Quoth the Raven

by Jane Haddam

  “—and if I’m working later than two o’clock in the morning, I’ll put a towel under the typewriter so you can’t hear it and I won’t wake up old George downstairs—”

  “Worry about old George, not about me. I’d be relieved to hear you were back at work.”

  “—and all that sort of thing,” Bennis finished up. “Would you mind, Gregor? Would it bother you?”

  “No,” Gregor said. “But Bennis, this is a fine time to tell me.”

  “A fine time? Why?”

  “Because you closed on that apartment yesterday. I ran into Stephen Telemakian last night and he told me all about it.”

  Bennis took her cigarettes slowly, carefully, deliberately out of her shirt pocket, extracted one from the pack, lit up, and blew a stream of smoke at the foyer ceiling.

  “Never try to surprise a detective,” she told him solemnly. “All it does is get you kicked in the ass.”

  3

  HALF AN HOUR LATER, they were standing out on the curb, loading picnic baskets into Donna Moradanyan’s van while Donna stood by with Tommy in her arms, looking wistful. The sun was still shining brightly and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, but the day had grown sharply colder. Bennis had tucked her shirt back into her jeans and put on a pair of L.L. Bean’s Maine Hunting Shoes.

  “I wish you were coming with us,” she was saying to Donna. “I know it would have been problematic with Tommy along, but Father Tibor loves Tommy. We could have found a way to make do.”

  “Lida has me signed up to tell fortunes at eight o’clock tomorrow night. It’s all right, Bennis. I’ve got all that work to do on my portfolio. Besides, if I’m not here, who will sign for your furniture?”

  “Old George?”

  “He’d send it all back and get his grandson Martin to buy you a set of new.”

  “I need a set of new.” Bennis climbed into the van, counted to seven twice—checking out the picnic baskets, Gregor thought—and climbed out again. “Remember, if Mitzy Hansen from Doubleday calls, you want fifteen hundred for cover art and no less. Don’t worry about what’s-his-name from Random House. They always pay all right for artists.”

  “Okay.”

  “What about you, Gregor? You ready to go?”

  Gregor was definitely ready to go. Cavanaugh Street was beginning to get to him. Howard Kashinian had given up handstands for a prancing little vaudeville act that was positively surreal. Little Susan Lekmejian, aged six, was hopping up and down on the bottom step in front of her parents’ town house, dressed as a potato plant. Any minute now, somebody was going to decide to tie himself to the top of a tall tree and swing through the air like Peter Pan.

  Bennis slammed the side door of the van shut. Gregor climbed into the front passenger seat and hooked himself into his seat belt. Donna Moradanyan caught Bennis by the sleeve and said, “Don’t forget about the downshift. It sticks.”

  “I won’t forget.”

  “And don’t drive faster than fifty-five.”

  Bennis didn’t answer that one. She climbed into the driver’s seat, fastened her seat belt out of deference to Gregor, and put the van in gear.

  “You know,” she said, “there’s been something else I’ve been meaning to ask you, About Father Tibor.”

  “What about Father Tibor?”

  “Well, is he all right? Is something seriously wrong with him all of a sudden or something?”

  “Of course not,” Gregor said, surprised. “Why would you think there would be?”

  “It’s just all these changes, that’s all. We were supposed to go up there tomorrow morning, and then he calls you up in the middle of last night and wants us up there today—”

  “It wasn’t the middle of the night, Bennis. It was about six thirty.”

  “Whatever. It isn’t like him. When Tibor makes a plan, he usually sticks to it.”

  The van was easing out into the sparse traffic on Cavanaugh Street, rolling south toward a red light, and Gregor thought: That’s true. It isn’t like Tibor. The problem was, it hadn’t been not like Tibor, either. It hadn’t been hysterical, or overwrought, or insistent. It had been—sort of small and sad.

  “I think,” he said carefully, “that Tibor is a little homesick. You’ve read about the fuss they make out of Halloween in that place. I don’t think he knows how to deal with it.”

  “Hannah Krekorian told me that some priest who was here when you were all children said that Halloween was a Protestant plot to turn good Armenian Christians into Devil worshipers.”

