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people on the stairs in silence, and never seemed to entertain visitors. The details furnished by the rental agency were scant: she had said she was a secretary, gave two written references and a driver’s license in verification, and presented so favorably in an anonymous kind of way that the agency never bothered checking. Most three-family houses saw the landlord living on the premises, but Carew was a student-resident district, so Tennant’s landlord owned fifteen three-family houses, and used his realty business as a rental agency. When July’s rent came due on the first of the month, Miss Tennant didn’t pay it, and ignored the agency’s reminders. This led to the discovery that Miss Tennant had no telephone—amazing! Several personal visits to her home by the clerk delegated to handle the affair never found Miss Tennant there, and thus matters stood when August arrived. She was now well and truly in arrears, and no one could remember seeing her since June.
    The delinquency now attained a certain urgency, for early September saw the new academic year’s influx of students pour into rental agencies looking for furnished accommodations: Miss Tennant had to go, and go fast. In mid-August the realtor went to the Holloman PD and requested that he be accompanied to Miss Tennant’s apartment by a police officer, as enquiries suggested she hadn’t been seen since June, and her rent was overdue.
    Missing Persons leaped to the same conclusion the Realtor had, that Miss Margot Tennant would be found inside her apartment, very dead: but such was not the case. A faint and noisome smell proved to emanate from the refrigerator, where two-month-old fish and meat were in a slow decay. Miss Tennant’s few possessions were removed from the premises and stored until garnishment proceedings saw them auctioned to pay rent and damages, the latter to the refrigerator. Said possessions were meager: a cheap radio, a black-and-white TV, a few clothes and a cigar box of imitation jewelry—no books, magazines, letters or other private papers. Thanks to the refrigerator, they didn’t fetch enough to pay what the missing Mary Tennant owed.
    Each year since had seen the same pattern. Locations were scattered all over Holloman County, but the renting was always at New Year or scant days after, and June the last rent paid by the missing woman before the six-to-eight-week period leading to a report with Missing Persons. The few things in common lent the task of finding the missing women a nightmare quality because the differences only pointed up the similarities.
    Missing Persons had handed the Shadow Women to Detectives and Carmine Delmonico when the third woman vanished from her studio flat on the twelfth floor of the Nutmeg Insurance building; now the total had escalated to six. “Ghost” was the sobriquet of a famous case, therefore couldn’t be applied to the missing women, but Delia had suggested “Shadow” as apt, and the Shadow Women they became.
    Something was going on, but what on earth could it be? The Commissioner, John Silvestri, found the case fascinating and kept tabs on it through his regular breakfast meetings with his detectives; since she was his blood niece, Delia yearned to be able to produce something brand-new to offer him, but thus far the pickings were nonexistent.
    One promising hypothesis had been promulgated by Silvestri’s wife, Gloria, who was the best-dressed woman in Connecticut. She decided that each woman was having cosmetic plastic surgery, and that in her own identity she was too well known not to be hounded and embarrassed if news of the surgery leaked. So she became a Shadow Woman for six months.
    “As you well know, John,” said Gloria, stroking her smooth, unscragged throat, “any woman in that predicament would die sooner than confess, even if the price is a murder hunt.”
    “Yes, dear,” said the Commissioner, dark eyes twinkling.
    “The cops never find any clothes worth wearing, do