Quoth the Raven(69)

Gregor winced.

The twang was back.





2


THE LITTLE LADY THIS morning was Dr. Katherine Branch, looking considerably more normal this morning than she had on the only other occasion on which Gregor had seen her. Gone was the black and white greasepaint. Gone were the leotards and tights—if that, in fact, was what they had been. To Gregor, Dr. Katherine Branch was recognizable mostly from her hair, which had been blazing red yesterday afternoon and was blazing red now. The rest of her was barely recognizable as female. That, Gregor thought, was surprising. He’d had a good look at Katherine Branch yesterday, and she was most definitely female. In his experience, women with bodies that good—and bodies that good took work, especially in women over thirty; nobody got handed one free by the grace of genetics alone—didn’t hide their light under bushels. Or, in this case, sweaters. That was what Dr. Katherine Branch was wearing, sweaters, in the plural, over a pair of baggy pants. She had a turtleneck. She also had something that looked like a cross between a tent and a tunic. The effect was not entirely unattractive, but it was totally asexual.

David Markham was holding out a chair in his best gallant local yokel manner. Katherine Branch ignored it, walked around to the chair next to Gregor and slammed her tray on the table. There wasn’t much on it—orange juice in a little waxed cardboard carton, coffee, and an apple that had been sealed in plastic wrap—but it hit its target with a bang as loud as any sound a jackhammer could have made. She pulled a chair out from under the table, banged it into the floor, and sat down in it.

“If you two white male fascists think you’re going to intimidate me,” she said, “you better get rid of that idea right now.”

“Ahhh,” David Markham said.

Gregor took another sip of coffee. The interesting thing about that little speech was what hadn’t been in it: any real passion or conviction. Gregor wondered briefly what exactly was going on inside Katherine Branch. The signals were mixed.

David Markham had retreated to his own chair and his own coffee. Now he plastered a shit-eating grin across his face and said to Gregor, “I figgered, instead of us runnin’ all over the place gettin’ statements from ever’body in sight, I’d see if they weren’t willin’ to do us the courtesy of comin’ to us.”

“I’m not doing you a courtesy of any kind,” Katherine Branch said. “If you couldn’t throw me in jail, I wouldn’t be here.”

Markham’s twang had been so thick, Gregor was sure Katherine Branch would twig it. She didn’t. She accepted it as perfectly normal. Gregor wondered if she really believed that David Markham could throw her in jail for refusing to talk to him. She was an educated woman. She couldn’t be that naive.

She opened her orange juice, looked deeply inside it—to see if it were fizzing?—and drank. Then she turned to Gregor.

“I don’t have to talk to you at all,” she said. “You aren’t anybody. Unless you pull out a card and prove you’re still with the FBI, you can’t ask me any questions at all.”

“I can always ask,” Gregor said pleasantly. “You don’t have to answer.”

“Damn right I don’t.”

“Of course, I’ve only got one question,” Gregor told her. “And I could get the answer from a dozen places. Dr. Elkinson, for example.”

Katherine Branch made a face. “Oh, Alice,” she said. “Alice will be cooperative. Alice makes a goddamned career out of cooperating in her own oppression.”

“Mizz Elkinson is a very gracious lady,” David Markham said fatuously.

Katherine Branch corrected him. “Dr. Elkinson,” she said. “Believe it or not—and I find it very hard to believe, under the circumstances—Alice has the best degree on this campus with the exception of that shit Donegal Steele. Who, by the way, is who I think did in Miss Maryanne Veer. Not that he had anything to worry about from her, even if he thought he did. She wasn’t going to go out kicking. Not Miss “if-you-can’t-behave-like-a-lady,-you-shouldn’t-be-out-in-good-company’ Veer. I think he just got so damned tired of having his papers copied by someone he couldn’t feel up, he offed her.”

“Nobody’s offed her yet,” Gregor said. “The last I heard, she was in the hospital and doing quite well, considering.”

“Doing very well, considering,” David Markham said. His drawl was nearly gone, but Katherine Branch didn’t notice that either.

She took a long sip of her coffee. “I just hope this wakes her up,” she said. “I just hate it when women worship men. Alice, Miss Veer. It’s so damned stupid. We’re supposed to be smarter than that.”