by Jane Haddam
Out in the corridor, it was better, because it was quieter, but it wasn’t as good as it could be. Going up the stairs to her office, Alice ran into Katherine Branch. Katherine was bobbing and weaving to some music inside her head. That was always a bad sign, as far as Alice was concerned. Katherine in a self-confident mood was Katherine up to trouble. Usually, Katherine wore her victimization like a crown: revolutionary sainthood on the cheap; martyrdom on tenure and fifty thousand a year.
“Talked to the police,” Katherine said. “As a high, I recommend it.”
Katherine zipped down the stairs and Alice continued up, wondering what that was all about. It was the kind of question it was never safe to ask about Katherine.
Alice got to the third floor, pushed through the fire doors and turned the corner into the corridor. She saw the man immediately, although she didn’t exactly recognize him. He was standing at the far end, near the door to her office, reading notices on the corkboard on the wall. He was too tall, too fat, too slouched, and too formal—where had he gotten that navy blue pin-striped suit?—to be a fellow academic. Anyway, she knew all the older men on the faculty of this college. She studied his face until she placed it: that man, that friend of Tibor Kasparian’s who was helping the police, Gregor Demarkian.
She walked up to him, looked at the corkboard from around his back—he seemed to be studying a notice about a meeting of the Federalist Club—and said, “Mr. Demarkian? Can I help you with something?”
“What?” He abandoned the corkboard. “Oh. Dr. Elkinson. No. I was just reading.”
Alice tried to take him in but he seemed like—nothing. He was too round and soft and old for her to take him seriously. “It must seem pitifully provincial after some of the places you’ve been. Sometimes I wonder what our students think when they get out into the real world and find that none of this matters.”
“Their educations matter, surely?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know how educated they get. Sometimes I think some of them just float through here on their way to their MBAs. Or their masters in social work, what with the changes in fashion.”
“Oh, dear.”
Alice got her keys out of her pocket and began to unlock the door to her office. It was right across the hall from the corkboard, not a distance that would require stopping the conversation. That was good, because she found she didn’t want to stop the conversation. Talking to Gregor Demarkian was oddly soothing. She got the door unlocked and pushed it open.
“Do you want to come inside and sit down? You look done in. If you weren’t in that suit, I’d say you’d just got back from one of Ken’s climbs up Hillman’s Rock.”
“Oh, no. Nothing that strenuous. I was just making a fool of myself in Constitution House. Are you sure you want me to come in? I don’t want to interfere with your work.”
“You won’t be interfering with my work,” Alice said, “although God only knows I have enough to do. Magnum opus number four due at the University of Chicago Press three weeks ago, and I haven’t even finished writing the conclusion. Don’t worry about it. I’m supposed to be holding office hours. It’s Halloween. No one will come. Come on in. I’ll make us some tea.”
Gregor Demarkian seemed to hesitate, but it wasn’t for long. He followed Alice into her office, using his foot to push the little rock prop she kept on the floor into position. Alice opened her window to let in the cross-breeze and plugged the hot water maker into the socket next to her desk. When she turned around, Demarkian was looking at her degrees in their frames on the wall.
“Very impressive,” he said. “In fact, all this is very impressive. Berkeley for your doctorate. Swarthmore undergraduate.”
“Oh,” Alice said, amused. “I’ve always been impressive. That’s what I do with my life.”
“It seems a little like overkill for a place like Independence College,” Gregor said, “unless they’re paying you a great deal of money.”
Alice laughed. “They don’t. They did give me tenure when I was practically an adolescent, though, so I suppose it works out. And they give me the time to write. That’s important.”
“Mmm,” Gregor said.
Alice turned away. “So,” she said, “do you want to ask me all kinds of questions? That phony policeman David Markham already has, but in the movies I see the police always ask everything four or five times.”
“I’m not the police.”
“I know you’re not. That doesn’t matter, does it?”
Gregor Demarkian shrugged. “Sometimes I think it does, and sometimes I think it doesn’t. I suppose there are a few things I could ask you, if you feel like answering questions.”
“I don’t feel like answering questions, I feel like hearing questions,” Alice said. “Then I’ll know how the minds of the police are working, and I can go back to Ken and be a fascinating woman. Unfortunately, you aren’t going to ask me what I was doing at the time of the crime, because you know what I was doing. Standing right there next to the victim in plain sight of half the college.”
“Mmm,” Gregor Demarkian said. “What about the victim? Do you happen to remember what she was carrying on her tray?”
“You mean on her cafeteria tray? She had a cup of tea, I remember that. She—” Alice stopped.
Gregor Demarkian cocked his head at her. “What is it?”
Alice shook her head.
She wasn’t sure what it was. It was funny how much you forgot about traumatic eruptions into your life. She remembered that from the aftermath of the attack at Berkeley. For a couple of weeks she had been fine, and then things had begun to surface, details and particulars she had repressed so well she’d actually forgotten all about them. It had made her feel like a fool at the time, and it made her feel a little like a fool now. A scholar was supposed to be a noticing person, in spite of all that nonsense about ivory towers and absentmindedness. She had made it her business to be a noticing person. She shook her head again.
“I don’t really know,” she said. “It’s not something—when she came through the cash register, what she had on her tray was a cup of tea. Nothing else. I’m sure of that.”
“But—”
Alice felt herself blushing slightly, giving in to the perennial curse of the fair haired. “It was later,” she told him, “after we’d paid up. We were standing in the middle of things, so to speak, and she was—I know it must have looked like I was talking to her the whole time—”
“It did.”
