An Imperfect Spy by Amanda Cross Page A

work, poor dears, tend to chatter when left unattended, and the faculty men who drift in tend to become first bantering and flirtatious, and then peeved.”
    “Did Nellie have an office?” Kate asked.
    “She did. I know that because I was asked, as an extension of my duties, to arrange for her personal belongings to be cleaned out of it.”
    “And what happened to what they cleaned out?”
    “It’s in the basement, in a box, waiting to be called for. So far, no one has. Her family scarcely wanted her leavings from this beastly place. Are you contemplating a snoop among them?”
    “Yes.”
    “Good girl. I’m glad to see you’re beginning to take an interest.”
    “I hope I’ll be able to justify this sort of snooping; but she is dead, and one would rather like to know why. Not that I don’t feel a certain moral pang, but in this place, I can subdue it rather easily. After all, it’s no one’s business but Nellie’s, and I can’t believe she would mind.”
    “In the very first book he wrote about Smiley, le Carré says: ‘It was a peculiarity of Smiley’s character that through the whole of his clandestine work he had never managed to reconcile the means to the end.’ I think if you have the same peculiarity, you should cherish it. I’ll show you where her stuff is in the basement. But do try not to get locked in there, or even discovered in there, willyou, Kate? We don’t want to worry the old boys unnecessarily.”
    Harriet led Kate to the basement, an area with which she had, through her weekly seminar, become somewhat familiar. Harriet, who appeared, like a medieval chatelaine, to have all the household keys dangling from her belt, opened a small storage room, waved a welcoming hand, and pulled the string to turn on the light. “All yours,” she said. “Good luck. Just bang the door shut when you leave.”
    Kate settled down to her task; she pulled out a box and sat on it while examining the other boxes by the light of the single bulb dangling from the ceiling. Almost all the boxes contained books, and files removed from their file drawers—doubtless the file cabinet itself was passed on to someone else. Kate hoped, shamelessly, that among the law books would be a novel that Nellie had marked with pinpricks to indicate a code contrived to reveal the nefarious secrets she had uncovered about Schuyler. There was no novel. The files all contained class schedules, student papers, student records—at least up to the last year of her life. The most recent ones had been removed so that her orphaned students might be granted a grade, or so Kate surmised. Kate reproved herself for her idiotic expectations. Nellie had not known she would die; she had not left clues to her murderer, if any. If she had learned anything untoward about the school, she had not recorded it, or if she had recorded it, someone had seen to its removal.
    Kate moved off her box and, sitting back on her heels, turned over its contents. More papers relating to law—Nellie had taught Contracts—and a few letters addressed to her. This box, then, held the contents of Nellie’s desk. The letters were all academic, the sort Kate regularly received at her university, different content, same themes. Nellie had had a desk set, and it was here: a blotter, left over from the days when people actually wrote with fountain pens, a leather letter holder that matched, and a picture frame. The picture was of Nellie—Kate had seen her picture in an old catalog of Schuyler Law—and a man, standing with his arm around her shoulder, both of them laughing. Carefully, Kate removed the picture from the frame, but there was nothing written on the back; carefully, she reinserted it in the frame. Kate would have to find out who he was.
    But she had no hope that anything would come of this information. You’re off on a wild-goose chase, she told herself; pondering a mare’s nest, grasping at straws. Nellie may have known New York, Kate and many others