Quoth the Raven (21 page)

“How worried?”

“Worried enough to want to call the police and report him missing,” Jack said. “That’s what she and Dr. Elkinson were talking about when I came up. Dr. Elkinson was trying to talk her out of it.”

“On what grounds?”

“On what grounds do you think? Verbally, anyway. Steele isn’t the world’s most trustworthy character. He doesn’t usually skip office hours and classes and things, but still. Personally, I think Dr. Elkinson doesn’t care one way or another if the man is dying in a ditch somewhere by the side of the road. I wouldn’t either.”

“Mmmm.” Gregor looked down and saw that he was still drumming his fingers against the workbench. He picked his hand up and put it in his lap. “Let’s go back to something else,” he said. “Miss Veer didn’t have any food on her tray but she wasn’t at the cash register yet. If she had gone back to get something to eat, could you speculate on what she might have taken?”

“Sure,” Jack said. “I used to work lunch in the cafeteria freshman year. That was the worst of it financially and I needed the two jobs. I’ve seen her once or twice since then, too. She always ate the same things.”

“Which were?”

“A chef’s salad with blue cheese dressing. A Belleville Lemon and Lime—that’s a regional brand of soda made locally. She drank the soda with the salad. She drank the tea after the salad. She’d put the tea in the bottom of the cup, dump water in on top of it and let the thing steep all through lunch. By the time she was ready to drink it, it was black.”

Gregor thought about it. In one way, it was perfect. He couldn’t imagine anything more appropriate in which to disguise lye—especially commercially produced lye products, like Drano or toilet bowl cleaner—than blue cheese dressing. The color was right. The consistency was right. Any small gummed-up wads of lye would look like minuscule pieces of cheese. Still, it wouldn’t work.

“It would have been all over everything,” he explained. “Pieces of lettuce and turkey and cucumber. Smears of dressing. Nobody could have removed all the traces or even removed a significant portion of them soon enough. It had to be something else. Something more self-contained.”

“Maybe she changed her pattern this afternoon because she was so worked up,” Jack said. “I’m sorry, Mr. Demarkian. I only saw what I saw. It wasn’t much.”

“That’s all right.”

Jack had the solderer put together, lying clean and shining in front of him on the workbench. “I’m done here now,” he said. “We could get on to what you wanted to come here for. I’m sorry I held you up.”

“That’s all right, too,” Gregor waved it away. “Are you sure I’m not holding you up? It’s not getting too late? What I want you to do may take some time.”

“Chessey will wait. If she doesn’t, I’ll wake her up.”

Gregor wanted to tell him not to get too cavalier about that young woman. She might be a little distraught at the moment, but she didn’t look like an eternal pushover. It wasn’t any of his business.

“That thing,” he said, pointing at the solderer. “Is it all cleaned up and ready to go again?”

“Sure.”

“Fine. Now I want you to make me something with it, or make this thing out of solder one way or another. A small cylinder, about half an inch across and less than a quarter of an inch thick, absolutely flat or even a little concave at one end, a little bumped out at the other.”

Jack Carroll was staring at him in astonishment. “Mr. Demarkian, what are you talking about?”

“I don’t know exactly,” Gregor said, “but when we’ve made one right I will know that. Will you do it?”

Jack Carroll would do it, but it was clear he thought Gregor Demarkian was crazy.

W
HEN DR. ALICE ELKINSON
told Dr. Kenneth Crockett that she wanted to come down to his apartment for the night, rather than having him come up to hers, he found it only a minor inconvenience—usually, he would have found it a major pain in the ass, and protested. Alice had one of the three apartments in this building with full kitchens. Ken only had a cooking alcove, like Father Tibor’s and Donegal Steele’s. The problems came with breakfast, which Ken always wanted to overeat, and which he didn’t like going to the cafeteria for. Alice was remarkably accommodating about breakfast, considering how she operated in the rest of her life. Sometimes, her willingness to cook for him surprised Ken beyond reason. Ken often told himself that that was what he loved about her, her surprises, the fundamental contradictions in her personality—even though some of those contradictions made him nervous. He often told himself that she would be perfect if she would only rid herself of her fickleness. Alice was always hating someone one minute and loving him the next, or vice versa. It made Ken wonder about what was going on between the two of them, and how long it would last. So far, it had lasted five years without a serious break. When he got very,
very
nervous, he told himself he ought to be satisfied with that.

