By Monday morning Set had left the weekend behind. That's what teaching did to you, she thought. Bombs could explode over the weekend, but you had to be presentable, cheery, and inspirational when you faced a wall of faces, usually silent and blank, first period on Monday.
     She heard herself talking. "Jill, would you read the first two verses of Keats's poem." She heard herself, saw herself, as if she were a separate person; in charge, solid, informed, enthusiastic. A general low groan issued up from the back of the room. You little lazy geeks, she thought. What do you think it takes for me to look enthused for you? Do you think I'm a different kind of species, a teacher species, with genes that automatically create in me the desire to learn "Ode to a Nightingale," design paper work for you, and then stand happily before you, urging you to read the poem. To simply read it, let alone love it and study it?
     "I know you're tired and Keats's Ode is not exactly what you were looking forward to this morning. But trust me, it has so much beauty, and Keats was such a pathetic and talented creature," she said. "He died young and was so in love with a sixteen year old when he wrote this poem." She usually launched into biographical, titillating material when interest waned. Keats's abbreviated love life and wretched death were juicy morsels for this Monday morning.
     Kirt Smith and Seth Lapp swung up vague eyes from closed books. Only several students had bothered to open to the correct page. Jill Anderson was a sure shot for at least reading the poem. She sat upright against the back of her seat, ready to intone the lines, if not inspirationally, then clearly. She was a good reader.
     "Just read the first few lines, Jill."
     "My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains my sense," the girl wheeled on gracefully between line breaks. "As though of hemlock I had drunk or emptied some dull opiate to the drains one minute past . . ."
     "Stop there, Jill." Set could not let it go. Heads rolled sluggishly forward on chests, downward. Kirt sprawled backwards, his head lolling from side to side, his hand pushing his head abruptly until it sounded a disgusting, and athletic crack in the silence of the classroom. Set had long ago stopped trying to point out the personal and chiropractic nature of these head pops. Now she simply stared in disbelief when the male basketball and footballs players continued to groom their skeletons during poetry readings. She stared now. "Do you know what Keats is saying?" Silence. A smile from Jill. "Well, do you know what an opiate is?" Seth, who had a quick mind, not disciplined, but street-wise--if one could use that term reasonably in East Worthy, where the streets were village pathways--sat slightly forward and raised his hand limply. "Seth, do you know?"
     "Somethin' to do with gettin' down? You know, on stuff?" He cast a sideways, knowing look to Kirt who grinned.
     "Explain how you know that, Seth."
     "Well, opiate or whatever the dude said, sounds kinda like opium, or somethin'."
     "Very good, Seth," Set responded, while she recoiled internally from "dude" as an epithet for the precious Keats. "That's what Keats was asking for, opium or a drug, or anything to release him from his great pain, for he knew he was dying."
     "Miss Hunt, I think we oughta talk about what happened, don't you? I heard you were there. We can't really think about this stuff when things are so messed up." Seth's tone bordered on self-righteous.
     Set was familiar with this psychological cleansing for which high school students frequently asked. During her fifteen years of teaching, she had been witness to auto accidents, accidental shootings, and run-a-ways--events which teenagers, who had sat in the long years of her classrooms, silently contemplated. The morning after, although some students just liked to cash in on free time, most students, she believed, had a raging need to talk about tragedy. She had hoped for Keats, but she was going to get the Reverend Sowders. Lori's seat, empty like a missing tooth in a mouth, was oddly illuminated in the cold morning light.
     Set looked up. A wall of faces, strained and alert, followed her with quiet anticipation. Change strides, she thought, teacher to counselor. "I know this has been a tragic weekend, and poor Lori must be suffering horribly. Does anyone know how she's doing?"
     "Miss Hunt, I was with her last night. Me and Dawn went over but it didn't do any good," a nasal voice spoke from the back of the room. Susie Baxter had moved into her best persona, the deeply-involved companion of emotional situations.
     "You mean she can't be comforted, Susie?"
     "Nah, I mean she's weird. She won't talk, will she, Dawn?" She looked toward an overweight girl with drooping hair, sitting in the adjoining row. "Brian saw her Saturday night, didn't ja, Brian? Tell her, man."
