did it just to keep you around, in case.” He paused and added, “And her husband’s schedule. I checked that as a matter of routine. He came out the following weekend.”

They were both silent until she said, “None of this is very conclusive, is it?”

He laughed harshly.

After a moment she asked, “What are you going to do about me?”

“You planning to run away?”

“No.”

“Then I’m going to think about it. How did you find the exact dates of her husband’s inauguration?”

She told him about the private sitting room in the mansion filled with Walter Melton’s proofs of achievement.

“Something of a pack rat?” he asked.

“Something...” She glanced at him, but he seemed absorbed in watching the swift river. “She might have kept anything from Philip, too. Not in the mansion, but in her private residence at the coast. Why did she go out there this weekend with so much going on?”

“Let’s take a ride, Blair. Let’s go look at the ocean.”

He complained about her driving on the steep winding road, and she snapped that she knew every curve in it. The road was narrow, posted the entire length for no passing, for fifteen miles an hour, ten miles; the forest pressed in close. The road descended precipitously. “Why do you keep telling me things?” she demanded, taking a curve too fast.

“Like I said, the more you know, the more help you are. A tight community like this one, if the door closes, it takes dynamite to get it open again. An insider helps. Don’t go near her house. Head into the village. I want to use a telephone.”

As they drew near the village of Crystal Beach, more and more young people appeared on the road, some walking, some on bicycles. “Spring break,” she said, slowing to a crawl. She stopped at a filling station a few minutes later and watched him go to the telephone.

“Something to eat,” he said when he got back. “A place with a view would be nice.”

Crystal Beach had a population of five hundred, but today there were dozens of college students on the streets making it appear much more populous. Weekend traffic on 101 was heavy. Haliday shook his head at a Dairy Queen, and again at a hamburger joint, and then pointed to Cap’n John’s Seafood House. So they were going to be here for a while, she thought, and pulled in to park.

It was a strange meal. They ordered, clam chowder for him, crab salad for her; he gazed out the window and said, “Pretty,” and then became silent and remained silent.

This was a rugged section of coast, with cliffs, many rocks jutting up from the water, rocky tide pools, and a narrow strip of sand. The restaurant was seventy-five feet above the beach. Down there kids were flying kites, tossing Frisbees, clambering over mountainous piles of driftwood that from here looked like a giant’s jackstraws carelessly abandoned. The water was deep blue and calm.

When the waiter came with coffee, he nodded, then ignored it. She sipped hers, waiting. He glanced at his watch several times, and the last time, got up. “Right back,” he said and left. Fifteen minutes after he returned, he grinned at her. “Time to go. Whoever taught you to keep quiet so a man could think did a good job of it.”

Her father, she thought, as they left the restaurant. Poor Dad had tried hard to teach her mother, who never had learned that particular lesson. She drove again, up 101 to Crystal River Road, back the way they had come for half a mile, and then she turned onto a narrow winding road, past two driveways, and into Hilde Melton’s drive.

“What am I supposed to do?” she asked then, reluctantly eyeing the house ahead. It was a low, rambling, unpainted cedar building, the rustic look of the wood offset by stained-glass windows on this side. Trees misshapen by the wind, wind-carved boulders, a few pieces of silvered driftwood made up the yard. Beyond, the ocean was visible.

“You don’t do a thing,” Haliday said. “Not a peep.”

They walked to the front stoop and he rang the bell.

Hilde was still wearing jeans and a sweater. She looked at the lieutenant, then at Ellen, and said angrily, “This is just too much! What are you doing out here? What do you want?”

“A couple of things came up,” Haliday said. “Can we come in?”

“Ellen, I told you you don’t have to work for this man any longer. Who is your superior, Lieutenant?” She moved aside to let them enter and slammed the door.

The room they entered was spacious and bright, with the stained-glass windows on one side and sliding glass doors on the other. A deck was beyond the doors with a view of the ocean. The furnishings inside were rattan and bentwood, with Indian print throws on chairs and a sofa, colorful cotton rugs on a wide plank floor with a nice gloss. On the deck the furniture was heavy wood, massive terracotta planters with greenery, nothing that would blow away.

“Captain Hersholt,” Haliday said. “Dr. Melton, you said you and your husband came out here Saturday morning after the big party. Are you sure? Our information is that he was in New York and didn’t get back here until the following week.”

“You asked me about an event that happened thirteen years ago. I told you what I believed was true. We always came out here after the party, I assumed we did that time, too.”

“I understand that your husband never attended college functions, that he stayed here on the coast when he was home.”

“Your informant is mistaken.”

“What kind of a car did your husband drive back then?”

