by Jane Haddam
“Well. Yes. Maybe you do. But you’ve got to admit, Miss Veer, if it wasn’t for rampant sexism, you’d be Head of this Program yourself.”
You’d be Head of this Program yourself. Miss Maryanne Veer refolded Vivi Wollman’s New Publications Report, took it back to her desk, and sat down. She didn’t know what was worse, that Vivi had been sincere, or that in her sincerity she had actually thought she was paying Miss Veer a compliment. Miss Maryanne Veer didn’t think she would ever understand the sensibilities of modern young women. They were so consummately irrational.
She opened the blue cardboard folder, put the New Publications Report inside—and then thought of something. Poor specimen though she might be, Vivi Wollman was a faculty member. Unlike Miss Maryanne Veer, she lived on campus.
“Dr. Wollman?”
Miss Maryanne Veer had expected the little chit to be halfway down the hall by now, but she wasn’t. Vivi was still leaning against the counter, waiting for Miss Maryanne Veer to do the Good Lord only knew what.
“Yes?” Vivi said.
Miss Maryanne Veer put her best effort into not letting out the granddaddy of all sighs. “Dr. Wollman,” she said again, “you live in Constitution House, don’t you?”
“Yes, Miss Veer. Of course I do. Most of the people who teach in the Program do.”
“Have you happened to see Dr. Donegal Steele around at all in the past two days?”
“Dr. Steele?”
“Yes, of course, Dr. Steele. I’ve been unable to get in touch with him.”
“Well, Miss Veer, I don’t usually see Dr. Steele, if you know what I mean. I mean, he and I aren’t exactly simpatico.”
“No, of course you’re not. I thought you might have seen him in the hallways, in passing. Or in the college dining hall, for dinner last night or breakfast this morning.”
“I wasn’t at dinner last night,” Vivi said, “I had a meeting of the Intercampus Council on Sexism in Philadelphia.”
“What about breakfast this morning?”
Vivi Wollman blushed. “Well, Miss Veer, you see, I don’t tend to be too alert at breakfast. I don’t notice much of anything except my New York Times.”
“No,” Miss Maryanne Veer said. “Of course not.”
“Is it really all that important that you get in touch with him?” Vivi asked. “I mean, I know he has to be around somewhere, he always is, but it’s been really relaxing not having him just swoop down from nowhere without warning. I was kind of hoping he’d decided to bug out until after Halloween. You know, to avoid the fuss.”
“If Dr. Steele was going to do that, he’d have left word with me.”
“Well, maybe.” Vivi Wollman was doubtful. “But you know, Miss Veer, maybe not. And he’s a senior professor. If he wants to take off on his own, what can you do about it?”
The student drop cards at the top of the desk had become disarranged, the way papers on desks always become disarranged, for no discernable reason. Miss Maryanne Veer pulled them toward her, and made two piles of them: cards proper to one side, explanation sheets to the other. She was not, after all, a ditherer. She was certainly not the kind of ditherer Vivi Wollman was. She knew what it was she had to do next. She only had to work up the courage to do it.
She deposited the drop cards and explanation sheets into the long center drawer of her desk and said,
“I can do what I ought to do, Dr. Wollman. I can go to lunch, and come back, and if I haven’t seen or heard from Dr. Steele by then, I can call the police and report him missing.”
2
IN SPITE OF WHAT Dr. Alice Elkinson thought, Dr. Kenneth Crockett didn’t always go rock-climbing with Jack Carroll. Sometimes he went on his own, which was what he had done this morning. He knew he shouldn’t. The first thing he taught the new people who joined the Climbing Club was never to go up anything you needed pitons for on your own. Even Sir Edmund Hilary had gotten into trouble on climbs. Everybody did. Everybody got tired. Everybody got sick. Everybody got stupid once in a while. It was the iron law of human nature, the flip side of Socrates’s old know thyself. Never trust yourself. That was the ticket.
