Quoth the Raven(97)

2


GREGOR HAD HEARD ENOUGH about hushed silences in his day, and read enough about them, so that he shouldn’t have been surprised to be presented with one. The hall had gone dead quiet and paralytically still. The only person in the place who was even fidgeting was Tibor, standing right behind him. A man in the center of the front row had gone as white as chalk. Gregor assumed he was the dean. He felt sorry for the man even, as he turned away to ignore him.

At the last minute, his eyes swept the room, searching for his suspects, but if he had been looking for some special reaction, he would have been disappointed. They were all still in their seats and impassive. They might have been numb. He moved closer to the lectern and leaned out over the crowd.

“Yesterday afternoon,” he said, “we were presented here with a very interesting problem, in feet an impossible problem. Not only had a woman, Miss Maryanne Veer, with very few personal ties to the college and only limited professional ones, been fed enough lye to put her in the hospital for several weeks and possibly to cripple her for life, but she had been fed it in full view of the lunch crowd in a packed dining hall, while she was standing up, while she was holding a cafeteria tray on which was nothing but a cup of strong tea. Now I don’t know what you people out there know about lye, so I will tell you something about it. The technical name for it is sodium hydroxide, and it always fizzes when it comes in contact with water. Our first thought—mine, and later that of the police—was that what we were looking at was a Tylenol-poisoning type of attack. At first glance, it looked as if we had someone, a cafeteria worker or a student or a faculty member, intent on causing havoc to whoever might get in his line of fire. Given that assumption, first I, and later David Markham and his men, began to look for what the lye might have been in. It could not have been in Miss Veer’s tea, because if it had been the tea would have been fizzing, and it was highly unlikely that she would have drunk it. Even if she hadn’t expected to be poisoned, she would have, as any of us would have, been suspicious about what she was being fed. Her natural reaction would have been to dump out that cup of tea and pour herself a new one. So we went looking, at that point, for what else she might have had and what else she might have eaten—someone suggested to me over the course of this investigation a peanut butter sandwich. That would have been good. But there was no peanut butter sandwich. In fact, there was nothing of any kind. Everyone we asked told us the same thing: Miss Maryanne Veer had come through that cafeteria line with a cup of tea and only a cup of tea on her tray. We searched the floor for food that might have gone unnoticed and been dropped when Miss Veer fell. Nothing. We searched the tables. Nothing. We searched the cafeteria line. Nothing. We were finally forced to admit to ourselves what seemed so unlikely to be true: that someone had attacked Miss Veer in particular for some personal reason, and then taken away, or disposed of, whatever food the lye had been in.

“Now we had two new problems, equally disturbing. In the first place, although the lab reports haven’t come in yet, it was clear that whatever Miss Veer had eaten that contained lye was unlikely to have been large and only theoretically likely to have been solid food at all. Immediately after she fell, I and a number of people in the crowd applied the antidote for her condition, namely milk forced into her mouth and down her throat. I saw no residues of solid food in her teeth or gums. Then there was the larger problem: Who would want to hurt Miss Maryanne Veer and why? I say hurt and not kill, because there is something you must understand about lye. People do die from being poisoned by it, but I have never yet heard of a murderer who managed to bring such a thing off deliberately. It is almost impossible for someone to swallow enough lye to kill them immediately. Lye burns—actually, it dissolves human flesh on contact. People have been known to die by swallowing small amounts of lye, thinking they’ve cured the problem with milk or some other agent, and three or four days or a week later being presented with a perforated stomach lining that has finally given out in its attempts to counteract the alkali. With a dose of the strength administered to Miss Veer, however, and with that dose administered in full view of a hundred or so people, the attacker would have had to realize that it would have been very unlikely for Miss Veer to die. So we had someone here who did not care if Miss Veer lived or not. That could not have been the point.

“But what was the point? The more we looked into Miss Veer’s life, the less likely it was that there was one, at least of the kind we are used to in murder investigations. Miss Veer lived with a woman friend of many years standing, who was not on campus at the time. She did her work in her department without causing any obvious rancor among the faculty and students she worked with. We heard no underground rumbles of unfairness or dislike. In fact, the only person on campus who seemed to have any antipathy to Miss Veer at all was a man I had never met but heard much about, Dr. Donegal Steele.