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  “Was she depressed when you saw her on Thursday morning?” I asked him.

  “Not depressed so much as agitated, excited.”

  “About Stein?”

  “Yes, and about seeing her brother, Ethan. It was almost as if she felt she had to choose between the two of them, if for no other reason than to find an ending for her book.”

  “What does the book have to do with seeing Stein or Ethan?” I asked.

  “As I told you, she is living out what she writes. Stein and Ethan represent different paths to her—present and past, roughly. Frankly I’m afraid they lead in the same direction.”

  “Suicide?”

  He nodded. “She thinks it’s her destiny.”

  “I don’t believe in destinies,” I said, getting to my feet. “Could I use your phone? I need to make a couple of calls.”

  The man pointed to a phone on the desk. “I’ll leave you alone,” he said, standing up and walking to the door. “If there’s anything I can do . . .”

  “I’ll let you know,” I told him.

  ******

  I had only one contact in the Chicago area—an ex-FBI agent named Brandt Scheuster, who had opened his own P.I. agency in Skokie. I found his number in my address book and phoned him. All I got that late on a Sunday night was an answering machine. I left my name, Kirsten’s number, and told him I’d be back in touch. I tried calling Marnee Thompson at the apartment, but there was no answer there either. Marnee obviously hadn’t been forthcoming with me about Kirsten and her brother. But then, I was working for Papa Phil, and Kirsty was her friend.

  I thought about phoning Pearson himself, and decided to wait. Judging by how much of his children’s pasts—and his own—he’d already concealed, I didn’t think I’d get him to talk openly without some leverage. Or a body.

  After a time Heldman came back into the room. He had a beautiful little girl of about ten with him.

  “This is my daughter, Katie. Katie, Mr. Stoner.”

  Katie curtsied as if I were royalty.

  “Go on, toots,” he said, giving her a smack on the rear.

  She gave her father an indignant look and marched off up the hall.

  “She thinks she’s too old to be given a potch on the tuckus.”

  “She’s very pretty.”

  Heldman smiled proudly. “I think so. Did you finish your calls?”

  “All except for a cab to take me back to Kirsty’s apartment.”

  “I could drive you.”

  “That’s all right, Professor. I need you to run another errand.”

  “Anything,” he said.

  “How close are you to Jay Stein?”

  “He’s a colleague,” the professor said with a stilted air of professional courtesy. “He came here this past year as an instructor, fresh out of the Iowa workshops. I very much doubt he will be renewed this coming year—if that’s what you’re getting at.”

  It wasn’t what I was getting at, but I was glad to hear it anyway. Glad to know that forbearance had its limits, even among professors of literature.

  “I’m sure that Stein has told me a few self-protective lies,” I said. “But there is probably a certain amount of truth mixed in with them. It’s important for me to know what Kirsty and he actually talked about on Thursday morning—if she did in fact tell him she was going to see her brother or someone else. Do you think you could . . . ?”

  “What?” Heldman said uneasily. “Pump him?”

  “I was thinking of something a little more hardball than that. It wouldn’t be a lie if you said that you’d just talked to me and that I’d raised some disturbing questions about his conduct, would it?”

  “You want me to threaten him?” Heldman said with horror.

  “I want you to find out where Kirsten went. Otherwise, she may well be destined for calamity.”

  Heldman thought it over for a moment. “I’ll do what I can” was all he said.

  6

  I CALLED for a cab and, before leaving, told Heldman to phone me at Kirsten’s apartment after he’d talked to Stein. He wasn’t comfortable with the idea of blackmailing the man—that was obvious. But I had the gut feeling that he’d get the information I wanted, because he really did care for Kirsten, as I myself was beginning to care for her in spite of my initial misgivings about the case.

