IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN simple—in fact, in the beginning, it was simple. There is nothing on earth like a poisoning with lye. Gregor could have recited the indications from memory, just the way he had learned them in his second month of Bureau training at Quantico: the stripping away of the skin that looked worse than it was but not nearly as bad as it would get; the gagging heaves that turned to choked strangling and brought up no vomit; the short-term inviability of all the nonhuman surfaces. Miss Maryanne Veer’s dress must have been made of silk. Silk was one of the few materials lye would eat through on contact, except for human skin. Or animal skin, Gregor thought irrelevantly. The effect would be the same on most animals as it was on human beings. He could remember a case, years ago, from when he was new in the Bureau and assigned to kidnapping detail. A small girl had been snatched from the playground of her expensive private grammar school in Beverly Hills and taken high up into Coldwater Canyon and killed. Her mother, half-insane with grief and self-recrimination, had been unable to stand the sound of the girl’s tiny kitten mewling disconsolately through the house. She had taken the kitten and locked it in the back pantry. Then she had gone on with her life and forgotten all about it—unsurprising, because her life at that point had consisted of a bottle of Stolichnaya before breakfast and whatever she’d had to drink afterward to get herself unconscious for the rest of the day. The kitten had remained locked in the back pantry for three days without food, kept alive only because a small leak in the roof made a puddle of water on the pantry floor. Then the kitten had gotten too hungry to care about anything else and had gone looking for something open and chewable. It had found an open tin of drain cleaner that had been made mostly of lye.
Gregor Demarkian was not a physically active man. When he read the detective novels Bennis sometimes gave him, he preferred the ones about Nero Wolfe and Hercule Poirot, men who solved the problems of the world from the safety of their living rooms, who sat and thought instead of ran and shot. Because he had been determined to join some sort of police force when he was young—he couldn’t remember why now—it was a good thing the Bureau had existed. He couldn’t imagine himself, even at twenty-five, chasing across the landscape with his gun drawn. He couldn’t imagine himself directing human traffic in an emergency, either—but now, he knew, that was what he had to do.
For what seemed like minutes after Miss Maryanne Veer dropped her teacup and began to gag, nobody spoke and nobody moved. Miss Veer was the radial point in a large empty circle, central and spotlit. The only sound in the room was the low-grade hissing Gregor knew came from the puddle at Miss Veer’s feet, lye mixed with water, activated. Then Dr. Alice Elkinson threw back her head and began to scream.
“Dear God,” Bennis Hannaford said, “will somebody please shut her up?”
“Never mind about shutting her up,” Gregor said. What he had been afraid of was beginning to happen. Miss Maryanne Veer had fallen to the floor, and the rest of them were converging on her, throwing themselves at her. There were things that needed to be done and done quickly, and a roadblock of bodies was going up that could become impossible to penetrate at any moment. Gregor grabbed Tibor by the shoulders and spun him around, so that he was facing the cafeteria line and the door out. “Go,” he said. “Call 911. Ask for an ambulance and the police. Tell them we’ve got an attempted murder by lye.”
If Tibor had been thinking clearly, he would have protested. There was no way to know, now, whether what they had was an attempted murder, an attempted suicide, or some kind of gruesome accident. Because Tibor was thinking no more clearly than any of the people now clotting up the center of the room, he took off at a brisk trot without asking questions. Gregor turned to Bennis and said, “Go get some milk. Lots of milk. As much as you can carry. Bring it to me when I get in over there and then go back and get some more.”
“Milk?”
“Don’t ask stupid questions, Bennis. Just go.”
Bennis went. The clot in the center of the room was pulsing, sending up waves of sound that weren’t words and weren’t music but had something in common with both. Dr. Elkinson had stopped screaming and begun crying hysterically instead. She kept altering sobs with wails, sobs with wails, so that she sounded like a defective police siren.
“We’ve got to make her vomit,” someone in the crowd was saying. “We’ve got to force her to bring the poison up out of her system.”
Gregor pushed through two young girls, students, whose skin was tinged with the whitish-green of incipient nausea. As he forced himself through the second layer and into the still empty but smaller circle of the center, he saw one of the girls turn away and bend over. He wedged himself into the open space next to Miss Maryanne Veer’s body and dropped to his knees.
