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In the midwinter-shortened days of 1974, Seattle’s morning rush-hour traffic began in the dark, usually in the rain. Out of the suburbs and neighborhoods, the headlights of the morning migration pointed inward toward the city. Over the sounds of traffic and the monotonous lapping of wiper blades on wet windshields, drivers turned up car radios to hear the latest on Watergate.
At the top of the news for commuters that morning was President Nixon’s State of the Union message from the night before, January 31. His recorded voice was making a vow: “I have no intention whatever of ever walking away from the job that the people elected me to do.”
Those dark days of the so-called Boeing recession—a painful memory for Seattle and the state—had passed. Seattle’s economy was on the upturn. Boeing had many orders for new jets and was recruiting workers around the nation. The recovery and its new growth were not without problems. In an area where people held a possessive, protective affection for their uncrowded life-style and environment, there was resistance to sudden growth—especially the growth-at-any-price phenomenon which had arrived at, and, it seemed, despoiled other regions of the West.
One bumper sticker in the flow of traffic urged, “Don’t Californicate Washington.”
Among America’s cities, Seattle, at the beginning of 1974, remained a rather fresh, cheerful adolescent. It had been spared the problem of chronic, violent crime which flourished in the streets of many larger cities. Surrounding the city, rural King County, with a population of about 400,000, had only six murders during the preceding year—twenty-two fewer than the FBI’s national population and crime statistics indicated it could have expected. “Where’d we go wrong?” asked one King County homicide detective with a pleased grin.
The sparkling rivers of commuter headlights, reflecting on wet roadways, continued into the city on the north-south freeway and, from the east, over the two floating bridges which cross Lake Washington. Although the climate of Puget Sound can be wet and gloomy, most of its residents considered it worth enduring the drizzle to be able to live near so many shorelines, lakes, and mountains—places for boating, fishing, and camping. In an increasing number of homes, families kept a full set of ski equipment for Mom, Dad, and each of the kids. It was possible, after work that day, to drive the whole family to a nearby mountain for skiing.
The cheerful feminine voice on the radio was reminding commuters of that possibility:
“Hi, skiers. This is Lynda with your Cascade Mountain ski report for Thursday. All areas are operating and all areas are reporting new snow. Snoqualmie Pass is reporting eight inches of new snow for a sixty-eight inch total. Crystal Mountain reports ten inches of new snow. ...”
* * *
Beginning early in the morning, that clear, youthful voice with the latest ski news was being heard each day on several radio stations around the Pacific Northwest, a promotion broadcast for Northwest Skier magazine. For twenty-one-year-old Lynda Ann Healy, the girl with that melodic voice, her morning radio work was a handy part-time job. She was a psychology major at the University of Washington.
A tall, slender, pretty girl with long brown hair, Lynda had settled in with some other young women students in one of the many old two-story houses near the university campus. Lynda and another girl had adjoining basement rooms in the old house.
Her morning radio job meant rolling out of bed early. At her bedside, Lynda’s clock radio was regularly set for 5:30. She had just enough time to dress, push her bike up a couple of concrete steps from the basement and out the side door to a sidewalk. Lynda enjoyed her solitary morning bike ride through the quiet residential neighborhood in the predawn, past the businesses of the U District, then over to the storefront office of Northwest Skier on Northeast 45th Street.
There she and other girls doing the ski reports had to work swiftly. Speed was important. The ski operators wanted to reach the radio listeners in the morning commuter traffic.
Lynda was reliable. So her absence was conspicuous that Friday morning, February 1. When Lynda hadn’t appeared at her job by 6:30, Betty Bowen, her supervisor, thought she might have overslept. Betty telephoned Lynda’s residence and heard, at the other end of the line, the drowsy voice of a housemate explain that Lynda must be on her way. Lynda’s clock radio had gone off as usual.
But then Karen, the housemate, also noticed that Lynda’s bicycle was still in the basement, in the place Lynda always kept it, outside her room. The bedcovers had been pulled up over Lynda’s bed, too. That was unusual. In her morning rush to get to work, Lynda usually didn’t bother to make her bed.
Through the day, after telephone calls between Lynda’s mother, her supervisor at the job, and the other girls at the house, everyone began to feel uneasy. Lynda had invited her parents to the house for dinner that evening. To anyone who knew her, it made no sense that Lynda would have gone away somewhere without telling anyone. When police were summoned to the old house, Joanne Testa, another housemate, told them, “We think something’s really wrong.” She showed the officers Lynda’s bed. When the covers had been pulled down, they discovered some blood on the pillow and more blood on the sheet. In Lynda’s closet they found the short, cream-colored nightie Lynda had worn to bed. Around the seam of the garment, on the shoulder and back, there were more bloodstains.