  “I don’t think Tibor would go that far. I think he just feels out of place and out of step.”

  “Out of place and out of step,” Bennis repeated. “Oh, well. That’s practically a definition of the man, isn’t it?”

  Actually; Gregor didn’t think it was, but he didn’t have time to protest. As soon as the light turned green, Bennis shifted into first and slammed her foot on the gas.

  Two

  1

  FATHER TIBOR KASPARIAN WAS waiting for them in the parking lot at the back of King’s Scaffold when they drove up, standing hatless, coatless, and sweaterless in the stiff chill wind that had been flowing ever since they first entered the Allegheny Mountains. Maybe it was the Appalachians. Gregor could never get the geography of this part of Pennsylvania straight. In his childhood he had perceived it as a wilderness, a natural fortress that protected hillbillies and leftovers from the old west. Thinking about the fact that Philadelphia, a civilized city, was propped up from the south by places like this had made him lose his sense of linear time. Many years later he had come back and discovered what he should have expected to discover: that this might be the northern tip of the hill country, that hillbillies there might be, but that most of the territory was occupied by what everyplace else was occupied by. Small, neat ranch houses built of clapboard and stone, small collections of false-fronted stores antiqued with specialty vinyl siding, brick and redstone post offices and town halls—it wasn’t suburbia exactly, because there wasn’t enough of anything in any one place, but the aesthetic was in harmony with Levittown and Shaker Heights. Every once in a while Gregor caught a glimpse of something modern in cedar and glass and knew just what it was. The back-to-the-landers had their outposts here, offering up their Ivy League educations on the altar of politically correct environmentalism.

  Seeing Tibor, Gregor’s first reaction was fret and frustration. Dressed in nothing warmer than his day robes, the priest had to be freezing. Then Bennis jerked the van to a stop, pulled the Walkman headphones off her head—she had been listening to Joni Mitchell tapes all through the drive up, not talking to him—and cut the engine. Gregor found himself feeling suddenly grateful. He was grateful that the van had stopped. Bennis’s preferred speed in road vehicles was somewhere around ninety-five, and she hadn’t made much concession to the twisting mountainside roads they had had to travel to get here. He was grateful, too, for Tibor. Left on his own, he couldn’t have found a college anywhere in this landscape. There was certainly no sign of one.

  Bennis had detached her seat belt and, instead of getting out of the van, gone into the back where the picnic baskets were. Gregor detached his own seat belt, opened his door, and climbed out onto the tarmac.

  “Tibor?” he said.

  Tibor had been staring at a small shack at the back of the parking lot, near the drive where they had come in. Now he nodded to it, as if he’d been talking to it, and turned his head away.

  “Krekor,” he said. He looked at the van and frowned. “You did not drive yourself, all the way down here from Philadelphia?”

  “Bennis is in the back with the food. And it’s funny, but I keep thinking of us as coming up here from Philadelphia.”

  “You have been traveling south, Krekor.”

  “I know. But we’ve also been traveling up.” Over at the van, the side door slid open and Bennis Hannaford jumped out, holding one of the picnic baskets in her arms and staggering under its weight.

  “We’re
never going to get all this stuff where we’ve got to go,” she said, “not unless that’s a lot closer than I think it is. Hello, Father. Is there a college less than a mile from here, or should I have brought my hiking shoes?”

  “Tcha,” Tibor said. “Your hiking shoes would have been appropriate, because so many of the people here hike. And climb mountains. And jog. It is very remarkable, Bennis, this is such a place of peace, such a place of rest, and nobody ever stops moving.”

  “Right.” Bennis put the picnic basket back on the floor of the van and walked over to them. If it hadn’t been for the way she moved, they might have taken her for a college student herself. She had none of the slackness of skin, none of the distortions of body, that time and gravity visit on most people by the age of thirty-five. It was her sophistication and apparent self-confidence that was off, both too strongly settled and too deeply felt to belong to an adolescent.

  She drew up to them, shoved her hands in her pockets and asked, “Is there a college around here somewhere? Is there anything?”