Now it was ten minutes to twelve, and he was back, tired and sweaty, sitting on the porch of the log house that served as the Climbing Club’s in-season headquarters. What was below him wasn’t a climb but a walk. The slope was too gentle to feel like anything else to anyone but the most out of shape of amateurs. What was around him was silence. “In season” for the Climbing Club meant the spring, or maybe the very early fall. This late in October, the temperatures were too low and the threat of rain too constant. That was why he was stuck with Jack if he wanted a companion. Jack Carroll was the only other person he knew at Independence College willing to go up Hillman’s Rock at six o’clock in the morning and in a temperature of twelve degrees.
Ken Crockett adjusted his behind on the hard seat of the rocker, shifted the cellular phone to a more comfortable place on his shoulder, and stretched out his legs. He always carried a cellular phone in his backpack when he climbed, even though he knew there were places in these mountains where a cellular phone wouldn’t work. It was a precaution. He always called Dr. Alice Elkinson as soon as he got back to the log house, to make sure she didn’t worry. Now she was jabbering away in his ear like an agitated bird.
“I don’t know, Ken,” she was saying, “if you really had to climb this morning, you could have asked me. I climb.”
“I know you climb. You hate to climb in the cold.”
“I’d rather climb in the cold than have you lying up there with a broken leg and no one to send for help.”
“I’m fine, Alice. It’s you who doesn’t sound fine.”
“Maybe you should have asked Katherine Branch,” she said. “Then she’d have been up there bothering you, instead of down here bothering me.”
“What was our Kathie bothering you about this time?”
“Something Maryanne Veer said to Vivi Wollman. About calling the police and reporting Dr. Steele missing. It seems he really has dropped off the face of the earth.”
“Lucky for us.”
“Good riddance to bad rubbish, my mother would have said. Oh, Ken. Let’s not talk about it. Vivi was totally hysterical, God only knows why, and Katherine came bursting into my room ranting about Nazi storm troopers and I don’t know what else. Vivi probably has a bag of marijuana stashed under her mattress.”
“Borrow some,” Ken said. “They say it’s very good for sex.”
“We already have everything we need for good sex.”
Ken shifted the phone on his shoulder again—it was amazing how hard it was to find a place to rest it that stayed bearable for more than a few minutes—and smiled. It was true. He and Alice did already have everything they needed for good sex, and he found that a little surprising. Alice was not exactly an emotionally forthcoming woman. She gave good public appearance, and fine party, but when he’d first met her he’d thought she was cold. Maybe it was just that, having always been reasonably well-heeled and reasonably attractive, he’d gotten far too used to women falling in his lap.
He leaned over and started to untie his hiking boots, which he really shouldn’t have been wearing on the porch anyway. The cleats dug holes in the soft pinewood.
“So tell me,” he said, “what else have you done with your day? I came up before breakfast. The place could have blown to pieces for all I know.”
“The place hasn’t blown to pieces. Somebody in my Civil War class rigged my desk so that every time I leaned on it, it screamed. That was fun. I think it had something to do with microchips. Oh, and I ran into Father Tibor and that friend of his, the one who’s giving the lecture.”
“Gregor Demarkian?”
“That’s the one.”
“What was he like?”
What came across the wire was the sound equivalent of a shrug, except that it wasn’t a sound, exactly. It was more like a sudden contraction of auricular space.
“I don’t k
now what to tell you,” Alice said. “He’s tall. A little too heavy. Looks like he’s in his fifties.”
“Intelligent?”
“It would be hard to say. He didn’t look stupid. He didn’t look like the man who caught the Fall River Knifeman, either.”
“I think the point about him is less who he caught than the system he set up to catch him. Them. You know what I mean. I was on the committee that reviewed the proposal for the talk. We ended up with all this stuff in our file about ‘internal consistency.’ ”
“What’s that?”
“A method for catching murderers. Serial or otherwise.”
“I wish he’d devise a method for catching practical jokers. It wasn’t just the screaming desk, Ken, it’s been the whole day. And Halloween isn’t until tomorrow. You know that tree out in front of Liberty Hall, the one with the hole in the side of it?”
“Sure.”
