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opened my notebook and concentrated on my chicken-scratch shorthand. Chaney’s lover, Chaney’s student, Denali Brinkman, was the blackmail trigger and the obvious place to start. At first, my client, an affronted gentleman had been reluctant to speak about her, certain she would never have betrayed the secret of their affair. A curiously naïve man, my client. When I pointed out that it was a simple matter of whether he’d talked or she’d talked, he’d admitted the truth of my deduction. Then once he started talking about Denali, he’d had a hard time stopping. The details poured out while I tried to pry facts out of his rose-tinted reminiscences.
    She had been a freshman in his Introductory Educational Psychology class. It was surprising that he’d gotten to know her at all, because he paid little attention to the freshman classes, the huge beginning-level crushes taught, as a rule, by graduate assistants. But he tried to give some attention to the entry-level classes.
    I didn’t like her being a freshman. Her age bothered me, made me wonder where I’d draw the line. If Chaney had been a teacher at the local high school where my little sister attends classes, would I have agreed to work for him? Kids who still live with their parents — is that the line? When does innocence end and experience raise its head?
    In his version, the nineteen-year-old had come on to him. But did it matter? I reminded myself that it was his version. The woman in question wasn’t around to tell her side of the tale, and few are the Harvard profs dumb enough to claim they made a play for a student.
    She had been intrigued by one of his lectures and asked if she could set up an appointment to discuss it. Maybe if she’d been less attractive, he might have told her to submit her comments and questions in writing.
    He hadn’t wanted to come up with a physical description, and he maintained that he had no photos of the young woman. When pressed, he said she was blond, average height, average weight. Maybe a little on the thin side, but he admitted her figure was good. He sounded uncomfortable, regretful, and sad.
    She was unusual, he insisted, gifted. Unusually bright, unusually warm, extremely outgoing with him, but terribly reserved in class. She wasn’t like any other student or any other woman he’d ever known. She was a secret delight, and their relationship had grown intimate more quickly than he’d dared imagine possible. He resented my questions, and kept talking to avoid them. He
wanted
to talk about her; he just didn’t want to answer my intrusive and awkward questions — like whether she was a virgin (no), or if he had ever altered any of her class grades (certainly not — what did I think he was?), or exactly how she had died (he knew no details, didn’t want to know any). She rarely spoke about herself, but he’d gotten the impression of an unconventional upbringing, possibly from the flower-child quality of her first name. He didn’t think she’d been born in Alaska, home of Mount Denali, but knew she’d traveled a lot as a child — Europe, South America, and Asia. She was brilliant and an orphan and part American Indian, though she didn’t look it.
    Girl sounded like some fairy-tale princess to me. Too good to be true. Typical Harvard material, no doubt.
    “Tell me about her friends,” I’d said.
    As far as he was concerned, she’d had no contact with anyone but him. She barely spoke to other students in class. She arrived and departed alone. They had never gone to a party, never socialized with another couple.
    “She held herself aloof?”
    “You make her sound snotty. She wasn’t like that. She was
different
. She was most comfortable on the river.”
    “The river?”
    “She was a rower. I didn’t know the river at all. She showed me things about the river I would never have seen without her.”
    “It’s not exactly private, the river.” His admission of Charles River field trips seemed to nullify