The smell of the lake was with them in the slow-deepening purple of the evening, and a few early explorers had arrived in advance of the inevitable insect swarm that would, as it always did, eventually force them to give it up and go back to the ordinary light of their homes.

"I'm looking up trying to find it when it comes back into the light, and the third baseman says, 'You got it, kid.' And everybody trots off the field while I'm weaving around out there looking for the ball."

Everyone listened to Jesse quietly. They were men to whom such stories mattered. Men who would know why the story was funny. Men who could imagine the scared kid alone in the middle of the diamond looking up into the night for his first professional pop-up.

"You catch it?" someone said.

The younger guys listened most closely. Kids who would fall asleep in class, listening to Jesse talk about life in the minors, as if he were Socrates.

"Barely," Jesse said.

Everyone laughed. They were happy with the story. They all knew that the better you were, the more you talked about your failures. Jesse was clearly the best player in the league, maybe good enough to have played in the majors if he hadn't got hurt.

"You win the game?" someone asked.

"Don't know. But I went two for four."

Everyone laughed again. Jesse had been there. They could laugh with him at the pretense that players cared only about winning. You played ball, you knew better.

Jesse finished his beer. One more wouldn't hurt. It was Lite beer anyway. You could drink a lot of Lite beer before you got drunk enough to show it. He plunged his hand into the ice-filled cooler and rummaged out another can. It had a round solid feel to it, cold in his hand.

"You have a lot of groupies in the minors, Jess?"

"Not enough," Jesse said.

"When I was playing football," someone said, "we'd go into some town for an away game, they'd be waiting outside the visitors' locker room."

"You score?"

"During the game or after?"

They all laughed.

"After."

"A lot more than during," the football player said.

"What about AIDS?"

"It was before AIDS," the football player said.

It was dark now. The kind of thick summer darkness that feels soft. Oddly the bugs hadn't found them yet in thick enough quantity to drive them home.

"I remember playing hockey in Helsinki," somebody said. "Outdoor rink. Was so fucking cold the puck froze. One of our guys tees up a big slap shot from the blue line and the goddamned puck shatters."

People began to drift home. To wives. And children. And late suppers. And living rooms lit by the glow of a large-screen television.

"You find out who killed that girl yet, Jesse?"

"Not yet," Jesse said. "But I went three for three tonight."

"I got twelve names," Jesse said to Lilly Summers. "Kids gave their class rings to a girl."

"Makes last year's class seem embarrassingly unromantic," Lilly said.

"Embarrassingly," Jesse said. "Seven of these kids can account for their girlfriends' whereabouts, and we've verified it."

"Which leaves you five."

"Four of them are supposed to be at summer homes with their parents, but we haven't been able to reach them yet. One boy doesn't know where she is."

"And her parents?"

"Kid didn't know anything about her parents," Jesse said.

"How could that be?" Lilly said. "What are the names?"

"Boyfriend's name is William Royce," Jesse said.

Lilly smiled. "Hooker," she said.

"And the girlfriend is Elinor Bishop."

"Oh dear," Lilly said.

"You know them."

"Yes, of course."

"You have an address for her?"

"She called herself Billie. Yes, I have her address."

"Could you talk to me," Jesse said, "about Hooker and Billie?"

"How long do you have?"

"If it's a longish story we could do it over lunch."

Lilly smiled. She was wearing a pale yellow silk dress today.

"What a very good idea," she said.

It was low tide. They sat in a small restaurant that looked out over Fisherman's Beach at the gunmetal Atlantic rolling stolidly in onto the shiny sand. The ocean smell was strong. Even if you didn't look at it, it was there in that mysterious way that the sea asserts itself.

"I hope it's not Billie," Lilly said.

"It's going to be somebody," Jesse said.

They ordered iced tea and looked at their menus. Lilly ordered a house salad, dressing on the side. Jesse had a tuna fish sandwich.

"Hooker Royce," Lilly said, "is our All-American. Honor roll since first grade. Three sports, captain in all of them. All-state in football. Scholarship to Yale."

"And he's handsome and self-effacing," Jesse said.

"How did you know?"

"They're always self-effacing and handsome."

"All of them?"

"All the small-school heroes, it's part of the heroism. The expectations of the town force it upon them."

"Even the handsome?"

"Might be sort of circular. Probably wouldn't be the town hero if he were ugly."

"Even if he were just as good?" Lilly said.

"Maybe," Jesse said.

"Well, that's cynical."

"Or observant."

She smiled at him. "Being observant would make you cynical," Lilly said. "Wouldn't it."

"You seem observant," Jesse said.

"I try."

"But you don't seem cynical."

"I'm in the hope business," Lilly said.

"Education?"

"Yes."

"You think you might be saving them?"

"I have to think so, or hope so," Lilly said. "Otherwise what have I done with my life?"

Jesse sipped his iced tea and looked at her. Lilly's eyes were almond shaped and dark brown, maybe black. Her skin was smooth. She wore quite a bit of makeup, but carefully.

"What about Billie?" Jesse said.

Lilly breathed deeply through her nose. It made her chest move.

"Billie Bishop," she said.

Jesse was quiet. Lilly shook her head gently.

"Billie was…" She stopped to think about it. "Billie was our town pump," she said.

"Don't beat around the bush," Jesse said.

"I know. It's a terrible thing to say, isn't it?"

"We used to say it when I was a kid," Jesse said.

"We all did," Lilly said. "It says everything and nothing."

Jesse nodded. There were potato chips with his sandwich. Jesse ate one.

"I'm more interested in everything," he said.

"Yes."

Jesse looked at the ocean. It was uninterrupted here, stretching to Spain. In Jesse's imagination, the Atlantic was a gray ocean. The Pacific had been blue.

"Teachers hear things, and they gossip."

"I'm shocked," Jesse said.

Lilly smiled. "Billie," she said, "was probably what we would have called, in less enlightened times, a nymphomaniac."

Jesse smiled. "Not a bad thing in a woman," he said.

Lilly looked at him thoughtfully.

"Sexuality is not a bad thing in a woman," she said.

"It certainly isn't."

"But frequent indiscriminate sex probably is," Lilly said. "However outmoded the phrase, it at least served to identify sexuality rooted in something wrong."

"So does 'town pump.' "

"Yes."

"And there's something wrong with Billie?"

"I think so. A school principal knows very little about the souls of her students."

Jesse nodded.

"But I do know her external circumstances."

Jesse waited.

"She is not a discipline problem in the sense of an angry rebellious teenager that we all think of in this context…"

Lilly stopped suddenly and looked at Jesse again. Jesse waited.

"I don't know if I should be talking to you like this."

"It's okay," Jesse said. "I'm the police."

"You are not even one of our police," she said.

"True."

"There's something so quiet about you."