Quoth the Raven(83)

“So,” Tibor said, with an air of being responsible for getting the conversation going, “you are still worried about that.”

“Tibor, you remember yesterday when we first arrived here, when we were up in the parking lot? You were being tickled that the professors, and I think I quote, ‘all fix their own cars.’ ”

Tibor nodded. “Yes, yes,” he said. “It’s very democratic, Krekor, except that I am not one of them. Of course, I do not have a car.”

“What about the rest of the professors in the Program? Do they?”

“As far as I know they do, Krekor, yes.”

“Do they all fix them by themselves?”

Tibor considered the question gravely, as if he’d been asked to give an account of the reasons for the Greek Schism. “Dr. Steele,” he said, casting a surreptitious glance at the wall he shared with the college’s least-liked professor, “does nothing for himself or by himself that he considers menial. Dr. Steele even has a woman who comes in to clean his bathroom. It is very unusual. Also, Krekor, it is one of the reasons he always gives for why he thinks Miss Flint will—will—”

“Leave Jack Carroll and end up in his bed in time?”

“Or has ended up in his bed already, Krekor, yes. He says she will prefer a scholar over a grease monkey. But Mr. Carroll, Krekor, is—”

“I know,” Gregor said. “He’s hardly your everyday grease monkey. What about the rest of them? Alice Elkinson? Ken Crockett? Katherine Branch? Even Chessey Flint.”

“Chessey Flint is not a professor, Krekor. I do not think she has a car, but I don’t know. If it needed to be fixed, I think Mr. Carroll would do it for her, yes?”

“Yes.”

“Dr. Branch fusses around in the shed and under the hood and pretends,” Tibor said, “and often in the shed she leaves a mess. Then I think she takes the car into town and has it fixed by a mechanic in secret. Dr. Crockett and Dr. Elkinson fix their own. I have seen them.”

“In the shed?”

“Yes, yes, Krekor, in the shed.”

Gregor drummed his fingers against a pile of books, The Sociopolitical Consequences of Unilateral Peace, Augustine’s City of God, unabridged and in Latin. Then he reached into his pocket and came up with a folded sheet of paper. It was unlined, flimsy, and cheap, and had been torn off the sort of typing paper pad that could be bought in any small-town pharmacy. The surface interior to the folds had been covered with David Markham’s incongruously small, neat, precise handwriting, in ballpoint pen.

“This,” Gregor told Tibor as he flattened the paper on yet another pile of books, wondering all the time how the damned things had migrated to the coffee table. Yesterday, the surface of that table had been clear. “This,” he said again, “is David Markham’s timetable for yesterday morning and early afternoon, up to the point where Miss Veer was poisoned. David Markham likes timetables. He likes lists. He likes notes. He sheds paper wherever he goes.”

“I like timetables, too,” Bennis said, coming back to them. She had a can of something to drink in her hand. “Those are my favorite kinds of mysteries. You know. The ones with the train schedules and things.”

“This is not a mystery with a train schedule in it.” Gregor looked at her drink again, tried to figure out what was wrong with the can, and dismissed the whole subject as irrelevant. “Now,” he said, “let’s flesh this out a little bit. We arrived here yesterday at eleven o’clock—”

“Quarter to,” Bennis said sheepishly.

“Quarter to?”

“I fudged the time a little,” Bennis was defensive. “Gregor, I know how you are about speed—”

“Never mind how I am about speed,” Gregor told her, exasperated. “I’ll give you my last word on speed when we have this done. Let’s just get it straight. We arrived here at quarter to eleven. We walked down from the parking lot. We got to the quad in, what, ten minutes?”

“Not so long as that, Krekor,” Tibor said. “Five at the most.”

“Fine. Five. That puts us at ten of. That means we talked to Jack Carroll at no later than five of. Now, according to what he told Markham, right after Jack Carroll talked to us he went straight to—”

“Chessey Flint’s room at Lexington House,” Bennis put in. “We talked to this guy named Max this morning, Gregor. This thing between eleven and twelve with Jack and Chessey is famous on campus. Everybody knows. Jack Carroll’s been missing all day and—”

“I know about Jack Carroll being missing,” Gregor said. “I even have a fair idea of where he is. Never mind. He’ll be back. Now, we got to Constitution House no later than a minute or two after eleven, and we saw Alice Elkinson coming out, looking for Ken Crockett. Then we came up here and talked for a while before going to lunch. In the meantime, again according to what Dr. Elkinson told David Markham, Dr. Elkinson went to her office, checked Dr. Crockett’s office, and then came back here. She says she got back here at about quarter to twelve. At ten to twelve, she says she got a call from Ken Crockett, supposedly from the Climbing Club cabin on Hillman’s Rock. Where exactly is Hillman’s Rock?”