     A slender boy with long hair and jean jacket spoke without moving his position in his desk. "Yea, but it's her own business. I mean, what's she suppose to do when her dad kicks off? Recite poetry?" Set had felt antagonism from this ruffian before, but she was determined to remain upbeat, pleasantly, solidly concerned.
     "No, Brian, not poetry, but it would be well if she could express her grief, don't you think?"
     A muffled snort, accompanied by a thin-lipped mocking smile, was the response from Brian Saddler.
     "I know tomorrow those of you with notes from home will be released early to attend the funeral. And I realize that everything we're doing here, going on with the work, seems irrelevant, but, really, this is the best thing for us, to be together, and to try to push on." Keats was virtually over for the day. "How many will be attending the funeral?" Several students lifted hands when a girl in the back left-hand corner of the room wrenched up from her seat, rushed toward Set, and turned suddenly. The flailing girl flung open the heavy door, and ran down the hall. Agitated but ready, Set watched her the length of the corridor, finally dissapearing around the corner where the last composite class photograph hung, tilting on its wire. Set imagined the five starchy seniors--class of 1903--watching sympathetically this lastest woeful run. The green tiles below would hear the girl's wailing. The teacher decided to let her go. She had found over the years that it was wise to give a teenager several minutes to compose herself in these restroom episodes. When Set stepped inside the door again, she responded to their questioning look.
     "Did something particular happen to Joannie?"
     "I think the talk got to her, Miss Hunt. She's been goin' to Reverend Sowders's church, and her family, too." Set identified mentally then Joannie Madden as one of the teenagers who took Lori into the trees on Friday night.
     "Susie, will you go on down to the restroom and talk to her? I'll be there in a few minutes. Now, will you please, class, remain quiet. I know you won't be reading the Ode, but, for heaven's sake, don't get me in trouble with the powers that be. I've got to leave you alone, and I expect you to be responsible." She was using her "I'm-doing-something-against-the- institution-and-you-protect-me-against-detection" psychology. Seniors loved it, and, in fact, Set had discovered it a necessary mind-set for teaching. "Just appear to be doing something scholarly should anyone official approach. I'm counting on you." She turned to go with one more admonishing look; but before she was fully under the transome another voice spoke.
     "Somethin's cockeyed, that's what's happenin', and it's all gonna hit the fan." Brian Saddler's lips were drawn in that thin smile again.
     Set turned back. "What do you mean, Brian, something's cockeyed? Is there something else we should all know?" She hesitated on this last question because she had a familiar feeling. If she allowed this petulant teenager to spill his knowledge into a room full of potential whirlpools, dangerous waters, each rising centrifugally out of inquiring households, imagination could not foresee the resulting sea of rumors. But Brian Saddler simply writhed like a snake, casting a reptilian glance at another boy across the aisle, and sat mute. "Well, maybe we can talk later, Brian." Another snort from this obnoxious seventeen year-old made Set realize that there was no dealing with it now. She gave him a look and exited the room, understanding she probably left behind a platter of charged information which would be doled out to her later by various teenage confessors.

At lunch, Set poured out the first period's scene to Maggie McPherson, the home ec teacher. By twelve twenty-three, desperately needing the companionship of a mind over eighteen years old, Set would have talked to almost anyone. But she was glad it was Maggie.
     "That kid is such a brat. We'll be preparing packets of homework for Buckeye Farm before the year is over, mark my words. Give these to Brian Saddler, number 5916487." She laughed low under her napkin as she swished mayonaisse off her lower lip. Maggie's first response was good, easing Set's turmoil by empathy. Situated in Columbus, behind tall wired fencing, Buckeye Farm was the state farm for youthful offenders.
     Set liked Maggie for her curt tongue and quick mind, although her appearance was always shocking. Her unkept dirty hair and her tight polyester pants denied the existence of any semblance of style, a characteristic which Set had noticed in virtually all home ecomonics teachers whom she had known. She never quite understood it. Maybe when they were reduced to charts about color combinations and fabric textures in college, their abstract and better sense of beauty was wiped out. Maggie chomped at a lettuce and peanut butter sandwich, sliding papers dotted with red marks away from her Tupperware container. "What did the misfit have to say anyway, Set?"
     "He said there was something that was going to hit the fan. Maggie, don't you have the Schmidt girl in class, Kirstin, isn't it?" Maggie nodded an affirmation while she bit into a radish. "Have you met her parents? I think I've seen them here at parent-teacher conferences."
