Her father, a funeral director, protested that her good looks couldn’t help but attract “the wrong kind of people.” Her mother, a well-known writer of suspense novels, took full responsibility, adding, “It was all those trials I took you to. I never should have done it.” Regan had reasoned with them, “I have a father who owns three funeral homes and a mother who spins yarns about serial killers. And you want me to get a ’normal’ job?” To their continuing dismay, Regan loved her work.

That last job had been to trace a father who disappeared with his two young children. As she told her parents, witnessing the reunion between the mother and the little boys was worth all the endless hours of following deadend leads.

She and Kit had begun their vacation in Venice, then met Regan’s parents in Paris. Nora was just winding up a publicity tour for her latest novel. “If anyone asks me again where I get ideas for my books, I’ll kill myself,” Nora had sighed. Then she’d asked Regan penetrating questions about the kidnapping. Nora and Luke were sailing Monday on the Queen Guinevere to New York. Nora might enjoy a few days in a deck chair, but Regan knew her mother’s mind would be spinning out a new plot, and it probably would involve custody battles.

Now, as Regan studied the contents of the room, bits and pieces of memories slowly began to surface in her mind. Well, they certainly haven’t wasted any money on an interior decorator in these ten years, she mused. The threadbare grayish-green carpeting, the ancient nondescript wallpaper, the “temporary” closets that gave new meaning to the word, the little white scratched sink with a foggy-looking mirror hanging above, the dormers you had to be careful not to hit your head on when you got up in the morning, and finally the two pieces of lumpy foam on wheels that were passed off as beds. Ah, the price you pay to be a part of history, Regan thought. To have studied in Oxford . . . Although St. Polycarp’s wasn’t actually a part of Oxford University, if you said you had studied in Oxford, people were impressed. They should see these rooms, Regan thought.

The covers rustled on the other bed. Regan looked across the room and laughed. Kit had pulled the blankets over her head and was clawing the top of them, the only visible part of her anatomy being her fingernails.

“Nice try, but they have to be black,” Regan laughed.

Athena’s slumbering position had been famous in the dorm. They had teased her that her long black fingernails sticking straight out when she was sleeping made her look as if she was either about to attack someone or was frozen in an advanced stage of rigor mortis. The sight of them had taken Regan by surprise more than once when she returned home after a night of partying.