One of the officers theorized that Lynda might have had a nosebleed or something in the middle of the night, then gotten out of bed and gone somewhere. Lynda’s parents and other girls insisted that hadn’t happened. “This is serious,” said one of the girls. Seattle Police Sergeant Tom Burke arrived at the house, looked over the scene, and made a detailed report. He tried to piece together Lynda’s movements the night before.
During the early evening she had spent some time at Dante’s tavern, one of several student beer-drinking hangouts. Around 9:30 she had walked home with two friends. After arriving there, Lynda had gone downstairs to her basement room, undressed, slipped into her nightie, and then returned upstairs to the living room. She lounged there in an easy chair for a while, watching television. The prime show that night was CBS’s “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman.” Around midnight, after a conversation with Joanne about routine things, including her planned dinner with her parents and a psychology quiz next day, Lynda went downstairs to bed.
Karen arrived home a little later. She, too, remained upstairs for a while talking with Joanne. It might have been 1:30 when Karen went downstairs to her bed. As she crossed the open area of the concrete basement floor, approaching her own room, Karen noticed that, beyond the draped entryway, Lynda’s room was dark. Apparently Lynda was asleep.
Only a thin partition separated Lynda’s and Karen’s basement rooms. They weren’t exactly rooms, with construction walls—just areas divided by partitions of half-inch plywood. As Karen slept in her bed Lynda would have been sleeping only a few feet away, beyond that plywood. “I’m normally a light sleeper,” Karen told the officer. “But I didn’t hear a thing.”
The top bed sheet was missing. Lynda’s pink satin pillowcase, which the other girls said was always there, was now gone. Examining Lynda’s wardrobe, her roommates decided that some items of her clothing also were gone: her bell-bottomed blue jeans, white blouse, hiking boots, and yellow ski cap. Her red knapsack with the gray stripes was also missing.
Girls frequently wander away impulsively, for any number of reasons but the Seattle police concluded that Lynda wasn’t the type for a flight of impulse. Something had happened to her. That seemed obvious. The investigators concluded that someone, standing outdoors in the darkness, in the narrow stretch of lawn on the south side of the house, could have peered down into Lynda’s room as she undressed. Then it would have been possible for that someone to enter the door on the north side of the house—none of the other girls could be sure whether or not the door was locked or unlocked—and slip down the stairs into the basement, into Lynda’s room. And then? Perhaps he used a knife to wound her, to frighten her into silence, forcing her to dress and accompany him somewhere. They could only guess. But why, they wondered, had Karen, sleeping just beyond the thin wall, heard nothing? Or had Lynda been taken out in that hour and a half or so, after midnight, before Karen came downstairs to her room?
Lynda’s disappearance became news a few days later. A Seattle Times article, reporting the police puzzlement over the mystery, quoted a homicide detective: “We have interviewed seventy-two people and haven’t learned what might have happened to her. We have talked with every guy she dated since age fifteen, and you’d be proud to have any of them as your son. It doesn’t look good. It doesn’t look good at all.”
The article’s headline, After She Put Out The Light, What Evil Crept In? was to be the first of a series of troubling headlines.
That investigation led Seattle police back to another house a few blocks away in the University District. A vicious crime had occurred there twenty-seven nights before Lynda’s disappearance. In an older house in the 4300 block on Eighth Avenue Northeast, Sharon Clarke also lived in a basement apartment. Sharon, a pretty young woman, had been upstairs watching television until quite late. Around two o’clock that morning she went downstairs to her bed in the basement.
Throughout the following day her housemates—all young men—noticed she hadn’t been up and around. One of them late in the day approached Sharon’s bed. Seeing the covers drawn over her head, he called her name. There was no reply. When he drew back the covers, he recoiled at the sight of all the blood. Her face was covered with dried blood, and her hair was a matted crimson. Blood had soaked into the pillow and sheets. With a faint moan, she coughed up more blood. She was still alive.
Sharon was rushed to a hospital. To the surprise of the attending doctors, she lived. She had massive skull fractures and severe internal injuries. Other residents of the house told police they thought that a steel reinforcing rod, which had been outside the house, was missing.
