Quoth the Raven

by Jane Haddam

  “So?”

  “So maybe he’s had an accident. Maybe he was mugged. Maybe a lot of things. But if Jack talked to him yesterday, it would have to have been on campus, wouldn’t it?”

  “I guess so,” Chessey said. “Jack didn’t work yesterday. He went for a climb, but that was with Dr. Crockett.”

  “There. Dr. Crockett would not go on a climb with Jack and Dr. Steele together, or with Dr. Steele at all. I don’t even think Dr. Steele climbs.”

  “I still don’t get it.”

  “If Dr. Steele was on campus yesterday,” Evie said carefully, “somebody besides Jack would have seen him. He would have made his ten o’clock class. He would have met his office hours. Hell, he would have had to eat. Somebody would have seen him.”

  “And nobody did,” Chessey said slowly.

  Evie looked into her cup of punch, made another moue of disgust at it, and poured it down the sink next to the one Chessey was standing at. Chessey took a paper towel out of the dispenser on the wall and dried her hands with it.

  “Evie, you know, I’m not making this up. Jack has changed. Just in the last couple of days.”

  “Oh, Jack’s changed all right.”

  “I don’t see what else it can have anything to do with, if it isn’t that he talked to Dr. Steele.”

  “Can’t you?”

  “No.”

  “I think I’m going to go catch that snake dance and have some punch.”

  Chessey dropped her paper towel into the wastebasket and turned around. Evie was leaning against the rim of one of the sinks, staring at her in a sad, almost affectionate way—and that made Chessey even more frightened than she had been, up in her room this morning with Jack.

  “Evie,” she said tentatively.

  But Evie was shaking her head. “Never mind, infant. It’ll all come out in the wash, one way or the other.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

  “Look on the bright side,” Evie said. “Maybe the Great Doctor Donegal Steele is dead.”

  Four

  1

  FATHER TIBOR KASPARIAN LIKED to arrange his life in habits. Schedules were beyond him. Simple things—like the hour every Sunday he had to be in Holy Trinity Church to pray the Liturgy, or the half hour he had to be in Liberty Hall to give his class—he could manage. More complicated things ran afoul of his one true passion, the reading and study of books. Gregor thought he must have run up against it more than once in his life, that panicky moment when he realized it had been days since he ate, or talked to another person, or even left his house for a few moments to buy a newspaper at the corner store. Back on Cavanaugh Street, Tibor had turned the rectory of Holy Trinity Church into a kind of book warehouse, with paperbacks and hardcovers, works of classical philosophy and the novels of Mickey Spillane, stacked haphazardly one on top of the other on every available surface. Gregor was amused to find that he had managed to do the same thing to his two large rooms in Constitution House—and in only a few weeks. The front room, meant to be the living room and fitted out with a couch, two wing chairs, and a glass-topped coffee table, was lined with heavy volumes in dull green dust covers and paperbacks in garish red and silver. The couch was covered with periodicals, both academic and tabloid. The wing chairs held what looked like complete collections of The Philadelphia Inquirer and The New York Times from the day Tibor had moved in to the present. Only the coffee table was clear of literate debris, maybe because Tibor distrusted the strength of glass. Gregor wondered where all this stuff had come from. He had moved Tibor into these rooms himself, with Bennis and Donna for company, in the very same van in which he and Bennis had come up today. He knew what they’d brought with them, and it wasn’t all this. Nor could he blame the collection on the small additions Tibor might have been able to make to it from his stash back in Philadelphia, going back and forth every Sunday to meet his duties at the church. For those, Tibor came and went by bus. He wasn’t a strong man. He wouldn’t have been able to carry much.

  Gregor took the stack of Philadelphia Inquirers off the seat of the wing chair closest to the window, discovered a copy of Judith Krantz’s I’ll Take Manhattan buried in their folds, and dumped the whole mess on the floor. Where did Tibor get these things? As far as Gregor knew, there wasn’t much of anything anywhere in the vicinity of Independence College—no large towns, no malls. Did the college bookstore sell I’ll Take Manhattan and—Gregor spied it across the room, sitting on top of the first volume of Thomas Aquinas’s Summa—Danielle Steele’s Daddy?

