He was already getting heat for Lucas. After every suicide, there was a witch hunt. Mira had been on college campuses long enough to understand that.

She swallowed. At least now she knew what she was dealing with. At least now she could address it head on. Blame had to be laid.

She looked from the bright spot on the dean's head to the raven, and then down to the syllabus on his desk, and then back into Dean Fleming's small, piercing eyes. She took a deep breath and said, "I certainly understand the seriousness of suicide, sir. It's one of the things I try to bring to full light for my students. My major purpose in teaching the courses I teach is to deromanticize death, and to effectively convince a disbelieving segment of the population, youth, as to its permanence. Believe me, there were no students at the morgue today who don't understand that now."

"I've been informed that he was working with you. Lucas. That he'd-"

"He wasn't working with me. I interviewed him about Nicole Werner, yes, and-"

"And he says as much in his G.o.dd.a.m.ned suicide note, Professor Polson. Do you have any idea what this means?"

Mira shook her head. She could feel her blood beating at her temples and behind her knees. His suicide note. She said, nearly spluttering the words, "He didn't commit suicide because of me." Then she took a moment to think about it, and actually laughed out loud. "There were reasons that boy killed himself, and there was plenty the college could have done, but none of that had anything to do with me."

"Well, maybe that's true, but you were a faculty member aware of his problems, and-"

"And I informed Mental Health Services after the interview. I spoke with three therapists. I spoke with Lucas himself. I made an appointment for him. I did everything except walk him over there myself."

"Well, you didn't inform his parents, who, as you can imagine, are-"

Mira laughed again, involuntarily, in amazement. "Oh, my G.o.d," she said. "Dean Fleming, I have a statement in my contract specifying that, under the Confidentiality of Academic Information Act, I can under no circ.u.mstances contact my students' parents. The university is a closed system. Remember? I'm not to contact police, medical professionals, and surely not parents. Those were your exact words when I was hired. A closed system."

He cleared his throat. He licked his lips. He paused for what seemed like a long time, and then he said, "You misunderstood. And this course of yours, it's encouraging a death cult in our college."

This time it was so funny Mira couldn't even laugh. "I'm encouraging a death cult?" she asked.

"Yes. There are girls directly influenced by your cla.s.s who have started a club devoted to trying to contact Nicole Werner and some other dead girl. They claim to be seeing ghosts. They've done some serious injury to themselves, and to the facility. Cutting. That sort of thing. Their candles caused a fire."

Mira felt all the breath inside her leave. She waited for the dean to go on, but neither of them spoke, and finally she shook her head and said to the silence between them, "There are always crazy college girls. Those aren't my students. You can't blame me for what crazy coeds do in a dorm."

Dean Fleming looked around him then, as if he'd lost his raven and was trying to locate it, and then he put his hands on his desk, folded, looked back at Mira, and said, "Believe it or not, there's more." He leaned a little closer, as if there were someone else in the room who might overhear. He said, "There's the question of your relationships, Mira, which have been called to my attention. Your husband has informed me that you're involved in a . . . situation. With a student. An extracurricular situation."

Mira had then the sensation of having been hit by a blunt object, a blow to the head, and she remembered, suddenly, once, in the dark, getting out of bed and stumbling into a bookshelf, jarring a solid bra.s.s bookend off of it, and the blank, dull feeling when it smacked her just above her left temple.

Such surprise, it wasn't even painful. The pain was somewhere so deep inside her it did not register on any physical scale. It took her several seconds to open her eyes again, blinking, and recover enough to say, "What? My husband? You heard from my husband?"

"Yes. But that's only part of this. A part of it. I have my own concerns, my own reservations, about your relationship with Professor Blackhawk."

"Jeff?"

"Yes."

Yes.

The drive out of town to get her twins, pa.s.sing, on the way, Dean Fleming, who was standing at a crosswalk.

Now, Mira understood that the blank expression on the dean's face as they drove by had been his way of registering the two of them together, maybe adding it up with other things he'd suspected. Idle gossip in the faculty lounge. Hunches, glimpses. "Jeff?" she asked again. It was the only thing she could think to ask.

"In truth, it's none of my business," the dean said, "although it's another delicate matter, and relationships between colleagues in a program as intimate as ours have to be discouraged. But I'm less concerned about Jeff Blackhawk than I am about Perry Edwards, who is a student. I know you know how seriously this university takes the crossing of the line between a student and a teacher, and I have to warn you, Mira, these are puritanical times we're living in. You can't expect to remain employed here and behave in a manner that is, that is, that is . . ."

Mira put her hand to her temple, feeling it again-that dull ache in the dark at the back of her head-and managed to say, again, "My husband called you? Clark called?"

Was it possible? Was that why he'd left? Was that why he'd seemed not to feel any guilt about taking her children away from her, and then not even calling to tell her where they'd gone?

Dean Fleming lifted a shoulder as if he weren't sure what his answer should be.

"Where is he?" Mira asked. "Where did Clark call you from?"