An investigator stood in the narrow side yard of that house, and concluded it was almost identical to the setting where Lynda had disappeared. Someone could have stood there and looked down through a curtainless basement window as Sharon had prepared for bed. Then he could have slipped through a side door—a door trustingly left unlocked—and descended the few steps into the basement.
During her long, slow recovery, Sharon was questioned by police, but she could remember nothing of what had happened to her. She had suffered partial amnesia as a result of the beating. Police tried hypnosis on the girl, hoping that, through a heightening of her recall, she might be able to grasp some memory of the attack. It didn’t work. Police concluded that Sharon’s assailant must have knocked her unconscious while she slept, with the first crushing blow from that steel rod.
* * *
The Evergreen State College campus was located in a remote, meditative place, surrounded by a dense evergreen forest, a few miles east of the state capitol at Olympia. By that autumn 1974 quarter, its enrollment still hadn’t reached 3,000. Not far away, in the legislature, Evergreen became a pet target of criticism for conservative legislators. They grumbled about Evergreen’s cost, its “frills,” its soaring per-student cost of operation, and the “hippie atmosphere” which seemed to prevail on the campus. One lawmaker delivered a speech of outrage, detailing what the kids’ dogs were doing to the expensive carpeting in the library.
For many students, though, Evergreen’s atmosphere was exhilarating. Many gifted instructors were drawn to it by the academic freedom and creativity it encouraged.
Blue-eyed, brown-haired Donna Gail Manson, a petite nineteen-year-old was naturally drawn to Evergreen. She had always insisted on and savored her personal independence. That trait in their daughter was accepted, though occasionally with some reservation, by her conservative parents. Lyle Manson was a music instructor in the Seattle school system; Marie Manson was a part-time legal secretary and church choir director.
It was the evening of Tuesday, March 12, 1974. In her room at the student residence hall, Donna sat cross-legged on the floor, playing her flute for a while. Then she rose and began preparing to go out for the evening. She stood in front of her mirror, head tilted, brushing her long brown hair. Her roommate, Deanna Ray, recalled that Donna changed clothes, fussing with her appearance. Donna was going across campus to attend a concert in the student lounge. Some of the students and faculty members would be fooling around with jazz, improvising. Donna’s father played jazz—his preference was Dixieland—and so she’d grown up with music.
Around seven o’clock, before she left, Donna stirred some vegetable beef soup in a pan on the stove and turned the burner knob down to “warm.” She was wearing green pants and a bright striped shirt of red, orange, and green. Donna pulled on a long, warm fuzzy black coat and left the apartment.
Donna liked old-fashioned things. That fake-fur coat she was wearing had been her grandmother’s. Wearing it, Donna, who was only about five feet tall, looked like a little bear cub, her friends told her. But that night the old coat was surely warm as Donna began her walk across the campus in the chilly, wet blackness.
From Donna’s residence, the building where the concert was held would have been, perhaps, a five-minute stroll. Much of the route was in partial darkness. There were scattered lights along the campus pathways.
Donna never reached the jazz concert.
Several days later some local police officers in the small town of Auburn arrived at the front door of the Manson home to tell Lyle and Marie that their daughter had apparently run away from the Evergreen campus. The parents felt an instant uneasiness.
“She hasn’t run away,” said Donna’s mother with certainty. “Something’s happened to her.”
Just the night before that concert, Marie Manson had had a long conversation on the phone with Donna. “Mom,” Donna had said, “when we get to spring break at school, I’d really like to take a trip out to the ocean with you.” Donna loved the ocean beach, where she could walk the vast expanse of wet sand, watch the crashing waves, search for seashells, and watch for the treasures of smoothed, sculptured driftwood tossed in by the waves.
Her mother had told Donna on the telephone that the trip to the ocean sounded like a good idea. Marie thought she could get away from home for a few days. “Dad and Jimmy can batch it for a week,” she’d told Donna. There was a gas shortage, and the drive to the ocean would be a long one, but Marie had told her daughter, “We’ll find a way.”
After he got the news from the police, Lyle Manson drove quickly to the Evergreen campus to find out what had happened. Donna’s roommate had delayed reporting the disappearance for a few days. Even though the pot of soup had been left on the stove, the other girl assumed Donna had just impetuously decided to go away for a while. At the college, Thurston County Sheriff’s Detective Paul Barclift tried to give some assurance to the worried father. “Maybe,” reasoned Barclift, “she just went off somewhere with some boyfriend. That’s the way these things usually turn out around here.”