  Bennis sat down on the floor, cross-legged, and picked up a copy of The Illustrated Guide to the Films of Roger Corman. It was a ridiculously thick, outrageously oversize paperback with a picture of a decapitated woman on its cover.

  “Well,” she said, “it’s relaxing, in a way. Not to have to look at Halloween decorations all the time.”

  “But I have Halloween decorations,” Tibor said. “I have a jack-o’-lantern on the window ledge, right outside the window.”

  “That’s not the same as what’s going on in the quad,” Bennis said.

  “What is this place?” Gregor asked. “Are you supposed to be a faculty adviser in a dorm? Are we surrounded by students?”

  “No, no,” Tibor said. “This is a house for faculty only. It is a part of the philosophy here, Krekor, which I find very strange. The faculty here are supposed to be open to the students—available, that is the word. Not like in Europe, where we were supposed to be gods. We are supposed to be here so the students can knock on our doors and ask us questions.”

  “Do they?” Bennis asked.

  Tibor shrugged. “Some of them do and some of them don’t. That young man I introduced you to, Jack Carroll, he comes sometimes just to keep me company. He brings wine and the girl he is in love with, a nice girl but not of his seriousness. That is all right, I think. It is enough to have one serious person in a marriage. We talk about everything but what goes on in the class he has with me, and the girl—Chessey, her name is; have you ever heard a name like Chessey?—the girl sneaks into my cooking alcove and cleans my pots.”

  “I wouldn’t think faculty would want to live on campus in a place like this,” Gregor said. “A cooking alcove is fine for you, Tibor. You ought to be discouraged from cooking in any case. But with a family—” Gregor shrugged.

  “The ones with families don’t live here,” Tibor said. “The ones without are required to. It has its advantages, Krekor. It does not cost any money and we are given green cards to take to the dining hall, so that our meals cost almost no money, too. And the library is right across the quad, only a few steps away.”

  “What about the people from your department?” Bennis said. “Do any of them live here?”

  “It is not a department,” Tibor chided, “it is a Program. You must remember that while you are here. To say otherwise will get everyone very upset. And yes, Bennis. They do live here. All the permanent senior members and myself. Which is stranger than you realize.”

  “Why?”

  “Because this is not the only faculty house, Bennis. There are two more. I talked to Dr. Elkinson just after I came here and she said she thought the administration had done it on purpose, to try to get us to act as a unit. As a ‘team,’ she said. But—” Tibor shrugged.

  “But, what?” Gregor said.

  Tibor sighed. “Here,” he said. “Look. There are in this building four floors, the ground and the three above. The ground floor has four apartments and the foyer. The other three floors have five apartments each. On the fourth floor, there are Dr. Elkinson and Dr. Branch, and also some faculty from other Programs and other Departments. But of us, Dr. Elkinson and Dr. Branch.”

  “All right,” Gregor said. “The only thing I can think of is that you didn’t seem to like Dr. Branch.”

  “I don’t like her, Krekor, but that is not the point. Did you know the building is built on a courtyard?”

  “No.”

  “Well, Krekor, it is. It is a b
ig block with a hollow middle, and four staircases, one in each corner—”

  “Oh,” Bennis said, “I see. You really only get to know the people who live on your staircase, and the people who live on the other staircases you never even see. In the building, I mean. And Dr. Elkinson and Dr. Branch live on different staircases.”

  “Exactly,” Tibor said. “Dr. Elkinson lives on the north staircase. Dr. Branch lives on the east staircase. Then, on the third floor, there is Dr. Kenneth Crockett. He lives on the south staircase.”

  “Don’t tell me,” Gregor said. “You live here on the second floor on the west staircase.”

  “Yes, Krekor, but then the analogy breaks down. I am not the only one of us who lives on the second floor and on the west staircase.”

  “Who else is there?” Bennis asked.

  Tibor composed his face into a solemn mask and said, “The Great Doctor Donegal Steele.”

