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there was a prowler," he said to Libby, "but there wasn't. Now go back to bed, sugar-"
    "Hey, who gave Sam a new toy?" she asked.
    Jason Marshall turned and saw the Labrador sitting proudly in the doorway, holding something shiny in his mouth. His tail whipped back and forth like a hairy windshield wiper.
    "Put it down, Sam. Down!" Bonnie Marshall said.
    The dog happily ignored her.
    She said, "Jason, you'd better get that thing away from him before he swallows it."
    Sam was famous for eating items other than food. Jason Marshall grabbed Sam's collar and tugged him inside the house. Then he began the slimy chore of prying the dog's jaws apart with his fingers, which wasn't easy.
    "C'mon, be a good boy," Jason Marshall implored. "Drop it, Sam."
    The dog decided he was in the mood for a chase and started dashing in crazy circles around the room. Every time the Marshalls had him cornered, he'd squirt through their legs and take off running again.
    "I give up," Bonnie Marshall said finally. "Good night, all."
    Libby kicked off her slippers. "Me, too," she sighed, and headed for her room.
    Jason Marshall sat down in an armchair to wait. With nobody pursuing him, Sam soon got bored with the game. He lay down panting on the rug and dropped his mystery toy at Jason Marshall's feet.
    Libby's father sat forward, staring in surprise. He picked up the small plastic tube, wiped off the dog slobber, and looked at the initials written with a green Sharpie on the cap.
    There was no mistake.
    It was his daughter's asthma inhaler, the one that she'd lost in the Black Vine Swamp.
     
     
     
     
     
     
    FIVE
     
    The Truman School had once been known as the Trapwick Academy, named after the man who had founded it eighteen years earlier. Vincent Z. Trapwick was a rich Rhode Island banker who'd moved to southwest Florida and gotten even richer.
    Vincent Trapwick didn't want his three snotty, pampered children attending school with ordinary kids, so he started his own private school and kept out just about everyone who didn't have the same skin color, religion, and political point of view as Vincent Trapwick.
    As a result, the Trapwick Academy had a ridiculously small enrollment and lost money by the bucketful, although Vincent Trapwick didn't seem to care. When he died, he left two hundred thousand dollars to the school, which was a generous amount but hardly enough to keep it running forever.
    So the board of trustees gradually loosened up the admissions policy and began reaching out to the community, recruiting all kinds of students. For the first time, scholarships were offered to bright kids and athletes whose families couldn't afford the expensive tuition. Enrollment grew steadily, and so did the Trapwick Academy's reputation.
    Things were rolling along smoothly until Vincent Trapwick's own kids-now graduated and grown to adulthood-started getting into trouble. The eldest, Vincent Jr., was caught embezzling millions of dollars from his late father's bank to support wild gambling junkets to Monaco. The middle one, Sandra Sue, on three occasions drank too much beer and drove her golf cart off the Naples Pier. The youngest, Iggy, was arrested for ripping off Social Security checks from old folks living in the chain of shabby nursing homes that he owned.
    The name Trapwick kept popping up in the newspapers, and not in a way that was flattering to the Trapwick Academy. Ironically, the same spoiled children for whom the school was created had grown up to become its most embarrassing advertisements.
    In an emergency meeting-held late one night after Iggy Trapwick had been stopped at the Sarasota airport while wearing a diaper stuffed with cash-the board of trustees voted unanimously to change the academy's name. They chose to call it the Truman School, after President Harry S. Truman (who'd been dead for a long time and therefore was unlikely to cause any public relations problems).
    To save money, the board voted not to replace the entire granite