“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.”