"Mira, this was some time ago, and your marital problems, although regrettable, aren't the reason why-"

She stood up, although she could not feel her legs beneath her. She said, looking down on his bright spot, his bald spot, his soft spot, "What is the reason, then, Dean Fleming? Because all of this, whatever this is, has been-no offense, Dean Fleming-utter bulls.h.i.t."

She felt the shock of her own words register in the look on his face, but didn't wait for him to react. She held up a hand, and said, "I'm sorry. Forgive me. But there's something else happening here. This has nothing to do with Jeff Blackhawk, and certainly nothing to do with Perry Edwards. This has to do with Nicole Werner, and the sorority, doesn't it? It has to do with Nicole Werner, and my research, and my cla.s.s, and Lucas and Perry, yes-but it's not what you're saying it is."

But what was it? She found herself saying it before she'd even thought it: "The runaway."

Jeff's story was coming back to her now.

A new sense was being made of everything.

She said, as if in a trance, "The girl from the music school. The other sorority girl. No one's looking for her. Why is that, Dean Fleming? Why would the university so quickly drop-?"

"Oh, for G.o.d's sake, Mira. Don't become a conspiracy theorist now on top of everything else. Frankly, and I'm sorry to be so blunt here, you were always a wild card. When we hired you we didn't know, really, what we were hiring. We had no way of knowing. I'll admit I, like your students, was intrigued by the material and your pa.s.sion for it, but this simply can't be allowed to go on. I'm sure I don't have to remind you here that you don't have tenure, so if you're interested in keeping your position, Professor Polson, I suggest you take what I've had to say here very seriously, and, and, and . . ."

But Mira had left his office before finding out whether this time the word for which he was so desperately searching ever found its way to him.

76.

People laughed as they pa.s.sed him in the hallway, but when they saw the expression on his face and the blood smeared across it, they stopped. Only Megan Brenner spoke: "You okay, Craig? Did someone punch you in the face or something? What's on the back of your shirt? That's not blood, too, is it?"

Craig said nothing to her. Megan was perhaps the most pet.i.te fully grown human being he'd ever known. He could have wrapped his arms around her waist twice. He could have carried her across the Sahara and not even gotten thirsty or winded. He and Perry had taken to calling her Mega, because it was so absurd. He looked at her-that face peering up at him, the size of a cat's-and all he could do was nod.

He went to the boys' bathroom. No one else was in there. Just the slick, bright, urine-colored tiles (Perry had suggested they'd once been white; Craig had said the tile people had simply been thinking ahead) vaguely reflecting him at the sink as he washed the blood off his face, careful to avoid the actual mirror and his actual reflection in it, and tossed the T-shirt with the manicotti on it into the garbage can, and headed to his room to put on a new one.

Perry was back from the cafeteria himself, sitting at his desk chair with his head in his hands. He didn't look up when Craig came in, but he cleared his throat. For a terrible second Craig thought maybe Perry was going to say something, that maybe he'd even try to apologize, or explain, and if that happened, there was no way Craig was going to be able to take it: He would have to kill Perry, or die trying.

But that wasn't what he wanted to do, not at all.

Perry had been on top of him, straddling him, not that different, really, from the way what's-her-name, the girl in the hot tub (what was her name?) had straddled him in the MacGuirres' pool house back in Fredonia, looking down on him, staring him in the eyes, except that he'd been inside that girl, and she'd been looking into him, pretending that f.u.c.king was some big spiritual experience.

He doubted it was, since she had the same experience every Sat.u.r.day night in Fredonia with a different guy. She'd been stoned as h.e.l.l, and so was he, but Craig remembered her saying as she stared into his eyes, "I know what you're thinking. You and I are one . . ."

And how she'd slapped him hard when he started to laugh.

Even then, with his d.i.c.k seven inches into her, Craig couldn't remember her name, and he'd told her that.

But Perry.

Craig had known something at that moment. Something transcendent. Truly, this time, as Perry was straddling him, staring down at him, slamming him into the floor, Craig had felt his whole life grabbed like his T-shirt in Perry's fist, and yanked, and shoved back down, and it was a spiritual experience.

"f.u.c.ker. a.s.shole. Listen. You stupid, stupid idiot."

Perry was his friend. His first real friend.

He didn't want to kill Perry. He wanted Perry to be Perry. Underlining s.h.i.t in a book like his life depended on it, giving Craig advice on how to keep his side of the room a little bit tidier, piling up his salad bowl with things his mother must have threatened him for eighteen years to eat, and that he was still eating. He wanted Perry to be his roommate, his friend.

But what he had to do was see Nicole.

That had nothing to do with Perry.

Luckily, Perry didn't speak.

Craig grabbed his coat and closed the door more carefully than usual behind him-not slamming it, but not leaving any doubt that he was closing it, either.

He headed for Lucas's room.

He didn't have time to walk to the OTT house.

He needed a car.

77.

Jeremy purred in her lap as Sh.e.l.ly sat at the computer and scrolled through the articles. There were a hundred of them, and she was familiar with all of them, but they were cast in a new light now.

