Quoth the Raven (28 page)

Gregor cleared a place for himself on the love seat, pushing a pile of Mickey Spillane novels to the floor. Tibor watched him do it without protest. Tibor spent a lot of his time pushing piles of books to the floor.

“Perhaps,” Tibor said, “this is the answer to what happened to Miss Maryanne Veer. You say Dr. Crockett is gay and—and using a cover. Yes. So, Miss Veer finds out, and threatens to tell, and Dr. Crockett, worried about his career, decides to—”

Gregor choked. “This is the 1990s, Tibor. And this is a college campus. No one would care.”

“According to Bennis, Dr. Crockett would care.”

“Actually,” Bennis said, “he might even have reason to care. It’s like that Katherine Branch person.”

“We ran into Dr. Branch in the quad, Krekor.”

“Strange woman,” Bennis shrugged. “Anyway, the thing is, there’s a position open here for Head of the Program all these people teach in, right?”

“Right,” Gregor said. Cautiously.

“Well, it’s one thing to grant tenure to someone who’s a little ridiculous, like Katherine Branch. I mean, why not? If they’re politically correct about being ridiculous, it even makes the administration look good. So tolerant, you know the gig.” Bennis had finished her pastry. She reached for another one. “With an important administrative post, though—and that’s what Head of this Program or Chairman or whatever is, from what I can tell, it’s the most important Program on campus—anyway, for that sort of thing, you want dignity. I hate to apprise you of this, Gregor, but 1990s or not, homosexuality has yet to acquire the odor of sanctity most college administrations are looking for in their officially visible members. Neither has being a witch. Neither has being a sex bomb.”

“
Sex
bomb?”

“It is silliness, Krekor. It is Bennis’s personal theory of what makes a professional image.”

“Well, Alice Elkinson is a very ambitious woman. You don’t put out all those publications everybody’s talking about if you’re not. Under those circumstances, if I’d had a randy old goat chasing me all over campus right before a promotion decision, I would be furious.”

Tibor sighed. “We have been all over campus today, Krekor. We have been talking with students. Bennis has been flirting. I have been serving as bodyguard. If it is necessary to a professional image not to be perceived as a sex bomb, I think it is a good thing Bennis did not become a scholar.”

“I would have choked on the dust.” Bennis had finished the second pastry. She licked her fingers and stood up. “I’m going to go find myself something to drink,” she said, “you people want anything?”

Gregor and Tibor both shook their heads, and she wandered off The alcove kitchen was neither hidden nor very far away. They could both see her opening the refrigerator door, leaning down to get a good look at what was inside (it was really only half a refrigerator), rummaging through the contents. Gregor couldn’t imagine anyone looking less like a sex bomb than Bennis did on an ordinary day: the knee socks, the baggy jeans, the turtleneck, the oversize flannel shirt, the hair either falling or rising cloudlike into the air around her face or pinned precariously to the top of her head. And yet, he knew what Tibor was getting at. There was just something
about
Bennis Hannaford.

Gregor looked up to find Father Tibor staring at him in concern, and shrugged slightly, feeling embarrassed. He had come up the west staircase determined to lay his theory on the line and proceed from there, but now he didn’t want to do it that way. He had been made a little gun-shy by David Markham’s laughter. He and Father Tibor had discussed the little solder cylinder thoroughly last night, after Tibor and Bennis had come home from the restaurant. Gregor pulled the copy Jack Carroll had made for him out of his pocket and put it down on one of the books on the coffee table. Tibor raised eloquent eyebrows. Gregor shrugged. Bennis had taken to sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of the refrigerator and swearing under her breath.

“So,” Tibor said, with an air of being responsible for getting the conversation going, “you are still worried about that.”

“Tibor, you remember yesterday when we first arrived here, when we were up in the parking lot? You were being tickled that the professors, and I think I quote, ‘all fix their own cars.’ ”

Tibor nodded. “Yes, yes,” he said. “It’s very democratic, Krekor, except that I am not one of them. Of course, I do not have a car.”

“What about the rest of the professors in the Program? Do they?”

“As far as I know they do, Krekor, yes.”

“Do they all fix them by themselves?”