Lyle Manson’s stern Scotsman’s face showed cold disagreement. No, he said—Donna had no need to run away. “We’ve always given her freedom.” Lyle and the detective walked to the residence hall, to Donna’s room. She had left behind all her money, her toilet articles, the other things which she would have taken with her had she gone off somewhere voluntarily. The detective shuffled through some of Donna’s papers and her address book, looking for something that could be a helpful lead. Swallowing hard, Lyle Manson picked up his daughter’s flute and held it—gently. He knew Donna was gone and something serious had happened to her.
* * *
Eastward out of Seattle, Interstate 90 ascends through foothills densely covered by rain-loving cedar, Douglas fir and pine, to cross the Cascade Mountains at Snoqualmie Pass. From there, beyond the mountains eastward, the terrain becomes more open and arid—a rolling country of pine-topped ridges, bare buttes, and flatlands. In April 1974, spring again was retouching the winter-dulled landscape around the small town of Ellensburg. Cottonwoods along the Yakima River had a new sprouting of foliage, the hay crop in farm fields was greening, and newborn colts were making their wobbly-legged debut on the ranches. Ellensburg is mostly a ranch town, a trucker town, a rodeo town, comfortable in denims and boots. Its biggest and steadiest industry is the college—Central Washington University. That spring its enrollment was nearly 7,000 students.
At a ranch five miles out of town, the campus police chief, Al Pickles, was settling into the saddle of a horse in the paddock of a riding stable when he noticed one of the white campus police cars braking to a stop near the fence. Whatever it was, Pickles thought, something important must have happened. The man climbing out of the car, waving at him, was Robert Miller, the dean of students.
“Hey, Al, Al,” the dean shouted. “C’mon over.”
Pickles jogged the horse over to the fence, swung out of the saddle, and tied the reins to a fence rail.
“What’s up?” he asked.
“Al,” said the dean, “we’ve got a girl missing.”
“A girl missing?”
“One girl student just told me about it. Her roommate left the residence hall for a meeting last night and never came back.”
“I’ll be right in,” said the chief.
After he reached his office, Pickles interviewed the roommate, Diana Pitt. She was in tears. The night before, said Diana—Wednesday, April 17—her roommate, Susan Rancourt, had gone out to attend a meeting across campus, at Munson Hall. On her way to that meeting, Susan had put some clothes in one of the washing machines in the basement of the dorm. She hadn’t returned. The clothes had been left in the washer.
“All her things, her bike, her wallet—all her ID—are still in the room,” said Diana. “It isn’t like Susan at all. Just to go off.”
Pickles jotted down a description of the missing girl:
Susan Rancourt, 18, 5’2”, 118 pounds, blonde hair to shoulders, straight and parted in the middle, blue eyes, light complexion ... Additionally described by roommate as busty ... Last seen wearing yellow, short-sleeved sweater, gray cord pants, brown Hushpuppies, yellow coat. Personality described as shy, quiet, withdrawn (lately trying to meet new people ...).
The chief studied a photo of Susan. Against a campus background, strolling along a walkway, Susan was looking back, smiling, over her shoulder. Bright smile, beautiful girl, Pickles thought. Susan had been a high-school cheerleader, and Pickles vaguely remembered her as one of those students who’d been in that early-morning jogging class he attended.
When Susan’s parents arrived from Anchorage, the mother examined Susan’s medicine cabinet. Susan’s dental floss was there. That, concluded Mrs. Rancourt, was the proof that something serious had happened. Susan would never go anywhere without her dental floss. Dental care was important to Susan. She’d had extensive dental work—ceramic crowns and bridgework.
“She lived for each day and was a happy girl,” said Susan’s father. “She would get up in the morning and just be very vibrant and knew exactly what she wanted to do and went ahead and did it. And this ... this ... is just completely out of character for her.”
Time and again, in daylight and darkness, the campus chief walked pathways across the campus, following the route he thought Susan might have taken after she left her meeting at Munson Hall. One night, with another campus officer, Cheryl Schmeitzer, the chief again walked the most likely route—from Munson Hall, past the front steps of the library, then north and east in front of Black Hall, onto Chestnut Street, and from there northward.
Where Chestnut Street emerged from its underpass beneath the railroad tracks, Pickles observed, “It’s darker ’n hell right over there.” He pointed to a place just north of the tracks, where the roadway turned to parallel the rail line. “You could park a car in there and nobody’d ever see it.”
