Markham shook his head. “I never thought I’d see the day. Me, the world’s most pragmatic small-town sheriff, taking part in a scene straight out of Ellery Queen. Gather the suspects! Produce the revelations! The master detective will—”
“David.”
Markham’s movements had ceased to be random. He was heading for the bedroom door and the hall and the living room, tucking in his shirt as he went. Gregor thought he didn’t look all that displaced to be on his way to “a scene straight out of Ellery Queen.”
At the bedroom door, Markham stopped, turned around and smiled. “You know that stuff you asked for? The soda and the beer?”
“What about them?” Gregor asked.
“Well, the person you asked to get them for you was Freddie Murchison, and Freddie is Freddie no matter what happens. He got you a can of soda. He also got you a case of beer.”
Seven
1
FROM THE MOMENT GREGOR Demarkian had stepped off the path from the parking lot onto the campus of Independence College proper, he had thought the schedule he’d been given—a lecture to be held at eight o’clock on Halloween night—was self-defeating. The essence of Halloween at Independence was a kind of movable street fair, an all-campus party that dispersed only during the early hours of the morning. Every once in a while, there would be a planned activity of some sort—a snake dance, a parade, a talent contest—but those seemed as superfluous as icing on a marzipan cake. The real action was in the quad, with the milling costumed crowd that swayed and jerked and giggled to the music being blasted through the windows of the dorms. Gregor didn’t believe even a few of them would be willing to give that up to hear an overweight, underexercised middle-aged man talk for two hours about “The Technological and Intellectual Investigation of Crime.” He wouldn’t have had any respect for them if they had. Bennis always said that adolescence was supposed to be about love unconsummated, and early adulthood about sex celebrated. Gregor was a little too old-fashioned to buy into that, but smart enough to see its relevance. He didn’t expect more than thirty people to show up at his lecture, at least a dozen of whom he would have arranged to have there himself.
What he did expect, when he walked out of Constitution House with Bennis and Markham and Father Tibor to make his way to the lecture hall, was a torchlit campus full of capering students. He got the torchlights. While he was busy noticing other things, the torches had been fastened to makeshift holders spread out along the edges of the paths and in a circle around the broad expanse of Minuteman Field. The students, however, had disappeared. Between the torches and the blacked-out windows and the emptiness of the quad, Independence College looked like a ghost town, reliably haunted.
“What the Hell is going on here?” Gregor asked the air.
Markham came back, “It’s the blackout. No activity until the procession to the bonfire.”
“But where is everybody?” Bennis asked.
Markham pointed down the angled path on which they were walking, to a tall oblong building with something that was not quite a steeple and not quite a spire rising from the front of it. It was a building Gregor had noticed before, the first one visible when you came off the parking lot path. He had never been required to go into it, or seen anyone else going into it, and so he hadn’t paid it any attention.
“A lot of them are probably in there,” Markham said. “That’s Concord Hall, the old chapel. It’s used as an auditorium now.”
“That’s where I’m supposed to give my speech?”
“That’s where.” Markham contemplated the back and side of Concord Hall. “It’s got its advantages, considering. They modernized it about ten years ago. Took one whole wall of the auditorium and turned it into windows. The windows look out on King George’s Scaffold and Minuteman Field.”
“They’ll be blacked out,” Gregor said.
“They’ll be blacked out with a blackout curtain, installed special at the time it was renovated. The bonfire is an annual event around this place.” Markham smiled thinly. “All we have to do is haul the curtain up and there we are.”
“Where will we be?” Gregor asked. Nobody answered him. There was something about all this silence that was contagious. He pressed on, ahead of the others, until he got to the back door of the hall. It was propped open, and when he got to it he saw that it was guarded, too—by Freddie Murchison, standing just inside it in the dark. Freddie was, as usual, dressed up as Dracula, with a mouth full of fangs. If his face hadn’t been so naturally sappy-silly round and childish, he would have been frightening. Gregor pushed past him, made way for the others and said, “Well?”