“For God’s sake,” he said, “whatever we do here, what we can’t do is let her vomit.”
“Who’s that?” someone in the crowd said.
Bennis pushed through, her arms full of those small waxed-cardboard cartons of milk that seem to be sold only in school cafeterias. She had at least thirty of them. She dumped them on the floor next to Gregor and stood up again, looking a little wild.
“Is that what you wanted?”
“More,” Gregor said.
“More?”
“Just in case.”
Bennis whipped around and ran off again. Gregor looked up and tried desperately to judge the character behind the faces he saw. Dr. Elkinson was in no shape to help anyone with anything. She had fallen out of the crowd and collapsed into a chair. Gregor could see the top of her head, bent and shuddering, between the shoulders of a student dressed as Leonardo the Ninja Turtle and the shoulders of another student dressed as Snow White. That was part of the problem, the way all the students were dressed. The face Gregor most wanted to see was that of Tibor’s friend, Jack Carroll. He remembered that the boy had been dressed as a bat, complete with hood, but there were two bats in the crowd, both complete with hoods. Gregor hadn’t paid enough attention to the way the rest of the boy had looked to be able to determine if either of these bats was the one he wanted. He didn’t want to call out the boy’s name, either—although at that moment he couldn’t have said why. There was just something about it that felt damned wrong, maybe even dangerous for the boy, and Gregor had to go with that. He didn’t have the time or the inclination to work it all out.
“I know who that is,” someone in the crowd said. “That’s the man who’s giving the lecture about crime.”
Gregor examined the faces before him, the ones he knew and the ones he didn’t know. The ones he knew were few in number and not always attached to names. There was Dr. Elkinson in her chair, yes, but there was also the pretty, blond, athletic girl hanging on to one of the bats. She was dressed as a pumpkin and her face was streaked with tears. Gregor had seen her on the quad when Tibor had been leading them to the dining hall for lunch. She had been part of a whole line of girls dressed as pumpkins, and she hadn’t looked happy even then. Gregor mentally rejected her services out of hand—not only was she too upset, she wasn’t strong enough—and went back to his search. Finally, he came to rest on Dr. Kenneth Crockett, upset, even horrified, and hanging back as far as he dared, but blessedly still in control of himself.
“You,” Gregor said, “Dr. Crockett. Come here please. I need some help.”
“Me?” Kenneth Crockett said.
“I have more of them,” Bennis said, stumbling into the open space and dumping another load of milk next to Gregor’s knees. “More?”
“No. Go find out what’s happened to Tibor. I sent him to the phone.”
“Right,” Bennis said. She took off again.
Gregor motioned Dr. Crockett in toward the writhing body. This time, he came, slowly but steadily, as if he were forcing himself to move.
“What I need you to do,” Gregor told him, “is to get her mouth open and your finger on her tongue, so that she can’t swallow it or block the progress of the milk. She’ll have third-degree burns in her mouth and we’ll get to them, but we have to get to the esophagus first. Lye is a corrosive. It will eat right through her windpipe if we let it, and if it does she wont be able to breathe, not now and not later, no matter what anybody does for her.”
“Lye,” Ken Crockett hissed. “Oh, my God.”
Gregor took one of the cartons of milk, ripped it open, and poured it on Miss Maryanne Veer’s chin and chest. It wouldn’t be much help, but it would be some. He didn’t want to look at that pulped, untreated skin a moment longer. He motioned to Ken Crockett and the other man leaned forward, got his thumbs around Miss Maryanne Veer’s teeth, and pulled.
“Dear God,” Ken Crockett said. “She’s fighting me.”
Gregor got another carton of milk open, took aim, and poured the contents straight down Miss Maryanne Veer’s throat.
“She’s not fighting you on purpose,” he said. “From the state of her pupils, I’d say she was barely conscious. But she will try to clamp down. It’s sheer instinct. The lye came in that way. The body is trying to keep it out.”
“I don’t blame her,” Ken Crockett said.
Gregor opened another carton, took aim again, poured again. “You were standing near her when it happened. Do you remember what she was carrying on her tray? What besides tea or coffee or whatever was in the cup.”
“I remember the tea. She always had tea.”
