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found for seventy years."
"It would be far-fetched to think the building was burned down a few years after her disappearance to further hide the crime," Simon said.
     
"Far-fetched is an understatement," David said. "There's no evidence of that at all."
    "But it certainly is a coincidence," Julia said. "And I think there is one solid conclusion we can draw from all this: Anne Bloodworth's murderer was someone who knew her, which isn't really surprising. That's true in most murders."
    "I think he definitely knew her fairly well," Simon said.
"Hold it—that's going too far even for you," David said.
    "The body was laid out for burial," Simon said. "Anne Bloodworth was shrouded in a quilt and her hands were crossed across her chest, just as if she'd been buried formally. Her jewelry hadn't been stolen. Would an ordinary criminal, a stranger, do something like that? Especially if he was in a hurry? Hell, where did he get the quilt? Did he go into the house?"
    "It's a mystery, that's for sure," said Julia, "and one I would like to solve." "No way," David said, "the trail's too cold."
"No trail's so cold that we can't at least try to make sense of it," Simon said. "Look at what we know already."
    "And by next week, we should know a lot more," Julia said. "Simon's going to do his historical research thing, I'm going to search our files, and the ME, we hope, will be able to ID the corpse positively, and who knows what else he may find." Simon and Julia both looked at David expectantly, waiting for his contribution.
"I think you're both crazy," he said.
    "Well, I've got to go back to the office and pretend to work on something a little more current," Julia said. "But what I'm really going to do is find out what happened to our own files from 1926, if we even had any." She declined Simon's offer to walk her to her car, then went off by herself toward the parking lot. Simon watched her walk away from him. She had a good figure.
"I would think you'd be cured of women," David said. It was the first reference David had made to Simon's troubles, and Simon chose to ignore it.
     
"What do you think of her?" he asked.
     
David shrugged. "She's okay. At least she doesn't mind getting a little dirty." Simon liked just about everything about Julia McGloughlan except that awful gray suit.
    As Simon walked back to his office and his meeting, he noticed that the sky was becoming very dark with promised rain. Some of the cars on Hillsborough Street already had their lights on. Hillsborough Street was a broad thoroughfare even back in the twenties, when Anne Bloodworth had disappeared. The first mass-produced automobiles mixed with horse-drawn vehicles of every description. The trolley, its bell constantly sounding, ran under a tangle of wiring between downtown Raleigh and State College, now North Carolina State University. Anne Bloodworth would probably never have ridden the trolley, even though it had passed right in front of her home. Her set had its own carriages or automobiles to drive to one of the houses on fashionable Blount Street for chicken salad and pickled oysters, or perhaps to the Nine O'Clock Cotillion in the ballroom on the second floor of the Olivia Raney Library. Had Anne heard of the Scopes trial? Did she care that women got the vote in , although without the approval of North Carolina? What kind of young woman had she been? And who cared now, anyway?
    Finally, whatever had been eating at Simon had worked its way into his consciousness. He realized that he cared. A lovely and intelligent woman had died violently long before her time. In the natural order of things, she should have lived, married, had children, enjoyed the good times and endured the bad, and died in bed. Someone took all that away from her. Simon wanted to know who and why.
Chapter Five
    EVERYONE ELSE HAD GATHERED IN THE LOUNGE BY THE TIME Simon arrived for the faculty meeting. Nonetheless, it was a sparse assembly, with just Walker Jones, Vera Thayer, Alex