Authors: Jane Haddam
Sometimes she wondered if she had the talent to be sixty-three years old. Maybe that was her problem. Under the old rules, she would have been forced to retire in just two years. Now she could stay on until she was seventy, and until the Great Doctor Donegal Steele turned up she had been looking forward to that. She had come to The Program—Miss Maryanne Veer always thought in titles and capital letters; The Program was her interior designation for The Interdisciplinary Major in The American Idea—at its inception, years ago. Since then, through a succession of weak-minded and weakly educated chairmen, she had pretty much run it on her own. She would go on running it on her own, too, as long as the Great Doctor Donegal Steele didn’t get himself installed in the chairman’s office.
She heard a squawk in her ear, and realized with some embarrassment that she still had the phone wedged up there, and that Margaret was still on the line. When Margaret started talking, she also started blithering. When Margaret started blithering, Maryanne tuned her out. It was a simple matter of self-defense. If Maryanne had listened to everything Margaret said, she’d have gone crazy in a week.
Once, back in 1975, when the college employee educational program was first started, Maryanne had taken a course in introductory psychology. Most of it she had considered criminal nonsense. Part of it she now had to admit the truth of. She and Margaret were the quintessential example of what that course had called The Female Couple: Margaret “feminine” and dependent to the point of ludicrousness; Maryanne herself rigid and rational to the point of caricature. The only thing the course had got wrong was the bit about sex. Miss Veer couldn’t imagine having sex with Margaret. Miss Veer couldn’t imagine having sex with anybody.
She adjusted the telephone receiver and said, “Margaret? I’m sorry, Margaret. I got distracted.”
“Did you put me on hold?”
“Only mentally. I’ve got a desk full of message slips here.”
“I know, dear. You’re very busy. I ought to get off the line. But I think what I was saying had a lot of merit in it. Don’t you?”
Because Maryanne hadn’t heard a word Margaret had said beyond “hello,” she grunted. Margaret would take the hint.
Margaret did. “I don’t think you’re giving enough weight to the seniority business, Maryanne. I really don’t. After all, Dr. Steele has only been at the college since the start of the semester—”
“Dr. Steele came in as a full professor. Tenured. The administration likes him, Margaret.”
“I know they do, dear, but—”
“And he wrote that book.” Miss Veer made a face, and then wondered why she’d done it. There was nobody here to see her, “That book,” she said slowly, “has sold six hundred thousand copies. In hardcover.”
“
The Literacy Enigma
. Yes, Maryanne, I know. But you said yourself it wasn’t very scholarly.”
“It’s famous,” Miss Veer said patiently. “He’s famous. Famous authors attract students. And with a dwindling student candidate population—”
“Yes, yes, Maryanne. I understand that. You explained it all yesterday. But I don’t see how you can leave the seniority out of it. I mean, the college really doesn’t know a thing about this man. And look at what’s happened now. He’s disappeared. He isn’t reliable.”
“He hasn’t disappeared, Margaret.”
“Well, what would you call it? He didn’t show up for his ten o’clock class. You told me that yourself. And he hasn’t shown up since. Have you tried calling him at home?”
“Of course I have.”
“And was he there?”
“No, Margaret, he wasn’t. If he had been, I wouldn’t be fretting about these messages. But—”
“I think he’s run off for the day with one of those students of his. You’ve told me again and again how awful he is about women. He’s probably locked away in a motel room somewhere, doing—well, doing God knows what.”
Miss Maryanne Veer sometimes read an off-campus, student-generated publication called
The Hedonist
, meant to be a contribution to “the alternative press.” She corrected the grammar in it—which took a lot of work—but she also paid attention to the things it said. By now, although she would never have admitted it to anyone, she knew exactly what was implied by “God knows what.”
Still.
She looked down at the message slips again and shook her head. The door to the office was open, as it always was. Only the chairman’s inner sanctum was kept private and shut. Anything she said could be heard outside in the hall—assuming there was anybody out there to listen to it.
Maryanne picked up the message slips she had written out to the Great Doctor Donegal Steele, looked through them, and found the three she wanted. They had come in at three-hour intervals over the course of the day, becoming increasingly hysterical. They were all from a girl named Chessey Flint.