“The lye couldn’t have been in the tea. Tea is full of tannic acid. Lye is an alkali. Even if the tea was weak—even if the tannic acid wasn’t strong enough to neutralize the alkali, and it probably wouldn’t have been, it isn’t that strong an acid to begin with when it’s derived from tea leaves—anyway, tannic acid or no tannic acid, most of the available forms of lye foam when they come in contact with water.”
“What do you mean, ‘most of the available forms’?”
Another carton, another aim, another pour. Dr. Crockett was holding Miss Maryanne Veer’s mouth wide open and her head tilted back toward the light. Gregor could see well into her throat. The skin there was raw and unforgiving. He grabbed another carton and opened it.
“Drain cleaners,” he said. “Almost all of those have sodium hydroxide. So do the acids in some batteries—”
“Sodium hydroxide is lye?” Ken Crockett said.
“That’s right. In the days before packaged cleaning products, people used to keep it, almost pure, in buckets, for washing out latrines and that kind of thing. But these days almost nobody—”
“I know somebody who does.” It was the girl in the pumpkin dress, pushing forward in the crowd. “I don’t mean somebody. I mean someplace. I’ve seen it.”
“Seen what?” Ken Crockett demanded. “Chessey, what are you talking about?”
“The Climbing Club,” Chessey said desperately. “The cabin up on Hillman’s Rock. There are outhouses up there and there’s a bucket just outside of them and it’s marked ‘lye.’ ”
Gregor opened another carton, took aim again, poured again—the process was beginning to feel like assemblyline work, and just as futile. He thought: So this is the Chessey that Tibor was talking about; there couldn’t be two girls named Chessey on a small campus like this one. Then he grabbed another carton and started all over again.
“Even if what we had here was pure sodium hydroxide,” he said firmly, “it still would have at least fizzed when it came in contact with water. The best way to feed somebody lye—”
“Feed somebody?”
Gregor had no idea who had said it. Part of him was concentrating on Miss Maryanne Veer. Part of him was delivering this absurd lecture on sodium hydroxide. The rest of him was thinking that the bat the girl Chessey had been hanging on to must have been Jack Carroll. She was supposed to be Jack Carroll’s girlfriend. “—or for someone to take it accidentally,” he went on, “is for the lye to be delivered dry. For best effectiveness, it should be delivered dry and washed down with some kind of nonacidic liquid, done fast, so that the victim wouldn’t notice until it was too late.”
“Oh,” God,” somebody else said.
Carton, aim, pour. He was getting a headache, straining to see into that throat. “If the lye had been in her tea, she would have seen it foam. She wouldn’t have drunk it. There had to be something else. A sandwich. A piece of cake. Something.”
“There isn’t any lye up at the cabin on Hillman’s Rock,” Ken Crockett said. “There never has been while I’ve been with the Climbing Club. The cabin was remodeled for plumbing years ago.”
“We’re beginning to make some progress,” Gregor told him. “I want to do a wash of the mouth. When I tell you, release the tongue so I can get some milk under it.”
Ken Crockett braced forward, ready. Gregor reached for yet another carton of milk, thinking as he did that the seriously adrenalated part of this crisis was over. From now on it would be steady, a routine, holding the fort until the medical people arrived and could get a tube down Miss Veer’s throat to ensure that the air passage stayed open. He got the carton open and poured it in with a swirling, circular motion that reminded him—it was horrible, but he couldn’t help it; the metaphor was there and it wouldn’t leave him alone—of the way you were supposed to pour heavy-duty cleaners into toilet bowls. He tossed the empty carton on the floor and reached for another one, wishing that Bennis and Tibor would come back and tell him that help was on the way.
He was just reaching for carton number three, destination the mouth, when all hell broke loose.
AT FIRST, IT WAS impossible to know what was going on. Gregor was in the process of pouring even more milk into Miss Maryanne Veer’s mouth. He couldn’t turn around or look up or do anything else to pinpoint the cause of the disturbance. He didn’t dare. Dr. Kenneth Crockett was looking up, and the expression on his face was shock. Gregor tried to tell himself that the noise he was hearing was the arrival of the ambulance men—who else could be coming in force at a time like this?—but there was no way to sustain the illusion, even with his back to the source of the commotion. What he was hearing was not the barked commands of an emergency medical squad, but the wavering distortion of a Gregorian chant.
