That was crazy. The office had been full of people earlier when she left for the ditto room-Dr. Hunsington, his secretary, the receptionist, and a whole collection of professors, instructors, and teaching assistants, an milling around the receptionist's desk, waiting to collect their daily quota of departmental mail to say nothing of their semimonthly pay checks. So where were they now?
She started to leave the dittoed papers by the locked door while she went to find someone with a key. She quickly discarded that idea.
Several exams had been entrusted to her for dittoing purposes that morning. Diana took her charge of exam security very seriously, and she was unwilling to let the tests out of sight for even a moment.
Taking the entire stack with her, she started down the hall.
Halfway down the long corridor, she heard the echo of solitary footsteps coming up the stairs at the far end.
Diana was immensely relieved when Gary Ladd, one of the teaching assistants, materialized out of the stairwell and immediately started toward his office located in the bullpen at the far end of an adjacent wing.
'Mr. Ladd,' Diana called. 'Yoo-hoo.'
He stopped, turned, and came back toward her, his head cocked questioningly to one side. 'What are you doing here?' he asked. 'I thought everybody went home.'
Garrison Walther Ladd, HI, was by far the best-looking male teaching assistant in the English Department's stable.
With aquiline, tanned good looks and lank blond hair, he wore expensive but rumpled clothing with offhand, upper-class ease. Garrison Ladd knew he was hot stuff.
Breathless coeds who came within his sphere of influence found him irresistible. They tended to hie themselves off in search of obliging physicians willing to issue prescriptions for birth-control pills.
This was Diana's second year as an undergraduate student assistant in the English Department at the U. of O.
During that time she, too, had admired Gary Ladd, but only from a far.
For one thing, she had convinced herself that someone from Joseph, Oregon, could never be in Gary Ladd's league. For another, he was a graduate student while she was only a lowly sophomore.
He looked at her now with his tanned brow furrowed into a puzzled frown.
'Why didn't you go home when everybody else did?'
'I'm working,' she said. 'At least I'm trying to work.
I've got this whole stack of papers to deliver, but the door to the office is locked. Do you have a key? Where'd everybody go?'
Gary Ladd reached into a jacket pocket, extracted a key ring, then took two steps down the hallway before stopping and turning on Diana.
'Nobody told you, did they?'
'Told me what?' she returned. 'I've been in the ditto room. When I came out, everything was closed up. Even the classrooms are empty.
What's going on?'
'Somebody shot President Kennedy.'
'No!'
The very idea was incredible, unthinkable. Assassinations happened in other parts of the world-wild, terrible, jungle-filled places like South America or Africa--but not here in the good old U.S. of A.
'Where?' she managed to slammer. 'When?'
'This morning. In Dallas. They already caught the guy who did it?'
'Is he all right?'
Garrison Ladd looked mystified. 'He's fine. They've got him in jail.'
'No, not him. I mean President Kennedy. Is he all right?'
Gary Ladd shook his head, while his gray-blue eyes darkened in sympathy.
'He's dead, Diana. President Kennedy is dead. They just swore in LBJ on the plane headed back to Washington. Come on. Let's go drop off your papers.
They must be heavy.'
An Indian Health Services nurse hovered over Rita's bed-bound form, but the old woman's mind was far away in another time and place.
Dancing Quail hid behind her mother's skirts as the horse-drawn wagon pulled up beside the low-slung adobe house. It was the end of Shopol Eshabig Mashad, the short planting month. For days the children of Ban Thak had worried that soon Big Eddie Lopez, the tribal policeman, would come to take many of them away to boarding school.
Seven-year-old Dancing Quail didn't want to leave home.
She didn't want to go to school. Some of the other children had told her about it, about how they weren't allowed to speak to their friends in their own language, about how they had to dress up in stiff, uncomfortable clothing.
