Quoth the Raven(12)

Alice got up off the sewing machine stool, walked through the kitchen, and came to a halt at the open back door. Lynn was standing in the middle of the porch holding the white plastic bucket of hand bleach. She was frowning down at the other buckets, all blue and all painted over in red with skulls and crossbones.

“Are the skulls and crossbones real?” she asked Alice. “Are those trick-or-treat buckets, or what?”

“No,” Alice said. “They’re not trick-or-treat buckets.”

“What are they?”

Alice rubbed the side of her face with her hand. She didn’t like having those buckets on her porch. She didn’t like having them anywhere in her life? It bothered the hell out of her that she needed what was in them.

Lynn was still standing out there in the wind, head tilted, curious. Alice cleared her throat.

“What’s in them,” she said, “is lye.”

“Lye,” Lynn said in wonderment. “Where did you ever get lye? I didn’t think anybody used it anymore.”

“They use it in Drano,” Alice said, hesitating. And then, because she’d been dying to tell somebody, she said, “I got it from Donegal Steele.”





8


NO CARS, FACULTY OR otherwise, were allowed onto the campus of Independence College; Members of the college who had cars had to park them in a lot high on a hill to the back of King’s Scaffold. Most of the faculty kept cars and complained about the inconvenience. Most students didn’t bother to keep cars. Jack Carroll did—a heavily used, religiously cared for, Volkswagen Beetle convertible—because he had a job at the Sunoco station in Belleville three days a week. Freshman year, he had tried getting there by bus. There was excellent bus service to Belleville, paid for by the college, for just such people as Jack Carroll, who had to work. Jack, however, liked to work late for the overtime, and he felt stupid working as a mechanic and not having a car of his own. He’d brought the Beetle up from home at the beginning of his sophomore year and kept it in the lot ever since. Sometimes, he thought about it enough to be grateful that Independence College was as isolated as it was. The Beetle was an antique. Kept at a city school, it would have been dead meat.

Now he shook his head at the tangle of wires under the Beetle’s hood, drew his head back into the air, and motioned to Ted Barrows, who had come up to help him, to follow him into the shed. The shed was really a shop, fully equipped. Anyone who knew how to fix his car himself could use the tools in there, or get a friend who knew to use them. Anyone who had to call a garage in Belleville could be assured that it wouldn’t need to be towed anywhere for anything less than a junking. It was a small concession on the part of the college, but it was an expensive one. Before he’d made up his mind to go to law school, Jack had thought hard and long about owning his own body shop. Then he’d checked into the costs of equipping one, and decided law school would be cheaper.

Over on King’s Scaffold, students dressed up as Frankenstein and Batman were dropping logs down the face against the side of the effigy. Jack was keeping his fingers crossed that they were doing it right. If they weren’t, he was going to have to go over there and straighten it out. Sometimes he thought he was nuts. His college education was being pieced together by four scholarships, two loans, and thirty hours a week in a grease pit. His law school education was going to be just as crushed. He didn’t have time to be President of Students, which he was. He just couldn’t seem to stop himself.

He let himself into the shed and headed for the soldering bench. Someone had been there before him, God only knew when, and left the solderer lying out. The solderer wasn’t clean, either. None of these academic types seemed to have the least respect for good tools.

Jack sat down and started to clean up. Ted Barrows came in from outside and stood beside him. Ted was from a very rich family on the Main Line, and he found the things Jack did with metals fascinating.

“So you see,” Ted said, continuing the conversation they had started outside, “the whole campus is in an uproar. I mean, the guy’s totally disappeared. Just totally. Freddie Murchison says somebody finally went and offed him.”

“I think a hell of a hangover finally went and caught up with him,” Jack said. “Just look at this crap. I can’t believe people do this to tools.”

Ted pulled at his scraggly little mustache, the one he’d been trying to grow for three years now. Jack had counted the hairs in it once. There were eight.

“You know,” Ted said, “I was in Liberty Hall? The old lady was on the phone to the other old lady and what she was saying was that Steele and Chessey—”