Quoth the Raven

by Jane Haddam

  The other problem with having Alice come to him, rather than his coming to her, had to do with the staircases at Constitution House. In order for Alice to get from her apartment on the fourth floor to his on the third, she had to go down the north staircase all the way to the ground floor, wend her way through a series of hallways to the foyer, wend her way through another series of hallways to the south staircase, and come all the way up again. He had to do the same to get to her—but for some reason he always seemed to be able to do it faster. It took him about ten minutes to get to Alice’s apartment. It took Alice about forty to get to his. Waiting for her after she’d said she’d be right over sometimes made him crazy.

  Now it was ten o’clock on the night of Wednesday, October thirtieth, and Ken Crockett had other things on his mind.” Alice coming to his apartment, and the time it would take for her to actually get there, were even useful in the short run. He’d meant to spend his day in reasonable tranquility. Going up Hillman’s Rock this morning, he had imagined himself over the course of the coming afternoon: having lunch with Alice, reading de Tocqueville under the shade of the pine trees behind Constitution House, maybe taking Alice out into the quad after it got dark and getting her to dance. The attack on Miss Maryanne Veer had put an end to that—but the attack wasn’t all that had put an end to it. He had come back to his apartment all jangled, not having expected to come back to it at all after that mess in the dining room. Alice had been such a wreck. Ken had been sure she’d want him with her. When she hadn’t, he’d been more than put out. He’d been positively angry. It was as if she thought of him as some kind of teenage Good-Time Charlie, desirable for the giggle times but not much use for anything other than that. He’d walked around and around the campus, skirting the Halloween festivities in a mood so sour he thought he was turning into Katherine Branch and Donegal Steele, kicking trees. Then, when he had finally gotten himself calmed down, he went back to Constitution House and found—the package.

  At the moment, the package was lying on Ken’s coffee table, undone, its papers spread out across the glass surface like used cocktail napkins at the end of an overlong party. When his doorbell rang, he was just picking one of those papers up and turning it over in his hands. He’d been doing that by then for two hours, even though the papers were nothing but lists with various items marked in red. He kept reading the marked items, shaking his head, and reading the marked items again. The whole thing was so damned silly he didn’t know what to do with it.

  This time, with Alice jabbing and pounding at the bell, he didn’t bother to read anything. He put the paper down and got up to let her in. On his way to the door he checked his watch. It had taken her twenty-one minutes to get here. It was a record.

  She was leaning against the wall next to his door, dressed as if she were about to go out on a climb—or as if she’d just come back from one.

  “Hi,” she said. “I’ve calmed down. Have you?”

  “Sort of. I got a surprise when I got back here this afternoon.”

  “What surprise?”

  “A little present from Mrs. Winston Barradyne.”

  Alice raised her eyebrows, one of her patented Alice-in-a-good-mood expression, except that this time it didn’t quite come off. Ken ushered her in, thinking as he did that what he had here was an in-between mood. She may have calmed down—after the way she’d been in the dining room, anything less than outright hysteria would have meant she was calming down—but she wasn’t herself again either. Her skin seemed to be twitching and jumping under her sweater, as if it had been stuffed full of Mexican jumping beans. He sat down on the couch and spread his arms over the papers.

  “There,” he said. “I don’t know what you’ve been doing with yourself all evening, but what I’ve been doing for most of it is reading through these. Mrs. Winston Barradyne’s recollections of just what Donegal Steele took out of the Historical Society library.”

  “What I’ve been doing with myself all evening is looking at that goddamned bird.” Alice sat down in one of his chairs and put her feet up on his coffee table. The thick sharp cleats on the bottoms of them stuck into the air like a fakir’s bed of nails. “It’s gone, now. Lenore, I mean. It was up overhead circling and circling until I thought I’d go crazy.”

  “I think they sleep at night,” Ken told her. “I wonder what’s wrong with Lenore?”

  “Maybe she’s been captured by aliens and turned into a flying spying machine.” Alice put her feet on the floor again. The cleats cut through his carpet and knicked into the hardwood of his floor with a click. “Are these what Mrs. Barradyne sent you? They look like lists.”

  “They are lists. Of all the books and all the pamphlets and all the everything else in the Historical Society library.”

  “The things Steele took out are marked in red?”

  “That’s right.”

  “John Cowry—letters from Antietam.” Alice frowned. “That’s the wrong period.”

  “I know.”

  “Are they all from the wrong period?”

  Ken grinned. “Every last one of them. Every last damn one of them, Alice. I’m not kidding. Christ, I could take Mrs. Barradyne and wring her neck. You have no idea how paralyzed she made me.”

  “Yes I do.”

  “Maybe you do,” Ken admitted. “I know you thought this was all silly, Alice, but it really wasn’t. I can’t imagine what would have happened to me in this place if it had gotten around that four members of the great and illustrious Crockett family, benefactors of the college and outstanding patriotic blowhards for two hundred years, were hung for British spies in New England during the Revolutionary War.”