The other problem with having Alice come to him, rather than his coming to her, had to do with the staircases at Constitution House. In order for Alice to get from her apartment on the fourth floor to his on the third, she had to go down the north staircase all the way to the ground floor, wend her way through a series of hallways to the foyer, wend her way through another series of hallways to the south staircase, and come all the way up again. He had to do the same to get to her—but for some reason he always seemed to be able to do it faster. It took him about ten minutes to get to Alice’s apartment. It took Alice about forty to get to his. Waiting for her after she’d said she’d be right over sometimes made him crazy.

Now it was ten o’clock on the night of Wednesday, October thirtieth, and Ken Crockett had other things on his mind.” Alice coming to his apartment, and the time it would take for her to actually get there, were even useful in the short run. He’d meant to spend his day in reasonable tranquility. Going up Hillman’s Rock this morning, he had imagined himself over the course of the coming afternoon: having lunch with Alice, reading de Tocqueville under the shade of the pine trees behind Constitution House, maybe taking Alice out into the quad after it got dark and getting her to dance. The attack on Miss Maryanne Veer had put an end to that—but the attack wasn’t all that had put an end to it. He had come back to his apartment all jangled, not having expected to come back to it at all after that mess in the dining room. Alice had been such a wreck. Ken had been sure she’d want him with her. When she hadn’t, he’d been more than put out. He’d been positively angry. It was as if she thought of him as some kind of teenage Good-Time Charlie, desirable for the giggle times but not much use for anything other than that. He’d walked around and around the campus, skirting the Halloween festivities in a mood so sour he thought he was turning into Katherine Branch and Donegal Steele, kicking trees. Then, when he had finally gotten himself calmed down, he went back to Constitution House and found—the package.

At the moment, the package was lying on Ken’s coffee table, undone, its papers spread out across the glass surface like used cocktail napkins at the end of an overlong party. When his doorbell rang, he was just picking one of those papers up and turning it over in his hands. He’d been doing that by then for two hours, even though the papers were nothing but lists with various items marked in red. He kept reading the marked items, shaking his head, and reading the marked items again. The whole thing was so damned silly he didn’t know what to do with it.

This time, with Alice jabbing and pounding at the bell, he didn’t bother to read anything. He put the paper down and got up to let her in. On his way to the door he checked his watch. It had taken her twenty-one minutes to get here. It was a record.

She was leaning against the wall next to his door, dressed as if she were about to go out on a climb—or as if she’d just come back from one.

“Hi,” she said. “I’ve calmed down. Have you?”

“Sort of. I got a surprise when I got back here this afternoon.”

“What surprise?”

“A little present from Mrs. Winston Barradyne.”

Alice raised her eyebrows, one of her patented Alice-in-a-good-mood expression, except that this time it didn’t quite come off. Ken ushered her in, thinking as he did that what he had here was an in-between mood. She may have calmed down—after the way she’d been in the dining room, anything less than outright hysteria would have meant she was calming down—but she wasn’t herself again either. Her skin seemed to be twitching and jumping under her sweater, as if it had been stuffed full of Mexican jumping beans. He sat down on the couch and spread his arms over the papers.

“There,” he said. “I don’t know what you’ve been doing with yourself all evening, but what I’ve been doing for most of it is reading through these. Mrs. Winston Barradyne’s recollections of just what Donegal Steele took out of the Historical Society library.”

“What I’ve been doing with myself all evening is looking at that goddamned bird.” Alice sat down in one of his chairs and put her feet up on his coffee table. The thick sharp cleats on the bottoms of them stuck into the air like a fakir’s bed of nails. “It’s gone, now. Lenore, I mean. It was up overhead circling and circling until I thought I’d go crazy.”

“I think they sleep at night,” Ken told her. “I wonder what’s wrong with Lenore?”

“Maybe she’s been captured by aliens and turned into a flying spying machine.” Alice put her feet on the floor again. The cleats cut through his carpet and knicked into the hardwood of his floor with a click. “Are these what Mrs. Barradyne sent you? They look like lists.”

“They are lists. Of all the books and all the pamphlets and all the everything else in the Historical Society library.”

“The things Steele took out are marked in red?”

“That’s right.”

“John Cowry—letters from Antietam.” Alice frowned. “That’s the wrong period.”

“I know.”

“Are they all from the wrong period?”

