Quoth the Raven(62)

“Sort of. I got a surprise when I got back here this afternoon.”

“What surprise?”

“A little present from Mrs. Winston Barradyne.”

Alice raised her eyebrows, one of her patented Alice-in-a-good-mood expression, except that this time it didn’t quite come off. Ken ushered her in, thinking as he did that what he had here was an in-between mood. She may have calmed down—after the way she’d been in the dining room, anything less than outright hysteria would have meant she was calming down—but she wasn’t herself again either. Her skin seemed to be twitching and jumping under her sweater, as if it had been stuffed full of Mexican jumping beans. He sat down on the couch and spread his arms over the papers.

“There,” he said. “I don’t know what you’ve been doing with yourself all evening, but what I’ve been doing for most of it is reading through these. Mrs. Winston Barradyne’s recollections of just what Donegal Steele took out of the Historical Society library.”

“What I’ve been doing with myself all evening is looking at that goddamned bird.” Alice sat down in one of his chairs and put her feet up on his coffee table. The thick sharp cleats on the bottoms of them stuck into the air like a fakir’s bed of nails. “It’s gone, now. Lenore, I mean. It was up overhead circling and circling until I thought I’d go crazy.”

“I think they sleep at night,” Ken told her. “I wonder what’s wrong with Lenore?”

“Maybe she’s been captured by aliens and turned into a flying spying machine.” Alice put her feet on the floor again. The cleats cut through his carpet and knicked into the hardwood of his floor with a click. “Are these what Mrs. Barradyne sent you? They look like lists.”

“They are lists. Of all the books and all the pamphlets and all the everything else in the Historical Society library.”

“The things Steele took out are marked in red?”

“That’s right.”

“John Cowry—letters from Antietam.” Alice frowned. “That’s the wrong period.”

“I know.”

“Are they all from the wrong period?”

Ken grinned. “Every last one of them. Every last damn one of them, Alice. I’m not kidding. Christ, I could take Mrs. Barradyne and wring her neck. You have no idea how paralyzed she made me.”

“Yes I do.”

“Maybe you do,” Ken admitted. “I know you thought this was all silly, Alice, but it really wasn’t. I can’t imagine what would have happened to me in this place if it had gotten around that four members of the great and illustrious Crockett family, benefactors of the college and outstanding patriotic blowhards for two hundred years, were hung for British spies in New England during the Revolutionary War.”

“Why do you think he was asking Mrs. Barradyne all those questions about you? He was asking them, wasn’t he?”

“Sure. He’s nosy.”

“I think the proper word is probably intrusive,” Alice said. Then she sighed. “Listen to me. I’m talking like an academic. I promised myself I was never going to do that.”

“At Berkeley?”

“At Berkeley, I promised myself I’d never talk like a revolutionary. Speaking of which, what do you think our Katherine is doing?”

“Chanting petitions to the Great Goddess.”

“I ran into Lynn Granger while I was walking around outside a little while ago and she said she’d seen Vivi Wollman coming out of Liberty Hall this afternoon—through a window.”

Ken laughed. “Katherine probably tried to talk her into filching the evaluation files for the old Women’s Studies program. Just so nobody got the idea they wanted Miss Veer out of the way because she had access to a lot of private information that could ruin their careers.”

Alice shook her head. “I don’t believe even Katherine could do anything that trite.”

“Katherine is always trite,” Ken said. Then he took a deep breath. It was always a risk asking Alice what she was feeling. You could get an answer, or you could get an argument. “Alice?” he said. “Are you all right? I know all this stuff with Miss Veer upset you, and I don’t blame you for being upset, it’s just—”

“It’s not Miss Veer,” Alice said. She got out of the chair, walked over to the window and drew his curtains. The window didn’t look directly out onto the quad. Some of the apartments on the south staircase did, just as some of the ones on the west staircase did, but not the ones on this side. She was looking across an empty patch of lawn to a line of darkened windows on the third floor of Madison House.