  “Over there,” Tibor said solemnly, pointing away from the shack across a long flat expanse of ground that seemed to go nowhere. “What do you see?”

  “Something orange,” Bennis said doubtfully.

  “A pumpkin,” Gregor said.

  “A jack-o’-lantern,” Tibor corrected them. “You see it from the back, so you can’t tell it has been carved. That is the top of King’s Scaffold there, King’s and the jack-o’-lantern is the head of mad King George. You know that they burn every year the effigy of King George?”

  “I’ve heard of it,” Bennis said, doubtful again.

  Gregor tsked at her with impatience. “It’s famous,” he told her. “At least, it’s famous in the state. There was some fuss a few years ago, the state Environmental Protection Agency tried to shut it down, the Governor practically had to call out the state militia.”

  “Dr. Katherine Branch,” Father Tibor said.

  “Who’s Dr. Katherine Branch?” Gregor asked him.

  “The lady who started the fuss. She is a professor in the program in which I teach, Krekor, a very strange lady. She says she is the reincarnation of a witch.”

  “Well,” Bennis said, “that’s perfect for Halloween.”

  “For Halloween, Bennis, yes, but she does not confine her silliness to Halloween, if it is silliness. She is not a woman I like very much. There is another woman, Dr. Alice Elkinson, and her I do like very much. And a man. Kenneth Crockett.”

  “Doctor?” Gregor asked.

  “Oh, yes, Krekor. Here they are all doctors, except me, and I have what they call, what they call—”

  “An equivalent,” Bennis said.

  “Yes, Bennis, that is right. An equivalent. How they can possibly think I have an equivalent, considering how I studied, I do not know. Perhaps they think stubbornness under torture is educational. But it is as I said. Here they have only doctors, even in the most minor of teaching positions, which I think is a mistake. A doctorate is a degree for research. Here we do very little research. We teach.”

  “You write,” Bennis pointed out.

  “Yes, Bennis, I write. I write so much these days, I think I have diarrhea of the pen, to change an expression a student of mine explained to me the other day. I like my students, Krekor. They are very—enthusiastic. Very energetic. Uneducated to a point that is criminal, you understand, and in complete ignorance of history, but we do what we can about that.”

  “Right now I think we ought to do what we can about these picnic baskets,” Bennis said. “Hannah and Lida packed them this morning, and they weigh a ton. We’ve got to get them to your room somehow, Tibor. I couldn’t just bring them back to Philadelphia.”

  The three of them turned to look back at the van. Its side door was still open. The picnic basket Bennis had carried forward still sat on the carpeted floor just inside the door. A new wind was rising, even stiffer and chillier than the last, ruffling their hair and their clothes and the loose asphalt shingles on the roof of the shack.

  “It’s hard to believe we’re only an hour and a half from Philadelphia,” Gregor said, and meant it. It was hard to believe they were still in the state of Pennsylvania.

  Tibor brushed the palms of his hands against the sides of his robes, his customary gesture for getting on with it. “We will go down onto the campus,” he said. “We will leave the picnic baskets and ask some of the boys to come for them after lunch. The boys will not mind, Bennis. They are true Americans. Very obliging.”

  “Is that what we are?”

  “Yes, Bennis. That is what you are. Also very tolerant, very open-minded, very friendly, and very lazy. Especially intellectually lazy. Tcha. Such fine minds my students have and all they want to think about is Batman, The Movie. We will go now, Bennis, yes?”

  “Yes,” Bennis said.

  Gregor watched her walk across the tarmac to the van and slam the sliding side door shut, her hair whipping around her face in the wind and her jacket nearly falling off her shoulders. She was securing the sliders when he tapped Tibor on the shoulder and pointed across the parking lot at the shack.

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  “That is a shop for fixing cars,” Tibor told him. And then he grinned. “In Armenia, Krekor, when the Soviets came in—in my grandmother’s time this is—we had much trouble with a program that was to make us all comrades. In the end, the intelligentsia retreated into their offices and the mechanics into their garages and nothing was changed. Well, Krekor, here is capitalism for you. Here we have the cars for all the faculty. The Jeep over there is the car of a member of my Program, Dr. Crockett. They say maybe he would be the next Head. He has not a large reputation, but he is very local. But there, that black Mercedes, that belongs to a philosopher. A philosopher, Gregor, not a famous one, but still a philosopher. And like every other intellectual here, he fixes his own car!”

