by Norbert Davis

excerpt from CHAPTER ONE: HERE IT WAS SPRING AGAIN, AND THE bees were buzzing and the buds were bursting and the doves were cooing, and the sun was beaming on all these and lots of other activities in a benignly obscene way. It was just the same old tedious show that has been playing return engagements at regular intervals for a million years or more and certainly nothing to get worked up over, but nevertheless it seemed new and splendid and fine to Melissa Gregory, because she was happy. She was a simple and uncomplicated sort of a person, and it didn't take much to put her in that state.

She walked along the edge of the Old Quad now with her head up and her shoulders back and her heels tapping in what she considered a briskly competent manner. She was slim and tall enough, and she had brown hair with copper-gold glints in it. Her blue eyes tipped a little at the outer corners, and her nose had three freckles on its bridge and turned up at the end. She was wearing the wrong shade of lipstick.

She was being happy at this particular moment because she had been promoted to a better job as the result of her outstanding merit and her faithful record of attendance at faculty tea parties. She was now an instructor. In the odd hierarchy of college faculties, an instructor rates somewhere between the head gardener and the lowest professor, if anyone can determine which one he is. An instructor is not allowed to lecture--or, for that matter, to talk loudly anywhere--but is entrusted with conveying the more elementary truths in certain subjects to beginning students.

Melissa taught anthropology, and she did this at an institution of higher learning called Breckenbridge University, Western Division, which specialized in the mass production of graduates of a standard size and competence. It was an efficient and impersonal sort of a place, but unfortunately one of its founders had once been on the campus of a well-known Eastern college and hadn't forgotten it. Consequently the campus of Breckenbridge had as much functional design as a bunch of dice dumped out of a hat. The buildings were scattered in all directions and hidden under ivy and behind bushes.

Melissa's headquarters was a building known as Old Chem because there were three beginning chemistry laboratories on the first floor. Old Chem was a solid, two-story, gray granite building with an ugly front and a splayed-out rear, and its architect had evidently had the theory that windows were designed to shoot Indians out of and not to facilitate the entrance of fresh air or light.

Melissa went up the block stone steps and through the arched entrance and then up the stairs to her right into the dimness of the upper corridor. Her office was the second one down, and she was fumbling in her purse for the key when she noticed that the door was slightly ajar. She pushed it open wider and looked in.