Ken grinned. “Every last one of them. Every last damn one of them, Alice. I’m not kidding. Christ, I could take Mrs. Barradyne and wring her neck. You have no idea how paralyzed she made me.”

“Yes I do.”

“Maybe you do,” Ken admitted. “I know you thought this was all silly, Alice, but it really wasn’t. I can’t imagine what would have happened to me in this place if it had gotten around that four members of the great and illustrious Crockett family, benefactors of the college and outstanding patriotic blowhards for two hundred years, were hung for British spies in New England during the Revolutionary War.”

“Why do you think he was asking Mrs. Barradyne all those questions about you? He was asking them, wasn’t he?”

“Sure. He’s nosy.”

“I think the proper word is probably
intrusive
,” Alice said. Then she sighed. “Listen to me. I’m talking like an academic. I promised myself I was never going to do that.”

“At Berkeley?”

“At Berkeley, I promised myself I’d never talk like a revolutionary. Speaking of which, what do you think our Katherine is doing?”

“Chanting petitions to the Great Goddess.”

“I ran into Lynn Granger while I was walking around outside a little while ago and she said she’d seen Vivi Wollman coming out of Liberty Hall this afternoon—through a window.”

Ken laughed. “Katherine probably tried to talk her into filching the evaluation files for the old Women’s Studies program. Just so nobody got the idea they wanted Miss Veer out of the way because she had access to a lot of private information that could ruin their careers.”

Alice shook her head. “I don’t believe even Katherine could do anything that trite.”

“Katherine is always trite,” Ken said. Then he took a deep breath. It was always a risk asking Alice what she was feeling. You could get an answer, or you could get an argument. “Alice?” he said. “Are you all right? I know all this stuff with Miss Veer upset you, and I don’t blame you for being upset, it’s just—”

“It’s not Miss Veer,” Alice said. She got out of the chair, walked over to the window and drew his curtains. The window didn’t look directly out onto the quad. Some of the apartments on the south staircase did, just as some of the ones on the west staircase did, but not the ones on this side. She was looking across an empty patch of lawn to a line of darkened windows on the third floor of Madison House.

“Ken?” she said. “Ken, listen, I had some things, out on my balcony, some buckets.”

“Yes?”

“Well, you know how it is with me during Halloween. Half the campus has keys to my apartment. And it’s not like the buckets were important, if you know what I mean.”

“No.”

“No,” Alice said. “Well. Never mind. I was just wondering if you’d come up and borrowed them or something.”

“Borrowed them? Why would I do that?”

“I don’t know.”

And that, Ken thought, was the truth—she had no idea why she’d just asked him what she’d asked him. It was as if she’d had to ask him, just to make sure, but the making sure hadn’t brought her any kind of relief. This mood she was sliding into now was one he recognized.

She was tight as a wire.

I
F THERE WAS ONE
thing Chessey Flint hated more than any other, it was Jack Carroll in one of his decisive moods—and that was strange, because, in the beginning, she had loved Jack in his decisive moods. When she’d first met him, there had been something scary and secretly thrilling about seeing him that way, like the way it felt when she made herself ride the big roller coaster at Disney World, even though she was terrified of heights. Lately there had been an element to it she didn’t like. She kept feeling Jack was going to tell her something she didn’t want to hear or force her to do something she didn’t want to do. The only thing she could think of that would fit either description would be that he would want to leave. It was all she thought about anymore. She was beginning to be boring even to herself.

It was eleven o’clock at night, and Jack was standing in the tree just outside her dormitory window, bracing himself on a branch and stretching out his arms to help her climb through. This was the method they had devised to avoid having her come down to the foyer when they wanted to get together at night. It was silly in a way, because there were no curfews at Independence College and no parietal hours in the boys’ and coed dorms. If Chessey wanted to leave her room and spend the night with Jack in his, she had every right to do it. The problem was with how deserted Lexington House got after dark. Even with all the manic Halloween stuff going on outside, the corridors and common rooms were empty, except for the common rooms just off the foyer itself, which were full. That, Jack had told her, might actually make things worse. With all the confusion, it would be hard to keep security as tight as it ought to be, considering the way things had been going. Chessey hooked her small hands into Jack’s big ones and let him draw her to him, slowly, inch by crazy inch. She really was afraid of heights—terrified of them, in fact. The very idea that she was balancing on a thin branch four stories above the ground made her physically ill.