I checked my messages again. I had a call from Steven Kincaid, a friend who was renting my old house. It had been a relief to find such a good tenant, since I am inexperienced as a landlady. I returned the call, afraid that this meant the plumbing had failed or the roof had leaked. Turned out he just wanted to invite Frank and me to his housewarming, to be held in a couple of weeks.

I was thanking him for the invitation when my purse started to rattle and hum, sounding as if I had somewhere received a hive of live bumblebees in lieu of change.

I told Steven I’d talk to Frank and call him back with an answer, said good-bye, and turned off the pager. This time the number was June Monroe’s.

“I’m glad you called me,” she said when I returned her call. “I almost came by that newspaper to talk to you, but decided I had probably made enough trouble for you for one day.”

“Not at all.”

“Well, I am just about as tired as a body can be right now, and you probably aren’t much better off. So I’ll make this quick. First, after I talked to you, I got to thinking about some things, and decided that I will bury Lucas in Las Piernas. You were right. He loved Las Piernas. His daddy is buried there, so Lucas will rest next to him.”

“I know that must have been a hard decision to make,” I said.

“Oh, not after I thought about it and prayed on it for a time. Lucas’s friends may be having hard times, but they were his friends. If I hold this funeral way out here in Riverside, nobody but Charles and me would be likely to attend.”

“I’m glad it will be here, but I would have come out there. Roberta, too, I think.”

“Well, it doesn’t matter, it will be right there in Las Piernas on Friday morning at eleven. That doesn’t give you much time to let his friends know about it, but I would appreciate anything you can do to spread the word.”

I told her I would do my best. She gave me the name of the funeral home and cemetery.

“After making all the arrangements,” she went on, “I came straight home and looked for that phone bill. I’ve got the number that Lucas called.”

“Edison, right?”

“Right.”

I wrote the number down. “Thanks for doing that, June. I know the last twenty-four hours have been exhausting for you.”

“You said you had a couple of questions?”

“Yes, but first, I wanted to let you know that the police have Lucas’s ring now.” I explained Two Toes as far as he could be explained.

“You don’t think he’s the one who killed Lucas?”

“No. I’m not sure I can tell you why, but I guess it’s just that I think he’d admit it if he did. He’d be saying God told him to do it.”

“Maybe so,” she said, sounding unconvinced.

“I think whoever killed Lucas wanted more than a school ring. That brings me to a question I had for you. I wondered if you knew what became of Lucas’s thesis-I mean, his copies of it? His raw data, his drafts, the final copy-any of it?”

“Well, it was here until recently. Had it in a box, one of those filing boxes. But he took it with him after his last visit. I asked him, did that mean he was going to try to get his degree? He just said that it was probably too late to worry about that, and besides, it wasn’t so important to him now.”

I couldn’t tell her how disappointed those words made me feel. If he wasn’t interested in getting his degree, was he more interested in blackmail? “I wonder what he did with them. The papers weren’t among Lucas’s things at the shelter.”

“No,” she said. “Maybe he just threw them out.”

“When he left, did he walk to the bus station from your house?”

“No, I gave him a ride. Even waited with him at the station.”

“Did he have the box with him when he got on the bus?”

“Yes. Yes, he did. Hmmhmm. That was the last time I saw him alive, waving to him as that bus pulled out. He was smiling.” She paused, then said, “Well, what else did you need to know?”

“I just wondered if you could tell me a little more about what happened to Lucas after he was denied his master’s degree. Did he just give up after that?”

“No, not then. I never did finish telling you that story, did I? Sorry, I’ve been a little rattled. I meant to tell you about this Nadine. She was dating that professor, right? Old Andre Selman kept that real quiet, only his closest friends knew, and I guess they just sort of turned a blind eye to it. Lucas told me about this, and I said, ‘Lucas, you always tell me that this man can’t hang on to a woman. He just loves them and leaves them. So you just wait until he leaves this one, ’cause a woman scorned is something to behold.’ Sure enough, not long after this study is finished, so is Nadine-Selman drops her.”

“And Lucas talked with her?”

“Yes. He was smart, he gave her a little time, then he went and talked to her. And she admitted to him how she had done him dirty. She told Lucas that Selman had her substitute the pages of the thesis, that Selman was afraid Lucas would ruin the project, would cause the school to lose all that grant money. But by the time Lucas talked to her, I think she realized what harm she had done to him. She was sorry all over.”

“He must have wanted to kill her.”

“No, no. He knew she was the only chance he had of ever getting that mess straightened out. So he gets her to agree to testify on his behalf at a hearing at the college.”

“A hearing?”

“Yes. Lucas went to the department chair. That man liked Lucas, and he’d been suspicious of Selman, so he set up a hearing. First time, it was just going to be the department chair, that Dr. Warren that had stirred things up in the first place, and someone from the foundation that gets the grant-strange name, I can’t remember it though. Just remember thinking it was a funny kind of name.”

“Booter? Booter Hodges?”

“That’s it! You know him?”

“I’ve talked to him a few times.”

“Lucas didn’t like him at all. Anyway, two days before the hearing, this Nadine is acting like she’s got cold feet. Says she doesn’t want any hard feelings with Selman, doesn’t want to sneak around behind his back. She’s going to talk to him. Lucas begs her to just wait until after the hearing, but she won’t have any of it. The night before the hearing, Lucas gets a call from Selman’s best friend, saying that Nadine is back together with Selman. So Lucas went to talk to her, find out if it’s true. She’s all smiles. Tells him Selman admits he’s wrong, and he’s going to come with her to the hearing. He’s going to face the music. Lucas didn’t believe it for a minute, but what can he do?”

“And she never showed up?”

“No Nadine, no Selman, just one more round of humiliation with this Warren turkey. And that Booter says something like, ‘We should have expected this.’ Lucas couldn’t even find Nadine after that.”

“What happened to Lucas after the hearing?”

“Well, he couldn’t get into other colleges, and he couldn’t find a job anything like what he wanted. He was able to find work, but he wasn’t happy. He started drinking then, but not real bad. But pretty soon it started to be a problem. He’d get a job somewhere, be doing fine, and somehow the story from the school would catch up to him.”

“You think someone was making sure it caught up to him?”

“I don’t know, I guess maybe I do. Even if the employer didn’t pay any attention to the story, it embarrassed Lucas. That pride of his would suffer. He was all the time bitter and angry. He’d go drinking. Next thing you know, he’s missing work and so on. It all just went from bad to worse. After a time, it was easier for him to sit around drinking than to try to keep a job, I guess. I’m not trying to excuse it. The drinking was his problem. Wasn’t anybody who made him sit down and become an alcoholic. I told you before, it’s an illness, that’s all. Who knows?-maybe he would have ended up drinking even if he got a degree and teaching job at some university.”