Authors: Jane Haddam
What Ken had decided to do—once he had decided not to go to Liberty Hall—was to go back to his apartment instead and get some work done. He wasn’t sure what work he had to do, but there was always something. That was part of being a teacher in a school that expected scholarship as well—and no matter how gushingly the brochures described Independence College’s commitment to teaching, the administration most certainly expected scholarship as well. He had papers to grade and a book to work on and a monograph to edit for presentation to the American Historical Society in June. He had that mess of papers Mrs. Winston Barradyne had sent him to clear up, too. Ken thought of those papers and frowned slightly, irritated. It had all been nothing, really, nothing, and he had been so frightened. Walking through the middle of the quad with the sun beating down on his head and the students all looking so ludicrous in streamers and makeup, he found it hard to credit how terrified he had been. That was how he had started to make mistakes. He had never been someone who worked well under pressure. Under pressure, he didn’t work at all. It had been paralyzing, wondering what Donegal Steele had found out about his family. It had been killing, wondering what Donegal Steele had found out about him. Ken wondered why Alice had never noticed any of it. She was an observant woman. Her talent for observation seemed to stop before it reached him.
He was on one of the radial paths that led to the Minuteman statue, the wrong one for where he wanted to go. He hadn’t been paying attention and he had wandered off course. He changed direction and started cutting across the grass. It felt awful to him not to think about Miss Maryanne Veer. He was sure he had a moral obligation to think about her, the way he had once been taught he had a moral obligation to pray for the sick, to ask God to make them better. His religious training had been sporadic and determinedly Congregationalist, which was like saying it had been determinedly amorphous. Only God knew what the Congregational Church now believed in. Ken Crockett hadn’t a clue. He just couldn’t help feeling—under the circumstances—that he ought to be thinking of Miss Maryanne Veer and nothing else at all.
He saw her from halfway across the quad, sitting on the Constitution House steps, stretched out, her hand wrapped around a sandwich. With most people he wouldn’t have known who it was from that far away. His eyesight was good, but he didn’t have X-ray vision. With Katherine Branch it was a different matter. There was nobody else on earth with that hair.
She saw him, too, and sat up, and wrapped her arms around her knees, waiting for him. He walked up to her because he couldn’t think of anything else to do.
“Katherine,” he said. “Good morning.”
She made a face at him. “For God’s sake,” she said, “stop doing that. It isn’t even morning.”
“I was just trying to be polite.”
“You’re always trying to be polite. Do you know what I did with my morning? I talked to that policeman and Gregor Demarkian.”
“Oh,” Ken said. He looked around. No one was going in and out of Constitution House. No one he could see was actually going anywhere. They were all just milling around, aimless and hyperactive. He sat down on the steps as far from Katherine as he could get. “Well,” he said, “that must have been interesting. Did they grill you?”
“Of course they didn’t. What kind of an idiot do you take me for?”
“I’ve never taken you for an idiot.”
“No? Well, God knows, I was an idiot once. I was the idiot who slept with you for six months before I figured out—”
“Katherine.”
“Does Alice know yet?”
“There isn’t anything to know,” Ken said. “You’re making all this up.”
Katherine’s sandwich was ham. She finished the last corner of it, licked the tips of her fingers, and stood up. Above their heads, Lenore was cawing and circling, cawing and circling, making enough noise to be heard even above the music in the quad. It was “Monster Mash” again. The entire student body was obsessed with it.
“Listen,” Katherine said, “I didn’t tell Demarkian about—all that—but I did tell him about the lye on Alice’s porch—”
“You’re a bitch, Katherine.”
“Of course I am. I make a point of it. You should have heard Vivi Wollman on the subject just last night. Kenneth, for once in your life pay attention, will you, please? I think you ought to take that bat suit of yours and burn it.”
“What bat suit?” Ken said, and thought:
It’s cold. Oh, Christ, it’s so damned cold.
Katherine was off the steps and onto the path, walking backward, not noticing where she was going. That was always true, Ken thought irrelevantly. Katherine never noticed where she was going.
