The Memorial Hall Murder (4 page)

Vick stuck her box of thumbtacks in her pocket and stood back to look at the poster.

Free tickets. Free tickets again. That was Ham's doing. Of course, it was crazy, just crazy. Because Ham would be handing out tickets too, and he'd lose track, and too many people would show up, and they'd be hanging from the rafters and crowded in the aisles, just the way they were last year. That was the way Ham wanted it. Let everybody in. Admission free for all. Well, that was what some people called it, a free-for-all. All that noise and confusion. But somehow Ham always seemed to make it work, and when they came to the end of
Messiah
, Part Two, he'd let everybody in Sanders stand up and sing the “Hallelujah Chorus” at the top of their lungs, and when the concert was over they'd all go home glad and satisfied. A concert with Ham Dow was always a lot more than just a musical experience. It would be like that again.

Vick pulled the door open, but the wind sucked through the enormous dark chamber on the other side and blew the door wide, slamming it against the side of the stone portal. She reached for the handle and tugged the door shut behind her and walked into the memorial transept. Morning light was slanting through the rose window, casting colored splotches on the wooden timbers that rose to the ribs of the pointed vault high over her head. The vaults themselves were almost invisible in the gloom. It was as if sheets of night sky were hung, pitchy black, down the length of the high corridor. Vick knew the building was supposed to be sort of medieval, but in her opinion it felt more like her great-grandfather's house in Illinois, which had been built during the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant. The dark volumes of musty air had the fragrance of that house in Illinois, with the dim shadowy parlor and the laundry with the set tubs and the high varnished pantry. Vick's footsteps were sharp chips of sound as she walked past the pale marble memorial tablets glimmering along the walls.

HENRY LIVERMORE ABBOTT. 6, MAY, 1864. WILDERNESS

JOHN LYMAN FENTON. 28, JULY, 1863. GETTYSBURG

She knocked on Mr. Crawley's door.

Mr. Crawley looked out, his face vague under his duck-billed hat. “Oh, hi, there. You want something?”

“Oh, Mr. Crawley, did you remember to set up the chairs in Sanders? You know, for our special rehearsal with the orchestra. It's a big special get-acquainted rehearsal of the Collegium and orchestra together, just for today. After today it will be the chorus at ten and the orchestra at eleven, every Monday and Wednesday. Remember? I mean, today is Wednesday.”

“Oh, Wednesday. Jeez, I thought it was Tuesday. Besides, I got like this acid stomach. Heartburn, you know?” Mr. Crawley belched stupendously and pressed a pitiful hand on his chest.

“Oh. Well, all right. I guess I can set them up myself. If I could just borrow the key.”

“Here, take it. It's all yours. No, that's all right. Keep it. I got lots of keys. Be my guest.” Then Mr. Crawley shut the door and withdrew into his cozy chamber, where Vick knew he had a nice leather sofa for snoozing. She hung the key on its long loop of string around her neck, crossed the hall, opened the instrument storage closet under the stairs, and took out her cello.

Then a long bar of sunlight fell on the floor from the door that opened on Cambridge Street, and she looked up in surprise. A very large angry man was standing over her, shouting. “Where in the name of God is Memorial Hall 201? I've been all over this place from top to bottom. I've turned it inside out, and I can't find that sly, skulking lecture hall. I mean, Christ almighty, the building is so colossal, you'd think it would be bristling with lecture halls, but all I can find is vast caverns and long lonely corridors intertwining underground. Where in the hell is it
at?
I have given up all hope.”

Vick laughed. The man was pretending to be furious, but he was sort of crazy at the same time, and he looked so really incredibly tall and funny, with that shock of hair standing up all over his head. “Mem Hall 201? Oh, it's way around the other end. You have to go out and come in again. It's way down at that end, only on the other side.”

“Thank you,” growled the man. He disappeared, and Vick drew her music stand out of the closet, locked the closet, and unlocked the door to Sanders Theatre. She climbed the stairs to the stage and began moving chairs, hauling them from the back of the stage to the front. Sanders was empty, except for the stained-glass lady in the window at the back of the balcony, who was hanging a piece of crepe on a column, and the marble statues of Otis and Quincy, who were posturing at either side of the stage, and the foxy wooden faces of animals on the ends of the beams overhead. Would there be enough chairs? The chorus would be sitting on the benches out front, too swollen with hopeful candidates to fit on the stage with the orchestra. Ham would have to conduct in all directions at once.

The man came back.

He stood on the floor in front of Ham's music stand and thundered at her. “No, it's
not
, by God. I'll be damned if I can find anything but a bloody copy center. I mean, how in the hell do the students find it? I'll bet there are students wandering like lost souls around the city of Cambridge looking for Memorial Hall 201. I'll bet they've got into another time frame entirely, and they'll never get back into this world until another age dawns and judgment day bursts upon us all, and the architects who designed this building get their just deserts. I mean, why didn't they make a Greek temple or something good-looking like that? Well, actually”—the man stopped his tirade and looked around and smiled—“actually, I like it, I mean, all this. It's nice.” He waved his arm at the surrounding forest of timber in Sanders Theatre. “The light in here. It's like amber. You can almost feel the flies stuck in it. You know. Ladies in long skirts. Gentlemen in frock coats. I'll bet when you sit down you can feel their plump ancestral undergirding knees.” The man sat down promptly on the front bench and leaned back and grinned at Vick. “Really comfortable. The cozy ample laps of the forefathers. Now, where was I?” He stood up. “I got carried away.”

“You were looking for Mem Hall 201,” said Vick. “Come on. I'll take you there myself. Just follow me.”

