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weather. Come on, let’s get over to the barns before they take her away. I’d like to make sure she’s still dressed as we last saw her.”
    The three men left the Crescent and cut across the athletic field toward the college barns. Shandy, though much the smallest, outdistanced the others and got to the pigpens just as the police were lifting Miss Flackley’s body out of the extremely sophisticated pig feeder which had been designed and built to Professor Stott’s specifications. She made an astonishingly small bundle for a woman who’d earned her living shoeing Shire horses and Balaclava Blacks.
    He thought of the farrier as he’d last seen her, smiling, a bit flushed with wine and good food, gently but firmly setting him straight on one of the lesser-known passages from the poetical works of Felicia D. Hemaris. She’d been the only one at table who knew that the D. stood for Dorothea. It occurred to Shandy that he didn’t even know what her own first name was, much less her second, and that he was more distressed by his ignorance than he could have believed possible. Damn it, he’d liked Miss Flackley as well as Odin and Loki did; why had he never taken the trouble to know her better?
    To be sure, she’d never gone out of her way to encourage familiarity. She’d always kept that little screen of crisp competence around her, like a trained nurse in a private home, not wishing to be either snubbed or patronized. It must have been a lonesome life for Miss Flackley.
    Or had it? For all he knew, she had a lover in every haymow. In any event, she’d had a pleasant time on her last night alive. For that, as for so many other things, he was grateful to his wife. He told the police who he was and why he was there, and they let him take a close look at the body.
    “Yes, that’s the dress she had on last evening,” he said. “Have you any idea how long ago this—this thing happened?”
    “Certainly not less than three or four hours ago, perhaps a little longer,” said a man who must be a police doctor.
    “Then it’s quite possible she came directly here, though I can’t think why she would,” Shandy replied. “Our dinner party didn’t break up until close to midnight.”
    “She didn’t mention anything about checking the pig?”
    “No, nor was there any earthly reason why she should have, at least not by herself. Another of our guests was Professor Stott, head of our animal husbandry department. That’s he coming along the path now. Belinda—that is, the missing sow—was his particular—er—research project. If he had wished Miss Flackley’s professional opinion, he would surely have come with her.”
    “What makes you so sure he didn’t? Who saw her last when she left your house?”
    “Why—er—he did. He walked her to her van, which she had left parked in the Home Arts Auditorium lot around the corner from the Crescent, where we live.”
    “Oh yeah?” said Fred Ottermole, Balaclava’s police chief, who had managed to include himself in the interrogation. “Then what happened?”
    “Then she drove off.”
    “And where did Stott go?”
    “I suggest you ask him that question,” snapped Shandy.
    He’d had dealings with Fred Ottermole before. It was his opinion that Fred would be well advised to go back to cruising up and down Main Street, nabbing malefactors who threw candy wrappers about in violation of Balaclava Junction’s stiff anti-littering regulations.
    Fred’s nose was no doubt out of joint because President Svenson had been so quick to call in the highly efficient state police, thereby showing excellent sense. The last time Svenson had trusted Ottermole with a corpse, he’d wound up having two murders on his hands instead of one. He would not make the same mistake twice. Indeed, the President seldom made a mistake at all. He surely would not allow Professor Stott to be arrested for the murder of Miss Flackley just because Stott happened to have walked the farrier to her