Authors: Jane Haddam
The branch was not so thin. Jack pulled her along it until she reached the place where a whole raft of branches came together to join the trunk, then wedged her tightly into the crook there until she felt safe. In the old days, he used to ask her if she felt safe. Now he didn’t seem to need to. He got her settled and then climbed back up to the crook where he liked to sit when they weren’t going directly to the ground. There was a mild wind blowing, flapping his black cape in the air and bringing them snatches of music from the quad.
“My cape is filthy,” he said. “I had Mr. Demarkian in the shed and he got filthy, too. I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have to apologize about the cape.”
“All the way back to campus I kept thinking you were going to tear it off my back as soon as you saw it and throw it in the wash.”
“I’ve never torn anything off your back in my life.”
“I know.”
“I want to get out of this tree and back onto the ground and I want to do it right now. You know how I hate to be high up. You know it. How can you do this to me?”
“Chess—”
“Oh,
don’t
.”
Suddenly she was crying again, crying and crying, the way she cried when she was alone in her room and no one could see her. It made her so angry with herself, so damn furious, because it made her think she’d turned into one of her sisters. Emotions always on full alert and out of control, life always in a mess and headed for failure—what had she worked so damn hard for all these years if not to escape that? Jack was reaching out for her, but she didn’t want him to touch her. Chessey pushed herself out on the branch to get away from him, not really caring that she was suspended above nothing but darkness and air. She even closed her eyes and tried to imagine herself falling, into a void, forever, without ever touching ground.
“Look,” she said, “I know that everything’s gone wrong. I know you don’t want to touch me anymore—”
“That’s not true—”
“—and that you can’t stand to talk to me anymore—”
“That’s also not true—”
“—and that you’re going to leave here tonight and not come back—”
“Chess, don’t be an idiot—”
“—but the one thing I absolutely refuse to put up with after all this time is listening to you delivering a little speech about how damned adult we’re being and how we’re both going to grow up and find out what love is really like at last and all the damned rest of it. I won’t do it, Jack. I won’t co-operate in that kind of charade and I won’t hear any crap about that was then and this is now or any of the rest of it.”
There was a silence from way up in the branches that went on for so long she began to think:
Well, I’ve said it all for him, and now he doesn’t have anything left to say.
Then Jack began to climb down from his perch, to test the branch she was lying on with his foot. It wouldn’t hold them both. They’d discovered that her sophomore year, when she and Evie had first taken this room. When he helped her out of the window he always stayed in the crook near the trunk. Chessey felt the branch spring and bounce back, shaking her. Jack said “damn” under his breath and retreated.
“Chessey?” he said. “Will you listen to what I’ve got to say?”
“No.”
“You’re going to have to. I’m not going to help you down out of here until I’m done talking.”
“I’ll start screaming at the top of my lungs and someone will come.”
“Don’t.”
“Oh, hell,” Chessey said. “I don’t have the energy for it anyway.”
Jack cleared his throat. “Chessey, look, I’m not going to say there hasn’t been anything wrong, because there has been. It just hasn’t been what you think it has. It isn’t that I don’t want to touch you anymore.”
“Oh, I see,” Chessey said, “you’ve given it up for Lent.”
“Lent is at Easter. Chess, it’s just gotten to the point where I can’t do that and stop in the middle of it. This morning in your room, there was a point where I thought I was going to rip you up. It’s not that I want to hurt you. It’s just that the whole damn thing—the way I feel and the way I respond—hell, Chess, whether you realize it or not, the way you feel and the way you respond—Christ, Chessey, I don’t know how to describe it. There’s been some kind of cosmic shift. It’s different and you know it.”
“Bullshit.”
“Not bullshit. And you know that, too.”
Chessey swung herself up into a sitting position, forcing herself to move and forcing herself to stop. For a minute it felt as if she’d launched herself into space.
“Listen to
me
,” she said. “If this is the great put-up-or-shut-up speech, you can shove it up your own ass. I don’t give a flying damn about cosmic shifts. I don’t give a flying damn about anything where that subject is concerned. It’s my body and my life and I have every damn intention of doing what I want with both of them my way.”
