“Bye-bye, now,” Vesta called as I staggered out of the office. I didn't answer, for my head was spinning, full of the frightening words I'd just heard. Suspicious lump, cancer, mastectomy, biopsy, operation, chemo. To those words, I added the unspoken ones. Disfigurement, nausea from chemotherapy, and quite possibly an early death. If I hadn't put my checkup off for five years, would this have happened? One thing I knew for sure, I'd never let another year go by without one.

Somehow I found myself sitting in the front seat of my car with no recollection of walking from the building to the parking lot. There was no way I could go on like this until I heard from the doctor. I had to find something to do to keep myself from worrying about it.

Back in Lickin Creek, I drove directly to the Lickin Creek College for Women. Getting back into the investigation of Mack Macmillan's death might be what I needed.

Instead of parking miles away in the visitors’ lot, I took a chance and parked in the faculty lot adjoining the administration building. After all, I figured, I was here on semi-official business.

I rode the clanking elevator to the attic and entered Lizzie's office, where I found her working at the computer. “Morning,” she said. “Cuppa coffee?”

I remembered her coffee from Sunday. “No thanks. What are you working on?”

“Press releases. The college expresses sympathy to the widow of Representative Macmillan on the occasion of his tragic accidental death-blah blah blah. When I'm finished with them, I've got to go through all these newspapers and clip any mention of the college for the scrapbook. Three more students left this weekend. You'd think we had a psycho serial killer on campus from the panic this has generated.”

“Sorry to hear that. The paper isn't doing too well, either.”

“One good thing came out of all this,” Lizzie said. “At least Professor Nakamura won't be retiring soon. He's everybody's faculty favorite.”

“What made him change his mind?”

“He announced his retirement when Mack became the chairman of the board of trustees. Said he couldn't work with the man. Now he won't have to.”

“Do you know why he felt that way?”

Lizzie shook her head. “Uh-uh. He never said why- just that it was personal. We all thought it was kind of odd, him being a Quaker and all. I thought they were supposed to love everybody.”

I made a mental note to talk to Professor Nakamura soon. “So-let's do something. Can you show me the storeroom where the guns were kept?”

“Sure.” She reached in her top desk drawer and pulled out a key ring. “Janet had the keys with her when she went to the hospital, but her husband brought them back yesterday.”

I headed toward the elevator, but Lizzie stopped at the head of the stairs. “If you don't mind,” she said, “I really don't trust that thing.”

By the time we reached the basement, my knees were shaking. Lizzie looked okay, though, so I didn't complain. She clicked a switch, but the single bulb hanging from the ceiling didn't do much to light our way.

“Watch your head,” she warned. “Some of these pipes are really low.” She ducked a few times, but I didn't have to. It was one of the few times being vertically challenged was an advantage.

At the end of a long hallway, she stopped before a metal door. Some yellow police tape lay on the floor. “Here we are,” she announced. Nothing happened when she turned a key in the lock.

“Just like Saturday, right?” I said. “Woody told me Janet had to try two keys to open the door.” Lizzie nodded as she shoved with her shoulder as she again turned the key, but the door still didn't open. “Hang on, I'll try the other one.” This time the door opened without a hitch.

“Let me see those keys,” I said. She handed me the ring with two keys on it. They looked very similar, the one that had worked and the one that hadn't; they were from the same manufacturer, were the same brass color, and basically were the same shape. But when I put one against the other, it was obvious there was a slight variation.

“I wonder how that happened. We've never had a problem before… not until Saturday… The day of the reenactment.”

When I pointed out to her that they were both Kwik-set keys, she said, “That's not surprising. The college has a contract with a local locksmith, Lucy Lock-It. That's probably the type of lock she always uses. See, here's the key to our office-it's a Kwikset too.”

“Let me try that one.”

“You can, but there's no way it could be the storeroom key. See-it's silver-and the storeroom keys are brass.”

I tried it anyway, but she was right. It didn't even go halfway into the lock.

“Told you so,” Lizzie chortled.

We entered the storeroom, hardly more than a closet, with metal shelves along each wall. There were no other doors, nor was there a window. The floor, walls, and ceilings were of solid concrete. Whoever had replaced the blanks with real bullets had come through the door. Lizzie showed me where the guns had been left overnight. We looked on and under every shelf, but there was no sign of anything unusual, nor was anything out of place.

Lizzie grabbed a box of ballpoint pens from a shelf before she locked the door behind us.

“Now what are you going to do?” she asked as we walked down the hall.

“I should talk to the widow, Mrs. Macmillan. Can I get her address at the front desk?”

“You can, but she's probably here at the college today. You'll find her at the stables.”

“She wouldn't be here the day after her husband's funeral, would she?”

“Sure she would. Horses are her life.”

We climbed the stairs to the first floor, where Lizzie waved good-bye before continuing her upward trek. I was more than grateful I didn't have to go to the attic with her. If there ever was a next time, I'd make an excuse about a bad knee or something and take the elevator.

Outside, I asked a young man dressed in Desert Storm combat gear, right down to the combat boots, if he could tell me how to find the stables.

“Yes, ma'am, go down the hill across the creek, turn right and follow the signs.”

When he answered, I realized he was a young woman. Hanging around the campus was making me feel older by the minute. Next thing you knew, I'd probably be saying things like “In my day…”

As I crossed the foot bridge spanning the Lickin Creek, I paused, as I had a few days earlier, to admire the view. But today the mountain ridges loomed darkly against the sky and there were no ducks on the water, only a Styrofoam cup bobbing along on the surface. A little voice in my head kept repeating over and over, The world's never going to look beautiful to you again, because you've got-

“Shut up,” I said sharply, startling two young women who were passing me. The voice quieted and I continued on my way, smelling the stables several moments before I actually saw them. It wasn't an unpleasant odor, but a mixture of warm earth and straw. A group of girls worked outside the longest building, painting, hosing down the sidewalk, and deadheading geraniums.

“ Charlotte 's inside,” one of them said in response to my asking where Mrs. Macmillan was.

“Don't you find it odd that she's here so soon after her husband's death?” I asked the girl.

She looked surprised that I would ask such a question. “Of course not. We have a competition coming up in a few weeks. She's got to help us get ready for it.”

I entered through the open door and recognized Mrs. Macmillan immediately. Even though I'd seen her only briefly at the funeral, the elastic mask covering her face was unforgettable. My imagination conjured up visions of Vincent Price in House of Wax and Lon Chaney in The Phantom of the Opera. What was she hiding under it? Since she was without the veil she'd worn to the funeral, I could see some shiny blond hair swinging loose around her shoulders. Today she wore faded blue jeans, white T-shirt, and a bedraggled beige cardigan. She looked no older than the college girls around her. Ivy Leaguer, I'd bet my life on it.