“Burn it,” she called back to him. “It’s right there on the floor of your closet. If I could find it, so could they. It’s got mud all over the hem of the cape.”
“Monster Mash” had changed into something else, something new, heavy metal, full of blood and sex and suicide. Ken Crockett got up, went through the doors of Constitution House, and stopped in the foyer. He was shaking so hard, he could barely stay on his feet.
All these years, all these last few days and everything that had happened in them, all the maneuvers and all the mistakes—and it was all going to come to nothing.
A
T THE ONLY MCDONALD’S
off any exit anywhere on the Parkway, Evie Westerman was standing at a counter, checking the contents of a pair of overstuffed paper bags with the list in her hand. The list had been hastily written out and was hard to read. It was also long. Evie kept going back to the part marked “Jack,” which called for three Big Macs, two fish sandwiches, and large fries, among other things. She was fairly sure she had counted them all out right the first time. She was also sure she was never going to get herself to believe it.
The girl behind the counter might not have been a girl. She was skinny and dyed blond and chewing gum. She might have been fifteen or forty. She couldn’t have been anything in between. Evie was giving her the benefit of the doubt.
“Hey,” the girl said through her gum. “Tell me somethin’. You got a boy back there in that car?”
“Yes,” Evie said.
“Thought so. Teenage?”
“I think he’s twenty-two.”
The girl shrugged. “Same difference. I can always tell. Girls come in here with orders like that one, I know they got a boy in the car. Teenage.”
“Right,” Evie said. She folded the sacks into her arms like grocery bags. They were as heavy as grocery bags. They smelled like grease.
Outside, she looked across the parking lot at Jack’s Volkswagen wreck and sighed. She had left Jack and Chess sitting up in the front seats, and now there was no sign of them. The only thing to be said for it was that the parking lot at McDonald’s had to be a safer place to disappear than the last place they’d done it, which was stopped for a red light out on the commercial section of Route 92. She marched over to the car, tried to look through the driver’s side window—it was steamed up; she’d never believed they did that when she read about it in books—and grabbed the door handle. She yanked the door open and found them as she expected to find them, doing what came naturally.
“Except that, before last night, Evie would never have thought that this was what came naturally to Chessey Flint.
Evie threw the McDonald’s bags on top of them both and said, “Oh, crap. Why don’t the two of you just screw right here in the car and I’ll go hide in the trunk?”
W
HEN GREGOR DEMARKIAN LEFT
Freddie Murchison on the quad, he first went directly to Constitution House, springing along happily in what he later decided was a state of utter delusion. He hadn’t paid much attention to Constitution House before, or to any of the other buildings he had been in, except to make mental notes of the routes he had to take to get where he wanted to go. What he found out about Constitution House when he finally decided to pay attention to it was disheartening. It had both a cellar and an attic, both locked, and probably both vast. He had no idea what the arrangements with the keys were. Both places might be being used for resident storage, with keys passed out to everyone who lived in the house. Both could have been off-limits and as hard to get into as the Pentagon subbasement. Or one or the other. Or either or both. Or—. It didn’t take him long to decide that he was engaged in an exercise in futility. In spite of the exploits of Bennis Hannaford’s favorite private detectives, in the real world the police were necessary for more than comic relief or political counterexample. They were necessary to search large areas, for instance. If Constitution House was as big as it seemed to Gregor after his prowl through the ground floor, it was going to take a dozen men to go over the attic and the basement with any degree of attention in anything less than a millennium.
Actually, the ground floor hadn’t made Gregor feel much better and neither had the staircases. He had no idea when Constitution House had been built, but he thought it must have been a hundred years ago or more. Much more. Modern architects didn’t go in for all these nooks and crannies, all these hidey-holes and sliding panels. The place was like some Victorian lady’s dream of a haunted mansion, except that it was built in the Federalist style. Gregor imagined little cells of fevered adolescent patriots, cut off from the fighting of the Revolutionary War, wallowing in paranoia and secret passwords, burying themselves away against imagined harm in the walls of their own college buildings. It was a nonsensical image—from everything Gregor had heard, the American people in 1776 had been extraordinarily commonsensical—but it brought home the point with force. Under no circumstances was he going to be able to search any part of Constitution House without the help of David Markham and his men.
