by Jane Haddam
What he did expect, when he walked out of Constitution House with Bennis and Markham and Father Tibor to make his way to the lecture hall, was a torchlit campus full of capering students. He got the torchlights. While he was busy noticing other things, the torches had been fastened to makeshift holders spread out along the edges of the paths and in a circle around the broad expanse of Minuteman Field. The students, however, had disappeared. Between the torches and the blacked-out windows and the emptiness of the quad, Independence College looked like a ghost town, reliably haunted.
“What the Hell is going on here?” Gregor asked the air.
Markham came back, “It’s the blackout. No activity until the procession to the bonfire.”
“But where is everybody?” Bennis asked.
Markham pointed down the angled path on which they were walking, to a tall oblong building with something that was not quite a steeple and not quite a spire rising from the front of it. It was a building Gregor had noticed before, the first one visible when you came off the parking lot path. He had never been required to go into it, or seen anyone else going into it, and so he hadn’t paid it any attention.
“A lot of them are probably in there,” Markham said. “That’s Concord Hall, the old chapel. It’s used as an auditorium now.”
“That’s where I’m supposed to give my speech?”
“That’s where.” Markham contemplated the back and side of Concord Hall. “It’s got its advantages, considering. They modernized it about ten years ago. Took one whole wall of the auditorium and turned it into windows. The windows look out on King George’s Scaffold and Minuteman Field.”
“They’ll be blacked out,” Gregor said.
“They’ll be blacked out with a blackout curtain, installed special at the time it was renovated. The bonfire is an annual event around this place.” Markham smiled thinly. “All we have to do is haul the curtain up and there we are.”
“Where will we be?” Gregor asked. Nobody answered him. There was something about all this silence that was contagious. He pressed on, ahead of the others, until he got to the back door of the hall. It was propped open, and when he got to it he saw that it was guarded, too—by Freddie Murchison, standing just inside it in the dark. Freddie was, as usual, dressed up as Dracula, with a mouth full of fangs. If his face hadn’t been so naturally sappy-silly round and childish, he would have been frightening. Gregor pushed past him, made way for the others and said, “Well?”
“Well,” Freddie told him, “we couldn’t lock the front doors because of the fire regulations, but we’ve got guys strung out all along the front hall, the whole football team in fact. They’re not much of a football team, but they ought to be all right.”
“I’m sure they’ll be fine,” Gregor said. “What about our friends?”
“Take a look for yourself.”
Freddie was leering at Bennis, who had declined to come in costume but had put on one of her best black silk shirts. She had a lot of them, all so fine they might as well have been transparent, and she always wore them with the top two buttons undone. Gregor pushed past them both and went up the small flight of stairs that was the only other way to go than out. The flight led to a fire door that led to a short hall that led to another fire door. Gregor pushed this open and stuck his head through.
The “auditorium” was really the entire second floor of the old church, fitted out now with curving rows of cushioned chairs like a movie theater, its east wall an unbroken curtain of black cloth. The room itself was brightly lit and packed full, mostly of students in varying degrees of self-conscious absurdity. Gregor saw a couple made up as Barbie and Ken, a boy dressed up as a beach ball, an entire row of girls dressed up as pumpkins. He scanned the room until he picked out the faces he was looking for, and the costumes: Dr. Ken Crockett and Dr. Alice Elkinson sitting side by side on the third row center aisle; Dr. Katherine Branch, red hair floating in the air like liquid flame, sitting by herself and looking furious in the middle of the front row; Jack Carroll and Chessey Flint, in costume but easily identifiable, surrounded by friends in the back toward the left. When Jack saw Gregor he nodded slightly, reached down into his seat, and came up with his bat hood mask. Then he pulled it over his head.
“Look,” Tibor said from somewhere behind Gregor. “Look what Freddie kept for us.” He pushed in on Gregor’s left side and held out his hand. Perched there, pecking at a fine dust of honey-sticky crumbs, was Lenore.
“Krekor?” Tibor said.
Gregor was capable of making up his mind in an instant. Sometimes he even wanted to. “Have you got any more of whatever you’re feeding it?” he asked Tibor. “Can you put some of that stuff on my hand?”
Tibor reached into the pocket of his cassock, came up with a mangled piece of Lida Arkmanian’s honey cake, and held it out. Lenore followed it, pecking as she went.
“Usually they sleep in the nighttime, I think,” Tibor said. “But this is a good bird, Krekor. This is a bird who knows how to be an ally.”
In Gregor’s opinion, this was a bird who knew how to eat, but that was irrelevant. He had just made up his mind about something else. Back at the apartment, he and Markham and Bennis and Tibor had gone over and over the choreography of this scene. First Tibor would introduce him to the Dean, who was waiting patiently in the front row to finally be allowed to participate in this event. Then the Dean would introduce Gregor, reading from a vita supplied by Tibor and containing Gregor didn’t want to know what. Then—
But it was all too complicated and it would take too long. Gregor had always been a man more comfortable with formality than chaos, but there was a limit. He smeared his own left hand with honey and cake and watched while Lenore climbed onto it. Then he stepped out onto the stage and crossed to the lectern. Behind him, Tibor was scrambling frantically to catch up. He was not quick enough and he didn’t make it. On Gregor’s hand, Lenore pecked, hopped, pecked again, and then cawed out “Bastard, bastard, bastard” in a chillingly venomous voice that carried to the back of the hall.
