Quoth the Raven(67)

The girl at the cash register was tense—understandably, Gregor thought—so he gave her his best reassuring smile as he stuffed his change into his pants pocket. Then he picked up his tray and, not looking at it, headed for David Markham. Linda Melajian back on Cavanaugh Street had taught him that about not looking at coffee while you were carrying it. For some reason—Linda had talked a great deal about natural balance and the inner ear—it helped you not to spill.

“This is something of a surprise,” Gregor said, as he put his tray down in one of the few spaces left by Markham’s paper blizzard, “I expected to find the place shut and in possession of the authorities.”

The sheriff looked at the glowing tip of his cigar and said, “It would be wonderful if we could do things like that, but we can’t. Not here. This is the only place on campus to eat. We had enough trouble keeping it shut last night.”

“You did keep it shut last night?”

“Oh, yes, until about nine o’clock. That was about how long it took for us to get done what we had to get done. You should have heard the screams from the President’s office, though. The nearest town to this is fifteen miles away and the nearest mall, meaning the nearest Burger King, is forty. Most of the kids don’t have cars. Whoosh.”

“What did they do about dinner last night?”

Markham grinned. “Some Dean or other got hold of a pickup truck and went fifty miles to the nearest serious pizza joint. By serious he meant run by actual Italians. Anyway, the pizzas showed up in the dorms around five o’clock and everybody had a party. Like they needed to have another one.”

“I’m surprised I missed all that,” Gregor said. “I was here.”

“You were outside,” David Markham said. “I saw you.” He began to pick up the papers he’d been working on, stacking them in ragged-edged piles without really looking at them. At Gregor’s quizzical look, he shrugged. “My notes. What do I need notes for? I could recite you chapter and verse what we’ve got so far.”

“What have you got so far?” Gregor asked him.

“Not damned much. You know what we were doing here until nine o’clock last night? Taking the food out. All of it. Also looking for available cleaning materials that contain lye—sodium…”

“Sodium hydroxide,” Gregor said. “Did you find anything?”

Markham sighed. “No. The last word on the food’s going to have to come from the lab, of course, and that’s going to take a couple of days. The lab’s up in the county seat. But we did what you sort of suggested yesterday. We opened all the sandwiches. We checked all the pies and cakes for tampering. We did stuff I couldn’t believe. Nothing.”

“What about the cleaning materials?”

Markham threw up his hands. “That was worse. Turns out, this campus is something called a central inventory ordering system. You know what that is?”

“No.”

“It’s this deal where everything the college needs is ordered by one department at one time, to take advantage of bulk rate discounts. The cleaning materials are ordered from there and then sent to Janitorial, and Janitorial keeps them. They had a little problem here a few years ago with a student who tried to unclog a drain by nuclear explosion or something. Anyway, he mixed a couple of different drain cleaners, poured them down the sink and blew up the plumbing. He caused a lot of expensive damage and he could have gotten himself and a lot of other people killed. You mix that stuff, you release fumes that are absolutely lethal. Point is, since then Janitorial doesn’t let the buildings have their own stuff. Something goes wrong, no matter how small, you have to call a college plumber.”

“I take it nobody called a college plumber yesterday,” Gregor said.

“You take it right. There was no lye, and no product containing lye, anywhere on these premises when Maryanne Veer keeled over. At least, not officially.”

Gregor had finished his first cup of coffee. He reached for his second and thought this over.

“You know,” he said, “this is actually a good sign. It means the lye was brought here deliberately. It makes it unlikely to the point of ridiculousness that what we’re dealing with is a Tylenol-poisoning type nut. Unless you found whatever the lye was in when Maryanne Veer ate it, I’d say someone came here yesterday to put Maryanne Veer in particular out of commission in a hurry. And went to a great deal of trouble to do it.”

“We didn’t find anything that came off that tray except the tea,” Markham said. Then he scratched his nose and looked speculatively up at the ceiling. “But you know, Mr. Demarkian. I’ve been working with this now for quite a few hours. And like I said, I’ve known Maryanne Veer all my life. You may not have noticed, you haven’t been talking to as many people as I have, but we’re a little stuck on motive.”