Quoth the Raven (16 page)

“It’s got to be something small,” he told Tibor. “It might even be a piece of food, but I’m not expecting to get that lucky. Pick up anything you find.”

“I am likely to find a lot of things, Krekor. Lost earrings. Money.”

“Leave the money on the edge of the cash register. That’s not what we’re looking for.”

“Krekor.” Tibor hesitated, so-long and in such an uneasy way that Gregor began to become alarmed. Then he brushed at the front of his cassock and straightened up. “Krekor, do you believe what you said to David Markham, that the people who work in the cafeteria are the most likely suspects?”

“Yes and no.”

“What does that mean, Krekor, yes and no?”

“Yes, because they have the best access to the food. You have to take that into consideration, Tibor, whether you like it or not. There’s always the chance that what we’re dealing with here is a lunatic, like the man who put the cyanide in the Tylenol capsules.”

“Did they catch that person and know he was a man, Krekor?”

“I don’t remember. It happened when Elizabeth was sick.”

“Why the no?”

“A lot of reasons,” Gregor said. “In the first place, a lunatic wouldn’t have bothered to get rid of the evidence, especially not at the risk of exposing himself. Why should he bother? The frightening thing about incidents of that kind is that they so seldom leave anything that actually points to anybody in particular. In this situation, it would have been easy to set it up in a way that left him completely in the clear. The victim would be random. Our lunatic wouldn’t be singled out as a man with a motive. It would be easy to throw suspicion on somebody else. He only had to put the lye in the food in a section of the line where he wasn’t working. Why leave the line to pick up what remained of the food, in full view of a hundred or so people, a fair proportion of whom could identify him? If he was par for the course at this sort of thing, he’d be happy to have the rest of us know just what he’d done and how he’d done it. The only thing he’d be trying to protect is the who.”

“What else?” Tibor asked.

“What else should be obvious, Tibor. The Tylenol incident and things like it make the papers and cause a lot of fuss, but the reason for that is that they’re out of the ordinary. Stranger-to-stranger crime is rising, of course, because of the drug problem, but in ninety-nine percent of the cases, in murder and in attack, the victim and the victimizer not only know each other but know each other well. If the food hadn’t disappeared, I would have had to assume a lunatic, on practical grounds. With the food gone, I have to assume something else.”

“You are sure the lye was not put into the tea, Krekor?”

“Positive. There was lye mixed with the tea by the time the tea hit the floor. It was hissing away like a snake at her feet just before she keeled over. She would never have drunk it if she heard it doing that.”

“Even is she was distracted?”

“It was loud, Tibor. She would have had to be virtually comatose.”

“I was afraid of that,” Tibor said. “Do you realize, Krekor, that if it was someone who knew her who tried to kill her, it was somebody who is in the Program?”

“Why? David Markham said she was local. She must have known—”

“David Markham also said most of the people on campus are not local, and he is right. Miss Veer knew the staff of the Program and a few of the senior students—Jack Carroll and Chessey Flint, a few else. She knew some of the members of the administration in passing and some of the general staff also in passing. I have talked to her, Krekor. I have made it a point because she was always so lonely. She has a woman she lives with in town. Other than that, her life is in Liberty Hall.”

“You can’t know that, Tibor, no matter what she said to—you. You can never really know anybody well on six weeks’ acquaintance.”

“I know that I have seen at least one thing on this floor,” Tibor said.

Gregor watched him kneel down and stand up again, holding something very small in his hand and frowning at it. When he was standing fully upright, Tibor held it out on his palm for Gregor to see.

“There,” he said, “what’s that?”

“That” was a solid little cylinder of metal, half an inch in diameter and less than a quarter of an inch thick. Gregor took it out of Tibor’s hand and examined it in the light.

“I know what it looks like,” Gregor said. “A solder plug.”

“A solder plug. I don’t know what this is, Krekor, a solder plug. But there is something else.”

Tibor went down again, came up again, held out his hand again. What he had this time was a small ragged piece of cotton, dyed black and raveled at the edges, as if it had caught on something and torn.

