Quoth the Raven (29 page)

“Because of this,” Bennis waved her can of soda in the air. “That was what she was doing. Opening a can of Belleville Lemon and Lime soda. She must have just gotten it, too. It was cold, sweating like crazy.”

Bennis was waving the can in the air like a flag. Gregor stopped her hand and took the can out of it. He’d never been so startled in his life.

“Belleville Lemon and Lime,” he said slowly. “This is a local brand.”

“Yes, of course it is. It’s been pointed out to you more than once.”

“It’s in a
tin
can,” Gregor said.

Yes, Gregor, its in a tin can. Bennis was looking at him as if he were crazy.

“Not an
aluminum
can,” he insisted.

“It’s some ecological thing,” Bennis said. “You can read about it on the side if you want to. It was in that greener-than-green language that makes me want to nuke the whales, so I never got past the friends of the earth business. All the products of the Belleville Natural Soft Drink Company and the Belleville Organic Beer and Wine Company are—”

“Beer,” Gregor said, throwing up his hands. “Oh, my God.”

“He is having a stroke,” Tibor burst out in agitation. “Bennis, we must get him to a doctor, he is going red in the face—”

“Tin cans have seams,” Gregor said, and then saw they had no idea what he was talking about. But he did. Oh, Lord, yes he did. He got up off the love seat.

“Tin cans have seams,” he said, as calmly as he could. “Aluminum cans do not have seams. Also, they’re soft. I know how it was done.”

“How what was done?”

“How Miss Veer was poisoned with lye even though there was nothing on her tray but tea and the lye couldn’t have been in the tea. Hell, I know more than that. I know who poisoned her. I even know where the body is hidden.”

“What body?” Bennis asked wildly. “Tibor, I don’t think the man is having a stroke, I think he’s already had it. Gregor, have you any idea how nuts you sound?”

Gregor had a fair idea just how nuts he did sound, but that didn’t seem to be important at the moment, and there were things he had to do. It was a relief to realize that for once he wasn’t worried about stopping another murder, about getting to the site of a fresh execution and getting there in time. He didn’t think there was going to be another murder. He did think there was a fair chance, if he didn’t get to the people he had to get to and convince them to do what needed to be done, of the evidence just vanishing into thin air.

He was on his feet, pushing his arms into the sleeve of his coat. They were still sitting where he had left them, gaping at him.

“Come on,” he said. “We’ve got to find David Markham. We’ve got work to do.”

T
HE CALL CAME IN
at five o’clock, while Dr. Alice Elkinson was still sitting at the desk in her office, pretending to correct papers under the light of a flex-stemmed reading lamp. The papers were spread out across the gouged and battered oak surface in neat little paper-clipped piles. The stem of the lamp had been pulled all the way over and pointed down, as if it were an examination light in a mad doctor movie of the 1940s. Alice was wasting her time either staring out the window at Minuteman Field or looking up to the wall beside her, where her degrees hung in thin-edged dark wood frames, protected by glass that had been recently polished. Usually when she worked she pinned her hair up, or tied it back with a scarf. Now it was hanging down over her shoulders like a curtain of blond threads. Every once in a while she picked up her red marking pencil, turned it over in her hands, and put it down again.

It got dark early here in October, but not this early. Through the window, Alice could see figures moving back and forth through a half-grey light that looked like ash. She could hear them, too: laughing, giggling, faking sounds of menace and surprise. It was all so different from Berkeley—or even from Swarthmore, where she had started. It was all so different from what she had imagined it to be. For some reason, thinking through to the rest of her life when she was still an adolescent, she had imagined herself in tweed skirts and cashmere sweaters and pearls, under Gothic arches. It hadn’t occurred to her that she would have to read through papers with titles like “The Effects of Capitalist Structural Paranoia on the Work of Benjamin Franklin.”

Idiot.

She started to pick the papers up and put them in a single pile again—that was beginning to feel like all she had done with this day, stacking papers and unstacking them—and as she did she felt the phone next to her arm begin to hum. The phone system was new and didn’t work very well. Even the most rudimentary of the equipment seemed to come on line with an anticipatory growl, like a malicious computer. Alice raised her hand over the receiver and waited. Somewhere at the back of her head, she was counting mentally to three without really knowing she was doing it. There was something about the hum of the phone that was like the ash-gray of the air outside. It boded ill.