That was the problem with Margaret’s analysis of this little glitch in the life of the Great Doctor Donegal Steele. If he was going to be camped out in a motel room with anybody today, it was going to be with Chessey Flint. His only other interest at the moment was in Dr. Alice Elkinson, and that was entirely unrequited. Maryanne knew for sure.
She dumped the message slips back on the desk and said, “I have to get off the phone, Margaret. I still have a hundred things to do before I can come home.”
“Of course,” Margaret said. “You just get busy. We can talk about all this later.”
“We’ll talk about it over dinner.”
“I’m making Yankee pot roast for dinner, dear. I know it’s not your absolute favorite thing, but I had to do something with the meat. I just know it’s not a good thing to leave meat for too long in a freezer.”
The meat had been in the freezer for less than a week, and Maryanne hated Yankee pot roast. It didn’t matter. Margaret had already hung up.
Maryanne hung up, too, and then sat for a while looking at those message slips. Then she got up and put them in the Great Doctor Donegal Steele’s departmental mailbox.
At the back of her mind, a warning light was blinking on and off, telling her that something was very wrong here. Whatever else Dr. Donegal Steele might be, he was not the type to miss his classes or fail to show up for his appointments. He was not the kind to drop out of sight without phoning the office at least three times to make his presence felt. He was positively addicted to having an audience.
If it had been Ken Crockett or Alice Elkinson who had started behaving like this, Miss Maryanne Veer would not have been worried.
As it was, she could think of only one thing: Wherever that slimy little fool had gone, she hoped to God he stayed there.
T
HERE WAS A PHOSPHORESCENT
cardboard skeleton hanging from the center of the archway between the foyer of Lexington House and its front utility hall, and Chessey Flint, coming out of the public phone room at the hall’s front end, ran into it. She backed up, looked the skeleton up and down, and shook her head. She was a tall, solid girl in the best midwestern style, with honey blond hair that had been groomed to look fluid while never straying out of place. She had two tiny diamond studs fastened into her single-pierced ears and a twenty-four-carat gold heart-shaped locket on a twenty-four-carat gold chain around her neck. Her jeans were from Gloria Vanderbilt, and pressed. Her 100 percent cotton broadcloth, pink-and-white striped, stiff-collared shirt was from Brooks Brothers, but could not be buttoned down. Her sweater was from Marissa Christina. She looked as if she had already become the woman she had trained herself so long to be: the pretty wife of a solidly successful, upwardly mobile Battle Creek executive; the mistress of a modern ranch house with a steel-reinforced foundation and all the necessary appliances; the mother of two adored and adoring children, ages six and eight. There were people who would have called Chessey Flint a caricature, but she knew she was anything but. Her very-much-older sister had gone off to Wellesley and caught the Feminist Bug. The results had been just as disastrous as Chessey’s mother had predicted they’d be. So far, Madeline had an MBA, four promotions, and two ex-husbands to her credit. As far as Chessey could see, Madeline led a life just a little less miserable than that of their oldest sister, Caroline, who had gone to Berkeley and been bitten by the Hippie Bug. Caroline lived alone in a three-room apartment in Santa Barbara with the child she had borne out of wedlock to who-knew-which of the scruffy young men she was constantly taking to her bed, and called home often for money. By the time she was eight years old, Chessey Flint had established the two great truths of her world: It was hard to get enough money to live nicely and it was harder still to put together a marriage that would stay with you and not leave you both poor and alone. From that time to this, she had been driven not by complacency, but by fear.
Now she brushed past the skeleton, walked into the foyer, and looked over the projects going on there. Lexington House was decorating for Halloween, getting ready for the open-house party they would give after the bonfire, preparing for their part in the parade that would wind through the campus in the early morning hours of All Saints’ Day. Chessey was not only a genuinely nice girl, she was a good organizer. She would have made an excellent president for the kind of sorority more interested in who they could take in than who they could keep out. Because sororities, fraternities, and private clubs of every kind were barred from the Independence campus, she had become the unofficial head of Lexington House instead. It helped that Lexington House was the single dorm on campus assigned exclusively to women.
