"It's beautiful, isn't it," he said quietly.
She nodded. It was.
"So," he said with a clap of his hands, "which role do we play, Doc? The lions or the Christians? If you want my opinion, I hate raw meat."
She shook a fist at him, hurried to the row of sinks by the door and washed her face and hands in cold water. A brush snagging through her hair, her own smock to its hooks, and she picked up her handbag, turning her back momentarily so he couldn't see the pat she gave to Homer's head. Then she took hold of his arm and led him away, one hand trailing behind to switch off the lights.
The corridor was deserted. The lights inlaid in the walls and covered by white glass had been dimmed. A red light over the fire exit glared cyclopean.
The conference room was in the corner down the hall from her office, but when they reached it he surprised her by moving on toward the front, past her office, past his own room as well.
"Round and round," he said when she looked quizzically at him. "For luck we'll pretend it's a carousel, okay?" He gestured toward the curved wall of the auditorium. "A peeling lion there," he said, pointing. "A llama, an ostrich, a bench for two, one for four." They were on the east side, darker, all the rooms empty, a chill that seemed writhing in the recesses of the ceiling. "Here a chick, there a chick, and over there a purple galumph."
"A galumph? What in hell is a galumph?"
"A galumph," he announced, "is a sacred African animal much like the spotted leopard. The primary difference, however, is that it doesn't have spots, and it isn't a cat, and it would rather eat junk than anything like food." He stopped and stepped in front of her, his hands on her shoulders. "Much like Ford Danvers, wouldn't you say?"
She giggled. She felt like an idiot marching around the corridor, but she giggled as he took her elbow and led her at last to the conference-room door.
The light crept into the hall, and as she approached the threshold she looked up at him and stopped suddenly. He went ahead and turned around, his face drifting abruptly to black.
"What?" he asked.
She didn't know. Not positively. But she touched a finger to his tie, nudging it into place. "There's something wrong, Greg. What is it?"
"Not now," he whispered loudly. "Good lord, Pat, they're listening in there."
"They're not it, are they?" And suddenly, without any proof, with nothing more than a flickering pain that had escaped his control and flared across his face, she knew. "There was an accident on Mainland last night. You . . ."
"Yeah," he said. "I knew her." Then he grinned and laid a palm to her cheek. "However, it is not to worry. Right now I intend to find out if I have a job tomorrow. If I don't, my dear, I'm putting a cot in your office."
He left her then, and entered the room. A murmur of voices, and his laugh leavened the air.
There was a brief moment when she thought him remarkably brave to carry on like that, another when she astonished herself by thinking him horridly callous. But her last thought as she followed was a wondering about the dead girl, and what she had to do with Greg Billings.
Chapter 5
She almost panicked. Standing alone in the corridor, listening to Greg chatting with the others as if nothing momentous were about to be discussed, she almost lost her nerve. Her arms folded across her stomach and she hugged herself, anticipating a bout of nausea that did not come, wondering if her face were flushed, her lips trembling, her posture more like a supplicant than one who has courage. It was irrational, this sudden attack, and it came close to shaming her. She had always prided herself on being a woman who had never flinched, who had taken the slings of a man's world and caught them in her bare hand, flung them back with a smile not of contempt but of competence. And now she was behaving as though the room ahead contained the gas chamber, not a table and chairs and a handful of gossiping colleagues.
And then, just as Greg called out to her, she knew what she was doing. Again. Anticipating failure so that her possible conquest might be all the sweeter.
She scowled at herself, recomposed her features into what she hoped was confidence, and entered, adding a deliberate swing to her mid-calf skirt as she cut right toward her chair that made her smile.
It was going to be all right, she told herself nervously. Not to worry. It's only your life, after all, and she jammed her tongue between her teeth to keep from giggling.
