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bags are all just . . .” The man gestured vaguely toward the inside of the house.
    â€œIt was a fellowship year he was doing, is that right? Do you know what he was studying?”
    â€œEconomics, I think. Or history. To tell you the truth, I don’t think Thom was doing all that much studying this past year.” The man smiled sadly. “He’d met a girl. English. She was going to come over this summer. To meet everybody. He told Anna all about her.”
    I noted the name. Anna. That must be Mrs. Carlyle.
    â€œThom and Anna are—were—they’re very close. He called her, you know. On the way from the airport, when he landed. To tell her he was home safe. And that was yesterday and then a few hours later she gets acall that he—that it—about what happened.” The man paused, cleared his throat, and turned to go back inside.
    â€œThank you. I’m so very sorry.” I heard the bolt slide into place. I started back down the driveway.
    I knew I should head back to the newsroom. Start writing up what I had so far. It was late afternoon and Hyde Rawlins would be stalking the cubicles, chasing down what was on offer for tomorrow’s front page.
    But right now what I had was pretty thin. I didn’t have a sense of what kind of guy Thom Carlyle had been. I didn’t know why he’d fallen from the top of Eliot House. I wanted to be able to picture it, to see what he had seen in the moments before he fell.
    And so I went back.
    THIS TIME NO GUARD WAS posted outside. The television trucks were gone too. Students were coming and going from the main doors, and I walked right in. The cops must have figured they’d collected whatever evidence they could find, and now dorm life was getting back to normal.
    I checked the courtyard first. By this point I knew where I was going. The dark stain had been scrubbed away, but the ring of police tape was still there. People had left bouquets of flowers. I turned toward H-Entry.
    Here the police tape was gone. I walked up a flight. Another one. No one stopped me. I could hear music from behind one of the doors. Students were home. There was no sign of cops. I kept climbing, but on the fifth floor I hit a dead end. At the end of the corridor was a door marked LEONARD BERNSTEIN ’39, MUSIC ROOM AND TOWER . It was sealed with the POLICE—DO NOT CROSS tape. I jiggled the knob. Locked tight.
    I slumped down against the wall and tried to imagine what had happened here last night. There were three possible explanations. The most likely, surely, was suicide. Thom might have climbed up the bell tower to throw himself from the top. Maybe the tower had some symbolic significancefrom his undergraduate days here. Or maybe it was just a really tall tower—tall enough to guarantee you wouldn’t survive a fall—for which he happened to have the key. The major problem with this theory was that so far I’d found no reason to believe he’d been depressed. I’d had the Chronicle reference librarians scour his record, his Facebook page, old Crimson cuttings. They’d found no trace of trouble, no hint of anything other than a nice kid with good grades and a lot of rowing trophies. You never know what’s going on in someone’s head. But from a practical standpoint, why would someone bent on killing himself have taken the time to wipe the railings free of fingerprints?
    So maybe it was an accident. He might have been drunk. Leaned out too far, slipped. The autopsy would presumably turn up whatever drugs or alcohol were in his system. Galloni did say they found beer bottles up here. But he’d said a couple of bottles. I found it hard to believe a twenty-three-year-old athlete could have gotten drunk enough off two beers to fall off a roof. And there was still the issue with the fingerprints.
    Which left the most sinister possibility. What if someone else was up here last night? Carlyle had been a big