Fellowship of Fear by Aaron Elkins

quietly. From a television set downstairs, he could hear a parrot squawking, "Ring around the collar!" Nothing else.
    Possibly, whoever had been there was gone; Gideon had been in class for three hours. Still, he kept his body low and behind the meager protection of the partition as he slowly turned the handle. The spring latch slid smoothly out with a soft click; the door was unlocked.
    Gideon took a deep breath and exhaled. Then he inhaled once more, stopped his breath, and flung the door sharply open, throwing himself full-length onto the hall carpet. The flimsy door banged noisily against the metal bed frame, and Gideon stiffened himself to lunge for the legs of anyone who rushed out.
    No one rushed out; the bed frame vibrated, and the door slowly swung a third of the way closed again. One part of Gideon continued to tense itself; another, convinced by now that the intruder had gone, was wondering what to say should anyone emerge from another room to find him sprawled there.
    He stood up and looked directly into the room. The light in the hallway threw enough illumination to show him that no one was crouching inside. He walked in and turned on the light. No one was under the bed. No one was in the corner alcove that served as a closet. He checked the door to the bathroom he shared with the occupant of the next room. It was still bolted from his side. He opened it and looked in. It was empty.
    He went back to the hall and got his lecture notes, then returned to the room and closed the door. Nothing had been moved, but he could sense that someone had been there. He spent a long time going over the room and trying to determine what had been taken. The intruder, he assumed, must have gotten what he came for, or he would have been waiting for Gideon, as had been the case in Heidelberg.
    When Gideon was unable to locate anything missing, he sat down and wrote a list of all the possessions he could remember, down to an underwear count. Then he went through the room again, checking off each item on the list. In the end, he came down to only one thing that wasn’t in its place: a plastic bag containing his clean socks.
    The idea was so ludicrous that Gideon wouldn’t accept it at first. He knew that his memory for everyday things was poor. Nora had often laughed with him about his being an absentminded professor, though he always protested that his mind wasn’t absent but elsewhere, pondering weightier things. Once they had searched for fifteen minutes for a watch that was on his wrist, another time for a wallet that was already in his pocket. But the socks were not to be found, though he went so far as to go down to the car to search for them. When he came back up and stood looking stupidly at the alcove shelf for the fifth time, he suddenly remembered positively how he’d stood right there that morning and taken a green pair of socks from the bag, then changed his mind and taken a brown pair, and finally tossed the bag back on the shelf.
    There wasn’t any doubt about it. Someone had waited until he went to class that evening, furtively let himself into his room, searched it—and made off with two pairs of blue socks and one of green. Plus the plastic Safeway produce bag that held them.
     
     
       THE man didn’t change his position. He remained slouched in the hard plastic chair, his hollow chest depressed and his long, skinny legs crossed at the knees and then entwined again at the ankles, the way women could sit—or men with long, skinny legs. His trousers, rucked up by the convolutions of his legs, revealed unattractive lengths of hairless white calf above beige anklets. His eyebrows were the only things that moved. They went up. His eyes remained on the sports page in front of him.
    "They took
what?
" he asked, his voice barely audible above the wooshes and clanks of the washing machines.
    "I know," Gideon said, "it’s ridiculous. I feel stupid saying it, but that
is
what they took."
    It was so absurd that he