The Memorial Hall Murder (12 page)

O FORTUNATA MORS!

proclaimed the inscription over Mr. Crawley's door. Well, who would believe that? The death of a young man was never happy or fortunate. Useful, maybe, but not fortunate.

BREVIS A NATURA NOBIS VITA DATA EST
AT MEMORIA BENE REDDITAE VITAE SEMPITERNA …

Homer stared at the inscription and half closed his eyes, trying to let the meaning sink in without struggling through it word by word. It was something about the shortness of life. Nature has given us a short life—that was it—but the memory of a good life endureth forever.
Sempiterna.
A good word. It seemed to go on foreverrrrrr.
Sempiterrrrnaaaaaa.
Only, memory didn't endure forever, that was the trouble. Who gave a thought to these young soldiers now? They were just names, forgotten names on the wall. And who would remember poor old Ham Dow after a while? After this batch of students was gone? They were talking about putting up a memorial plaque for Ham, right here along with the others. But that wasn't good enough. The memory of his life was a poor substitute for a good man cut down in his prime.

The chorus was pouring out of Sanders now, hauling on jackets and knapsacks. Violinists and cellists were going the other way, carrying their instruments, butting open the doors with armfuls of books. Jonathan Pearlman bustled past Homer and nodded at him and walked into Sanders with Rosie Bell, and soon the timpani began thumping a mighty rubadub and Rosie's trumpet pealed the
Amen.

Homer remembered a poem by Walt Whitman.
“Beat! beat! drums!—blow! bugles! blow!”
he said, as Mary ran toward him, pulling on her coat.
“Make even the trestles to shake the dead where they lie awaiting the hearses.”

And Mary grinned at him and said the rest,
“So strong you thump O terrible drums—so loud you bugles blow.”

Chapter Seventeen

He had been asleep again, but now he woke up and lifted his face from the floor and stared into the darkness, listening. Could he hear something or couldn't he? Somewhere there was a kind of rhythmic vibration. He kept feeling it in his head, and then not feeling it, and thinking it was his imagination, and then feeling it again. It was like music, like drums or brass instruments very far away. Like a marching band making threadlike sounds far away when you wait for it on the street. You hear only the thump of the drums at first, and then the toy bleating of the horns and trombones. But this was even less than that. It was only a kind of throbbing and buzzing in his temples. And now even the throbbing and buzzing had stopped.

Ham closed his eyes again and dropped his head. He was thirsty, terribly thirsty. How long had he been drifting in and out of sleep? How many hours, or days, or weeks?

Something terrible had happened. That was apparent. But what? He couldn't remember anything about it except for the stranger's face. There had been a look of surprise on someone's face, someone new to him, a stranger, he could remember that. But nothing more. Something colossal must have happened, but he couldn't for the life of him remember what.

Something was lying heavily on his back. With an effort Ham crawled out from under it. Then he rolled over and tried to sit up. But trembling seized him. He was overcome with nausea and dizziness. He dropped down again and closed his eyes. After all, they would find him sooner or later. They must be looking for him, searching everywhere. Surely they would be digging and shoveling at the outer edges of his darkness, right now. He could trust them to keep trying. They wouldn't let him down. He would just drowse off and leave it up to them. They were his good Rats.

Chapter Eighteen

Vick hurried out of her Corelli seminar in Paine Hall and then stopped short at the west entrance and pressed her nose against one of the oval windows in the doors, studying the rain outside. It was coming down like pitchforks, like waterfalls and cataracts. Well, never mind, she didn't have time to wait for it to stop pouring. Vick hunched her shoulders and ducked her head and clutched her books to her breast and ran down the steps. It was like going swimming with all her clothes on. Head down, she splashed in the direction of the Science Center, where she could take a shortcut to Memorial Hall. In the Science Center she took off her squelching shoes and padded barefoot along the brick corridor, shaking back her wet hair. The corridor was dry, but in the Science Center Vick couldn't help thinking of her Chem 2 class, which met in the building twice a week, and she winced.

She had been an idiot to sign up for Chem 2. She should have known better. The
Confidential Guide
had given her fair warning. “Chem 2 is extremely competitive and covers almost all areas of chemistry in agonizing depth at withering speed.” And it was true. She was already way behind, less than a month into the term. And it was probably too late to drop the damned thing and sign up for that gut course her roommate was taking, Nat Sci 112, which was supposed to be just one big slide lecture on the history of science, Galileo and his telescope, and so on.