     "Kathy Schmidt is a darling person, supportive, and Kirstin is a better-than-average student. Always has her work done. I can count on her in class. The sire of the family is another story. He's a little bleak. Doesn't say much during the conference, I think they've been here twice during the past year, but I have the feeling that he's waiting to condemn, waiting for me to slip up and teach something unholy to his little darlings. But I can't blame the kids for the household they were born into. And I guess it could be worse. God knows half my class doesn't have both parents. I don't think Brian Saddler has either." She pushed the Tupperware radishes toward Set. "Why do you ask?"
     "Oh, someone was asking me about her the other day. And she was out there at Shequonur Friday night." Set did not want to divulge, even to Maggie, what she and Darby had seen. In any case, this thirty-minute lunch period did not lend itself to full-blown explanations. "She seems to know David Owen. I mean quite well. Were you in school with them? " Set glanced up at the round face of the home ec room clock. Her inquiries for Maggie had to be cut short.
     "Good heavens, no, my dear. I'm a baby. I graduated in seventy-four and they were . . . probably . . . let me think now . . . maybe sixty-two or sixty three, maybe later. But I think Owen and Kathy did graduate together." She replaced her plastic lid. Voices crescendoed outside the door. Locker doors slammed insolently. "Check the hall. They'll be up there, and I'll bet Morrison knows. He's been here since they put the corner stone in this mausoleum."
     Striding long steps to her sixth period class, Set followed the Senior class composites which lined the tiled hall. At nineteen sixty-two, and then sixty-three, she paused. Heavy noises bumped from her corner room and her cheeks felt hot. But she walked slowly, trying to pinpoint a familiar face. Finally, she stopped and took a second long look at the graduating class of nineteen hundred and sixty-six . There. The slender features of an innocent David Owen smiled down at her. Intelligent hope and wild determination gazed perpetually from his young face. But, as is often the case in many who attain physical or intellectual distinction, his full potential was not evident in the photograph. The faces altogether had the generic look of nineteen sixty-six, black and white glossies, smooth-haired girls with flipped ends, neatly framed by boat-necked collars. Still, Set thought, David Owen must have been a wonderful glimmer of hope for his English teacher. Insights, artistic. She could visualize the entire scene, the slender, poetic boy raising his hand, offering fresh young words about Hamlet and "Intimations of Immortality."
     This created scene--the long-ago boy and his teacher--scattered when Set's eyes scanned again the distant faces. Now the dark eyes of a great beauty, long brunette hair curling at her face--different from the other "flips"--stared out from the photograph. Because the frames hung high on the wall, Set read the name with difficulty, standing on her toes, although she knew already who the face belonged to. "Kathy Rogers, Kathy Schmidt." She said it outloud, and immediately recognized another face directly in the middle of the photo, right below the bold print, "East Worthy High School." Class President--Nathan Sowders. This face was bold and athletic, rigid, stocky, and handsome, determined and knowing. So Sowders was class president, Set thought. That fits, and, strangely enough, his potential was evident in this early setting. He was all there, even in nineteen sixty-six. A less-worn Donald Morrison, class advisor to these distant seniors, smiled grimly below the glass. Set would speak with him when the last bell rang. Now she had to quiet the knockings of desks and chairs in the corner room, subdue with participals and infinitives.

When Set tried to arrange three piles of papers to be graded at home, and straighten her desk, before climbing the stairs to Don Morrison's room, she was waylaid by two students--one who had participated in the Shequonur scene. Jon Phillips was a tall boy with a sincere and engaging manner. As she looked into his acne-scared face, Set thought he would do well later in life. He had wanted to know if she would attend the funeral. And she had commented that she believed she could do more by holding down the fort at school, so to speak. Besides, the administration, such as it was, Principal Edgar Louden, needed all the help he could get in controlling unusual situations that bubbled up on uncharacteristic days. She had let Jon in on this behind-the-scenes psychology, knowing he would understand, she said. Before Jon, and a muscular boy named Barry, left the room, Set had injected one question that might give her insight into the congregation of Sowders's church.
     "Do you attend Calvary Chapel, Jon? I know you were with Lori on Friday." Set had jostled several paper stacks to appear uninvolved.