“I know. I’ll admit I thought of that at first—coming to you and making a fuss about it and seeing what happened. I gave it up because I knew what was going to happen.”
“Don’t you dare tell me I’m pretty when I’m mad.”
“I won’t. I couldn’t tell you anything about the way you look at the moment. All I can see is that jack-o’-lantern face in Day-Glo on your—backside.”
Her—backside—felt as if it were sticking up into a spotlight, making a spectacle of itself. It felt that way even though she was sitting on it. Chessey shifted a little and then wished she hadn’t moved. She hadn’t come close to calming down since Jack left her room this afternoon, but she was calming down now. That was not such a good thing when she was dangling up here in space. It was one thing to take risks when she felt she didn’t care if she lived or died. It was another to take them in cold blood.
She started to inch her way down the branch, toward the trunk, moving slowly. She felt Jack’s hand waving in the air near her face and grabbed on to it.
“I can’t breathe,” she said.
“I was wondering how you were managing to sit out there all by yourself without fainting.”
Jack inched farther back up the tree, and Chessey let him pull her farther in toward the trunk. When she was finally in the crook she relaxed a little, because the crook always made her feel safe. She was only half-aware that he had not gone all the way back up to his usual perch, or that her head was resting against his knees. When he began to stroke her hair, she let him. It just felt so nice not to be tense anymore.
“Look,” he said, “I’ve been thinking about this all day. More than all day. For days. It seems to me we have two problems, not one.”
“What two problems?”
“Sex and Donegal Steele.”
“For God’s sake,” Chessey said, “don’t put it that way.”
“I’m not putting it any way, Chess, I’m just stating fact. We’ve got to do something about the physical thing between us that will work, and we’ve got to get Steele off your case. Right?”
“Dr. Steele isn’t on my case at the moment. He isn’t on anybody’s. He hasn’t been around.”
“He’ll be around again soon enough if we let him. The trick is to cut him off at the pass.”
“How?”
“The same way we solve the physical thing between us.”
“Jack, for God’s sake, what do you want to do? Relieve me of my virginity at high noon on Minuteman Field? What do you think will get through to him?”
“Chess, please, please, will you trust me?”
“I don’t know.”
“Sure you will.”
He had managed to slide down farther against the trunk of the tree, to somehow seem to be sitting on his haunches—although how that was possible, stuck in the branches the way they were, Chessey didn’t know. He took her face between his hands and lifted her chin until he was looking into her eyes, so much like the way he had the first time he had kissed her that Chessey found herself unable to breathe again, for reasons that had nothing to do with her fear of heights.
“What we’ve got to do right now,” he said, “is we’ve got to get into your room and get you out of that pumpkin thing.”
“Men aren’t allowed in the rooms at Lexington House after ten o’clock on weekdays.”
“So who’s to notice? Evie? When we tell her what we’re going to do, she’ll pin a medal on us.”
“Only if it’s bloody murder,” Chessey said.
“It’s better than that. Please?”
Chessey looked away. “What about you? You’re still in your bat suit.”
“We’ll take care of me later. I’m all right for now just the way I am.”
Chessey thought he was all right with her just the way he was—he was always all right, no matter what he did—but it was too stupid a thing to admit in public and besides, he was pushing her out on the branch again, toward the window. She went without thinking about it, the space between her body and the ground eliminated from her imagination. She could feel his hands on her shoulders and his laughter in her ear. She wondered if he realized they’d never tried going in this way before.
The window was still open. She barreled for it, head first, anything to get her hands onto the sill. At the same time she thought:
This time he’s going to want to do something
really
crazy.