D
R. KATHERINE BRANCH DID
not use real belladonna in the DMSO ointment she put on her wrists to perform the rituals of Wicca, and she didn’t consort with the Devil, either. Even if she could have made herself believe in the Devil—she had inherited a stubborn middle-class American resistance to belief in evil of any kind, a resistance that two decades of work in campus rape crisis centers, storefront women’s health centers, and studies of intercultural practices of wife-battering had done nothing to weaken—she would not have worshiped him. It bothered her sometimes that her namesake, that Katherine Branch who had lived in Hartford in 1652 and been hanged for a witch on a scaffold hung over the Connecticut River in 1676, had been so thoroughly celebratory of male images of power. For Dr. Katherine Branch, the whole point of Wicca was that it was so woman centered. That was why you called it Wicca instead of witchcraft. You had to take possession of the terms of the debate, wrestle with the differences between male and female vocabularies, insist on your own point of view. That was all anything ever was, point of view. Even gravity was suspect, and possibly illusion. It was always being described in such erectile terms. As for witchcraft, that was the name men had given to the spirituality of women, making it something dark and threatening. The Devil was what men called the Great Goddess of all creation, changing her with all her power into a man.

What Dr. Katherine Branch put into the DMSO ointment she used on her wrists to perform the rituals of Wicca was a little diluted hashish, and she was beginning to think it had been a mistake. What she wanted was a release from the prison of her repressions. What she had gotten was a dry mouth, a headache, and that awful dizziness she always ended up with when she smoked a little grass. When she was dizzy she couldn’t analyze and she couldn’t organize. She hated not being able to do either. Besides, it might not be as safe as she had thought. The dry mouth was a bad sign. When you got it from antihistamines, you were warned about the effect they were having on your heart.

She, stepped back out of the spray of the shower, leaned over and shut the water off. Through the shower stall door, she listened for the sounds of Vivi back in the apartment, and heard them: the clink of metal on glass, the hiss of coffee coming through the Dripmaster. Vivi was in the kitchen. Katherine pushed open the door of the shower stall and stepped out onto the blue terry cloth mat. This was the first time she had taken a shower in Vivi’s apartment—or even been in Vivi’s apartment for more than five minutes at a time—and all she could say was that the place was claustrophobic. The shower stall was so small it had made her feel as if she was suffocating. The rest of the bathroom was not much bigger. There was not quite room enough for a toilet and a narrow sink with no counter attached. The medicine cabinet looked like it had been left over from World War II. It was the personal touches that bothered Katherine most, however. The blue terry cloth mat with its ribbed rubber backing, the blue terry cloth towels on the rack near the door, the lacquered white wicker utility shelves shoved over the back of the toilet and crammed with extra rolls of toilet paper and white plastic canisters painted over with bluebells and birds: it was all so damn K mart and Sears. Vivi could have chosen better.

Of course, Katherine could have chosen better, too. She could have brought them both back to her own apartment, instead of here. It was just that that hadn’t seemed like a very safe choice, after what had happened to Miss Maryanne Veer. Katherine couldn’t for the life of her figure out why that had been so. She didn’t expect anyone to put lye in her own food, especially not at home. Like most of the rest of the faculty who lived in Constitution House, she kept almost no food on the premises. She didn’t expect Sheriff David Markham and his men to come bursting through her door like a SWAT team, either. She couldn’t imagine them doing it and she couldn’t imagine what they would do it for. Maybe she was having some kind of reaction to the hashish she had never had before.

She reached for the robe Vivi had laid out for her—wraparound and made for a man;
there
was something to think about—and drew it around her. Then she stepped through the bathroom door into the cramped back hall and said, “Vivi?”

In the kitchen, the sounds of coffee making and domestic neurosis came to a halt. Katherine waited for Vivi’s answering call, but it didn’t come. Neither did the renewed sounds of coffee making. The silence in the apartment felt as thick and opaque as mayonnaise.

Katherine walked down the hall, through the tiny living room, across the dining ell and into the kitchen. Vivi was standing at the sink, with her back to the rest of the apartment, looking at the plain white stoneware coffee cup she was holding in her hand.

