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old woman to bypass anyone, even doormen standing right in front of those signs that say ‘All visitors must be announced.’ You have a well-run building, so I had to pretend to be an aunt. Usually, they just assume I live there, since plenty of old women live there or visit regularly, and we all look alike. It works like a charm. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it years ago.”
    “What did you do before you disappeared?” Kate asked. “Before all the leaves fell off simultaneously?” Reed seemed distinctly stunned, and Kate felt it incumbent upon her to keep up the conversation. Besides, she found to her surprise that she really wanted to know.
    “I was a professor, of course. What else? In a university outside Boston, even beyond Cambridge. I had a house like everybody else, with a dog, and a yard with plenty of space for a garden. I rather thought I’d take up gardening one day, when I had the time. Sheer rot, of course. Like all those people who tell you they want time to read all the booksthey’ve never got to. If they had wanted to read, they would have read. And I would have gardened. One day I realized that I would never plant a flower, not so much as a bulb, and that I would never go back to my office again and listen to all those second-rate men and women without enough guts to face up to a belligerent mouse. So I just took off for London over the Christmas holidays, having sold my house to a friend who had always admired it but couldn’t afford its real worth and who was willing to take on the dog into the bargain, came back, and just disappeared. I assumed that they would assume that I wouldn’t have sold my house if I wasn’t planning to die, and such plans could easily be understood in the light of my cantankerous nature, which had recently become more so. I vanished, presumed dead, though not legally, of course. But legally doesn’t mean a thing to me.”
    “But—” Kate said, and stopped.
    “I know all the questions,” Harriet said, “so why don’t I answer the ones I can think of, and that will leave you fewer to ponder. But don’t hold back. Ask what you want, when you want. Just don’t tell anyone you know me, have met me, or have heard a single thing about me, not so much as a whisper. Agreed?”
    Kate nodded. This new mode of listening to someone who talked more than she did and did not expect her to talk at all was, she found, refreshing and remarkably little effort. Reed, nudged by Kate, nodded, too.
    “I had already cashed in my pension; fortunately,my university lets you do that after sixty. My husband had a pension, and I had persuaded him to take bigger benefits for his lifetime, not survivor benefits. He died five years ago, and managed to enjoy his retirement without ever stooping to gardening or reading Tolstoy or anything he regretted not having read before. Actually, he became enthralled with computers, but that doesn’t really have anything to do with this story. If there’s a computer heaven, he’s in it. I turned the money I got for my house into cash, and decided, since I had disappeared and wanted to be presumed dead, that I would move into the cash economy, which is bigger than any of us who get paid by salary checks have ever supposed. It’s not all that hard. I get paid by check at the Schuyler, of course, and I cash it at the bank where I’ve opened an account with my nice phony identification, but apart from my Schuyler check I live strictly on a cash basis. I rent a room for cash, I pay cash for everything. I’m an underground spy in America, taking all my cues from le Carré. Fun. And,” she added, “as I said, Harriet is a new name for a new incarnation, so don’t waste your time going through academic catalogs.”
    “Why did you want to meet me because I was going to teach at Schuyler Law School?” Kate asked.
    “You know, it does show that things do sometimes change under pressure,” Harriet said. “There’s been so much flak at dear