     "Yeah, it's great. At least it was before Friday night. Reverend Sowders was a cool dude. He really knows, ah, knew, how to reach young people. I know he's changed my life around. Or I should say, Reverend Sowders and the Lord." Set needed to get up to Morrison's room before he got out of the building, so she had looked downward at her desk and shuffled papers. She did not want a confessional from this enthusiastic boy tonight. On some other night she could have been amused by his animation and commitment, but not now.
     Now Set laid her leather attache on a desk at the back of the mathematics department, a single room on the second floor. She read, "Screw Morrison," penciled heavily into the desk top made Set feel pity and distaste for the tall, lumbering man erasing the blackboard at the front of the room. He hadn't heard her come in.
     "Don, I was passing by and decided to see how everything's going in the math department." Morrison took one more swipe and turned.
     "It's going," he said, a tired attempt to find humor where no humor lay. The students could ramrod him into anything, and every man, woman, and child in the school was aware of that fact. Set believed that the students' treatment of this inept individual was akin to torture, but no one could help the unequipped and weakened teacher in the classroom. It was every man, or woman, for himself. "Or herself," Set added in her mind. She usually tried to stop faulty language in thought, to be an aware, semi-feminist.
     Perched sideways on the top of a desk, she was casual, conversational. "I was just surveying the line-up of classes downstairs and saw your picture on the sixty-six composite. Boy, I've got to give you credit. You've been hanging in there for a long time. That was not a play on words," she added.
     "Well, yeah, and trust me, it doesn't get any easier. The seniors are pistols this year. My days in the army didn't prepare me for anything like this."
     Set gave a sympathetic and knowing laugh and moved directly to her subject. This tired teacher would not notice any lapses of conversational etiquette nor would he tune in on any extraordinary interests. Teachers could plunge from subject to subject after school and no fellow teacher would lift an eyebrow. All were accustomed to deep, multidimensional subjects attacked swiftly in cramped time periods. "Say, Don, have you attended the Owen lectures? I noticed that you were his teacher. What a mind that man has. Did he show any of that brain when you had him?"
     Morrison drug a rumpled sports coat from a wall hook and stuffed an ancient leather bag, like a nineteenth-century doctor's pouch, with a red grade book and a flopping pile of papers. "Actually, David Owen was not much of a student in here. But I liked him. Sort of quiet and polite. Not really a class leader, but I think everybody basically liked him. I haven't been out there. Polly's got some projects for me at home. But I figure there won't be any more of the conference now. Boy, that's quite a shock about Nathan Sowders. You know, David and him sat in this same room together. Advanced Trig, I think. Now there was some leader, that Sowders."
     "So they were together? Friends?"
     "In a manner of speaking. I think mostly they were thrown together because of the church thing and all." He looked at his watch. "Don't want to be rude, but Polly's got a dentist appointment and we're down to one car."
     "What do you mean they were thrown together because of the 'church thing'? You mean that they went to the same church?" Set was determined to follow this part up.
     In the hall they passed a young woman emptying a dust pan into a large canvas wastebin on wheels. "Monique, do you never get to go home?"
     "Nah, not till I get them little darlings cleaned up." She smiled a full, grateful smile at Set. Set enjoyed it, those few words with the afternoon help. Monique Lamb, with her tight jeans, fat rolls at the top, came in to help John the janitor three days a week. Set never passed Monique without a word on bubble gum or restrooms or the weather. When Morrison and Set reached the back exit, at the top of the stairs near the industrial arts department, she could still near Monique knocking her pan inside the canvas.
     In the parking lot the wind tossed their coats out behind them. "Well, you remember that big glitch, ah, about, a . . . fifty-six or so. Sowders and Owens and some other families here in town separated from the church, I forget which one, and started their own. Some big theological flap. I don't know the details but it was pretty much on the town docket for a long while. And Nathan and David were kids in the same group. Or predicament. Pretty ironic that David came back to this, isn't it?"
     "No, I don't remember. I've only been here three years, Don."
     "O, yeah. But don't ask me. If you want details, lots of people here know more than I do."
     At a beat-up Chevy, Morrison fumbled in his pocket for his car keys. Set stood by while he wrenched opened the crooked door.
     "Oh, by the way, did David have any big love interests?"
