“How can you think Miss Veer was—attacked—by Donegal Steele?” Gregor asked her. “I thought Dr. Steele was away from campus for some reason.”
“Well, he hasn’t been around, if that’s what you mean,” Katherine said. “It’s been a blessing to all of us, let me tell you. But he’s the one with the lye, isn’t he?”
“What?” David Markham sat straight up in his chair. “What do you mean, he’s the one with the lye?”
Katherine Branch was practically purring—and Gregor finally twigged something himself. Of course, she wasn’t so naive as to believe that David Markham could arrest her for not talking to him. That was beyond the silly. She was here because she had something to say, and this was it.
Sea changes, Gregor decided a minute later, were a matter of psychological aura. The way they happened could almost make him believe in the paranormal. Markham was too shocked to go on with his local yokel pose with any consistency. Looking at him was like looking at one of the reflections in a fun house mirror. Every time he moved, his image changed. But Katherine Branch was the real shock. Her defensiveness had vanished. So had her air of petty complaint, that strange body-language suggestion that she was about to attack from a position of weakness. There wasn’t a damned thing weak about her now. All she needed to turn herself into the Spirit of the Age was Helen Reddy music playing in the background.
She leaned across the table, pushed her face straight into David Markham’s, and said, “Lye. Donegal Steele is really big in the Climbing Club, really big on ruggedness, really big on a lot of macho bullshit. And don’t wince every time I say ‘shit,’ Markham. It’s a good old Anglo-Saxon word.”
“It’s not very ladylike,” Markham said, but the twang was faint and the words were automatic.
“I am not ladylike,” Katherine Branch told him.
“What does all this have to do with Dr. Donegal Steele having lye?” Gregor demanded.
Katherine Branch pulled away from Markham and turned to him. “Macho bullshit,” she repeated. “Steele is always going on and on about how the college boys need to toughen up and be men and God only knows what. You’d think it all went out with the Neanderthals. In the old days the Climbing Club cabin up on Hillman’s Rock used to have outhouses instead of plumbing. The outhouses are still there, but nobody’s used them in years. Steele wants to open them up again.”
“You mean Chessey Flint was right yesterday?” Gregor asked. “She did see buckets of lye up at that cabin?”
Katherine Branch shrugged. “How the hell do I know? I know that’s not where they were four days ago, though, if they were Steele’s buckets of lye.”
“Where were Steele’s buckets of lye?” That was Markham, in a croak.
Katherine Branch stood up and shoved the tray away from her, across the table, into Markham’s stacks of papers. Maybe she had done it on purpose. The stacks shuddered and some of the papers fell. She didn’t seem to notice.
“The buckets,” she said, smiling fully now, completely enjoying herself, “were at least until last Saturday on Alice Elkinson’s back porch. I saw them there. Dear Alice just can’t say no to a man, even if it’s a man she hates. She just has to be a perfect little lady.”
“Dr. Branch—” Gregor started.
Katherine Branch gave her tray one more shove. “Here,” she said. “If you two big strong powerful men absolutely insist, I suppose I’m going to have to let you take that up for me.”
She started to turn away, changed her mind, turned back and gave the tray one last vicious shove. It had all the force of muscles made hard by regular exercise and training in self-defense. The stacks of papers shuddered, slid and fell—first into David Markham’s lap, and then off that onto the floor. Katherine stalked out.
“Damn,” David Markham said. “Here we go again. Academia nuts.”
“She’s not nuts,” Gregor told him. “She’s been rehearsing. That was guerrilla theater we just witnessed.”
Markham was on the floor, gathering up papers. He stuck his head up over the table, threw some rescued sheets onto the surface, and sighed. “Dr. Elkinson. Dr. Steele. God knows who. Why didn’t she tell us any of this yesterday?”
“She didn’t want to.”
“Well, we’re going to have to go find them now. All of them. Including the Great Doctor Donegal Steele. Lord God Almighty.”
Gregor took the papers Markham had been throwing onto the table and started piling them neatly in stacks. Because Markham hadn’t bothered to sort them before, he didn’t bother to sort them now. He was staring out the great windows at his side into the quad, and through the quad at the faint suggestion of the rise of King George’s Scaffold.