Schmeitzer nodded. The spot was in deep darkness, just beyond the campus lights. They searched the ground there, but found nothing.
Among the Central students who had read and talked about Susan’s disappearance were two young women who had paid scant attention to separate nighttime encounters they had had with a young man on the campus around that time. In each instance, the coed had encountered a man outside the library. He appeared to have an injury to one arm and was fumbling with some books. Each girl had offered to help the man by carrying his books for him. Each girl had been led from the steps of the library to that darkened area just beyond the railroad underpass where his Volkswagen was parked. Each girl had felt uneasy about the man and had fled quickly. Nothing had really happened. Neither girl had bothered to make a report to anyone.
* * *
“It’s probably not related, I guess,” said Bill Harris. “We’re so far south of you. But we’ve got a missing girl down here. ...”
Harris, campus security chief at Oregon State University, was having a telephone conversation with a detective to the north, in Washington State.
Harris’ small office was in an obscure place, tucked away at the mezzanine level of Gill Coliseum, OSU’s basketball arena. From his desk, through a window, Harris looked down onto a campus bathed in brilliant mid-May sunshine.
“She was walking across the campus last night, and that was the last time she was seen.”
At the other end of Harris’ long-distance call was Paul Barclift, a detective in Olympia, about 200 miles to the north. “Left all her things behind in the room,” Harris went on. “Even left her study lamp turned on.”
That sounded familiar to Barclift. He was investigating the disappearance of Donna Manson at Evergreen—Donna had left a pan of soup to warm on the stove in her room the night she disappeared.
Harris described the missing OSU coed: Roberta Kathleen Parks, always known as Kathy; pretty, slim, long, blonde hair, parted in the middle. A sensitive young woman, Kathy had been upset the night she disappeared, Harris explained. Kathy’s father, in Lafayette, California, had suffered a heart attack. Kathy had been concerned, restless. She had decided to take a walk that evening—May 12—across the campus. It was quite warm. While she was walking near the student union building, she had encountered a girlfriend. They talked for a few minutes. The other girl invited Kathy to her room. “No, thanks,” Kathy had replied. “I just want to walk for a little while.” She continued onward, across a rather well-lighted part of the pretty tree-lined campus. Walking the route she was on, Kathy would have reached the business district of Corvallis within a few more minutes. But no one had seen her there. Or anywhere since she talked with that other girl.
Barclift and Harris agreed there were eerie similarities between Kathy’s disappearance and Donna’s. Barclift mentioned the disappearance of the girl in Seattle and the missing coed across the mountains at the campus in Ellensburg. But the officers agreed it would be far-fetched to assume some connection between a missing girl at Oregon State and the Washington State coeds. Seattle was about 250 miles north of Corvallis. Then Ellensburg would be another 140 miles to the east.
It might seem far-fetched as hell, Barclift reflected afterward. Nevertheless, he gathered identifications of the missing girls from each campus and, on the authority of Sheriff Don Jennings, issued a regional police teletype. Directed to northern California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Montana police, it summarized a possible pattern of disappearances:
All four females ... ages 18–21, are considered attractive. They all were attending colleges or universities located on or near an interstate highway. All disappeared, telling no one that they were leaving and they took no personal belongings with them. Request other agencies with similar disappearances to contact Detective Barclift, tele 206-753-8122 or write to Thurston County Sheriff’s Office. ...
* * *
In early June 1974, with a summer vacation approaching, there was no widespread feeling of fear on the college campuses—yet.
It was a warm night in Seattle. Occasional sounds of laughter and stereo music came from the fraternity and sorority houses of “Greek Row,” just north of the University of Washington campus.
It remained rather noisy along the Row until past midnight. The date was June 11. At one of the houses in the block north of 47th Street there had been a “welcome summer” beer party. Together Georgann Hawkins and Jennifer Roberts, her sorority sister, were returning from that party, walking south on 17th Avenue, when Georgann paused in front of the Beta Theta Pi fraternity house. She told Jennifer she was going to drop into the Beta house to say good night to her boyfriend. Jennifer continued her stroll along the sidewalk to their sorority house at the far end of the block.
Georgann, a radiant, eighteen-year-old from the Tacoma area, had, understandably, been one of the community Daffodil Festival princesses during her high-school years; a pretty, brown-haired, brown-eyed girl, an outstanding student. She entered the Beta house and talked for a while with Marvin, her boyfriend, as he wearily finished his homework.
