glasses, were startled and wary until he saw her curled up on the couch; then they brightened-briefly. The sudden spark of pleasure dimmed and the comers of his mouth pulled down in what might have been displeasure and might have been resolve. He came all the way into the apartment, set his shabby briefcase on the coffee table, and struggled out of the coat (which could easily have held two of him).
“What are you doing here?” he said.
Not a promising beginning. “Obviously I came to see you.”
“I told you not to.”
“I had to come, Jan.”
His eyes shifted away from hers, to the glass on the floor beside the couch. “Well, I see you’ve made yourself at home.”
“Yes. Can I get you a brandy?” God, she sounded assured. And all the while she was like jelly inside.
His mouth twitched: the ghost of a smile. He wasn’t put off enough not to appreciate what he often referred to as her “sassiness.” He said, “No, I’ll get it. You want another?”
“Yes.” For courage.
He returned after a minute with the drinks, then went back to the kitchen and brought out a straight-backed chair. So he wasn’t even going to sit on the couch beside her. Another bad sign.
“Why are you here?” he asked again.
“Oh, Jan, you know why I’m here. Let’s not play games with each other.”
He was silent, looking down into his glass.
“I love you and I don’t want to lose you,” she said. “But I don’t know how to keep that from happening because I don’t know what’s wrong, why you’ve… changed toward me all of a sudden. Was it something I did?”
No response.
“I don’t think it was,” she said. “First you told me not to come to Boston; you were busy, you’d drive down to New York at the end of the semester. Then you had to work on an article over semester break. I offered to come up here; you didn’t think that was a good idea. Next you promised you’d meet me in Connecticut for the weekend, but you cancelled at the last minute. You haven’t written or called in the last three weeks. Jan… is there somebody else? Is that it?”
He looked up. “There’s no one but you, you know that.”
He had spoken the words softly, apologetically, but they only served to anger her. “How can you say, ‘There’s no one but you’? There isn’t even me anymore! You’ve forced me out of your life and I want to know why.”
“I’m trying to do what’s best for you-”
“What’s best for me? Don’t you think I have the right to make that decision?”
He sighed and finished the rest of his brandy. Then he leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, rolled the empty glass between his big hands. He said slowly, “Look, Alix, I’m not an easy person to be around all the time. Not an easy person to be close to. I tend to brood-”
“I know that-”
“No, hear me out. This past year you’ve seen the best side of me. I’ve been happy and that’s allowed me to open up to you in a way I never have to anyone else.”
“So why should that change now?”
He went on as if he hadn’t heard her question. “What you didn’t see this past year was the other side of me. I’m prone to periods of depression-severe depression. I wouldn’t ask anyone else to suffer through one of those periods, least of all you.”
“I don’t understand. What brings on this depression?”
“I’m not sure. I mean, it isn’t as if something goes wrong at the university, or I have a bad day otherwise, and I get the blues for a while. It’s not that simple. My depression is chronic and cyclical.”
“Why? What causes it?”
“There are things in my past,” he said. He spoke even more slowly, still rolling the glass between his palms.
“What kind of things?”
When he met her gaze again his eyes, even with the protection of his glasses, revealed a vulnerability that touched her deeply. “I told you my mother died,” he said. “And it’s true; she died over ten years ago. But what I didn’t tell you was that years before that, when I was only three, she left my father and me, ran off with another man.”
“Oh, Jan, I’m sorry.”
“His name was Petersen, he worked for the creamery in Baraboo that bought most of our milk. He was from Minnesota, some town up by Duluth; that was where he and my mother went.”
“Did your father try to get her back?”
“No. He disowned her completely, would never even mention her name. I was twelve before I found out the truth. A kid on one of the neighboring farms told me. He laughed about it; I thought at the time that everyone must be laughing and I felt humiliated. Indirectly, that’s one of the reasons I became interested in lighthouses: I spent most of my time with books, after that.”
She wanted to say something comforting, but no words came to her. None except, “But that was such a long time ago… ”
“No, listen. I know it’s irrational, but all my life I’ve felt that the people I cared most about were going to abandon me, just as my mother did. And they have: my father died when I was in college. The only other woman I’ve loved besides you broke off our two-week engagement to marry someone else. I can’t even keep a cat. They get sick and die or run off.”
“So you’re afraid I’ll leave you too, eventually.”
“Yes. Somehow, in some way. Tragedy of one kind or another has plagued me all my life, Alix.” He paused, looked away from her again. “I didn’t tell you about the murder, did I.”
A small chill settled between her shoulder blades; she sat up straighter. “Murder?”
“It happened during my senior year at Madison. There were several of us-all history majors-who shared a house near campus. Outcasts who couldn’t afford a fraternity or couldn’t get into one. In a way we formed a fraternity of our own. We had parties, of course. And there was a regular crowd of people who would come-most of them outcasts, too, I suppose.
“One Saturday night in October, one of the regular girls brought a friend to the party. Sandy. Sandy Ralston. She wasn’t an outcast; she was blond and quite beautiful. We all took a turn at trying to impress her. Maybe one of us or someone else at the party succeeded; maybe not. There were a lot of people there-loud music, plenty of beer. Everyone was at least a little drunk, and afterwards no one could remember when Sandy left, or with whom.”
“She was the one who was murdered?”
“Yes. She didn’t come home that night-she roomed with another coed-and when she still hadn’t returned or called by noon the next day, the roommate got worried and called the police. A search was organized; most of the fellows in my house joined in. She had been raped and strangled and her body left in a wooded area only a few blocks away.” He was silent for a moment, and when he spoke again his voice was raw with emotion. “I was the one who found her.”
“How awful for you!” She reached over, put her hand on his arm. Almost convulsively, he set down his glass and twined her fingers with his.
“We were all suspects, of course, everyone who’d been at the party. We were questioned over and over again. None of us remembered much about that night-it was all a blur. At first we talked about it, but it wasn’t long before things got strained among us. We began to look at one another differently. Could one of us have strangled Sandy Ralston? Rob had been dancing with her about ten. Kevin kept bringing her beers. She talked to Neal for a while. And so forth. After a while, along with wondering if one of your friends was a murderer and a rapist, you began to wonder what each of them was thinking about you.”
Jan’s fingers were gripping hers so hard he was hurting her. She pulled her hand free, as gently as she could. “Did they… did they ever find out who did kill her?”
“Yes. Inside of two weeks they arrested the fellow who had the room next to mine-Ed Finlayson. He claimed he didn’t do it, but they had a strong circumstantial case and eventually he was convicted and sent to state prison. All of us in the house wanted to believe in Ed’s innocence, but at the same time it was a relief to think the murder
