Quoth the Raven

by Jane Haddam

  Gregor looked out at Ken Crockett and noticed that, although Crockett was as white as he had been since he first came to the hall, he had now begun to relax. The stiffness of his shoulders had begun to melt. Gregor looked away.

  “According to some people,” he continued, “Dr. Crockett might even have a secret he was afraid Dr. Steele might expose—but I didn’t like that secret. I hadn’t been able to verify it. I still haven’t been able to. And it was the kind of thing that could possibly be—worked out. If it was true at all. No, what began to dawn on me was what people said when they hadn’t been asked directly about who would be the next Head of the Program if not for Donegal Steele. The official version was one thing. The collective gut instinct was another. And here, I saw, I had a person with a much better motive, a person in a much better—or worse—position, a person far more easily ruined by Dr. Donegal Steele. This was also a person who worked on her car and did it well. This was also a person who had been seen heading in the direction of the parking lot in the hour or so before Miss Maryanne Veer was attacked. This was Dr. Alice Emerson Elkinson.”

  Dr. Elkinson was sitting in the seat one in from the aisle, blocked off from escape by Dr. Crockett sitting beside her. Dr. Crockett, Gregor noticed, had gone into a kind of waking paralysis. All his muscles that had begun to relax only a few moments before had stiffened into mock rigor. Dr. Elkinson was far more poised. She glanced to her right, to her left, at her hands and up. Then she said, “Are you accusing me of something, Mr. Demarkian? Of a murder that never even happened?”

  Her voice was strong and soprano-clear, but Gregor ignored it. He reached under the lectern for the can of Belleville Lemon and Lime soda and brought it up. Then he nodded to Freddie Murchison, waiting in the wings.

  “Let me show you,” he said, “how Miss Maryanne Veer was poisoned with lye, when there wasn’t any other food on her plate but tea.”

  There was an ice pick under the lectern, too, just as he had asked. He picked it up, turned the can on its side, and punched a hole in the seam. A hiss came up he thought he was probably the only one to hear. He widened the hole a little, shook some of the soda out onto the floor—he had to do it over and over again to get enough out; even with a reasonably wide hole the physics of the process was difficult—and then reached for the small bag of lye and poured some in to fill up the space left by the missing liquid.

  “Miss Veer didn’t have a can of this on her tray,” he said, “but you did, Dr. Elkinson. Now we have to wait a little while here, to let the lye fizz and pop its way to reasonable peace. It’ll never calm down completely, but it doesn’t have to. This is a carbonated soda. It’s supposed to fizz. Mr. Murchison?”

  Freddie Murchison came forward, took the can, and picked up the soldering gun.

  “Mr. Murchison is going to make a solder plug,” he said. “To anyone not looking for a trick, the can, when he is finished with it, will look to all intents and purposes normal, and as if it has never been opened. So will a can of Belleville’s local brand of beer, which is what people on this campus use when they commit an alcoholic atrocity called popping. That was what Dr. Steele was on his way to do when he ran into Jack Carroll on the twenty-eighth. When someone pops beers, the beer goes down his throat in force and at a tremendous pace. That would have gotten quite a bit of lye into Donegal Steele before he’d have had a chance to react. As for Miss Maryanne Veer, I think what you intended to do was to hand her that doctored can of soda either sometime at lunch or sometime after it. You knew it was what she liked. Everybody did. You fell into a little luck. She was so upset, she didn’t pick up her usual lunch. You stood there beside her right next to the cash register, opened the doctored soda, and handed it to her. When you both got past the cash register and she took a drink, as she started to drop it and the tray and everything else, you took it back.”

  “Why?” Alice Elkinson burst out. “For God’s sake, why? Just to end up Head of Program in a small college in Pennsylvania? Whatever for?”