On the floor behind the lectern there was a can of Belleville Lemon and Lime soda and Freddie Murchison’s case of Belleville beer. Gregor tapped the mike on the lectern’s surface and was relieved to find it live and loud. By then, Tibor had caught up with him and begun hissing in his ear.
“Krekor,” he said, “Krekor, what are you doing? I’m supposed to speak first. You’re supposed to meet the Dean.”
Because Gregor had never met the Dean, he didn’t know which one of the faces in the front row belonged to him, and he thought that was just as well. He leaned into the mike and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, I was supposed to come here tonight and tell you how the Federal Bureau of Investigation, of which I was a part for many years, goes about the tracking and the capture of serial killers. I have decided to talk instead about a topic much more interesting to me at the moment, and probably much more interesting to you. I have decided to discuss the maiming and mutilation of a secretary in this college’s Interdisciplinary Program in the American Idea, Miss Maryanne Veer—and the murder of a professor in that same department, Dr. Donegal Steele.”
2
GREGOR HAD HEARD ENOUGH about hushed silences in his day, and read enough about them, so that he shouldn’t have been surprised to be presented with one. The hall had gone dead quiet and paralytically still. The only person in the place who was even fidgeting was Tibor, standing right behind him. A man in the center of the front row had gone as white as chalk. Gregor assumed he was the dean. He felt sorry for the man even, as he turned away to ignore him.
At the last minute, his eyes swept the room, searching for his suspects, but if he had been looking for some special reaction, he would have been disappointed. They were all still in their seats and impassive. They might have been numb. He moved closer to the lectern and leaned out over the crowd.
“Yesterday afternoon,” he said, “we were presented here with a very interesting problem, in feet an impossible problem. Not
only had a woman, Miss Maryanne Veer, with very few personal ties to the college and only limited professional ones, been fed enough lye to put her in the hospital for several weeks and possibly to cripple her for life, but she had been fed it in full view of the lunch crowd in a packed dining hall, while she was standing up, while she was holding a cafeteria tray on which was nothing but a cup of strong tea. Now I don’t know what you people out there know about lye, so I will tell you something about it. The technical name for it is sodium hydroxide, and it always fizzes when it comes in contact with water. Our first thought—mine, and later that of the police—was that what we were looking at was a Tylenol-poisoning type of attack. At first glance, it looked as if we had someone, a cafeteria worker or a student or a faculty member, intent on causing havoc to whoever might get in his line of fire. Given that assumption, first I, and later David Markham and his men, began to look for what the lye might have been in. It could not have been in Miss Veer’s tea, because if it had been the tea would have been fizzing, and it was highly unlikely that she would have drunk it. Even if she hadn’t expected to be poisoned, she would have, as any of us would have, been suspicious about what she was being fed. Her natural reaction would have been to dump out that cup of tea and pour herself a new one. So we went looking, at that point, for what else she might have had and what else she might have eaten—someone suggested to me over the course of this investigation a peanut butter sandwich. That would have been good. But there was no peanut butter sandwich. In fact, there was nothing of any kind. Everyone we asked told us the same thing: Miss Maryanne Veer had come through that cafeteria line with a cup of tea and only a cup of tea on her tray. We searched the floor for food that might have gone unnoticed and been dropped when Miss Veer fell. Nothing. We searched the tables. Nothing. We searched the cafeteria line. Nothing. We were finally forced to admit to ourselves what seemed so unlikely to be true: that someone had attacked Miss Veer in particular for some personal reason, and then taken away, or disposed of, whatever food the lye had been in.
“Now we had two new problems, equally disturbing. In the first place, although the lab reports haven’t come in yet, it was clear that whatever Miss Veer had eaten that contained lye was unlikely to have been large and only theoretically likely to have been solid food at all. Immediately after she fell, I and a number of people in the crowd applied the antidote for her condition, namely milk forced into her mouth and down her throat. I saw no residues of solid food in her teeth or gums. Then there was the larger problem: Who would want to hurt Miss Maryanne Veer and why? I say hurt and not kill, because there is something you must understand about lye. People do die from being poisoned by it, but I have never yet heard of a murderer who managed to bring such a thing off deliberately. It is almost impossible for someone to swallow enough lye to kill them immediately. Lye burns—actually, it dissolves human flesh on contact. People have been known to die by swallowing small amounts of lye, thinking they’ve cured the problem with milk or some other agent, and three or four days or a week later being presented with a perforated stomach lining that has finally given out in its attempts to counteract the alkali. With a dose of the strength administered to Miss Veer, however, and with that dose administered in full view of a hundred or so people, the attacker would have had to realize that it would have been very unlikely for Miss Veer to die. So we had someone here who did not care if Miss Veer lived or not. That could not have been the point.