It was after that that Gregor had gone to Liberty Hall, haphazardly in search of Father Tibor Kasparian, and run into Alice Elkinson instead. What he had got out of that conversation was a vague feeling that he was overlooking the obvious, but he didn’t know why. From the beginning, he had felt he was overlooking the obvious, stumbling over large boulders in the dark, skinning himself on sharp protrusions he should have been able to see. The necessity of the murder of Donegal Steele was only part of it. Now it was half past one and he was wandering through the crowd on the quad again, going back to Constitution House. He knew by analysis that he had been wandering for some time—it had been half past twelve when he left Alice Elkinson in her office; it was now an hour later; he must have been wandering—and he felt like a pinball played by an expert on a machine that refused to go tilt. The only hope he could see lay in questioning the one person he had yet to question and the one person most likely to give him accurate answers. Father Tibor.
Gregor let himself into Constitution House, looked with something like despair at its multitude of closed doors leading to a multitude of closed rooms, and went down the short hall in the corner to the west staircase. Besides the door that led to the hall that led to the foyer, the west staircase—like all the other staircases—had a door to the outside. If one of Gregor’s suspects had had a dying Donegal Steele squirreled away in the upper reaches of Constitution House, it would have been no problem at all to get the finally dead body out and onto the grounds without being seen. Professors weren’t students. They had work to do and classes to teach. Do your dirty work late enough at night, and you could be fairly sure that anyone who might have seen you would be safely tucked in bed. Going up the winding stair, Gregor automatically checked for traces of blood—but he had done that before. There was nothing he could see without the aid of a mobile crime unit. That was true even though he knew there must be something somewhere. If Donegal Steele had been dying in Constitution House since late on the twenty-eighth, he was no longer dying—or dead—there now. Anyone who was keeping an eye on Lenore could have figured that out. Lenore had been circling Constitution House since Gregor got to Independence College and, according to Tibor, well before. Today, the bird had lost all interest in the place.
Gregor stopped on the landing that led to Tibor’s floor, pressed his face against the staircase window there, and checked. Lenore was out over the campus, circling so widely she looked like she was taking off for outer space. Gregor turned around, pushed his way through the fire door, and headed for Tibor’s apartment. For once on this godforsaken day, he was in luck. He hadn’t got halfway down the hall to Tibor’s door before he heard the low, rich, explosive staccato burst of Bennis Hannaford’s laughter.
“T
HE PROBLEM WITH YOU,”
Bennis was telling Tibor as Gregor let himself in the door, “is that the men you pick for me are always so gay.”
“Gay?” Tibor said. “Dr. Crockett? Dr. Crockett is not gay. Dr. Crockett is in love with Dr. Elkinson.”
“I don’t care what he does for a front, Tibor, the man is gay as a green goose. Trust me. I can tell.”
Gregor shut the door behind him, walking into the living room, and looked down at the scene: Tibor stiff and proper in one of the wing chairs, with books on his lap; Bennis on the floor next to an open picnic basket, eating her way through some kind of pastry that dripped. There were streaks of honey running down her chin, and every once in a while she swiped at them with a finger and licked the finger clean. When she saw Gregor, she grinned happily and took another bite.
“Tibor’s arranging my love life for me again,” she said, through a mouthful of honey. “He means well, but he’s just so bad at it.”
It was Gregor Demarkian’s opinion that Bennis was so bad at arranging her own love life, almost nothing could be worse. So far in their relationship, he had suffered through an avant-garde artist in a black leather jacket and a spiked nose ring, a science fiction writer who believed that computers could be taught to procreate, a Philadelphia lawyer who spoke in what Gregor could only assume to be code, and two rock stars. The rock stars had almost given poor old George Tekemanian a heart attack. All these people had had only one thing in common. They were all extraordinarily beautiful men.