  Gregor’s mind had caught on the word “analogy” and snagged there. There was no analogy involved, and he couldn’t get over the bizarreness of it. Tibor’s English was always halting and sometimes incoherent. He’d lived in too many places under too many linguistic dispensations to be entirely comfortable anymore even in his mother tongue. But wrong—no. Tibor never got it wrong. He was much too careful for that.

  It was Bennis who picked up on it, maybe because she was the one who was really listening.

  “Donegal Steele. Isn’t he the one who wrote The Literacy Enigma?”

  “Yes,” Tibor said. “He did write that.”

  “Good Lord. I had no idea he taught at Independence College. In fact, I’m sure I saw somewhere that he was at Berkeley.”

  “He was at Berkeley. Then, at the beginning of this term, he came here.”

  “As a visiting professor?”

  “No, Bennis. As a permanent appointment, with tenure and without a probationary period. This would not be unusual in Europe, but Dr. Elkinson tells me it is very unusual here.”

  “Yes,” Bennis said, “it is.”

  “And then there are all the rumors about the money,” Tibor said. “I try not to listen to rumors, you know how I am, but this rumor is in so many places, it is impossible not to hear. There are people who say the college is paying him in excess of one hundred thousand dollars a year.”

  “A college this size?” Bennis was shocked. “But that’s absurd.”

  “It may not be true,” Tibor said.

  Bennis blew a raspberry. “If it is true, I’d say the college got held up. I mean, The Literacy Enigma was a hardcover best-seller for forty weeks. The man has to be a millionaire by now. He can’t need the money.”

  “I’d say that all depends on what you mean by need,” Gregor said. “In my experience, people can think of reasons to need as much money as there is. And more.”

  “Yes,” Tibor said sadly. “I have heard that, too, Krekor. I think it is true.”

  While they had been talking, Tibor had sat down on the couch, wedging his small compact body in between the literary Leaning Towers of Pisa, resting one arm on The Truth about Lorin Jones and the other on Thomas More’s Utopia. Now Gregor watched him get up and pace abstractedly to the window, his hands clasped behind his back in the classically stereotypical pose of a schoolmaster. He stopped when he got to the window and looked out on the quad. Then he leaned forward and pulled up the sash.

  “Here,” he said, “here is something much more pleasant to talk about.” He formed his lips into a fish-circle and brought up a noise from the back of his throat, loud and raucous, that made Gregor jump.

  “Here,” Tibor said again. “Here she is, Krekor, as I have told you. Lenore.”

  What came through the open window was the largest raven Gregor had ever seen, so black and glossy its beak looked almost canary yellow. It hopped onto Tibor’s arm and then began to climb up his shoulder, moving carefully, as if it knew its talons could hurt and it was taking care not to hurt Tibor. It came to rest on Tibor’s shoulder.

  “You look like Edgar Allan Poe,” Bennis said.

  Tibor had been hunting around in his pockets. He came up with something small and round, put it in the center of his palm, and offered it to Lenore. The bird looked at it for a moment and then ate it.

  “Hamburger,” Tibor said. “I feed her pastry, sometimes, but it is not right. Ravens are carnivores.”

  “You carry hamburger around in your pockets for a bird?” Bennis said.

  “I change it every day.”

  Gregor thought the more proper question to ask in this case would have been: Why would anyone want to cultivate the friendship of something that looked so much like a harbinger of death? He wouldn’t have asked it, because he knew it was just one more manifestation of his skewed feelings about Halloween. As it turned out, he wouldn’t have had a chance to ask it even if he’d wanted to.

  “Say ‘hello’ to Gregor and Bennis,” Tibor commanded the bird.

  Lenore hopped off Tibor’s shoulder, flew into the room, and came to rest on the back of the empty wing chair. She stared first at Gregor, then at Bennis, then at Tibor. Then she opened her mouth and let out the most bloodcurdling scream Gregor had ever heard.

  “I don’t understand,” Tibor said, “what’s that?”

  Lenore jumped onto Tibor’s hand and said very clearly: “Bastard. Bastard, bastard, bastard.”

  2

  “THE REAL PROBLEM WITH Mattengill’s analysis of the sociocultural parameters of evidentiary psychosis,” the man ahead of them in line was saying, “is that it doesn’t take into account the essential functions of spatiotemporality.”

