“Are you sure you want to go back to work?”

His shoulders sagged. “I’d like to go to the hospital to see Olivia.”

A Blocken lynching played out in my mind. “I don’t think that’s a great idea.”

A silver luxury car pulled up to the fountain. The driver, a solid man with silver hair leaped out of the car before it was fully settled into park. The man was Sam Lepcheck, college provost and spin-doctor extraordinaire, and his presence was never a good sign.

Lepcheck approached Mains and conversed for a few minutes, then nodded and scratched his chin. I could hear the bad press headlines careening through his mind. “Stripling native tumbles into Martin’s hideous fountain,” and the like. Lepcheck sucked in a big gust of air—Mains must have told him that the victim was Regina Blocken’s daughter. So much for the amicable town and gown relationship that Lepcheck tried so desperately to foster. Mark’s name floated across the pavement to us.

I grabbed my brother’s arm. “It’s time to go.”

I dragged Mark across campus toward the library and my car before Lepcheck decided to make my brother the fall guy. Mark already ranked on Lepcheck’s hit list because he hadn’t completed his Ph.D. Martin prided itself on having roughly ninety percent of its teaching faculty toting doctorates, and although Mark planned to reach this accolade sometime before his seventieth birthday, his pace was a bit slow for Lepcheck. Fortunately for Mark, and, I supposed, unfortunately for Lepcheck, Martin had a notoriously poor math department, and staffing was always a challenge. So the college had hired Mark on the basis of his master’s degree and his alumnus pledge that he would complete the higher doctorate.

Halfway to the library, Mark froze. “Theodore! I left him in my car.”