The Case of the Confirmed Bachelor

“Nice manners,” she said, tongue-in-cheek.

“You opened the door for me back when I broke my leg in your senior year of school. Drove me back and forth to work every day, too, on your way.”

“Wasn’t I sweet?” she asked wistfully. “Ah, those good old days.”

“You were less irritating then.”

“So were you,” she tossed back. She cocked her head and studied him. “Footloose Nick,” she murmured. “I suppose you’ll end up in a shoot-out with spies somewhere and they’ll mount you on a wall or something.”

He grinned. “Lovely thought. How kind of you.”

She gave up. “My office is on the second floor.”

She led him into the big brick building, past the admissions office and up the staircase that led to the history and sociology departments.

“I’m down the hall. The historians have this wing. The sociology department here is rather small, although we offer some interesting courses.”

“Anthropology is sociology,” he remarked. “I took one course of it in college myself. Sociology and law go hand in hand, did you know?”

“Sure!” she said, unlocking her office. “That’s the biology lab down the hall. They’re only up here temporarily while their facilities are being remodeled. They have snakes in there,” she said with a shiver.

A primal scream echoed down the hall with its high ceilings. “Is that one of them?” he asked.

“Snakes don’t scream,” she muttered. “No, that’s Pal.”

“Who? Or should I say what?”

“Pal’s a what, all right. He’s the missing link. That’s what we call him up here. Australopithecus insidious.”

“Greek.”

“Latin,” she corrected. “Pidgin Latin. What I mean, is that Pal is too smart to be a monkey. We have to lock him up. He likes to rip up textbooks. And if you ever leave your keys lying around when he’s on the loose, you’ll never see them again.”

“Isn’t he caged?”

“Usually. He picks the lock.” She laughed. “The last time he got out, the administrator and several members of the board of trustees were having a catered meeting in the conference room. Pal got in there and started pelting everybody with melon balls and rolls.”

“I’ll bet that went over well with the guests.”

“Guest,” she corrected. “It was a senator from Maryland. We never did get that funding we needed for a new research project.”

“Why doesn’t that surprise me? Out of idle curiosity, what were you going to research?”

Her eyes brightened. “Primate social behavior.”

He burst out laughing. “It seems to me that you’re doing enough of that without funding.”

“That’s exactly what our president said. Here.” She opened the door to a Spartan office with a desk, a chair, and a bookcase jammed full of reference books. On her desk were stacks of paper and a college handbook. “Like most everyone else here, I’m a faculty advisor. In my spare time, I teach anthropology.”

He stood looking down at her with open curiosity. “You were always a brain. I used to feel threatened by you sometimes. No matter what I knew, you seemed to know more.”

“Brains can be a curse when you’re a young girl,” she replied with faint bitterness. “But they last a lot longer than a voluptuous figure and a pretty face,” she added.

“There’s nothing wrong with you,” he mused. “Except that you need feeding up.”

“Oh, I’ll spread out one day. This is where the artifact was lying when it vanished.”

She pointed to a central spot on the desk.

“How long ago did it walk off?”

“Yesterday afternoon.”

He nodded and pulled a small leather-bound kit out of his pocket. “Go and read a book or make a telephone call for a few minutes while I do a little investigating.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Dust your desk for fingerprints and look for clues, of course. Has anyone been at this desk except you since the artifact was taken?”

She shook her head.

“Good. That narrows it down a bit.”

She started to ask him more questions, but he was knee-deep in thought and investigation. She shrugged and left him there.

Minutes later, he straightened, irritated by the lack of fingerprints. The desk had a rough surface, which made it hard to find a full print. But a tiny piece of what looked like hair lay on a white sheet of paper, and that he took with him, securing it with a pair of tweezers and sticking it in a tiny plastic bag that he then sealed. It wasn’t much, but if it was human hair, the lab over at the FBI could tell them plenty about it. It was amazing how much data one strand of hair could provide. It was strangely coarse. He dismissed it instantly when Tabby came in the door, his eyes watchful as they skimmed over her. She made him feel as if he’d only just come back from a long journey. It was a very pleasant sensation. When he was with her, his restlessness seemed to go momentarily into eclipse.

“Anything?” Tabby asked hopefully.

Her question diverted him. “Not much,” he said. “I couldn’t get a full print….”

He stopped as a tall, unsmiling man appeared in the doorway behind Tabby.

“This is Dr. Daniel Myers,” she introduced the new comer, who was wearing a dark blue suit with a white shirt and conventional tie. On a Saturday, he was dressed like a preacher, which gave Nick a pretty accurate picture of his meticulous personality.

“Nick Reed,” Nick said, introducing himself. He didn’t offer his hand. Nor did Daniel, he noticed with some amusement.

“You must be discreet,” he cautioned Nick. “I’m sure you understand what a theft like this could do to the image of Thorn College.”

“Certainly,” he agreed. “As aware as I am of what it could do to Tabby’s future.”

“Tabby?”

“Her family and mine have been close all our lives,” Nick told the man.

“It sounds like something one would call a cat, don’t you think, darling?” he asked Tabby, and slid a long arm over her thin shoulders.

Nick just stopped himself from leaping forward. Incredible, he thought, how his mind reacted to the sight. Tabby was like a sister to him. Perhaps he only felt protective. That had to be it.