“I’m sorry,” she said, turning away from him to pick her way down the steps in her clacking flats so that all he was left with was a burning silhouette, and the thing was, she wasn’t even attractive, wasn’t graceful or helpful or sympathetic, wasn’t Lori, not even close.

He tried the door—the door she’d just come out of—but the door was locked.

Was it a coincidence that Officer Salter was waiting for him when he left the campus and made a wide awkward turn onto Franklin? He’d meant to turn right, to go back to the house and weigh his options, but at the last minute he decided to go in the opposite direction, thinking he’d drive up to Annandale, where Bard was, and see if he could find Toby, though Bard wouldn’t have been in session either and if he’d ever known Toby’s surname it eluded him now. He could picture him, though—the weasel face, the stringy hair, the way he laughed at the world and sneered and postured and put his hands on Lori as if she belonged to him—and that was enough. All he had to do was spot him crossing the quad—was there a quad?—or in one of the student bars or wherever, a burger joint, and see if he could get some information out of him, and what if Lori was with him? What then?

He never got a chance to find out because the police cruiser was right there, right on his bumper, and though everything was a bit hazy he knew enough to pull over and submit himself to whatever came next. There were the usual demands—“License and registration”—with which he was able to comply without too much difficulty, though the registration was in Fanchon’s name and his license was still a Massachusetts issue because he hadn’t yet been able to find the time to go down to the Department of Motor Vehicles and change it over, but now there was a further entanglement that went beyond the usual harassment and ticket writing and involved a question Officer Salter was putting to him at two-thirty-five on a coruscating high-summer afternoon that was redolent with the smell of hot tar and alive with the love song of the cicadas in the trees across the road: “Have you been drinking?”

He said the first thing that came into his head, which, in retrospect he thought was fairly witty, given the circumstances: “I’m a Mormon. It’s against my religion.”