Quoth the Raven(31)

“There. Dr. Crockett would not go on a climb with Jack and Dr. Steele together, or with Dr. Steele at all. I don’t even think Dr. Steele climbs.”

“I still don’t get it.”

“If Dr. Steele was on campus yesterday,” Evie said carefully, “somebody besides Jack would have seen him. He would have made his ten o’clock class. He would have met his office hours. Hell, he would have had to eat. Somebody would have seen him.”

“And nobody did,” Chessey said slowly.

Evie looked into her cup of punch, made another moue of disgust at it, and poured it down the sink next to the one Chessey was standing at. Chessey took a paper towel out of the dispenser on the wall and dried her hands with it.

“Evie, you know, I’m not making this up. Jack has changed. Just in the last couple of days.”

“Oh, Jack’s changed all right.”

“I don’t see what else it can have anything to do with, if it isn’t that he talked to Dr. Steele.”

“Can’t you?”

“No.”

“I think I’m going to go catch that snake dance and have some punch.”

Chessey dropped her paper towel into the wastebasket and turned around. Evie was leaning against the rim of one of the sinks, staring at her in a sad, almost affectionate way—and that made Chessey even more frightened than she had been, up in her room this morning with Jack.

“Evie,” she said tentatively.

But Evie was shaking her head. “Never mind, infant. It’ll all come out in the wash, one way or the other.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of.”

“Look on the bright side,” Evie said. “Maybe the Great Doctor Donegal Steele is dead.”





Four


1


FATHER TIBOR KASPARIAN LIKED to arrange his life in habits. Schedules were beyond him. Simple things—like the hour every Sunday he had to be in Holy Trinity Church to pray the Liturgy, or the half hour he had to be in Liberty Hall to give his class—he could manage. More complicated things ran afoul of his one true passion, the reading and study of books. Gregor thought he must have run up against it more than once in his life, that panicky moment when he realized it had been days since he ate, or talked to another person, or even left his house for a few moments to buy a newspaper at the corner store. Back on Cavanaugh Street, Tibor had turned the rectory of Holy Trinity Church into a kind of book warehouse, with paperbacks and hardcovers, works of classical philosophy and the novels of Mickey Spillane, stacked haphazardly one on top of the other on every available surface. Gregor was amused to find that he had managed to do the same thing to his two large rooms in Constitution House—and in only a few weeks. The front room, meant to be the living room and fitted out with a couch, two wing chairs, and a glass-topped coffee table, was lined with heavy volumes in dull green dust covers and paperbacks in garish red and silver. The couch was covered with periodicals, both academic and tabloid. The wing chairs held what looked like complete collections of The Philadelphia Inquirer and The New York Times from the day Tibor had moved in to the present. Only the coffee table was clear of literate debris, maybe because Tibor distrusted the strength of glass. Gregor wondered where all this stuff had come from. He had moved Tibor into these rooms himself, with Bennis and Donna for company, in the very same van in which he and Bennis had come up today. He knew what they’d brought with them, and it wasn’t all this. Nor could he blame the collection on the small additions Tibor might have been able to make to it from his stash back in Philadelphia, going back and forth every Sunday to meet his duties at the church. For those, Tibor came and went by bus. He wasn’t a strong man. He wouldn’t have been able to carry much.

Gregor took the stack of Philadelphia Inquirers off the seat of the wing chair closest to the window, discovered a copy of Judith Krantz’s I’ll Take Manhattan buried in their folds, and dumped the whole mess on the floor. Where did Tibor get these things? As far as Gregor knew, there wasn’t much of anything anywhere in the vicinity of Independence College—no large towns, no malls. Did the college bookstore sell I’ll Take Manhattan and—Gregor spied it across the room, sitting on top of the first volume of Thomas Aquinas’s Summa—Danielle Steele’s Daddy?

Bennis sat down on the floor, cross-legged, and picked up a copy of The Illustrated Guide to the Films of Roger Corman. It was a ridiculously thick, outrageously oversize paperback with a picture of a decapitated woman on its cover.

“Well,” she said, “it’s relaxing, in a way. Not to have to look at Halloween decorations all the time.”