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and shuddered. She broke free and went to the casket where she stood, hands at her hips, staring at the body. Not ten feet away, Mary Shuster studied the new arrival. She had seen the greeting she received from the Nevilles—who hadn’t? Someone approached the Nevilles and then the word went around.
    â€œShe’s Fred’s fiancée. Naomi McTear.”

Part Two
Portrait of a Lady

1
    THE BELLS OF SACRED HEART basilica tolled mournfully on the Friday, prelude to the funeral Mass for Fred Neville. Snow had begun to fall during the night, falling on the living and the dead, and students tramping through it to dining hall or early class heard without hearing the tolling bells. Few of them would have heard of Fred Neville, let alone his death. A decade ago he had been one of them, indifferent to the liturgies that went on in the campus church, weddings, funerals, baptisms. The hall chapels were the site of such devotions as students engage in. Sacred Heart was for special occasions. Students could be pardoned if they did not regard Fred Neville’s funeral as a special occasion.
    There are four seasons at Notre Dame, of course, but students know only three of them and fall and winter are the only ones whose beginning and end they observe on campus. Despite the excitement of football in the fall, winter is the season most will remember in future years, the campus walks winding between piles of shoveled snow, the leafless trees exposed in their spectral beauty, mere sketches of what they have been and will be again. In winter the world awaits its resurrection, spring is the Easter season when ducks and geese and swans move about on the melted lakes, and for seniors commencement looms. It is an academic conceit that the end of their time at Notre Dame should be called a beginning, but so in a way it is, for then they will join the great silent majority, the quick and the dead, that have walked this campus and, however little remembered, take indelible memories of it with them when they go. So it had been with Fred Neville with the difference that he had returned to find himself an almost-stranger in a place that had marked him for life. And now he was definitively gone.
    Last night, when he had returned to the funeral home a second time and witnessed the arrival of Naomi McTear, Roger had received disturbing news. A hand was laid on his arm and he turned to face Lieut. Jimmy Stewart of the South Bend police.
    â€œIs your brother with you?”
    â€œHe will be picking me up.”
    â€œGood. Let’s go in here.”
    Jimmy Stewart led Roger down the hall to an empty room much like the one in which the body of Fred Neville lay.
    â€œWe may have a problem, Roger.”
    â€œHence your presence?”
    He nodded. “Apparently it wasn’t an accidental death.”
    There had been an autopsy, just routine because Fred had been dead some days before his body was discovered and, while the usual tests were being run, the body had been turned over to the undertaker.
    â€œNo problem there, though we may postpone burial.”
    â€œYou don’t mean the funeral won’t take place.”
    â€œThat can go on. Why not? But the body will be brought downtown to the morgue.”
    â€œGood Lord. His parents have come, all kinds of people will expect to accompany the body to Cedar Grove Cemetery.”
    This cemetery was on campus, on Notre Dame Avenue just south of the bookstore, not to be confused with the community cemetery where members of the Congregation of Holy Cross were laid to rest in their own private Arlington under identical crosses, row on row. That was located off the road that led from the Grotto to St. Mary’s College across the highway.
    Phil came half an hour later, having got Marjorie safely to her door and through it.
    â€œShe chattered all the way home,” Phil said. And then he noticed Jimmy Stewart. “What’s up?”
    Jimmy Stewart took Phil away and put