Well, she could probably slog through Chem 2 somehow or other. She had always been able to get a course together sooner or later.
Victoria is highly motivated to succeed academically.
But of course it wasn't so much a matter of brains and motivation and success and all that claptrap. It was the way time presented itself to her every day as something to be carved up into pieces, like a pine board. Fiercely she hewed it into hours and minutes. It was a useful material, not to be wasted. Even the scraps could be whacked together into something. The vibration of the wheezing, jerking saw jiggled in every nerve in Vick's thin body, swiveling her head in rapid darting glances as she hurried along the sidewalk, heading for Memorial Hall. Impatiently she leaned forward. staring eagerly through her wet eyelashes at the massive building that blocked out the whole sky.

She still wasn't sure she could do it. When Mrs. Krapotkin and Professor Howard had told her to take over for Ham, she had said, “Oh, no, no, I can't. I really can't.” But they had been firm. They had insisted. Vick had walked out of Mrs. Krapotkin's office in a dazzled terrified trance. She had run upstairs to the library in Paine Hall and snatched up everything she could find about Handel's
Messiah.
Mrs. Krapotkin seemed to think Vick could just take over the whole thing because she had done so well in Ham's conducting course last year, and he had entrusted her with some of the rehearsals for last year's Christmas performance. But to take on the whole thing! To weld it all together! To nag the chorus until they could sing the long passages of sixteenth notes to perfection, to work with the soloists, to try to keep Mrs. Esterhazy calmed down, because she got so swoopy when she was excited, to take over the orchestra from Jonathan Pearlman, and on top of everything else, to give lessons to Miss Plankton! Oh, Miss Plankton, what to do about Miss Plankton! Jon Pearlman had thrown up his hands and sworn he wouldn't put up with Miss Plankton. But Vick had persuaded him to let her stay. Miss Plankton was in. She was in for good. If Jane Plankton was good enough for Ham Dow, she was good enough for Jon Pearlman and Vick Van Horn. Vick had promised to give her private lessons, free of charge.

But of course it wasn't just a matter of getting the parts right. The whole thing had to be not only note perfect, it had to be one whole, musically and meaningfully.
Christ was bom and died for our sins and rose from the dead to prove that we too can be saved.
That was what the music was about. It was an exalted statement of Christian belief, whether one agreed with it or not. But how could she get it all together, unskilled as she was, so that the music really said that,
For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive?
It had to be more than a collection of familiar tunes. Vick remembered Ham's cautionary joke about the man who dreamt he was playing the violin in a performance of Handel's
Messiah
, and woke up to find he really was. That was the trouble. Everybody took it for granted. They had to feel it, the whole chorus, the whole orchestra; they had to understand it and sing it and play it as if they did, as if they really cared, as if they saw the heavens open up before them to reveal the great God himself, the way Handel said he did.

She still had so much to learn. She had buried herself in the score. She had driven her roommate half crazy by playing the tape recording of last year's performance over and over and over. She had drenched herself in Handel's
Messiah.
She breathed it, ate it, drank it, dreamt it. She woke up at night with her teeth tapping the rhythm of the “Hallelujah Chorus.” There was no other piece of music in the world but
Messiah.
She couldn't understand how her classmates in Paine Hall could be bothered with Corelli or anybody else but George Frederick Handel. She was temporarily insane, out of her head, a monomaniac, she knew that. But how was she ever going to get all the beat patterns straight, and the cues, and remember which arias were da capo, and master all the swift changes from one part to another? There was the place where the lilting allegro moderato of the chorus
All we like sheep have gone astray
turned into a ponderous adagio—
And the Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all.
The whole thing was full of tricky transitions like that. She had to know it all by heart.

Vick sloshed up the steps of the north entry of Memorial Hall and ran barefoot into Sanders, leaving a dripping trail from her heavy wet skirt on the marble floor of the memorial corridor.

The thing was, it was all for Ham. It was his concert. He was as alive as ever in Vick's head. She would make him come alive for everybody else, just one more time.

Chapter Nineteen

Ham woke to a feverish thirst. He rolled over, hunched himself up on his hands and knees, and began crawling in the dark. He was dizzy, but instinctively he kept his eyes closed. His head pounded, but he hardly felt it. All he could think of was his thirst. He must find water.