“You see, my wife had the course the first two weeks. She's a specialist in the Boston abolitionists and Harriet Beecher Stowe and so on. It's this course we're teaching, ‘The Great Cloud Darkening the Land.' That's a quote from Walt Whitman, you see, that famous poem about Lincoln's funeral train. It's what we call it, you see, the course. I mean, it's the literature of abolition and the Civil War, and Mary and I teach it together. Thoreau, Whitman, Parkman, Garrison, Phillips, Melville, Lowell. People like that. Great stuff. Except for the fact that my wife—good grief, you know what she did? She palmed Louisa May Alcott off on me. How do you like that?”

“Gee, it sounds like a great course. I wish I could take it instead of Chem 2. I'm over my head already in Chem 2. Look, you see that door? You just go in that door and up the stairs instead of down.”

“Well, so that's where it is. Well, thank heaven. And thank
you
, Ms.…?”

“Van Horn. Vick Van Horn. I'm Ham Dow's assistant conductor for the Collegium Musicum. That's the mixed chorus. That is, I am until I flunk Chem 2.”

“Kelly here. Homer Kelly. You'll be seeing my wife, Mary, at ten o'clock. She's going to sing in your chorus, the Collegium Whatchamacallit, this fall. I mean, it's so handy, because the rehearsals are at ten and our class meets in the same building at eleven. Well, so long, Vick. You've been a friend in need.”

Vick ran back to Sanders and sat down with her cello and spent the next half hour practicing double stops in thirds. They were a brand-new exercise. Ham had assigned them at her lesson the day before. They were gruesome. Vick spraddled her left hand over the G and C strings at once and tried to get the major thirds on pitch. When Ham came in at quarter of ten with Jonathan Pearlman, she shouted at him, “Don't listen.”

“Who wants to?” said Ham. He grinned at her and thumped his
big Messiah
score on the edge of the stage, while Jonathan began fussing with the chairs for the orchestra, shifting them a few inches this way and that. More people trickled in, greeting Ham with glad handshakes because they hadn't seen him since last June. The trickle became a flood. Old and new members of the Collegium and the orchestra were thronging in the doors. The music librarian for the chorus moved back and forth, slapping down music folders on benches in alphabetical order, shouting, “A through H, pay your music deposit here.” A hundred pieces of music snapped into a hundred folders with sharp popping noises like scattered firecrackers. Ham stood at one side, his huge stomach thrust forward, his great bearded head turning, his big laugh breaking out. Something came sailing through the air, and Ham reached up calmly and caught it and threw it back. It was the Esterhazy boys, Siegfried and Putzi Esterhazy, throwing a Frisbee. They were running around the balcony, and up and down the stairs. Vick laughed. Why weren't those little kids in school? Mrs. Esterhazy was terrible about making her children go to school. Then Mrs. Esterhazy herself steamed in, wearing a red fat-lady's dress that nearly swept the floor. “Darling Veectoria,” boomed Mrs. Esterhazy. She was carrying a basket. She was passing out homemade candy. Vick took a piece. Rosie Bell, first trumpet, took another. Rosie was a star, a famous economist, and you'd think she'd be too busy to play in the orchestra, but Rosie was a good sport, and she never missed a rehearsal. She took her trumpet out of its case. The trumpet glittered in the sunlight. Rosy blew warm air into it and sat down and flapped through her music and let go with her solo from the end of
Messiah.
It was Rosie's big moment.
TahDAH, dadidadiDAH, dadidadidadidadiDAH, DAH DAH DAHdida
, blared Rosie, her trills rippling like water. And then Mr. Proctor unbuttoned his sweater and swelled his barrel chest and closed his eyes and sang the words that went with Rosie's fanfare:
The trumpet shall sound and the dead shall be raised, the dead shall be raised incorruptible.

“I won't stand for it.” Jonathan Pearlman was shaking Vick's arm. “She's back. That crazy old lady. You know, the one Ham squeezed into my second-violin section last year. I tell you, I won't take it lying down. Not again.”

“Oh, no, not Miss Plankton?” Vick looked around in dismay. There she was, Jane Plankton, that funny little old lady, pulling her fiddle out of its scuffed case, her hair ribbon bobbing, her cheeks bright pink. Oh, it was incredible. Ham had
sworn
he would get rid of her. Because the poor dear could hardly play at all, and she was always downbow when everybody else was upbow. She had no business being in the orchestra anyway, even if she was an old 'Cliffie of the class of aught nine or something. What was the matter with Ham? Why didn't he
do
something?

And then Vick saw Jennifer Sullivan. She ran up to Jennifer and took her by the shoulders and stared at her in mock horror. “Jennifer, I didn't know.” Because Jennifer was pregnant, really bulging.

“Oh, never mind,” said Jennifer. “Just never mind. I don't want to even talk about it. And if you want to know who the father was, it was just some guy I know, I mean I don't care, I mean it doesn't make any difference. I'm staying with Ham. I mean, they wouldn't let me have a baby in the dorm, so Ham said I could have it there at his house on Martin Street. So shut up. Just tell me where you want the sopranos. Over there? Hey, Betsy, the sopranos are over there.”

But Betsy wasn't listening. Betsy Pickett was riding around on the back of Jack Fox, screaming to be let down, and the new people in the chorus who didn't know Betsy were staring at her. You'd never think Betsy was a prize-winning student in the Classics Department, you'd just never believe she was writing an honors thesis on some old Roman poet. Betsy's boyfriend, Tim Swegle, was dragging at her from the rear. Tim had a firm grip under Betsy's fat shoulders, but Betsy was hanging on to Jack's neck with her little hiking boots and shrieking with rapture, and Jack was choking and clawing at his throat. Vick smiled and sat down with the cellos, then looked up as a tall big-boned woman bent down to speak to her. “Where do you want the altos?” said the woman. “I'm new. My name's Mary Kelly.”