"Saylor? I just want to tell you that I'm going to give you until tomorrow—"
"Listen, Jennings," Norman cut in sharply, "I hung up on you last night because you kept shouting into the phone. This threatening line won't do you any good."
The voice continued where it had broken off, growing dangerously high. "—until tomorrow to withdraw your charges and have me reinstated at Hempnell. If you don't—"
"I told you not to threaten. There were no charges. You just flunked out. If you want to talk it over reasonably, come and see me."
The voice at the other end of the line broke into a screaming obscene torrent of abuse, so loud that he could still hear it very plainly as he was placing the receiver back in the cradle.
Paranoid—that was the way it sounded.
Then he suddenly sat very still.
At twenty past one last night he had burned a charm supposedly designed to ward off evil influence from him. The last of Tansy's "hands."
At about the same time Margaret van Nice had decided to accuse him of seducing her, and Marvin Jennings had decided to make him responsible for an imaginary plot.
Next morning Hervey Sawtelle, poking around in the stacks, had found—