Stud Rites

somewhere deep inside the ice machine.
    My pace quickened. At the end of the hallway, I descended a flight of twisting stairs. Instead of taking the familiar route through the maze that ultimately led to the lobby, I followed the series of arrows that read TO THE LAGOON. The arrows eventually led me to a door that opened to what I recognized as the grotto end of the dimly lighted Lagoon, a mock-tropical garden with split-leaf philodendrons, narrow flagstone pathways, and patches of fir-bark mulch planted with vines and impatiens. Avoiding the shadowy paths through this South Seas paradise, I followed a sort of sidewalk of artificial-grass carpet that ran along the perimeter, past the numbered doors of guest rooms and big, heavily curtained plate-glass windows intended, I suppose, to compensate for the airless undesirability of the interior rooms of the hotel by offering a bold vista of plastic foliage.
    After I turned a corner, guest rooms finally gave way to function rooms. The deserted restaurant appeared. I hurried past it and dashed into the big, brilliantly illuminated ladies’ room, where I poured large amounts of small change into the vending machines and supplied myself with enough sanitary protection to last through the next week. Feeling shy about passing through the lobby clutching a bouquet of feminine hygiene products, I decided to retrace my route around the grotto. Despite all the talk about random violence engendered by the recent slaying of Elsa Van Dine, I was only slightly more wary than I’d ordinarily have been in making my way alone through a sleeping hotel. Although I assumed that Hunnewell’s murderer must be someone at the show, probably someone staying at the hotel, my vigilance was the taken-for-granted alertness that prudent women develop. In fact, my mind had drifted to memories of a seventh-grade girls-only minicourse called, of all things, ”Growing Up and Liking It,” which, despite the name, said nothing about orgasm and everything about cramps and self-adhesive pads.
    I had just passed the dark, empty restaurant and entered the tropical-garden area when a series of muted noises emanated from what sounded like the far end of the cavernous Lagoon. A door opening? A soft voice? Someone taking a dog out, I thought. Or maybe another woman in my little plight. If so, I’d generously spare her the trip to the ladies’ room. Then a voice again, a deep voice, a man’s, I assumed: ”Hello?” And only seconds later, a gut-wrenching scream, ungodly loud, that rang through the huge, ridiculous Lagoon, reverberated off the high glass ceiling, and sent me pounding down the carpeted walk toward the source of that ungodly scream. As I rounded the corner at the far end of the Lagoon, the only movement I noticed was the slow, automatic closing of the door through which I’d first entered, but when the door had finished closing itself and had sealed off the bright light of the corridor beyond, on the dark carpet ahead of me a figure moved.
    Foolishly rushing on, I slammed my foot into what turned out to be one of the decorative paddles from the Lagoon walls, and in a frantic effort to keep my balance, stretched a hand toward one of the plate-glass windows of a guest room and found myself teetering amid a pile of tampons and carefully packaged sanitary pads as guest-room doors opened and voice after voice demanded to know what was going on. It took me a second to identify the angry, distraught face of the figure sprawled motionless on the carpet at my feet: Harriet Lunt, the lawyer who specialized in dogs, the hypocrite who’d joined Victor Printz in belittling our rescue dogs and who’d suddenly become an ardent supporter of breed rescue when I’d pretended to represent the Gazette.
    Ignoring the stuff I’d dropped, I hurried to her, helped her to her feet, and asked the inevitable: ”Are you all right?”
    By then, eight or ten people had emerged from nearby rooms.
    ”Just my shoulder,” Harriet Lunt reported. ”My left shoulder.” With the fingers of her right hand, she explored the injury. Then she raised her left arm, moved her elbow around, and said, ”Probably nothing worse than a bad bruise.” She wore the kinds of gigantic foam hair curlers that are banned in Cambridge (they’re a symbol of female oppression) and an old-fashioned pink mesh hair net dotted with miniature bows. Her quilted cotton bathrobe was identical to one I’d given my grandmother last Christmas.
    As