They walked on, eating good ice cream and herding insolent panhandler squirrels back into their trees. Off at the far corner of the campus, the halftime show ended and the band's attempt at music lapsed into blessed silence to let the equally-inept football team reclaim their field.
His cell phone rang. They stopped under the shade of a tall pine and he checked the caller ID display. It wasn't a number he recognized, but the exchange code was near Stonefort — maybe Winter Cove. He couldn't remember.
"Hello." He turned his back on Jane, walking around the tree trunk for an impromptu phone booth.
"Gary?"
Voice was either Dad or Ben — they sounded the same on a phone. He'd been told he did, as well.
"Yep."
"It's your cousin Dan. Where the hell you been? I've been trying to get you since last night."
"Had the phone switched off. Didn't want to be disturbed." True enough, spending the night in Jane's bed. But it also meant family code for 'I didn't want to be traced by the cell locator signal.'
And 'Cousin Dan' was code for Dad, in case of phone taps. Gary actually had a Cousin Dan, common name in the family from 'way back. The guy lived in New York.
"Roger that. I wanted to get to you before you saw the news or had a visit from the police. Problem at Morgan's Point."
That straightened him up. "Police?" Then he remembered Jane and dropped his voice back to near whisper. "What happened?"
"Cops found a body dumped on your dad's memorial stone, anonymous telephone tip. Yard service says it wasn't there Wednesday. The police may want to talk to you because you own the place now. Just routine, they know you've been away to school for a month."
Routine meant the cops hadn't stumbled on any Morgan secrets, like the entrances to the tunnel complex or the tower. "You said 'dumped.' Killed someplace else, like the one out on the ridge?"
"No statement yet. Word on the street says someone had cut the heart right out. No blood, though."
So "yes" to "Killed somewhere else." Probably dumped on the Morgan grounds for a reason. Question was, what? "Man or woman? Anyone I know?"
"No word. I've called your guardian and told her. Don't roll in any meadow muffins while you're green-grassin' your gal out in the cow pastures."
And the phone clicked dead before he could come up with a snappy comeback. Gary stared at the black plastic lump in his hand. Messy corpse left on Dad's memorial marker. More family code there. They had security cameras covering the grounds. Dad would have said if they'd picked up anything.
And 'meadow muffins' were the tunnel traps. He hoped Caroline got that word. She might be off in Arizona right now, but she'd be coming back damned soon and had this habit of wandering around the tunnels without an invitation. Said she belonged there just as much as any other Morgan.
Gary took three deep breaths, slowly, and then pasted a smile on his face before turning back around the tree. Jane didn't need to know that stuff.
But she wasn't there. He stared frozen at the empty grass, the dropped ice cream dish, and then pulled himself together to scan the mall and the stately ranks of oaks and maples and the equally formal columns of the flanking buildings. He caught a flash of green that might have been her backpack disappearing around the corner of Howell Hall. That route led into a maze of smaller walks and outbuildings and doors and shrubbery.
Gone.
He'd damn near shouted 'police' and the clock struck midnight at Cinderella's Ball. Gary's breath caught in his chest, and he sank back against the rough bark of the pine.
He didn't have a clue where to look for her. Damned sure she wouldn't go back to that cellar. Next class they had together would be Wednesday, odds were she'd skip that.
Hell, he didn't even know if 'Jane White' was her real name. She could be like Dad or Ben, five different valid driver's licenses from five different states in five different names. Of course, that sort of thing took money.
Gone. The word echoed in his head. Paranoid as she was, she might not even trust campus email, afraid the sysadmins could nail down an IP address and send the cops straight to a network jack.
She might check email from off-campus, dial-up or internet café, just hit-and-run faster than a cop could trace her. That was the closest thing he had for a substitute glass slipper.
Gary picked up her ice cream dish and spoon. Not just being neat as a substitute for doing something — they'd have her fingerprints. As Ben pointed out, all those jokes about paranoids sometimes having real enemies wouldn't exist without a grain of truth behind them.
The campus felt empty, in spite of cheering from the distant crowd. She was gone.
Chapter Twelve
Ben frowned and clicked another line of three-way toggle switches, eight of 'em, self-test position. The board showed blinking amber lights for about half a minute and then solid green again — all sensors active, no circuits open or shorted.
He settled back in his chair and studied the ranks of closed-circuit monitors, the gray and red enameled panels filled with switches and indicator lights, the opened junction boxes and conduits filled with neatly-bundled color-coded wiring.
Nothing there that didn't belong, either, no "black boxes" added to intercept signals or introduce lies into the logic. Everything checked out, same here in the old stone tower as on the parallel control board up in the house.
But someone had slipped past the cameras and dumped a body on Dan's memorial. Ben stared at the cool rough granite of the tower walls, and thought.
He could spoof the system. Gary had fooled it, escaping from under Ben's eye and risking his life to gain his selkie birthright. Both of them had access to the control boards and manuals and circuit diagrams, though. They worked within the laws of physics and
