“Thomas Hollander,” she said. “The names are listed alphabetically.”
The door closed even in that short second which preceded his thanks. It was a gesture of retreat from hinted intimacies. It wasn’t so much the door of the room she had closed as it was the door guarding her secrets. He felt that she wanted to show him she had already repented of having gone so far—not that she had gone any distance, really, but there were beacons, faint pin points of light toward which he would chart a course over the surface of her troubled seas.
He took the reference book and sat down. He began with A and started to go systematically through it. At H he fixed in his memory the street and telephone number of Hollander’s house. He continued without interest to turn the pages.
At the end of the M ’s he came, to his marked bewilderment, upon the address and telephone number of Marge Myles.