At the other end of the line, The Owl swiftly disconnected the phone. "My, my, Laura," he said approvingly. 'You are a good actress after all. That was an Academy Award-winning performance."

Laura had slumped back against the pillow, her head turned from him, her sobs subsiding into quivering sighs. "I only did it because you promised that now you wouldn't hurt Jean's daughter."

"So I did," The Owl said. "Laura, you must be hungry. You haven't had a thing since yesterday morning. I can't guarantee the coffee. The counterman in the delicatessen down the hill was getting too inquisitive about me, so I went to another place. But see what else I brought."

She did not respond.

"Turn your head, Laura! Look at me!"

Wearily she obeyed. Through swollen eyes she could see that he was holding up three plastic bags.

The Owl began to laugh. "They're presents," he explained. "One is for you, one is for Jean, and one is for Meredith. Laura, can you guess what I'm going to do with them? Answer me, Laura! Can you guess what I'm going to do with them?"

78

"Sorry, Rich. No one will ever tell me that it's only a bizarre coincidence that Gloria Martin, one of the Stonecroft lunch table girls, had a pewter owl in her hand when she died," Sam said flatly.

It had been another sleepless night. After the call from Joy Lacko, he had gone straight back to the office. The file on Gloria Martin's suicide had come in from the Bethlehem police department, and together they had analyzed every word of it, as well as the newspaper accounts of her death.

When Rich Stevens got to the office at 8:00 a.m., he called them in for a conference. After listening to Sam, he turned to Joy. "What do you think?"

"At first I thought it was a slam dunk, that The Owl nut case had been killing girls from Stonecroft for the past twenty years and is back in this area," Joy said. "Now I'm not so sure. I talked to Rudy Haverman, the cop who handled Gloria Martin's suicide eight years ago. He did a very credible investigation. He told me that Martin was into that kind of junk. She apparently was big for picking up cheap tchotchkes of animals and birds and such. The one she was holding when she died was still in its plastic wrap. Haverman found the vendor who sold it to her in the local mall; she distinctly remembered Martin telling her that she was buying it as a joke."

"You say the blood-alcohol level shows that she was smashed when she died?" Stevens asked.

"She was. It registered at.20. According to Haverman, she started drinking after she was divorced, and she went so far as to tell her friends that she didn't have anything to live for."

"Joy, have you found anything in the files of the other women from the lunch table indicating that one of those pewter owls was found in their hands or in their clothing when their bodies were examined?"

"Not so far, sir," Joy admitted.

"I don't care whether or not Gloria Martin bought that owl herself," Sam said stubbornly. "The fact she had it in her hand says to me that she was murdered. So what if she told her friends she was depressed? Most people feel depressed after a divorce even if they're the ones who wanted it. But Martin was very close to her family and knew how devastated they'd be if she killed herself. She didn't leave a suicide note, and from the amount of alcohol she'd imbibed, it's a miracle to me that she managed to get the bag over her head and still hang on to the owl.".

"Do you agree with that assessment, Joy?" Rich Stevens snapped.

"I do, sir. Rudy Haverman is convinced it's a suicide, but he hasn't dealt with two other bodies with pewter owls in their pockets."

Rich Stevens leaned back and folded his hands. "For the sake of argument, let's say that whoever killed Helen Whelan and Yvonne Tepper may-and I repeat may-be involved in the death of at least one of the deceased Stonecroft lunch table girls."

"The sixth, Laura Wilcox, is missing," Sam said. "Which leaves only Jean Sheridan. I warned her yesterday to trust no one, but I'm not sure if that's going far enough. She may need actual protection."

"Where is she now?" Stevens asked.

"At her hotel. She called me around nine o'clock last night from her hotel room to thank me for something I gave her yesterday. She'd been at a cocktail party given by the president of Stonecroft Academy, and was having dinner sent up to her room. She's meeting her daughter's adoptive parents tonight and said she hoped she'd be able to calm down and get a good night's sleep."

Sam hesitated, then continued. "Rich, sometimes you've got to trust your instincts. Joy is doing a great job digging through the files on the Stonecroft deaths. Jean Sheridan would turn me down flat if I suggested she get a bodyguard, and she'd feel the same way if you offered her protection. But she likes me, and if I tell her I want to hang around with her whenever she leaves the hotel, I think she'd go along with it."

"I think that's a good idea, Sam," Stevens agreed. "All we need is to have something happen to Dr. Sheridan."

"One more thing," Sam added. "I'd like to put surveillance on one of the reunion guys who's still in town. His name is Mark Fleischman, Dr. Mark Fleischman. He's a psychiatrist."

Joy looked at Sam, her eyebrows raised in astonishment. "Dr. Fleischman! Sam, he gives the most sensible advice I've ever heard from anybody on television. A couple of weeks ago he did a program warning parents about kids who feel rejected at home or at school, and how some of them grow up damaged and emotionally warped. We see enough of that, don't we?"

"Yes, we do. But from what I understand, Mark Fleischman got badly hurt both at home and in school," Sam said grimly, "so maybe he was talking about himself."

"See who's available for surveillance," Rich Stevens said. "One more thing-we'd better list Laura Wilcox as a missing person. This is the fifth day she's been gone."

"I think that if we were being totally honest, we'd be listing her as 'missing, presumed dead,'" Sam said flatly.

79

After she hung up from Laura, Jean splashed water on her face, ran a comb through her hair, threw on her jogging suit, dropped her cell phone in her pocket, grabbed her pocketbook, and rushed out of the hotel to her car. Storm King Lookout on Route 218 was fifteen minutes from the hotel. It was still early, and traffic would be light. Normally a careful driver, she pressed her foot on the accelerator and watched the speedometer climb to seventy miles an hour. The clock showed that it was two minutes past seven.

Laura is desperate, she thought. Why does she want to meet me there? Is she planning to hurt herself? The mental image of Laura getting there first and maybe being desperate enough to climb over the railing and throw herself off haunted Jean. The Lookout was hundreds of feet above the Hudson.

The car skidded on the final turn, and for a frightening moment Jean was not sure if she could straighten it, but then the wheels righted and she could see that a car was parked near the telescope at the observation site. Let it be Laura, she prayed. Let her be there. Let her be all right.

Her tires screeched as she pulled into the parking area, turned off her engine, got out, and rushed to fling open the passenger door of the other car. "Laura – " Her greeting died on her lips. The man behind the wheel was wearing a mask, a plastic mask that was the face of an owl. The eyes of the owl, with black pupils set in pools of yellow iris, were surrounded by tufts of white down that gradually changed in color, deepening to brown around the beak and lips.