Storm Front

between them; he peered through the crack and simultaneously rang the doorbell. Nothing moved. He rang again, and there was none of the vibration you got from an occupied house.
    After a third ring, and another minute on the porch, he walked over to the detached garage and looked in the window: there was an SUV inside, but it appeared to be covered with a thin layer of dust, as though it hadn’t been moved for a few weeks. Had Jones been home at all? He’d certainly had the time.
    After looking in the garage window, he wandered into the backyard and looked in a window in the back door, but couldn’t see anything but the inside of a mudroom, with a bunch of coats hanging on pegs.
    He’d climbed down off the stoop when a woman shouted, “Hello?” He looked around and saw her next door, standing on her own back stoop, an old lady with a cane and Coke-bottle glasses, looking at him with suspicion.
    He called back, “I’m a police officer. I’m with the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.”
    “Elijah isn’t home. He’s in Israel,” she called.
    Virgil walked over, took his ID out of his pocket, and showed it to her. “He’s actually back in the country—he’s been here for a while, over at the Mayo,” Virgil said.
    “Hasn’t been here,” she said. “He always stops here first thing—he leaves a set of keys with me.”
    “His biography at the college said he’s married,” Virgil said. “Is his wife around? Or did she go with him?”
    “That’s Magda, poor thing. She has Alzheimer’s,” the old lady said. “She’s in a home now. He couldn’t take care of her anymore. No, he lives here by himself. His children are gone. One lives up in the Cities, one is out on the West Coast, San Diego, I think. I haven’t seen either of them, either.”
    “How old are they?”
    “Oh, the oldest one, Dan, he must be . . . forty-one or forty-two? Ellen must be in her late thirties. I think she’s three years younger than Danny.”
    “Would you have their addresses or phone numbers?”
    “Well, no, no, I don’t. Ellen works for the state, her last name is Case. You could probably find her that way. Did something bad happen?”
    “There’s some kind of an argument going on with this dig that Reverend Jones was on,” Virgil said, evading the question. “Listen, I’m going to leave a note on his front door. If you should see him, tell him to call me, right away. The moment he gets in.”
    —
    W HEN V IRGIL left Jones’s house, he checked his watch. If Gustavus Adolphus operated like most colleges, he might be too late to talk to anyone, but he wasn’t doing anything else anyway, so he decided to take fifteen minutes to run up to the town of St. Peter, where the college was.
    Gustavus was a mixture of old and new buildings set on a rolling campus; in the late nineties, it had been hit by a huge F3 tornado that tore the campus apart, but luckily during spring break, and none of the students were killed.
    Virgil had to poke around for a few minutes before he found the administration offices, and from there was sent to Jones’s department, where he found a woman pecking at a computer keyboard in a small book-stuffed office. Her name was Maicy, she said, an assistant professor. She’d been working every day, she said, because she couldn’t afford to go anywhere that summer, and had not seen or heard from Jones.
    “We’ve had a lot of calls, though,” she said. “We just haven’t been able to help. We can’t even believe what they’re telling us—that Elijah stole this stele? I mean, if so many people weren’t telling us the same story, I would have said it was nonsense. I don’t think Elijah ever stole a single thing in his entire life. To steal a stele? It’s hardly credible.”
    She was insistent, and said that if Virgil tracked down other department members, he’d get the same thing from them: until they saw the proof, they would not believe that Jones was in any way involved in any theft.
    Virgil thanked her and left.
    He’d run out of time. The college offices were closing, and there wouldn’t be much more that night. He stopped by Jones’s house again, found his note still on the door, leaned on the bell, got nothing.
    It occurred to him that Jones might be inside, dead. If another day passed with no sight of the man, he’d go talk to a judge about that idea—or call the daughter, when he found her.
    Virgil went home, ate, and resumed work on a magazine story about