  The college dining hall was a cafeteria—inevitable, Gregor would have realized, if he’d thought about it—and Tibor was leading their way down the line past the plates of Swedish meatballs and roast beef au jus. Beyond the line was a large, unusually graceful room, high ceilinged and marble floored, furnished with sturdy Shaker tables and high-backed chairs. Gregor had been under the impression that every college in the country had given up that sort of thing in favor of painted steel and laminated wood. The line itself, though, was the epitome of the twentieth-century American college dining hall aesthetic. It had stacks of rectangular plastic trays with rounded corners. It had heavy stainless steel tableware devoid of any ornament. It had a long tray-rest made of stainless steel tubes. Most of all, it had food: starchy, gelatinous, and colorless. It was food that promised fervently to be bland.

  Tibor had loaded up his tray without really thinking about what he was going to eat. Tibor never thought about what he ate. Bennis had taken a wilted-looking chef’s salad that seemed to be blanketed by indeterminate cheese. Gregor, remembering all those picnic baskets in the back of the van, had settled for a doughnut and a cup of coffee. He knew he wasn’t going to starve. There were two dozen honey cakes on the way. Now they were approaching the cash register, Tibor with his green card out. The man who had been talking about spatiotemporality was just paying up.

  “I don’t know what was wrong with Lenore,” Tibor was saying. “She never did anything like that before. She says ‘Hello.’ She says ‘Good-bye.’ She says ‘Good luck.’ To Dr. Branch she says ‘You have a nice ass.’ I think Dr. Crockett taught her to do that. She does not scream like a banshee in its death throes.”

  “If she says all those things, she’s a he,” Gregor said. “Female ravens can’t be taught to imitate talk.”

  “That’s a sexist thing to say,” Bennis said.

  Gregor gave her a withering look. “Sexist or not, that’s nature. Here, I’ll do another sexist thing. I’ll buy your lunch.”

  Tibor had already passed beyond the cash register, waving his green card and smiling vaguely at the student who was manning it. He was walking briskly through the large room toward a table next to one of the tall windows. Watching him, Gregor realized he had been wrong to think, as he had at first, that the dining hall had not been decorated like the rest of the campus for Halloween. The decorations were there, but the room
was so large and well proportioned it swallowed them. Every table had a tiny jack-o’-lantern in the middle of it, candlelit from within. Every column had a bouquet of Indian corn tied to the center of it. It all looked superfluous.

  “Six ninety-five,” the student at the cash register said.

  Gregor gave her a ten, took his change, and motioned Bennis to follow him to Tibor’s table. She had been listening to the conversation behind her—something about the intergenerational reenactments of mythic gravities that Gregor hadn’t really heard—and Gregor wasn’t sure she’d seen where Tibor had gone.

  “Over there by the windows,” Gregor told her, as they passed between two students who were, blessedly as far as Gregor was concerned, talking about the latest Star Wars movie. “He’s been joined by a man who looks like a cover model for one of your L.L. Bean catalogs.”

  The man not only looked like the model for the cover of one of Bennis’s L.L. Bean catalogs, he behaved the way Gregor had always suspected those men would behave. As soon as Gregor and Bennis reached the table, he leapt to his feet. Then he reached out, took Bennis’s tray, and put it down for her. Gregor’s tray was already on the table, so he didn’t bother with that. He simply put out his hand, smiled heartily, and said,

  “How do you do, Mr. Demarkian. I’m Dr. Kenneth Crockett.”

  Father Tibor Kasparian never leapt to his feet for anyone, although he’d done it once or twice from sheer excitement. He stared at Dr. Kenneth Crockett for a moment in utter astonishment, then waved Dr. Crockett, Gregor, and anyone else who might be in the vicinity into their seats.

  “This is Miss Bennis Hannaford,” Tibor said. “Miss Hannaford is a member of my parish.”

  Gregor nearly choked on his coffee. Had Bennis told everyone on earth, except him, that she was buying that apartment?

  “We have been talking,” Tibor was going on, “about Lenore. Have you seen Lenore today, Dr. Crockett?”