harassed. Neither of those are new to me.”
“But this week? These last two days?”
“Matthew aside,” Mike said, trying to play to Faith’s good humor.
She finally looked at me. “I don’t know. I had an unusual encounter last night.”
“What was that?” Mike asked.
“Maybe nothing, but I can’t shake it. Could just be because it happened right before Ursula’s uncle called.”
“That’s all right,” I said. “Mike thinks I see ghosts everywhere. Sometimes I actually have.”
“And I talk to spirits,” Faith said, her dimples reappearing as she braved a smile. “No visions yet, but we’d be quite the pair. Anyway, I left here to go home to make dinner for Chat and me, so roughly around seven. It’s not a very long walk. I sort of just square the campus and it puts me onto Claremont.”
“Was Chat with you?”
“Oh, no. I was alone. At least, I thought so, until I got to 122nd Street. A man started following me from the corner of Broadway.”
“What made you aware of him? Did you hear footsteps?”
“I didn’t hear anything. That’s part of what was so strange. I just had that sixth sense that someone was too close to me. Do you know what I mean?”
“I get that all the time,” I said before Mike could interrupt with his personal view. He preferred hard, cold facts to women’s intuition. “It’s the kind of instinct that has saved a lot of potential victims.”
“I kept walking west but I glanced over my shoulder,” Faith said, looking at the floor again. “No one was there. So I sped up a bit, and I fished my cell phone out of my briefcase. This time I’m sure I heard him speak.”
“Actual words?”
“One word only. A name. I thought he said ‘Ursula.’ That made my head snap around—not because I thought anything was wrong with her, but because I thought maybe she was coming by to surprise me. She’d often drop in if she was around the school. I thought maybe this man saw her, called out to her.”
“And when you looked?” I asked.
“Unless my eyes were playing tricks with me, I saw a fleeting glimpse of a figure—a man, not Ursula—but then he darted into a recessed doorway on the side of one of our buildings.”
“Did you note anything about him?” Mike asked.
“You’ll think I’m stupid, but he was so fast, and he moved so gracefully, I couldn’t make out anything about him. It would have been like trying to catch a shadow and hold it still.”
“Nothing stupid about you. Not your fault,” I said. “What next?”
“I actually stood my ground. I stopped and called Ursula’s name myself. But there was no one else around. No one answered. So I kept on walking, under the scaffolding now.”
“What scaffolding?” Mike asked. “What’s with all these churches and their scaffolding?”
“Our spirit may be strong, Detective,” Faith said, smiling again. “But our bones are weary. There’s always something to be repaired here. We’re a very old institution. This piece of it runs along the northwest corner of the campus, ending right opposite the entrance to my building.”
Mike’s wheels were turning. His right hand went to his hair and began to comb through it. He was wondering where and how the scaffolding connected to the roof from which the statue just fell, and I was remembering Lieutenant Peterson’s remark that the structures around the never-finished St. John the Divine offered shelter to all the wrong people.
“What next, Faith?”
“I couldn’t see any light in my apartment when I turned the corner onto Claremont. I speed-dialed the number, hoping that Chat would be there and open the window, make contact with me in some way. But no such luck. I broke into a run, and I swear I heard Ursula’s name again. Closer this time, almost above me.”
“Okay. Go on.” I didn’t want Mike belittling this experience, which had obviously shaken Faith deeply.
“I looked back again.”
“Did you hear anything, any noise from the scaffolding?” Mike said.
“That’s what’s so creepy. Nothing like that at all. And yet when I ran across the street with my keys in my hand, the man that I thought I had seen the first time was ahead of me. He’d somehow crossed the street and was coming at me. Directly at me.”
“How could that be?” I asked. “How could he have gotten past you, if he ran into the street?”
“That’s sort of why I worried about telling anyone. It sounds incredible.”
“Look, the figure you saw behind you the first time, you told us you