He stepped out in a polo shirt with no coat, leaving one finger hooked around the knob of the cracked door.
“This isn’t a great time,” he said.
Yale extended a hand. “Yale Tishman,” he said. “Are you Nora’s son? Frank?” Best-case scenario, he could win the guy over. Have him call off his dogs.
“You can’t come up here and harass her.”
“I apologize. We didn’t have a phone number, and I knew she wanted to meet the gallery director. This is Bill Lindsey”—Bill nodded—“and we’ve brought one of our graduate students.” Yale was talking too fast. The man looked them up and down, and Yale couldn’t even imagine how they appeared to him: three fags of various ages, shivering in dressy coats and scarves.
In the house, Nora was talking. Yale heard her say, “Then why didn’t I hear the doorbell?” He thought of calling to her, of ducking under Frank’s arm and through the door.
Frank squinted down. He was up a step. He said, “You’re trespassing. This house belongs to me, not my mother. If you’re gone by the time the police get here, I might not have you arrested.” And he closed the door.
Bill started laughing, a thin, helpless laugh. They walked back to the car.
The air around Yale had taken on a migraine density, a pink, oppressive haze. Frank was surely on the horn already to his donor friend, who would call his lawyers and Cecily and the president of the entire university.
They went to a café in Egg Harbor, the first place they found open, to regroup.
“I’m sorry.” Yale directed this at Bill. “This was a phenomenal waste of time.”
He suspected Bill felt otherwise, though, the way he’d been pointing things out to Roman like a tour guide, even as they’d fled the scene. Bill was ordering coffee now, wondering if he was hungry enough for a sandwich. He’d warned Yale: He himself had nothing to lose. And with Roman here, Bill didn’t seem to notice Yale circling the drain, didn’t notice the pallor Yale was sure had overtaken his face.
Yale said, “What if—what if we drop in on the lawyer? If he’s back from his very long holiday. And have him call her. Or give us the number. We can’t just leave.” It was too late to give up; they were going to suffer the consequences now regardless.
Roman slurped his coffee and said, “The mailbox was by the road, right?”
“Yeah. With the house number.”
“I mean—it’s two p.m., so maybe they’ve picked up the mail, maybe they haven’t. Probably the redhead got it when she was out with her kids. But what if we put a note there for Nora? We make it look like it came in the mail. Fake return address, whatever, just as long as Frank doesn’t see us. It could ask her to call us at the bed-and-breakfast. I mean, I don’t know. I’ve been watching too many spy movies, but I think it could work.”
Bill said, “Isn’t he great? Intern of the year.”
Yale watched his hand stir his coffee. “It’s not a bad idea,” he said. “And we can visit the lawyer in the meantime.”
They found a gift store that sold greeting cards, and inside a “Thinking of you!” note with butterflies, they wrote Nora a letter saying they apologized for dropping in, but they’d been unable to reach her, and right now was the best time to meet the gallery director. They addressed the letter and even dug up a stamp, rubbed some ink on it so it looked mailed. They drove slowly down County Road ZZ, and when they neared Nora’s mailbox Yale rolled down the passenger window and stuck the letter in with the magazines and bills that were, in fact, still there. They sped away laughing like teenagers who’d just egged a house.
Bill and Yale dropped Roman at the B&B, where he was to wait by the house phone in case Nora called, and found their way to the offices of Toynbee, Ball, and O’Dell in a converted Victorian outside downtown Sturgeon Bay, the kind of place that might as easily have been turned into an orthopedist’s. It was open, and Stanley looked happy to see them. He was working in a blue sweater and khakis, and seemed to have no pressing engagements.
“You probably did the right thing,” he said, “coming up. I worry for her, with that family. They’re not locking her in, nothing like that, but half the time I call, they won’t put her on. And she’s