Katherine got to the archway and stopped. “Vivi,” she said again. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.” Vivi let the coffee cup drop into the sink and turned around. In the interests of efficiency, Katherine had let Vivi take her shower first. Vivi now looked “normal,” in the sense that she was not in black and had no greasepaint on her face. Beyond that, she was a study in the problems of the hashish solution. Her pupils were dilated. Her face was flushed in places and dead white in others. She was sweating. She pointed across the room to the two-person table shoved into the corner and said, “There it is. I got it. But Katherine, don’t ever ask me to do anything like that again.”

“It’s because of the anointing,” Katherine said mildly. “I don’t think I mixed the ointment right. I put in too much of everything.”

“It has nothing to do with the goddamned anointing, Katherine. It has to do with the police. They were all over Miss Veer’s office, in case you haven’t guessed.”

“What did they do when they saw you there?”

“They didn’t see me there.”

“How did you get in?”

“I went straight to the chairman’s office. Through the window, if you really have to know. With all the rest of the nutsiness going on on campus, nobody even noticed. Then I got that damned file and got out. I wish you’d look at it. I’d like to think I risked my job, my professional reputation, and my neck for something more important than one of your hashish fantasies.”

Actually, Katherine thought, she didn’t have hashish fantasies. The same drugs that made everyone else see visions only made her feel dull and nervous. Even LSD—which she had tried once in the 1960s, because the man she was sleeping with had tried it, and because she believed in men in those days—had done nothing more than make her light-headed and nauseated. Still, Vivi didn’t know that, and Vivi was angry with her—not only because of the file, but because of the hex. Vivi hadn’t wanted to have anything to do with that hex, and in retrospect she probably thought she had been right. Katherine couldn’t see it that way. You couldn’t remain passive in the face of an all-out assault on your integrity. You couldn’t remain passive, period. Passivity was what had been turning women into robots for the last 6,000 years.

Katherine sat down at the table, opened the file, and paged through it. There wasn’t much in it, and she hadn’t expected there to be. It was labeled “Feminist Approaches To,” which was short for “Feminist Approaches to the American Idea,” and it contained three single-page course proposals she had written herself, two syllabi she had also written herself, and a thin sheaf of faculty after-course effectiveness evaluations. The evaluations were routinely bad. One of them—written, of course, by Ken Crockett—called Katherine’s course in the History of Women in Colonial New England “an exercise in the glorification of sexual organs over reason.” The one that hurt was by Alice Elkinson. It called Katherine’s course in the Feminist Deconstruction of Witchcraft “a concerted effort to indoctrinate students in the moral superiority of a state of permanent victimhood.”

Katherine closed the folder, shoved it away from her, and said, “Nothing personal at all. I wonder where they put it.”

“How do you know ‘it’ even exists?” Vivi asked her. “Even if your analysis is picture perfect and right on the nose, what makes you think they would put it down on paper? What makes you think they would leave themselves open to an EOC lawsuit?”

“It’s a Republican administration, Vivi. They don’t have to worry about an EOC lawsuit. And I know there’s at least one personal evaluation, because; Donegal Steele wrote it. Marsha Diedermeyer saw him.”

The Dripmaster had emptied a full complement of coffee into the glass pitcher at its base. Vivi took the pitcher out, put it down in front of Katherine on the table, and turned around to get cups and spoons. When she turned back, her face was set and mulish, the way it got when someone expected her to help clean up after dinner, just because she was a woman.

“Katherine,” she said, sitting down, “listen to me. Get Donegal Steele out of your mind for a minute. Think about Miss Maryanne Veer.”

“What about Miss Maryanne Veer?”

“Somebody just tried to kill her.”

“Maybe,” Katherine said. “Maybe not. It could have been an accident. That’s why I sent you to get the file, Vivi. I didn’t want to have something lying around that would give them an excuse to incriminate us. You know that’s what they want to do. Especially that idiot David Markham.”

“I don’t happen to think David Markham is such an idiot,” Vivi said, “but that’s beside the point. What do you think of the other one, the one Father Tibor asked up to lecture?”