Idiot, Alice thought again.

The phone rang and she picked up, saying what she always said, thinking she must sound tired or out of sorts or both. God only knew, she felt both.

“Dr. Alice Elkinson here.”

There was a pause on the other end of the line and then a cough and then another pause. The second pause went on so long, Alice began to wonder if she had caught an obscene caller in the act. There were boys on campus who did that sort of thing, phoned at random and hoped to get a girl’s voice. All the phone numbers on campus were on the same exchange and nothing else in the area was. Alice had heard the talk at Faculty Senate meetings: the boy, the voice, the pause, the realization at the other end of the line that this was a mistake, the faculty was too quick to call security. Then there would be a click and a dial tone. It was the sort of thing that made Alice Elkinson’s skin crawl.

Idiot, she told herself, yet again, yet again, and the word echoed through her skull like a Ping-Pong ball in a cloud chamber.

She was just making up her mind to hang up when another cough came, and then a gargling sound that was surely someone clearing his throat, and then a voice,

“Dr. Elkinson? Dr. Elkinson, this is Chessey Flint.”

Alice had been so sure that the next thing she was going to do was slam the receiver into the cradle, she had to make a conscious effort to freeze her arm.

“Chessey?” she said. “Chessey, are you all right?”

Another pause, another cough, another gargle. Something seemed to be going on in the background: cars passing, small animals creeping out to greet the approaching dark. How could she possibly know something like that? Halloween must be getting to her.

“Chessey?” Alice said again.

“Yes,” Chessey said. “Yes. Dr. Elkinson. I’m here. I’m sorry.”

“What’s wrong?”

What’s wrong?
Alice wasn’t sure, but she thought she heard Chessey laugh, not a good laugh, low and bitter.

“Nothing’s wrong,” Chessey said, “not now.”

“Then what is it?”

Pause, cough, gargle. Pause, cough, gargle. Pause, cough, gargle. It was maddening.

“Listen,” Chessey said, “Dr. Elkinson? I’m out here on the Boardman Road. On the way to Hillman’s Rock. Do you know where that is?”

“Yes, Chessey, of course, I know I—”

“I thought you would, because of the hiking. Dr. Elkinson, something’s happened—”

“What?”

“To me.”

Halloween
, Alice Elkinson thought, closing her eyes. What was Chessey Flint doing out on Boardman Road?

“Chessey, listen to me, are you alone?”

“I am now.”

“What does that mean, you are now?”

“I’m bleeding, Dr. Elkinson. I’m sitting in this phone booth and I’m still bleeding and I don’t know what to do. I have to get out of here—”

“No,” Alice said. “Don’t get out of there. I’ll come with the car. Where on the Boardman Road?”

“At a gas station.”

There were two dozen gas stations on the Boardman Road. The road weaved in and out among the rising hills. Sometimes it seemed to be supported by gas stations. It was the longest and worst possible route to Hillman’s Rock. It was ten uninterrupted miles of curves and technological blight.

Alice was already reaching for her coat, bending over nearly backward, stretching until she thought it was going to break. The phone cord was short and the coat was all the way across the room, on the rack next to the door. Alice got hold of the coat and yanked it toward her, not really caring that the rack fell over in the process, hitting the floor with the hard ripping sound of splintering wood.

“Chessey, stay where you are. Don’t move. Do you understand me?”

“I have to move,” Chessey said. “I’m going to faint.”

“Chessey—”

But there was nothing at the other end of the line, nothing at all. Alice thought about running down the hall to one of the other offices and calling 911. With the phone line open like this, somebody might be able to trace the call. In the meantime, she could get in her car and start the search herself. Then she heard the one sound she hadn’t wanted to hear, had been afraid to hear ever since Chessey had said that she “had” to get out of there. Somebody hung the phone up.

Alice Elkinson looked down at the coat in her hand and then out the window, at Lenore circling way out over the campus someplace, circling widely and without regard for the darkening evening. Then she plunged her hands into the right-hand pocket of her coat to make sure her keys were there and headed for the door. At the last minute, the part of her she didn’t like resisted. There couldn’t possibly be a worse time to have to go hauling out to the Boardman Road. The resistance came and went in a flash, drowned by Chessey’s voice and a click on the phone.

