Quoth the Raven(76)

A breeze began to blow as the bells began to ring outside, and on it came Lenore, slipping slyly through the one open window like the prophecy of doom Shelley Linnington was always complaining about during office hours. Steve Jacoby saw her, shrieked, dropped to the floor and cried out, “It is she! It is she! Her shade hounds me to the grave and calls me murderer!”

It might have been a quotation. Alice Elkinson didn’t know. She also didn’t care. On top of the fact that this was Halloween, there was also the fact that she’d had a bad and restless night. She was not a woman who reacted well to less than an optimal amount of sleep, and she was not reacting well now. Her head ached. She picked up the papers she had fanned out across the desk when class began—photocopies of the ones the students had presented—and slapped them into a stack. They were held together by paper clips and therefore impossible to discollate. She had intended to bring them down the hall and read them during what she was sure would be a very silent office hour. She now knew she would bring them, but she wouldn’t read them. She had a copy of Judith Krantz’s Dazzle in the top right-hand drawer of her desk. She would read that.

“All right, people,” she said, “if you wouldn’t mind getting in touch with your fellow members of this seminar, we will be covering Henry Ford and the five-dollar-a-week wage next session. If anybody sees Mr. Jack Carroll, please tell him I would like to present his paper on the effects of wage spirals on mass consumption then.”

“What about Lenore?” Ted Barrows said. “She could present a paper on the effects of the industrial revolution on birds.”

“No she couldn’t,” Shelley Linnington smirked. “She lives out here. Out here hasn’t been through the industrial revolution yet.”

Ted Barrows turned sideways, raised his eyebrows, and smirked back at Shelley Linnington. Alice thought: Oh, Lord. Now I’m going to have to spend the rest of the term watching Shelley Linnington discover one of the great facts of female life. Self-confidence is everything.

What had ever given the United States Congress the idea that college students were old enough to vote?

Lenore had come to rest on the stack of papers. “Croak a cloak,” she said. Alice brushed her off and picked the papers up.

“Until next week,” Alice said, to a classroom that was half-empty. While her mind was somewhere else, half the students had sneaked out the door. She shooed the bird away, got the papers wedged as tightly as she could under her arm and went out herself.

Out in the corridor, it was better, because it was quieter, but it wasn’t as good as it could be. Going up the stairs to her office, Alice ran into Katherine Branch. Katherine was bobbing and weaving to some music inside her head. That was always a bad sign, as far as Alice was concerned. Katherine in a self-confident mood was Katherine up to trouble. Usually, Katherine wore her victimization like a crown: revolutionary sainthood on the cheap; martyrdom on tenure and fifty thousand a year.

“Talked to the police,” Katherine said. “As a high, I recommend it.”

Katherine zipped down the stairs and Alice continued up, wondering what that was all about. It was the kind of question it was never safe to ask about Katherine.

Alice got to the third floor, pushed through the fire doors and turned the corner into the corridor. She saw the man immediately, although she didn’t exactly recognize him. He was standing at the far end, near the door to her office, reading notices on the corkboard on the wall. He was too tall, too fat, too slouched, and too formal—where had he gotten that navy blue pin-striped suit?—to be a fellow academic. Anyway, she knew all the older men on the faculty of this college. She studied his face until she placed it: that man, that friend of Tibor Kasparian’s who was helping the police, Gregor Demarkian.

She walked up to him, looked at the corkboard from around his back—he seemed to be studying a notice about a meeting of the Federalist Club—and said, “Mr. Demarkian? Can I help you with something?”

“What?” He abandoned the corkboard. “Oh. Dr. Elkinson. No. I was just reading.”

Alice tried to take him in but he seemed like—nothing. He was too round and soft and old for her to take him seriously. “It must seem pitifully provincial after some of the places you’ve been. Sometimes I wonder what our students think when they get out into the real world and find that none of this matters.”

“Their educations matter, surely?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know how educated they get. Sometimes I think some of them just float through here on their way to their MBAs. Or their masters in social work, what with the changes in fashion.”