Stratton immediately recognized the voice. "Jeff!"

"Mr. Crocker, to you." Crocker beamed and threw an arm around Stratton's shoulders. "How are you, Tom? You look like hell."

"You too."

"Editors are supposed to look like hell. It's in their contract."

"Yeah, well, I've been driving all day and I'm beat."

They walked the campus, making small talk. Crocker had been a reporter for the local newspaper when Stratton had been a student at St. Edward's. Now he was executive editor.

"They even let me teach a journalism class out here."

"God help us," Stratton said with a ghost of a smile. "The National Star comes to Pittsville."

They gravitated to the beer cellar in the basement of the cafeteria. It was five o'clock, still early for the campus drinkers, so Stratton and Crocker had no trouble finding a quiet booth.

Halfway through his first beer Crocker said, "I kind of expected to see you at the funeral."

"I couldn't come, Jeff. I was in China."

"With David? When it happened?"

Stratton told him what he could.

"It was such a shock," Crocker said. "The irony. After all those years, to return-only to die."

"He told me he was writing new lectures."

"Yes," Crocker said. "We did a feature story before he left. David always felt there was a thirty-year gap in history, at least for him. By going back he hoped to fill that empty space so he could bring his students up to date. The way he talked, the trip was purely a scholar's survey… hell, we all knew better, Tom.

You should have seen how excited he was." Crocker polished off the beer. "He was packed two weeks before the plane left. Isn't that the David Wang we knew?"

"Orderly, to the extreme," Stratton said fondly.

"Yup. It was so sad. The service was very lovely."

"I would like to have been here, Jeff. You know that."

"Have you been up there yet?" Crocker motioned with his head. Stratton knew where he meant.

"No, not yet. I'll walk up in a little while. Is the house still open?"

"They decided to lock it up after David died. To protect his library as much as anything." Crocker winked. "The key's in a flowerpot on the porch."

"Thanks."

"On my way back to town I'll tell Gulley you're up there, so he won't get all worked up and send a squad car when he sees the lights."

Stratton said, "I'll only stay a little while."

"Stay as long as you want," Crocker said. "Don't cheat yourself."

Outside, darkness had gathered swiftly under a purple quilt of threatening clouds. Stratton set out for the Arbor with a quick stride, freshened by the cool stirrings of the birch and pine. All around him students lugging books hurried to beat the rain. Past the biology building, which looked and smelled like a morgue, the campus ended and the old trees gave way to a sloping, blue-green valley. All this had once been pasture, part of the old dairy David Wang had purchased after his arrival at St. Edward's. The valley was narrow and sharply defined, and halfway up the far slope Stratton could see the trees, David's trees, a lush wall of maple and pine and oak. At the top of that hill was the old farmhouse. Beyond that, on the downslope past another tall grove, was the bluff where David's coffin lay, near a lone oak. Stratton had no desire to visit the gravesite. An empty place, it mocked him in his nightmares.

The house was something else again-all the hours they had spent together there, the student and his teacher. It was there Stratton had shared his private agony-Man-ling-and tried to explain it over and over until David had gently touched his arm and said, "I understand, Tom. War."

"Murder." Stratton had wept. "Murder."

"I understand, Tom."

And from the confession had come a silent bond more powerful than any in Stratton's life. Often in the evening the two of them would sit on the porch, sipping tea, watching the hillside go dark. Stratton learned to talk of other things, and finally the nightmares went away. Because of David, Stratton had left St. Edward's a man reconciled to his past.

Now the wind came in fits, slapping at the leaves of the trees. Stratton jumped a clear brook and bounded up the hill in a rush toward the old clapboard house.

He clomped onto the wooden porch at full tilt.

For a few moments he stood there, facing the Arbor, trying to catch his breath.

The cool wind raked through his hair and made him shiver.

It was almost nightfall.

Stratton found the flowerpot on a freshly painted window-sill. The house key lay half buried behind a splendid pink geranium.

The key fit easily, but before Stratton could turn it, the door gave way.

Crocker was wrong. It had not been locked.

Stratton groped in the darkness, cursing loudly when his knee cracked against the corner of an unseen table. His hand found a hanging lamp and turned the switch.

He stood in the middle of David Wang's library. Ranks of books marched from floor to ceiling. There was the burgundy leather chair with the worn and discolored arm rests. There was the giant Webster's on its movable stand; David would drag it all over the house, wherever he happened to be reading. And there in one corner was the newest thing in the room, a grandfather clock. Never on time, never on key, it had been a recent gift from the faculty club.

Stratton felt warm and safe in this place.

His eyes climbed to a high spot in one of the bookcases where David had tenderly arranged several framed photographs of his family. Stratton moved closer and stood on his toes. One picture in particular intrigued him: two young men at the waterfront, arms around each other's shoulders. They could have been twins, they looked so much alike. Both young men in the sepia photograph smiled for the camera, but those smiles told Stratton which of them was leaving Shanghai Harbor that day. David's smile was bright with hope, his brother's strained with envy.

"Yes, it was a sad farewell."

The voice cut through Stratton like a blast of arctic air. He had no time to speak, no time to turn around. He heard a grunt, and then his skull seemed to explode, and he felt himself falling slower and slower like ashes from a mountaintop.

CHAPTER 27

The photo album had a royal blue cover and a gold stripe. It was old and worn, with tape for hinges. The album contained faded black-and-white pictures, a half century old, of wicked, life-giving Shanghai. There were photos of New York in the 1930s as well, of a self-conscious young man in stiff white shirt and broad necktie posed before municipal landmarks: Grant's Tomb, the spanking new Empire State Building.

The album had been David Wang's favorite.

He would sit at his desk in the old farmhouse and turn the well-remembered pages. Before a man can understand where he is going he must first come to terms with where he has been. Sometimes David Wang found refuge in the album when he had a visitor. From it he would extract lessons that matched the problem the visitor brought. Once Thomas Stratton, nerves jangled, memories still too fresh, had sat before the cumbersome old farmer's desk and watched David Wang finger the pages to the accompaniment of a gentle, wise man's monotone.

"Ah, Shanghai, what a city it was, Thomas. A cauldron of the very best and the very worst there is to life. Luxury unbounded. But for most, inconceivable misery. Too much misery. It had to change, but alas, it took the Communists to do it. We are all a bit like Shanghai, aren't we? We all change. Every day we are different. And if we are smart, smarter than the Communists, we do not destroy the good. We destroy the bad, edge it out slowly but surely-ruthlessness, cruelty, injustice, rash behavior. We build on what is good, like the body repairing a wound, forcing out the infection, replacing good for bad. Why, I remember as a boy in Shanghai… "