It was difficult to believe that my whole balloon of happiness had been inflated by the simple fact that I'd given a man an erection. But when I tracked my new attitude down to its source, this was what I found. Well, what the hey. I'd settle. It wasn't the erection per se. It was the fact that I still had it. Okay, granted, to excite the human male was fairly easy (sometimes just the state of breathing was enough). But Robin had standards above that, I told myself stoutly. He'd had a high-powered agent, he'd had women in Hollywood (where beautiful women were a dime a dozen), and still, yours truly had excited him. I had a suspicion that if I examined my line of reasoning I would find many flaws, but that wasn't the kind of mood I was in.

I was determined not to brood on Celia Shaw's terrible end. I told myself briskly that Arthur was on the case and he was a good detective, and I should leave it at that. I took another rotation in front of the mirror, deciding that my bottom looked real good in these pants. I dabbed on some perfume. I'd managed to cheer myself up to my former level by the time I breezed through the employees' entrance into the library, slung my purse into my little locker and pocketed the key, and collected my usual pile of memos and mailings from my pigeonhole in Patricia Bledsoe's office.

She looked up from her computer, gave me a brisk nod, and returned to her work. I nodded right back, and began flipping through the medley of garbage that was my daily tree consumption. Lying between memos from the regional director about how many hours of course work were required to keep one's library degree current, and the seasonal reminder detailing the symptoms of head lice, was a plain dime-store envelope (in these days, you should call it a plain Wal-Mart envelope, I guess) with a folded sheet inside. I never got personal mail at the library. Only my name was written on the outside, in neat block capitals.

"Patricia, who brought this in?" I asked, holding it up so she could get a look at it.

"I don't know. It was on the floor by the checkout desk this morning, Perry said. He brought it back here," Patricia said. She didn't seem too interested. As usual, she was ironed, starched, aligned, and every other straight-and-narrow adjective I could recall.

"Well, hmph," I said. I put everything else down and borrowed Patricia's letter opener, which seemed to irritate the woman. Tough. I tapped the letter out of the envelope; a plain sheet of five-by-eight white lined paper, torn from a tablet.

It said, "You Whore she's not even buried and your after her boyfriend."

I stared at it as if it were a poisonous snake. I wanted it to go away, or to say anything other than what it actually said. I took a deep breath and tried to think what to do next. An almost irresistible impulse seized me, told me to rip the paper to shreds and burn those shreds. I didn't want to admit to myself that someone had directed words so venomous to me, much less admit to anyone else that I had received such a message. But Duty is practically my middle name—well, maybe Conventional, or Law-abiding— anyway, I had to call the police.

Of course, the cop who answered the call was Arthur Smith.

He held the paper with a pair of tweezers as he read it. His face remained blank. "This is very interesting," Arthur said, in a voice that would've sounded genuinely detached if I hadn't known him so well. He asked Patricia the same questions I had about the letter's provenance, plus about twenty more, all designed to elicit any detail she might have omitted.

It was interesting to watch Arthur with Patricia. She answered his questions clearly and in detail, but she never looked directly at him, and she didn't elaborate. It was like she was counting out the words she had to use to get her message delivered, and that was the number she would utter—that many, and no more. To my alert eyes, Patricia looked absolutely relieved when Arthur drew me from her little office into the employee lounge, which was deserted.

"You've been with the writer with the stupid name?" he asked.

He knew quite well who Robin was.

"Depends on what you mean by ‘been with,'" I replied. "If you're talking biblical, that's none of your business. But my mother asked him over to dinner last night, and we had to sneak him out of the motel so the reporters wouldn't follow. So, yes, I've spent time with him. I've known him for years." It was remarkable how defensive I sounded for someone without a guilty conscience.

"Who knew this?" Arthur was nothing if not tenacious.

"Any of the movie people at the hotel, I guess," I said slowly, thinking as I spoke. "My family—my mother and John's family, that is. And Shelby helped me get Robin out of the motel, so Shelby and Angel knew." I detailed the little plot to Arthur. It all sounded silly today, though yesterday it had seemed to make perfect sense.

"A lot of people," Arthur said. He looked at the letter again, frowning. "I don't want to alarm you, Roe, but you should do some thinking. The last woman who dated Robin Crusoe got smothered. Now you've gotten a nasty letter."

I was flabbergasted. "There's a great distinction between being killed and getting an anonymous letter," I said, trying to sound tart and undaunted. But I was turning over what he'd told me, and I was dismayed; and that was what Arthur had wanted, for whatever reason.

"What was the name of the secretary?" he asked me, out of the blue.

"The lady you just met? Patricia Bledsoe," I said.

"Is she new to Lawrenceton?"

"Comparatively. She's lived here maybe a year."

"She have family?" he asked idly.

"She's got a son, Jerome. He's in the fifth or sixth grade, I think."

Arthur stared at the wall of her office as if it would open to reveal Patricia Bledsoe. He shook his head as though whatever he was trying to recall just wouldn't pop into his head, a feeling with which I was all too familiar.

"Where's she from?" he asked, as if he were losing interest.

"She never talks about herself." That was a remarkable thing all by itself. "I only know from seeing her application that she moved here from Savannah."

"Savannah. Okay, let me get this back to the station, send it off to the crime lab. You get any other mail like this, you call me right away. You did the right thing." He sounded a little surprised.

"Yes, I know," I said, taken aback by all this unnecessary chatter. This wasn't like Arthur.

"I'd stay away from Robin Crusoe," he threw over his shoulder, which was far more Arthur-esque. Suddenly, he turned around, marched over to me with purpose in every step, and kissed me. I could not have been more surprised if he'd unzipped his pants. Stunned and unhappy, but anxious not to hurt Arthur's feelings—we'd hurt each other enough over the years—I endured the pressure of his lips, my hands hanging limp at my sides.

Then it was over, and he stepped back, giving me a baffled, angry look that I didn't know how to interpret. He walked out without looking back.

Arthur was like a dog with a favorite old bone, I decided as I wiped my mouth and set my mind in the right mode for work. He couldn't quite forget about it, and he couldn't quite abandon it. He kept digging it up and chewing on it, then putting it back in the ground.

That was where our long-ago affair should stay; dead and buried.

Mondays are always iffy at the library. Some Mondays are just dead; people are running errands and shopping and picking their work week back up after the weekend. But then, we have regulars who finish their library books on the weekend and come in Monday for a new supply. Teachers are fond of assigning term papers on Monday, and there are kids who come in to check out all the available books on a certain subject so they'll be sure of a resource.