  “Just to end up not professionally dead,” Gregor said gently. “What Donegal Steele was threatening to do to you was what he had already done to Chessey Flint—to make you look like a tramp, to make you look ridiculous. He kept coming to your apartment. That’s why the lye was there in the first place, when Dr. Branch found it. Dr. Steele was going to bring it out to the Climbing Cabin, but he stopped by your place first and he left it there, to give himself an excuse to come back. My guess is that he gave you the same kind of ultimatum he gave Chessey, one you had no intention of buckling under—but if you didn’t, the consequences would have been much worse than anything Chessey could have imagined. After all, Chessey’s only concern was Jack Carroll, and Jack believed her. Yours was the entire academic community, because you knew that one thing mattered if you were going to have the career you’d spent so much time working for and yet be a woman. You could not afford to be made to look like what he would make you look like. It would have destroyed any claim you had to be a serious scholar, a serious intellect, a woman on the way up and not just another fool sleeping her way into the good graces of her Chairman.”

  “Donegal Steele is not dead,” Alice Elkinson said, but as she said it she turned, backward, toward the blackout curtains. When she turned all the way around she stopped. The blackout curtains were supposed to be closed, but they weren’t. Gregor had watched over Alice Elkinson’s head while two of Freddie’s minions pulled them up, probably prompted by Markham through Freddie himself. Now the view was open to Minuteman Field and King’s Scaffold, the huge pile of logs against the outcrop lit by the torches around the field’s rim. On top of it all, the effigy sat resplendent in flounces and velvet, a mad old king with a pumpkin for a head.

  “Dr. Elkinson,” Gregor said, even more gently this time, “it’s gone. The body’s gone. We took it out of there while you were chasing around looking for a wounded Chessey Flint who was back in her dormitory room safe and sound. The biggest mistake you made was taking it out there at three o’clock this morning, dressed up as a bat.”

  “It’s Jack Carroll who dresses up as a bat,” Alice Elkinson said in a strangled voice.

  “I know,” Gregor said, “but at three o’clock this morning, Jack Carroll was in a motel room in Elgin, Maryland, having just married Miss Chessey Flint.”

  Alice Elkinson whipped her head back to the front, back to Gregor, and now her eyes were blazing.

  “I fed him lye and I put him up on that roof and I would do it again tomorrow if you damn well want to know. That flaming bastard was the prize. He waltzed right in here on nothing but a meretricious piece of right-wing crap and thought he was going to take over. He hadn’t done half the work I’d done and he didn’t think he had to. He could just manipulate the images. That’s what he always said. All you had to do was know how to manipulate the images. Well, after I fed him that beer, I manipulated the images, all right. I went up there with a glass of lye in water and I poured it all over that bastard’s face.”

  Ken Crockett was clutching her arm. Alice shook him off.

  “I took him right up onto the roof on Constitution House and put him in that lean-to thing,” she said, “and it worked. I left a piece of Jack’s suit on the floor next to the cash register and you didn’t even find it—”

  “We found it,” Gregor said, “we didn’t believe it.”

  “Nobody ever believes anything except what isn’t true,” Alice Elkinson said. “That’s the problem with places like this.”

  On Gregor’s left hand, Lenore had finished with the honey cake crumbs and become restless. The bird took off and began to circle in the brightly lit room, churning around and around like it was caught in a cyclone.

  “Bastard,” it cawed out in that horrible voice. “Bastard, bastard, bastard.”

  Epilogue

  Quoth the raven,

  Nevermore—

  —E. A. Poe

  1

  THERE WAS MORE MOVEMENT on King’s Scaffold and Minuteman Fiel
d that night than there had been on Halloween at Independence College for many years. When Dr. Alice Elkinson had gone out at three o’clock in the morning to exchange the effigy of George III for the body of Dr. Donegal Steele, she had put her best effort into the body’s concealment. She had scattered the straw down the waterfall of logs that seemed to cascade from the ridge down the face of the outcrop. She had exchanged Steele’s clothes for the costume from the drama department and covered his head with the King’s jack-o’-lantern skull. The police had confiscated all of it. At one point, they had even threatened to confiscate the bonfire itself. Steele’s own clothes had to be somewhere. In all likelihood, they were down there among the wood somewhere, thrust out of sight. At any other time and in any other place, the area would have been roped off and no one allowed near it until it had been thoroughly searched.