“—but I wasn’t. There was Ken there and I was talking to him, looking away from her, just before it happened. And when I turned back—this is going to sound very strange—when I turned back I could swear to God she was swallowing something.”
“Solid or liquid?”
“Liquid,” Alice said positively, and was surprised to realize she was positive.
“The tea,” Gregor said gravely. “She could have been drinking the tea.”
Alice shook her head. “I wasn’t doing an analysis at the time,” she said, “right after that Maryanne fell over and I wasn’t doing an analysis of anything. But I can swear to you that that tea hadn’t been touched.”
“Why?”
“Because it was slopping. One of the things I did when I was working summers during high school was wait tables in a diner. You got much better tips if you didn’t slop the coffee. I have an eye you wouldn’t believe for when a cup is overfull, and that cup was overfull. Trust me.”
Trust me. Alice felt herself blushing again. That was the kind of thing people said when they weren’t trustworthy at all, when they had something to hide. Demarkian would be a fool if he didn’t at least consider the possibility that she had something to hide, like attempted murder. She had been the one standing closest to Miss Maryanne Veer when she fell.
She braced herself for another round of questions about the cafeteria tray and the swallowing and was surprised again. Instead of pursuing the subject, Demarkian was going off on a tangent.
; “Tell me about the Climbing Club,” he said. “Who’s in it? What do they do?”
“The Climbing Club?” She found it a little hard to switch gears. Why would he want to know about the Climbing Club? “We’re all in it. All the faculty in the Program, I mean. Ken and me. Katherine Branch. Everyone except Father Tibor.”
“I’ll admit I can’t see Tibor climbing rocks if he doesn’t have to. Isn’t that a strange hobby for so many of you to take up? I wouldn’t think you’d all have the talent for it.”
Alice laughed. “We don’t. Ken’s good, but I’m a mess. Jack Carroll’s supposed to be a wonder, according to Ken, but Chessey Flint—” Alice shrugged. “I think it’s like pajama parties and mixers when we were all in high school. You do it because everybody else does it. It’s part of belonging. And then, of course, “there are the people with ulterior motives, like Katherine Branch.”
“What constitutes an ulterior motive for rock-climbing?”
“In Katherine’s case, there are several. In the first place, she has to try it, just to prove to herself and everybody else that she hasn’t been turned into a puling little wimp by the sexist expectations of a patriarchal society. Relax, Mr. Demarkian. I’m quoting. Anyway, then, of course, she’s got to fail—”
“Fail.”
“Certainly. If she succeeds at everything she wants to do—and Katherine’s got the talent for that, Mr. Demarkian, don’t let all that nonsense with the witchcraft fool you—anyway, if she succeeds, her whole philosophy goes up in smoke. The patriarchal society hasn’t wounded her. She’s nobody’s victim. Good Lord, she’d have to throw all the scholarship she’s done up to this point in the trash can and start over from scratch.”
“Did she have a talent for rock-climbing?”
“According to Ken she did. About ten times better than she ever let on. It used to drive him crazy.”
“Used to?”
“Katherine gave it up at the beginning of this term. Stopped coming to meetings. Stopped going on climbs. She said she refused to join any organization where even the women voted for men for president.”
Gregor Demarkian seemed to consider this, shifting back and forth in the chair he had chosen—the most uncomfortable one in the room. Alice wondered why he had done that. There was a perfectly good stuffed armchair in the corner and a wing chair next to the window. The water in her teamaker was boiling away. Alice leaned over, took the pitcher off the burner, and started searching around for her cups.
“Do you really want tea? And if you do, what kind? I’ve got six.”
“Any kind,” Gregor Demarkian said. “Can I ask you one more question?”
“Of course. But if it’s one more question about Katherine, I think I’ll go hide in the closet. The woman gives me migraines.”
“It’s not about Katherine,” Gregor Demarkian said. “I want to know what you know about Donegal Steele.”
Outside Alice Elkinson’s window, a breeze had kicked up, rustling what was left of the brown and drying leaves in the trees and bringing half-hysterical laughter and Lenore. “Croak a doak,” Lenore said, perching on the windowsill. Then she took off again, back out to wherever she went, and Alice threw a pair of tea bags into a pair of teacups. Earl Grey for herself, Darjeeling for Gregor Demarkian. Gregor Demarkian seemed to her like a Darjeeling sort of man.
Gregor Demarkian had just asked her a question about Donegal Steele.
It bothered Alice Elkinson enormously that she hadn’t expected it.
2
DR. KENNETH CROCKETT HAD seen Gregor Demarkian go into Liberty Hall. Ken had been coming up the path from Constitution House at the time, intent on getting some work done and dropping in on Alice’s office hours, but once he saw that tall broad figure go up the steps he changed his mind. He wasn’t in the mood to deal with any of it today—with any of anything. He’d had a long night and an even longer morning. He’d been looking for Jack Carroll for hours and getting nowhere. The boy was supposed to be on campus and on duty. In a social sense, this, was the most important night of his college career. He had still managed to vanish so completely, he might as well have been the invisible man. Ken had talked to Freddie and Max and Ted, and the situation was worse than any he could have imagined. Jack hadn’t just vanished. He had ceased to exist. Even his best friends didn’t know where he had gone.
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.”<
br />
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.
3
AT 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.