by Jane Haddam
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.
4
THERE 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.”
“Unless you know something I don’t know, they’re not doing it together. Lighten up, Chessey. Go pat Susan Ledovic on the head. She’s dying for your attention.”
“Mmm,” Chessey said. Evie had gone back to her clipboard, and Chessey could see Susan Ledovic, the fat girl with the pimples, ripping out a seam with the thread in her teeth. Evie was right. It was time to stop fretting over what she could do nothing about, and go back to being the Perfect College Coed instead.
What nagged at her, though, was that she did know something Evie didn’t know. She knew that Jack had intended to see Dr. Steele today, and have it out once and for all.
5
DR. KATIIERINE BRANCH SOMETIMES wondered what would have happened to her if she had been brought up in another time, or another country. When she was a child, she had read a roomful of books on Great Women Pioneers—Elizabeth Blackwell, Maria Mitchell, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Marie Curie—but she had known immediately that she was nothing like them. Stuck in a situation that offered her any kind of real resistance, she would yield. By the time she was seven, she had yielded on a number of important issues, including Leggings, Lavelieres, and Sean Cassidy. If she found the strength to defy her hyperconventional, hypercritical, chillingly emotionless mother, it was only because she was desperate not to defy that small group of girls who represented Everything That Mattered at John F. Kennedy Memorial Elementary. Katherine Branch had always had a very fine eye for distinctions of status and a consuming passion of shame at the fact that she had been born worthy of belonging to none of the first-class categories offered for her inspection. She had figured out early that Women Didn’t Count, and that all the things women did—nursing, teaching, raising a family—were irretrievably second-rate. She had figured out even earlier that, among women, being pretty was not enough, unless you had something else to back it up. Katherine had always been pretty enough, but the other things—wit, maybe, or that school-skewed form of intelligence that is so important in grades K-6—eluded her. She was a fairly attractive, moderately bright, nondescriptly pleasant child of the early sixties. From the day she started kindergarten to the day she graduated from high school, she was destined to fade into the woodwork.
At the moment, she looked like anything but part of the woodwork. Her red hair fell down over her back in a cascade of body-permed curls. Her bright orange sweater, chosen deliberately for shock and contrast, reached nearly to her knees, not quite hiding the black stretch pants she was wearing under it. Also under the sweater was a bright white, 100 percent cotton turtleneck, meant to save the skin of her chest from the scratch of ramie and wool. Ever since Katherine Branch had committed herself to wearing only natural fibers, she had had a great deal of trouble with chafing and rash.
She caught sight of her reflection in the side of her toaster, made a face at it, and walked on past, to that small stretch of her cramped kitchen counter where she kept the instant coffee. Behind her, at the tiny round table, Vivi Wollman was sitting over a plate of Betty Crocker carrot cake and staring out the square kitchen window at the quad. Vivi Wollman was Katherine’s best friend at Independence College and the only other person who really hated the fuss that got made around her about Halloween. Vivi had even been an ally in Katherine’s one attempt to put a stop to it all, that year that Katherine had called the Pennsylvania EPA and reported the bonfire as a “pollution hazard.” Unfortunately, that foray into common sense and political correctness hadn’t turned out the way Katherine expected. The bonfire was so famous, people simply couldn’t think rationally about it. The Governor had issued a proclamation blocking the EPA’s attempt to shut the bonfire down, the state legislature had passed a special law to allow Independence College to go on making bonfires until the final blast of Gabriel’s trumpet, and someone had sneaked her name out of the EPA’s files and given it to the press. It was a good thing she’d already had tenure, because if she hadn’t she would never have gotten it. For the next year, with the exception of Vivi, not a single person spoke to her—except to call her a bitch.
Katherine got the jar of instant coffee, took a couple of spoons out of the rack next to the sink, and headed back to the table. Because there was no way to avoid looking out the window at the quad, she was faced for a few seconds with a. sight that grated on her nerves: dozens of students, dressed up in ridiculous costumes, milling around among the greenery and playing seduction games. Katherine wondered if Alice Elkinson was out there, showing off her engagement ring, acting like a teenager instead of a woman old enough to know the score. Then she sat down.
