Quoth the Raven(79)

Gregor Demarkian had just asked her a question about Donegal Steele.

It bothered Alice Elkinson enormously that she hadn’t expected it.





2


DR. KENNETH CROCKETT HAD seen Gregor Demarkian go into Liberty Hall. Ken had been coming up the path from Constitution House at the time, intent on getting some work done and dropping in on Alice’s office hours, but once he saw that tall broad figure go up the steps he changed his mind. He wasn’t in the mood to deal with any of it today—with any of anything. He’d had a long night and an even longer morning. He’d been looking for Jack Carroll for hours and getting nowhere. The boy was supposed to be on campus and on duty. In a social sense, this, was the most important night of his college career. He had still managed to vanish so completely, he might as well have been the invisible man. Ken had talked to Freddie and Max and Ted, and the situation was worse than any he could have imagined. Jack hadn’t just vanished. He had ceased to exist. Even his best friends didn’t know where he had gone.

What Ken had decided to do—once he had decided not to go to Liberty Hall—was to go back to his apartment instead and get some work done. He wasn’t sure what work he had to do, but there was always something. That was part of being a teacher in a school that expected scholarship as well—and no matter how gushingly the brochures described Independence College’s commitment to teaching, the administration most certainly expected scholarship as well. He had papers to grade and a book to work on and a monograph to edit for presentation to the American Historical Society in June. He had that mess of papers Mrs. Winston Barradyne had sent him to clear up, too. Ken thought of those papers and frowned slightly, irritated. It had all been nothing, really, nothing, and he had been so frightened. Walking through the middle of the quad with the sun beating down on his head and the students all looking so ludicrous in streamers and makeup, he found it hard to credit how terrified he had been. That was how he had started to make mistakes. He had never been someone who worked well under pressure. Under pressure, he didn’t work at all. It had been paralyzing, wondering what Donegal Steele had found out about his family. It had been killing, wondering what Donegal Steele had found out about him. Ken wondered why Alice had never noticed any of it. She was an observant woman. Her talent for observation seemed to stop before it reached him.

He was on one of the radial paths that led to the Minuteman statue, the wrong one for where he wanted to go. He hadn’t been paying attention and he had wandered off course. He changed direction and started cutting across the grass. It felt awful to him not to think about Miss Maryanne Veer. He was sure he had a moral obligation to think about her, the way he had once been taught he had a moral obligation to pray for the sick, to ask God to make them better. His religious training had been sporadic and determinedly Congregationalist, which was like saying it had been determinedly amorphous. Only God knew what the Congregational Church now believed in. Ken Crockett hadn’t a clue. He just couldn’t help feeling—under the circumstances—that he ought to be thinking of Miss Maryanne Veer and nothing else at all.

He saw her from halfway across the quad, sitting on the Constitution House steps, stretched out, her hand wrapped around a sandwich. With most people he wouldn’t have known who it was from that far away. His eyesight was good, but he didn’t have X-ray vision. With Katherine Branch it was a different matter. There was nobody else on earth with that hair.

She saw him, too, and sat up, and wrapped her arms around her knees, waiting for him. He walked up to her because he couldn’t think of anything else to do.

“Katherine,” he said. “Good morning.”

She made a face at him. “For God’s sake,” she said, “stop doing that. It isn’t even morning.”

“I was just trying to be polite.”

“You’re always trying to be polite. Do you know what I did with my morning? I talked to that policeman and Gregor Demarkian.”

“Oh,” Ken said. He looked around. No one was going in and out of Constitution House. No one he could see was actually going anywhere. They were all just milling around, aimless and hyperactive. He sat down on the steps as far from Katherine as he could get. “Well,” he said, “that must have been interesting. Did they grill you?”

“Of course they didn’t. What kind of an idiot do you take me for?”

“I’ve never taken you for an idiot.”

“No? Well, God knows, I was an idiot once. I was the idiot who slept with you for six months before I figured out—”