“She’s a friend, yes. I wouldn’t say a close friend. I hadn’t seen her in months.”

“And yet she left her child with you.”

“Close enough at one time that it didn’t seem too odd leaving him with me for a little while—that’s what she said, a little while, and it was clearly some kind of emergency. I assumed maybe an hour or two. But that was at eight a.m. yesterday. Around noon I started calling her, and not getting an answer, so I thought I’d come over today and see if I could find out anything.”

He scribbled away in silence.

“Look, what’s wrong?” I asked. “Has something happened to Karen?”

“I was hoping you could tell me,” he said.

“Then she’s not—” I stopped myself. I didn’t want to say the word “dead.” I didn’t even want to think it.

“We haven’t found a body, if that’s what you mean,” the chief said. “The place was broken into last night, and has been pretty thoroughly ransacked. Any chance you’d be willing to take a look around, see if anything’s been taken?”

“I’m willing, but I’m afraid I wouldn’t be very useful,” I said. “I didn’t even know she lived here. I went over to the bungalow she used to live in, on Hawthorne Street. That’s 125 Hawthorne Street,” I added, anticipating the chief’s question.

“Bit of a comedown from Hawthorne Street,” he said, glancing up over his shoulder at the College Arms.

I nodded. The town of Caerphilly didn’t have much in the way of bad neighborhoods, but if there was anyplace within the town precincts that would make me surreptitiously click my door lock button before I drove through it, this two-or three-block stretch of Stone Street would be it.

“You might want to talk to the woman who moved into her old house,” I said. “I don’t usually think of myself as a very menacing presence, but she was afraid to open her door to me at first. I had to use Timmy to lull her suspicions, and I get the idea some pretty unsavory characters have turned up there looking for Karen.”

The chief scribbled some more.

“Just how do you know Ms. Walker?” he asked.

“She was one of the first friends I made when I came to town,” I said. “The first who wasn’t really Michael’s friend. And I got the feeling all of them were a little wary of me.”

“Wary?” the chief repeated. I had to smile, because the word rather accurately described his usual attitude toward me.

“Well, they didn’t know how long I’d be around—we were just dating then. And most of them were faculty or faculty spouses, and sometimes the college gets a little suffocating, you know?”

He nodded.

“I met her when I went by the college accounting department to drop off some form Michael kept forgetting to turn in,” I went on. “Karen works there. At least she did work there. We started talking, and hit it off. She invited me for coffee. She helped me find my way around. Let me use guest passes to her gym until I found I was spending so much time down here that I might as well join myself. We did yoga classes there together at first, but after a while, we began drifting apart.”