“I hate that. I just hate it.”

“I know. But, honey, I don’t know what else to say.”

Ashley sighed, then turned to her father and smiled. “He just freaked me out a little. It will be okay. Guys like him, Dad, they’re really cowards when you get right down to it. Maybe he was strutting a bit when he took the money, but really he was pretty shut down. He’ll go out, call me names when he’s drinking with his buddies, and move on. I don’t much like it, and you’re out some cash…”

“Damnedest thing,” Scott said. “He said he didn’t want it, then he put it in his pocket. It was almost like he was tape-recording us. Saying one thing, doing another. Creepy.”

“Well, let’s hope it’s all over.”

“Yeah. Look, here’s the drill. Any sign of him, and I mean anything, and you call home. Get your mom on the case, or Hope or me, right away. Anytime, day or night, got it? And I mean any sort of suspicion that he’s been tailing you or calling you, or harassing you, or even just watching you, and you call. You get a bad feeling and you call, okay?”

“Yes. Look, Dad, Michael creeped me out, too. I’m not looking to be heroic here. I just want my life to go back to what it was, even if it wasn’t all that perfect.”

She sighed again, undid her seat belt, grabbed her purse, and took out her apartment keys.

“You want me to walk you up?”

“No. Just wait until I’m inside, though, if you don’t mind.”

“Look, honey, I don’t mind anything. I just want you to be happy. And I’d like to forget about this whole incident, and Michael O’Connell, and watch you get your master’s or doctorate in art history and have a wonderful life. That’s what I want, and your mother, too. And that’s what’s going to happen. Trust me. And before too long you’re going to meet someone special, and all this will just be like a little blip on the past. You’ll never think about it again.”

“A little nightmare blip.” She leaned across and kissed him on the cheek. “Thanks, Dad. And thanks for driving and coming and helping and just, I don’t know, for being who you are.”

This made him feel quite wonderful, but he shook his head. “You’re the special one.”

Ashley got out of the car, and Scott gestured her toward the front of the apartment building. “Now get a good night’s rest and call us tomorrow just to touch base.”

She nodded. Scott had one other curious thought, which seemed to come out of some darkened place within him, and before he could stop himself, he asked, “Hey, Ashley, one thing bothered me.”

She was about to shut the car door, but stopped and leaned in. “What’s that?”

“Had you told O’Connell anything about me? Or your mother?”

“No…,” she said hesitantly.

“Like on that first and only bad date, did you talk about us at all?”

She shook her head. “Why?”

He smiled. “No reason. No reason at all. Get inside. Call tomorrow.”

Ashley smiled, pushed the hair back from her eyes, and nodded. Scott gave her another smile, said, “It will only take me a couple of minutes to get home at this time of night. All the troopers have the night off.”

“Don’t ever grow up, Dad. It would disappoint me.” Then Ashley closed the door and bounded up the steps to her building. It only took her a second or two to open the outside door, enter the sally port, then open the second door. She turned as she entered and waved to Scott, who still waited until he saw her heading up the stairs before he put the car in gear and pulled out of the hydrant slot, wondering, in that second, just precisely how it was that O’Connell had known to call him professor.

“So, they felt safe?”

“Yes. Safe enough. Not that exhilarating we-dodged-a-bullet sensation, but enough right for that moment. They still had some doubts and some concerns. Some residual anxiety. But, for the most part, they actually felt safe.”

“But they shouldn’t have?”

“Would I be telling you all this if that was the end of it all? Five thousand dollars and a so-long-see-you-later fare-thee-well?”

“Of course not.”

“I told you. This is a story about dying.”

When I failed to respond, she looked up and out a window. Sunlight seemed to catch her face, illuminating her profile. “Doesn’t it make you wonder,” she said slowly, “how things can be turned upside down in one’s life so easily? I mean, what protects us? I suppose the religious fundamentalist would say faith. The academic would say knowledge. The physician might say skill and learning. The police officer might say a nine-millimeter semiautomatic pistol. The politician might say the law. But really, what is it?”

“You don’t expect me to answer that question, do you?”

She tossed her head back and laughed out loud. “No. Not at all. At least, not yet. Of course, neither could Ashley.”

15

Each in his or her own way felt unease over the following days, almost as if a low-hanging cloud of deep gray fog had settled onto their lives. When Scott replayed the meeting with Michael O’Connell over again in his mind, it seemed curiously inconclusive one instant, then strangely decisive the next.

He told Ashley that he wanted to hear from her daily, just to make sure that things were okay, and so they set up a regular early-evening phone call. Ashley, even with her fiercely independent streak, had not objected. He was unaware that Sally had proposed precisely the same arrangement.

For her part, Sally suddenly found that nothing in her life seemed in order. It was a little as if she had become detached from all the anchors in her existence, with the single exception being Ashley, and even that was tenuous. The purpose for her daily phone calls to her daughter, she came to understand, had as much to do with regaining some sort of foothold on who she was herself as with being reassured that Ashley was okay. After all, she told herself, the incident with O’Connell was merely the sort of commonplace unpleasantness that all young people go through at some point.

But far more disturbing to her was the less-than-effective work she was doing in her law practice, and the growing tension between Hope and herself. Clearly, something was wrong, but she could not bring herself to focus on it. Instead, she threw herself into her various cases, but in a distracted, erratic way, where she would devote too much time to a small issue dogging one case, while ignoring large problems that shouted for attention in others.

Hope merely dragged herself through each day, wondering what was happening. Sally wouldn’t really fill her in, she couldn’t call Scott, and for the first time in all the years she and Sally had been together, she thought it was inappropriate for her to call Ashley. She threw herself into the team, as it pushed toward the play-offs, and into her counseling work with struggling underclassmen. She felt as if she were walking across shards of broken glass.

When Hope received an urgent message from the school’s dean of faculty, it took her by surprise. The command was cryptic: Be in my office at 2 p.m. Sharp.

Some thin, wispy clouds were scudding across a slate-colored sky as Hope hurried across the campus to be on time for her meeting. She could feel a sullen pre-winter cold creeping through the air. The dean’s office was in the main administration building, a remodeled, white Victorian home, with wide, brown wooden doors, and a fireplace in a reception area with a log burning. None of the students ever went there unless they were in deep trouble.

She pushed her way in, nodded to some of the office workers, and went up to the second floor, where the dean of faculty had his small office. He was a veteran of the school and still taught a section of Latin and a class in ancient Greek, clinging to classics that were increasingly unpopular.