Jack shook his head. “Not at all. I’ll be glad to get out of here for a while. This gets me a little nuts when I have to spend too much time in the middle of it.”
Gregor saw Chessey give Jack a sharp, anxious look and then glance away again. Jack had turned slightly to look into the crowd and didn’t notice it. He turned back, stroked Chessey gently on the hair, and said, “You want me to walk you up to your door? It’ll only take a minute. I don’t think Mr. Demarkian will mind waiting.”
“You don’t have to do that,” Chessey said. “Evie’s coming up the walk right now.”
“You sure?”
“Positive.”
“All right. Look, um, after Mr. Demarkian and I are through, I’ll come back and throw a rock at your window, all right?”
“Don’t throw a rock, Jack. I’ll leave the light on.”
“Tell Evie if she doesn’t stop chewing bubble gum, her teeth will rot.”
Chessey turned away, looked up the steps through the open door of Lexington House, and turned back. She was smiling, but to Gregor her smile looked strained and anxious.
“I’ve got to go,” she said. “If I don’t get some work done before you start throwing rocks, Dr. Steele will loll me in the morning. It was nice talking to you, Mr. Demarkian.”
“It was nice talking to you, too.”
Chessey flashed another of her tense little smiles and ran up the steps to the open doors, not looking back.
When she was out of sight, Jack Carroll started walking toward the center of the quad, against the crowd. Gregor started walking with him, even though nothing had been said, because there wasn’t anything else to do. It had been obvious since the start of this conversation that Chessey had told Jack what Gregor wanted. It had also been obvious that Jack had agreed to go along with it. Gregor decided to assume that Jack was leading him in the right direction.
They were out on the edge of Minuteman Field, walking silently toward the path that led to the top of King’s Scaffold and the parking lot, when Jack began to get restless. He had been walking with his arms at his sides. He lifted them, wrapped them around his chest, unwrapped them, hooked his thumbs through his belt. He looked up at the stars, sharp and bright in the clear cold darkness, and sighed. Finally he said, “Mr. Demarkian? Do you know what all that was about, when I offered to walk Chessey to her door?”
“You wanted to kiss the girl good night in decent privacy,” Gregor suggested.
Jack smiled. “That, too, maybe. But it wasn’t the main point. The main point was rape.”
“Rape?”
“You look so surprised. This is a college campus.”
“This is the middle of nowhere.”
“What’s the matter,” Jack said. “Do you think rape doesn’t happen in the middle of nowhere?”
Gregor brushed this away. “Don’t be ridiculous. I read the Uniform Crime Statistics every year. But venue does matter, Mr. Carroll. The middle of nowhere never has as high a crime rate as, say, New York City.”
“That’s probably true. But I’m president of students. I get this report the Student Security Service puts out—that’s a security organization run by students, by the way, no fudging the numbers the way the administration might to pacify the parents. There were twenty rape attempts on this campus last semester and three successful ones. This semester there’s been I don’t know how many yet, but a lot. Chessey’s friend Evie Westerman got jumped right in the foyer of Lexington House at two o’clock in the morning not a month ago. Dick Corbin and I heard her screaming, smashed through one of those big windows on the main floor, made enough noise to wake the dead and still had to drag the guy off her by main force. And in case you think it was some local yokel getting back at the college, it was a sophomore from Concord House. Daddy makes a million and a half a year, Mommy has her own personal art gallery in Rittenhouse Square, and the kid came up to college with a Visa gold card with a twenty-thousand-dollar line of credit just for him. The dean put him on suspension, but I don’t think the message got through.”
They had reached the path, its wide beaten rut detectable even in the darkness. Jack led the way up and Gregor followed him.
“I take it you don’t approve much of the way your fellow students were raised,” Gregor said. “You must know they don’t all turn out like that, even if they’re rich.”
“Of course I know,” Jack said. “Chessey didn’t turn out like that. More to the point, Evie didn’t turn out like that, and I think she’s got something like fifteen million in her own right. Car money, from Detroit. She’s still one of the sanest and most honest people I know. But Mr. Demarkian, I come from the kind of background that’s supposed to land kids in trouble. Alcohol, dope, sex every night at ten in abandoned cars in vacant lots—I keep thinking of all the guys I grew up with, including the ones who are already in jail. I can’t think of one of them who would have pulled the stunt that asshole pulled on Evie Westerman.”