Quoth the Raven(84)

Over there, Tibor said ingenuously, pointing to one of the walls. Then, seeing the look on Gregor’s face, he got up, went to the desk he had shoved into one of the corners, and came back with a piece of paper of his own. This was a far more expensive example of the art of papermaking than Gregor’s, a thick textured thing stained to look like parchment. Tibor flattened it out on the one clear space on the coffee table, and Gregor read the legend that was written across the bottom in sweeping, embossed calligraphic script: A Visitor’s Guide to Independence College.

Tibor patted his pockets, found a pen and took it out. It was made of clear plastic and filled with hot pink ink.

“Now,” he said, “here is where we are.” He drew a circle around the pen-and-ink drawing of a square building with drawings of shrubs around the edges of it. “This is Constitution House. We are almost at the center of this side of the quad. The—”

“West side,” Gregor said.

“Yes, Krekor. Exactly. Here is Hillman’s Rock.” He drew another circle, this time around what looked like a Girl Scout Handbook rendition of a mountain, far to the east.

“Where is the parking lot?” Gregor asked him.

Tibor moved his hand across the paper and drew another circle, this one to the west, but not so far. The sweep of the circle he drew took in a drawing even Gregor could recognize as King George’s Scaffold. Gregor’s gaze moved around and around among the three circles, taking in the entire campus.

“What about Liberty Hall?” he asked.

Tibor drew a circle not quite midway between the parking lot circle and the Constitution House circle. Gregor sat back.

“Is there something wrong?” Tibor asked him. “It is a very good map of the campus, Krekor, even if it is artistic. Very accurate.”

“That’s good to know.”

“Then what is it?” Bennis asked.

Gregor leaned forward again. “Let’s say you were going to climb Hillman’s Rock,” he told them. “What would you do? How would you get from Constitution House, he tapped that circle, “to where you were going to start?” He tapped Hillman’s Rock.

“Well,” Tibor said, “I think it would matter, Krekor, who you were. You could drive there, yes, if that is what you are asking.”

“If you were Ken Crockett, would you drive there?”

“No, Krekor, I would not. I would go on foot. All the very serious climbers in the club hike there on foot. It is not as far as it seems.” Tibor hesitated. “And Krekor there is something else. If we are speaking now of yesterday, Dr. Crockett did not take his car to Hillman’s Rock, at least not until we had been in the parking lot and gone. And after that, the times—” He shrugged. “I saw his car in the parking lot when you were getting out of the van, Krekor. I remarked on it—”

“I remember now.” Gregor finished.

Bennis took another swig of her soda. “This is weird enough. Maybe Ken Crockett wasn’t rock-climbing at all yesterday. Maybe he was somewhere else. I wonder where.”

“Maybe he just did what he always did and hiked out there on foot.” Gregor turned to Tibor. “Are the times right for that? Could he have called Alice Elkinson at ten of twelve and still been in the dining room at twenty after?”

“Yes, Krekor, if he started almost right away. He is a very fast walker. I know. I have walked with him.”

“All right.” The edge of the map was lying a little over the edge of the timetable David Markham had given him. Gregor pushed the map away.

Gregor picked the timetable up and squinted at it. Bennis might love mysteries with timetables in them, but he didn’t. “All right,” he said again. “Now. Katherine Branch. When David Markham asked her, she said she’d spent the entire time between around eleven thirty and twelve thirty with her coven—I’m not making this up; coven is what she said—preparing, as she put it, for the ceremony of black exorcism they were going to perform in the dining room. The coven got into their makeup in her apartment in Constitution House and then formed a procession, which proceeded to the cafeteria, getting there at—”

“Bullshit,” Bennis said.

Gregor looked up. “What do you mean, bull—”

“Well, she’s lying, isn’t she?” Bennis waved her can in the air. “We got there after twelve sometime, right? And she was there, in the open space just outside the cafeteria doors, and she had to have been in the cafeteria first because—”

“Bennis, what are you talking about?”

Bennis sighed. “I’d have said something if anybody asked me, but it wasn’t the right time and you were the one who said that whoever had handed Miss Veer the poison had to be standing right next to her practically, and she wasn’t in the cafeteria then. Dr. Branch, I mean. But she was outside it just as we were going in to lunch. I didn’t recognize her or anything. We’d just got here, for God’s sake. But I really couldn’t mistake that hair. And she wasn’t in makeup, either. Her hair was tied back in this bandanna thing and she was wearing a raincoat.”