"Let me come up with you."

"No. It's going to be all business. I'll take you on a real vacation, after this is all over."

"The thought of you going up there all alone depresses me. It's dreary this time of year."

"I'll be fine. You just take care of yourself and get some work done. I'll call you when I get settled."

"You're sure you don't want me to come along?"

"You know I love your company, but there'll be no time for sightseeing. You'd be miserable."

"All right," she said reluctantly. "I'll miss you."

"I'll miss you too. I love you. Take care."

"The same goes for you. Love you, sweetie. Bye bye."

"Bye."

I took a 9 p.m. flight out of LAX and landed at Sea - Tac Airport at 11:25. I picked up a rented Nova at a Hertz desk. It was no Seville but it did have an EM. radio that someone had left on a classical station. A Bach organ fugue in a minor key unraveled out of the dash speaker and I didn't cut it off: the music matched my mood. I confirmed my reservation at the Westin, drove away from the airport, connected to the Interstate highway and headed north toward downtown Seattle.

The sky was as cold and hard as a handgun. Minutes after I hit the blacktop the gun proved to be loaded: it fired a blast of thunder and the water started coming down. Soon it was one of those angry Northwest torrents that transforms a highway into miles of drive - thru car wash.

"Welcome to the Pacific Northwest," I said out loud.

Pine, spruce and fir grew in opaque stands on both sides of the road. Starlit billboards advertised rustic motels and diners offering logger's breakfasts. Except for semis groaning under loads of timber I was the road's sole traveler. I thought to myself how nice it would be to be heading for a mountain cabin, Robin at my side, with a trunk load of fishing gear and provisions. I felt a sudden pang of loneliness and longed for human contact.

I reached downtown shortly after midnight. The Westin rose like a giant steel - and - glass test tube amid the darkened laboratory of the city. My seventh - floor room was decent, with a view of Puget Sound and the harbor to the west, Lake Washington and the islands to the east. I kicked off my shoes and stretched out on the bed, tired, but too jumpy for sleep.

I caught the sign - off edition of the news on a local station. The anchor man was wooden - jawed and shifty - eyed, and reported the day's events impersonally. He lent identical emphasis to an account of mass murder in Ohio and the hockey scores. I cut him off in mid - sentence, turned off the lights, stripped down in darkness and stared at the harbor lights until I fell asleep.

21

A thousand yards of rain forest shielded the Jedson campus from the coastal road. The forest yielded to twin stone columns engraved with Roman numerals that marked the origin of a cobbled drive running through the center of the college. The drive terminated in a circular turn - around punctuated by a pockmarked sundial under a towering pine.

At fist glance, Jedson resembled one of those small colleges back East that specialize in looking like dwarf Harvards. The buildings were fashioned of weathered brick and embellished with stone and marble cornices, slate and copper roofing - designed in an era when labor was cheap and intricate moldings, expansive arches, gargoyles and goddesses the order of the day. Even the ivy looked authentic, tumbling from slate peaks, sucking the brick, trimmed topiary - fashion to bypass recessed, leaded windows.

The campus was small, perhaps half a square mile, and filled with tree - shaded knolls, imposing stands of oak, pine, willow, elm and paper birch, and clearings inlaid with marble and bordered by stone benches and bronze monuments. All very traditional until you looked to the west and saw manicured lawns dipping down to the dock and the private harbor beyond. The slips were occupied by streamlined, teak - decked cruisers, fifty - foot craft and larger, topped with sonar and radar screens and clutches of antennae: clearly twentieth - century, obviously West Coast.

The rain had lifted and a triangle of light peeked out from under the charcoal folds of the sky. A few knots out of the harbor an armada of sailboats sliced through water that looked like tin foil. The boats were rehearsing some type of ceremony, for they each rounded the same buoy marker and unfurled outrageously colored spinnakers - oranges, purples, scar lets and greens, like the tail feathers of a covey of tropical birds.

There was a lucite - encased map on a stand and I consulted it to locate Crespi Hall. The students passing by seemed a quiet lot. For the most part they were apple - cheeked and flaxen - haired, their eye color traversing the spectrum from light blue to dark blue. Their hairstyles were expensively executed but seemed to date from the Eisenhower age. Trousers were cuffed, pennies shined prettily from the tops of loafers and there were enough alligators on shirts to choke the Everglades. A eugenicist would have been proud to observe the straight backs, robust physiques and stiff - lipped self - assurance of those to the manor born. I felt as if I'd died and gone to Aryan Heaven.

Crespi was a three - story rhomboid fronted by Ionic columns of varicose - veined white marble. The public relations office was hidden behind a mahogany door labeled in gold stencil. When I opened it, the door creaked.

Margaret Dopplemeier was one of those tall, rawboned women predestined for spinsterhood. She'd tried to couch an ungainly body in a tentlike suit of brown tweed, but the angles and corners showed through. She had a big - jawed face, uncompromising lips, and reddish - brown hair cut in an incongruously girlish bob. Her office was hardly larger than the interior of my car - public relations was obviously not a prime concern for the elders of Jedson - and she had to squeeze between the edge of her desk and the wall to get up to greet me. It was a maneuver that would have looked clumsy performed by Pavlova and Margaret Dopplemeier turned it into a lurching stumble. I felt sorry for her but made sure not to show it: She was in her midthirties and by that age women like her have learned to cherish self - reliance. It's as good a way as any of coping with solitude.

"Hello, you must be Alex."

"I am. Pleased to meet you, Margaret." Her hand was thick, hard and chafed - from too much wringing or too much washing, I couldn't be sure.

"Please sit down."

I took a slat - backed chair and sat in it uncomfortably.

"Coffee?"

"Please. With cream."

There was a table with a hot plate in back of her desk. She poured coffee into a mug and gave it to me.

"Have you decided about lunch?"

The prospect of looking across the table at her for an extra hour didn't thrill me. It wasn't her plainness, nor her stern face. She looked ready to tell me her life story and I was in no mood to fill my head with extraneous material. I declined.

"How about a snack, then?"

She brought forth a tray of cheese and crackers, looking uncomfortable in the role of hostess. I wondered why she'd gravitated toward pr. Library science would have seemed more fitting. Then the thought occurred to me that public relations at Jedson was probably akin to library work, a desk job involving lots of clipping and mailing and very little face - to - face contact.

"Thank you." I was hungry and the cheese was good.

"Well." She looked around her desk, found a pair of eyeglasses, and put them on. Behind the glass her eyes grew larger and somehow softer. "You want to get a feel for Jedson."

"That's right - the flavor of the place."

"It's quite a unique place. I'm from Wisconsin myself, went to school at Madison, with forty thousand students. There are only two thousand here. Everyone knows everyone else."