“But what was the point? The more we looked into Miss Veer’s life, the less likely it was that there was one, at least of the kind we are used to in murder investigations. Miss Veer lived with a woman friend of many years standing, who was not on campus at the time. She did her work in her department without causing any obvious rancor among the faculty and students she worked with. We heard no underground rumbles of unfairness or dislike. In fact, the only person on campus who seemed to have any antipathy to Miss Veer at all was a man I had never met but heard much about, Dr. Donegal Steele.
“At one point in this investigation, someone suggested to me that it was Dr. Steele who had attacked Miss Veer, even though he had not been seen in the dining room at the time and was a figure unlikely to go unnoticed by faculty or students. I dismissed this suggestion out of hand, considering where it came from, but it got me thinking. Because you see, there is one way to commit murder successfully with lye, although I’d never seen or heard of it done. If you can get enough of the stuff down your victim’s throat and then keep him away from any and all medical attention for at least three days, he will die. It’s a nasty way to kill a man, but it could be done. Starting from there, I realized I had two very interesting pieces of information. In the first place, no one had laid eyes on Dr. Donegal Steele since sometime late on the night of the twenty-eighth of October. In the second place, what Miss Maryanne Veer had been doing on the morning of the day she was attacked was worrying about Dr. Steele’s disappearance, making up her mind to call the police and report him missing—and telling at least one person and possibly more about her decision.
“Now, considering Dr. Donegal Steele as a victim was much more rewarding than considering Miss Maryanne Veer. In the first place, he was from all accounts a personally objectionable man. He made passes at women and refused to take no for an answer. When he got no, he got nasty—not physically violent, but slanderous. He tried for a girl named Chessey Flint and failed. In the wake of that failure, he told everyone he could that he had succeeded, causing Miss Flint a great deal of anguish and putting her boyfriend, Mr. Jack Carroll, into an entirely untenable position.”
Gregor looked up at Jack, who had begun to glower and squirm in his seat. Beside him, Chessey was beginning to look panicked, as if she feared an explosion. Gregor didn’t blame her. He had always found Jack Carroll a very controlled young man, but he was convinced that under that control was enough explosiveness to satisfy anybody.
Gregor looked back at his notes and cleared his throat. “In the second place,” he said, “Dr. Steele was a famous man with a book on the best-seller list and more money than he knew what to do with, hired away from his old university by the administration of this college for what was rumored to be a great deal of money and a solid bank of promises. I haven’t talked to the administration about any of this, but I tend to agree with the people I’ve talked to. It was perfectly rational for the faculty members of the Interdisciplinary Program on the American Idea to assume that Dr. Steele had been promised the Chairmanship. It was hard to think of any other reason why he would agree to come to Belleville, Pennsylvania, no matter how illustrious the Program’s reputation might be. From what I’ve heard of the man, it wasn’t the kind of position he could expect to get on any campus where he’d spent a considerable amount of time. He was too abrasive.
“Now, even after I’d figured this out, I was still left with two problems. Unlike Mr. Markham here behind me, I didn’t count as one of those problems that Dr. Steele’s body had not been found. I didn’t think he was necessarily a body yet. What I did count as problems were the following. First, we did not know how the lye had been administered to Maryanne Veer. Second, that we had to account for this.”
Gregor held up one of the little solder cylinders, he really had no idea which one. He wasn’t sure it mattered.
“We found this,” he said, “on the floor under the cafeteria line after Miss Veer had been taken to the hospital. We found other things, too, but for the moment they don’t matter. The problem with this was that we had no idea what it was or what it was for, and, therefore, we had to explain it. It was the only unnecessary and inexplicable thing found anywhere near the scene of the crime. This cylinder is made out of solder. There are facilities for soldering in the shed at the edge of the parking lot behind King’s Scaffold. Yesterday, I had Mr. Jack Carroll take me up there and reproduce one of these. He not only did it, in the process of doing it he created a mess of solder shards very much like the one he had found in the shed on the morning after the last t
ime he had seen Dr. Steele, and very much like the one we found that night, after Maryanne Veer had been attacked. My assumption was that the cylinder had been made in the shed, but I still didn’t know why, or what for.
“Being brought to that impasse, I concentrated instead on motive. I considered first whose lives could be ruined, or might even be about to be ruined, by Dr. Steele’s presence on this campus. I started with Miss Chessey Flint, whose reputation was certainly in a shambles. I went to Mr. Jack Carroll, who loves Miss Flint and wants desperately to protect her. Then I went to the faculty, and I found a curious thing. Whenever I asked anyone who would be Head of the Program if Donegal Steele were not, I was told Dr. Ken Crockett—a good candidate for this murder and this attack, because he was strong, because he was frequently in a place, the Climbing Club cabin, where I was told lye was kept, and because he was known to work on his car in the shed where the cylinder must have been made.”
