through or languish for years. I’ve been able to help plenty of the
languishers and I tried to help Dawn. But she rejected counseling.
Didn’t show up for appointments, made excuses, kept saying she could
handle it, just needed more TIME I never felt I was getting through
to her. I was at the point of considering dropping her from the
program. Then she was..
She rubbed a fingertip over one blood-colored nail. “I suppose none of
that seems very important now. Would you like a chocolate?”
“No, thanks.”
She looked down at the truffles. Closed the box.
“Consider that little speech,” she said, “as an elongated answer to
your question about her disks. But yes, I did boot them up, and there
was nothing meaningful on them. She’d accomplished nothing on the
dissertation. As a matter of fact, I hadn’t even bothered to look at
them when your Mr. Huenengarth showed up-had put them away and
forgotten about them, I was so upset by her death. Going through that
locker felt ghoulish enough. But he made such a point of trying to get
them that I booted them up the moment he was gone. It was worse than
I’d imagined. All she’d produced, after all my encouragement, were
statements and restatements of her hypotheses and a random numbers
table.”
A random numbers table?”
“For random sampling. You know how it’s done, I’m sure.
I nodded. “Generate a collection of random numbers with a computer or
some other technique, then use it to select subjects from a general
pool. If the table says five, twenty-three, seven, choose the fifth,
twenty-third, and seventh people on the list.”
“Exactly. Dawn’s table was huge-øthousands of numbers. Pages and
pages generated on the department’s mainframe. What a foolish waste of
computer TIME She was nowhere near ready to select her sample.
Hadn’t even gotten her basic methodology straight.”
“What was her research topic?”
“Predicting cancer incidence by geographical location. That’s as
specific as she’d gotten. It was really pathetic, reading those
disks.
Even the little bit she had written was totally unacceptable.
Disorganized, out of sequence. I had to wonder if indeed she had been
using drugs.”
“Did she show any other signs of that?”
“I suppose the unreliability could be considered a symptom.
And sometimes she did seem agitated-almost manic. Trying to convince
me or herself that she was making progress. But I know she wasn’t
taking amphetamines. She gained lots of weight over the last four
years-at least forty pounds. She was actually quite pretty when she
enrolled.”
“Could be cocaine,” I said.
“Yes, I suppose so, but I’ve seen the same things happen to students
who weren’t on drugs. The stress of grad school can drive anyone
temporarily mad.”
“How true,” I said.
She rubbed her nails, glanced over at the photos of her family.
“When I found out she’d been murdered, it changed my perception of
her.
Up till then I’d been absolutely furious with her. But hearing about
her death-the way she’d been found. . . well, I just felt sorry for
her. The police told me she was dressed like some kind of
punkrocker.
It made me realize she’d had an outside life she’d kept hidden from
me.
She was simply one of those people to whom the world of ideas would
never be important.”
“Could her lack of motivation have been due to an independent
income?”
“Oh, no,” she said. “She was poor. When I accepted her she begged me
to get her funding, told me she couldn’t enroll without it.
I thought of the carefree attitude about money she’d shown the
Murtaughs. The brand-new car she’d died in.
“What about her family?” I said.
“I seem to remember there was a mother an alcoholic. But the policemen
said they hadn’t been able to locate anyone to claim the body. We
actually took up a collection here at the school in order to bury
her.”
“Sad.”
“Extremely.”
“What part of the country was she from?” I said.
“Somewhere back east. No, she wasn’t a rich girl, Dr. Delaware.
Her lack of drive was due to something else.”
“How did she react to losing her fellowship?”
“She didn’t react at all. I’d expected some anger, tears,
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