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to miss him again, tell him I
want to talk to him, okay?”
    “ Sure thing.”
    “ Cindy, how are you
doing?”
    For an instant their eyes
locked. “Okay,” said Cindy. “It’ll be okay.” Then her gaze slid
away and she glared at the smiling man who was pushing a wire cart
laden with manila envelopes into the office. “Oh, damn, here comes
the mail to sort.”
    Anne waved good-bye and
walked back out into the sun. She was jumpy today, wasn’t she,
unable to make phone calls, thinking of that curvy premed for the
first time in years. Well, months. She crossed the parking lot,
surprisingly full for vacation time. Probably people who usually
had to park at the peripheral lots, taking advantage of les vacances . A high
proportion were the old rusting hulks driven by grad students,
instead of somewhat newer Toyotas or Vegas favored by the faculty.
The undergraduate Porsches were probably off to the
beach.
    The woods were lovely,
washed by yesterday’s rain, each leaf defined in the chiaroscuro of
June sun and deep shade. The noises of civilization—motors, sirens,
voices—faded rapidly as she descended. Birds called, a squirrel
ranted in high-pitched hoarse indignation, foliage rustled. Almost
nice enough to take that old bastard Rousseau seriously, all his
drivel about getting close to nature. Anne tramped stolidly down
the path, her bag swinging from her shoulder, her face turned up to
catch the occasional dazzle of sky beyond the rippling
leaves.
    She heard the voices
first, from the fork in the path. Men’s voices, gruff working-class
voices, down by the creek. As she hiked along the upper path, she
tried to peer down through the ragged screen of young maples to see
what was happening. Nearing the bridge, she could glimpse flashes
of light and paused, squinting. A photographer of some sort? She
pushed aside a young branch so she could survey the
activity.
    The photographer was
squatting, stretching, clambering onto logs and rocks, even into
the stream in a strange ritual ceremony around a quiet heather-gray
form on the path. Well outside the circle of his dance, others
stood watching: men in uniforms, the gray of the campus safety
officers, the navy of the city police, the white of ambulance
attendants who stood with a stretcher vertical between them. Beyond
them, clumps of university people—tweeds, blue jeans, Aran
sweaters. A tall black man in a blue blazer was talking to the
largest of the tweedy ones. Looked like Bart, Anne thought. Next to
them, a lanky young woman with black curls had a comforting arm
around a sobbing female student in a jeans jacket.
    Anne stepped back onto the
path, letting the branch spring back across the view. With
shivering hands she pulled a cigarette from her pocket, lit it, and
inhaled deeply. Then she marched back to the fork in the path and
down toward the crowd.
    She was stopped after a
few yards by a big gray-jacketed safety officer, young, taut-faced,
a trace of acne on his jaw. Dixon, said his badge. “I’m sorry,
ma’am,” he croaked hoarsely, and cleared his throat. “Please use
the other path. This one is closed.”
    “ Someone’s hurt?” asked
Anne, drawing in the sustaining smoke. She knew it was a dumb
question. The ambulance attendants had been standing idly by,
waiting.
    “ Someone’s been shot and
killed!” confirmed the youthful officer, his murky blue eyes
troubled and lively in his stiffly held face. “So we have to ask
you to go the other way until they’re finished with the
body.”
    “ But you see,” explained
Anne, enunciating carefully for the benefit of his dazed young
ears, “I think I’m married to that body.”

4
    Charlie stood smacking his
fist rhythmically into his other hand, an ineffectual release for
his fury and confusion. Tal could not be dead! “I just saw him this
morning,” he’d protested stupidly to big Sergeant Hines, a line
from a million B movies. But he couldn’t accept it. He’d taken one
look at that lump of gray