     Don Morrison rolled down the window and stuck the keys in the ignition. He chortled with some memory. "I ought to know. I practically had to protect his girl from him on the Senior trip. Those were the days. Let's see. Do you know the Schmidt girl, Kirstin? Her mother, Kathy Rogers. Talk to Agnes, she's been around since before them. She's got a memory like an elephant. Well, Polly's going to be chomping at the bit."
     He rolled up his window and left Set standing in the gravel. When she struggled back, the wind whipped her coat the other way, almost over her head, at the corner where the new addition, the wrestling room, jutted into the lot. Back under the overhang, where the old part of the high school hooked on to the wrestling room, she pulled the back lap of her coat from her head. She looked up at the exit sign before she struggled with the heavy glass door. She was thinking about the immutability of teenage desires.

Set lit a candle in the Keats room and piled her stack of papers near a cup of steaming coffee. At once light glimmered on the wood slats of the shade. At first she thought it was the flicker from her candle, a lighting which she performed nightly in order to get through the ordeal of "And I know that we'll always be the best of friends." This sentiment, achieved in letters looped with large hearts and circles, signaled that she was entering an essay written in what she deemed "Cheerleader penmanship."
     But it was not the candle. The lights dimmed abruptly and within seconds there was a knock at her red door. Chaucer and Will flapped violently in their cages. At first she thought it might be Darby, but he usually called ahead.
     When she opened the door she saw first, peering in at her, large frightened eyes. It was Lori Sowders. Her hair was damp. The evening cold had turned to icy drizzle. She looked like a twelve-year old. Her heavy make-up was gone, leaving her face round and innocent. Frightened. "Miss Hunt, I'm sorry. Are you real busy? Please forgive me, I know you probably got a lotta' stuff to do for tomorrow, but could you talk a few minutes?"
     "Good heavens, Lori, yes, come in. You look frozen." She pulled the girl in by the hand and helped her with a limp jean jacket which provided a thin layer against the rain. Set hung the wet coat in the garden room. When she returned the girl looked hunched and small in the Keats room. "Lori, is something wrong? How about a cup of hot chocolate, or tea? I know you are thoroughly chilled."
     "Nah, no thank you." She hesitated. "But you wouldn't happen to have a cup of coffee? I've been drinkin' it for a long time, Miss Hunt, just so you don't think I'm doing somethin' that my parents don't know about." Her eyes suddenly looked hurt, her innards stabbed. "I mean, Mom wouldn't care."
     "Of course, Lori. Do you want cream or sugar? Milk, actually, and two percent at that?" Set realized, even as she said this, how inappropriate it was. What did the girl care about the fat content of milk when she was embroiled in adolescent terrors.
     "Both, please."
     After a quick preparation, she offered a large hot mug to the teenager. Set pulled her chair close to Lori who was enveloped by a soft, bolstered chair in the corner. The teacher leaned in toward the diminutive presence. The word "waif" flitted across Set's mind and she took Lori's hand. She expected something dramatic and pitiful, for Lori was distraught, and even the most stable of adolescents had dissolved before Set in similar situations. She had many times comforted her students in Millrun, but up to this moment no student had visited the caboose in East Worthy. But then, no event had occurred quite as dramatic as the Sowder thing during the past three years.
     "Lori, what's wrong? You're going through so much now. Tell me." She expected tears, breakdown, but Lori did not cry. She straightened her back up, assumed a strength. Her voice was oddly level.
     "Miss Hunt, I've got to tell you this, because I've got to tell someone. I trust you. Rachel Smith told me that you helped her a lot last year when her parents split, and that I could trust you not to tell." Set waited. "I don't think Dad died . . . I don't think he died . . ." She looked down and then lifted a wide-eyed face to her teacher. "I don't think he died normally. I mean, you were there and you saw him and there was something terrible wrong. But I don't think it was . . . normal."
     The teenage girl was wheeling tales of morbidity and romantic deaths in her mind. The poor child, no doubt, had had to channel her grief into avenues of thought which somehow eased the confrontation with blind death. Drama was always easier than reality. "Lori, you've had a lot to bear. Perhaps after you get through tomorrow you and your mother can begin the healing process."
