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single-minded in his attention. His purpose.
    Arno regarded Miss Price as he adjusted the carnation in his lapel. Should he approach her now? Or wait?
    Perhaps wait, he decided.
    Let her enjoy the ride. Relax. Lower her guard.
     
     
    Meanwhile, Jack Romaine was hobbling back to the cart hawking chilli and dogs.
    “What happened ta you?” the vendor challenged.
    “When’s the next trolley?” Jack grated.
    “Half hour.”
    A half hour! Jack ran his hands through his hair. Well, that was it. He’d lost her. A deep, deep nausea stabbed him in the stomach. Bladehorn wasn’t going to like this. Not at all.
    Jack was about to limp away, but then the smell from the cart reminded him. The Coney dog. Chilli and cinnamon.
    He turned back to the vendor.
    “I was ’spose to meet my girl, see.”
    “Your girl.”
    “Yeah, plaid skirt and sweater? Flat-chested?”
    The vendor’s eyes narrowed.
    Jack pulled out a crisp dollar bill along with the black and white photograph.
    “Think of anything might help me out?”
    He shrugged. “She might’ve asked about the trolley.”
    Jack peeled off another bill.
    “Just tell me where.”
    The vendor gathered the bills in his cigarette hand.
    “Try the zoo.”
     
     
    Sally paid her two bits and entered the Cincinnati Zoo. It was the city’s pride, the zoo. Best in the country, people said. More animals than any zoo, animals you couldn’t see anyplace else.
    Sally adored those large mammals who spent their time in water, the hippopotami, the sea lions. The big cats were also a thrill, of course. And who could resist the chimps and bonobos? The one great ape? But it was the birds that always offered a particular fascination for Sally, especially the predators, the raptors. As a girl Sally had made her daddy stop so she could watch when the keepers fed live snakes to the secretary bird. She had relished that encounter, the crested relative of the falcon, earthbound, stamping its clawed feet onto the snake’s neck, a sharp plunge of beak. Shaking the reptile to make certain of death. Then the feeding, the entrails bursting from their integument. Other children would hide their eyes, but not Sally.
    But today she ignored the aviary, pausing instead to spend another nickel for food—a sausage in brown paper, a sweet roll, a root beer—before skirting the hippos’ paddock and the albino rhinoceros to head directly for Swan Lake.
    The city’s zoo had been built on the acreage of a large dairy; Swan Lake dominated the interior, a body of water vast enough to accommodate sailboats and offering along its shoreline any number of retreats. On a weekend you’d expect to see hundreds of families milling about along the lake’s well-tended shoreline. By midday there would be any number of boaters on the water. All forms of languid recreation.
    But at half past eight on a working day, the shoreline was deserted. There weren’t even any employees about, the staff still occupied with the tasks of feeding, grooming and medicating the largest gathering of exotic animals in the country. Sally, in fact, had not seen a single soul on her trek to the far side of Swan Lake. An ideal place for a woman seeking privacy. A retreat from prying eyes
    She settled with her sausage and sweets on a bench tucked by an eddy of shallow water shaded by a grove of sycamore. No company but a gaggle of ducks that came for the crumbs that Sally threw into the water.
    She retrieved the letter from her bag and spread it in her lap. Fifty dollars, and a hotel room waiting at five! Sally smiled. She counted her money again, chiding herself for profligate spending, separating the bills from the coins. Like Midas counting his hoard.
    She finished the root beer, then returned to the letter, reading it once more before turning it over and smoothing the stationery on the bench’s hardwood planks, careful not to soil the precious correspondence on the wrapper stained with the grease of her sausage.
    Those small chores