Aside from the resigned, almost imperceptible slumping of three sets of shoulders, there was no feedback.

It hadn’t been one of her better faculty meetings, Callie thought with irritation as the door closed behind them. She hadn’t elicited enough response, as exasperating as that invariably turned out to be. She hadn’t made them feel that the training was their idea. Well, what could she expect? The letter from Miranda had arrived only an hour earlier, and of course it had upset her. She was a high-strung person; she’d never claimed she wasn’t.

Harlow must have received his copy in the morning’s mail too; that would be more than enough to account for his having looked even more gray-faced and dyspeptic than usual.

She pulled it out of the desk tray and scanned it again. Whitebark Lodge. What a host of wretched memories that name stirred up.

Not that it had started badly, of course. It had been Nellie Hobert’s idea in the first place, as she recalled: an informal conference-cum-retirement-party-in-the-woods for Albert Evan Jasper, put on by the celebrated anthropologist’s grateful and adoring former students. Never mind that Callie had felt neither grateful nor adoring toward the chauvinistic old bully; never mind that she had left him after two maddening years to come and study with the less demanding Harlow Pollard, himself a browbeaten former student of Jasper’s. The facts were that she had learned a lot from Jasper, that she’d been flattered to be invited to the meeting, and that some sort of send-off seemed his due.

Well, the old man had gotten a send-off, all right. Straight out of this life. She couldn’t claim to be sorry about that even now, but it had been a miserable experience for her all the same. For a long time she had dragged around a burden of guilt, as if it had been her fault, her personal doing, that had driven him to his death.