Quoth the Raven (19 page)

Then she turned her head, directly into the light, and he saw it, through the tears and the chalky deadness of the white makeup plastered over her sickly pale skin: Chessey Flint.

G
REGOR DEMARKIAN HAD NEVER
had the kind of shoulder women liked to cry on. He had never gotten into the habit of offering tea and sympathy to women he didn’t know. And yet, walking over to Chessey Flint, he really had no particular intention but to offer sympathy. He was aware that she might know where Jack Carroll was, and that that was important to him. He was aware that she had been in the dining room this afternoon, and that that was important to him, too. He just didn’t have any urge to ask her about any of these things while she was sitting all huddled up like that, all small and weak and sad.

He maneuvered his way around a tall boy who seemed to be dressed up as the Straw Man from
The Wizard of Oz
, thought about sitting down beside Miss Flint without a word, and decided against it. He stopped directly in front of her instead, and cleared his throat.

“Miss Flint?” he said.

Chessey Flint looked up, blinked a little at the contrast between the harsh light around her and the shadowed place his face was in, and said, “Oh. Mr. Demarkian. It’s you.”

“Would you mind if I sat down for a moment? I came out looking for your friend, Mr. Carroll. I haven’t found him and I haven’t found anything else, either. I seem to be lost.”

“It’s easy to be lost out here,” Chessey Flint said. Then she brushed at the surface of the step beside her, as if she had to clear it off for him, even though it was empty. “I’m sorry,” she told him. “Of course you can sit down. I’m just a little—out of it tonight.”

“I don’t think I blame you.”

“You mean because of this afternoon? I don’t blame me either. I don’t see how Jack can—” She waved a hand feebly in the direction of the crowd and shook her head. “He’s out there in the middle of it all, doing what he always does, just as if it didn’t matter. I asked him how he could go through with it and all he said was it was his responsibility.”

“You don’t consider that an explanation?”

“No, Mr. Demarkian, I don’t. I suppose you’re going to go all male and self-righteous on me and tell me I ought to, but I don’t. I don’t have much respect for feminists, but at least I’ll give them this. All that groaning and bellowing men do about how they have to be responsible even if it means putting their emotions in the deep freeze is just so much stupidity.”

“Does your Mr. Carroll have a great deal of responsibility? Is he going to be tied up all night?”

“Jack? No, Mr. Demarkian, not all night. It’s, what? About six thirty?”

“About that.”

“They judge the talent contest at seven. Then Jack hands out the trophy. After that, he’s free and clear for the rest of the night. If he wants to be.”

“Well, then,” Gregor said, “I hope he wants to be. I want to go up to the parking lot, to that shack where the tools are to fix the cars. Father Tibor said Mr. Carroll knew something about it.”

“Oh, he does,” Chessey agreed. “He’s a licensed mechanic. Jack knows a lot about a lot of things.”

“Do you like that?”

Chessey Flint didn’t answer. She had lapsed into a private reverie, chin propped up on the palm of her hand, sharp point of her elbow digging into the top of her knee. Gregor didn’t feel right about interrupting her, so he lapsed into a private reverie of his own. He couldn’t see through the crowd to the Minuteman statue, but he knew that the boy in white tie and tails must have stopped performing. Up until a little while ago, he had been able to see the green glow of the boy’s ghost wand poking up above the heads of the people around him. Now the air above that space in the center was occupied by nothing but the light of the lamps shining into it. Instead of cheering and clapping their feet, the watching crowd was laughing.

Suddenly, Chessey Flint sat up straight, stretched out both her arms and legs in a ritual motion of unkinking, and said, “Mr. Demarkian? Can I ask you something?”

“Yes,” Gregor told her, “of course.”

“Jack said he thought you thought that—that the person who did that to Miss Veer wasn’t really looking to do it to Miss Veer. That it was just someone on the cafeteria staff who put that stuff in something it wouldn’t be noticed in, like a peanut butter sandwich, and then just left it out for anyone to take and get hurt by it. Is that what you think?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

Gregor, thought about skirting the whole question. It wasn’t his investigation. He hadn’t even been asked to help yet. He had no idea what David Markham did or did not want generally known. To tell Chessey Flint only that such an explanation didn’t feel right, though, would offend her—and she would have a right to be offended. She was treating him like a human being and she had a right to be treated like one by him.

