Lisa Atkinson - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 131, No. 5. Whole No. 801, May 2008

“There have been other times,” Tatum added quietly.

The security guard, who shifted her gaze back to Tatum, wore large glasses that made her eyes big and blurry. She wasn’t very old; it didn’t seem quite right to Tatum to call her Officer Reynolds, which was written on the silver badge on her chest. Her first name was Cathy, but that didn’t seem right either.

“You’ve seen him other times recently on campus?” Officer Cathy probed.

“Oh yes,” Tatum replied. She was named after Tatum O’Neal, the child star her mother liked to watch over and over again in a movie about a young girl and adventures with her father. “I see the man often when I’m alone. He’s always by himself, too.”

“Has he said anything to you, gotten in your path, or tried to touch you in any way?”

“Oh no. He just follows me around and stares.”

Officer Cathy stared at her too, through those thick glasses. She was short, shorter than Tatum. Her shoulders were broad, like a boy’s, and her shoes were black and heavy. Tatum wondered if she had to run fast sometimes, and if she knew how to use a gun, even though she didn’t wear one. Tatum liked having her nearby.

“I may follow you around a bit on campus, so don’t be alarmed,” Officer Cathy informed her. “That’s just SOP.” When Tatum blinked blankly in response, Officer Cathy explained on her way out the door, “You know, ‘standard operating procedure.’”

Tatum lay back on her bed, satisfied. She didn’t write in the same journal for this part. She pulled another one out from underneath the special satin pillow her mother had made for her.

What does it feel like to have the Secret Service around you all of the time, like presidents, their wives, and their children? SOP.

Officer Cathy asked me more questions. I think he has green eyes, or maybe blue, not brown. But no glasses, except for reading. He usually has a spiral notebook and the newspaper all folded up.

Going to class now felt more interesting to Tatum. She thought she might see the man, because she had written and talked about him, or she might run into Officer Cathy on her rounds. With the early, powdery pollen of springtime floating in the air, she felt lighter somehow. The pudgy weight she wanted to lose to make her mother happy didn’t hold her back so much. Tatum felt less shy, too. Back at home, she’d worn black jeans with dark tops and had frowned intentionally at anyone who came her way. Now it was easier to smile — because she knew someone was watching her.

On her daily walks, Tatum wore the long, striped, colorful scarf that belonged to her roommate. Jen, who was studying Eastern religions, had renounced materialism; she’d tossed the scarf in a pile of woolens after the last snowstorm. Tatum kept it wrapped around her neck. She liked recycled things. Her favorite store in town was the All Souls Thrift Shop. Expensive clothes that the other girls discarded cost just a few dollars there. She didn’t care if her classmates recognized their designer clothing on her. It meant they had a bond. In the evenings, for dinner, she wore some of her mother’s cast-off blouses, shiny ones bought for parties before she got too sick to go out anymore.

On Tuesday, Officer Cathy left a message that she had additional questions for Tatum. They met in her dorm room again. Tatum showed her what she had written in her journals, the main one. There was just one entry from the weekend.

Yesterday he sat on a bench by the pond. I think he knows my schedule, even weekends. His pants are khaki, and they look like someone ironed them. But his shoes are brown and scruffy.

Then on Monday, she had written:

He was not on the bench today, but I think I saw him in the hallway of the Hayes Building. He looks tired to me, as if he couldn’t sleep.

“You saw him inside Hayes?” Officer Cathy probed.

“That’s where my history course is,” Tatum explained. “I was working on my class project. Mine is on the British Museum, and whether or not the collectors stole ancient artifacts from Greece and Italy.” Tatum knew they did, which was not just a feeling; it was a fact.

“How close were you to him?” Officer Cathy asked in a tense voice.

Tatum’s parents would not be pleased to learn that a tall man in a green jacket was following her around campus. They were counting on her staying safe while her mother had chemotherapy treatments. She was losing her hair, even her eyebrows.

“We brushed by each other in the corridor,” Tatum replied. Officer Cathy made a note on her small spiral pad in a red pen. Just talking about him gave Tatum stomach flutters.

After curfew she told Jen about the man. Jen sat on the floor in a lotus position, wearing only bikini underwear and a tank top. Tatum lounged on the bed, her entire body covered by a long T-shirt, one that had been discarded by her father. Jen listened so quietly that Tatum thought she might have fallen asleep while meditating.

The next day a notice in Jen’s cursive handwriting appeared on the hall bulletin board: “Watch out for stalkers! Report anything suspicious to school security.” She decorated it with a border of peace symbols. Tatum liked the way it looked. When Sara from the school newspaper called her up and asked for a description, Tatum held her cell phone against her ear and closed her eyes. She lay back on the bed.

“Yes, he’s about forty, I’d say. Not nearly as old as my father,” she guessed. “His hair hangs down in his eyes like somebody even younger, though. Somebody who doesn’t think to comb it every day.”

Sara assured Tatum that she would not identify her source in the story, but news travels fast in a small place. On Wednesday, when the paper came out, several people asked Tatum to sit with them at lunch. She hoped that Officer Cathy would notice all of her new friends. Tatum planned to bring her a cappuccino from the coffee shop in town, the one where the man watched her from behind his newspaper.

That afternoon Tatum worked on the British Museum project in the library. From the school computer, she downloaded images, cutting and pasting them with Superglue on a poster board. The pictures were of ancient artifacts taken from the Mediterranean. The British Museum is a thief, she wrote in the heading. In smaller print, she added: The English exploited other people in distant countries, even after they had given up colonization, stealing their history from them and claiming it as their own. Famous museums in America also knowingly took donations from rich people who bought stolen goods from Greece or Italy. They knew what they were doing. They couldn’t help themselves. They let the facts of the situation get all tangled up with their desires.

Tatum wanted to tell the tall man about these illicit acts. Maybe he was someone who used to teach here, or the husband of one of her teachers who wasn’t even aware that he came on campus, because he was supposed to be working at the Corner Bookstore or in City Hall, defending criminals. That was it. He defended criminals, and he needed to conduct research in the library on campus in order to understand the criminal mind.

Jen had started talking to Tatum about all kinds of things. That night she described her paper topic for the Eastern religions course.

“Suchness,” she stated matter-of-factly. “It’s Buddhist.” When Tatum took off her glasses, Jen looked small.

“Suchness,” Jen repeated from her distant bed. “It means something like being present.”

“Whatness?” Tatum asked. She’d been reading Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man for literature, and they’d learned about James Joyce and his kind of crazy epiphanies.

“No, it’s Suchness. Which is what you need,” Jen stated in a superior voice. “We all do,” she added softly.