Rating: ★★★★☆ Tags: Mystery Detective, General, Fiction

Please get this. Please get me
.
And she would finally say, 
So?
And I would say:
‘Oh, I actually know this! She must mean my office. At
the junior college. I’m an adjunct professor there. Huh. I
mean, it must be, right?’ I squinted and reread. ‘She took it
easy on me this year.’
‘You want me to drive you over?’ Gilpin asked.
‘Nah, I’ve got Go’s car.’
‘I’ll follow you then.’
‘You think it’s important?’
‘Well, it shows her movements the day or two before
she went missing. So it’s not unimportant.’ He looked at the
stationery. ‘It’s sweet, you know? Like something out of a
movie: a treasure hunt. My wife and I, we give each other a
card and maybe get a bite to eat. Sounds like you guys
were doing it right. Preserve the romance.’

---

Then Gilpin looked at his shoes, got bashful, and
jingled his keys to leave.
The college had rather grandly presented me with a coffin
of an office, big enough for a desk, two chairs, some
shelves. Gilpin and I wended our way through the summer-
school students, a combination of impossibly young kids
(bored yet busy, their fingers clicking out texts or dialing up
music) and earnest older people I had to assume were mall
layoffs, trying to retrain for a new career.
‘What do you teach?’ Gilpin asked.
‘Journalism, magazine journalism.’ A girl texting and
walking forgot the nuances of the latter and almost ran into
me. She stepped to the side without glancing up. It made
me feel cranky, 
off my lawn!
old.
‘I thought you didn’t do journalism anymore.’
‘He who can’t do … .’ I smiled.
I unlocked my office, stepped into the close-smelling,
dust-moted air. I’d taken the summer off; it had been weeks
since I’d been here. On my desk sat another envelope,
marked second clue.
‘Your key always on your key chain?’ Gilpin asked.
‘Yup.’
‘So Amy could have borrowed that to get in?’
I tore down the side of the envelope.
‘And we have a spare at home.’ Amy made doubles
ofeverything – I tended to misplace keys, credit cards, cell
phones, but I didn’t want to tell Gilpin this, get another baby-
of-the-family jab. ‘Why?’
‘Oh, just wanted to make sure she wouldn’t have had to
go through, I don’t know, a janitor or someone.’

---

‘No Freddy Krueger types here, that I’ve noticed.’
‘Never saw those movies,’ Gilpin replied.
Inside the envelope were two folded slips of paper.
One was marked with a heart; the other was labeled clue.
Two
notes. Different. My stomach clenched. God knew
what Amy was going to say. I opened the note with the
heart. I wished I hadn’t let Gilpin come, and then I caught the
first words.
My Darling Husband,
I figured this was the perfect place – these hallowed halls of learning! – to
tell you I think you are a brilliant man. I don’t tell you enough, but I am amazed
by your mind: the weird statistics and anecdotes, the strange facts, the disturbing
ability to quote from any movie, the quick wit, the beautiful way you have of
wording things. After years together, I think a couple can forget how wonderful
they find each other. I remember when we first met, how dazzled I was by you,
and so I want to take a moment to tell you I still am and it’s one of my favorite
things about you: You are BRILLIANT.
My mouth watered. Gilpin was reading over my
shoulder, and he actually sighed. ‘Sweet lady,’ he said.
Then he cleared his throat. ‘Um, hah, these yours?’
He used the eraser end of a pencil to pick up a pair of
women’s underwear (technically, they were panties –
stringy, lacy, red – but I know women get creeped out by
that word – just Google