Tibor considered the question gravely, as if he’d been asked to give an account of the reasons for the Greek Schism. “Dr. Steele,” he said, casting a surreptitious glance at the wall he shared with the college’s least-liked professor, “does nothing for himself or by himself that he considers menial. Dr. Steele even has a woman who comes in to clean his bathroom. It is very unusual. Also, Krekor, it is one of the reasons he always gives for why he thinks Miss Flint will—will—”

“Leave Jack Carroll and end up in his bed in time?”

“Or has ended up in his bed already, Krekor, yes. He says she will prefer a scholar over a grease monkey. But Mr. Carroll, Krekor, is—”

“I know,” Gregor said. “He’s hardly your everyday grease monkey. What about the rest of them? Alice Elkinson? Ken Crockett? Katherine Branch? Even Chessey Flint.”

“Chessey Flint is not a professor, Krekor. I do not think she has a car, but I don’t know. If it needed to be fixed, I think Mr. Carroll would do it for her, yes?”

“Yes.”

“Dr. Branch fusses around in the shed and under the hood and pretends,” Tibor said, “and often in the shed she leaves a mess. Then I think she takes the car into town and has it fixed by a mechanic in secret. Dr. Crockett and Dr. Elkinson fix their own. I have seen them.”

“In the shed?”

“Yes, yes, Krekor, in the shed.”

Gregor drummed his fingers against a pile of books,
The Sociopolitical Consequences of Unilateral Peace
, Augustine’s
City of God
, unabridged and in Latin. Then he reached into his pocket and came up with a folded sheet of paper. It was unlined, flimsy, and cheap, and had been torn off the sort of typing paper pad that could be bought in any small-town pharmacy. The surface interior to the folds had been covered with David Markham’s incongruously small, neat, precise handwriting, in ballpoint pen.

“This,” Gregor told Tibor as he flattened the paper on yet another pile of books, wondering all the time how the damned things had migrated to the coffee table. Yesterday, the surface of that table had been clear. “This,” he said again, “is David Markham’s timetable for yesterday morning and early afternoon, up to the point where Miss Veer was poisoned. David Markham likes timetables. He likes lists. He likes notes. He sheds paper wherever he goes.”

“I like timetables, too,” Bennis said, coming back to them. She had a can of something to drink in her hand. “Those are my favorite kinds of mysteries. You know. The ones with the train schedules and things.”

“This is not a mystery with a train schedule in it.” Gregor looked at her drink again, tried to figure out what was wrong with the can, and dismissed the whole subject as irrelevant. “Now,” he said, “let’s flesh this out a little bit. We arrived here yesterday at eleven o’clock—”

“Quarter to,” Bennis said sheepishly.

“Quarter to?”

“I fudged the time a little,” Bennis was defensive. “Gregor, I know how you are about speed—”

“Never mind how I am about speed,” Gregor told her, exasperated. “I’ll give you my last word on speed when we have this done. Let’s just get it straight. We arrived here at quarter to eleven. We walked down from the parking lot. We got to the quad in, what, ten minutes?”

“Not so long as that, Krekor,” Tibor said. “Five at the most.”

“Fine. Five. That puts us at ten of. That means we talked to Jack Carroll at no later than five of. Now, according to what he told Markham, right after Jack Carroll talked to us he went straight to—”

“Chessey Flint’s room at Lexington House,” Bennis put in. “We talked to this guy named Max this morning, Gregor. This thing between eleven and twelve with Jack and Chessey is famous on campus. Everybody knows. Jack Carroll’s been missing all day and—”

“I know about Jack Carroll being missing,” Gregor said. “I even have a fair idea of where he is. Never mind. He’ll be back. Now, we got to Constitution House no later than a minute or two after eleven, and we saw Alice Elkinson coming out, looking for Ken Crockett. Then we came up here and talked for a while before going to lunch. In the meantime, again according to what Dr. Elkinson told David Markham, Dr. Elkinson went to her office, checked Dr. Crockett’s office, and then came back here. She says she got back here at about quarter to twelve. At ten to twelve, she says she got a call from Ken Crockett, supposedly from the Climbing Club cabin on Hillman’s Rock. Where exactly is Hillman’s Rock?”

Over there, Tibor said ingenuously, pointing to one of the walls. Then, seeing the look on Gregor’s face, he got up, went to the desk he had shoved into one of the corners, and came back with a piece of paper of his own. This was a far more expensive example of the art of papermaking than Gregor’s, a thick textured thing stained to look like parchment. Tibor flattened it out on the one clear space on the coffee table, and Gregor read the legend that was written across the bottom in sweeping, embossed calligraphic script:
A Visitor’s Guide to Independence College
.

