Hardscrabble Road(114)
“But they know where everything is. They know things you can’t possibly know, that even Drew couldn’t possibly know.”
“I’ve got a friend from home who’s been a secretary all her life. I’m going to bring her in to run things. I’ll bring her in a couple of weeks early so they can show her what she needs to know. And no, Neil, I’m not so stupid that I don’t know that they’ll probably sabotage her—or is it that I think they’ll probably sabotage her that’s the stupid part? That’s something I heard once, too. That people like Drew think the things they think because they’re just stupid enough to know they don’t get it, so they suspect everybody all the time of trying to pull one over on them. But Drew wasn’t stupid, you know. No matter what you thought.”
“I didn’t think he was stupid.”
“Maybe not. Maybe you only thought he was vulgar. I don’t see where it matters. After I get Janice installed at the office, I’m going to take off for two weeks and take my nieces to Disney World. No fancy restaurants where I don’t know how to pronounce the food. No being stuck with mineral water and a salad because that’s what everybody else is eating and I’m afraid to look like an idiot having a hamburger. I’m going to drink Coke, eat pizza and Tex Mex, and go on rides. And you’ll never hear from me again.”
“I don’t think you can just take off for Florida like that,” Neil said. “You’re a suspect in a murder investigation. You may have to get permission from the court.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Ellen said. “The only reason I’d need that is if I’d been arrested and I was out on bail, but I’m not going to be arrested, and you know it. Nobody suspects me of killing Drew. Not even Gregor Demarkian suspects me of killing Drew.”
“You can’t possibly know that.”
“But I do know it,” Ellen said. “And do you know how I know it? Because the person he suspects is you.”
2
It had been bothering her since Gregor Demarkian had come to see her the night before, and now it was impossible to keep out of her mind on any level. Alison wasn’t even able to keep it out of her mind while she was teaching, and usually teaching was better than a memory drug. She found it all too easy to retreat into the Middle Ages and to experience that as more real, and more immediate, than anything in the present. Maybe that was because the Middle Ages were more real and immediate than anything in the present. The passage of time did a lot of good things for whatever cultural periods it didn’t completely destroy. It washed away the trivial and the dross. It eliminated the extraneous. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Hildegarde von Bingen’s music stood out like shining beacons of culture, taste, erudition, and sanity next to the violent confusion of a world full of Madonna and Beethoven, Steven Spielberg and Shakespeare, The Weekly World News and The Portrait of a Lady. But Chaucer’s world had been a violent confusion, too, and on every level. It was a world where people died young of diseases we didn’t have the names for anymore, where maiming and mutilation were par for the course in war, where the cultural landscape included hundreds of truly execrable morality plays and drama from traveling troupes with no more thought to the artistic integrity of what they were doing than for the feelings of the playwrights whose works they were plagiarizing. Then there was the really gruesome: the art of religious relics, manufactured wholesale from bits and pieces of dead animals and, yes, dead human beings. There was the art of the Chapel of Bones, with its facade made of human bones stacked one on top of the other and, in the sanctuary, the bodies of a dead man and a dead child hung by hooks over the congregation, to remind them of the fleetingness of life. There was the Plague, and there were the flagellants, monks who walked through the streets of towns and cities in formation, scourging themselves with metal-tipped leather whips until their upper torsos spurted blood. Hell, Alison thought, give me World Wrestling Entertainment anytime.
She looked up now at the building she thought was the one she wanted, and tried consulting the visitor’s map one more time. It was astounding that she had managed to be at Penn for all these years and still not know where the Math Department was, but she wasn’t in the Math Department, and she didn’t usually need them for anything, so that was the way that went. The visitor’s map was more than a little surreal. It showed the university buildings as if they were made of Lego blocks, but it didn’t show anything of the city that not only surrounded the campus but interweaved with it. It was disorienting. People who came to visit here must feel as if they’d entered a virtual reality game, or exited from one.