She stopped at a knot of girls sewing orange-and-black striped pumpkin costumes for the party servers, then at a knot making papier-mâché bats to hang over the front door. The first group was being led by a fat girl with too many pimples on her face, the second by an anemic-looking child who always looked just about ready to cry. At any other time, Chessey would have stopped next to both of them and trumpeted words of encouragement. She was very good about that kind of thing, and compulsive about it when she thought she saw a girl in need. Today, however, she couldn’t seem to work up the energy.
She drifted through the foyer, smiling vaguely, “and into the sitting room on the other side, which was crammed with people. Evie Westerman, her best friend, was stuffed into an ancient club chair in the far corner, sitting crosslegged and writing things down on a stack of papers that had to be a good inch thick. The stack of papers was attached to a brown wooden clipboard, because Evie never went anywhere without a brown wooden clipboard.
Chessey crossed the room, smiling at a few more people along the way, and sat herself down under Evie’s feet. Evie put the clipboard down and stared at her.
“Well?” she said.
Chessey shrugged. The room was so crowded, there was so much danger of being overheard, that she didn’t really want to talk about it. Unfortunately, with all this craziness going on for Halloween, she wasn’t going to get another chance.
Chessey fingered her locket and said, “No luck. I’ve been trying and trying, all day, for both of them. They’ve… disappeared.”
“Jack was supposed to go climbing this morning with Dr. Crockett,” Evie said. “Maybe they’re still climbing.”
“After ten hours?” Chessey shook her head. “It’s not the Himalayas out there, for God’s sake, Evie. It’s just a lot of rocks. And Jack isn’t the one I’m worried about.”
“No?”
“Jack has a lot of responsibilities,” Chessey said vaguely. “He’s head of the Bonfire Committee. He’s President of the Student Council. The bonfire’s less than forty-eight hours away. He could be anywhere.”
“Right.”
Chessey looked down at the fourth finger of her left hand, where, as yet, there was nothing. Only six weeks ago, she had confidently expected Jack Carroll to put something there at the beginning of the coming spring term. Most of the time, she still did expect it. Other times, she was uneasy. Things had gotten so strange lately.
Chessey looked back up at Evie and said, “The thing is, it doesn’t make sense. Dr. Steele missing, I mean. He never does things like that.”
“He’s a maniac. Maniacs will do anything.”
“I know, but he’s not that kind of maniac. He’s an egotist. He likes—performing. He gets the biggest charge out of standing up in class and talking silliness for an hour and making us all write it down as notes.”
“Did he really say he’d mark down anyone he caught not taking notes?”
“First day of the course.” Chessey made a face.
“If I were you, I’d have dropped that course, graduation or no graduation. If you’re going to marry Jack, you don’t have to graduate anyway.”
“Jack hasn’t even asked me.”
“He will.”
“And if he does ask me,” Chessey plowed on, “what will I tell my children? That I was a college drop-out? How will I get them to finish their educations?”
How are you going to explain to them that you flunked out of school? You know what’s going to happen, Chessey. Come the end of the term, Steele is going to hand you an ultimatum. You’re either going to give him your virginity on a silver platter, or you’re going to fail that course.”
“If he does that, I can go to the Faculty Senate about it.”
“At which point, all you’ll have to do is prove it.” Evie looked exasperated. “Drop the course, Chessey. Make it up next fall at Michigan while Jack is doing law school. Even if you hold out in the end and let him fail you, he’s doing you a lot of damage in the meantime.”
“Jack doesn’t believe any of that stuff.”
“Everybody else does. You know that old cat in the office thinks you’re spending your free time in half the rent-by-the-hour motels in eastern Pennsylvania.”
“Evie.”
Evie shrugged. “If you’re not going to listen to reason, I can’t help you. And please try to remember it’s not just my reason you’re listening to. It’s Jack’s.”
“I know.” Chessey stood up. She had come to Evie to “talk it all out,” fully expecting to be made to feel better. Instead, she felt worse. It hardly seemed fair. “I just wish I knew where they were,” she said, “Jack and Dr. Steele both. I wish I knew what they were doing.”