O
UT AT COUNTY RECEIVING
it was midnight and Miss Maryanne Veer was lying in a bed on the intensive care ward, neither conscious nor unconscious, neither dreaming nor not dreaming, thinking about lemons. She had been thinking about lemons at least since she first remembered waking up. She had even thought about them while Margaret was here to visit. Margaret had been Margaret the whole time—weepy and hysterical when a doctor or nurse was in the room, fiery and hard when the two of them were alone. Maryanne and Margaret shared their secret lives only with each other.
Now the ward was dark and quiet. The only other patient was three doors down, suffering the aftereffects of having a heart attack in the middle of a fire. Miss Maryanne Veer closed her eyes and let her mind drift, over the lemons and onto the hand.
This is how it happened, over and over again, no matter what she tried to do to stop it: The lemons were piled in a pyramid on somebody else’s table in somebody else’s house, each and every one of them perfectly round, each and every one of them marked in ink like those Sunkist oranges but with a line that said: “full of sugar.” Miss Maryanne Veer was standing next to them and wishing they were hers. The hand came out of nowhere and handed one to her, taking it off the top. When Miss Maryanne Veer got it into her own hand, she saw there was a straw sticking out of one end.
Lemons, hand, straw:
that was it. There was nothing sensible. It wasn’t even a hand she recognized, although she kept thinking she should.
Lemons, hand, straw:
there was something there that was sensible, maybe even important, but she couldn’t pin it down. She ought to tell somebody about it, but she couldn’t do that either. She’d already heard them say it was doubtful if she would ever again be able to talk.
They had given her seventy-five milligrams of Demerol to deaden the pain and sent her into outer space instead.
Lemons, hand, straw.
She’d never gotten around to telling the people who mattered that Donegal Steele was missing.
A
T THREE O’CLOCK IN
the morning, Gregor Demarkian, unable to sleep, got off the couch he had been lying on in the suite he was not supposed to be sharing with Bennis but was and went to look out the window. Bennis was behind the closed door of the bedroom, dead to the world. Even the acid smell of her cigarette smoke had faded hours ago. Gregor’s back felt as if it had been worked over by a curling iron for days. This was the guest suite in Constitution House, the best apartment in the building according to Tibor. It was on the fourth floor and looked out over Minuteman Field to King’s Scaffold.
At this hour of the morning, the campus was dead. There were no students wandering back from late study in the bowels of the library, no stray drunks reeling in from roadhouses out of town. Gregor had never seen a college campus so peaceful in the dark. He kept thinking that one good look at the Halloween decorations ought to change the atmosphere for him, but he couldn’t see any Halloween decorations. There were only the ominous lumps of logs rising up against the Scaffold and the straw man pumpkin head at the top.
He didn’t know how long he had been standing there at the window before he realized what he was looking at. Five minutes, ten minutes, a minute and a half: he found it hard to keep track of things when he was this tired. His gaze swept back and forth across the top of the Scaffold, back and forth, and finally it stopped.
There was somebody up there, prancing back and forth, doing God only knew what in the harsh light of a moon that looked like it ought to belong to another planet.
A bat.
Thursday, October 31
Deep into that darkness peering,
long I stood there, wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal
ever dared to dream before.
—E. A. Poe
G
REGOR DEMARKIAN HAD NEVER
given any thought to the differences between large city police departments and small-town cop shops in the sealing and securing of crime scenes. If he had given it any thought, he would have said there wasn’t any. Crime scenes weren’t something he had been either trained or conditioned to consider. In his early years at the Bureau, he had mostly dealt with crimes without scenes. Kidnappers tended to snatch their victims off sidewalks or in department stores or out of playgrounds, and to do it where they couldn’t be observed. In his later years at the Bureau, Gregor was called in mostly as an afterthought. First there would be a series of killings in one state, then a similar series in a second state, then another similar series in a third. At that point, the local police from all three states would start talking to each other, and somebody would say:
Doesn’t the FBI have a department that deals with this kind of crap?
By the time Gregor or his agents got into it, there would be no scenes left, just bodies in drawers and evidence in bags. If something new came up while they were trying to get the “crap” coordinated and ultimately straightened out, it was the local police who handled the details of sealing, securing, and gathering evidence.