Quoth the Raven(28)

Ken Crockett adjusted his behind on the hard seat of the rocker, shifted the cellular phone to a more comfortable place on his shoulder, and stretched out his legs. He always carried a cellular phone in his backpack when he climbed, even though he knew there were places in these mountains where a cellular phone wouldn’t work. It was a precaution. He always called Dr. Alice Elkinson as soon as he got back to the log house, to make sure she didn’t worry. Now she was jabbering away in his ear like an agitated bird.

“I don’t know, Ken,” she was saying, “if you really had to climb this morning, you could have asked me. I climb.”

“I know you climb. You hate to climb in the cold.”

“I’d rather climb in the cold than have you lying up there with a broken leg and no one to send for help.”

“I’m fine, Alice. It’s you who doesn’t sound fine.”

“Maybe you should have asked Katherine Branch,” she said. “Then she’d have been up there bothering you, instead of down here bothering me.”

“What was our Kathie bothering you about this time?”

“Something Maryanne Veer said to Vivi Wollman. About calling the police and reporting Dr. Steele missing. It seems he really has dropped off the face of the earth.”

“Lucky for us.”

“Good riddance to bad rubbish, my mother would have said. Oh, Ken. Let’s not talk about it. Vivi was totally hysterical, God only knows why, and Katherine came bursting into my room ranting about Nazi storm troopers and I don’t know what else. Vivi probably has a bag of marijuana stashed under her mattress.”

“Borrow some,” Ken said. “They say it’s very good for sex.”

“We already have everything we need for good sex.”

Ken shifted the phone on his shoulder again—it was amazing how hard it was to find a place to rest it that stayed bearable for more than a few minutes—and smiled. It was true. He and Alice did already have everything they needed for good sex, and he found that a little surprising. Alice was not exactly an emotionally forthcoming woman. She gave good public appearance, and fine party, but when he’d first met her he’d thought she was cold. Maybe it was just that, having always been reasonably well-heeled and reasonably attractive, he’d gotten far too used to women falling in his lap.

He leaned over and started to untie his hiking boots, which he really shouldn’t have been wearing on the porch anyway. The cleats dug holes in the soft pinewood.

“So tell me,” he said, “what else have you done with your day? I came up before breakfast. The place could have blown to pieces for all I know.”

“The place hasn’t blown to pieces. Somebody in my Civil War class rigged my desk so that every time I leaned on it, it screamed. That was fun. I think it had something to do with microchips. Oh, and I ran into Father Tibor and that friend of his, the one who’s giving the lecture.”

“Gregor Demarkian?”

“That’s the one.”

“What was he like?”

What came across the wire was the sound equivalent of a shrug, except that it wasn’t a sound, exactly. It was more like a sudden contraction of auricular space.

“I don’t know what to tell you,” Alice said. “He’s tall. A little too heavy. Looks like he’s in his fifties.”

“Intelligent?”

“It would be hard to say. He didn’t look stupid. He didn’t look like the man who caught the Fall River Knifeman, either.”

“I think the point about him is less who he caught than the system he set up to catch him. Them. You know what I mean. I was on the committee that reviewed the proposal for the talk. We ended up with all this stuff in our file about ‘internal consistency.’ ”

“What’s that?”

“A method for catching murderers. Serial or otherwise.”

“I wish he’d devise a method for catching practical jokers. It wasn’t just the screaming desk, Ken, it’s been the whole day. And Halloween isn’t until tomorrow. You know that tree out in front of Liberty Hall, the one with the hole in the side of it?”

“Sure.”

“If you lean up against it in the right place, it yells ‘boo.’ ”

“Yell ‘boo’ back,” Ken said, laughing. Then he sat up straight. His boots were off. His feet felt cold even in their thick climbing socks. He stood up and stretched the kinks out of his back. “Why don’t you hang in there for about fifteen more minutes and I’ll be down to take you in to lunch. That way, if Katherine tries to nail you, I’ll be there to fight her off.”