Chapter 4

He shrugged. “Well, I’m not that smart, right? I mean, he really was intelligent. He just plain likedthinking. He said he liked to think about things.” The big man chuckled, his eyes still bright with tears.

I nodded. “Yeah. He was like that in college. He was essentially a dreamer.”

Horst nodded. “He said something like that once too.”

“You know,” I continued, “he could have done really well in college, but he didn’t seem capable of applying himself. He got average grades. Some nights I’d come back to our room and he’d be lying on his bed in the dark, hands behind his head, gazing up at the reflected light on the ceiling from the streetlamp outside.”

Horst nodded. “Yeah. He’d sit like that on the couch, or on the balcony, for hours at a time. But mostly he lay on his bed in his bedroom. He called it his inner sanctum.”

This brought me back to the matter at hand.

“There are—what—four bedrooms here? Are there other people living in them?”