Quoth the Raven(14)

When Jack Carroll’s brother had smashed his Ford Falcon into that concrete abutment, he had not only killed himself, but his girlfriend, his best friend, and the twenty-dollar-an-hour whore his best friend had picked up for celebratory purposes in Allentown.

Sometimes, when Jack thought about Donegal Steele, what he saw was Steele’s body in that Falcon, crushed and crumpled and covered with blood.

Now he draped the cable he needed over his shoulder and headed for the shed’s door.

“Come on,” he told Ted Barrows. “Let’s not talk about Donegal Steele.”





9


AT QUARTER TO SIX, Father Tibor Kasparian gave up. Lenore had shown up at his window, finally, but she hadn’t stayed long. The raven had been edgy and inconsolable, pecking at his fingers when he tried to give her food. He had gotten her to eat a little pile of pine nuts covered with honey. After that, she hadn’t wanted anything. It made Tibor depressed.

A lot of things made Tibor depressed. Once Lenore was gone, his mind drifted back to Donegal Steele. That always made him feel tight, as if he’d been roped around the chest-and was now being squeezed. He kept getting a picture of the worst thing he had ever seen Steele do, the definitive act that had defined the Great Doctor’s character for him for all time. It had happened at the opening convocation at the beginning of the college year. The faculty had been assembled on stage facing the student body, standing while the school song was sung, and Donegal Steele had raised his arm, swung it sideways, put it down the front of the robe of a young woman in the Department of English, and squeezed. Just like that. In front of hundreds of people. Students. Faculty. God only knew who else. It had all happened so fast, and so decisively, nothing had come of it. When it was over, no one could think of what to do. And the look on Steele’s face—Tibor got itchy even thinking about it. The look on Steele’s face had had no triumph in it at all. It had been sly and self-satisfied, as if he did that kind of thing all the time, and in much more sensitive circumstances—and as if the fact that he always got away with it signed and sealed the truth of what he had always believed women were.

Meat.

Tibor sighed, and then looked up to see that the clock tower was showing six thirty. He started to stack his books into a pile, starting with the Castleford history of the anti-Federalist papers and ending with the magazine he carried everywhere these last few weeks, the one with the story of the Long Island murders and Gregor Demarkian’s picture in it. Seeing Gregor’s face always made him feel better. If he’d had his way, Gregor would have moved up here with him, and brought some of the others: Bennis Hannaford, Donna Moradanyan, Lida Arkmanian. The names from home rolled through Tibor’s mind and made him feel pleasantly melancholy. True sadness was either a curse or an opportunity. It could destroy you or make you into a saint. This kind of sadness was a luxury.

He had a green canvas book bag to carry his things in, just like the students did. He put his books inside it and started to put the magazine in there as well. Then he stopped and opened the magazine up again. “America’s Premier Private Sleuth Nabs Another One,” the subhead said. The picture underneath it made Gregor look half-furious and half-terrified. Tibor smiled a little, closed the magazine, and tucked it in the book bag.

Poor Gregor. He’d always hated publicity, and now he had it all the time. What was he going to do when they wanted to make a TV movie about his life? Tibor was sure someone would want to make a TV movie about Gregor Demarkian’s life. That was the sort of thing people did in America.

He went down the empty corridor to the front stairs, then down the front stairs to the wide foyer that led out onto the path to the quad. The bushes that crowded the sides of the great stone building were covered with crepe paper and bats. The paths were covered with students in costume. Tibor wondered what was going on back in Philadelphia, on Cavanaugh Street. He liked all this enthusiasm about Halloween, but it felt a little wrong to him, undernourished somehow, without children. He passed a boy dressed up as the Incredible Hulk and a girl dressed up as Little Red Riding Hood and smiled and nodded to them both. He couldn’t tell who they were under all the makeup, but he thought he might as well be pleasant.

At the place where the path curved to join the quad proper, Tibor could see the stretch of Minuteman Field again and the effigy against King’s Scaffold. The Scaffold was swarming with people and the pile of logs was higher than ever, but there were neither logs nor kindling in the effigy’s lap. Maybe the students had decided they didn’t want anything to block their view of good King George in flames.