Quoth the Raven(88)

That was what Vivi looked like. Sylvester the Cat. Same short-legged, pear-bottomed figure, only shorter.

“Look,” Katherine said into the phone, “I still don’t understand what you think you’re—”

“Of course you do,” Evie Westerman said. “Gregor Demarkian is looking for someone who was in that shed yesterday, messing around with the soldering equipment.”

“I was not messing around—”

“Yes, you were,” Evie said. “I saw you. I’ve been sitting right here for the last hour, thinking about whether or not I ought to tell Demarkian about it.”

“Evie,” Katherine said, “where are you?”

“In the Finger Lickin’ Bar and Grill.”

“Where in God’s name is that?”

“On the other side of Belleville from campus. Out on Route Fifty. It’s a roadhouse.”

“I’d guessed that, Evie.”

“I think you ought to be here, too,” Evie said. “I think you ought to get here right away. Because if you’re not here by the time I finish my beer, I’m going to get back into my car, drive back to campus, and go straight to Gregor Demarkian. And you in that shed isn’t the only thing I’m going to tell him about.”

“Evie—”

“There’s also you and a certain bat suit. And you and a certain pair of buckets of lye. And you breaking into Dr. Crockett’s apartment and Dr. Elkinson’s apartment and—”

“Evie.”

“I’m going to hang up now,” Evie said. “Then I’m going to go to the bar and order that beer. Don’t be late.”

The phone was hung up with a smash so hard and so loud, it made Katherine wince.

On the other side of the room, Vivi had stopped pacing and taken up leaning against the windowsill. Her posture was terrible. Her spine was made of spaghetti and everything slumped. Katherine stared at her in exasperation. Anyone else on earth would have had the sense to get out of here minutes ago. Anyone else would at least have had the sense to be getting out of here now.

“If you think I’m going to let you get away with this,” Vivi said, “if you think I’m going to let you fob me off with a lot of pious platitudes and abusive bullshit—”

Katherine walked over to the closet, opened it up, and grabbed her coat. She didn’t have time right now to think about how many times she had played this scene, or with how many people. She didn’t have time right now to think about anything. It didn’t matter a flying damn that her entire history seemed to come down to confrontations like this one, wars fought on worn carpets with women who didn’t have the sense God gave a kangaroo.

Women.

Her coat was a heavy green parka filled with goose down and stitched to look like puffy waves of soap on chemically polluted waters. She threw it over her shoulders and said,

“Vivi, the best advice I can give to you is put your head in the toilet bowl and flush.”

Then she left.





3


FOR KEN CROCKETT, THE only thing on earth at this precise moment in time—five thirty on Halloween, sharp black splinters of clouds against a grey-dusk sky—was fire. He knew it shouldn’t be. He had known ever since five fifteen, when his phone rang and he’d heard Jack Carroll’s voice, low and threatening, spelling out what he had to do. He had told Jack he had written the directions down on the back of an envelope, and that was true. The envelope was sitting right there in his apartment on the narrow strip of end table next to his phone. Ken distinctly remembered covering it with ink. He even remembered holding down the edge of it with the knuckles of his left hand, while the fingers of that hand were still wrapped around the hem of the bat suit he had found on his closet floor, just as Katherine Branch had said he would.

“We’ve got to talk,” Jack Carroll had said to him. “You do realize that, don’t you, Ken? We’ve got to talk.”

“Yes,” Ken had told him. “I suppose we do.”

“I can’t just walk away from something like that and pretend it never happened. Do you understand that?”

Yes, Ken had thought at the time. He did understand that. What he didn’t understand was what he was supposed to do about it. Sometimes he didn’t understand what he was supposed to do about himself. Was it some kind of psychosis, not wanting to be what you so obviously were, what you couldn’t do anything to change? They had been up at the top of Hillman’s Rock that clay and getting stupid. It was much too late in the afternoon for them to be that high up and still be sure they could get safely down. The sun had been melting into the trees behind them in a flare of red and gold. Even with evening coming on, it had been oddly hot. Jack had taken off his down vest and unbuttoned his flannel shirt. And he—