I was opening my mouth to ask who was there when it occurred to me that maybe someone who was sitting in an office with the lights off might be doing something that wasn’t on the up-and-up.

I put down my tote and the water bottle and tried to stand up quietly. I was taking slow, careful steps toward the door—

And tripped over my purse. I twisted to avoid landing on my shoulder, and ended up knocking over the office chair, which landed with a noisy clatter on the linoleum floor. I scrambled up as quickly as I could, but I heard soft, rapid footsteps going down the hall.

By the time I opened the door, the hallway was empty.

And now Riddick’s office door was standing open.

I walked in.

At first I thought that Riddick had made a clumsy attempt to decorate his office for Christmas. Then I realized that the decorations piled on his desk, his shelves, and his floor were actually church castoffs—broken angels, half-melted candles, an ancient fly-specked Santa. All the worn-out items Mother and the ladies of St. Clotilda had winnowed out and marked for donation or disposal when they’d decorated the church. Was he keeping the junk out of some sense of thrift or feeling of nostalgia? Or was it merely, like so many other things at Trinity, a case of Riddick just not yet getting around to dealing with the detritus?

Maybe the mounds of paper covering every horizontal surface were similar signs of neglect rather than busyness. It would take someone more familiar with them—perhaps only Riddick himself—to tell if anyone had been messing with them. But I did notice that his computer was on. Would he have gone home and left it on? Many people did, of course. If I were Riddick and knew Barliman Vess might come snooping around at any time, alert to every nanowatt of waste, I wouldn’t, but maybe Riddick was used to Vess’s nagging.

I stepped inside to see what was on the screen. It appeared to be the alumni directory for a prestigious school of music. Someone had done a search on the name “Lightfoot.” I scrolled down to see the results. Only one Lightfoot, and he was Arnold, not Jerome. The picture didn’t look right, either—the choir director was a tall, skinny, light-skinned African-American. This Lightfoot was a short, bespectacled white guy with thinning blond hair. About the only similarity was their age—at a guess, they were both in their forties.