  On the cab ride back to the apartment I wondered why Phil Pearson had waited for the girl to go missing before calling for help. He had talked vaguely about “disturbing signs” in Kirsten’s behavior—he’d talked vaguely about everything having to do with his daughter, as if her past was a personal embarrassment to him. But the signs of Kirsten’s disintegration were quite clear to everyone who knew her. They had to be just as clear to her father, who was a trained psychiatrist. Perhaps Pearson couldn’t bring himself to intervene in his daughter’s life again after his disastrous rescue attempt of the previous summer. Perhaps he thought that another such intervention would drive her over the edge. I didn’t know. But there was an inconsistency about his behavior, about everyone’s behavior toward Kirsty, that almost amounted to ambivalence. It was as if her friends had decided to let her life run its course, even if it meant her death.

  I’m sure they felt they were respecting her wishes, showing her the courtesy of treating her as an adult. But it seemed heartless to me when she was so obviously not fully an adult. Even Professor Heldman seemed irresponsible, knowing as he did that Kirsten was close to suicide and still letting her walk off to her self-pronounced doom. Maybe that was the way enlightened people treated each other in academia.

  It was past nine when the cabbie dropped me off at the brownstone on 54th. No light was on in the second-floor apartment windows, and no one answered the entry buzzer. I fished through my pocket, found the keys that Pearson had given me, and let myself into the front hall. The hallway was dark, and the cat piss smell was overwhelming. I fumbled up the staircase to the apartment, unlocked the door, and went in.

  A sliver of moonlit sky hung in the darkness like a hallucination. It took me a second to realize that it was being reflected off the mirror in Marnee Thompson’s bedroom. I found the desk light and clicked it on.

  The boxed manuscript was the first thing I saw. The box had been opened and the manuscript removed. At first I thought that Marnee Thompson must have taken it out to read. But on further thought I couldn’t see Marnee tampering with Kirsten’s things—not with her fierce sense of propriety. Which meant one of two things. Either someone else had broken in and stolen the manuscript. Or Kirsty Pearson herself had come back for it. I liked the idea of Kirsty taking it, for several reasons.

  One, the apartment lock hadn’t been tampered with, so whoever had removed it had had a key to the room. Two, Kirsty hadn’t finished the book yet. According to Art Heldman she was waiting for real life to supply her with an ending. Maybe she’d found that ending over the past four days.

  There was a third reason why I liked the idea. If Kirsty had taken the manuscript, it meant she was still alive. And I wanted her to stay alive until I could find her.

  I went down the hall to Kirsty’s bedroom, flipped on the light, and went through the trashy room again—carefully this time—looking for any other sign that Kirsty might have returned to the apartment. But nothing else had been moved or taken—the clothes were still disarrayed, the books made their tipsy towers, the birth control pills were hidden in the underwear drawer, the picture of Phil Pearson lay facedown in the panties.

  I hadn’t examined the loose papers scattered on her desk the first time I’d searched the room. This time I read each one through. They were fragments of prose, mostly. Journal entries that made little sense to me and one that made too much sense, a scrap cut from The New York Times Magazine and pasted to a blank page:

  Suicide was a crime—ironically, a capital crime—in most Western nations well into the nineteenth century. In England, failed suicides were frequently nursed back to health in order to be hanged.

  The
re was a fragment of a prose poem, copied out several times. Presumably one of her own:

  Closing windows at dawn

  Against the heat of the day,

  He is suddenly lost among bulky

  Colorless furnishings

  The windows stick

  in swollen tracks,

  the blinds will not close

  under thin sheets

  his feet search out her legs

  his hands . . .

  And that was all, as if she’d stopped those hands with her own. I put the paper down and thought about Jay Stein—about paying him another visit—when the phone in the living room rang. I went back down the hall and picked it up. It was Brandt Scheuster, returning my call.

  “I’ve got a missing person, Brandt,” I told him. “A Cincinnati girl, going to school up here, who dropped out of sight about four days ago. She’s unstable, possibly suicidal. I need you to check with the cops—see if she’s been picked up or if they’ve got her in a morgue. You could canvass hospital emergency rooms and psych wards, too.”