Hilde was looking more and more angry; her face flushed deep crimson. She threw up her hands and turned her back on him, crossed the room to stand at the sliding door and gaze out. “This is insane,” she said. “I don’t remember what kind of car he had. He had a car and I had one.”

Ellen had not moved from the door; she watched miserably. Haliday was strolling around, looking at things, a vase with pampas grass plumes, a bowl of seashells, a magazine...

“Was it a green seventy-nine Dodge two-door?”

“I don’t know,” Hilde snapped.

“You see, our information is that you took a Dodge like that to a body shop in Salem on Friday following the death of Philip Seymour. You told them your husband had driven it off the road into bushes or something and banged it up.”

Hilde didn’t move. After a moment she said, “I did one year. I don’t remember when it was.”

“The problem is I can’t figure out how you managed to get it in town from out here and still have your own car available. I mean, if you drove out here and drove the Dodge back to town, your car must have stayed here. But on Saturday that week you went up to Portland and picked up your husband at the airport. Didn’t you?”

She turned toward them; the low sun behind her was so brilliant that she was only a black shadow. “Whatever point you’re trying to make, Lieutenant, just make it.”

He nodded. “I think Seymour followed you out here to the coast the night of the party, and for a time your car, your husband’s car, and his van were all here. When he went back to town in the van, you followed in your husband’s car, and later drove the van back out, leaving your husband’s car in the garage at the faculty residence. The following week you drove your car back to town, took your husband’s car to the shop, and all the pieces were accounted for, or will be when you tell us where you dumped the van.”

“And I don’t give a damn what you think,” she said coldly. “Now if you’ll get out of here, I have things to do.”

“I’m afraid I have to search your house, Dr. Melton,” Haliday said.

“Just exactly what do you think you’ll find?” she demanded. She went to the telephone on an end table. “You said Captain Hersholt, I believe.”

Haliday nodded. “I’d be looking for Seymour’s manuscript, personal letters, probably a lot of photographs, maybe a blue tuxedo, and a gold ring that looks like a snake.”

Hilde looked past him at Ellen then. “You finally talked,” she murmured. She stood with her hand on the telephone, then slowly removed it.

“I told him everything except names,” Ellen said.

“Why stop there?”

“Why ruin a lot of other people? They were helpless, under his spell, as I was, and you were.”

“This has been interesting,” Hilde said, moving to the front door. “When you get a proper search warrant, Lieutenant, then we can talk about searching my house. Now leave.”

She opened the door and stopped moving. Winona Kelly and a uniformed officer were on the porch. Winona held out a paper; Haliday reached past Hilde and took it, and then closed the door again. Hilde had turned waxy and pale.

She walked stiffly to the glass door and out to the deck. Haliday motioned to Ellen and they followed her. Another man in a gray suit was on the edge of the cliff facing the house. Hilde ignored him. “Lieutenant,” she said, looking toward the ocean, “there’s no need to tear up the house. In my bedroom, a cedar chest, locked. The key is in my purse on the dressing table.”

When he left Hilde said in a low voice, “That Saturday, we played all day and ate out here at sunset. Such a beautiful day. Then he said he was going. I thought he would stay until Monday or Tuesday.” She glanced at Ellen. “I wonder that you didn’t break early. I thought you would. The need to tell someone is so terribly strong, isn’t it?” She moved to the edge of the deck and stood with her head against a support post. “When he held your face and kissed your forehead, I hated him. I realized then that what he had planned involved women, sex, a ritual of some sort. I said you couldn’t drive, you were drunk, or high or something. I told him if you crashed, if you killed yourself, he would be up against manslaughter. We followed you, watched you park and start to walk home. He wanted to stop, to get the van, but I kept driving.” The wind was very cold coming in from the ocean; she seemed unaware of it. Ellen was shivering.

“Then I turned down the lane to the sheep pasture. I wasn’t planning anything, I just did it. And he put his hand on mine on the steering wheel, and he said to keep going. Then farther on, he said, turn around here, and I did. He was saying things like Walter would be back in a few days, life would go on, we had our day in the sun, the sweetest memories were forged in tears and pain... I stopped the car, and he hurt my hand. Drive, he said, and I said no. No more. He said he would walk, but first he took my face in his hands, the way he had done to you. He said you were too young, but I was too old, and which was sadder, and he kissed me on the forehead and got out of the car and started to walk. He was in the headlights, walking away, nearly naked, covered with snakes... I don’t think I meant to do anything. It was Walter’s car, an automatic, and suddenly it raced forward and hit him.” She turned away from the wind finally. Her cheeks were wet with tears.

