He went to his study and began organizing his papers and his finances.
At dusk he jerked awake — having fallen asleep at his desk — heart pounding with a dream whose final image he could still see. Colette had come straight back to America after her Austrian voyage. She had cabled him: she didn't care for Hans Gruber after all; it was he, Younger, whom she loved. He waited for her in Boston Harbor. She came running down from the ship, but when she reached him she froze, her green eyes shrinking from him in horror. He limped to a mirror. In it he saw what she had seen. During her five weeks' absence, he had aged fifty years.
Skipping church and canceling his usual weekly visit to his father in Staten Island, Littlemore returned on Sunday to the police garage. He climbed inside the kidnappers' car and went through it minutely again, even though the vehicle had already been fully searched and inventoried by other policemen. He was rewarded with exactly one discovery. Wedged deep in a crevice between seat back and seat cushion, Littlemore found a scrap of Western Union paper. It was not a telegram, but a receipt, showing only that some message had been sent somewhere by some customer.
With a few weeks at his disposal, and a dozen men pounding the pavement, such a receipt might conceivably have been tracked to its originating office. But Littlemore didn't have the men, he didn't have the time, and sending a telegram obviously didn't count as evidence of a crime.
The telephone rang in Younger's house on Sunday evening. He answered it, cursing himself for hoping it was Colette. It wasn't.
'What are you doing in Boston?' asked Littlemore s voice.
'I live here,' answered Younger.
'I left you messages all weekend at the Commodore. You didn't tell me you were going to Boston.'
'You told me not to tell you if I left town.'
'Oh yeah — good point,' said Littlemore. The detective described the unfortunate turn of events. 'Drobac gets out of prison tomorrow afternoon. I'm sorry, Doc. And I'm worried. Seems like Drobac's lawyer knew all kinds of things about Colette, including that she was up in New Haven. How would he know that? I think they've got somebody tailing the Miss. Or maybe somebody she knows in New Haven reports to these guys, whoever they are. I'll tell you what: after Drobac gets out, I don't know where is safe for her. I think the Miss and her brother should go into hiding.'
Younger rang off, grabbed his coat and hat, and left to make arrangements. When he'd finished, he sent a wire for immediate delivery to Colette:
YOU AND LUC MUST LEAVE AT ONCE STOP DROBAC BEING
RELEASED FROM JAIL TOMORROW STOP GENUINE DANGER
STOP HE KNOWS WHERE YOU ARE STOP I HAVE BOOKED
YOU A CABIN ON THESS WELSHMAN LEAVING NEW YORK
HARBOR FIVE-THIRTY PM MONDAY FOR HAMBURG STOP
LITTLEMORE WILL BE THERE WITH TICKETS STOP TELL NO
ONE REPEAT NO ONE
Because it was a Sunday night, Younger was obliged to pay a king's ransom to get this telegram sent and to have it hand-delivered upon transmission. Unfortunately, Western Union's hastily hired delivery boy in New Haven couldn't distinguish among Yale University's dormitories, and the telegram was slipped under the door of the wrong residence.
Colette, returning to her room Sunday night after working late at the laboratory, found the door unlocked. This dismayed her. She had told Luc over and over to keep the door locked; he didn't listen to anything she said anymore. Colette stepped into the silent darkness of her dormitory room. It shouldn't have been so dark — or silent. Could Luc already be asleep? He never went to bed until she made him.
The air felt damp, heavy, pregnant. She fumbled to turn on a lamp, but couldn't find the switch. Then she heard dripping — as if it were raining, but inside. The sound came from her bedroom.
'Luc?' she called out. No answer came. She felt her way to the bedroom, found a light, switched it on.
The room was empty. The boy's narrow bed was undisturbed. On the ceiling, drops of water were forming and falling into a puddle on the floor.
One flight above lived a graduate student in divinity and his kind wife, who had often taken Luc and watched him when Colette was at work. In fact Luc had a standing invitation from these neighbors to come up to their kitchen for milk and cookies any time he wanted — an invitation he'd taken advantage of more than once. The leak was surely coming from their apartment. Luc must be up there as well, Colette thought.
She went out into the unlit common stairwell of the dormitory building and, groping in the darkness, found the handrail and climbed the steps. A light showed beneath her friends' door. She knocked; the door swung open. The small apartment was bright, silent, and still. The living-room window was open, its curtain fluttering. Colette called out the names of her friends; there was no answer.
Colette's heart began to beat faster. The divinity student and his wife shouldn't have been out; they were always home at night. Colette went to the kitchen, which was empty, but the icebox door was open, which was wrong; one always shut one's icebox door. Then she heard the sound of water running. A door from the kitchen led to the bathroom. Colette looked down: from the bottom of that door, water was seeping out onto the kitchen floor. Colette opened the bathroom door.
No one was there. The bath was running, unattended. The tub was full; water overflowed onto the tile floor. Colette didn't shut off the tap. Instead, for no reason she could have explained, she ran back to the living room, pulled open the window curtain, and looked down into the courtyard outside. Luc was there.
He was standing under a tree near a lamppost, a glass of milk in one hand, a cookie in the other, staring at a female figure who was on her knees, looking into his eyes, her wispy hair tinged red in the lamplight. The girl's lined face was strained and taut. She could almost have been pretty, if the eyes hadn't been so frightful — eyes that had seen something unspeakable or were contemplating something unspeakable. She unbuttoned her dress and pulled it open, showing the boy her throat and her naked chest. Though her face was as taut as a madwoman's, her throat and chest were unmarred, white, soft — almost radiant. The glass slipped from Luc's hands. It fell to the grass, and so didn't break, but for a moment a circle of white milk glistened in the darkness at his feet. The figure stretched out her arms as if beckoning him to her.
Colette cried out from the upstairs window. She ran into the hallway and down the stairs. When she heaved open the heavy front door, other voices in the courtyard were crying an alarm too — but they were calling out to her, not to Luc. The girl under the tree had disappeared.
The other voices belonged to Colette's upstairs neighbors — the divinity student and his wife — who breathlessly declared that they had in their possession a telegram that Colette must read at once. They had been home when an undergraduate came knocking with a message from Western Union erroneously delivered to him. The moment the couple read the urgent wire, they ran off to Colette's laboratory, telling Luc to stay behind and wait; they had rushed so precipitously that the divinity student had left his bathtub running. But when they reached the laboratory, Colette had already left.
After Colette had taken Luc back to their room, after she had read the message, after the neighbors had retired upstairs, she looked at her brother. 'Did she touch you?' asked Colette.
The boy shook his head. He pointed to his neck and made signs with his hands, which Colette understood.
'Yes, I saw it too,' she answered. 'The aura.'
Detective Littlemore returned to the law library early Monday morning. It took him several hours, but he finally found what he was looking for. Armed with this knowledge, he set off for the Astor Hotel, where