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his own life.”
    â€œNever presume that, Dennis. The police do not.”
    â€œHow do you know?”
    Father Carmody made an impatient wave of his hand. “The question is, who would have wanted to kill the man?”
    â€œI could make a list.”
    â€œCome now.”
    â€œYou remember him as an undergraduate, I am sure. In the early seventies. Mad as a hornet about the fact that women had been admitted to Notre Dame.”
    â€œThat was long ago.”
    â€œBarley is my favorite suspect.”
    â€œBarley!”
    â€œThey shared a quad in St. Edward’s.”
    â€œTwo in a quad?”
    â€œOh, there were four of them. But Barley had the strongest motive.”
    â€œWhat an odd fellow you are, Grantley.”
    â€œHe is here for the reunion Sadler defiantly initiated as a thumb in the eye of the alumni association. They were to be a foursome at Warren, the four old roommates. They whooped it up in the Morris Inn last night and early this morning Sadler crept out on Burke for some practice holes. That is why he was found there.”
    â€œHe was playing alone?”
    â€œWhat killed him was in his water bottle.”
    Philip Knight had already reported this to Carmody by telephone. “What does belladonna suggest to you, Father?” he’d asked.
    â€œI am a celibate.”
    â€œShe is a poison.”
    â€œWhat a chauvinist you are.”
    â€œRoger tells me that chauvinist has something to do with baldness. My hair is still thick.”
    â€œYou mean that Mortimer Sadler was poisoned?”
    â€œThat was the first result of the police investigation.”
    This was dire news. High on Father Carmody’s list of priorities was that only good should be spoken of Notre Dame, and if evil occurred it was to be discreetly muffled if not entirely silenced.
    â€œHave the media been told?”
    â€œIt’s hardly a secret.”
    The media! The plural of medium, a medium being one who conducted séances and invoked the powers of evil to wreak havoc in the world. Only such a profession would have accepted such a designation. Father Carmody, of course, exempted the alumni who had done well in journalism.
    â€œWhat are you going to do?” Grantley asked now, studying his empty glass. Father Carmody had capped the Powers after pouring Grantley a second tot and was indisposed to open it anew.
    â€œWhat do you mean?”
    â€œWe can’t have a scandal.”
    Grantley’s remark reminded him of his feeling of impotence when Phil Knight had passed on the news. He had asked Roger Knight’s brother to represent the university in the matter, the better to prevent public attention. But it would have been delinquent of the local constabulary to treat a murder on campus as if it were a secret.
    â€œThis would have been unthinkable once,” Grantley said.
    Carmody said nothing. A local woman had compiled an unpublished manuscript on the strange and unsolved deaths on the Notre Dame campus. Any acreage in the world chosen at random might deliver up similar mysteries. Was Grantley really unaware of the precedents? More likely his remark was simply another instance of his resolve to treat the present as a betrayal of the past.
    â€œThe more quickly it is solved the better.”
    â€œThe murderer found?”
    â€œI thought you suspected suicide.”
    â€œIt was my first thought. But that is so horrible to contemplate.”
    Grantley’s tone indicated that he would have welcomed an exchange on the inscrutable ways of Providence, the folly of men, the mercy of God, and allied subjects. The fact was that the man annoyed Father Carmody, all the more because of his manifest assumption that they were in the same boat. Grantley considered his own years at Notre Dame to be a record of unjust treatment and feeble loyalty to one who had given his life to the university. He had a case of sorts, but what was the point of making it again and again? If