  Gregor Demarkian’s position was that the clothes could hardly matter. The woman had confessed in full view of two or three hundred people—considering the present rules of evidence, that could hardly matter, either—and most of what the prosecution would need to complete their case could be had from the one person on campus least likely to protect their murderer: Katherine Branch. Gregor kept saying it, over and over again. The key to making the lawyers happy was Katherine Branch. In the end, David Markham gave in. He didn’t want to be the cause of the first bonfireless Halloween at Independence College in more than two hundred years, any more than Jack Carroll and Freddie Murchison and their friends wanted to graduate with the first class that had not managed to set off a bigger and better conflagration than the class before it. David Markham took the list Gregor had written out for him while he was arresting Alice Elkinson, squinted down at the thick numbered lines scrawled across a piece of paper Freddie had torn out of someone’s notebook, and scowled. Then he rounded up the few uniformed men he had left after Alice Elkinson had been driven off in the direction of the Belleville jail and got to work. By then, Ken Crockett was gone, too, chasing the hiccuping sirens and glowing red taillights of the police cars. Gregor thought Ken Crockett might be doing what he did best, and what had made Gregor dislike him so instinctively the first time they met: taking on a load of guilt and responsibility for something he’d had no control of at all. In Gregor’s mind, the man had no idea who he was or what he was or what he felt. He simply made decisions for himself and carried through, whether or not he was making any sense. His present decision seemed to be that he was supposed to be in love with Alice Elkinson, and that his failure to leap to her defense in the auditorium was the worst kind of cardinal sin. Now he was chasing around the countryside, trying to think of some way to atone for it, trying to hurt himself enough to delude himself into believing he had been punished.

  In the meantime, Gregor and Tibor and Bennis sat comfortably in the smaller common room on the first floor of Lexington House, drinking food-colored, brightly orange mimosas in black plastic glasses. That was what people did at Independence College while waiting for the bonfire procession at midnight. They had sprawling, chaotic parties in their dorms, carefully screened from the silent emptiness of the quad by all that blackout paper. In Lexington House, the party consisted of dorm sisters in pumpkin costumes, mimosas ladled like punch into hollowed-out pumpkins (alcoholic to the right, soft to the left), and Lou Reed on a stereo system loud and sophisticated enough to have served at a Bruce Springsteen concert. The Lou Reed had been Bennis Hannaford’s idea.

  “And hard to find it was, too,” Bennis said, coming back with another full glass of the mimosa version on the right. “I mean, for God’s sake, you’d think any college student worth the name would at least have a copy of ‘Walk on the Wild Side.’ ” She sat down in the chair she had vacated only a few moments before, looked up at Evie Westerman sitting on the arm, and sighed. Evie had attached herself to Bennis just after the scene in the auditorium broke up and had been hanging on, fascinated, ever since. “Evie,” Bennis said, “do you think you could get just drunk enough to sort of glaze out a little? Every time I look at you, I think you’ve got X-ray vision.”

  “How did you get your hair like that?” Evie asked her. “Is there a name for that kind of treatment?”

  Bennis shook her head. “Evie, my hair is like this because I was born with my hair like this. Everybody in my family has hair like this. However, if you must, you can get the same effect with a cloud crimp at Sassoon’s. And a dye job. Now will you please—”

  “What I don’t understand,” Jack Carroll said from his place stretched out on the floor at Gregor’s feet. Chessey was down there with him, sitting cross-legged on the carpet near his legs. He had one hand around her ankle. “What really bothers me is, why Alice Elkinson? I mean, your whole explanation seemed to center on motive—”

  “Not at all,” Gregor said. “My whole analysis was grounded on one incontrovertible point. Miss Veer decided to call the police about Steele’s disappearance late on the morning of the thirtieth. Before that, no one had any reason to attack her. Therefore, whoever did attack her had to be someone who had the time to get to the shed and make that plug before meeting Miss Veer in the dining room. That couldn’t have been Katherine Branch, because Bennis saw her in the foyer outside the cafeteria when we came in for lunch. Granted, those plugs are much easier to make when you have the can to work them into, instead of doing them blind the way we did last night. Still, they’re not that easy to make. Then there was Dr. Crockett. In the first place, he was all the way over on Hillman’s Rock just before noon. He’d been there all day. He might still have had time to get down, all the way over to the shed and back, except that he was sitting at a table with me a good fifteen minutes before Miss Veer fell. He wouldn’t have had time for that.”

