From a block away, he saw the group begin to stir. Almost in unison, they rose, brushing themselves off, unaware of anything other than their immediate halo of laughter and happy talk.

He moved forward, following slowly, not closing the distance, mingling with other people on the sidewalk, watching until Ashley and the others walked up some steps and into a building.

Her last class ended at four thirty, he knew. Then it would be over to the museum for two hours of part-time work. He wondered if she had plans for that night.

He did. He always did.

“But there’s something I don’t exactly get.”

“What’s that?” Her reply was patient, like that of a teacher with a slow child.

“If this fellow…”

“Michael. Michael O’Connell. Nice Irish name. Boston name. Must be a thousand of them from Brockton to Somerville and beyond. Makes one think of altar boys carrying incense, and choir practice, and firemen in kilts playing bagpipes on a brisk and cold Saint Paddy’s Day.”

“That’s not really his name, is it? This is a part of the puzzle, correct? If I were to follow up, I wouldn’t find a Michael O’Connell, would I?”

“You might. You might not.”

“You’re making this a little more difficult than it has to be.”

“Am I? Isn’t that for me to judge? I might be presuming that there will come a point when you’re going to stop asking me questions and head out on your own, because you’re going to want to know the truth. Already you know enough, at least to get started. You’ll start comparing what I’ve said against what you can find out. That’s the point of telling this. And making it a little difficult. You called it a puzzle. That would be apt.”

Her voice was direct. If she meant to be coy, it didn’t register in her words.

“All right,” I said, “let’s move forward. If this fellow Michael was really heading towards some sort of fringe life, working his way up the petty-crime ladder, where did Ashley fit in? I mean, she would have had a pretty good read on this guy in two seconds, right? She’d been well educated. She must have attended classes or gone to lectures about stalkers and that sort of man. Hell, there’s even a segment on them in the state’s high school health textbook. It’s alphabetical, so it comes right before STDs. So she would have picked him out rapidly. And then done whatever she could to extricate herself. You’re suggesting a sort of obsessive love. But this guy O’Connell, he sounds like a psychopath, and-”

“A psychopath in training. A nascent psychopath. A psychopath wannabe.”

“Yes, well, I can see that, but where did the obsession come from?”

“Good question,” she answered. “And one that should be answered. But you would be unwise to think that Ashley, despite her many strong qualities, was properly equipped to deal with the sorts of problems that Michael O’Connell presented.”

“True enough. But what did she think she was involved in?”

“Theater,” she replied. “But she just did not know what sort of production it might be.”

Two tables away from where Ashley Freeman sat with a trio of friends, a half dozen members of the Northeastern University varsity baseball team were hotly arguing the relative virtues of either the Yankees or the Red Sox, engaged in a loud, frequently foulmouthed assessment of each team. Ashley might have been perturbed by the over-the-top noise, except that having spent many hours in student-oriented bars over her four academic years in Boston, she had heard the debate a multitude of times. Occasionally it ended in some pushing or maybe a quick exchange of blows, but more often just gave way to cascading torrents of obscenities. Often there were fairly creative suppositions about the bizarre off-hours sexual practices of the players on either the Yankees or the Red Sox. Barnyard animals figured fairly prominently in these sexual inventions.

Across from her, her friends were in a passionate discussion of their own. The issue was a show over at Harvard of Goya’s famous sketches of the horrors of war. A group of them had taken the T across town to the exhibit, and then wandered, unsettled, through the black-and-white drawings of dismemberment, torture, assassination, and agony. It had struck Ashley that while one can always tell the citizens from the soldiers in the drawings, there was no anonymity in either role. And no safety, either. Death, she thought, has a way of evening things out. It crushes spirit without regard to politics. It is unrelenting.

She shifted about in her seat, a little uncomfortable. Images, especially violent images, creased her deeply and had done so since she was a child. They lingered unwelcome in her memory, whether they were Salome admiring the head of John the Baptist in a gruesome Renaissance rendition, or Bambi’s mother trying to flee the hunters who pursued her. Even the campy killings of Tarantino’s Kill Bill unsettled her.

Her de facto date for the evening was a lanky, long-haired BC psychology graduate student named Will, who was leaning across the table, making a point, while trying to narrow the distance between his shoulder and her arm. Small touches were important in courting, she thought. The slightest of shared sensations might lead to something more intense. She was unsure what she thought of him. He was clearly bright and seemed thoughtful. He’d shown up at her apartment earlier with a half dozen roses, which, he said, was the psychological equivalent of a get-out-of-jail-free card; it meant he could say or do something offensive or stupid and she would likely forgive him at least once. A dozen roses, he said, would have been too many; she would likely see through the artifice of it all, whereas half that number at least held out some promise as well as some mystery. She had thought this was funny, and probably accurate as well, and so she was inclined to like him initially, though it wasn’t long before she started to sense that he was perhaps just a meager bit too full of himself, and less likely to listen than he was to pronounce, which put her off.

Ashley pushed her hair back from her face and tried to listen.

“Goya meant to shock. He meant to thrust all the reality of war into the faces of the politicians and aristocrats who romanticize it. Make it undeniable-”

The last words of this statement were lost, overcome by a burst from the nearby table: “I’ll tell you what Derek Jeter’s good at. He’s good at bending over and…”

She had to smile to herself. It was a little like being trapped in a uniquely Bostonian version of the twilight zone, caught between the pretentious and the plebeian.

She continued to shift about in her seat, maintaining a neutral distance that neither discouraged nor encouraged Will, and thought about how she had always been wildly unlucky in love. She wondered whether this was merely something that would pass, like so many moments growing up, or was, instead, a predictable vision of her future. She sensed that she was on the edge of something, but of what, she was unsure.

“Yes, but the dilemma with shocking and showing the true nature of war through art is that it never stops the war, but gets celebrated as art. We flock to see Guernica and we revel in the depth of its vision, but do we really feel anything for the peasants who were bombed? They were real one day. Their deaths were real. But their truth is subordinated by art.”

This was Will-the-date speaking. Ashley thought it a wise observation, but, at the same time, one that a million politically correct college kids would have made. Ashley glanced over at the loud baseball players. Even alcohol-fueled, their argument was exuberant. She felt a twinge of doubt. She liked sitting at Fenway with a beer. She loved wandering through the Museum of Fine Art. For one long second she wondered which of the two arguments she really belonged in.