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shake.
    “Knight, Blakely,” he said in a smooth tone, “fellow toiler with Amelia in the academic salt mines. I’m sorry, what is your name, again?”
    “Daye, Felicity. Nice to meet you.”
    The woman’s plump face was pleasant as she gazed up at Blakely. She shook his hand and fell into step on my other side.
    “May I join you? I’m trying to get in a little exercise; gotta stay well.”
    “Indeed,” said Blakely dryly.
    We walked some more.
    “So where is it you live, Mrs. Daye?” Blakely asked.
    “Toledo, Ohio. For twenty-eight happily married years,” she answered with special emphasis.
    “How lucky you are,” Blakely said, making the Dayes’ accomplishment sound unbearably dreary.
    Honestly, Blakely, I thought, is no one safe from your acid tongue?
    It seemed especially boorish to aim his cynicism at such a nice woman, even if she probably didn’t realize she was being mocked.
    We reached Chez Prentice in another minute, and Mrs. Daye and I turned to go up the sidewalk. “You go on ahead, dear,” she said to me. “I want to have a word with Mr. Knight about something.”
    She turned back toward him, but he hadn’t paused and his long legs had already carried him almost out of sight.

CHAPTER FIVE

    A week later, when all the excitement happened, I had slipped into class just ahead of the last bell, opened the roll book and begun hurriedly marking homeroom attendance when Serendipity Shea appeared at my elbow.
    “Miss P—Mrs. Dickensen,” she corrected herself with a glance at the blackboard, “here’s that book report I was supposed to turn in before Christmas.”
    I gave her a sharp look. “Serendipity, I already told you—”
    She interrupted me quickly. “Remember you said you wouldn’t, like, take off points if I turned it in right after, but I left it at my grandma’s house and she brought it with her when she came to visit yesterday and since we’re not having class today, I thought . . . ” She shrugged as she trailed off.
    That got my attention. “Not having class?”
    She made a questioning moue . “You know, the assembly thing we have every month. Starts right after the first bell.” Her tone was one of disgust at my appalling ignorance. “It’s some scientist guy this time.”
    I pulled a tissue from the box on my desk and offered it to her. “Here. For the gum.”
    She hadn’t been obviously chewing and had probably parked the wad in the back of her cheek, but I had an unerring instinct for such things. If Serendipity had been required to pay for the removal the disgusting stuff from the bottoms of chairs and desks, she might have better understood my mild obsession.
    She rolled her eyes, but complied.
    The rest of the class ignored our exchange, except for Hardy Patchke. “It’s the Monster guy,” he informed me.
    I was completing the roll taking. “Who’s what, Hardy?” I asked distractedly.
    “The guy in assembly today. He’s the one who looks for the monster.” His pale green eyes sparkled eagerly under butterscotch-colored lashes that exactly matched the color of his curly hair and tawny skin. “You know, Champ.”
    “You mean Dr. Alexander?”
    “That’s him.”
    I cringed inwardly, but let it pass. I had given up requiring my students to say the clumsy but more correct, “That is he.” Sic transit grammar.
    The class bell rang, and as the room emptied, I debated the issue of my attendance at the assembly. I hadn’t been tapped as a monitor this time and therefore was not required to go. Should I?
    I was of two minds on the subject. These elaborate time-wasters were the brainchildren of our fearless leader, Principal Berghauser, who, when but a lad in the wilds of Minnesota (where their winters made our Northern New York cool snaps feel like Florida, he liked to remind us) he found his young intellect stimulated by itinerant musicians and lecturers in the finest nineteenth-century Chautauqua tradition.
    I had to applaud his good intentions. I,