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speaking.”
    “Earl! It’s Ronda. Did you read in the
Herald
that they found the body of that medical student you and my sister used to hang out with at NYCU, the one who disappeared?”
    New York City University had been where he attended medical school.
    He hesitated. “Yeah. I saw that this morning. A real shock.”
    “Must be. From what Melanie has told me about those times, I know the three of you were good friends.”
    “That we were.”
    “Better you be forewarned. The police will probably want to talk to everyone who knew her.”
    Exactly what he’d already figured, but hearing someone else say it made the squeeze he’d been feeling in his stomach cinch tighter. “Probably. I appreciate the heads-up. Did you reach Melanie?”
    “I tried to call, but the hospital couldn’t track her down. I left a message with her answering service. I’m going to be in Peds all day, so she’ll be able to reach me.”
    “Well, thanks, Ronda.”
    The call gave him a new worry. Not about Ronda. They’d been friends for years, ever since Melanie told him to look up her kid sister when he moved to Buffalo to join the staff at St. Paul’s. At the time Ronda had been starting her own specialty training in pediatrics. Now, twenty-four years later, she was married, had two kids, and was a veteran in her field. He and Janet had often enjoyed the company of Ronda and her husband during hospital functions. At the St. Paul’s annual picnic, her kids played with Brendan.
    No, the problem lay in who else Melanie Collins might have gossiped to about Kelly McShane and him being such “good friends.” After all the new headlines, someone in their class, however oblivious of him and Kelly in 1978, might suddenly suspect the truth if unintentionally prompted by Melanie now. The police would be investigating murder this time, not a disappearance, and that was likely to make everyone they talked to turn amateur detective.
    “Dr. Garnet, there’s another call for you on line three. It’s the police.”
    “What?” His voice sounded overly loud.
    The clerk frowned at him. “They found the body of a teenage boy in a crack house on the east side. It’s a DOA, but they want to know if we can make it official and do the paperwork. It’s our district.”
    He felt the band around his stomach release a few notches. “Better we don’t do a slough,” he said. “I’ll handle it myself.”
    Getting lost in an hour’s worth of forms and someone else’s heartbreak was just the diversion he needed.
    “But I could tell them to bother another hospital-”
    “I said I’d do it!”
    The young woman’s jaw dropped.
    Immediately he regretted having snapped at her. “Sorry,” he muttered, retreating into the hallway.
    Keep hold of yourself, Garnet.
Or when the police did come for him, his entire staff would say, “Well, he has been acting on edge lately.”

Chapter 3
    That same day, Tuesday, November 6, 1:00 P.M.
    Hampton Junction
     
    R unning was a drug to Mark.
    Miss a day, he felt lousy.
    Two, downright depressed.
    Three, and he was convinced he had cancer.
    He always followed the same route, turning left onto the road at the foot of his driveway, following it downhill a few miles toward town to loosen up, then going west on Route 4, a winding uphill grind that led farther into the mountains. How far he took it depended on the time he had and the caliber of tension he was trying to work off. Practicing medicine in a small town had different pressures than those of urban centers, but they were every bit as weighty.
    This afternoon a heavy fog had settled into the valley. The tiny droplets it left on his face as he ran felt pleasantly cool, but it rendered the road, the forest, and anything else more than thirty feet away invisible, isolating him in a gray sphere of vague shapes. Yet as he passed through a corridor of towering maples and white birches, their foliage formed a canopy of iridescent orange and gold that floated above him