  I gave him Kirsty’s name and physical description.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Brandt said. “Does she have a car?”

  “A yellow VW Bug. I don’t know the plates yet, but if you could run her name through Illinois BMV, I’d appreciate it. I’ll check in Ohio myself to see if she registered the car down there.”

  “You want this to go out as an APB, Harry? You want to make it official police business?”

  I didn’t even have to think about it. “Yeah. I want the kid found.”

  “If we do locate her . . . ?”

  “Call me. I’ll be checking into a hotel later tonight. When I have a new number I’ll let you know. Until then you can get me here at the girl’s apartment.”

  After finishing with Brandt I called Al Foster at the Cincinnati Police Department and asked him to run Kirsten’s name through the Ohio BMV computer. I told him it was urgent.

  I’d just hung up when the phone rang again. This time it was Art Heldman.

  “I’ve talked to Jay,” he said in a guilty-sounding voice.

  “What did he have to say?”

  “He repeated the story that he told you—about Ethan, Kirsty’s brother.” He cleared his throat dramatically. “However, when I . . . pressured him, he admitted that Ethan hadn’t been the only focus of the conversation. He and Kirsty did talk about their own relationship as well. Apparently Kirsty wanted to start seeing Jay again—romantically.”

  “What did Stein say to that?”

  “He claims he didn’t commit himself either way. He told her that he cared for her and that they would talk again after the holidays. He’s fully aware that Kirsten is still in love with him, and he’s determined to ease her out of the infatuation slowly and gently.”

  “Like he did last year?” I said acidly.

  “Jays knows he behaved badly last spring. He simply panicked. Kirsten can be demanding. Her needs are so great.”

  “That’s the way it is with nineteen-year-old women, Professor, especially when you abandon them.”

  Heldman didn’t say anything.

  “Did Stein give you any sense of how Kirsten reacted to his spiel?”

  “He thought he’d talked her into putting everything on hold—the renewed romance and the visit to Ethan. He thought she was going back to Cincinnati, as she originally planned to do. I thought she was, too, Stoner. That was definitely the impression I got.”

  I sighed. “Well, something must have changed her mind.”

  “I did learn one more thing that may be of interest. Jay didn’t tell you because he didn’t trust you—possibly because you’re working for Kirsten’s father, and Kirsty has made it clear to any number of people that her dad isn’t to be told anything about her life here in Chicago. Dr. Pearson may be a well-meaning man, but he can also be an overbearing one. At times of crisis he seems to overreact. It’s almost as if he’s afraid that Kirsty’s emotional problems will reflect badly on him.”

  “I have that feeling too,” I admitted.

  “That’s why Jay left out part of the conversation.”

  “Which part?”

  “The part about where Kirsty’s brother, Ethan, is staying.”

  “Stein had an address?”

  “Not an address—a name. Kirsty mentioned a motel in Evanston. The University Inn. I looked up the address myself. It’s on Lake Shore, south of the campus. According to the desk clerk, Ethan Pearson is still registered there.”

  “Good work. I’ll get a cab immediately.”

  “I’d like to come along,” Heldman said. “I mean I have a car. And I know Kirsty. If she is in a bad way, perhaps I can help.”

  “All right,” I said. “Let’s do it.”

  7

  HELDMAN PICKED me up outside the brownstone a little before ten.

  It took us about thirty minutes to drive up to Evanston, and another fifteen to find The University Inn on the south side of town—a run-down, fifties-style motor court with a small office building in front and Quonset-like motel rooms stretching in parallel rows behind it. The ice-shagged neon sign on the highway berm said “Vacancies.” And always would.

  Heldman pulled up by the office. Through the steamy picture window I could see a night clerk, resting his elbows on a countertop.

  “You want to go in?” Heldman asked. “Or should I?”

  “I’ll handle it, Professor.”

  “We’re not going to do anything rash, are we? I mean we’re not going to use force, right?”

