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assured him. “I won’t let anyone else look at it until you get here.” The silhouette shook his head briskly, like a dog shaking off water. His hair spiked out from his scalp. “I’ll call you after I’ve reserved a room for you. I’ve got to go now.” She really did. The silhouetted man had vanished from the window. He could have gone anywhere. He could be doing anything. With or without a shirt on.
    “Very well, then. I’ll see you Thursday evening. I suggest you refer to me as Avery at this point,” he added. “I’m not grading you anymore.”
    Five years after graduating from Harvard, Erica ought to stop viewing her former professors with awe. Randy Rideout was only two years out of her class, and he didn’t treat her with awe. Even so, she felt funny saying, “Goodbye, Avery.”
    She disconnected the phone, returned to the kitchen to hang up the handset and peeked out the back-door window. The man was standing near the fallen fence, staring at her half-planted garden. He was still a silhouette in the gray twilight, but he was a full-length one now, tall and long limbed and definitely better built than Jack Willetz.
    And he was crossing the fence onto her land. What were the rules about trespassing in Rockwell? Either she was supposed to be neighborly or she was supposed to haul out a shotgun and aim it at him. She didn’t own a shotgun, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to be neighborly to a man who stood a good six feet tall and had to outweigh her by at least fifty pounds.
    She shouldn’t have ended her phone call with Dr. Gilman— Avery , she mentally corrected herself. If the stranger continued to approach, she could have told Avery and he could have…well, he couldn’t have done much from Concord Avenue in Cambridge, Massachusetts. But he could have dialed 911 for her.
    She could dial 911 for herself—except that Rockwell didn’t have a 911 system. Grabbing a knife, she nudged her kitchen door open.
    She flicked on the porch light, and as he approached, the jaundiced glow from the yellow bulb spilled light across his features. He had a wide forehead, a sharpnose and, as best she could see in the rapidly dying evening, pale, intense eyes. His face was framed by shaggy hair that could either be dark blond or light brown. He wore black jeans and a dark wool shirt over a snug-fitting T-shirt, which implied that he hadn’t been topless when she’d seen him in Mr. Willetz’s window. She wasn’t sure if she was relieved or disappointed by that.
    He arrived at her back porch, and more light bathed his face. He looked familiar, but she wasn’t sure where she’d seen him before. At a school function? On a Most Wanted poster in the post office? She clutched her knife more tightly and asked, “Can I help you?”
    “I’d consider it a big help if you’d put down your knife,” he said. His voice had a raspy edge to it, as if he’d spent the past few weeks screaming. Where had she seen him? Maybe he was a movie star. He was certainly that handsome. Then again, she’d been living long enough in Rockwell that any new male face would dazzle her. One thing Rockwell didn’t have in abundance was gorgeous men.
    “I’m Jed Willetz,” he said, extending his right hand. He still kept his distance—her knife must have spooked him—so if she wanted to shake his hand, she was going to have to descend from the porch.
    She could bring the knife with her, just in case. But he was a Willetz—and then she remembered where she’d seen him before: at John Willetz’s memorial service back in January. His hair had been a lot neater then, and he hadn’t had a day-old growth of hair smudging his jaw and upper lip, but yes, he was the fellow her friend Fern had pointed out to her after nudging an elbow into her ribs with enough force to leave a bruise. “That’s the grandson,” Fern had whispered. “John Edward Willetz III. He was two years behind me in school. Every girl at Rockwell Regional would have