He sat there with his teeth chattering like a child not sensible enough to come in from the snow. There was a way to stop it. Wake her up, tell her, let her take Florence’s call. Let her take over entirely. Probably what stopped him was the pity that Karen would feel, the gush of sympathy that she would be unable to control. It made him ashamed. He had to think of his own welfare; waking her was the sane thing to do, but the thought of it made him recoil in self-disgust. He waited quietly for Florence to call him.

Forty minutes. “Mr. Leland, I don’t know what you wanted, but we asked the questions you gave us. Mr. Petrakis drew a complete blank. The only way to get a transcript of a former student’s record at the University of California is for the former student himself to request it in writing and pay a fee to cover the cost of photocopying.”

“I was afraid of that. What about you?”

“I found Mr. Matthews. He doesn’t live in Vineland anymore, but he is in the same county—same directory. I told him that MacIver was dead and he was sorry to hear it and so on, and then I told him that MacIver committed suicide for reasons unknown and that he, Matthews, might be able to help me. He didn’t know how, he said. He sounded like an old man, Mr. Leland. He sounded more like the First World War.”

“It says in the book that he’s four years my junior. If you figure out what happens to people, let me know, will you?”

“Don’t wait, Mr. Leland. This was really no fun for me. I asked him if MacIver ever talked about his personal life, his background, or anything that happened in college, as you told me. He said that MacIver had been very quiet about himself. He remembered that clearly. I asked what else he remembered. MacIver was friendly enough, he said. He liked to go out. He went to London and Paris whenever he could, with anybody who would go with him. When he was out he loved to have a good time—I’m not quoting; I think if Matthews ever said a word like ‘love,’ he’d throw up. MacIver would talk to strangers, he did say. Walk right up. Especially girls. He did very well with the girls.”

“Then you don’t have the feeling that Matthews held anything back because he was speaking to a woman,” Leland said.

“No, I don’t think so. One more thing that Matthews remembered was that MacIver said that being in Europe, seeing it, was the greatest opportunity an American could have. I said that he, Matthews, had been quoted in the souvenir book as saying that MacIver had been a brave man—words to that effect. He said, ‘Well, we came in at the end of the war. We really didn’t see much action.’ Then he said, ‘We shouldn’t have been in that war in the first place,’ and he went on to remark about Roosevelt and Truman. I kept my ears open, as you said, but I couldn’t hear anything unusual in that, for what it was, any hostility toward MacIver. It was strictly political.”