“Who you calling?” he asked.

“Molly.”

“Relax, they’re at the university. I mean it, noble mon, you’re giving me the shingles just watching you.”

I got Molly’s voice mail and realized she had probably left her cell phone in the automobile or turned it off when she entered the library. I tried Alafair’s number and got the same result, then I remembered Alafair had left her purse at the house.

The phone rang in the kitchen.

ALAFAIR HAD SPREAD her note cards on a table that was not far from shelves of books that dealt with the flora and fauna of the American Northwest. She was writing down the names of trees and types of rock that characterized the escarpment along the Columbia River Gorge just south of Mount Hood. Then her eyes began to burn from the fatigue of the day and the sleepless nights she had experienced since Bobby Mack Rydel, a man she had never seen before, had tried to kill her.

In her earliest attempts at fiction, she had learned that there are many things a person can do well when he or she is tired, but imagining plots and creating dialogue and envisioning fictional characters and writing well are not among them.

She gathered up her note cards and placed them in her book bag, then took out the yellow legal pad on which I had written down the remnants of the words at the bottom of Bertrand Melancon’s letter to the Baylor family.

In the stacks, a man with a raincoat over his arm and an oversize hat on his head was gazing curiously at the titles of the books arrayed along the shelf. He lifted a heavy volume off the shelf and seated himself on the opposite side of Alafair’s table, three chairs down from her. He did not glance in her direction and seemed intent upon the content of his book, a collection of photographic plates of scenes in Colorado. Then, as an afterthought, he seemed to remember that he was still wearing his hat. He removed it and set it crown-down on the table. His scalp was bone-white under the freshly shaved roots of his hair.

“How do you do?” he said, and nodded.

“Fine, how are you?” Alafair replied.

He opened his book and began reading, his forehead knitted. Alafair went back to work on Bertrand Melancon’s water-diluted directions to Sidney Kovick’s diamonds. Molly returned from the restroom and looked over her shoulder. The original letters had been Th dym s un the ri s on e ot ide of h an. Alafair had spaced them out ten times on ten lines, trying different combinations with them on each line. By the tenth line, she had created a statement that seemed to make syntactical and visual sense.

“You should have been a cryptographer,” Molly said.

“Spelling is the challenge,” Alafair said. “He probably spells most polysyllabic words phonetically. So if the first word is ‘The’ and we create ‘dymines’ out of ‘dym,’ we’ve got a running start on the whole sentence. If the third word doesn’t agree in number with ‘dymines’ and we substitute ‘is’ for ‘are,’ it begins to come together pretty quickly.”

The man with the mustache and shaved head paused in his reading, stifling a yawn, his head turning in the opposite direction from Molly and Alafair. His eyes scanned the high windows for a flicker of lightning in the sky. He watched a tall black kid in a basketball letter sweater walk by, then resumed reading.

“We turn ‘un’ into ‘under’ and let ‘the’ stand. Put a ‘b’ in front of ‘ri’ and add a ‘k’ and you get ‘bricks.’ ‘On’ stands by itself and ‘ot’ becomes ‘other.’ ‘Of’ stands alone and we turn ‘h’ into ‘the.’ So we’ve got ‘The dymines is under the bricks on the other side of the…’ It’s the ‘an’ I haven’t worked out.”

Molly thought about it. “Put a ‘c’ in front and an ‘e’ behind.”

“‘Cane,’ that’s it. ‘The dymines is under the bricks on the other side of the cane.’ How about that?” Alafair said.

The man staring at alpine scenes in the large picture book he gripped by both covers, the spine resting on the table, looked at his watch and yawned again. He got up from the table and replaced his book on the shelf. Then he walked over to a periodicals rack and began thumbing through a magazine, occasionally glancing out the window at the darkness in the sky.

At 9:53 Molly and Alafair left the library and walked toward their automobile.

It was 9:12 p.m. when the phone rang in the kitchen. I hoped it was Molly. I looked at the caller ID and saw that the call was blocked. I picked up the receiver. “Hello?” I said.

“I had to cajole a couple of people, but this is what I found out,” Betsy said. “Tom Claggart attended the Citadel in the late seventies. His father was stationed at Fort Jackson. The father was a widower and had only one child with the name Claggart. But at various times on his tax form he claimed two dependents besides himself, his son. Tom Junior, and a foster child by the name of Ronald Bledsoe.”

“Yeah, I’ve already got that.”

“You’ve got that? From where?” she said.

“A reference librarian at the Citadel.”

“A reference librarian. Thanks for telling me that.”

“Come on, Betsy, give me the rest of it.”

“Dave, try to understand this. An agent in Columbia, South Carolina, drove to Camden, thirty miles away, and found people who remembered the Claggart family. He did this as a favor because we were in training together at Quantico. Be a little patient, all right?”

“I understand,” I said, my scalp tightening.

“Claggart Senior was originally from Myrtle Beach. Evidently he had a child out of wedlock with a woman named Yvonne Bledsoe. She came from an old family that had fallen on bad times, and ran a day care center. Evidently she thought of herself as southern aristocracy who had been forced into a life beneath her social level. According to what my friend found out, a couple of parents accused her of molesting the children in her care. Tom Claggart, Junior, seemed to have lived with his father at several army bases around the country, but Ronald Bledsoe stayed with the mother until he was fifteen or sixteen.”

“Where is she now?” I asked.

“She burned to death in a house fire, source of ignition unknown.”

When I hung up, the side of my head felt numb. I called Molly’s cell phone again but got no answer. Clete was looking at me, a strange expression on his face. “What is it?” he said.

“Let’s take a ride,” I said.

MOLLY AND ALAFAIR walked across a stretch of green lawn between two brick buildings covered with shadow, crossed the boulevard, and entered an unlit area by the side of Burke Hall. The wind was colder now, threading lines through the film of congealed algae in the lake. The vehicles that had been parked by Molly’s car were gone, the windows in Burke Hall dark. Molly unlocked the driver’s door, then got behind the wheel and leaned across the seat to unlock the passenger side. In a flicker of lightning, she thought she saw a man standing at the rear of the building, leaning against the bricks, his arms folded on his chest. When she refocused her eyes, he wasn’t there.

Alafair got in on the passenger side and closed the door behind her. “I’m tired. How about we pass on picking up a dessert?” she said.

“Fine with me,” Molly said.

Molly removed her purse from under the seat and set it beside her. She slipped the key into the ignition and turned it. But the starter made no sound, not even the dry click that would indicate a dead battery. Nor did the dash indicators come on, as though the battery were totally disconnected from the system.

“I bought a new battery at AutoZone only three weeks ago,” she said.

“Let me have your cell phone. I’ll call Dave,” Alafair said.

A gust of wind and rain blew across the cypress trees in the lake and patterned the windshield. Suddenly the man who had been sitting across from Molly and Alafair in the library was standing outside Molly’s window, wearing his raincoat, his oversize hat cupping his ears. He was smiling and making a circular motion for Molly to roll down her window. That’s when she noticed there was a one-inch airspace at the top of the glass, one that she didn’t remember leaving when she had exited the car.