“If you lean up against it in the right place, it yells ‘boo.’ ”
“Yell ‘boo’ back,” Ken said, laughing. Then he sat up straight. His boots were off. His feet felt cold even in their thick climbing socks. He stood up and stretched the kinks out of his back. “Why don’t you hang in there for about fifteen more minutes and I’ll be down to take you in to lunch. That way, if Katherine tries to nail you, I’ll be there to fight her off.”
“I don’t know where Katherine’s gone. She went stomping out of here, saying she knew exactly what to do about the arrival of the police state. Or words to that effect. I expect to find her boiling eye of newt and toe of frog in the middle of the quad. Are you sure you’re all right?”
“I’m fine, Alice. I love you.”
“You sound depressed,” Alice said. “Never mind. I love you, too. Hurry back.”
“I will.”
The phone went to dial tone in his ear. Ken reached around with his left thumb and shut the power off.
It was funny, but it was true: Alice always seemed to be half-right about him. He wasn’t depressed, exactly. He was sort of floaty, the way he got when there was too much in his life he had to deal with immediately and not enough information coming in about how he ought to act. He went to the edge of the porch and looked down into the trees, into nothing, into a place where there was neither Halloween nor Donegal Steele. Ken didn’t mind Halloween much—after all these years not merely at Independence College, but in Belleville, he had learned to live with it—but Steele had been on his mind for days. There didn’t seem to be any way to get him off.
If he had had to put a name to it, he would have said that Alice was just too innocent. She didn’t understand why Maryanne Veer was upset at Steele’s absence, or why Katherine Branch and Vivi Wollman were upset at the prospect of a visit from the police. He, on the other hand, understood both these things far too well.
The very idea of them made his blood run cold.
3
IT WAS NOON BY the time Jack Carroll and Chessey Flint came downstairs from Chessey’s room, and by then the living room of Lexington House was full of students in heightened states of exasperation. It was at times like these that Chessey realized how little, different college was from high school. What was supposed to be happening here was a snake dance, across the quad to the dining hall. It went off every year. In theory, anyone at Lexington House could have got it going at any time at all. What was holding it up was the rigid economy of campus status. Among the classes, seniors were more important than anyone else. Among the seniors, Chessey and Jack were more important than anyone else. The categories were so thoroughly ingrained and so deeply felt, they were paralyzing. These were grown men and women here in the living room of Lexington House, twenty-one and twenty-two year olds who were supposed to leave campus in less than eight months to go out and conquer the world. They were hanging around on sofas and love seats, waiting for the Most Popular Girl and the Most Popular Boy to lead them in a bunny hop.
She was not, Chessey knew, being fair. She was much too rattled to be fair. In the face of what the last few minutes had proved to her to be true—that Jack had changed; that he had changed toward her specifically; that he had changed toward her sexually most of all—all this stuff, these crepe paper streamers and plastic ghoulies and satin costume masks that squirted blood and water at the touch of a string, seemed like so much lunatic nonsense. They had read Poe’s Masque of the Red Death last year in her Nineteenth-Century American Lit course, and suddenly Chessey thought that that was what this was like, a not very benign exercise in group torture. Usually, when she came down from her time with Jack, she felt high. There was something exhilarating about not quite having sex, about letting him touch her when she knew the completion would be postponed. At the moment, she just felt terribly wrong, as if she had done something inexcusable.
As if, in her virginity, she had become imprisoned in the pointless and inane.
Chessey was looking through the crowd for Evie Westerman, hard to find with so many girls dressed identically in satin pumpkin costumes. Jack touched her on the shoulder and she jumped.
“Are you all right?” Jack said.
“I’m fine.”
“You don’t look fine.”
You’re the one who doesn’t look fine, Chessey thought. She didn’t say it. She was too frightened to say it. Instead, she went on looking for Evie and said while she was doing it, “Why don’t you get the dance started on your own? I want to talk to Evie for a minute.”
“Evie’s over there by the punch bowl. I think she’s got it spiked.”
Evie was most definitely over there by the punch bowl—and she probably had got it spiked. She had her mask on top of her head instead of over her face and her gloves tucked into the neckline of her pumpkin dress.
