Michelle Harris and her toddling daughter stopped between the opened screen door and the opening front door. “Yes?” the elder Harris prompted.

“Sarah Breaux. We spoke on the phone.” Sarah did not extend her hand, for she had made a point of remaining below the crack-painted steps which led to Harris’s front porch.

“I didn’t know you would get here so soon.” Harris ignored her daughter’s demand of “Mommy” to be let into the house.

“Early bird catches the worm. May I come in?”

“I don’t know what to tell you, Miss Breaux. I went to college with him, and that’s it.” Michelle Harris’s hard visage looked across her kitchen table at the visitor who drank her coffee with milk.

“Exactly. Your maiden name was Morrison, so I assume you sat near him at commencement.”

“Next to him. But Ballinger College was a big school. The person on the other side I’d never met before in my life.”

Sarah raised her eyebrows over the lip of her cup. “So you had met Ingram Morris before?”

Michelle Harris paused in a shudder over her own cup. Then she let the cup down, slowly. “I’m the mother of a little girl these days, Miss Breaux.”

Sarah set her own cup down and made sure her smile was reassuring. “Understood.”

Harris raised her cup again. “You should try Michael Innis. He lives here in town. They were frat brothers.”

####

“Mister Innis?”