The room was the smallest on the floor, barely large enough for a light pine oval table and the dozen chairs that surrounded it. On the plaster walls were prints and oils of the college's previous chief administrators, a sailing vessel in Bristol harbor, and the school as it had been at its founding, in 1904. Her place was midway to the chairman's seat. Greg was beside her on her left, on her right Stephen DiSelleone, a chain-smoking young Sicilian whose subjects were music theory and piano. Opposite her Janice Reaster, a dark blonde whose figure was fuller than Pat thought anatomically possible without artificial aid, and whose deep brown eyes never once left Stephen's. There were six others, most of them as meek as anyone Pat had known, and just as liable to slip her a razor as congratulate her on whatever had been her last achievement. They were Ford Danvers' people, but only as long as Danvers occupied the mountaintop.
Smoke curled to the lighting in the ceiling. Chatter was quiet now that she had taken her seat, gazes flicking from the wall prints to the table to her and away. Pat smiled at them all, nodded when Greg touched her arm in support, and wished suddenly and violently she had not left her purse in her office. She wanted a cigarette. She wanted it badly. And more so when Danvers came into the room and sat in the chair nearest the door.
He was a head shorter than she, slender and thin-lipped. His hair was gleaming black and slicked close to his scalp; a handlebar mustache that never quite managed the flair. He was given to tailored tweed suits and silk ties, a waistcoat when the weather was chilly, and an imperious manner that was never quite gracious. He looked at her and smiled, a shark's smile unconvincing, and she felt her pulse quicken. His eyes were puffed, and he kept moistening his lips. It was the first sign she'd had that she might have actually won.
Again the craving for the cigarette, but before she could get one from Stephen, George Constable strode in, bloated and tweeded and smelling of witch hazel. A bulldog's face, complete with jutting chin and swaying jowls, and brown eyes so cold they reminded her of the dead. He said nothing to Danvers, merely nodded at the greetings murmured his way and took his seat at the head of the table.
Pat's throat suddenly dried. This was it. A small segment of her dream either created or relegated, and she wished without warning she didn't have to be here to hear it.
And it was a wish that reversed itself drastically ninety minutes later. Constable had insisted, shortly after Danvers called the meeting to order, that me department go through its regular monthly affairs before, as he put it with a smile to Pat, "we break out the news." She had wanted to scream, but she smiled grimly back. She wanted to kick under the table everyone who spoke, and to strangle Danvers, who obviously knew the results of the Trustees' deliberations and was determined to drag out the small items as long as possible: scholarships granted and denied for lowerclassmen, supplies, showings in the building's lobby for Greg's and Pat's seniors, more supplies, an announcement from the president about the June graduation, a notice from Chief Stockton concerning the increase in village vandalism directly linked to students living on campus.
She wanted to scream.
And astonished herself by agreeing when Constable, at six o'clock, suggested they break for a quick meal in the Union cafeteria before getting on.
Both Greg and Janice had been ready to dissent, but were stopped by a frown that left them both visibly puzzled. She could not explain, however, that she needed some time to banish the tension that had been spilling acid into her stomach. And after three years of fighting, another hour wouldn't make any difference. She wanted now to be completely ready in case she had to start the fight again.
She waited, then, until the others had left the room, grinning encouragement at her friends while she traced meaningless designs in the table's high-polished top. The drone of voices and the slap of soles faded before she rose, were gone by the time she had reached her office and had closed the door behind her. She did not turn on the light. Instead, she took her seat behind the desk and pulled Homer from her handbag. It was night-dark, chilly, and she felt a curious drowsiness pulling at her eyes after less than five minutes. But she did not fight it. She only congratulated herself on not taking the cigarette, and laid her head on folded forearms, intending to run through a series of conversations she would have with the Dean should it all go wrong.
An arm of the wind slowly closed the casement window.
The white globes of the campus lights shimmered in the dark like stars trapped beneath black ice.
Homer, on the desk, almost seemed to glow.
Pat slept. Lightly. A portion of her mind listening for sounds in the hall, her mouth slightly open, her eyelids fluttering.
