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together?” I said.
    “Yes,” she said.
    “And you are still the president of this college,” I said.
    “Yes.”
    “So standing up to Pappas may have cost you a lot, but it didn’t cost you everything,” I said.
    “In fact,” she said. “It saved everything.”
    “Good,” I said. “Can you tell me about it?”
    Clarice looked at Susan.
    “He seems an unusual private detective,” she said. “Something of a romantic. Should I trust him?”
    “Not if you have something you don’t want him to know,” Susan said.
    “Did he bring you along, and tell me he’d miss you if he didn’t, to impress me? So I would, so to speak, lower my guard. Or was he sincere?”
    “Both,” Susan said. “He is romantic. He understands things. And we love one another. But he is also the hardest man I have ever met, when he thinks it’s necessary, and I guess you should know that, too.”
    “Suze,” I said. “I didn’t bring you along to blow my cover.”
    Clarice smiled.
    “I’m sorry to discuss you like this, as if you were a wall sconce,” she said.
    “It’s okay,” I said. “I understand. Harvard girls.”
    “Exactly,” Clarice said.
    “Pappas has a hold on a number of people, such as he had on you,” I said. “I’m trying to figure how to get them loose.”
    “Tell the truth,” Clarice said.
    “They won’t.”
    Clarice nodded.
    “It is idle to tell them they should,” she said, and looked at Susan. “Is it not, Dr. Silverman?”
    “It is,” Susan said.
    “So if you can tell me what you can about your experience with Pappas,” I said, “maybe it’ll help.”
    She nodded.
    “Trudy,” she said to the big cop. “It’s okay, you can go. I’ll be fine.”
    “I can wait outside, Clarice,” Trudy said.
    “No, thank you, Trudy. Go ahead.”
    Trudy nodded and looked at me hard and left. Clarice watched her go and then turned in her chair toward me and crossed her legs.
    “How shall we begin,” she said.
    I fought off the urge to say “Start at the beginning.”
    Instead I said, “Tell it any way that makes sense to you.”
    She leaned back a little in her chair and looked for a moment at the pictures on her credenza, and took in a long breath and let it out, and said, “Okay.”

Chapter22

    MY HUSBAND’S NAME IS ERIC,” she said. “Eric Richardson. I met him in graduate school. We’ve been married for twenty-five years. He is a professor of history at this college.”
    As she talked I could look past the family pictures and out onto the campus. The day was overcast. No students were in sight. The maple trees had shed their leaves for the season and looked sort of spectral.
    “About seven years ago,” Clarice said, “for reasons not relevant to this discussion, Eric and I became estranged. We didn’t actually separate. But we separated emotionally. I know we loved one another through the whole time, but we also hated each other.”
    She looked at Susan. Susan nodded.
    “The girls were away at school, and we were”—she paused and glanced out the window—“here.”
    “Not a lot of options here,” I said. “If it isn’t working at home.”
    “No,” Clarice said. “Though we both sought them.”
    “And Goran Pappas was one?”
    “Yes,” she said. “He was calling himself Gary Astor at the time.”
    “Gary Astor,” I said.
    She smiled without much pleasure.
    “I know,” she said. “Pathetic, isn’t it?”
    “In retrospect,” I said.
    She held her smile for a moment.
    “I was at an alumnae function in Albany,” she said, “when I met him in the hotel bar. He was, of course, charming.”
    She paused again and looked out at the gray campus.
    “And I, of course, was starved for charm,” she said. “He was relaxed, he was funny, he obviously thought I was wonderful, and sexy, and amazing. We talked all evening and went our separate ways. But we agreed to have drinks the next night, and we did, and then we went to my room.”
    We were silent for a time. Until