“I think he’s run off for the day with one of those students of his. You’ve told me again and again how awful he is about women. He’s probably locked away in a motel room somewhere, doing—well, doing God knows what.”
Miss Maryanne Veer sometimes read an off-campus, student-generated publication called The Hedonist, meant to be a contribution to “the alternative press.” She corrected the grammar in it—which took a lot of work—but she also paid attention to the things it said. By now, although she would never have admitted it to anyone, she knew exactly what was implied by “God knows what.”
Still.
She looked down at the message slips again and shook her head. The door to the office was open, as it always was. Only the chairman’s inner sanctum was kept private and shut. Anything she said could be heard outside in the hall—assuming there was anybody out there to listen to it.
Maryanne picked up the message slips she had written out to the Great Doctor Donegal Steele, looked through them, and found the three she wanted. They had come in at three-hour intervals over the course of the day, becoming increasingly hysterical. They were all from a girl named Chessey Flint.
That was the problem with Margaret’s analysis of this little glitch in the life of the Great Doctor Donegal Steele. If he was going to be camped out in a motel room with anybody today, it was going to be with Chessey Flint. His only other interest at the moment was in Dr. Alice Elkinson, and that was entirely unrequited. Maryanne knew for sure.
She dumped the message slips back on the desk and said, “I have to get off the phone, Margaret. I still have a hundred things to do before I can come home.”
“Of course,” Margaret said. “You just get busy. We can talk about all this later.”
“We’ll talk about it over dinner.”
“I’m making Yankee pot roast for dinner, dear. I know it’s not your absolute favorite thing, but I had to do something with the meat. I just know it’s not a good thing to leave meat for too long in a freezer.”
The meat had been in the freezer for less than a week, and Maryanne hated Yankee pot roast. It didn’t matter. Margaret had already hung up.
Maryanne hung up, too, and then sat for a while looking at those message slips. Then she got up and put them in the Great Doctor Donegal Steele’s departmental mailbox.
At the back of her mind, a warning light was blinking on and off, telling her that something was very wrong here. Whatever else Dr. Donegal Steele might be, he was not the type to miss his classes or fail to show up for his appointments. He was not the kind to drop out of sight without phoning the office at least three times to make his presence felt. He was positively addicted to having an audience.
If it had been Ken Crockett or Alice Elkinson who had started behaving like this, Miss Maryanne Veer would not have been worried.
As it was, she could think of only one thing: Wherever that slimy little fool had gone, she hoped to God he stayed there.
4
THERE WAS A PHOSPHORESCENT cardboard skeleton hanging from the center of the archway between the foyer of Lexington House and its front utility hall, and Chessey Flint, coming out of the public phone room at the hall’s front end, ran into it. She backed up, looked the skeleton up and down, and shook her head. She was a tall, solid girl in the best midwestern style, with honey blond hair that had been groomed to look fluid while never straying out of place. She had two tiny diamond studs fastened into her single-pierced ears and a twenty-four-carat gold heart-shaped locket on a twenty-four-carat gold chain around her neck. Her jeans were from Gloria Vanderbilt, and pressed. Her 100 percent cotton broadcloth, pink-and-white striped, stiff-collared shirt was from Brooks Brothers, but could not be buttoned down. Her sweater was from Marissa Christina. She looked as if she had already become the woman she had trained herself so long to be: the pretty wife of a solidly successful, upwardly mobile Battle Creek executive; the mistress of a modern ranch house with a steel-reinforced foundation and all the necessary appliances; the mother of two adored and adoring children, ages six and eight. There were people who would have called Chessey Flint a caricature, but she knew she was anything but. Her very-much-older sister had gone off to Wellesley and caught the Feminist Bug. The results had been just as disastrous as Chessey’s mother had predicted they’d be. So far, Madeline had an MBA, four promotions, and two ex-husbands to her credit. As far as Chessey could see, Madeline led a life just a little less miserable than that of their oldest sister, Caroline, who had gone to Berkeley and been bitten by the Hippie Bug. Caroline lived alone in a three-room apartment in Santa Barbara with the child she had borne out of wedlock to who-knew-which of the scruffy young men she was constantly taking to her bed, and called home often for money. By the time she was eight years old, Chessey Flint had established the two great truths of her world: It was hard to get enough money to live nicely and it was harder still to put together a marriage that would stay with you and not leave you both poor and alone. From that time to this, she had been driven not by complacency, but by fear.