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Quoth the Raven(25)

By:Jane Haddam


“Ken wouldn’t be in costume.” Dr. Elkinson made a face. “Never mind. He went rock-climbing this morning, and I thought he might have stranded himself up on Hillman’s Rock or forgotten about the time. But if you’ve seen Jack Carroll, Father—”

“Just a few minutes ago,” Tibor said helpfully.

“Yes, well. If Jack’s back, then Ken must be back, too. They always go together. I’ll try the office.”

“He is perhaps working on a paper and too involved to know that he is hungry.”

“Of course.” Dr. Elkinson nodded to Gregor and to Bennis. “It was nice meeting you both. If you’re going to be on campus for two days, I hope we’ll run into each other again.” Then she turned on her heel, walked the rest of the way down the steps, and disappeared into the crowd on the quad.

Gregor had forgotten about the wind. Walking across campus, he had been shielded from it by the bodies of the students and the solid sides of the buildings. Now it ruffled his hair and chilled his scalp, making him feel feverish.

“Pretty woman,” Bennis said.

“Also very intelligent,” Tibor told her. “The most intelligent in the Program. A very good degree from Berkeley and she received it at only twenty-four. Three books published before she was thirty and very scholarly. I have read them. And then tenure here, very fast, the youngest person ever given tenure in the history of the college. She is a formidable woman, Dr. Elkinson.”

Gregor grunted. “I’m beginning to think there isn’t a single person on this campus who isn’t upset about something. Did you notice that?”

“No,” Bennis said.

“I noticed it,” Tibor said. “It is true, Krekor, we are all upset about something. I do not think we are necessarily all upset about the same something.”

“I wouldn’t expect you were. It’s just that this sort of thing gets so damned tiring.”

Gregor had put down his small suitcase while they’d been talking to Dr. Elkinson. He didn’t remember doing it, but there it was, next to his feet, instead of in his hand. He picked it up again and began to climb the rest of the steps to the door of Constitution House, wishing that whoever was playing that music in the quad wouldn’t play it so very loud.

“It’s bad enough,” he said, “to be worried to death about giving a lecture, without having to try to figure out what’s on everybody else’s mind at the same time.”

“You don’t have to figure out what’s on everybody else’s mind,” Bennis told him. “I mean, for goodness sake, there hasn’t been a murder.”

Still far down at the bottom of the steps, away from the door, Father Tibor Kasparian coughed.





Three


1


IT WAS TWENTY MINUTES to twelve, and by the rigid schedule she had set for herself on the first day she came to work for the Program, Miss Maryanne Veer was late for lunch. In fact, she was late for more than lunch. She had made it a rule never to leave anything on her desk when she left the office, even to go to the bathroom, unless there was another secretary in attendance to watch over it. Her desk was still covered with the detritus of a very long and annoying end-of-October day. This was the last week students could drop courses without penalty. She had half a dozen computer drop cards and their accompanying handwritten explanations—what Miss Maryanne Veer thought of as essays on “Why I Couldn’t Stand Professor X For One More Minute”—laid out in a line just above her pen holder. This was also the week when the midterm grades were supposed to be in, to be collated and sent along to the students’ academic advisers. Technically, grades weren’t due in until Friday, but she had most of them already, in a tall stack at the middle of her green felt blotter. Then there were the pink message slips that needed to be passed out to the faculty mailboxes, the course descriptions that needed to be packaged up and sent along to the Dean’s office, the syllabi and book lists that needed to be filed, the proposals for next term’s All College Seminars that needed to go to typing. Halloween might be a midterm holiday for the faculty and students of Independence College. For the secretaries and assistants, it was the very definition of a living Hell. Everything had a deadline, and the deadline was always the first of November. Everything was a matter of life or death, and—like the phone that sat next to the electric chair in all those ancient Jimmy Cagney movies—reprieve would either come by the close of All Saints’ Day or it might as well not come at all. Miss Maryanne Veer picked up the blue cardboard folder she was using to organize the New Publications Reports and sighed. The New Publications Reports had to be typed in triplicate and then distributed, one copy to the Dean, one copy to the Academic Standards Review Board, one copy to her files. She wanted to take a match out and burn the whole silly self-delusive thing.