  “Why do you think he was asking Mrs. Barradyne all those questions about you? He was asking them, wasn’t he?”

  “Sure. He’s nosy.”

  “I think the proper word is probably intrusive,” Alice said. Then she sighed. “Listen to me. I’m talking like an academic. I promised myself I was never going to do that.”

  “At Berkeley?”

  “At Berkeley, I promised myself I’d never talk like a revolutionary. Speaking of which, what do you think our Katherine is doing?”

  “Chanting petitions to the Great Goddess.”

  “I ran into Lynn Granger while I was walking around outside a little while ago and she said she’d seen Vivi Wollman coming out of Liberty Hall this afternoon—through a window.”

  Ken laughed. “Katherine probably tried to talk her into filching the evaluation files for the old Women’s Studies program. Just so nobody got the idea they wanted Miss Veer out of the way because she had access to a lot of private information that could ruin their careers.”

  Alice shook her head. “I don’t believe even Katherine could do anything that trite.”

  “Katherine is always trite,” Ken said. Then he took a deep breath. It was always a risk asking Alice what she was feeling. You could get an answer, or you could get an argument. “Alice?” he said. “Are you all right? I know all this stuff with Miss Veer upset you, and I don’t blame you for being upset, it’s just—”

  “It’s not Miss Veer,” Alice said. She got out of the chair, walked over to the window and drew his curtains. The window didn’t look directly out onto the quad. Some of the apartments on the south staircase did, just as some of the ones on the west staircase did, but not the ones on this side. She was looking across an empty patch of lawn to a line of darkened windows on the third floor of Madison House.

  “Ken?” she said. “Ken, listen, I had some things, out on my balcony, some buckets.”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, you know how it is with me during Halloween. Half the campus has keys to my apartment. And it’s not like the buckets were important, if you know what I mean.”

  “No.”

  “No,” Alice said. “Well. Never mind. I was just wondering if you’d come up and borrowed them or something.”

  “Borrowed them? Why would I do that?”

  “I don’t kno
w.”

  And that, Ken thought, was the truth—she had no idea why she’d just asked him what she’d asked him. It was as if she’d had to ask him, just to make sure, but the making sure hadn’t brought her any kind of relief. This mood she was sliding into now was one he recognized.

  She was tight as a wire.

  2

  IF THERE WAS ONE thing Chessey Flint hated more than any other, it was Jack Carroll in one of his decisive moods—and that was strange, because, in the beginning, she had loved Jack in his decisive moods. When she’d first met him, there had been something scary and secretly thrilling about seeing him that way, like the way it felt when she made herself ride the big roller coaster at Disney World, even though she was terrified of heights. Lately there had been an element to it she didn’t like. She kept feeling Jack was going to tell her something she didn’t want to hear or force her to do something she didn’t want to do. The only thing she could think of that would fit either description would be that he would want to leave. It was all she thought about anymore. She was beginning to be boring even to herself.

  It was eleven o’clock at night, and Jack was standing in the tree just outside her dormitory window, bracing himself on a branch and stretching out his arms to help her climb through. This was the method they had devised to avoid having her come down to the foyer when they wanted to get together at night. It was silly in a way, because there were no curfews at Independence College and no parietal hours in the boys’ and coed dorms. If Chessey wanted to leave her room and spend the night with Jack in his, she had every right to do it. The problem was with how deserted Lexington House got after dark. Even with all the manic Halloween stuff going on outside, the corridors and common rooms were empty, except for the common rooms just off the foyer itself, which were full. That, Jack had told her, might actually make things worse. With all the confusion, it would be hard to keep security as tight as it ought to be, considering the way things had been going. Chessey hooked her small hands into Jack’s big ones and let him draw her to him, slowly, inch by crazy inch. She really was afraid of heights—terrified of them, in fact. The very idea that she was balancing on a thin branch four stories above the ground made her physically ill.

  The branch was not so thin. Jack pulled her along it until she reached the place where a whole raft of branches came together to join the trunk, then wedged her tightly into the crook there until she felt safe. In the old days, he used to ask her if she felt safe. Now he didn’t seem to need to. He got her settled and then climbed back up to the crook where he liked to sit when they weren’t going directly to the ground. There was a mild wind blowing, flapping his black cape in the air and bringing them snatches of music from the quad.

  “My cape is filthy,” he said. “I had Mr. Demarkian in the shed and he got filthy, too. I’m sorry.”

  “You don’t have to apologize about the cape.”

  “All the way back to campus I kept thinking you were going to tear it off my back as soon as you saw it and throw it in the wash.”

  “I’ve never torn anything off your back in my life.”

  “I know.”