     "No, Miss Hunt, I'm not making this up. Please listen. Dad had been actin' funny for about the last year, and all. But something was goin' on and it happened right before . . . before he was out there in the van." Set listened, surprised still, at the girl's level voice. Lori looked around the caboose. "Miss Hunt, I'm real sorry, but would you mind if I smoked? I can't get through this without something. Please don't tell. I mean, I have to be a witness at school and I just can't kick this one." Set was mildly taken aback.
     "Certainly, Lori. Just take it slow and tell me what you mean." She retrieved a small bowl--one with a painted yellow bird--for the ashes.
     Lori flicked a spark from a plastic lighter and then smoked the interior of the Keats's room with her first puff. The teenager hacked a dry cough. "Well, you know Dr. Owen." Set nodded. "He was over to the house Friday morning. I wasn't feeling too good and was staying in bed. I don't think Dad knew I was in the house. Mom had already gone to work. She's a nurse up at Morgan General. Anyhow, I was just sort of lyin' there and I heard this real loud bang, or pound, or somethin'. I thought maybe Dad had dropped his briefcase cause he usually works in his study in the morning. But then I heard some yelling. Loud. I didn't even know anybody was in the house but Dad. Well, at first I thought maybe Mom had forgotten her purse and come back." Her eye opened wider. "Miss Hunt, please don't tell, but Mom and Dad have had trouble and some real bad fights. Specially during the last few months. But, anyway, it wasn't Mom. I heard a man's voice." Lori looked pleadingly into Set's eyes and then smashed the ciggarette butt in the bowl. "And then it got real bad. I mean there were hard sounds and I thought maybe Dad had been counseling someone who flipped. Dad lots of times has church members over for counseling. He's real good at it. Anyway, I got out of bed, sort of scared and went downstairs. I thought if someone had lost it, I had to help Dad. But when I got downstairs there was just yelling and then I recognized the voice." Lori paused. "It was Dr. Owen."
     Lori leaned in as if to reconsider what she was saying and took a short sip of coffee. Set waited--anxious now--for what might transpire next in the scene which the girl painted.
     "I walked real quiet up to the door and that's when I heard Dr. Owen plain. He was talking rough to Dad. I couldn't believe it. I never heard anyone talk to Dad that way. He was saying something about something he wanted. And he was calling Dad names. He said he wanted it and that Dad was a malig . . . malig. . . something like cancer. . ."
     "Malignant?" Set injected.
     "Yeah, malignant liar. He called Dad a liar. And then he started talking about getting it again and that if he didn't he would tell."
     "Tell what?" Set was unable to remain silent at this point.
     "I don't know, but it gave me the creeps. Dad laughed this kinda weird laugh. At first I thought he was crying. No kidding. I've heard him cry with Mom and sometimes I've heard him praying with members and sort of crying. But, Miss Hunt, he was laughing. Real soft. Anyway, Dr. Owen came close to the door so I got around the corner in the kitchen cause it sounded like he was leaving. But they said some more stuff that I couldn't hear real good cause I was around the corner. But pretty soon the door opened and I scooted back more and then he said something that sounded like 'He was here, Nathan.' I didn't know what in the hell . . . oh, I'm sorry, Miss Hunt, I didn't know what he was talking about, but Dad said something like 'No, David, he was not here.' He said that he'd pray for him. I mean, Dad said he'd pray for Dr. Owen, and something else about the acorn doesn't fall far from a tree. And right then, when Dr. Owen got to the door . . . I don't think Dad got up . . . he said, and this is the part, Miss Hunt, he said that someone is going to kill Dad before the whole thing's over."
     "Oh, Lori, think about it. Is that what was actually said?" Set felt her heart skip a beat.
     "Yes, Miss Hunt, I think it was 'Nathan, someone is going take your life before this whole thing is over. You are a sick man.' Dad said real loud after him--but I think he was out--'Read the scriptures, David. You have yoked yourself with the world.' And then he said that verse about yoked together with unbelievers. You know, II Corinthians 6:14. But I think Dr. Owen was already out." Set nodded as if to say that she was familiar with the verse, but she was not. But she was rather astounded that this coffee-drinking, cigarette-smoking teenager in gold hoop earrings could wheel off Biblical passages so fluently. Somehow it seemed incongruous, but Set realized that she was reacting to a stereotype.