  He laughed nervously, but his eyes were dead serious. He was beginning to have second thoughts about intervening in Kirsten’s life—second thoughts about me.

  I said, “Let’s see if Kirsten is here before we decide what we’re going to do.”

  Heldman didn’t look reassured. “I don’t know. I don’t know about this.”

  I got out of the car and walked into the motel office. A middle-aged clerk in a striped shirt and black gabardine pants was reading a comic book spread out on the counter. He looked up at me balefully, as if his instincts told him I wasn’t a paying customer.

  “Can I do for you?” he said, flapping the comic book shut.

  He had a slight cast in his left eye that gave him a queasy, distracting stare.

  I tried to smile at him pleasantly. “You can tell me what room Ethan Pearson is in. I’m supposed to meet him here around eleven, but I forgot the damn room number.”

  “That’d be fourteen. Down there on your right.”

  “Great.” I turned toward the door, then looked back at him. “You don’t know if Kirsten’s here yet, do you? Dark-haired girl, blue eyes, about nineteen?”

  “Ain’t seen nobody but his wife and kid,” he said, flipping the comic book open and bending over it again.

  I went back outside and got into Heldman’s Audi.

  “Room fourteen,” I said to him. “On the right.”

  The professor wheeled the car slowly around the office and down a driveway that ran between the two rows of motel buildings. There were numbered parking slots on either side of the drive—most of them filled with frozen slush. But the one in front of room 14 had a car in it, a yellow VW Bug.

  “Christ, I think that’s Kirsty’s car,” Heldman said excitedly.

  “It is her car. Pull over on the other side of the drive.”

  Heldman parked the Audi on the right hand berm, flipped off the lights, and turned in his seat to look back through the rear window at number 14. For a moment we both sat there, looking over our shoulders at the lighted motel room window.

  “What do we do now?” Heldman asked.

  “Talk to her, if she’s willing.”

  “And if she isn’t?”

  I didn’t answer him. What I had to say wasn’t what he wanted to hear.

  As I started to get out of the car, Heldman grabbed my coat sleeve. Without thinking, I jerked away—hard. The professor looked shocked, then frightened.
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br />   “I won’t be a party to coercion,” he said, trying to make his voice resolute.

  “I’m going to do my job,” I said, feeling sorry that he’d come along. “If that bothers you, stay in the car.”

  “No, I’m coming with you,” he said, as if I’d challenged him.

  I got out of the car and Heldman got out too. Side by side we walked across the icy driveway to number 14. I stopped by the VW for a moment—to take a quick look. The doors were locked and the windows were solid ice. There was thick ice on the hood and roof, as well. Clearly the car hadn’t been used all day—perhaps not for several days.

  A short cement walk led from the parking area up to the motel door. I automatically slowed my pace as I neared the door, and Heldman almost ran up my back.

  “Sorry,” he whispered, and dropped a step behind me.

  The curtain in the window was too thick to see through, but I could hear a television going inside the room.

  I gave Heldman a glance—to make sure he was out of the way—raised my fist, and knocked.

  The television went off abruptly, as if a hand had been clapped to its mouth. There was a moment of dead silence, in which I had the sure feeling that someone inside the room was straining to listen. Then the door opened slowly, and a stocky young woman with a badly bruised face peered out the crack.

  Even in the dim porch light I could tell that the bruises had come from a recent beating. She’d tried to hide the black eyes with makeup, but there was nothing she could do about the swollen nose or the fat, twisted bottom lip. She touched at the lip involuntarily, when she saw that my eyes were drawn to it. Then she covered her whole mouth with her right hand, as if that would divert me.

  “Yes?” she said behind her hand. Her voice sounded hoarse and weak, as if she’d used it up earlier that day—screaming. “What is it?”

  “My name is Stoner. I’m looking for Kirsten Pearson.”

  “She’s not here,” the woman said. “She’s gone. They’re both gone.”