“Get a grip, Campbell,” he muttered, and walked onward. But each step seemed to pound out the same three syllables, over and over. The red dress … the red dress … the red dress. His vision seemed to narrow, and the walls felt as though they were slowly beginning to press inward, closing in on him. He knew the warning signs of a panic attack, but fought the sensation by swinging his arms vigorously, concentrating on taking deep breaths.
He passed the familiar place where there was a water stain on the ceiling in the shape of Florida, and the janitor’s closet two doors away. He headed for the big lecture hall at the end of the corridor, which was where he would probably be giving his talk. He thought he detected a faint, lingering aroma of clove cigarettes in the air.
He reached the lecture hall, but the door was closed and locked. He tried to peer in through the gray smoked-glass partition on the door, with no success—he could see nothing except the sheen of sunlight coming through the row of tall windows on the far wall. The interior of the room was foggy and indistinct. The numbers 303 were stenciled on the top of the glass in an old-fashioned, gold-colored typeface.
He thought he heard footsteps behind him and spun around, his heart pounding, but the hall was empty. He felt all of his senses were magnified, more acute, but especially his hearing. It was as though he had the ears of a bat, and every little sound gave him a start. He leaned against the wall and put his hand to his left side, throbbing and pulsing with each beat of his heart. Steady on, Campbell.
There, on the opposite wall, was a student bulletin board, and clinging to it was a tattered scrap of paper with the remnants of a photograph of a smiling young woman wearing a lopsided graduation cap. Underneath the picture he could still make out the words, Please Help. He recognized it at once as a picture of one of the thousands still missing from the attack on the World Trade Center—no doubt buried under the mounds of rubble still piled high in Lower Manhattan. In the months following the tragedy, these pictures were everywhere—plastered on bus stops, park benches, trees, fences—hundreds of them, perhaps thousands, and the message was always the same: Missing—Please Help. And there was always a phone number to call. The smiling faces in the photographs were a terrible irony, as if mocking the reality of their fate—the people were never found, the phone numbers never called.
The girl in this photo was about the same age his sister had been when she disappeared.
The irony was suffocating. He tried to intellectualize it: Here he was, in the halls of the largest school for criminal justice in the greatest city in the world, yet he was as helpless to find his sister as the family of the lost girl was to ever find her again.
He turned to go but was overcome with nausea and had to lean back against the wall again. Saliva spurted into his mouth. His stomach rolled and churned, but he fought it. “Damn,” he muttered, “I’ll be damned if I’m going to be sick. “ Even as he said the words, he was aware they were somewhat ridiculous, but he fought the nausea anyway, and after a couple of minutes he felt a little better. He took a few steps but was still shaking. and then realized what he really wanted, more than anything, was to scream until he was hoarse. That was impossible, as there were other people in the building.
Suddenly he wheeled around, his body filled with an intense, gathering rage. Hardly knowing what he was doing, he lunged back toward the door and swung at the glass partition with all his might, hitting it almost directly in the center with his right fist. The glass shuddered and held for a fraction of a second, then cracked and shattered, crashing to the floor in a waterfall of broken shards.
Lee stared at the broken pieces of glass at his feet, then at his hand, which was bleeding. He felt no pain yet—that would come later. His body was too full of adrenaline to register anything. It did occur to him with some irritation that it would be a while before he could play the piano again—some of the cuts were pretty deep. He watched