“It’s like a Madonna/whore complex, right?” posited Hilary. “When he’s rejected by the Madonna-Sara, in this case-he takes it out on a whore. Literally.”

“I’m afraid so,” said O’Connell. “It’s a cliché, I know, but in this case it seems accurate.”

“Did you ask him about the stalking letters?” I asked.

“He said he didn’t know anything about them. And given everything else he was confessing to, I don’t know why he would have held back. He was very forthright about his feelings for Sara.”

“I can’t imagine anyone wanting to own up to having written those letters,” I said. “Wow, are they bad.”

O’Connell laughed, and the conversation segued into the letters. O’Connell’s opinion as to their literary merit was no higher than my own, and he entertained us with a few particularly absurd quotes from them. Soon, we were all making suggestions as to what Sara’s secret admirer could write next, fueled in no small part by the wine we’d all been drinking.

“I’m thinking limericks,” said Sean. “Nothing says I love you like a good limerick.”

Only Jonathan didn’t seem to be enjoying the tack the conversation had taken. In fact, he was not only silent, his face seemed redder than it had earlier. As if he were embarrassed, I realized. Or angry. He excused himself abruptly, asking Jane where he could find a bathroom. The rest of the party barely noticed he’d left the table.

But I had an epiphany. And it put the final nail in the coffin of Plan B.

I added it up in my head. Beasley had seemed unusually attentive to Sara, even if he was her section leader. And he was the only one who seemed to find the letters anything but nauseating. In fact, he’d described one as “sweet.” He’d also been very quick to dismiss the letters as dangerous in any way, and he’d been fairly cavalier about preserving them as evidence, unconcerned with people touching the letters and soiling them with their own fingerprints. And if he was obsessed with Sara, it would explain my feeling that he was only going through the motions in his advances toward me.

Maybe Jonathan Beasley wasn’t a serial killer. But could he be a writer of truly awful love letters? And, even more importantly, had he been stalking his student? Was he behind the attacks on Sara?

Thirty

T hankfully, Sean insisted that all of the menfolk accompany him to the basement to inspect the progress that he and Matthew had made on the cradle. I couldn’t understand the fascination that anything involving dangerous tools like saws and hammers held over people with a Y chromosome, but it was a convenient way to get Beasley out of the room. As soon as they were safely downstairs, I told my friends about my suspicions.

“You know, Rach, just because you’re upset that Jonathan isn’t Mr. Right doesn’t mean that he’s a crazed stalker,” said Hilary. “I’m not the guy’s biggest fan, but you may be jumping to conclusions-again-for the wrong reasons.”

“I think what she’s saying makes sense,” said Emma. “I was watching him, too, and he was really getting upset when we were joking about the letters.” Emma was quiet by nature, and she tended to be unusually observant, probably because she didn’t spend as much time as the rest of us trying to figure out how to get a word in.

“There is something weird about him,” Luisa said. “I thought he was going to blow a gasket when Jane corrected him before.”

“What does that mean, anyhow, blowing a gasket?” asked Hilary.

“Most people would have just laughed it off, but he seemed to take it really personally,” said Emma.

“But he’s Sara’s professor,” Jane pointed out. “To write those letters would be really crossing a line.”

“The letters do reference a ‘forbidden love,’” I reminded her.

“Ick,” said Hilary, reaching for a nearly empty bottle to top off her wineglass.

“Well, maybe he wrote them,” Jane said. “But would he really attack her?”

“You clearly have not been watching enough Lifetime Television for Women,” I answered. “Stalkers always end up trying to kill the women they love.”

“How much Lifetime Television for Women is enough Lifetime Television for Women?” countered Luisa.

“Okay,” said Jane. “Maybe Beasley is behind the letters. But how can we prove it?”

“I have an idea,” I told them. “But I’m going to need help.”

There was some debate about whether we should simply confide in O’Connell, but while I’d redeemed myself somewhat with the capture of Grant Crocker, I wasn’t willing to formally make another accusation against Jonathan without tangible proof. We came up with an alternative plan and none too soon. The guys trooped up from the basement just as we were finalizing the details.

“You all look like you’re plotting something,” said Matthew, taking in the five of us seated around the kitchen island with our empty wineglasses. My friends talking over the remains of a drinking session was a sight he’d seen on far too many occasions not to be suspicious of what we might be hatching.

“Oh, you know, the usual. Just figuring out how to overthrow the patriarchy,” said Hilary brightly.

“I thought you’d already done that.”

“We’re moving on to the second phase,” Emma said, taking hold of Matthew’s hand and looking up at him. “Beware, white males.”

“We stand warned,” he answered good-naturedly.

I stretched and let forth with an enormous yawn. “I’m sorry to be the first to break up the party, but I’m exhausted.”

Fortunately, Jonathan offered to drop me back at the hotel. It took a while to say good-night to everyone, but we had one more dinner planned for the following night, so these weren’t final goodbyes. Ten minutes later, Jonathan was unlocking the door of his car and helping me into the passenger seat. As he walked around the front of the car, I transferred my cell phone from my purse and into my left hand. I dialed Jane’s cell-phone number, heard her pick up and lowered my hand under the seat, so the phone wouldn’t be visible to Jonathan when he got in the car.

Under normal circumstances, this would have been an awkward ride home in a banal way. I’d realized that he wasn’t for me. And I’d also realized that while Jonathan may have been going through the motions of pursuing me, he didn’t really have his heart in it. Even before I’d decided Jonathan was Sara’s stalker, something in the dynamic between us had shifted, and I had a feeling that he sensed it, too. The banality would be due to the loss of the initial enthusiasm of which we wouldn’t speak but that would tinge the drive with a stale and slightly sour quality. Tingling was a thing of the past, and while I would mourn its potential efficacy in calorie-burning, I couldn’t say I would mourn its source.

But the good news was that I had more important things to do than make awkward small talk to fill up the ten minutes it would take us to get to the hotel.

“That was a nice dinner,” said Jonathan. “Your friends are really neat.”

There were many adjectives I would use to describe my friends, but “neat” wasn’t high on the list. Still, I let it pass, saying instead, “So, Jonathan, do you want to tell me about writing the letters to Sara?”

The car swerved into the opposite lane, and then nearly hit a parked car when he overcorrected back to our side of the road. “What? What are you talking about?” The note of surprise in his voice sounded strained, and it erased any last doubt I may have had.

“I’m talking about you being the one who wrote the letters to Sara. It’s pretty obvious that it must have been you.”

Headlights from behind us flashed in the rearview mirror, and Jonathan busied himself with adjusting its angle. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he repeated through clenched teeth. A nerve twitched along the line of his chiseled jaw. “Haven’t you made enough ridiculous accusations for one day?”