“Did Jerry ask you to hand it on to me?”
“As a matter of fact, he didn’t.”
She smiled. “Then I’ll certainly take it.”
Without any more being said, the paper became a token of their collaboration in the face of Jerry’s advice to the contrary.
Before they got up to leave, Sarah said, “Do you suppose by any chance that Jerry could have a tail on us?”
He smiled. “Anything’s possible.”
“As we go out, take a look at the girl on the stool at the lunch counter. Since we came in, I don’t think her eyes have left us. I’m sure I’ve seen her around campus.”
The girl was Oriental. He had an idea he had seen her once with Meg Kellaway. He didn’t want his dance partner getting upset about nothing.
That evening he called Meg and fixed a lunchtime rehearsal with her for the following Wednesday. She sounded no different from usual.
6
On Monday Sarah returned to Ed Cunningham’s and witnessed a therapy session. The patient was a twenty-four-year-old six-foot-three black. His name was Frank, and he was terrified of dogs. At one point in his early childhood a Dalmatian had put its front paws against his chest and tried to lick his face. The force of it had knocked Frank off balance, and he had cut his head on a stone step. For the twenty-two years since then he had taken elaborate precautions to avoid dogs. He went out only when circumstances demanded, and then his mind was so full of the possible dangers that he sometimes forgot his reason for being on the street. He had lived in New York all his life and never once been in Central Park.
After Sarah was introduced, and Frank agreed that she could sit in, he described his problem for her benefit. Then Ed attached a metal disk to each of Frank’s hands. Wires led from them to an apparatus that Ed explained was devised to measure the electrical conductivity of the skin. A pulsating sound would increase in frequency in response to electrical activity generated by anxiety. Frank had used the apparatus before and understood that it was an aid to controlling his reactions. He was asked to relax as much as he could. Then Ed asked him to listen to a tape that described a number of encounters with dogs. The situations were graded to increase the level of stress each time. In the half hour of therapy they went through the tape three times, and Frank showed a small but discernible improvement.
When he had gone, Ed explained that over a number of weeks the force of the stimulus would be increased, using pictures of dogs, then sound recording and film. Eventually, when the machine — which was only a learning aid — had served its purpose, he would go out on the streets with Frank and they would walk past dogs. It had to be taken in easy stages, but Frank was already responding well. Next time, Ed said, he would like to spend some of the session letting Sarah describe the change in her feelings about spiders. He was confident that Frank would be encouraged by her experience.
Another patient was expected in a few minutes, so Sarah prepared to leave.
‘Thanks, Sarah. I really appreciate this.”
“It’s no trouble. I hope I can be useful next time.” Without thinking too much about it, she stepped forward to kiss him, but he had turned away to return Frank’s file to the cabinet. She could not be sure if the move was just to evade the kiss. On an impulse she added, ‘Friendship is important to me.”
“Really?” He turned and studied her face. “I had the impression you managed very well on your own. Who are your close friends?”
“I’d like to think of you as one.”
“Why not? As we said, a friend and not a patient. But you have other friends?”
“Naturally.”
“I mean, people in college?”
He really meant people her own age. He meant that girls in their twenties didn’t usually make it with men in their fifties. She was afraid he was about to spoil things between, them by saying something negative. She told him in a rush, “I went out with Don Rigden last week. I’m not the lonely person you seem to be hinting at.”
“Don — the guy you do research with? That’s good.”
“Next Monday, then?”
She got into the elevator and smiled back at him. She was glad no more had been said.
The following Wednesday morning Don was making his rounds in the araneology lab when Bernice looked in. “Hi! Am I glad to find you! When Jerry told me to look for you, I thought you would be off campus. People are always off campus when I go looking.”
“Jerry wants to see me?”
“Not you, sweetheart. He has to chair a seminar at Hunter College this evening, and all the big guns are going to be there. He was in here at eight-thirty this morning — I repeat, eight-thirty — tearing my filing system apart to find some research paper he needs to quote from. Then he remembered he gave it to you to read. ‘Crypto’-something. Does that figure? Anyway, he’s out all day and he wants to pick it up when he gets back at six. Dig it out, would you, baby?”
“Christ, I lent it to someone else to read, and she’s off campus all day.”
“Oh, no! Jerry will blow his stack. Who is this — Sarah Jordan?”
“Yes. She definitely isn’t here. I always take the readings on Wednesday mornings so she can have the day clear. She’ll be at Lake Pinecliff. Now, where could she have left the damn thing?”
“You could call her. I have her number at Lake Pinecliff.”
He used the phone in Bernice’s office and got the Bear Crossing Motel. The desk clerk said Miss Jordan was out in the hills, but someone was going that way, and he would get a message to her to call back.
He waited nearly an hour with Bernice and heard the dirt on almost everyone in the department. The call came at eleven-twenty. He apologized to Sarah for taking her away from her gliding. She said she guessed it must be important. He told her his problem.
“That is a problem,” she said. “You see, I have the paper right here in my car. I haven’t even read it yet. Look, why don’t you come out and get it? You can drive here in an hour.”
“You really don’t mind?”
“Why should I? Come on, I’ll show you what a great flier I am.”
He asked Bernice if he could borrow her car for the afternoon, and she tossed him the key. Leaving her questions unanswered, he said he would be back with Jerry’s paper by five, and went straight to the parking lot.
Three men assembling a glider on a ridge of Bearfort Mountain confirmed that Sarah had just got airborne, so the solitary green and white kite moving across a cloudless sky had to be hers. Don stared up at the small black figure riding the wind. She’d known how long it would take him to get here. Perhaps this display was laid on for him. But why? After a year of frost, what had started the thaw?
Whatever it was, he welcomed it. Anything was an improvement over her remoteness in recent months. She had not been uncooperative; she had scrupulously observed their agreement about research, and reported regularly on progress. But she made every contact between them so formal that it became a tedious ritual.
He had sometimes asked himself if she was acting from insecurity. She got precious little support from Jerry, whose job it was to supply it. Her work was competent but not innovative, and she was intelligent enough to know it. It was not impossible that she felt threatened by a newcomer with Jerry’s obvious backing and some original ideas.
If that was the problem, maybe she believed she could fight it for the first time. Getting chosen for the TV series had given her a victory over Jerry and Don as well. She had discovered something at which she was a winner. And in Don she had now identified an ally. They were conspirators against Jerry.