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Harp’s heavily landscaped backyard sloped gently up to a forty-foot swimming pool that glowed aqua-green in the night. Two dozen people were scattered around the patio that surrounded the pool, all with drinks. Nobody was swimming, but several people sat with their bare feet in the pool, drinks by their sides, two peering at their phones. Letty limped to an unattended bar where she found three metal tubs, one holding bottles of Dos Equis, with a sign that said “21+” and the other two holding Coke, Pepsi, Sprite, and Fiji Water.
She grabbed a beer, popped the top with a bottle opener on a chain, and sidled into the party, beginning with a group of fourmale students who stopped talking as she wandered up. They were dressed in jeans and short-sleeve shirts and leather sandals that sent subtle signals of helpless computer nerdism.
“What happened to your knee?” one of the men asked, a crafty sally.
“Tried to hop a creek,” she said. She took a hit on the beer. “Didn’t quite make it. Hit a slippery rock and went down.”
“Up in the mountains?”
“Florida doesn’t have mountains,” Letty said. “Florida has swamps.”
“Florida, I know it well,” a second man said. To the others: “It’s that thing that hangs down from the East Coast, like an elderly penis.”
That was weak, but she smiled, which the men took as encouragement, and they all simultaneously began chatting her up. As they were doing that, Letty was watching a fortysomething man wearing jeans and a tee-shirt with a picture of Karl Marx wearing sunglasses and the legend “Class Dismissed.” He was the oldest man at the party, looked in good shape, thin, Roman nose, receding dark hair. He had a beer in his hand and Letty asked Larry—one of her new posse—“Is that Dr. Harp?”
“Yes, it is,” he said. “You don’t know him?”
“No, I... I’m sort of party-crashing. I’m here checking out your economics department. I was talking to a girl there and she mentioned the party... though I haven’t seen her.”
“Probably Carol. She can’t decide between computer science, math, and economics, so she tries to do all three. Doesn’t party. Tall, iridescent blue hair...”
“Mmm...” Neither yes nor no, in case Carol showed up.
Once adopted byher group of males, Letty kept them moving, integrating her original group with others, then peeling away, nursing the beer, watching Harp, and noticing the younger woman hanging behind the professor, who was watching Harp even more closely than Letty was.
The woman was a semi-attractive blonde, who might have been quite attractive if she’d done anything with it: her hair was frizzy, glasses tended to slip down her nose and she’d push them up with a middle finger. A loose shift-like dress concealed her body, which Letty judged was solid, athletic. Every once in a while, the woman would slide up to Harp’s side and throw a comment at whoever he was talking to.
The whole party tended to drift clockwise around the pool, and Letty watched the woman. She was young, younger than Letty. Twenty? Twenty-one? Drinking a Coke... but maybe she simply didn’t like alcohol. At one point, as Harp’s group rotated clockwise, the woman stepped slightly in front of him and he put one hand out, on her back, guiding her along the edge of the pool.
A familiar touch, Letty thought. A few minutes later, he did the same thing during the next ambling turn, but this time, his hand was lower, on the top of the woman’s butt. She didn’t react, which suggested a deeper intimacy.
Made Letty smile; her wolverine smile.
Her posse wanted to know more about the wings they could see at the top of her back, so she let one of them pull up her blouse to check it out, which the posse did, with unanimous praise. Harp was going by and took a look, grinned at her and said, “Ouch. Bet that hurt.”
He kept going, the young woman next to him, like a remora.
At eleven o’clock, Letty called Baxter and said, “People are leaving. I might be a while. I’ll call.”
“What are you doing?”
“I don’t know exactly. I’m watching.”
“Please, please...”
The pool patio was set in a garden, the edges spotted with densely foliated trees that Letty recognized from her Stanford days as fern pines. A groping couple had occupied a niche between two of the pines, and when they departed, Letty slipped into the niche, and then pushed farther back into the dark.
She didn’t know exactly why she did that, but it felt right.
Harp’s woman friend began walking around the pool area carrying a garbage bag, picking up party scraps. Letty took a video with her phone. The woman carried the bag into the back of the house, but didn’t reemerge.
Letty waited for another fifteen minutes in the trees, until Harp had shooed the last of the partygoers away. That done, he carried a Whole Foods bag around the pool, picking up bottles and cans. He emptied the bag into a recycling bin that sat in a corral at the corner of the house, turned off the backyard lights at an exterior switch, took a last look around, and went inside.
Second-floor lights came on a moment later. Letty waited. The second-floor lights dimmed, then went out, replaced by the flickering light of a candle.
Letty moved out of her fern pine hiding place and walked to the house. There was still a lamp turned on in a ground-floor room, casting a bit of light into what appeared, through the back-door window, to be a kitchen. She tried the doorknob, and it turned. The door gave a little raspy grunt when she pushed it open, but then swung in.
She hesitated... If she got caught...
