Quoth the Raven(77)

“Oh, dear.”

Alice got her keys out of her pocket and began to unlock the door to her office. It was right across the hall from the corkboard, not a distance that would require stopping the conversation. That was good, because she found she didn’t want to stop the conversation. Talking to Gregor Demarkian was oddly soothing. She got the door unlocked and pushed it open.

“Do you want to come inside and sit down? You look done in. If you weren’t in that suit, I’d say you’d just got back from one of Ken’s climbs up Hillman’s Rock.”

“Oh, no. Nothing that strenuous. I was just making a fool of myself in Constitution House. Are you sure you want me to come in? I don’t want to interfere with your work.”

“You won’t be interfering with my work,” Alice said, “although God only knows I have enough to do. Magnum opus number four due at the University of Chicago Press three weeks ago, and I haven’t even finished writing the conclusion. Don’t worry about it. I’m supposed to be holding office hours. It’s Halloween. No one will come. Come on in. I’ll make us some tea.”

Gregor Demarkian seemed to hesitate, but it wasn’t for long. He followed Alice into her office, using his foot to push the little rock prop she kept on the floor into position. Alice opened her window to let in the cross-breeze and plugged the hot water maker into the socket next to her desk. When she turned around, Demarkian was looking at her degrees in their frames on the wall.

“Very impressive,” he said. “In fact, all this is very impressive. Berkeley for your doctorate. Swarthmore undergraduate.”

“Oh,” Alice said, amused. “I’ve always been impressive. That’s what I do with my life.”

“It seems a little like overkill for a place like Independence College,” Gregor said, “unless they’re paying you a great deal of money.”

Alice laughed. “They don’t. They did give me tenure when I was practically an adolescent, though, so I suppose it works out. And they give me the time to write. That’s important.”

“Mmm,” Gregor said.

Alice turned away. “So,” she said, “do you want to ask me all kinds of questions? That phony policeman David Markham already has, but in the movies I see the police always ask everything four or five times.”

“I’m not the police.”

“I know you’re not. That doesn’t matter, does it?”

Gregor Demarkian shrugged. “Sometimes I think it does, and sometimes I think it doesn’t. I suppose there are a few things I could ask you, if you feel like answering questions.”

“I don’t feel like answering questions, I feel like hearing questions,” Alice said. “Then I’ll know how the minds of the police are working, and I can go back to Ken and be a fascinating woman. Unfortunately, you aren’t going to ask me what I was doing at the time of the crime, because you know what I was doing. Standing right there next to the victim in plain sight of half the college.”

“Mmm,” Gregor Demarkian said. “What about the victim? Do you happen to remember what she was carrying on her tray?”

“You mean on her cafeteria tray? She had a cup of tea, I remember that. She—” Alice stopped.

Gregor Demarkian cocked his head at her. “What is it?”

Alice shook her head.

She wasn’t sure what it was. It was funny how much you forgot about traumatic eruptions into your life. She remembered that from the aftermath of the attack at Berkeley. For a couple of weeks she had been fine, and then things had begun to surface, details and particulars she had repressed so well she’d actually forgotten all about them. It had made her feel like a fool at the time, and it made her feel a little like a fool now. A scholar was supposed to be a noticing person, in spite of all that nonsense about ivory towers and absentmindedness. She had made it her business to be a noticing person. She shook her head again.

“I don’t really know,” she said. “It’s not something—when she came through the cash register, what she had on her tray was a cup of tea. Nothing else. I’m sure of that.”

“But—”

Alice felt herself blushing slightly, giving in to the perennial curse of the fair haired. “It was later,” she told him, “after we’d paid up. We were standing in the middle of things, so to speak, and she was—I know it must have looked like I was talking to her the whole time—”

“It did.”

“—but I wasn’t. There was Ken there and I was talking to him, looking away from her, just before it happened. And when I turned back—this is going to sound very strange—when I turned back I could swear to God she was swallowing something.”