to Zanzibar, and nobody will find her.'
'We could stake out the property,' Hawk said. 'See if we see her.'
'We could,' I said.
' 'Course, if we don't see her, it won't mean she isn't there,' Hawk said. 'Just mean she hasn't come out while we there.'
'And if we do see her, how will we know it's her,' I said.
'And maybe Sonny a little more alert to stakeouts than your average suburban dad,' Hawk said.
'And since he's trying to kill us anyway. '
'There you go saying 'us' again.'
'All for one and one for all,' I said.
'Don't that suck,' Hawk said.
40
We settled for a lot of phone calls.
Of the 3,180 students that entered Taft in the fall of 1963, 954 of them were from greater Boston. The alumni directory had addresses for 611. At the rate of one minute per phone call, it would take me ten hours to call them all. If I didn't go to the bathroom. On the assumption that she would have more girlfriends than boyfriends, I went through the list again and winnowed out 307 female names.
'You wanna make some of these calls?' I said to Hawk.
'No.'
'Maybe I'll be lucky,' I said. 'Maybe she was pals with Judy Aaron.'
'You got one chance in three hundred seven,' Hawk said.
'I thought you didn't do math.'
'I do when I want to,' Hawk said.
'They'll chisel that on your headstone,' I said.
I picked up my cordless phone and leaned back and put my feet up and began. Most of the calls took longer than a minute. Who was I again? Why did I wish to locate Bonnie Lombard? Was I authorized by the university? This was compensated to some extent by the people who hung up on me or who weren't home. Still, I'd been at it almost three hours when I talked to Anne Fahey. 'Bonnie? Sure, I remember Bonnie.'
'May I come and see you about her,' I said.
'Sure. You got my phone number, does that mean you got my address?'
I read her address to her. 'That's it. When do you want to come?'
'I'll be there in an hour,' I said.
'Okay,' she said. 'Maybe I can rummage around, find some pictures or something. Should I do that?'
'Anything you have would be helpful,' I said.
Anne Fahey lived in Sudbury, in a very large house of the kind that Susan called McMansions. There were Palladian windows and a number of roof peaks and an assortment of architectural conceits, all overlooking a vast lawn devoid of ornamentation.
Anne herself was a handsome woman in her fifties, with a lot of curly silver blond hair and a strong, graceful body. I introduced myself.
'And this is Mr. Hawk,' I said. 'My driver.'
Hawk would be more easily mistaken for Santa Claus than someone's driver, but Anne smiled widely as she held the door open, as if she were unaware of my small deceit. We went into the front hall and then to the living room on the left. It appeared that, having spent far too much for the house, they had nothing left to furnish it. There were no rugs on the floor. There was a couch and three armchairs in the living room. The windows were undraped. There were no pictures on the walls. The huge slate-framed fireplace was ash-free, soot-free, and perfectly clean. There was nothing on the mantel. I sat on the couch. Hawk sat in an armchair with a view out the front window. Anne offered coffee. We declined.
'I found a few pictures of Bunny Lombard,' she said.
'So her nickname was in fact Bunny?' I said.
'Yes. While I was waiting for you, I checked our yearbook.'
She picked up a thick, white leatherette yearbook from the floor beside her chair. It read TAFT 1967 in blue script on the cover. Bunny had not stayed to graduate, so there was no individual head shot. But she had been in the drama club and the Sigma Kappa sorority, and she appeared in a group photo of each. There was also a candid of her at some sort of picnic, a very young woman wearing a tie-dyed T-shirt, her long dark hair cut straight across her forehead in bangs.
'That's me,' Anne said, 'with her. The one with the huge cup of beer.' She had been plumper then, with a big head of frizzy blond hair.
'I did a lot of beer in those days,' Anne said. 'Among other things.'
'And now?' I said.
