Sunny Randal 06 - Spare Change by Robert B. Parker

Author:Robert B. Parker
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Penguin Group, Inc.
Published: 2007-07-15T05:00:00+00:00

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Taft University was the big school in the area. Its basketball teams went to the NCAA tournaments. Its football teams played in bowl games. Its campus was bigger than some towns. It had begun life as a lovely rural campus with a lot of red brick Georgian architecture and a green, open campus. After World War II, veterans financed by the GI Bill began to fill the campus, and when they graduated they stayed, and Walford, where the university was located, began to expand. The result was, sixty years later, that the town was now a small city, and the university was a hodgepodge. Some of the buildings looked like they’d been there since the eighteenth century. Some of them looked like vocational school projects. There was very little green remaining on the campus.

I drove out the fifteen miles from Boston on a fine Wednesday morning and parked in a faculty-only space beside the new library, which looked somewhat like a beached aircraft carrier. Inside the library, with the help of an alert librarian, I found a collection of college yearbooks dating back to 1911. I sat at a table, put the picture from Bob Johnson’s bureau on the table beside me, and began to look at the yearbooks. If Bob Johnson was forty now, and all was normal, he would have graduated around nineteen years ago. I started there. Things had apparently been normal. Because he was there, with the rest of his graduating class. He had more hair then, but he was pretty similar otherwise.

He’d been on the yearbook staff, a member of an organization called the Social Committee, the chess club, and something called the International Relations Club. They all sounded to me like résumé filler. There were scraps of meaningless, to me, phrases beside the pictures of the graduating seniors. For Johnson they were “…last of the great ones…yes, we’re related…farewell to Ike.”

That was all there was, four years of college. A degree in accounting. I went through the yearbook page by page. There was a picture of the chess club, but no sign of Bob. There were pictures of the Social Committee, and the International Relations Club. Again, no Bob. In fact in the whole yearbook, though I couldn’t make out everybody in all the pictures, I could find no other sign of Bob. In the faculty section was a picture of Bob’s father, Robert B. Johnson III, professor of Business Administration. He was a pleasant, rather good-looking guy. Bob resembled him.

I kept at it. I went back four years, looking for Bob. I could find him nowhere in any of the yearbooks. He’d changed enough so that among the several montage pages of uncaptioned snapshots, he might have been there and escaped my eye. Nonetheless, it seemed as if he had been preparing even then to be a man of mystery.

When I got through, I sat up straight and arched my back a little and looked around. There were undergraduates of all genders in the library; some were studying, many were socializing.

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