The lake of blood, the beyond recognition, the burned over ninety-percent of her body, the driver of the car fleeing the scene on foot, and herself: the middle-aged woman who was the first to arrive on the scene, and who failed to give the emergency operator enough information about the location of the accident for the paramedics to locate it in time to save the victim.

According to the articles, by the time the EMTs had arrived, the victim had been abandoned, lying in a lake of her own blood, burned beyond recognition, in the backseat of the vehicle for over an hour.

No.

Not even close.

Sh.e.l.ly remembered one EMT hurrying out of the ambulance. He had a large black satchel in one hand and a fire extinguisher under his arm. Sh.e.l.ly had stood up from where she'd been kneeling beside the girl and the boy, on the other side of the ditch of water she'd had to wade through to get there.

She'd waved her arms to get his attention.

Naturally enough, he'd gone first to the car, and he was peering in the window. He had no way of knowing that the victim had been thrown from the vehicle, and how far.

"Over here," Sh.e.l.ly had called out, and he'd turned, looking confused.

Where, she'd wondered then, were the others? Surely, there was someone with him-following, driving, on the way.

"Ma'am," the EMT had shouted. "Don't touch her! Step back! Please return to your own vehicle immediately."

Reluctantly, Sh.e.l.ly had followed his directions. She made her way back through the ditch of cold water, pa.s.sing him as she did so. He didn't even look at her. He'd tossed the fire extinguisher onto the ground, and he seemed to be muttering under his breath.

When she stumbled up on the other side, she'd looked behind her again: The couple in the moonlight.

The boy with his arms wrapped around the girl.

Sh.e.l.ly had seen the girl up close. She'd seen and touched both of them. They were warm. They were alive. She'd been grateful to feel that warmth. The girl was wearing a black dress, and it made her bright gold hair shine even more brightly in the moonlight. When Sh.e.l.ly put her hand on the girl's neck to feel for a pulse (and she had felt it, that little insistent throbbing of some artery beneath the skin), her eyelids had fluttered. The boy had kissed her forehead then, and then he'd sobbed with relief. He'd said her name. Nicole. And at the sound of her name, Nicole had opened her eyes and looked at him, smiling and wincing at the same time.

Fine, Sh.e.l.ly had thought. She's fine. Bruised and shocked and disoriented, but utterly alive.

Sh.e.l.ly opened the next, familiar Google result, and there was Josie in her black dress, black sungla.s.ses, a wristful of black bracelets. The sun shone down on her black hair and those elaborate, exotic earrings she was wearing, which were Denise Graham's dead great-grandmother's. Beyond her, a fresh orchard was in bloom.

Sh.e.l.ly enlarged the photo.

She looked more closely.

They were all wearing the same black dress.

Every single sorority sister.

The same V neck, the ruffle at the hem. The sleevelessness and drape of the dresses identical. The small satin ribbon around the waist. Sh.e.l.ly remembered saying to Josie one afternoon in bed, "The thing I hated about being in a sorority was that we were all supposed to look and act alike." And how Josie had snorted. "Like that's not how it is with everybody? Like all the lesbians your age aren't all trying to look and act alike? Like all the counter-culture kids, or all the conservatives, or all the professors or librarians or bookstore clerks around here aren't, every one of them, completely interchangeable?"

Interchangeable.

The word, frankly, had surprised Sh.e.l.ly.

It had seemed beyond Josie, somehow, that word, as if she'd been thinking about sameness, about sororities, about the human condition or something for a long time, trying to find just the right word to describe it. Thumbing through the thesaurus. The effect of hearing Josie use this word, so perfect, was not unlike the way it might have felt if Jeremy had suddenly turned to her and expressed a dislike for a certain brand of cat food. (I would prefer no more Fancy Feast, if you don't mind.) It seemed somehow to change the rules of the game she thought they'd been playing, if only for a second or two.

In this photograph, there were at least thirty girls, and every one wore the exact same dress. Where had they gotten so many at once, especially since nearly every one of these girls would have been the same size? What store, what catalog, what warehouse, could possibly have held them all?

And the black sungla.s.ses. The black bracelets. Some with straight blond hair, shoulder length, and the rest with straight black hair, shoulder length. Not one of them was smiling, but neither were any of them crying.

Sh.e.l.ly enlarged the image once more, and then again, and when she leaned farther forward, with more urgency this time, Jeremy jumped off her lap and went scrambling across the wood floors, sliding on his claws into the hallway.

"Jeremy? Baby?" Sh.e.l.ly called after him, still intent on her computer screen, but he didn't come back. She'd scared him.

One more double click, and the central thing in this image became something she had only peripherally registered until now: A single blurred girl behind the scenes, moving with what looked like genuine swiftness through the parking lot behind them all. Her arms were swinging at her sides as if she were moving quickly. One foot was an inch above the ground. Her blond hair was blowing around behind her, either because of the swiftness with which she was traveling or because of a stiff breeze. There was a purposeful expression on her face. She was looking straight ahead. A few nice cars glinted in the sunlight around her.

There were still a couple of branches of blossoms framing the screen.