Later Georgann left the fraternity house through a rear exit, stepping into a brightly-illuminated alleyway, a familiar block-long tunnel of light and human presence leading “home”—southward a block to the rear entry of her sorority house.
When she stepped into the alleyway she heard her name being called: “Hi, George!” Georgann tilted her face upward where she saw, leaning from a window of the fraternity house, Duane Covey, a friend. “Hi, Duane,” she replied. She stood there for a few moments talking with Duane. She looked especially glowing, even in the artificial light of the alleyway. Georgann had picked up a healthy suntan in the first sunny days of spring. It was getting late, she told Duane—after one o’clock. “I’ve got a Spanish test tomorrow,” she told him. With a wave and an “Adios,” she turned to her right and resumed her stroll down the alleyway toward her sorority house.
From that window, Duane could watch Georgann, in her red, white, and blue blouse, navy-blue pants, and white canvas shoes, as she walked—in the lights of that alleyway. Her sorority house door was perhaps 200 feet distant. Given the angle of his vision, Duane could see her until she was within perhaps a few seconds of her doorway.
In those seconds, Georgann disappeared.
* * *
Next day Georgann’s roommate, Laura Heffron, worriedly told the house mother that Georgann hadn’t returned to their room. At first the house mother’s report to the Seattle Police Department stirred no response. But Laura’s father, Norm Heffron, a news executive at KING-TV, made certain that a report on Georgann’s disappearance was on the station’s evening newscast. Another co-ed had vanished. Then came a heavy police response.
Detectives swarmed into Greek Row, questioning anyone who might have been in the vicinity. During the afternoon, standing in the alley, Captain Herb Swindler, new chief of the homicide and robbery detail of SPD, studied the scene. Beside him, Sergeant Ivan Beeson pointed to the spot where Georgann had stood, talking with Duane, beneath the window of the Beta house. “She was right here, and then she started walking down the alley there,” the sergeant explained. Not far from where she had stood, two people sat in a parked car. “They could see her walking almost all the way, too,” Beeson added.
The two officers walked the route Georgann had walked. On their left were the rear walls of the fraternity and sorority houses—a mixture of frame and brick with numerous doors and windows. On the opposite side of the alley, to the officers’ right, buildings were scattered. There were some open parking areas.
Swindler puzzled over it. “All kinds of activity in here. Kids up late. Windows open. But nobody saw or heard a damned thing.”
The sergeant nodded.
“Whoever took her,” Swindler mused, “she must have gone willingly for some reason.” Perhaps, he thought, it was someone she knew. Or perhaps someone pretending to be a policeman. “Well,” concluded the captain, “I’ll bet anything it’s tied in with those others. I know damned well it is. And we’ve got another loser. No body. Nothing.”
The captain had a personal thought about the special vulnerability of the cheerful, outgoing young women of a college campus. “Y’know,” said Swindler, “I’ve got a girl here now. My own daughter’s a student here.”
* * *
After a few changing directions in her life, Cathy Swindler had decided she wanted to be a journalist. So, that spring of ’74, she had become a communications major at the University of Washington. Earlier, Cathy had taken a few months away from college to live and work in New York City. Now she was happy to be back in her hometown, applying herself in a field which interested her.
Emerging from the Communications Building, carrying her books, Cathy stepped into the sunshine of that spring day, leisurely descended a few brick steps to the flow of students criss-crossing the campus between classes. Suddenly, among the passing young faces, she noticed that especially familiar one, the face of the young man to whom she’d been so attracted six years earlier—Ted Bundy.
He was riding his bicycle along the street, moving slowly through the traffic of bikes and pedestrians.
They saw each other. Cathy wanted to grin and wave and shout, “Hi, Ted!”
But somehow she didn’t. “It was a noncontact, really,” she reflected later. “We both looked at each other. And we saw each other. But we didn’t say anything to each other. I often wondered why I didn’t say anything.”
Ted looked great, she remembered. Impeccable. On his ten-speed he appeared to be on his way to a tennis match, probably from his apartment near the edge of the campus. His tennis racket was tucked into a backpack. Ted was dressed almost exactly the way Cathy remembered him that day, in his apartment years before, when he taught her to play chess. He was wearing a white T-shirt, tennis shorts, socks, and shoes—his tennis whites.