Dial tone.

Going down the darkened corridors of Liberty Hall, it felt to Alice Elkinson that her life had disintegrated into something uncontrollable, into crises without number.

S
TANDING AT THE WINDOW
in the living room of her apartment in Constitution House, Dr. Katherine Branch was also watching Lenore circle above campus, but unlike Alice Elkinson she wasn’t making a big deal out of it. In spite of her attraction to witchcraft and some of the more esoteric aspects of the women’s spirituality movement, Katherine Branch had never been a particularly fearful or even mildly superstitious woman. Halloween had never meant any more to her than a lot of nonsensical, intrinsically sexist fuss on campus. Technically, she was supposed to be out there now, leading the coven in a procession to King’s Scaffold. They had planned for weeks to hold an exorcism against light in front of the effigy before the bonfire was lit. Instead, she was standing here, still in jeans and turtleneck and sweater, holding two impossible arguments at once.

One of those arguments was with Vivi Wollman, who was sitting on the couch just as she had the other day, but not as she ought to be. Not only was Vivi not dressed for the coven, she wasn’t dressed for anything Katherine could make out. She was wearing a skirt and a pair of stockings not opaque enough to be called tights, but dark enough to look dirty. She had had her hair permed into tight little curls and her face plastered with paint. Katherine couldn’t decide if Vivi looked more like she’d done the plastering herself or gone into town to have herself made up by Babs DeMartin at the Belleville Beauty Palace. Whichever it was, the effect was unrelievedly awful. Vivi Wollman trying to look like a woman was worse than ludicrous.

The other argument was with Evie Westerman, who had rung up just about three minutes ago, while Katherine was telling Vivi to come to her senses. In some ways, the call had been a relief. It had at least distracted Katherine from the fact that she was failing miserably with Vivi, and was probably destined to go on failing. Christ only knew what had gotten into the stupid fool. Unfortunately, the call from Evie was not entirely a relief. Katherine had had Evie in her Principles of Feminism class Evie’s junior year, and Katherine had thought at the time that the girl had the capacity to turn herself into a world-class bitch. Well, now she had. Olympic quality.

“I am no longer willing,” Vivi Wollman was saying, “to ruin my career, my present and my future by the bloodsucking selfishness you’ve decided to label ‘feminism.’ ”

Vivi Wollman. Evie Westerman. The similarities in the names made Katherine’s head spin.

“Just a minute,” she said to Vivi. “I’m on the phone.”

“I don’t want to keep you on the phone,” Evie Westerman said. “I just want to say my piece and get off.”

“I wish you would say your piece,” Katherine said. “I haven’t got the faintest idea what you’re talking about.”

Vivi had got up off the couch and started pacing. Her skirt fit badly. Every time she moved, the seams rode and twisted against her hips, the button placket at the back buckled.

“For Christ’s sake,” Katherine told her, “fix that thing, will you? You look like you’ve stuffed your underwear with mutated worms.”

Vivi came to a stop in the middle of the floor, threw her hair back—it didn’t work; that hair was permed stiff—and said, “I don’t know what it is you think you accomplish by insulting me, Katherine, but I’m telling you right now I’ve had it, I quit, and I’m not going to take any more.”

“If you weren’t going to take it anymore, you wouldn’t be here,” Katherine said. “Jesus Christ, Vivi, where do you think you’re going to go?”

“Vivian,” Vivi said. “That’s my name. Vivian.”

“What I’m talking about is you,” Evie Westerman said. “Yesterday. Up in the shed where they keep the tools for fixing cars. Up in the parking lot.”

Lenore had made her circuit and was coming back at Constitution House, cawing and cawing, screaming really. Katherine closed her eyes against the sight—it was amazing how distracting that damn bird could get—and tried to think. Vivi had gone into a full-force pace, back and forth, back and forth, practically bumping into the walls. She was working up a real head of steam. Katherine kept expecting to see smoke pour out of her ears, the way it did out of Sylvester the Cat’s when Tweetie Bird trounced him again.

That was what Vivi looked like. Sylvester the Cat. Same short-legged, pear-bottomed figure, only shorter.