Quoth the Raven(80)

“Katherine.”

“Does Alice know yet?”

“There isn’t anything to know,” Ken said. “You’re making all this up.”

Katherine’s sandwich was ham. She finished the last corner of it, licked the tips of her fingers, and stood up. Above their heads, Lenore was cawing and circling, cawing and circling, making enough noise to be heard even above the music in the quad. It was “Monster Mash” again. The entire student body was obsessed with it.

“Listen,” Katherine said, “I didn’t tell Demarkian about—all that—but I did tell him about the lye on Alice’s porch—”

“You’re a bitch, Katherine.”

“Of course I am. I make a point of it. You should have heard Vivi Wollman on the subject just last night. Kenneth, for once in your life pay attention, will you, please? I think you ought to take that bat suit of yours and burn it.”

“What bat suit?” Ken said, and thought: It’s cold. Oh, Christ, it’s so damned cold.

Katherine was off the steps and onto the path, walking backward, not noticing where she was going. That was always true, Ken thought irrelevantly. Katherine never noticed where she was going.

“Burn it,” she called back to him. “It’s right there on the floor of your closet. If I could find it, so could they. It’s got mud all over the hem of the cape.”

“Monster Mash” had changed into something else, something new, heavy metal, full of blood and sex and suicide. Ken Crockett got up, went through the doors of Constitution House, and stopped in the foyer. He was shaking so hard, he could barely stay on his feet.

All these years, all these last few days and everything that had happened in them, all the maneuvers and all the mistakes—and it was all going to come to nothing.





3


AT THE ONLY MCDONALD’S off any exit anywhere on the Parkway, Evie Westerman was standing at a counter, checking the contents of a pair of overstuffed paper bags with the list in her hand. The list had been hastily written out and was hard to read. It was also long. Evie kept going back to the part marked “Jack,” which called for three Big Macs, two fish sandwiches, and large fries, among other things. She was fairly sure she had counted them all out right the first time. She was also sure she was never going to get herself to believe it.

The girl behind the counter might not have been a girl. She was skinny and dyed blond and chewing gum. She might have been fifteen or forty. She couldn’t have been anything in between. Evie was giving her the benefit of the doubt.

“Hey,” the girl said through her gum. “Tell me somethin’. You got a boy back there in that car?”

“Yes,” Evie said.

“Thought so. Teenage?”

“I think he’s twenty-two.”

The girl shrugged. “Same difference. I can always tell. Girls come in here with orders like that one, I know they got a boy in the car. Teenage.”

“Right,” Evie said. She folded the sacks into her arms like grocery bags. They were as heavy as grocery bags. They smelled like grease.

Outside, she looked across the parking lot at Jack’s Volkswagen wreck and sighed. She had left Jack and Chess sitting up in the front seats, and now there was no sign of them. The only thing to be said for it was that the parking lot at McDonald’s had to be a safer place to disappear than the last place they’d done it, which was stopped for a red light out on the commercial section of Route 92. She marched over to the car, tried to look through the driver’s side window—it was steamed up; she’d never believed they did that when she read about it in books—and grabbed the door handle. She yanked the door open and found them as she expected to find them, doing what came naturally.

“Except that, before last night, Evie would never have thought that this was what came naturally to Chessey Flint.

Evie threw the McDonald’s bags on top of them both and said, “Oh, crap. Why don’t the two of you just screw right here in the car and I’ll go hide in the trunk?”





Four


1


WHEN GREGOR DEMARKIAN LEFT Freddie Murchison on the quad, he first went directly to Constitution House, springing along happily in what he later decided was a state of utter delusion. He hadn’t paid much attention to Constitution House before, or to any of the other buildings he had been in, except to make mental notes of the routes he had to take to get where he wanted to go. What he found out about Constitution House when he finally decided to pay attention to it was disheartening. It had both a cellar and an attic, both locked, and probably both vast. He had no idea what the arrangements with the keys were. Both places might be being used for resident storage, with keys passed out to everyone who lived in the house. Both could have been off-limits and as hard to get into as the Pentagon subbasement. Or one or the other. Or either or both. Or—. It didn’t take him long to decide that he was engaged in an exercise in futility. In spite of the exploits of Bennis Hannaford’s favorite private detectives, in the real world the police were necessary for more than comic relief or political counterexample. They were necessary to search large areas, for instance. If Constitution House was as big as it seemed to Gregor after his prowl through the ground floor, it was going to take a dozen men to go over the attic and the basement with any degree of attention in anything less than a millennium.