  “I want to get out of this tree and back onto the ground and I want to do it right now. You know how I hate to be high up. You know it. How can you do this to me?”

  “Chess—”

  “Oh, don’t.”

  Suddenly she was crying again, crying and crying, the way she cried when she was alone in her room and no one could see her. It made her so angry with herself, so damn furious, because it made her think she’d turned into one of her sisters. Emotions always on full alert and out of control, life always in a mess and headed for failure—what had she worked so damn hard for all these years if not to escape that? Jack was reaching out for her, but she didn’t want him to touch her. Chessey pushed herself out on the branch to get away from him, not really caring that she was suspended above nothing but darkness and air. She even closed her eyes and tried to imagine herself falling, into a void, forever, without ever touching ground.

  “Look,” she said, “I know that everything’s gone wrong. I know you don’t want to touch me anymore—”

  “That’s not true—”

  “—and that you can’t stand to talk to me anymore—”

  “That’s also not true—”

  “—and that you’re going to leave here tonight and not come back—”

  “Chess, don’t be an idiot—”

  “—but the one thing I absolutely refuse to put up with after all this time is listening to you delivering a little speech about how damned adult we’re being and how we’re both going to grow up and find out what love is really like at last and all the damned rest of it. I won’t do it, Jack. I won’t co-operate in that kind of charade and I won’t hear any crap about that was then and this is now or any of the rest of it.”

  There was a silence from way up in the branches that went on for so long she began to think: Well, I’ve said it all for him, and now he doesn’t have anything left to say. Then Jack began to climb down from his perch, to test the branch she was lying on with his foot. It wouldn’t hold them both. They’d discovered that her sophomore year, when she and Evie had first taken this room. When he helped her out of the window he always stayed in the crook near the trunk. Chessey felt the branch spring and bounce back, shaking her. Jack said “damn” under his breath and retreated.

  “Chessey?” he said. “Will you listen to what I’ve got to say?”

  “No.”

  “You’re going to have to. I’m not going to help you down out of here until I’m done talking.”

  “I’ll start screaming at the top of my lungs and someone will come.”

  “Don’t.”

  “Oh, hell,” Chessey said. “I don’t have the energy for it anyway.”

  Jack cleared his throat. “Chessey, look, I’m not going to say there hasn’t been anything wrong, because there has been. It just hasn’t been what you think it has. It isn’t that I don’t want to touch you anymore.”

  “Oh, I see,” Chessey said, “you’ve given it up for Lent.”

  “Lent is at Easter. Chess, it’s just gotten to the point where I can’t do that and stop in the middle of it. This morning in your room, there was a point where I thought I was going to rip you up. It’s not that I want to hurt you. It’s just that the whole damn thing—the way I feel and the way I respond—hell, Chess, whether you realize it or not, the way you feel and the way you respond—Christ, Chessey, I don’t know how to describe it. There’s been some kind of cosmic shift. It’s different and you know it.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Not bullshit. And you know that, too.”

  Chessey swung herself up into a sitting position, forcing herself to move and forcing herself to stop. For a minute it felt as if she’d launched herself into space.

  “Listen to me,” she said. “If this is the great put-up-or-shut-up speech, you can shove it up your own ass. I don’t give a flying damn about cosmic shifts. I don’t give a flying damn about anything where that subject is concerned. It’s my body and my life and I have every damn intention of doing what I want with both of them my way.”

  “I know. I’ll admit I thought of that at first—coming to you and making a fuss about it and seeing what happened. I gave it up because I knew what was going to happen.”

  “Don’t you dare tell me I’m pretty when I’m mad.”

  “I won’t. I couldn’t tell you anything about the way you look at the moment. All I can see is that jack-o’-lantern face in Day-Glo on your—backside.”

  Her—backside—felt as if it were sticking up into a spotlight, making a spectacle of itself. It felt that way even though she was sitting on it. Chessey shifted a little and then wished she hadn’t moved. She hadn’t come close to calming down since Jack left her room this afternoon, but she was calming down now. That was not such a good thing when she was dangling up here in space. It was one thing to take risks when she felt she didn’t car
e if she lived or died. It was another to take them in cold blood.

  She started to inch her way down the branch, toward the trunk, moving slowly. She felt Jack’s hand waving in the air near her face and grabbed on to it.

  “I can’t breathe,” she said.

  “I was wondering how you were managing to sit out there all by yourself without fainting.”

  Jack inched farther back up the tree, and Chessey let him pull her farther in toward the trunk. When she was finally in the crook she relaxed a little, because the crook always made her feel safe. She was only half-aware that he had not gone all the way back up to his usual perch, or that her head was resting against his knees. When he began to stroke her hair, she let him. It just felt so nice not to be tense anymore.

  “Look,” he said, “I’ve been thinking about this all day. More than all day. For days. It seems to me we have two problems, not one.”