“Crap,” she said, to the air rather than to Vivi. “I’m so rattled I can’t think straight. Do you have a cigarette?”
Vivi reached into her pocket and brought out a pack of Marlboro menthols. She was a small woman, dark and attractive enough except for the fact that she was oddly lumpy. A decade of weight-training and macrobiotic diets had twisted her out of shape. She got a blue Bic lighter from her other pocket and lit Catherine’s cigarette.
“I think you’re jumping the gun,” she said. “I mean, I think you’re panicking before you have to. After all, nothing has happened yet.”
“A lot has happened,” Katherine said. “This time last year, there was a Women’s Studies Department. This time this year, there isn’t.”
Vivi brushed this away. “That was our fault, not some plot on the part of the administration. We didn’t go about it right. At Berkeley—”
“This is not Berkeley.”
“I know it’s not Berkeley,” Vivi said patiently. “My point is, if you’re going to keep a department like Women’s Studies alive these days, you’ve got to have the numbers. You’ve got to have your classrooms full. The way to do that is with sex and spirituality—you know, self-actualization courses. Instead, we had all that stuff about women’s historiography and the sociology of housework in the Middle Ages, all this linear-logic, male-dominated crap—”
“Vivi.” Katherine took a great drag on her cigarette, blew smoke into the air, and sighed. Sometimes, talking to Vivi gave her a headache. “The Faculty Senate would never have put up with the kind of thing you’re talking about. They barely put up with my witchcraft course and you know it. They’re so hyped on academic rigor.”
“They’re so hyped on male supremacy,” Vivi corrected. “We should have sidestepped them, Katherine. We should have offered a course like ‘Images of Women in the Art of the Renaissance’ and then done what we wanted with it. Talked about birth control in the sixteenth century. Run some consciousness-raising sessions. The word would have gotten around after a while.”
“Mary Gillman tried that two years ago,” Katherine pointed out. “S
he got fired.”
Vivi got that long-suffering look on her face, usually reserved for men. “Mary Gillman got fired because that stupid girl accused her of sexual harassment, and then the parents threatened to sue. That isn’t the point. The point is, I don’t see how all this ties in with Donegal Steele.”
Katherine looked at the tip of her cigarette, a red coal burning into the filter. She took the saucer out from under her cup and stubbed the butt out in it. “All right,” she said, “let’s do this as a sequence. Have you read Steele’s book?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Then you must know he isn’t a friend of ours. He thinks all the minority studies departments ought to be run off campus on a rail—I’m sorry. I’m making a mess of this. Anyway, he isn’t likely to be a big supporter of what we want to do.”
“What we have to do,” Vivi corrected.
“We’ll get to that later. The fact is, the administration didn’t even think about hiring him until old Yevers got sick, then they went crazy and offered him a ton of money and practically dragged him out here by the heels—don’t you ever wonder why he agreed to come?”
“Why shouldn’t he?”
“Why should he be bothered?” Katherine said. “He’s famous, after all. His book is a best-seller. He has all the money he wants. What are we except an obscure little liberal arts college in an even more obscure part of Pennsylvania?”
Vivi considered this. “We’ve got the best rated undergraduate major in American Studies in the country. Donegal Steele is a professor of American history.”
“He could have been a professor of history at Yale. Or at Harvard, for God’s sake—they’ll hire anything at Harvard as long as it gets its name in the newspapers. But Vivi, there’s one thing he couldn’t have gotten, at Harvard or at Yale or anywhere else but here.”
“What?”
“Power.”
Vivi Wollman threw up her hands. “For God’s sake, Katherine, will you listen to yourself? You’ve gone totally paranoid. Power to do what? You just said yourself this was nothing but an obscure liberal arts college—”