     "Dad's done a whole series on the Corinthians, just before this conference," Lori said, seemingly in response to Set's thoughts. "But he said Dad was going to die, that someone was going to kill him, and, then, Dad . . . Dad died that night, Miss Hunt. I just had to say it. I heard it and it's too weird. I like Dr. Owen. But what if . . . " and she stopped because the resolution of this thought was too ominous, too horrendous, even for a dramatic teenager.
     "Lori," Set said, taking on her most empathetic voice, but running through another trail of thoughts in her mind, "people say strong, desperate things when they're angry. Things they don't mean. Dr. Owen had known your Dad for a long time and I'm sure they could say things to one another that casual acquaintances couldn't."
     "But it wasn't like Dad, I mean he was different, not just that death thing. He sounded different. Oh, I don't know what I mean." She choked in her throat and the whites of her eyes turned red. "I can't stand to look at him, and I've got to look at him, in the casket. I've never seen anyone dead and I can't look at him.”
     Set reached her arms around Lori, but the teenager remained stiff, her muscles wrenching with sobs, while her attempt to return Set's embrace was formal and self-conscious. Set, having learned long ago that too many words are anathema to grief, allowed her to cry. The moment was awkwardly pathetic. Set felt as if she could not really help Lori because she could not, in all conscience, tell her that what she had heard was of no consequence. Set noticed, and chided herself for noticing, the dark roots of Lori's blonde hair. As she stared at Lori's roots, the phone jingled in the kitchen.
     "Here, Lori, please sit down while I get that."
     It was Dar. Before Set could announce to him she had a visitor, he had swung into his conversation.
     "I simply had to call, Darling, because Mother just phoned and you're not going to believe what she said. You know . . . "
     "Dar, could you . . ."
     "Now, just listen to this first, please, and then you can talk. Mother works at the courthouse, you know. Well, her friend, Mamie Calland, heard from her daughter who," Darby took a long breath here, "works for Doc Ellison that he's got the scoop on Sowders." Set did not attempt to stop Darby now. "Ellison is the county coroner, you know, and Mother has always said he's such a blowhard. Anyway, Ellison was blowing off to his nurse about the autopsy on Sowders. It's all so macabre and grizzly when you think what they do in those . . . those autopsies. Anyway, Ellison was going on about what the ghouls found who were doing the cutting, and, Set, Sowders didn't die naturally. I don't know how exactly. I mean the unnatural part, but I know this is going to stir up the locals when it hits the paper tomorrow.
     Set had been afraid, somehow, that Darby was heading toward this revelation. But now with Lori there, she could not react. "Dar, let me call you back. I have a visitor. Just as soon as I can."
     "My, a little late for you, isn't it, dear? Call when you can," and the phone was down.
     In the other room, Set found Lori standing nervously at the door. Her face looked strained. Even guilty, Set thought. "I got someone out in the car waiting, Miss Hunt. Please don't tell."
     "Lori, I . . .," but the door was opened and she watched Lori run to the car. Set let her sentence fade. She was surprised to see that someone, a boy whose face or form she could not identify in the poor light, had been waiting all the time Lori was in the caboose. At her window, she watched them pull away.
     Before she returned Dar's call, she had to think. She had not really promised the girl that she wouldn't tell, but she was the adult, the responsible person. She could still hear her mother: "September, you have to be the adult. You do the right thing, no matter what." She had wanted drama, a lift to her small-town life, but perhaps this was too much. She had never been in a situation which was . . . was criminal. Set cringed at the word. Oh, but it couldn't really be criminal, could it? David Owen? And she the only adult who knew? Maybe. No, teenagers would never keep this quiet. She had to, had to what? Well, for sure, she had to tell another adult. Since Darby's words about gossiping Doc Ellison, Hamlet's clowns had rung in her head. "The crowner hath sat on her and finds it Christian burial." Why poor Ophelia should be in her mind now she could not say, except for the juxtaposition of "coroner" and "Christian."
     Her thoughts circled, also, around another phrase which had sounded twice during the last several days. It was too odd to ignore. Who wasn't here? she thought. Both Sowders and Owen had repeated the words, or at least a variant of it. "He wasn't here." And they were the Reverend's last words.
     As Set punched in Darby's numbers, she remembered--with Keatsian pleasure and pain--that she had asked David Owen to speak on epiphany, her Advanced Seniors. Friday. Nothing could be sure until after the funeral.
     "Dar, could you come over? Yes, right now."