WHEN JILL SAW JANE THE afternoon after the Incense Night, she noticed Jane’s eyes sparkling, but she assumed it was because of her diet pills, not because she was spooked as Don thought. Jane had developed somewhat of a habit of taking uppers after she had gotten back from Iran and didn’t want to gain back all the weight she’d lost.
Jane told Jill that after she and Don had left, Lee had taken out pictures of his kids. He had confided in her about how distraught he was about being cut off from them. Jane had been feeling lonely herself. Jim had been away for most of the semester—recuperating and studying in Toronto—and his visit in October seemed like ages ago.
But Jill was confused when Jane kept going on and on about “how odd and strange and everything he was.” That he missed his children hardly seemed surprising. For the entire fall semester of 1968, Lee had made no secret of how upset he was about his impending divorce. She and Don both knew that when Lee visited a married couple he knew from the department, he gazed lovingly at their six-month-old daughter and asked to hold her. “I have two little girls,” he said. They handed her to him, and he cuddled her, and tears started running down his face.
It seemed to Jill that something else had happened that night that Jane didn’t feel ready to talk about.