The Puzzled Heart by Amanda Cross

leaving messages at the dog place is a good idea, and we might as well continue with that. But I want to meet with you openly, and to be in on all the operations. Otherwise, I’ll hire another firm.”
    “Toni wouldn’t like it.”
    “So much the worse for Toni. I have a job for her, by the way.”
    “I don’t think she’ll like that either.”
    “Well, if she doesn’t like it, I’ll have to find another operator—is that the right term? I’ve a number offriendly students who will gladly take on the task, but there’s some danger involved, and I’d rather have Toni, who looks the part
and
can handle trouble better than students. Will you tell her, or should I?”
    “Let me tell her,” Harriet said. “I might be a teeny bit more persuasive, under the circs.”
    “The what?”
    “That’s what the British used to call the circumstances in the good old days of Lord Peter and company. I suspect you haven’t been keeping up with your literary reading.”
    “Not lately,” Kate said, and really smiled for the first time since Reed’s kidnapping.
    “That’s better. What is Toni’s assignment, then, although I hardly dare ask?”
    “I want her to get herself up looking both like a student and sexy. She’ll know what I mean, and if she doesn’t, tell her to rove around the campus and observe. Then I want her to visit all five fraternities. She needs a reason, subscriptions to a new magazine or flyers for a student production, something of that sort. I want her to case the joints. ‘Gee, I’ve never been in a fraternity. Would you guys show me around, like where do you sleep and all?’—well, you get the picture. I think Reed may be being kept in one of those houses. Toni wouldn’t be able to determine that on her first visit, but she’ll get some idea of the layout and the possibility of keeping a prisoner there. And all this has to be done tomorrow, need I say?”
    “Toni’s going to love it, but I’ll tell her orders are orders. She may want to talk to you.”
    “I’ve thought of that; if she does, let’s use e-mail. It’s totally insecure, and therefore we will be assumed not to use it. We will simply have to think of roundabout ways to say things.”
    “I didn’t know you had e-mail.”
    “Of course I do. It’s the best way of getting department notices without having to drop in and confront one’s most tiresome colleagues. Here’s my e-mail address,” Kate said, handing Harriet a slip of paper.
    “All right,” Harriet said, taking it. “On your head be it. Well, tally-ho and all that, as they also said in the good old class-ridden days. Toni or I will report back real soon.”
    “Don’t tally-ho quite yet, if you don’t mind,” Kate said. “I think I have a task for
you
, but I’ve got to dig up some information. Do you mind having another glass by yourself? I won’t be long.”
    “A pleasure,” Harriet said. “But don’t dawdle.”
    Kate went into her study to look through her class lists from recent semesters. There was often a young man in one of her classes, and sometimes a young woman, who took offense at any mention of women’s oppression or revolution, or the assignment of a book by a woman. This was, Kate had discovered after much suffering, not always because of “this feminist crap,” as angry students had been known tocall it. Women like Kate in positions of authority always evoked the mother in students’ minds, and sometimes that was sufficient for a negative personal response, particularly when added to a general hostility on the part of students to seeing women in positions of authority and power. It occurred to Kate, not for the first time, that someone ought to write a manual on the dangers for women in teaching, with a chapter on women teachers who were no longer young.
    Kate found names of four students who might have harbored resentment and nursed it sufficiently to have it flower into a kidnapping. She doubted, however, that such resentment