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looking sheepish. “We had an argument and you know how it is. Locked out and I don’t want to call the cops and let the whole neighborhood know. By morning it’ll probably blow over but right now …”
    The clerk studied him a moment longer, then relented. He passed over a card for Tanner to sign and took a key off the rack behind him.
    “It’s on the sixth floor. Bathroom down the hall and there’s a telephone by the stairway.”
    He took the elevator up and padded down the deserted hallway to his room. He went in, locked the door and jammed a chair in front of it. Then he switched off the light and stood to one side of the window, staring down at the street below. A few couples drifting by on the sidewalk, two or three customers in the delicatessen on the corner. But nobody in the shadows across the street, watching. Nobody in a parked automobile looking up at his window.
    He opened the box of sleeping tablets and juggled one in his hand, debating whether or not he should take it. He was dead tired but he had so much on his mind that he wouldn’t be able to sleep without it. Then it occurred to him that once asleep he might be easy prey for the questing mind that had almost driven him off the pier.
    But nobody knew he was staying at the Y, did they?
    It’s a gamble, he thought. They could check his apartment and once they discovered he wasn’t there, it wouldn’t take too much trouble to track him down. But on the other hand he had already been one whole night without sleep and he was riding the rim of nervous exhaustion. He couldn’t last it out another evening.
    He took the pill.
    When he awoke in the morning it was with a splitting headache and a confused recollection of a nightmare about the lake.
    But the important thing was he was still alive.
    He was jittery, he didn’t want to go back to the campus. But there were classes to be taught and a salary to earn and in broad daylight his courage was several notches higher. And he didn’t want to give in to the fear that he felt.
    There were the same gray, gothic buildings and the same tired ivy crawling up them but somehow the campus was different. It wasn’t hard to put his finger on it. The difference was in the students. Little knots of quietly gossiping collegians fell silent and stared at him with a bright-eyed curiosity as he walked past. A few feet away the whispers started up again and he knew they were rehashing every time he had said something to or about John Olson.
    Whether he liked it or not, he was going to wear Olson around his neck like an albatross. Olson had been on his committee and Olson had been about the same age, so it would naturally be assumed that he had known Olson fairly well.
    And that was one of the rubs. He had known Olson hardly at all.
    Petey was sitting at her desk in his shoe-box office on the third floor, staring stonily out the window. Her hands were folded in her lap and her face looked as if it had been hewn from granite. Her hair had been pulled back into an even tighter bun than usual and she was wearing a black dress with a high, starched collar and long sleeves. The only touch of color was in the two pink, plastic combs in her hair, and that just made the rest of her seem more forbidding.
    Petey in mourning, Tanner thought, looking ten years older than she actually was.
    “You didn’t have to come down, Petey.”
    “What else could I have done?” Her voice was mechanical and precise, without inflection. “There was nothing I could do at home or over at the Van Zandts’. The police told me that. So I came up here.”
    He wondered what she was actually seeing, staring out the window. Not the scenery, he was sure of that.
    “I wish I could think of something clever and sympathetic, Petey. I guess all I can say is that I’m sorry.”
    “Everybody’s sorry,” she said slowly. “It’s too bad that people don’t feel sorrier for each other when they’re alive.”
    Tanner felt uncomfortable. “I didn’t