Mary made sure to check the in-box a second time. There was another message there, called “Study Guide.” Mary clicked on it.

It was a picture of a dog, one of those big, happy breeds you see on television commercials. Beneath the dog Williams had typed, “Here is Pig’s dog, Lady.”

Lady was a black Lab.

15

On Tuesday Dennis tried to see Elizabeth, but she wouldn’t take his phone calls. When he got the old man he hung up quickly.

He walked around campus, then jogged, then broke out into a full sprint down Montgomery Street. He was in his khakis and blazer, his glasses sliding down his face, his hair smacking his forehead. When he got to the end of the street he stopped, bent over with his hand on his knees, and closed his eyes tightly. It had been a long time since he’d run, years, and it felt good. The muscles in his legs surged with heat. His heart banged in his chest. Torture yourself, Dennis, he thought. Go on. The stoplight changed, and Dennis started to cross Pride when he heard her behind him.

“I was working.”

He faced her. She was wearing a beige trench coat, and her books were slung up on her shoulder. It was true, she had been working: her eyes were tired, blood vessels broken here and there. He reached out for her hand but she pulled away from him.

“There’s so much going on,” she explained.

Dennis looked off. Evening was falling, and the streetlights were coming to life. “Yeah,” he said.

“My dissertation is coming up soon. It’s just not right to work all these years and not give it my best.”

“What are you writing it on, Elizabeth?” he asked. He looked in her eyes, trying to gauge her. She didn’t flinch.

“You know that, Dennis. Caretaking. How human beings take care of one another. How innately human that is.”

“Protection,” Dennis said.

“Yes.”

“Good luck with that.”

“Thank you, Dennis.”

“I just have one thing to ask you,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Is the link San Francisco?” he asked. “Or is it Pig?”

Again, there was no movement. No slit of the eyes, nothing. She stared at him. But when she opened her mouth to speak he saw it, just barely, in the way she failed to say anything. In the way her voice just slightly changed timbre.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

He nodded. It was over, then. As quickly as it had begun. He turned back toward the intersection, and when there were no cars coming he broke into a sprint again and felt the roar in his ears. A hundred feet on, when he looked back to see if she was still there, she was. Standing in the same spot. That night he would wonder about it ceaselessly: Had she been crying? Was that movement to her face a tug of the collar over her cheeks to block the wind, or was it something else?

Elizabeth reminded him, standing there, of his father. How strange. How you never could quite figure him out. His posture, his glances. How you would often look back at him after he’d left you somewhere-at school, at a soccer match-and wonder what he was thinking. Teaching, he’d told Dennis, is the greatest learning tool. And back to his papers he would go. He would shut himself inside his den for hours, and when Dennis’s mother said, “Go check on your father,” he would peek in to find the man slumped over at his desk, head down, asleep.

It was a long, sleepless night. Dennis had known it was over with Elizabeth before, when she dropped him off after the Kingsley Hotel, but there was a lack of closure. Hadn’t she granted it to him? Hadn’t she given him what he needed?

Yes. But it was all so backhanded. Underhanded, even. Wrong.

Because he still wanted her. Before she had met him yesterday on Montgomery, he was through with it. Now, suddenly, she crowded his thoughts.

Wrong. It was fucking wrong to do someone the way she had.

There was still a way, he knew. Elizabeth Orman herself had given it to him at the Kingsley. She had given him the trump card, his way back to her. He couldn’t get to her by calling her on the phone, just as he couldn’t get to his father by knocking on the door of his den and asking to come in. Even with all his honesty and his charm he knew that he would have to find another way back to Elizabeth.

And so Dennis decided to play the card she had given him.

Three Weeks Left

16

Wednesday’s guest speaker was a policeman, introduced simply as Detective Thurman. Thurman stood at the podium and addressed the class with his hands trembling. Professor Williams took a seat with his class and scribbled notes along with his students, pondering Thurman’s points here and there, laughing at the man’s crude jokes. The detective had an impressive paunch and spoke in a smoker’s whisper. His face was just shaved and irritated, and only a mustache, stained from years of nicotine and stress, remained. He had big fat hands that were all nicked up, Mary assumed, from days spent tending his garden. He had brought Professor Williams a huge paper sack of vegetables. Tomatoes, he’d scrawled on the bag.

“It’s not how you think,” he told the class. “Solving crimes ain’t the easiest thing in the world. I know you all are smart. I mean, I know Winchester is like Yale and Harvard”-some of them had a laugh at that comment-“but still. It takes a deeper intelligence to solve crimes. They’re like locks. You pick the first tumbler, and you feel something slide into place. That’s one theory. But there’s more. The pin slides in deeper, past the first set of tumblers to the second, and you have to pick them, too. And then there’s a third set, way down in the back of the mechanism, almost impossible to get to. You’ve got a perp? Okay. Does he have an alibi? He does not. Okay. What’s his motive? He’s got a viable motive? Okay. Can you find the evidence to convict him in court? It’s a series of tumblers that you have to go through, and when the last one falls into place the lock slides apart and you can get inside the thing to look around. A lot of people think there’s some voilà moment where everything becomes clear. Well, it ain’t like that. It just isn’t.”

Thurman paused then and shuffled through his index cards. His hands were still trembling, those thick knuckles knocking against the podium. “Now,” he said, his voice quavering. “I understand you all have a crime to solve. Mr. Williams has asked me not to speak specifically about your assignment. I might, you know, give somebody some tips.” He laughed, a musical little snort that blared out of one nostril. “But I can talk about missing girls. Lord, I can go on all day about missing girls.”

The detective took a sip from the Dasani bottle he had brought with him. Cleared his throat. He was looking at the class now with a glaring intensity, his eyes slick and wet. “There was this one,” he said. “Deanna Ward. You all may have heard of her.”

Mary sucked in a breath. She’d heard that name before somewhere, but she couldn’t remember exactly when. She shut her eyes and tried to recall it.

On Professor Williams’s desk. The yellowed paper, the typewritten words:

Deanna would be the same age as Polly if not

Was this the same girl? Mary opened her eyes again and focused on the detective. She suddenly knew that she should pay close attention to what he said. There was going to be important information divulged today, she thought.

“This is when I was down in Cale, working the homicide beat,” the detective went on. “Deanna went missing-oh, ’bout ’eighty-six or so. Young girl. Teenager. Student at Cale Central there. Her momma told me she had eloped with her boyfriend. The whole family seemed unconcerned about it all. Had this ‘it’ll pass’ attitude, you know. Yet they had called the police in, so figure that. Anyway, we didn’t think too much of it. We sent one of our detectives out to snoop around, find out if they’d gone to Vegas or somewhere to get hitched. But the boy came back alone. He had just been visiting his dad in Cincinnati and when he came back he was shocked. He thought, you see, that the girl had left him for another boy.