Tibor patted his pockets, found a pen and took it out. It was made of clear plastic and filled with hot pink ink.

“Now,” he said, “here is where we are.” He drew a circle around the pen-and-ink drawing of a square building with drawings of shrubs around the edges of it. “This is Constitution House. We are almost at the center of this side of the quad. The—”

“West side,” Gregor said.

“Yes, Krekor. Exactly. Here is Hillman’s Rock.” He drew another circle, this time around what looked like a
Girl Scout Handbook
rendition of a mountain, far to the east.

“Where is the parking lot?” Gregor asked him.

Tibor moved his hand across the paper and drew another circle, this one to the west, but not so far. The sweep of the circle he drew took in a drawing even Gregor could recognize as King George’s Scaffold. Gregor’s gaze moved around and around among the three circles, taking in the entire campus.

“What about Liberty Hall?” he asked.

Tibor drew a circle not quite midway between the parking lot circle and the Constitution House circle. Gregor sat back.

“Is there something wrong?” Tibor asked him. “It is a very good map of the campus, Krekor, even if it is artistic. Very accurate.”

“That’s good to know.”

“Then what is it?” Bennis asked.

Gregor leaned forward again. “Let’s say you were going to climb Hillman’s Rock,” he told them. “What would you do? How would you get from Constitution House, he tapped that circle, “to where you were going to start?” He tapped Hillman’s Rock.

“Well,” Tibor said, “I think it would matter, Krekor, who you were. You could drive there, yes, if that is what you are asking.”

“If you were Ken Crockett, would you drive there?”

“No, Krekor, I would not. I would go on foot. All the very serious climbers in the club hike there on foot. It is not as far as it seems.” Tibor hesitated. “And Krekor there is something else. If we are speaking now of yesterday, Dr. Crockett did not take his car to Hillman’s Rock, at least not until we had been in the parking lot and gone. And after that, the times—” He shrugged. “I saw his car in the parking lot when you were getting out of the van, Krekor. I remarked on it—”

“I remember now.” Gregor finished.

Bennis took another swig of her soda. “This is weird enough. Maybe Ken Crockett wasn’t rock-climbing at all yesterday. Maybe he was somewhere else. I wonder where.”

“Maybe he just did what he always did and hiked out there on foot.” Gregor turned to Tibor. “Are the times right for that? Could he have called Alice Elkinson at ten of twelve and still been in the dining room at twenty after?”

“Yes, Krekor, if he started almost right away. He is a very fast walker. I know. I have walked with him.”

“All right.” The edge of the map was lying a little over the edge of the timetable David Markham had given him. Gregor pushed the map away.

Gregor picked the timetable up and squinted at it. Bennis might love mysteries with timetables in them, but he didn’t. “All right,” he said again. “Now. Katherine Branch. When David Markham asked her, she said she’d spent the entire time between around eleven thirty and twelve thirty with her coven—I’m not making this up; coven is what she said—preparing, as she put it, for the ceremony of black exorcism they were going to perform in the dining room. The coven got into their makeup in her apartment in Constitution House and then formed a procession, which proceeded to the cafeteria, getting there at—”

“Bullshit,” Bennis said.

Gregor looked up. “What do you mean, bull—”

“Well, she’s lying, isn’t she?” Bennis waved her can in the air. “We got there after twelve sometime, right? And
she
was there, in the open space just outside the cafeteria doors, and she had to have been in the cafeteria first because—”

“Bennis, what are you talking about?”

Bennis sighed. “I’d have said something if anybody asked me, but it wasn’t the right time and you were the one who said that whoever had handed Miss Veer the poison had to be standing right next to her practically, and she wasn’t in the cafeteria then. Dr. Branch, I mean. But she was outside it just as we were going in to lunch. I didn’t recognize her or anything. We’d just got here, for God’s sake. But I really couldn’t mistake that hair. And she wasn’t in makeup, either. Her hair was tied back in this bandanna thing and she was wearing a raincoat.”

Gregor was counting to ten. He always ended up counting to ten when Bennis had information to give him. It was practically mandatory.

“Back up,” he demanded. “If you say you saw her there then, I believe you. Why do you think she was in the cafeteria first?”