“Jeff!” she called.

I whirled around.

“We have to talk,” Lynda said.

Chapter Eight - Out of Control

The impact of Lynda Teal’s gaze - those wide, brown eyes flecked with gold - is one of the strongest natural forces known to mankind. Only with great effort did I withstand the soulful expression she laid on me.

“I thought you’d send Maggie Barton,” I blurted out.

“Sorry to disappoint you,” Lynda said. “Maggie broke her ankle in a parachuting accident. You know Ben worked late last night. I didn’t have anybody else to send but me.”

Maggie Barton is almost seventy and has hair the color and consistency of pink cotton candy. I made a mental note to send her a get-well card.

“I’m very sorry, Ms. Teal,” I said coolly, “but if you want to ask about the theft yesterday I don’t have anything to add to what I told Ben Silverstein last night. I’d be glad to get back to you, though, after I talk to Campus Security.”

“That’s not what this is about and you know it.” She did not actually add an unladylike “a-hole,” but that was implied. “I want to discuss us.” Did I mention that her throaty voice drives me wild?

“Ms. Teal, there is no us,” I said with determined reserve. “You made that quite clear four weeks and two days ago.” Not that I’ve been counting.

“Damn it, quit calling me Ms. Teal! I want us to still be friends.”

I didn’t think she meant “with privileges.” I’d heard this tune before, back when she’d given me the old heave-ho the previous month. I hadn’t seen her much since, but I’d never stopped thinking about her.

“Of course we’re friends.” I smiled like a politician while my stomach did gymnastics. This wasn’t going well.

“Like hell we are! You’ve been avoiding me ever since we broke up, Jeff.”

“I distinctly remember that it wasn’t my idea to stop seeing each other.”

She threw up her hands. “If you hadn’t been so controlling, so self-righteous, so neurotic-” Lynda is half-Italian and sometimes expressive.

“Excuse me,” I said, cutting off the litany of my finer points as I moved away from her. “I have to deal with the broadcast media.”

The team from TV4 Action News had just appeared at the top of the escalator. Saved by the bell.

“You’re not getting off the hook that easily, Jeff Cody,” Lynda called after me. “I’m going to be here all weekend!”

The photographer sent by the Cincinnati TV station was an old hand named Sam Gardner who seemed to have taken on a permanent lean from thirty years of lugging television cameras, starting when they were a lot heavier than they are now. He’d acquired other baggage as well - a heavy dose of gray in his hair, a perpetual scowl on his ebony face, and a cynical outlook on the world at large. He was known in the trade as Smiling Sam. I liked him.

“New intern for you, Cody,” he said without bothering to look at me. “You can break her in.” Knowing Sam, I didn’t think the smutty double meaning was an accident.

She said her name was Mandy Petrowski but she was thinking of changing it to Preston or Peters or Prescott and what did I think?

I thought she should change the Mandy, but I said, “On you, Petrowski works just fine.”

She flashed me a smile without a hint of a flirt in it. I felt ancient.

Mandy was no more than twenty-two and a senior at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. But she seemed to have all the right ingredients for a career in TV journalism - lush auburn hair done up in anchorwoman style, perfect teeth, a generous mouth, a cute nose, a clear-channel voice devoid of accent, and a Saks Fifth Avenue wardrobe.

Channel 4 viewers wouldn’t get to enjoy any of that, however. As an intern working during spring break, Mandy wouldn’t show up on the air. She would ask the questions, the videographer would record the answers, and the anchorman would read the lead-in, probably written by Mandy and re-written by somebody else.

She held up a clipping of Ben Silverstein’s theft story. “This kind of changes things.”

No flies on you, kid. “Maybe a little,” I conceded, “but I was hoping it wouldn’t distract from the main story of our colloquium and the official presentation of the Woollcott Chalmers Collection.”

“I’m sure you were. I’d like to talk to you on-camera about the theft and the campus police investigation.”

“Fine. But first why don’t you get a few minutes of Woollcott Chalmers talking? That was the original plan, and he’s up next. Besides, he’ll probably say something about last night’s incident.”

She bought it and had Smiling Sam set up his equipment at the back of the Hearth Room while Al Kane was taking questions from the audience after his talk.

When I was sure that everything was under control, I ducked down the hall and called Campus Security. I know that using a cell phone so much might cause me to have a tumor the size of an orange in my head some day, but it’s an occupational hazard.

“So what have you got?” I asked Ed Decker.

“We haven’t got jack.”

“Would you care to elaborate?”

“Not for the press.”

“Then I’ll tell them you’re working on it.”

“That would be accurate.”

I found voicemail messages left on my phone by two of the other three Cincinnati TV stations. I returned both calls quickly and confirmed the AP story. Neither pressed me for on-camera comments.

Back in the Hearth Room, the TV light was on but the camera wasn’t whirling yet. Dr. Noah Queensbury was on his feet, apparently engaged in a dialogue with Kane.

“... just as there are those who believe that Francis Bacon or a Jewish woman or someone else wrote Shakespeare’s plays,” he was saying. “However, the notion that Dr. Watson’s literary agent, A. Conan Doyle, wrote the doctor’s accounts of Sherlock Holmes should not be given credence at this colloquium.”

The assertion was greeted with some laughter, but more cheers. Kane shrugged it off.

“I won’t debate you, Dr. Queensbury,” he said. “Let me just say that anyone who’s read my novel, The Baker Street Caper, knows how I feel. And anyone who hasn’t read it - ought to. It’s on sale at the back of the room.”

If it was a competition for getting laughs, Kane won. That set the stage nicely for him to clear out and let Chalmers take the lectern after a brief “man-who-needs-no-introduction” introduction from Mac.

Even though he used his cane to walk, Chalmers seemed younger, more vigorous as he stood at the front of the room. Perhaps he was even a touch defiant as he blinked his blue eyes in the glare of the TV lights.

“I’m sure you’re all expecting me to say something about the theft yesterday,” he said, “so I’ll do that and get it over with. As you all know by now, some very valuable pieces of the Woollcott Chalmers Collection were taken. But I don’t want anybody to lose sight of the fact that much more remains. The original sampling that was to be on display today is in a room sealed by the police. However, Professor McCabe and I worked with a campus librarian early this morning to put together an impromptu substitute in the rare book room of the Bennish Library. I promise you a full measure of unique and interesting items. No thief is going to spoil our weekend!”

With my brain rattling from the thunderous applause that greeted Chalmers’s pronouncement, I wondered if what he and Mac had done was such a good idea. The specter of hordes of Sherlockians overrunning the rare book room by no means comforted me.

Several rows in front of where I was standing at the back of the room, Lynda leaned over to whisper to Hugh Matheson. I shifted my focus to Renata Chalmers, who was revving up the laptop set up in the middle of the room. Her husband used a remote control to click to the first PowerPoint slide. It showed a large room stuffed with books and all manner of other materials, apparently the Woollcott Chalmers Collection in its natural habitat.