She hurried upstairs. In her bedroom she donned a lined trench coat, which seemed appropriate to detection. Since she did not like to return to a dark apartment at night, she turned on the bed lamp before switching off the ceiling light. Then she went into the kitchen and turned on a small light above the range. While there she briefly considered the advisability of having a quick nip against the cold, but rejected it. Back in the living room she switched off the ceiling light, pausing only long enough to note with relief how light splashed into the darkness from the bedroom on one side and the kitchen on the other. Downstairs she found Farley, in his topcoat, sulkily waiting in the hall.
They went out the alley door to Farley’s old Ford on the apron. It was cold outside, near freezing, but the sky was clear, with lofty stars and a slice of moon. Farley was sullen at having to go, and they drove in stiff silence to the Handclasp campus, which was not far away, and across to the library, the only building on the campus left with a blaze of lights.
Parking was no problem at this hour. They parked at the curb and went up a long walk to the building, passing reference rooms to right and left, and upstairs to the charging desk. The girl at the desk was trying to sustain the illusion of efficiency, but her eyes were heavy behind her thick glasses. She answered Fan’s questions dully. She had not been on duty at three o’clock, so she could not tell if Mrs. Miles had been in the library or not. She did not know Mrs. Miles, moreover, and could not have told in any event, unless Mrs. Miles had presented her stack permit.
“Say!” said Fanny, “I didn’t think of that. How could Terry have met someone in the stacks if she didn’t have a permit? Farley, do you happen to know if she has one?”
“I’m sure she has,” Farley said, “as the wife of a faculty member. It’s a courtesy.”
“That’s so,” said the heavy-eyed girl.
“Well,” Fanny said, “Farley is only a student, and I am only a sister, which is not so grand as being a wife, but I’d like to be admitted to the stacks, anyway.”
“Do you have a permit?” the girl said to Farley.
“Certainly.”
“Go ahead,” she said.
“I guess I’ll have to,” Farley said. “Although I can’t see any sense to it.”
They passed through into the stacks, which were erected on low-ceilinged levels from basement up. Level C was below them, and so they descended narrow steel steps and turned down an aisle between shelves of books. At the far end, beyond a cross-aisle, ranged a row of carrels, each furnished with a desk and chair. All the carrels were dark, except one in which a late bookworm toiled over a tome.
“I am thinking,” said Fanny, “that one of these alcoves would make a dandy place to meet somebody.”
“That depends,” Farley said, “on the purpose of the meeting. For private conversation, yes. For private frolic, no.”
“What other purpose can you think of, where Terry is concerned?”
“None at the moment. Incidentally, whoever she met had to be someone with a permit.”
“Logical. It also narrows the suspects down to about ten thousand people.”
“Fewer than that, I think. I’m sure we can eliminate the freshmen.”
“With Terry how can you be sure of anything? But I’ll concede on other grounds. Freshmen are not admitted to the stacks.”
“In any event, it is clearly impossible now to tell if Terry was here at three o’clock or not. We had better leave.”
“We had much better,” said Farley, “never have come at all.”
They left the library. At the curb beside the Ford, Fanny stopped and stared for a moment at a cast-iron VIP posed on a marble pedestal across the street.
“You’re thinking again,” Farley groaned. “What now?”
“I’m thinking that a library is not, after all, an ideal place for a tryst. Especially if something more than conversation is contemplated.”
“If there was a tryst, remember? If Terry was ever here at all.”
“That’s understood. It isn’t necessary to qualify every statement, Farley.”
“It isn’t necessary to prolong this foolishness, either. Let’s go home.”
“Well, I can’t think of any place else to go, except the Student Union. We could ask there if anyone saw Terry with anyone.”
“The Student Union! I’ve got news for you, sister. The Student Union is not an ideal place for a tryst, either, if something more than conversation is contemplated. All you can contemplate there is billiards or watching television or something like that.”
“It wouldn’t do any harm to ask.”
“It wouldn’t do any good, either. Chances are a hundred to one against finding anyone who even knows Terry, let alone who saw her there this afternoon and remembers it. I’m going home, Fan, and that’s that.”
“I dare say you’re right.” Fanny, for a wonder, was submissive. “We may as well. Perhaps Terry will return before morning, if she hasn’t already.”
Arriving shortly thereafter at The Cornish Arms, they drove up the alley and onto the apron, below the rear window of Farley’s apartment. Moments later, at the door Fanny cursed softly.
“Damn!” she said. “Orville has locked the back door for the night. Well have to walk around.”
They walked around to the front entrance and up the steps from the vestibule into the hall.
“Come have a nightcap,” Farley said.
“Beer? No, thanks.”
“I’m out of beer. I told you that this afternoon. I’ve got a little gin.”
“In that case, I accept.”
They had the nightcap, which Farley fixed in the kitchen while Fanny waited in the living room, and then Fanny went upstairs and struggled out of her tight pants and climbed into the loose ones of her pajamas. It was going on midnight, and in spite of the worrisome, puzzling developments of the night she was very sleepy.
She slept through the night like a log, as the saying goes. Although as Fan often pointed out, it has never been established that a log sleeps.
6
Fan slept so soundly that she woke the next morning with a hangover. On her stomach, her face buried in her pillow, she raised her head heavily and squinted at her alarm clock. If she were seeing right, and if the clock were not telling a lie, she had exactly fifteen minutes to bathe and dress and get to work — clearly an impossibility, even if she skipped breakfast.
Her own alarm system began ringing dire warnings of an irate employer and immediate dismissal. Fan bounced out of bed and sprang wildly for the bathroom. She was standing there with her pajama pants in a limp little heap around her feet before she remembered that this was Saturday morning, no work today, and to hell with alarm clocks and employers.
Weak with relief, she hoisted her pants and retied the string and strolled back to her bed and sat down on the edge of it. She had been shocked so widely awake that it was now hopeless to try to go back to sleep.
She began to think in terms of a leisurely shower and breakfast. The soft and silken feeling of having two whole days with nothing to do was nicely developing when all at once the events of the previous evening returned to her clearing head.
Had Terry come home in the night?
And where the devil was Ben?
Fan put coffee on in the kitchen and returned to the bathroom for her shower. Dressed and brushed, she boiled an egg, toasted a slice of bread, and ate the egg and toast with two cups of black coffee and strawberry jam. She washed her breakfast things and put them away, and then she was ready to apply herself to the problems at hand. A minute later she was rapping briskly on Farley’s door downstairs.
No answer — clearly, Farley was still asleep or had gone out. Of these alternatives, the former was more likely. This conclusion called for repeated and louder knocking, which Fanny was prepared to administer; but then it occurred to her that the best policy, when you wanted information, was to go to the horse’s mouth. So she moved across the hall to Jay Miles’s door and, stooping to plant an ear close to the panel, listened shamelessly. She was rewarded by the faint sound of movement within, and Fan knocked. After a moment the door was opened by Jay, who had been interrupted in the act of tying a knot in a black string tie.