Her inventory of excuses was depleted. Sarah opened the car door but remained sitting.

"Give me a kiss."

She leaned over and kissed her father quickly on his cheek then climbed out of the car, standing in the cool spring air heavily scented with bus exhaust. She took three steps toward the building, watching the car pull out of the driveway. She thought suddenly about the Garfield toy stuck to the back window of the family station wagon. Sarah remembered when she'd placed it there, licking the cups before squeezing them against the glass. For some reason this memory made her want to cry.

Maybe he would catch a glimpse of her in the mirror, change his mind and return.

The car vanished behind a hill.

Sarah turned and entered the building. Clutching her lunch box to her chest she shuffled through the corridors. Although she was as tall as any of the children swarming around her she felt younger than them all.

Tinier. Weaker.

At the fourth-grade classroom she stopped. Sarah looked inside. Her nostrils flared and she felt her skin prickle with a rash of fear. She hesitated only for a moment then turned and walked resolutely from the building, buffeted and jostled as she forced her way through the oncoming stream of shouting, calling, laughing children.

Not thirty feet from where they had found the body last night, he saw the note.

The piece of paper, pierced by a wild rose stem the shade of dried blood, fluttered in the moist wind, sending out a Morse code in the low morning sunlight.

Bill Corde pressed toward the paper through a tangle of juniper and maple saplings and stubborn runners of forsythia.

Had they missed it? How could they?

He barked his shin on a hidden stump and swore softly but continued toward the scrap.

Corde was six foot two and his short hair was Persian-cat gray, which because he was just about to turn forty made him maybe seven-eighths premature.