“Jesus screaming Christ,” Ken Crockett said, and then rose, involuntarily, to his feet, letting Miss Maryanne Veer’s face drop out of his hands and the back of her head hit the floor with a thud. “Jesus screaming Christ, what do these idiots think they’re doing?”
“Dr. Crockett,” Gregor said. “Get back here. Get back here now.”
Dr. Crockett was walking away, unhearing. Gregor was giving serious consideration to screaming out loud when one of the bats dropped into the doctor’s place, grabbed Miss Maryanne Veer’s mouth, and yanked it open.
“Jack Carroll,” the bat said.
“I thought so,” Gregor told him.
Behind Gregor’s back, the chant had grown louder, strident. He’d had enough Latin in school to know it wasn’t Latin he was hearing. It was nonsense, but angry nonsense, and it was getting louder.
Suddenly, Bennis dropped down beside him, holding a carton of milk in her hand.
“Get up,” she said. “I’ll do this for a while. Somebody’s got to get those people out of here.”
“Where’s Tibor?” Gregor demanded. “Where’s the ambulance?”
“The ambulance and the police are on the way. I talked to the sheriff of the county myself and explained the whole thing. You shouldn’t have sent Tibor, Gregor, he’s in shock.”
“I had to send Tibor. He was the only one I could trust who knew where the phones were.”
“Right. Let me do this. Turn around and see what’s going on. And get that Crockett person and calm him down. Oh, for God’s sake. I can’t believe this.”
She shoved him unceremoniously out of the way, positioned herself right in front of Miss Maryanne Veer’s mouth, and shot the carton of milk down it as he had been doing at the beginning. Obviously, she hadn’t been watching him over the past three or four minutes. She didn’t realize he had switched from the throat to the mouth. It didn’t matter. The throat was the important thing anyway. It was time somebody got back to it.
Gregor stood up, turned around, and stopped. For endless minutes it seemed as if he could enumerate everything he saw, but make no sense of it. There was a small knot of women standing in a circle at the end of the room near the cash register, blocking all passage in or out except by window. They were all dressed in identical black—black tights, black ballet slippers, black leotards, black gloves. Their faces were painted in mock harlequin design, black on one side and white on the other, with a symbol Gregor vaguely remembered as being an ancient sign of the Devil plastered under each of their right eyes. The one in the center was taller than the rest and had hair so red it seemed to burn. It was long and teased out around her face like radioactive cotton candy. She stepped out a little into the room, threw her arms out, threw her head back, and screeched.
“Ad hoverum sancterum dessit cray,” she said, and sounded like she was praying. “Quemmor stempanos knevit.”
Tibor was standing almost in front of her, frozen. Gregor lurched through the crowd toward him, grabbed him by the arm, and pulled him back.
“Tibor,” he said, “what’s going on here? Who is that woman?”
Tibor shook his head violently, as if to clear it of hallucinations—and Gregor didn’t blame him.
“Branch,” Tibor said in a croak. “That is Dr. Branch.”
“Who? The redheaded woman? That’s Dr. Katherine Branch?”
“That is what I said, Krekor, yes.”
“For God’s sake. What does she think she’s—”
“I told you, Krekor, I told you.” Tibor was suddenly agitated. “She says she is a witch. She thinks she is a witch. She’s doing her witch’s things that she says they did in New England before the Revolution except that they didn’t.” He grabbed Gregor, pulled him close, and began to whisper urgently in his ear. “Krekor, I think she takes belladonna and puts it on her wrists to make her—to make her—like a drug, Krekor, I am losing my English and you don’t understand Armenian. Like a drug, Krekor. I have seen her in class. She does this often.”
“Listen,” Gregor said. “Can you hear that?”
It was hard to hear anything. The women in black weren’t the problem. Now that Dr. Katherine Branch had finished her prayer, or whatever it had been, they were absolutely silent. They had moved out into the room and begun to dance, slowly and deliberately, in a circle. It occurred to Gregor that they were probably the calmest people in the dining hall. It was the crowd that was getting hysterical and loud. The crowd might be used to Dr. Katherine Branch’s antics, but it wasn’t used to Miss Maryanne Veer keeling over after a little light snack of lye. They were all wound up. They were all starving for a release. Now the release was here and they had begun to send up small ripples of reaction.