“Go talk to Evie and I’ll wait for you,” Jack said.
“It might take too long.” The last thing Chessey wanted was Jack waiting for her. “Go ahead, all right, please? I’ll catch up to you at lunch.”
“Chessey, if I’ve done something—”
“You haven’t done anything.” It was true. It wasn’t what he was doing. It was what he’d stopped being. “Go ahead, all right? I have a lot to talk to Evie about and I don’t want to feel—rushed.”
“Rushed,” Jack repeated.
“I’ll see you at lunch,” Chessey told him. Then she plunged into the crowd, moving against the current, in the direction of Evie.
When she got to the punch bowl, the crowd was moving out the door, led by Jack, and Evie was pouring herself another drink. The punch was spiked. It was much paler than it ought to have been, and that meant vodka. Chessey Flint almost never drank, literally never at noon, but she took a cup of it anyway.
“Come to the ladies’ room,” she told Evie. “We have to talk.”
If she had waited around to see the expression on Evie’s face, she would have known she was about to hear a lot of things she didn’t want to hear. As it was, she was in the hall leading to the ladies’ room before the last words were out of her mouth, and leaning, panting, against one of the marble sinks by the time Evie made her way in. By then, Evie looked the way she always looked, except a little more skeptical.
“Love on a mattress hasn’t done you much good today,” Evie said. “What’s the matter, Jack get a little out of control?”
“No.”
“No,” Evie assented. “Jack wouldn’t.”
There was a bar of Camay soap in each of the brass soap dishes attached to each of the marble sinks along the wall. Chessey picked up the bar closest to her and started to wash the makeup off her face. That way she had her back to Evie and her eyes closed so she couldn’t see her own face in the mirror.
“Listen,” she said. “I think he’s starting to believe it.”
“Believe what?”
“All those things Dr. Steele said about me. All those rumors he put out about the things we did together. Except that we didn’t do them. We really didn’t.”
“I know you didn’t. Jack knows you di
dn’t.”
“No, he doesn’t. He’s changed, Evie. Just in the last two days, he’s changed. Do you know what I think happened?”
“No.”
“I think he found Dr. Steele yesterday, even if he says he didn’t. I think they had a talk and I think Dr. Steele—convinced him.”
“Well, there’s an answer to that, isn’t there, Chess? You just let Jack sleep with you, and when you bleed all over the sheets, he’ll know he was wrong.”
“Evie.”
“Oh, Chess, for God’s sake, what do you want me to say? You’re being such a goddamned jerk.”
The water was backing up in the sink, making a small puddle filmy with soap. Chessey held her hands under the clean cold water from the tap, making them wet, making them wrinkle. Then she splashed water onto her face and turned the tap off.
“Does he talk to you?” she asked Evie. “Does he tell you things—about us?”
“Jack?” Evie shook her head. “Jack doesn’t talk to anybody. Not even to Dr. Crockett. Not about you.”
“Then how can you possibly know I’m being a jerk?”
“Common sense,” Evie Westerman said piously. Then, Chessey thought, she must have seen the effect she’d had. She made a small moue of self-disgust and reached under her costume for her cigarettes.
“Chess, listen to me. Jack didn’t see Dr. Steele yesterday. Nobody did. Nobody’s seen him today, either. I got it from Mandy Cavanaugh. She went over to Liberty Hall to drop a course and she heard Miss Veer talking about it.”
“Talking about what?” Chessey asked, confused.
“Talking about how Dr. Steele has disappeared.” Evie was impatient. “According to Mandy, he hasn’t just disappeared, he discorporated. No one’s been able to find him. Miss Veer was talking about calling in the police.”
To Chessey, this was not just confusing, this was incomprehensible. “Calling in the police about what?” she demanded. “What’s Dr. Steele supposed to have done?”
“It’s not what Dr. Steele is supposed to have done, it’s what somebody maybe did to him. I mean, let’s face it, Chess, senior professors don’t just fall off the face of the earth without telling anybody about it. Dr. Steele did.”