  2

  UP IN THE PARKING lot, it had been impossible for Gregor Demarkian to imagine that a full college campus—or a full measure of anything else artificial and civilized—was anywhere close. Once Tibor had led them down the narrow winding path that ended at Minuteman Field, it became impossible to imagine that the campus of Independence College could ever end. It wasn’t that the physical plant was so very big. Gregor had been a student at Harvard and a participant at conferences at Yale, Chicago, Johns Hopkins, and Georgetown. All those places had larger and more impressive collections of architecture, more inclusive and more diverse student bodies. Maybe the problem was that all those places were also set down in the middle of cities, so that they came to seem like just one more kink in an already tortuously convoluted urban landscape. Set down by itself, surrounded by nothing visible but trees and hills, Independence College defined itself—and its self-definition was distinctly eighteenth century. The redstone buildings were all Georgian and Federal in design. Even the ones whose shiny newness of material and lack of ivy indicated they must have been recently constructed maintained the artistic sensibility of 1778. Then there were the paths that had been threaded through the lawns from the door of one building to another, straight paths in straight lines, testimonies of symmetry to the triumph of reason. Lawns were lush but closely mown, hedges boxed and closely clipped. The statue of a Minuteman stood at the center of the largest quadrangle, at the place where all the quadrangle’s paths met. It had been cast in bronze and allowed to weather to green. Seen from halfway down the path from the parking lot, Gregor thought it radiated the confidence of self-control.

  The campus had been built on what must have been the only piece of solidly flat land in this part of Pennsylvania, and at the moment it was crowded with students. Students in mummy costumes, students in Frankenstein costumes, students made up to look like undefined victims of bloody violence—in no time at all, Gregor began to feel shell-shocked by how many of them there were, and by how many of them seemed fascinated with death and gore. Obviously, Gregor thought, this must have been goin
g on for some time. Tibor, usually the most squeamish of men, wasn’t fazed by it at all. Gregor caught a look at Bennis Hannaford and saw she wasn’t fazed by it, either. Maybe all those horror movies she watched with Donna Moradanyan had made her immune. Gregor refused to believe she had been inoculated by seeing her own sister dead on the floor.

  When they got to the very bottom of the path, Tibor turned slightly sideways, and waved his arms in the air.

  “There. There it is. Kings Scaffold and old King George. What do you think?”

  Gregor didn’t know what to think. The Scaffold was impressive all by itself, a massive outcrop of rock jutting straight up from the ground, at least as high as a three-story building and maybe higher. The bonfire, though, was the kicker. It didn’t make a bit of difference that it was unlit. Hundreds of logs climbed up the rock face of the Scaffold, decorated here and there by bits of paper and cloth. At the top, regally seated on a plywood throne, was a straw-stuffed dummy that looked too much like a man. Only the jack-o’-lantern head, made it possible for Gregor to look at it without cringing.

  “Good Lord,” Bennis said. “That’s very realistic, isn’t it?”

  “The pile has gone too high for you to see its hands,” Tibor told her. “You can see them if you try. They give it all away.”

  “I’m glad something gives it away,” Gregor said.

  “Just a minute, Krekor. It is that boy there in the bat suit that we need. I will be back.”

  Tibor darted into the crowd. Gregor returned his attention to the effigy, dodging visual interference from costumed revelers beneficent and malign: an Alice in Wonderland, a Devil with pitchfork and horns, a Little Red Riding Hood, a walking zombie from Night of the Living Dead. Everybody seemed to be carrying crepe paper streamers and confetti. Everybody seemed to be dancing to music that existed only inside their heads. Gregor kept having to beat back the nauseating suspicion that they all had the same music inside their heads. Finally he got momentarily clear of the crowd and caught a clear look at what he wanted: the effigy’s hands, white gloves badly stuffed with straw, much too small for anyone but a child.