“I’m hoping to squeeze in a few minutes once or twice a week, but I probably won’t get even that.”

Sybil nodded sympathetically and swirled her wine. She was a lean, fervid woman with pale eyebrows and pale thin hair she cut in a close-cropped style that made her look as if she were wearing a bathing cap. She had the sculpted beauty and adroitly undernourished body of an aging fashion model, but looking at the haircut and the pastel blue eye shadow (a signature of some kind), and an out-of season, nubby green pullover, you had to conclude that she objected to her own good looks on moral grounds. She’d been teaching in the English Department at Fordham for ten years, had been given tenure one month after an especially ugly divorce, and her devotion to her students was so unswerving it filled Desmond with a mixture of admiration, awe, and pity. She was an extraordinarily gifted and generous teacher, he thought, but surely she ought to have something better to do with her time. As a teacher, he always felt like a fraud in front of Sybil. He’d done a minimal amount of preparation for the two journalism courses he’d been hired to teach at Deerforth—he’d taught similar classes in and around Manhattan eight times—and had given serious consideration to passing out a trumped-up, dauntingly demanding syllabus the first class in the hopes of getting a handful of students to drop out. Pauline Anderton had spent her final days in a suburb of Boston, and Desmond was planning to arrange his schedule so he’d be able to spend the bulk of his time going over his notes and soaking up atmosphere.

“A lot can happen in one semester,” Sybil said, but it wasn’t clear from her tone if she meant it hopefully or as a warning. “I told you to look up Thomas Miller, didn’t I?”

“You did. I have it written down somewhere,” Desmond said.

“I haven’t talked to him in years, but I always admired him in graduate school. I imagine he’d remember me. He was a big bore but terribly sweet, and he didn’t push himself on you the way most bores do. I don’t mind boring people as long as they’re not self-confident along with it. I heard he married a TV producer or something. I suppose that can’t be very significant in a town like Boston.”

“I suppose not. I’ll look him up if I have the time. Maybe his wife can get me an insignificant job in TV.”

Sybil lowered her blue eyelids as she sipped. “There’s a grim thought,” she said. “I think I’ll circulate for a few minutes and see if anyone knows what the problem is here.”