early saturday morning I made coffee and fixed a bowl of Grape-Nuts and blueberries in the bait shop and ate breakfast by myself at the counter and watched the sun rise over the swamp. It had rained, then cleared during the night, and the bayou was yellow with mud and the dock slick with rainwater. A week ago Jerry Joe's vending machine company had delivered a working replica of a 1950s Wurlitzer jukebox while I wasn't in the shop; it sat squat and heavy in the corner, its plastic casing marbled with orange and red and purple light, the rows of 45 rpm records arrayed in a shiny black semicircle inside the viewing glass. I had resolved to have Jerry Joe's people remove it.

I still hadn't made the phone call.

I punched Jimmy Clanton's "Just a Dream," Harry Choates's 1946 recording of " La Jolie Blon," Nathan Abshire's "Pine Grove Blues."

Their voices and music were out of another era, one that we thought would never end. But it did, incrementally, in ways that seemed inconsequential at the time, like the unexpected arrival at the front gate of a sun-browned oil lease man in khaki work clothes who seemed little different from the rest of us.

I unplugged the jukebox from the wall. The plastic went dead and crackled like burning cellophane in the silence of the room.

Then I drove to the University of Southwestern Louisiana library in Lafayette.

Buford's bibliography was impressive. He had published historical essays on the Knights of the White Camellia and the White League and the violent insurrection they had led against the federal occupation after the War Between the States. The articles were written in the neutral and abstruse language of academic journals, but his sentiments were not well disguised: the night riders who had lynched and burned had their roles forced upon them.

His other articles were in psychological and medical journals. They seemed to be diverse, with no common thread, dealing with various kinds of phobias and depression as well as hate groups that could not tolerate a pluralistic society.

But in the last five years he seemed to have changed his professional focus and begun writing about the science of psychopharma-cology and its use in the cure of alcoholics.

I returned the magazines and journals to the reference desk and was about to leave. But it wasn't quite yet noon, and telling myself I had nothing else to do, I asked the librarian for the student yearbooks from the early 1970s, the approximate span when Karyn LaRose attended U.S.L.

She hadn't been born into Buford's LaRose's world. Her father had been a hard-working and likable man who supplied gumballs and novelties, such as plastic monster teeth and vampire fingernails, for dimestore vending machines. The family lived in a small frame house on the old St. Martinville road, and the paintless and desiccated garage that fronted the property was rimmed along the base with a rainbow of color from the gumballs that had rotted inside and leaked through the floor. If you asked Karyn what her father did for a living, she always replied that he was in the retail supply business.

Most of us who attended U.S.L. came from blue-collar, French-speaking families or could not afford to attend L.S.U. or Tulane. Most of us commuted from outlying parishes, and as a result the campus was empty and quiet and devoid of most social life on the weekends.

But not for Karyn. She made the best of her situation, and her name and photograph appeared again and again in the yearbooks that covered her four years at U.S.L. She made the women's tennis team and belonged to a sorority and the honor society; she was a maid of honor to the homecoming queen one year, and homecoming queen the next. In her photographs her face looked modest and radiant, like that of a person who saw only goodness and promise in the world.

I was almost ready to close the last yearbook and return the stack to the reference desk when I looked again at a group photograph taken in front of Karyn's sorority house, then scanned the names in the cutline.

The coed on the end of the row, standing next to Karyn, was Persephone Giacano. Both of them were smiling, their shoulders and the backs of their wrists touching.

I began to look for Persephone's name in other yearbooks. I didn't find it. It was as though she had appeared for one group photograph in front of the sorority house, then disappeared from campus life.

The administration building was still open. I used the librarian's phone and called the registrar's office.

"We have a Privacy Act, you know?" the woman who answered said.

"I just want to know which years she was here," I said.

"You're a police officer?"

"That's correct."

I heard her tapping on some computer keys.

"Nineteen seventy-two to nineteen seventy-three," she said.

"She dropped out or she transferred to another school?" I asked.

She was quiet a moment. The she said, "If I were you, I'd look through some of the campus newspapers for that period. Who knows what you might find?"

It took a while. The story was brief, no more than four column inches with a thin caption on page three of a late spring 1973 issue of the Vermilion, written in the laconic style of an administrative press handout that does not want to dwell overly long on a university scandal.

A half dozen students had been expelled for stealing tests from the science building. The article stated the tests had been taken from a file cabinet, but the theft had been discovered before the examinations had been given, and the professors whose exams would have been compromised had all been notified.

At the very bottom of the article was the line, A seventh U.S.L. student, Persephone Giacano, voluntarily withdrew from the university before charges were filed against her.

I called the registrar's office again, and the same woman answered.

"Can I look at an old transcript?" I asked. "You send those out upon request, anyway, don't you?"

"Why don't you come over here and introduce yourself? You sound like such an interesting person," she answered.

I walked across the lawn and through the brick archways to the registrar's office and stood at the counter until an elderly, robin-breasted lady with blue hair waited on me. I opened my badge.

"My, you're exactly what you say you are," she said.

"Does everyone get this treatment?"

"We save it for just a special few."

I wrote Karyn's maiden name on a scratch pad and slid it across the counter to the woman. She looked at it a long time. The front office area was empty.

"It's important in ways that are probably better left unsaid," I said.

"Why don't you walk back here?" she answered.

I stood behind her chair while she tapped on the computer's keyboard. Then I saw Karyn's transcript pop up on the blue screen. "She was here four years and graduated in 1974. See," the woman said, and slowly rolled Karyn's academic credits down the screen, shifting in her chair so I could have a clear view.

Karyn had been a liberal arts major and had made almost straight A's in the humanities. But when an accounting class, or a zoology or algebra class rolled across the screen, the grades dropped to C's, or Ws for "Withdrew."

"Could you drop it back to the spring of 1973?" I asked.

The woman in the chair hesitated, then tapped the "page up" button. She waited only a few seconds before shutting down the screen. But it was long enough.

Karyn had made A's in biology and chemistry the same semester that Persephone Giacano had been forced to leave the university.

Karyn was nobody's fall partner.

I parked my truck in the alley behind Sabelle Crown's bar and entered it through the back door. The only light came from the neon beer signs on the wall and the television set that was tuned to the L.S.U. – Georgia Tech game. The air was thick with a smell like unwashed hair and old shoes and sweat and synthetic wine.