The next day Leland and Schoenstein made the four-hour automobile trip to Lake Wokoma. They stopped first at the town police station, where they picked up the Chief of Police and a uniformed officer, and then they drove in one of the local cars up the mountain overlooking the lake to the home of Mr. and Mrs. Walter Howard, Leikman’s aunt and uncle. The house was a two-story white-frame about forty years old, moderately gingerbreaded, with a wraparound porch. The driveway was a pair of sandy tracks worn through the unkempt lawn. The March air was drier here, although the lake itself was visible down beyond the back of the house, and Leland, in his topcoat, felt overwarm and edgy. As he made his way over the lawn, the soil soft and uncertain under his feet, he saw the curtains hanging in the front room and had an anticipation of the very dry coal-fire heat in the house in which the rooms would be too small for the four men coming inside.

Now, thirty-six hours after the killing, practically nothing had panned out. The U-drive-it had produced only a duplicate of the document the police already possessed. The autopsy and the lab tests had confirmed what the police had presumed. The rest of the people in Leikman’s book had been less helpful than those who had been seen first. The names of the seven people who had once worked at Western Union had led nowhere. One man was dead, and three were too old or sick to understand what this was about. The real problem was still the roommate, of whom there was still no trace after all these hours. It was as if Leland has shot his bolt of luck with the early description.

He recognized the young woman who met them at the door. Susan Starrett.

Timidly, baring her teeth slightly in her nervousness, she glanced at them all. Her face was thinner and more pinched than it had been in the high school photographs. She looked as if she had had a bad day and night.

“This way,” she whispered. She led them to a room to the right of the narrow center hall. The room was as Leland had imagined, small and dark. In the center was a polished round table with a doily, and on the doily, a cream-colored fruit bowl, and in the bowl, a paper clip. Mr. Howard, a fat dark man with his black hair grown long on one side and slicked across his bald crown, rose from the high-backed love seat. He blinked at the four men. He was fat enough for Leland to wonder if he ever denied himself anything, and the part in his hair, barely an inch above his ear, made Leland think that he was too vain to take himself any way but seriously. Miss Starrett slipped onto the seat beside him. When the Chief introduced Leland and Howard looked at him to see if it was proper to shake hands, Leland produced his badge, let Howard just get his eyes on it, and then he put it away.