“Dr. Crockett told Dr. Elkinson she’d better be sure she didn’t have anything lying around her life she didn’t want found.”
“Do you think it was Dr. Elkinson who tried to kill Miss Veer?”
“Jack, for God’s sake—”
“Maybe they were in it together. Crockett and Elkinson. They’re in everything else together.”
“I hate it when you get this way. I really hate it.”
“Look,” Jack said, “Gregor Demarkian investigates murders. That’s what he does with his life. If you’d read the handout for his lecture, you’d know that’s what he has done with his life. Ken Crockett is just getting all academic liberal intellectual paranoid about it, that’s all. Unless he and Dr. Elkinson were the ones who tried to kill Miss Veer.”
“Jack.”
“Well, somebody tried to kill her, didn’t they? How’s that cape coming along? When I saw that rip I wanted to kill myself. Forty dollars down the drain.”
Chessey had actually stopped sewing several minutes ago, but Jack had had no way of knowing whether she’d stopped because she was finished or because she’d become too involved in their conversation to concentrate on stitches. Now she held the cape up for his inspection, solid and seemingly undamaged, a wall of black against the graying sky of evening.
“It won’t look as good in full daylight,” she said, “but you’ve only got to wear it in the daylight for tomorrow and I figured the point was really the bonfire tomorrow night. Isn’t it?”
“Definitely.”
“It’ll do, then.” She folded it, folded it again, and put it down on her lap, a fat black square. “Jack?” she said. “I was thinking. It’s so quiet-up here, and dark. And we’re alone. And this morning was, I don’t know, off somehow. So I was thinking…”
She let her voice trail into nothingness, a lilting diminuendo that was like music. It struck him that three days ago he would have felt faint to hear that music, and now he felt nothing at all, or almost nothing, just careful, as if the ground were made of broken glass and he was being forced to walk across it on bare feet. He got a wooden match out of his box, lit it, and tossed it onto his pile of sticks and leaves. It caught, sputtered, and caught again. The air smelled full of kerosene.
“No,” he said. “Chessey, not right now, all right? I don’t think it’s a good idea.”
He wasn’t looking at her, but he heard the music change, and he knew what the change meant.
She was crying.
3
IT WAS FIVE O’CLOCK, and over at Constitution House, Dr. Alice Elkinson had locked herself in her apartment. She had not only turned the switch at the center of the doorknob, but thrown the bolt at the top of the door. Then she had gone to every window in her living room and bedroom and drawn the curtains shut. In the kitchen, she only had shades, and they hardly seemed like enough. Even with all three of them pulled tight, she could see the light streaming in from the porch, making a puddle of dirty yellow in the middle of her kitchen table.
There were people in this world, and especially on this campus, who thought Dr. Alice Elkinson had had an easy life—and mostly the impression was true. She had always been pretty and she had always been smart and she had come from a family with enough money to let her do what she wanted but not so much that it might have made her crazy. Her abilities had always matched her ambitions. The men she had loved had always loved her back.
Still, nobody’s life on this earth is an Eden. There had been periods and incidents in Dr. Alice Elkinson’s that she would not like to repeat. What stuck out most in her mind now was her one experience of violence before the attack on Miss Maryanne Veer. She had been a third-year doctoral student at Berkeley and still possessed by that adolescent certainty of her own invulnerability, still walking through a world in which bad things happened only to other people. It had been late on a Tuesday night, after eleven o’clock. She was doing what she always did at eleven o’clock on weekday nights, walking home from the library. Usually, she walked only on well-lit streets or streets lull of people who never went to bed. On this Tuesday night, she had been too tired for that and had taken a shortcut instead. She had been just behind Sproul Hall when the boy had grabbed her, his arm reaching out of a darkness she could not penetrate, his long fingernails digging into the skin of her wrist and drawing blood. She had jerked away from him, screamed at the top of her lungs, and started running. She had gone all the way home that way, screaming and screaming, until the screaming began to feel like one of those Marine Corps war cries that were supposed to help soldiers charge into battle. Nobody had stopped her. Nobody had followed her. Nobody had asked her what was wrong. Berkeley had been like that then.