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Rollins.”
    â€œA stinking, lousy break,” Rollins said. He dropped into a leather chair and his face drooped. “A square shake for my kid, that’s all I’m after.”
    â€œHe’ll get one.”
    â€œLike hell. It’s stacked against him. All the Ferguson heirs, the Ferguson interests. They’ll throw him to the wolves. Fat chance my boy’ll have of saving his skin, much less collecting a dime of his inheritance.”
    So that was it!
    Vallancourt’s teeth acquired an edge. He reminded himself that he was a civilized man.
    â€œWhat is it that brings you to me, Mr. Rollins?”
    â€œYour girl, of course. I’ll lay you six to one Keith tries to contact her. If we play it right, she’ll lead us straight to him.”
    The study door sighed open. Charles said, “A call for you, Mr. Vallancourt.”
    Vallancourt reached for the phone on the desk. “Yes?”
    He listened.
    His face went bloodless.
    He said, “Thank you,” and hung up.
    Rollins came sliding up from the chair, looking interested.
    â€œYou’ll have to excuse me, Mr. Rollins.”
    â€œNow listen here! You can’t dismiss me like I was some kind of—”
    â€œGet out of here, Rollins.”
    When the door clicked, Vallancourt reached for the phone. He would start the search here and now, calling everyone she knew.
    But his hunter’s instinct told him he already had the answer.
    His caller had been Dean Hansbury. Nancy had attended none of her classes today. She had not arrived at the college this morning.
    She must have gone to a rendezvous with Keith. Innocently, in the manner of that other girl in Port Palmetto, Florida.

6.
    As the MG growled deeper into the hills on the winding county road, Keith tried to keep out of his thoughts the picture of his aunt’s lifeless body.
    The strange slow-motion quality was fading from his surroundings. A bird flitted normally across the path of the MG, and the details of the creature were not agonizingly clear.
    The acuity of his senses in times of crisis was frightening. It was as if the phenomenon did not really belong to the dweller in his flesh. He had heard or read somewhere that soldiers under fire often experienced the same sharp appreciation of danger. He could not remember when he had experienced the feeling for the first time. He was nagged by a dark suggestion, that his father was somehow mixed up in it. The experience went a long way back, to the beginning of memory. As if he had been under fire since the birth of consciousness.
    He braked the MG and took a steep curve under light acceleration. The car was a friendly tool in his hands. Below, the shallow valley rolled blue-green. Only the throaty tones of the car broke the silence.
    The MG nosed up, framing the cloudless sky in the windshield. The crest of the hill swept past and the car began to drop.
    She had felt so loose, so boneless … He bit his lip. Like a bundle of rags …
    And when he had jerked his hands away, there had been a smear of red jelly on his fingertip.
    The memory needled his face with a sweat which the rush of wind over the MG could not evaporate.
    It was an out-of-kilter, Dali-like grotesquerie, this portrait held in memory. He could identify the wavering outlines of a crouching figure as his own. He had looked at her stillness and the smear of red on his finger, and he knew she was dead.
    Then a scratchy needle on an invisible turntable brought forth sound. Voices belonging to Howard Conway and Jonathan Vallancourt.
    He felt again the flowing movement of his muscles, the touch of drapery fabric against his cheek. He had stood behind that frail armor, not breathing, hearing Howard and Vallancourt come into the room.
    If they would only leave the room for a moment, he had thought, he could slip out the window, re-enter the Ferguson living room from the rear of the house, pretend he had been looking for his aunt.
    Oh, God, let them go