Quoth the Raven(46)

“Even is she was distracted?”

“It was loud, Tibor. She would have had to be virtually comatose.”

“I was afraid of that,” Tibor said. “Do you realize, Krekor, that if it was someone who knew her who tried to kill her, it was somebody who is in the Program?”

“Why? David Markham said she was local. She must have known—”

“David Markham also said most of the people on campus are not local, and he is right. Miss Veer knew the staff of the Program and a few of the senior students—Jack Carroll and Chessey Flint, a few else. She knew some of the members of the administration in passing and some of the general staff also in passing. I have talked to her, Krekor. I have made it a point because she was always so lonely. She has a woman she lives with in town. Other than that, her life is in Liberty Hall.”

“You can’t know that, Tibor, no matter what she said to—you. You can never really know anybody well on six weeks’ acquaintance.”

“I know that I have seen at least one thing on this floor,” Tibor said.

Gregor watched him kneel down and stand up again, holding something very small in his hand and frowning at it. When he was standing fully upright, Tibor held it out on his palm for Gregor to see.

“There,” he said, “what’s that?”

“That” was a solid little cylinder of metal, half an inch in diameter and less than a quarter of an inch thick. Gregor took it out of Tibor’s hand and examined it in the light.

“I know what it looks like,” Gregor said. “A solder plug.”

“A solder plug. I don’t know what this is, Krekor, a solder plug. But there is something else.”

Tibor went down again, came up again, held out his hand again. What he had this time was a small ragged piece of cotton, dyed black and raveled at the edges, as if it had caught on something and torn.





Two


1


DR. KATHERINE BRANCH DID not use real belladonna in the DMSO ointment she put on her wrists to perform the rituals of Wicca, and she didn’t consort with the Devil, either. Even if she could have made herself believe in the Devil—she had inherited a stubborn middle-class American resistance to belief in evil of any kind, a resistance that two decades of work in campus rape crisis centers, storefront women’s health centers, and studies of intercultural practices of wife-battering had done nothing to weaken—she would not have worshiped him. It bothered her sometimes that her namesake, that Katherine Branch who had lived in Hartford in 1652 and been hanged for a witch on a scaffold hung over the Connecticut River in 1676, had been so thoroughly celebratory of male images of power. For Dr. Katherine Branch, the whole point of Wicca was that it was so woman centered. That was why you called it Wicca instead of witchcraft. You had to take possession of the terms of the debate, wrestle with the differences between male and female vocabularies, insist on your own point of view. That was all anything ever was, point of view. Even gravity was suspect, and possibly illusion. It was always being described in such erectile terms. As for witchcraft, that was the name men had given to the spirituality of women, making it something dark and threatening. The Devil was what men called the Great Goddess of all creation, changing her with all her power into a man.

What Dr. Katherine Branch put into the DMSO ointment she used on her wrists to perform the rituals of Wicca was a little diluted hashish, and she was beginning to think it had been a mistake. What she wanted was a release from the prison of her repressions. What she had gotten was a dry mouth, a headache, and that awful dizziness she always ended up with when she smoked a little grass. When she was dizzy she couldn’t analyze and she couldn’t organize. She hated not being able to do either. Besides, it might not be as safe as she had thought. The dry mouth was a bad sign. When you got it from antihistamines, you were warned about the effect they were having on your heart.

She, stepped back out of the spray of the shower, leaned over and shut the water off. Through the shower stall door, she listened for the sounds of Vivi back in the apartment, and heard them: the clink of metal on glass, the hiss of coffee coming through the Dripmaster. Vivi was in the kitchen. Katherine pushed open the door of the shower stall and stepped out onto the blue terry cloth mat. This was the first time she had taken a shower in Vivi’s apartment—or even been in Vivi’s apartment for more than five minutes at a time—and all she could say was that the place was claustrophobic. The shower stall was so small it had made her feel as if she was suffocating. The rest of the bathroom was not much bigger. There was not quite room enough for a toilet and a narrow sink with no counter attached. The medicine cabinet looked like it had been left over from World War II. It was the personal touches that bothered Katherine most, however. The blue terry cloth mat with its ribbed rubber backing, the blue terry cloth towels on the rack near the door, the lacquered white wicker utility shelves shoved over the back of the toilet and crammed with extra rolls of toilet paper and white plastic canisters painted over with bluebells and birds: it was all so damn K mart and Sears. Vivi could have chosen better.