“He hit his head on the concrete at the end of the bridge,” she said. “He was half off the bridge; his skirt had come off, and one sandal. I took off the other one. And I took a ring. I rolled him the rest of the way off the bridge into the brambles. They supported him for a long time, but finally he sank down out of sight.”

She sighed and moved to one of the heavy chairs and sat down. “Men cast such long shadows, Ellen. My famous husband, then Pryor, and finally Philip. His shadow reaches across thirteen years.”

Ellen didn’t move. She felt she had frozen into the floor of the deck, had become an ice woman. Neither spoke again until Haliday came out to the deck.

“Dr. Melton, I’m afraid I have to place you under arrest.” Another man read her rights to her; Haliday asked if she understood, and she looked bored and said of course.

“I will make a statement, nevertheless,” she said then. “Philip Seymour came to my house and forced me to accompany him at knife point. He forced me to drive his van to that place by the bridge, where he undressed and was trying to take my clothes off. We struggled. The van door opened and he fell out and hit his head. I believe he died instantly. When I tried to help him, he fell off the bridge. I was panic stricken. I think I must have blacked out then because the next thing I knew I was here, at the coast house in his van. Later, I removed his personal belongings and kept them just in case his body was recovered and anyone claimed them. I left his van in the parking lot by the Hilton Head lighthouse.” She stood up and regarded Ellen for a moment. “That is my statement. I won’t change a word of it.”

She left with Winona Kelly and another detective.

When Haliday came back, Ellen was still standing rigidly fixed in place. “Will they believe her?” she asked.

“No. But who’s going to dispute her story? It’s her word against the wind. Come on, let’s go. Your lips are blue.”

At her car he said, “Blair, would you be offended if I drive? To tell the truth your driving scares the hell out of me.”

Wordlessly she handed him the keys.

“What will happen,” he said, heading back toward Crystal Falls, “is she’ll talk to her lawyer, who will talk to some of her trustees, who will talk to the prosecutor, and that will be that. She’ll go up for something — manslaughter, obstruction of justice — something like that. It will all be discreet with little publicity. Case closed now instead of dragging out for the next five years with an uncertain conclusion.”

“You’re driving too fast,” she said after a few minutes.

“You’ve got a nerve, Blair.”

“Look, Haliday, I know the road, every curve, and at this time of day, this is too fast.”

He slowed down.

“You used me,” she said. “You left us together so she would talk. You gambled that if she knew I hadn’t told you any names, she would think of a story that would let her save face. That was deliberate, wasn’t it?”

He squealed around a curve and slowed down again. “You’ll probably lose your job, won’t you? What next?”

That was the only answer she would ever get, she knew. “I’ll have to stay until the end of the school year. It’s going to be a real mess. Then, I don’t know.”

She realized that she was now at the same place she had been two years ago when she had come home defeated. She hadn’t been able to keep a husband, to keep a job, to find a new job, and she had run home. After that the decisions had been made for her. She hadn’t resisted because she hadn’t realized how adrift she was. Even Jordan, she thought with a twinge of guilt; even with him she had let herself drift with the flow, accepting easy choices, pretending no decision had to be made as long as nothing was stated overtly. Now she had to deal with that. And Patty, she added. Something had ended there, too. How far those six people would have gone to avoid embarrassment she couldn’t guess, but they had turned their backs on murder, however they justified it. She thought of Hilde, who believed she finally had worked her way out of the shadows, only to be dragged back in. And of the other women Philip had swallowed whole, diminished. They passed the college, the president’s mansion, the beautifully maintained gardens, and she thought clearly, whatever she did after June, it would not be here.

Haliday kept driving through Crystal Falls at the posted limit of twenty miles an hour. “Where are you going?” she demanded.

“I have to check in at Salem,” he said. “Didn’t I mention that?”

“Do you own a car, Haliday?”

“You know, if you ever decided to go in for a little more schooling, criminology, something like that, you probably could get a recommendation or two to make the special investigation unit. If that would interest you.”

“Forget it, Haliday,” she snapped.

“Yeah, Blair, I will. For one thing, you’d have to call me Lieutenant, or even sir. Protocol. Show a little respect for authority.”

“So already I’m disqualified,” she said coldly.

He laughed. When he stopped the car at the courthouse in Salem, he got out and waited until she walked around to get behind the wheel, and then held out his hand. “You’re pretty good, Blair.”

They shook hands. “Thanks, Haliday. For a lot.”

He nodded. She got in the car and fastened her seat belt.

“Be seeing you, Blair.”

She waved and started to drive. In the rearview mirror she could see him watching her until she turned the corner.