  “So that left Dr. Elkinson,” Chessey Flint said.

  “Or the two of you,” Gregor said blandly, “but there was that bat up on the Scaffold. I didn’t catch on when I saw it—her. It didn’t hit me right then what she was doing. But I did know it didn’t look like Jack, and that it was suspicious. And later, of course, I talked to Freddie Murchison and figured out where the two of you must have gone—”

  “The three of us,” Evie said morosely. “I’m never going to do anything like that again. Have you any idea what it’s like, spending the night alone in a motel room while the people next door make the walls shake?”

  “Evie.” Chessey was appalled.

  “Back to Dr. Elkinson,” Gregor told them. “If you think about it for a minute, you’ll see it was very odd. Everybody was always wondering what Donegal Steele was doing at Independence College. His degrees. His book. His reputation. Nobody ever wondered what, Alice Elkinson was doing at Independence College. But think about it. She got her degree from Berkeley. She got tenure here so fast and so young, I had to assume that her publications and her professional reputation were exceptional. I don’t care what kind of reputation the Program has. Bennis was right. People like that don’t end up at places like this. They go to big-name universities.”

  “Unless they’re in a hurry,” Bennis said. “That’s what it was, wasn’t it? Youngest tenured faculty member. Youngest Head of Program. And then—”

  “Up and out,” Gregor agreed. “And Donegal Steele. The significant point about Donegal Steele wasn’t how awful his behavior was. It was that he’d told lies about Ms. Flint—Mrs. Carroll?—and been believed. He was a convincing man. He really could have ruined her.”

  “Well, this will ruin her,” Evie said. “What was all that stuff about Dr. Branch? When Markham left Concord Hall, he was saying her name over and over again and cursing under his breath.”

  Gregor laughed. “Oh, that. Well, this morning Dr. Branch talked to David Markham and me at breakfast. She had a lot of information. The only way she could have gotten it was by doing a lot of snooping on her own, which I wouldn’t put past her. Your Dr. Branch, I’m afraid, is addicted to various forms of nonmonetary blackmail. There are a couple of buckets of lye missing, and a bat suit. My guess is that D
r. Crockett tried to destroy the bat suit to protect Dr. Elkinson, but my guess is also that he wouldn’t have bothered if Dr. Branch hadn’t seen it first. As to the lye—” Gregor shrugged. “Either Katherine Branch moved it herself to put the fear of God into Alice Elkinson, or Dr. Crockett moved it after he found out Dr. Branch knew it was there. Markham will work it out. I’ve told him where to look.”

  “And Katherine Branch will testify,” Bennis said. “Take a look at it, everybody. This is Gregor Demarkian’s Great and Inscrutable Detective Act. It makes me nuts.”

  “What about that sweater,” Evie Westerman asked, “is it one hundred percent cashmere, or do you go for Lycra in the neck?”

  Out in the foyer, a grandfather clock pealed the first of its four bongs to announce the time as quarter to twelve. A second later, all the pendulum clocks on campus seemed to start in at once and the carillon began to toll. Jack Carroll stood up, pulled his hood out of his belt, and put it on. Chessey stood up after him, searching vaguely for her mask.

  “Gotta go,” Jack said. “Last real frivolity before law school.”

  “Law school,” Chessey breathed reverently.

  Evie Westerman blew a raspberry.

  Gregor got up, held a hand out to help Tibor to his feet, and followed the students into the Lexington House foyer. Just as they got there, somebody doused the lights.

  “Here we go,” Bennis said from somewhere behind them. “I’ve finally gotten rid of Evie. She has to march.”

  2

  IN THE QUAD, THERE were now so many torches the college looked on fire. Torches and people, costumes and silence: it was eerie to watch, that stream of heads and fire moving east toward the Scaffold. Gregor found himself wondering what it had been like the first time, and sure it had been nothing like this. That would have been a rite of politics. This was a celebration of mortality and sex. Gregor moved Tibor and himself into the crowd, keeping his hand on the priest’s shoulder, watching for signs of Jack Carroll’s tall, broad figure at the front. Someone had given Jack a torch and he was holding it higher than all the others, waving it in the air like an exploding firework he had mysteriously managed to bring under control.