He wrapped his arms around his knees and gave it to her, the whole thing, from why the lye couldn’t have been in Miss Veer’s tea to the utter lack of anything else it could have been in anywhere in the premises after Miss Veer had fallen to the floor. Chessey listened to him in silence, her large eyes wide and trained determinedly on his face. When he was done, she stretched again and sat back.

“I see,” she said. “I shouldn’t have said Jack thought you thought it was one of the cafeteria workers. That wasn’t quite what he was getting at. I don’t think he knows what to think.”

“What do you think?”

“I don’t know.” Chessey sighed. “I was sitting very close, you know. At one of the tables in the first line beyond the cash register, right on that side of the room. I was even looking straight at her when she started to fall. I just wasn’t paying any attention.”

“Had a lot on your mind?”

Chessey snorted. “I always seem to have a lot on my mind these days, Mr. Demarkian. I don’t think I like being a senior much. It’s confusing.”

“So is being fifty-five and retired. Life is confusing.”

“Maybe. But you know, Mr. Demarkian, I keep thinking about it. I was looking at it and I was not looking at it. I keep thinking I must have seen something. And all I can remember, really all I can remember, is thinking that Dr. Elkinson looks better with her hair back in a scarf.”

“Dr. Elkinson?”

“Dr. Elkinson was standing at the cash register with Miss Veer,” Chessey said. “They were just standing there talking, right inside the place where you have to pay, near the cans of Coke and Pepsi and that kind of thing. And then Dr. Crockett came up, and I got a little angry.”

“Why?”

“Sort of as a matter of principle. He’s been taking up a lot of Jack’s time lately, with the rock-climbing and the cabin on Hillman’s Rock and all that sort of thing. Did you know that Jack was a rock-climber?”

“From what I’ve heard,” Gregor said, “practically everyone around here is a rock-climber.”

Chessey nodded. “Practically everyone in the Program is, anyway. Dr. Crockett’s always been the adviser for the Climbing Club and he’s very popular. Even most of the faculty have gotten sucked into it at one time or another. Dr. Elkinson, Dr. Branch. I think it put Dr. Crockett’s nose a little out of joint when Dr. Steele came and it turned out he was a world-class climber too.”

“Dr. Steele.” Gregor rubbed his chin. “I keep hearing about this Dr. Steele, but I never actually see him. Isn’t he new on campus this term? Shouldn’t he be around?”

“Oh, he should be around all right, Mr. Demarkian, he just isn’t. Nobody’s seen him for a couple of days. It’s been a little weird, if you want to know the truth. Usually you can’t get rid of him. Anyway. About this afternoon. Dr. Crockett came up, and then Jack came up from the other end of the line. When I was first looking at them—at Dr. Elkinson and Dr. Crockett and Miss Veer—they were all talking together, but when Jack came up he and Dr. Crockett sort of split off by themselves. And I thought, well, if I don’t like it I ought to do something about it. I’m supposed to be all grown up. So I did.”

“Do something about it?” Gregor asked.

“That’s right. I went up, got Jack by the arm, and dragged him back to the table.”

“Then what happened?”

Chessey shrugged. “I don’t know. That was the point where I really stopped paying attention. To them, anyway. I had a lot to talk about with Jack. The next thing I knew, Miss Veer dropped her tray, the teacup smashed on the floor, and Dr. Elkinson started screaming.”

Out in the thickness of the crowd, a roar went up, raucous and hysterical, and people began to stamp their feet. Chessey Flint stood up, climbed a couple of steps to give herself more height, and craned her neck.

“That’s the voice vote starting,” she said. “I think this time Freddie’s going to end up winning it. I hope he does. This is the fourth time he’s tried in four years.”

She climbed back down to where Gregor was and began doing things to her costume, making it puff out the way it was supposed to. To Gregor, she looked better than she had—much better than when he’d first sat down. He found it a relief. At least she wasn’t crying anymore.

She sat down on the step beside him again and said, “It won’t be very long now. Then I’ll corral Jack for you and you can take him off to the tool shed. I hope you don’t mind getting your clothes in a mess.”

