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ready for a fight. Stuart Metz walked behind her, carrying a cardboard tray from Starbucks in both hands. Irene, in a double-breasted navy suit with white piping and white buttons, smiled at Dani as she passed. Stuart handed Dani her coffee as he hurried to catch up to his boss, for whom the elevator door opened as if it knew she was coming.
    “Time for me to get to work,” Dani told Tommy.
    “Can I tell you something?” Tommy said. “Whatever it was that happened up there on Bull’s Rock Hill, Liam didn’t do it. Not in a million years. I’d bet my life on it.”
    “Well,” Dani said, “I hope you’re right. See you around, maybe.”
    “I’m not going anywhere,” he said. “I’m waiting for Liam’s mom.”
    “Oh yeah, you said that,” Dani said, feeling awkward now and anything but professional. “So then . . .”
    She got on the elevator before she said anything stupid.

5 .
     
    “You look like you probably smell good.”
    Tommy wanted to kick himself. He hadn’t really said that, had he?
    Back in high school, he’d spent an hour staring at the telephone, summoning the courage to ask the formidable Danielle Harris out before realizing it was a losing battle. The East Salem High newspaper had called the homecoming pair “Beauty and the Beast,” but he’d gotten a report from a reliable source that others were calling them “the Princess and the Pea-brain.” Given how she’d fled from him on the dance floor, she must have agreed. She was even prettier than she’d been in high school, but how was that possible? Her eyes seemed bigger, maybe just because she wore makeup now. Some girls peaked in high school. Dani wasn’t one of them, even though she’d been more interesting in high school than the girls who were peaking.
    He took a seat on the bench by the water fountain. He refreshed the screen on his phone and Googled “Danielle Harris.” He clicked on a link to the home page for Ralston-Foley Behavioral Consulting, then on the bio for Dani. She’d graduated from East Salem High School the same year he did— that much he already knew. She’d completed her undergraduate degree at Brown two years before he’d taken his BA from Stanford. It didn’t surprise him to learn she’d finished four years’ worth of college classes in two—from what he remembered of her, he wondered what took her so long. She’d made a similar rush through Harvard Medical School and had spent two years as a psychiatric intern in Senegal, West Africa, with Doctors Without Borders, where she’d helped child soldiers reintegrate with society. She’d interned at Maclean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, outside of Boston, and she’d worked with troubled youths at the Blair-Hudson School in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Her bio listed scholarly papers she’d written or coauthored— several, Tommy noted, on the uses and misuses of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors and other psychotropic medications for the adolescent or developing brain.
    “A lifelong resident of East Salem and Westchester County, Dr. Harris brings a welcome medical component to the practice and an expertise experientially comparable to physicians twice her age.”
    Her bio added that she also taught part-time at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
    She’s still out of your league, Gunderson . But knowing you’re doing something stupid never stopped you before . . . Why let it stop you now?
    He returned to Google and typed in “Abigail Gardener” + “East Salem, NY.”
    A link brought him to the book pages of Amazon, where he found four titles attributed to Abigail Gardener: The History of East Salem , The Ghosts of East Salem , The Witches of East Salem , and The Natives of East Salem . None was still in print. Used copies of the first three could be purchased for $1.97 each.
    Hard to imagine how a person’s lifework could be had for $5.91.
    He recalled the time she’d visited his class, her energy and the enthusiasm she had