“It’s a siren,” Tibor said suddenly. “I hear it, Krekor. It’s a siren.”
“It’s a siren,” Gregor agreed. “Do you see Dr. Crockett?”
“No.”
“We’ve got to find some way to let the ambulance men in here, and the police, too. Everybody’s surging up to the front and cutting off the access. Isn’t there any other way in and out of this room?”
“The windows open, Krekor, for fire escapes.”
“That’s fine for fire escapes. The medical people would have a hell of a time getting their equipment through that way.”
“Look, Krekor, they are all lying down on the floor.”
They were indeed all lying down on the floor. Gregor didn’t find it hard to credit Tibor’s comment about belladonna. That, at least, would have been an authentic touch from the world of New England witchcraft. Tibor had told him about it once. So many men and women had confessed to consorting with the Devil and flying on broomsticks because they thought they had consorted with the Devil and flown on broomsticks. Belladonna was a poison. Like so many other poisons—strychnine, foxglove, airplane glue—you got high on it by flirting with a fatal dose. A miscalculation could kill you. A perfect calculation could make you feel like you were floating through air. They had done it, those old witches, in the covens of Massachusetts and Connecticut. Gregor was sure Dr. Katherine Branch and her friends were doing it now.
Whoever her friends were.
Did it matter?
“What we are going to do,” he told Tibor, “is go in, and get them, and pull them out of the way. Just grab their arms and pull.”
“Krekor, I am not a strong man—”
“Neither am I, Tibor. It won’t matter. They’re potted on something, if not belladonna then something else. Not a stimulant. It won’t be difficult. Just grab their arms and pull—”
“The crowd is going to riot, Krekor.”
“Not if we’re fast enough.”
They weren’t fast enough. Gregor had barely reached the first of the bodies on the floor when a roar went up behind him. He turned instinctively and saw Dr. Kenneth Crockett standing on a table, looking almost literally like the wrath of God.
“Katherine,” Dr. Crockett screamed. “Katherine, you world class bitch, you get up off of there!”
“Damn,” somebody else said.
Something flew up out of the air from the back of the room in a long graceful arc and smashed into the floor next to Katherine Branch’s head. It took a moment for Gregor to recognize it as one of the jack-o’-lanterns that had been out on the tables for decoration. It was a while after that before he realized that the candle inside it was still lit, and by then another one had come, and another, until it began to feel like it was raining pumpkins.
Up at the other end of the cafeteria line, at the doors that led to the foyer and the front of the building, the medical people had arrived. Gregor could see what looked like hundreds of them crowding in beside the Swedish meatballs and the roast beef au jus.
“What the hell,” one of the men back there said. And then a low, twangy voice cut in from deep in the ranks and said, “Let me through. Just let me come on through.”
If the crowd heard the men at the door, or even noticed they were there, they gave no indication of it. They seemed to have run out of pumpkins. What was raining down now was an eclectic collection of Indian corn, cardboard masks, crepe paper, and ball-point pens. The debris hit the bodies on the floor and bounced off of them without making any impression Gregor could see. Dr. Katherine Branch and her friends—six of them, Gregor counted, obsessively, six of them—lay absolutely still and absolutely silent, as if they were dead.
Down in the cafeteria line the twangy voice was droning on and on, on and on. “Let me come on through. Let me come on through. Let me come on through.” Gregor strained to see who it belonged to and caught only the movement of men in firemen’s uniforms and medical whites. Then the ranks of official rescuers parted, and a small man stepped into the room. He was old, and fat, and faintly ridiculous, dressed up in a Stetson hat and a khaki shirt. He could have been a Halloween reveler costumed as a good old boy Texas sheriff—except that he had a real Colt .45 in the holster on his hip, and there was something about his eyes that made Gregor think he wouldn’t be afraid to use it.
The crowd paid no more attention to the man in the Stetson hat than they had to anyone else since the ruckus started. The man in the Stetson hat looked them over, walked to the edge of Katherine Branch’s prostrate circle, and drew his gun. Then he pointed it at the ceiling and fired.
Well, Gregor thought, in the dead silence that followed, that got their attention.
The man in the Stetson hat looked pleased.
“Now what the hell,” he bellowed, “is going on around here?”