When The Bough Breaks

I took a 9 p.m. flight out of LAX and landed at Sea - Tac Airport at 11:25. I picked up a rented Nova at a Hertz desk. It was no Seville but it did have an EM. radio that someone had left on a classical station. A Bach organ fugue in a minor key unraveled out of the dash speaker and I didn't cut it off: the music matched my mood. I confirmed my reservation at the Westin, drove away from the airport, connected to the Interstate highway and headed north toward downtown Seattle.

The sky was as cold and hard as a handgun. Minutes after I hit the blacktop the gun proved to be loaded: it fired a blast of thunder and the water started coming down. Soon it was one of those angry Northwest torrents that transforms a highway into miles of drive - thru car wash.

"Welcome to the Pacific Northwest," I said out loud.

Pine, spruce and fir grew in opaque stands on both sides of the road. Starlit billboards advertised rustic motels and diners offering logger's breakfasts. Except for semis groaning under loads of timber I was the road's sole traveler. I thought to myself how nice it would be to be heading for a mountain cabin, Robin at my side, with a trunk load of fishing gear and provisions. I felt a sudden pang of loneliness and longed for human contact.

I reached downtown shortly after midnight. The Westin rose like a giant steel - and - glass test tube amid the darkened laboratory of the city. My seventh - floor room was decent, with a view of Puget Sound and the harbor to the west, Lake Washington and the islands to the east. I kicked off my shoes and stretched out on the bed, tired, but too jumpy for sleep.

I caught the sign - off edition of the news on a local station. The anchor man was wooden - jawed and shifty - eyed, and reported the day's events impersonally. He lent identical emphasis to an account of mass murder in Ohio and the hockey scores. I cut him off in mid - sentence, turned off the lights, stripped down in darkness and stared at the harbor lights until I fell asleep.

21

A thousand yards of rain forest shielded the Jedson campus from the coastal road. The forest yielded to twin stone columns engraved with Roman numerals that marked the origin of a cobbled drive running through the center of the college. The drive terminated in a circular turn - around punctuated by a pockmarked sundial under a towering pine.

At fist glance, Jedson resembled one of those small colleges back East that specialize in looking like dwarf Harvards. The buildings were fashioned of weathered brick and embellished with stone and marble cornices, slate and copper roofing - designed in an era when labor was cheap and intricate moldings, expansive arches, gargoyles and goddesses the order of the day. Even the ivy looked authentic, tumbling from slate peaks, sucking the brick, trimmed topiary - fashion to bypass recessed, leaded windows.

The campus was small, perhaps half a square mile, and filled with tree - shaded knolls, imposing stands of oak, pine, willow, elm and paper birch, and clearings inlaid with marble and bordered by stone benches and bronze monuments. All very traditional until you looked to the west and saw manicured lawns dipping down to the dock and the private harbor beyond. The slips were occupied by streamlined, teak - decked cruisers, fifty - foot craft and larger, topped with sonar and radar screens and clutches of antennae: clearly twentieth - century, obviously West Coast.

The rain had lifted and a triangle of light peeked out from under the charcoal folds of the sky. A few knots out of the harbor an armada of sailboats sliced through water that looked like tin foil. The boats were rehearsing some type of ceremony, for they each rounded the same buoy marker and unfurled outrageously colored spinnakers - oranges, purples, scar lets and greens, like the tail feathers of a covey of tropical birds.

There was a lucite - encased map on a stand and I consulted it to locate Crespi Hall. The students passing by seemed a quiet lot. For the most part they were apple - cheeked and flaxen - haired, their eye color traversing the spectrum from light blue to dark blue. Their hairstyles were expensively executed but seemed to date from the Eisenhower age. Trousers were cuffed, pennies shined prettily from the tops of loafers and there were enough alligators on shirts to choke the Everglades. A eugenicist would have been proud to observe the straight backs, robust physiques and stiff - lipped self - assurance of those to the manor born. I felt as if I'd died and gone to Aryan Heaven.

Crespi was a three - story rhomboid fronted by Ionic columns of varicose - veined white marble. The public relations office was hidden behind a mahogany door labeled in gold stencil. When I opened it, the door creaked.