Deputy Lonnie Pratt arrived at seven-forty with a powdered sugar donut in a napkin and the air of a man who had been promised a day off.

He stood in the doorway of Room 31 and looked at the cut chain hanging from its slot, and then at the bed, and then at Nell. "So he left," he said.

"The chain was on from the inside."

"So you say."

"So Gus says too. He cut it."

Lonnie looked at Gus, who was leaning on the door frame with his bolt cutters like a man at a parade. Gus nodded once. Lonnie sighed through his nose.

"I saw a thing on TV," he said, "where a fella hooks the chain on his way out with a piece of string. Pulls it through the gap, lets it drop."

"Not on this door," Gus said. "I hung that chain myself in 'seventy-two. Door shuts tight as a bank. You couldn't get a hair through that gap, let alone a string and a man's fingers."

Lonnie tried the window, the way Gus had, and got the same result. He looked under the bed. He opened the closet, which held six wooden hangers and a spare blanket that smelled of mothballs, and he knocked on the back wall of it in a way that made Nell think he had seen that on TV too. It sounded like a wall.

"Well," he said at last, dusting sugar off his uniform, "he's a grown man. Grown men are allowed to leave hotels. Unless somebody's filing a missing persons, and nobody here even knows who he is."

"His car's still in the lot," Nell said.

That got him, a little. They went down together and stood around the green Buick in the drizzle. It was locked. Through the window Nell could see a road map of Wisconsin folded open on the passenger seat, a thermos, and a single white carnation lying on the dashboard, the kind you'd pin on a lapel. Lonnie walked around to the back, wrote the plate number in his notebook, and went to his cruiser to call it in.

He came back looking less sleepy.

"Registered to a Robert Castellan," he said. "Seventy-one years old. Milwaukee."

"Castle," Nell said. "Castellan."

"People shorten their names all the time." But he wrote it down, and he underlined it. "I'll have somebody down there knock on his door. Maybe he took a cab home. Maybe he's sitting in his kitchen right now wondering where he left his car."

Nobody believed that, including Lonnie.

*

Vera Aldrich lived in three rooms behind the kitchen that had once been the housekeeper's quarters. At eight in the morning she was always at the same small table by the window, in a gray cardigan, doing the Sunday crossword in fountain pen. Nell had never once seen her cross anything out.

"Nell," she said, without looking up. "You're still here. You should have been in bed an hour ago."

Nell told her. The late arrival, the cash, the chain, the empty room. Mrs. Aldrich listened with her pen resting on the paper, and she did not interrupt, and she did not look up, not even at the part about the deputy.

Then Nell said, "He signed the register as R. Castle. The deputy says the car belongs to a Robert Castellan."

The pen didn't move. But a small dark spot of ink began to spread from its point into the newspaper, slowly, a letter becoming a blot.

"What did he look like?" Mrs. Aldrich said.

"About seventy. Tall. Gray hair, combed straight back. He had a tan raincoat."

"A raincoat." She said it the way you'd repeat a word in a language you used to speak. Then she lifted the pen, looked at the blot, and folded the newspaper in half so she wouldn't have to see it. "Did he leave anything?"

Nell thought of the postcard. It was in the pocket of her cardigan. She could feel its corner against her hip.

"The deputy took everything," she heard herself say.

Mrs. Aldrich looked at her then, for the first time, a long, pale, level look. Nell had worked three summers at the Aldrich House. She had never lied to Vera Aldrich before, not even about pie.

"Then that's that," Mrs. Aldrich said. "Go to bed, Nell. And don't make this into one of your paperbacks. Whoever he was, he's not the hotel's business anymore."

Nell went. But she didn't go to bed. She sat on the back steps by the kitchen door in the thin morning sun and took the postcard out of her pocket and looked at the writing on the back. The room is just as you left it. The careful capital T. The little loop on the y, like a fishhook.

She had seen that fishhook before. She had seen it about four minutes ago, upside down, in the margin of the Sunday crossword, in fountain pen.

END OF CHAPTER TWO