I’m looking forward to going to Montreal for the weekend. Maybe I’ll get a book from the library so we’ll all Know what to look for when we get there.

I love you,

Karen

Leland read it again. He wished that she had awakened him. He had awakened by himself at four-thirty and had felt a pang of fear before he had seen the clock and realized that she had gone. He felt it again now, diminished but more lasting, and for a better reason: the note. Except for the dinner invitation, it was a pointless thing that only repeated what she had told him at various times during the day. Somehow she had forgotten, which was not like her. It had been midnight when she had written the note; earlier she had been asleep herself: perhaps that explained it. He knew that he could be wrong in looking too closely, but it was on something like this that their trouble usually started. It had been a good day yesterday, as she had written, but last night while he had been asleep she had been awake, unwilling to waken him, and obviously wanting to talk.

Leland folded the note and slipped it into his jacket pocket. He could not tell about dinner; Florence’s call had promised another kind of day. Karen had said ten-thirty, but knowing her schedule, he could easily imagine getting a call from her later, begging off.

He put on his topcoat and started out. There was nothing he could do now. He began to sift the things that Florence had told him.

The newspaper belonged to the cabdriver.

… The investigation was led by Detective Lieutenant Joseph Leland, at the time the youngest man to ever hold that high rank in the Port Smith police department. A career cop who had distinguished himself as a patrolman before the war, Leland had come back from Europe with a chestful of medals, including the Distinguished Flying Cross, collected for shooting down (Turn to p. 5)

Leland turned.

LEIKMAN SLAYING (Story begins on p. 1)

21 Nazi planes. Now a private detective upstate, Leland is credited with uncovering singlehandedly the shreds of evidence that revealed the whereabouts of Leikman’s killer …

Leland closed the newspaper, glanced at the headline, WHERE IS MARY SHOFTEL? and the newly discovered fuzzy photograph of the seven-year-old beneath, and returned the newspaper to the front seat.

“Had enough, hah?” the driver said. “I could have made a dollar on you. When we saw you coming down the hill, one of the fellows said that you’d get a kick out of seeing yourself in the paper. I said you wouldn’t bother to go all the way through the article.”

Leland drew on his cigarette. “You should have taken his money.”

The driver’s name was Everett. “To tell you the truth, I wasn’t too sure myself. I shouldn’t tell you that, should I? How was it? The article—was it accurate?”