She slept while Homer watched, and there were images: a storm-roiled bay and a child helpless on a raft; a demon crimson and brown rising slowly from a steaming sea; her parents shaking their heads as she tried to explain through a white silk gag why she was divorcing the man they claimed to love; a demon crimson and orange slavering over a woman chained to a block of granite; Greg smiling; George Constable smiling; her station wagon sailing over the edge of a cliff, Abbey inside wide-mouthed and screaming; a demon thudding down a deserted dirt road, taller than the trees, wider than the valley, yet leaving no footprints and not making a sound; a classroom, her classroom, filled with blind and mute students; Greg smiling; Janice smiling; the demon in all colors smashing up through the floorboards of her office and reaching—
She sat up, gasping, slamming the chair back against the wall. The wind was keening, the panes quivering, the radiator clanking as it fought against the cold. She pulled at her face to waken her while she scrambled for her handbag and shoved Homer inside. Then she reached over and locked the window, shuddered for a moment as she looked over the slope to the black forest wall. Down on Chancellor Avenue a streetlamp winked. An eye, she thought; a white eye watching.
She turned, then, and hurried back to the conference room, taking her seat just as the dean rapped his knuckles on the table, sounding the call to order.
Danvers was the only one not in his place.
Constable cleared his throat and tugged at the wattles stiff below his neck. He sat and opened a file in front of him, stabbing at a series of papers with a diamond-ringed finger. He glanced up at the empty chair, at his watch, at the chair. There was no expression on his face, but Pat sensed a frown.
"I expect Mr. Danvers is . . . shall we say indisposed in the restroom?"
A stifling of dutiful laughter.
"However, due to a meeting in an hour or so I must attend with the Town Council, I think he'll forgive me if I proceed without him." He smiled, a bulldog's smile, and touched the diamond finger to the greying at his temple. "I also don't believe it fair that we should keep Dr. Shavers waiting any longer. She had worked extraordinarily hard on this project, and I believe I'm speaking for the Trustees when I say how much we appreciate all that she's done."
Her hands were clasped on the table, knuckles white, thumbs jumping. As best she could without showing it, she bit down on the inside of her lower lip, shifted her feet until her soles were flat on the floor.
Greg shifted in his chair; she did not look at him.
Janice winked at her; she barely managed a ghost of a smile.
The others were little more than mannequins positioned as background. For all she knew as her gaze scanned the room, they weren't even breathing.
The wind again, pummeling the outer wall, shaking the single corner window in its stone frame.
The dean glanced at her then, and she fought to keep a smile at bay. There was no clue in his posture, none in his bland expression, and she wished to hell he would either pull the damned trigger or put the damned gun back in its holster.
"Dr. Shavers."
She started.
Constable pointed at the folder. "I have been instructed to read this to you, and to the others. I trust you will bear with me and my rather untrained voice."
She could do nothing but nod, nothing but pray she could restrain herself from strangling him.
"This afternoon the Board of Trustees, Hawksted College, Oxrun Station, Connecticut, met in camera," Constable read after a flurry of shaking out a parchment-like sheet of paper, "regarding the proposition that the Fine Arts Department—current chairman, Dr. Ford Danvers—relinquish its administrative authority over those in the, uh, the arts."
He glanced up suddenly, looking directly at Pat. "I apologize for the confusion of language, Dr. Shavers, but I'm afraid even this small-town bureaucracy hasn't had the time to create a new phrase that also made no sense."
She blinked, refusing to look at the others even though they were staring. George Constable never, but never, attempted an off-the-cuff joke with them. Never. It wasn't done. It wasn't his style. And she could not help but think the attempt was a sign. She paid no attention to the goose flesh suddenly on her arms.
Constable rattled the paper, cleared his throat with a slight stretching of his neck. "Be that as it may . . . the Trustees have decided unanimously on the following, to be announced to the immediately concerned faculty in private session, to the faculty and student body as a whole at the earliest possible convenience.