O
NE OF THE THINGS
Gregor Demarkian had noticed in his last years at the Bureau—and he hadn’t noticed much; he was too caught up in Elizabeth’s dying—was how different the new men coming in from Quantico were from the men who had come in before them. It was the men in particular who had worried him. The new women were much more like the women the Bureau had always attracted than they wanted to admit, even if they did have new job titles and new responsibilities. Gregor sometimes thought it must be very difficult to force a woman not to grow up. When the Bureau had first decided to accept women as working agents, Gregor had gone to the library and taken out a pile of books on feminism. He had read his way through not only Friedan and Steinem and de Beauvoir, but Firestone and Dworkin and Carol Gilligan. Some of what he read was outrageous, some of it was tautological, much of it was brilliant—but on one point almost all of it was in agreement, and Gregor was not. In his experience, subculture notwithstanding, women were rarely “infantilized” in any significant way. He had met a few child-women among the rich of Palm Springs and Beverly Hills. Money and a certain kind of flaccid beauty, combined with an utter and determined isolation from real children, had made them into caricatures. The rest of the women he had known, from full-time housewives to Chanel-suited CEOs, had all been determinedly adult. They may or may not have been able to balance their checkbooks. Every last one of them had been able to understand the differences between authority and despotism, responsibility and obsessiveness, commitment and self-enslavement.

With the men it had been something else, and the something else had begun to make Gregor very uncomfortable, at least up to that point where the only thing on his mind had been whether the latest round of radiation treatments would put Elizabeth into remission or into her coffin. It was true that there had always been men in the world who couldn’t seem to grow up. The giggling martini-addict golfer and the rabbity suburban hubby with nothing on his mind but the length of the grass in his own front lawn were staple stereotypes of the kind of literature Gregor had been encouraged to consider “serious” in his days at the Harvard Graduate School. Still, there had been a hint of dysfunction about those men, a trace of self-knowledge, a guilt. It was as if they knew they had foiled themselves and everyone around them by becoming what they were. The new men Gregor had encountered in the halls of FBI headquarters had no self-knowledge and no guilt, and didn’t think they needed either. They blithered endlessly about self-fulfillment and career enhancement and personal growth as if they thought the terms had meaning. They were frozen in self-satisfaction. When one of the women around them complained about their childishness, they just smiled at her, as if they had a secret. They had looked into the future and seen the grave of manhood, marked by marble and covered with a bed of weeds. Resurrecting it would have meant nothing to them but a kind of self-abuse.

What had interested Gregor Demarkian about Jack Carroll, from the beginning, was his seeming immunity from all this. He was still a boy, but he was pulling against himself, struggling in all directions, trying to get out. Watching him come out of the crowd with Chessey Flint under his arm, Gregor thought he was having a little more success than he had been this morning in the quad. He had taken the hood off his head and tucked it into his belt. The faint, sparse streaks of red in his thick black hair were glowing copper in the light from the globe lamps. Behind him, boys were doing headstands and rebel yells and grabbing at girls and being slapped away. They might as well have been another species.

Gregor stood up—it was hard not to feel awkward, old, and fat in the face of Jack Carroll’s effortless physical ease and unforgiving muscle tone—and said, “There you are. I hope this won’t be an inconvenience.”

Jack shook his head. “Not at all. I’ll be glad to get out of here for a while. This gets me a little nuts when I have to spend too much time in the middle of it.”

Gregor saw Chessey give Jack a sharp, anxious look and then glance away again. Jack had turned slightly to look into the crowd and didn’t notice it. He turned back, stroked Chessey gently on the hair, and said, “You want me to walk you up to your door? It’ll only take a minute. I don’t think Mr. Demarkian will mind waiting.”

“You don’t have to do that,” Chessey said. “Evie’s coming up the walk right now.”

“You sure?”

“Positive.”

“All right. Look, um, after Mr. Demarkian and I are through, I’ll come back and throw a rock at your window, all right?”

“Don’t throw a rock, Jack. I’ll leave the light on.”

“Tell Evie if she doesn’t stop chewing bubble gum, her teeth will rot.”

Chessey turned away, looked up the steps through the open door of Lexington House, and turned back. She was smiling, but to Gregor her smile looked strained and anxious.