Desert Places (Andrew Z. Thomas/Luther Kite Series 1)

“Yep.”

Our room was at the end of a creaky hallway on the second floor. There were two double beds, placed on opposite sides of the room, a dormer window between them, from which you could view the mountains. The ceiling slanted up on both sides and met in a straight line, which bisected the room. Two paisley love seats faced each other in the center of the hardwood floor, a squat square coffee table between them. For seventy-five dollars a night, it was a lovely room. There were even fresh irises in glass vases on each bedside table. They made the room smell like an arbor.

Walter sat on his bed, unpacking his clothes, and I lay on mine, my suitcase still unopened on the floor. Voices moved through the walls, and I heard the hollow clack of footsteps ascending the staircase. Someone knocked.

Crossing the room, I stopped at the door. There was no peephole, so I asked, “Who is it?”

“Melody Terrence.” I opened the door to a striking longhaired brunette, far too young and pretty to be an innkeeper.

“Hi there,” I said.

“You guys settling in all right?” she asked.

“We sure are.”

“Well, I just came to let you know that we’re serving dinner in thirty minutes, if you’re interested. Danny forgot to put the sign up again.”

“Thanks for the invitation.”

“Will you be joining us? There’s a cozy dining room downstairs, and Danny’s been smoking a bird all day. We’ll have fresh vegetables, homemade biscuits—”

“It sounds wonderful,” I said. “We’ll see you there.”

“Excellent.” She smiled and walked down the hall to the next room. I closed the door.

Walter had placed a stack of shirts into a drawer, and, slamming it, he looked up at me, smoldering. “You call yourself a crime writer? Think we should go down and meet all the guests? What if someone recognizes you, Andy? If it ever got out that Orson, the Heart Surgeon”—he whispered the infamous title—“was your brother, and lived in Woodside, someone could put two and two together. They might remember that you were here in Vermont around the same time David Parker disappeared. And, you know, that’s all it’d take to put the FBI on our ass.” Walter moved into the dormer. His back turned, he looked into the woods, dark now that the sun had set. If the moon was up, it had yet to rise above the mountains and spread its meek light.

I moved across the room to my friend.

“Walter,” I said, but he didn’t turn around. “What? You scared?”

“We can’t f**k anything up,” he said. “Not one thing.”

Staring out into the Vermont night, the foreign darkness lodged a splinter of homesickness in my heart. A child again, I acknowledged the nostalgic pain, and then it passed.

“Thank you for coming,” I said, my hand on his shoulder. “You didn’t have to do this, Walter. I’m never gonna forget it.”

He turned back and faced me. “It has nothing to do with you,” he said. “Nothing.”

On a cold, cloudy Thursday, at eleven o’clock in the morning, I parked Walter’s Cadillac in downtown Woodside and set out at a keen pace for the campus. Two- and three-story buildings lined both sides of the street, which was quite busy for a small town. People filled the sidewalks, sitting on benches, gliding along on Rollerblades, on gazing into storefront windows. Most were students, and they vivified the town, easily identifiable by their backpacks and the unbridled, merry apathy in their faces.

I passed a drugstore, the Woodside General Store, the Valley Café, several apparel stores, and a coffee shop called Beans n’ Bagels, in front of which, canopied tables cluttered the sidewalk. It was the liveliest store by far, brimming with caffeine junkies and quirky music. The rich smell of roasted coffee beans mingled with the air outside the open vestibule. I would’ve bought myself a cup had I not downed two at the Woodside Inn, where Walter still slept in our room, drained from the previous day of driving.

The buildings ended, but the sidewalk continued from the downtown toward the wooded campus. I could now see the mountains that surrounded the town, the highest slopes already white with early snow. I wondered how many students had skipped classes for a day of skiing. A steely wind made my eyes water and I zipped my leather jacket all the way up to my chin and dug my hands into the warm pockets.

A brick walkway veered off from the main sidewalk toward a group of brick buildings. Heading up the walkway, I reached a hexagonal white gazebo within several minutes. It appeared to stand in the exact center of campus, as most of the buildings, each not more than forty yards away, surrounded it. Plaques had been nailed to each side of the gazebo, engraved with woodside college, est. 1800.”

I passed beneath the portico of a stone-columned building, the largest of the ten or so in the vicinity, and walked up the steps. A great clock surmounted the roof, surrounded by scaffolding, its black hands stuck suspiciously on 4:20.

Inside, the building was dim and stale. The floor was constructed of burnished marble, and the walls of the foyer, wooden and intricately carved, were adorned with large portraits of former deans, founders, and dead professors. A life-size statue stood in the center of the circular room, staring vacuously at me. I didn’t stop to see who he was.

Glass double doors led into the office of the university registrar. I caught my reflection as I pushed them open—my hair and recent beard now brown, a pair of wire-framed spectacles on the bridge of my nose. In jeans and wearing a faded denim shirt under my jacket, I looked nothing like myself.

In the bright windowless room, there were several open cubicles, each holding a desk and portioned off from the cubicle next to it. I walked to the closest one, where a woman typed fervidly on a computer. She looked up from the screen and smiled as I approached.

“May I help you?” she asked. I sat down in the chair before her desk. The constant pecking of fingers on keyboards would’ve driven me insane.

“I need a campus map, a class directory for this semester, and a campus phone book.”

She opened a filing cabinet and withdrew a booklet and a blue pamphlet.

“Here’s a map and here’s the phone book,” she said, setting the items on her tidy desk. “I’ll have to get a class directory from the closet.” She walked across the room, mumbling something to another secretary as she passed. I opened the phone book. It was only fifty pages thick, with the faculty listings in the first ten pages and those of the two thousand students in the remaining forty. I thumbed through it to the P’s.