"She dropped out or she transferred to another school?" I asked.
She was quiet a moment. The she said, "If I were you, I'd look through some of the campus newspapers for that period. Who knows what you might find?"
It took a while. The story was brief, no more than four column inches with a thin caption on page three of a late spring 1973 issue of the Vermilion, written in the laconic style of an administrative press handout that does not want to dwell overly long on a university scandal.
A half dozen students had been expelled for stealing tests from the science building. The article stated the tests had been taken from a file cabinet, but the theft had been discovered before the examinations had been given, and the professors whose exams would have been compromised had all been notified.
At the very bottom of the article was the line, A seventh U.S.L. student, Persephone Giacano, voluntarily withdrew from the university before charges were filed against her.
I called the registrar's office again, and the same woman answered.
"Can I look at an old transcript?" I asked. "You send those out upon request, anyway, don't you?"
"Why don't you come over here and introduce yourself? You sound like such an interesting person," she answered.
I walked across the lawn and through the brick archways to the registrar's office and stood at the counter until an elderly, robin-breasted lady with blue hair waited on me. I opened my badge.
"My, you're exactly what you say you are," she said.
"Does everyone get this treatment?"
"We save it for just a special few."
I wrote Karyn's maiden name on a scratch pad and slid it across the counter to the woman. She looked at it a long time. The front office area was empty.
"It's important in ways that are probably better left unsaid," I said.
"Why don't you walk back here?" she answered.
I stood behind her chair while she tapped on the computer's keyboard. Then I saw Karyn's transcript pop up on the blue screen. "She was here four years and graduated in 1974. See," the woman said, and slowly rolled Karyn's academic credits down the screen, shifting in her chair so I could have a clear view.
Karyn had been a liberal arts major and had made almost straight A's in the humanities. But when an accounting class, or a zoology or algebra class rolled across the screen, the grades dropped to C's, or Ws for "Withdrew."
"Could you drop it back to the spring of 1973?" I asked.
The woman in the chair hesitated, then tapped the "page up" button. She waited only a few seconds before shutting down the screen. But it was long enough.
Karyn had made A's in biology and chemistry the same semester that Persephone Giacano had been forced to leave the university.
Karyn was nobody's fall partner.
I parked my truck in the alley behind Sabelle Crown's bar and entered it through the back door. The only light came from the neon beer signs on the wall and the television set that was tuned to the L.S.U. - Georgia Tech game. The air was thick with a smell like unwashed hair and old shoes and sweat and synthetic wine.
Sabelle was mopping out her tiny office in back.
"I need Lonnie Felton's address," I said.
She stuck her mop in the pail and took a business card out of her desk drawer.
"He rented a condo over the river. Good life, huh?" she said. She resumed her work, her back to me, the exposed muscles in her waist rolling with each motion of her arms.
"Aaron was here, wasn't he?" I said.
"What makes you think that?" she answered, her voice flat.
"He was carrying the thirty-two I saw in that shoebox full of medals you keep behind the bar."
She stopped mopping and straightened up. Her head was tilted to one side.