The crowd closed in on all sides, rumbling with menace around him. Mark's claustrophobia increased, and the store suddenly felt small. He needed to get out. He needed a chance to breathe in the open air. He felt arms grasping for him, trying to wrestle him to the ground like a prisoner, but he pushed past the people in the store and bolted for his truck.
Chapter Thirty-One
Hilary hung up her phone with a pang of worry. She'd tried to reach Amy Leigh in Green Bay half a dozen times since the previous night, and each time, the call had gone straight into voicemail.
Wherever Amy was, she wasn't answering her phone.
She knew it didn't mean that anything was wrong. The girl had sounded drunk during her odd phone call. It was possible that Amy was embarrassed about making the call and was now ducking Hilary's attempts to reach her. Things like that happened at college parties. You drank too much, and you no longer knew what you were doing or why. Even so, that wasn't the girl that Hilary remembered.
Her former student had always reminded Hilary of herself in her high school days: confident, bubbly, determined, and sometimes naive. The girl was self-conscious about her larger frame and determined to make everyone forget it when she was on the dance floor. Amy was religious, just as Hilary was, and she came from a solid Chicago family. On the other hand, she was also young, and fun, and prone to impetuous mistakes, like any student away from home.
Hilary just wanted to make sure that Amy was OK. She dialed again. Voicemail. She left another message. 'Amy, it's Hilary. Listen, sorry to be a pest, but could you call me back? I'm a little concerned.'
She wouldn't have made a big deal of Amy's strange call, but the girl had talked about Florida in the midst of her ramblings. More than that, she'd said the one name that made Hilary sit up and take notice.
Glory.
Hadn't she? It had all happened so fast on the phone, and Amy's voice was a drunken whisper, and Hilary had barely understood the words. Amy had been talking about her dance coach, Gary Jensen. Then she'd said it. Glory. Or maybe Hilary had simply had Glory on her own mind, and when Amy said Gary's name again, she'd heard Glory instead. Maybe she was hearing what she wanted to hear. Maybe.
Hilary padded into the kitchen and poured herself a third cup of coffee from the pot. She wore a roomy sweatshirt, running shorts, and white socks. Her blond hair fell loosely about her shoulders; it was clean and wet from her shower. Her body ached, but it was mostly a pleasant ache now. A post-sex ache. She'd come home not realizing how badly she and Mark needed each other, like both of them grasping for a lifeline. The result was a wild, almost animal coupling, the way it had been in the early days, when they were getting to know each other's bodies. She could still feel him where he'd held her and been inside her.
It made her believe in him all over again. He couldn't fake what he felt for her. There had been a time when she, like Amy, was naive about relationships, but she'd left that part of herself far behind in her twenties. She had open eyes about men and about Mark. If Cab Bolton had a witness, then the witness was wrong. Whatever had happened in Florida, it wasn't what everyone else thought.
Florida.
Hilary was sure that Amy had said Glory's name.
She took her coffee into their bedroom, booted up her desktop computer, and logged into her Facebook home page. When she called up a listing of her online friends, she found Amy Leigh on the third page. She clicked on Amy's profile and saw that the girl had updated her status at 6:47 p.m. the previous day.
Hilary didn't think that Amy sounded like a girl heading for a college party. She reviewed the rest of the girl's profile page and noticed a comment from another Green Bay student that had been posted earlier this morning.
Hilary didn't like that at all.
She replayed the brief, hushed phone call from Amy in her head. She didn't know if there was anything she could glean from it. The call itself had only lasted a few seconds. Even so, whether Amy had said Gary or Glory, she had definitely mentioned Florida, and more important than that, Amy had been
Hilary knew most of the college coaches who worked with dancers in the Midwest, because she'd had to counsel students on choosing colleges, mostly in Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. She knew the name Gary Jensen, but she'd never met the man. His name had made its way around the dance grapevine when he'd been hired as a physical education instructor at Green Bay and been put in charge of the dance team. She didn't know much about his background, but from what she'd seen, he'd done well with the girls. She remembered an email from Amy two years earlier in which Amy talked about the enhanced physical training regimen their coach had implemented, which was something Hilary always emphasized herself. It wasn't just about coordination and practice; it was about conditioning.
She also remembered something Amy had said in her email back then. It was the kind of throwaway line that a college girl would use.
Hilary wanted to know more about Gary Jensen.
She visited the UWGB web site and drilled down to the athletics page. She found a link to the coach's biography in the faculty roster. The first thing she noticed was that, unlike most instructors, Jensen had no photograph posted on his page. His bio indicated that he'd taught at the school for four years, and she thought it was odd that he'd managed to duck the photo shoots for so long.
His bio said little about his past. He had a bachelor's degree in physical education and a master's in educational leadership, both from the University of Alaska at Anchorage. Based on his years of graduation, Hilary calculated that Jensen was in his mid-forties. At Green Bay, he taught physical education classes for freshmen and coached dance and wrestling. What was missing from his bio was detailed information about his work experience prior to his arrival in Green Bay. The summary was vague: 'Gary has been an adjunct professor and coach at colleges in Alaska, Oregon, South Dakota, and Canada.'
Despite the lack of specifics, his bio raised no red flags. Even so, Hilary kept digging, looking for more information about Jensen's past. She found references to him — or to someone with his name — in articles about sports teams in Anchorage and Portland, but most of the articles were more than ten years old. The name was also common enough that she found thousands of pages on men named Gary Jensen who had no connection at all to Amy's coach.
Then she found a headline on one of her searches that caught her attention.
COACH'S WIFE DIES IN FALL.
She read the brief article from the Green Bay newspaper. Not even four months earlier, Gary Jensen had lost his wife during a rock-climbing vacation in Zion National Park. The couple had been married only three years. Jensen was described as devastated. Heartbroken. The Utah Police had investigated the incident and found no evidence to suggest the death was anything other than what Jensen described. A terrible, tragic accident.
Hilary wondered. Two violent deaths in four months, and both times, Gary Jensen was nearby. A coincidence?
She of all people knew that smoke didn't mean fire when it came to guilt or innocence. Mark had suffered when others jumped to conclusions. She had nothing specific to feed her suspicions about Jensen. No connection to Glory. Nothing in the man's background. Just Amy's unsettling phone call. And a dead wife.
Hilary returned to Amy's profile page. She knew that Amy posted photographs compulsively, and she found an album dedicated to the girl's dance activities. The album included nearly one hundred pictures of Amy and her