"That the president shall be directed to appoint Dr. Patrice Lauren Shavers to the position of Full Professor effective immediately. That Dr. Gregory Allan Billings be appointed to the position of Full Professor effective immediately. That Janice Reaster be appointed Associate Professor effective immediately."
Janice squealed; Greg grunted and grabbed for Pat's leg to give it a squeeze that almost made her wince. And Pat, still biting her lip, could only close her eyes.
"That," Constable continued, oblivious to the growing commotion, "three new departments be created commencing with the fall term: Theater Arts, Music, and the Fine Arts. Dr. Danvers will chair the first, Dr. DiSelleone the second, and Dr. Shavers the third. It is further directed that the implementation of this directive be done with the understanding . . ."
Pat did not hear the rest. In spite of her resolution not to show weakness, not to break down and bawl if she had won, there was an abrupt surge of moisture at her eyes and a burning behind them, and it took several clumsy stabs with her fingers before she was able to see clearly again. Could see Greg beaming as if he'd just been chosen to show at the Met, Janice weeping openly into a lavender handkerchief, the others astonished enough to begin whispering and reaching across the table to shake her and Greg's hands before the dean had completed the Trustees' resolution. Whispering, shaking hands, and glancing fearfully at Danvers' still vacant seat. Then talking. Loudly. Chairs shifted and the table nudged. The room growing suddenly brighter, almost too bright to bear.
She felt her cheeks aching, her jaw the same, but she kept enough presence of mind to accept Constable's offered hand and thank him without babbling. The dean nodded once and slowly swept his papers back into the folder. He was neither the most diplomatic of men nor the most beloved on campus, but he was sufficiently sensitive to know when he had become superfluous, and when the control he had over the meeting was no longer in his hands.
He rose, then, after a perfunctory adjournment no one listened to, smiled grandly as if the entire affair had been his idea, and had taken two steps around the table when the door slammed open, smashing into the wall and jarring one of the framed prints loose. It fell to the floor, the glass shattering on impact.
A shocked silence; only the dying wind.
Pat was on her feet; Greg half-risen.
Danvers, his houndstooth jacket open, his blue silk tie yanked away from his collar, glared directly at her. His lips were quivering
, and a prominent tic half-closed his right eye. It was Pat's first confused impression the man had been drinking.
"Dr. Danvers!" Constable said, his voice cracking in admonition.
Danvers ignored him. He lurched over the threshold and grabbed hold of the back of his chair.
"Danvers, explain yourself at once!"
He swayed, looked to the dean as if he didn't see him, looked back to Pat and jabbed a finger at her. "Thought you'd lost, didn't you?" he demanded, his customary whine laced now with venom. "Thought you'd bloody lost, am I right, Shavers?"
Pat shook her head in bewilderment, looking first to Constable, then to Greg. "Ford, I don't understand you. I . . . what are you—"
The man's face was deep red with rage, and he cut her off with a vicious chop at the air, his other hand leaving the chair and reaching back for the doorframe. "You know damned well what I mean."
"I don't, Ford," she said, suddenly afraid, aware that Stephen and Greg were moving slowly toward him around the outside of the room. "I haven't the slightest—"
"You thought you'd lost, so you . . ." He looked around helplessly, enraged momentum slowing him, but not calming. "Well, you won't get away with it, Shavers, not by half."
"Get away with what?" Constable said. "What are you accusing this woman of, Danvers?"
"You'll see, you'll see," Danvers sputtered and backed into the corridor. "Just come outside, the lot of you. Just come outside and see what the precious little lady has done to her betters."
"Greg?" She reached for him and he took her hand.
"Now!" Danvers demanded. "Right now, so you can talk to the police."
Chapter 6
It was the silence more than the cold that caused tremors to skitter along Pat's arms, that snapped her head in small jerks from one face to another, that made her wish someone would scream.
The Bloodwind - An Oxrun Station Novel (Oxrun Station Novels) Page 5
