Quoth the Raven(27)
Miss Maryanne Veer had unfolded the piece of paper and was looking down at it. “RiverWomb: The Feminist Review of Literature,” she read. “GoddessRite.”
“GoddessRite is actually a very good journal.” Vivi was defensive. “It’s published at Harvard. You ought to look into things like that, Miss Veer. It could change your whole perspective.”
“I like my perspective the way it is.”
“Well. Yes. Maybe you do. But you’ve got to admit, Miss Veer, if it wasn’t for rampant sexism, you’d be Head of this Program yourself.”
You’d be Head of this Program yourself. Miss Maryanne Veer refolded Vivi Wollman’s New Publications Report, took it back to her desk, and sat down. She didn’t know what was worse, that Vivi had been sincere, or that in her sincerity she had actually thought she was paying Miss Veer a compliment. Miss Maryanne Veer didn’t think she would ever understand the sensibilities of modern young women. They were so consummately irrational.
She opened the blue cardboard folder, put the New Publications Report inside—and then thought of something. Poor specimen though she might be, Vivi Wollman was a faculty member. Unlike Miss Maryanne Veer, she lived on campus.
“Dr. Wollman?”
Miss Maryanne Veer had expected the little chit to be halfway down the hall by now, but she wasn’t. Vivi was still leaning against the counter, waiting for Miss Maryanne Veer to do the Good Lord only knew what.
“Yes?” Vivi said.
Miss Maryanne Veer put her best effort into not letting out the granddaddy of all sighs. “Dr. Wollman,” she said again, “you live in Constitution House, don’t you?”
“Yes, Miss Veer. Of course I do. Most of the people who teach in the Program do.”
“Have you happened to see Dr. Donegal Steele around at all in the past two days?”
“Dr. Steele?”
“Yes, of course, Dr. Steele. I’ve been unable to get in touch with him.”
“Well, Miss Veer, I don’t usually see Dr. Steele, if you know what I mean. I mean, he and I aren’t exactly simpatico.”
“No, of course you’re not. I thought you might have seen him in the hallways, in passing. Or in the college dining hall, for dinner last night or breakfast this morning.”
“I wasn’t at dinner last night,” Vivi said, “I had a meeting of the Intercampus Council on Sexism in Philadelphia.”
“What about breakfast this morning?”
Vivi Wollman blushed. “Well, Miss Veer, you see, I don’t tend to be too alert at breakfast. I don’t notice much of anything except my New York Times.”
“No,” Miss Maryanne Veer said. “Of course not.”
“Is it really all that important that you get in touch with him?” Vivi asked. “I mean, I know he has to be around somewhere, he always is, but it’s been really relaxing not having him just swoop down from nowhere without warning. I was kind of hoping he’d decided to bug out until after Halloween. You know, to avoid the fuss.”
“If Dr. Steele was going to do that, he’d have left word with me.”
“Well, maybe.” Vivi Wollman was doubtful. “But you know, Miss Veer, maybe not. And he’s a senior professor. If he wants to take off on his own, what can you do about it?”
The student drop cards at the top of the desk had become disarranged, the way papers on desks always become disarranged, for no discernable reason. Miss Maryanne Veer pulled them toward her, and made two piles of them: cards proper to one side, explanation sheets to the other. She was not, after all, a ditherer. She was certainly not the kind of ditherer Vivi Wollman was. She knew what it was she had to do next. She only had to work up the courage to do it.
She deposited the drop cards and explanation sheets into the long center drawer of her desk and said,
“I can do what I ought to do, Dr. Wollman. I can go to lunch, and come back, and if I haven’t seen or heard from Dr. Steele by then, I can call the police and report him missing.”
2
IN SPITE OF WHAT Dr. Alice Elkinson thought, Dr. Kenneth Crockett didn’t always go rock-climbing with Jack Carroll. Sometimes he went on his own, which was what he had done this morning. He knew he shouldn’t. The first thing he taught the new people who joined the Climbing Club was never to go up anything you needed pitons for on your own. Even Sir Edmund Hilary had gotten into trouble on climbs. Everybody did. Everybody got tired. Everybody got sick. Everybody got stupid once in a while. It was the iron law of human nature, the flip side of Socrates’s old know thyself. Never trust yourself. That was the ticket.
Now it was ten minutes to twelve, and he was back, tired and sweaty, sitting on the porch of the log house that served as the Climbing Club’s in-season headquarters. What was below him wasn’t a climb but a walk. The slope was too gentle to feel like anything else to anyone but the most out of shape of amateurs. What was around him was silence. “In season” for the Climbing Club meant the spring, or maybe the very early fall. This late in October, the temperatures were too low and the threat of rain too constant. That was why he was stuck with Jack if he wanted a companion. Jack Carroll was the only other person he knew at Independence College willing to go up Hillman’s Rock at six o’clock in the morning and in a temperature of twelve degrees.