THERE WAS MORE MOVEMENT on King’s Scaffold and Minuteman Field that night than there had been on Halloween at Independence College for many years. When Dr. Alice Elkinson had gone out at three o’clock in the morning to exchange the effigy of George III for the body of Dr. Donegal Steele, she had put her best effort into the body’s concealment. She had scattered the straw down the waterfall of logs that seemed to cascade from the ridge down the face of the outcrop. She had exchanged Steele’s clothes for the costume from the drama department and covered his head with the King’s jack-o’-lantern skull. The police had confiscated all of it. At one point, they had even threatened to confiscate the bonfire itself. Steele’s own clothes had to be somewhere. In all likelihood, they were down there among the wood somewhere, thrust out of sight. At any other time and in any other place, the area would have been roped off and no one allowed near it until it had been thoroughly searched.
Gregor Demarkian’s position was that the clothes could hardly matter. The woman had confessed in full view of two or three hundred people—considering the present rules of evidence, that could hardly matter, either—and most of what the prosecution would need to complete their case could be had from the one person on campus least likely to protect their murderer: Katherine Branch. Gregor kept saying it, over and over again. The key to making the lawyers happy was Katherine Branch. In the end, David Markham gave in. He didn’t want to be the cause of the first bonfireless Halloween at Independence College in more than two hundred years, any more than Jack Carroll and Freddie Murchison and their friends wanted to graduate with the first class that had not managed to set off a bigger and better conflagration than the class before it. David Markham took the list Gregor had written out for him while he was arresting Alice Elkinson, squinted down at the thick numbered lines scrawled across a piece of paper Freddie had torn out of someone’s notebook, and scowled. Then he rounded up the few uniformed men he had left after Alice Elkinson had been driven off in the direction of the Belleville jail and got to work. By then, Ken Crockett was gone, too, chasing the hiccuping sirens and glowing red taillights of the police cars. Gregor thought Ken Crockett might be doing what he did best, and what had made Gregor dislike him so instinctively the first time they met: taking on a load of guilt and responsibility for something he’d had no control of at all. In Gregor’s mind, the man had no idea who he was or what he was or what he felt. He simply made decisions for himself and carried through, whether or not he was making any sense. His present decision seemed to be that he was supposed to be in love with Alice Elkinson, and that his failure to leap to her defense in the auditorium was the worst kind of cardinal sin. Now he was chasing around the countryside, trying to think of some way to atone for it, trying to hurt himself enough to delude himself into believing he had been punished.
In the meantime, Gregor and Tibor and Bennis sat comfortably in the smaller common room on the first floor of Lexington House, drinking food-colored, brightly orange mimosas in black plastic glasses. That was what people did at Independence College while waiting for the bonfire procession at midnight. They had sprawling, chaotic parties in their dorms, carefully screened from the silent emptiness of the quad by all that blackout paper. In Lexington House, the party consisted of dorm sisters in pumpkin costumes, mimosas ladled like punch into hollowed-out pumpkins (alcoholic to the right, soft to the left), and Lou Reed on a stereo system loud and sophisticated enough to have served at a Bruce Springsteen concert. The Lou Reed had been Bennis Hannaford’s idea.
“And hard to find it was, too,” Bennis said, coming back with another full glass of the mimosa version on the right. “I mean, for God’s sake, you’d think any college student worth the name would at least have a copy of ‘Walk on the Wild Side.’ ” She sat down in the chair she had vacated only a few moments before, looked up at Evie Westerman sitting on the arm, and sighed. Evie had attached herself to Bennis just after the scene in the auditorium broke up and had been hanging on, fascinated, ever since. “Evie,” Bennis said, “do you think you could get just drunk enough to sort of glaze out a little? Every time I look at you, I think you’ve got X-ray vision.”
“How did you get your hair like that?” Evie asked her. “Is there a name for that kind of treatment?”
Bennis shook her head. “Evie, my hair is like this because I was born with my hair like this. Everybody in my family has hair like this. However, if you must, you can get the same effect with a cloud crimp at Sassoon’s. And a dye job. Now will you please—”
“What I don’t understand,” Jack Carroll said from his place stretched out on the floor at Gregor’s feet. Chessey was down there with him, sitting cross-legged on the carpet near his legs. He had one hand around her ankle. “What really bothers me is, why Alice Elkinson? I mean, your whole explanation seemed to center on motive—”
“Not at all,” Gregor said. “My whole analysis was grounded on one incontrovertible point. Miss Veer decided to call the police about Steele’s disappearance late on the morning of the thirtieth. Before that, no one had any reason to attack her. Therefore, whoever did attack her had to be someone who had the time to get to the shed and make that plug before meeting Miss Veer in the dining room. That couldn’t have been Katherine Branch, because Bennis saw her in the foyer outside the cafeteria when we came in for lunch. Granted, those plugs are much easier to make when you have the can to work them into, instead of doing them blind the way we did last night. Still, they’re not that easy to make. Then there was Dr. Crockett. In the first place, he was all the way over on Hillman’s Rock just before noon. He’d been there all day. He might still have had time to get down, all the way over to the shed and back, except that he was sitting at a table with me a good fifteen minutes before Miss Veer fell. He wouldn’t have had time for that.”
“So that left Dr. Elkinson,” Chessey Flint said.
“Or the two of you,” Gregor said blandly, “but there was that bat up on the Scaffold. I didn’t catch on when I saw it—her. It didn’t hit me right then what she was doing. But I did know it didn’t look like Jack, and that it was suspicious. And later, of course, I talked to Freddie Murchison and figured out where the two of you must have gone—”
“The three of us,” Evie said morosely. “I’m never going to do anything like that again. Have you any idea what it’s like, spending the night alone in a motel room while the people next door make the walls shake?”
“Evie.” Chessey was appalled.
“Back to Dr. Elkinson,” Gregor told them. “If you think about it for a minute, you’ll see it was very odd. Everybody was always wondering what Donegal Steele was doing at Independence College. His degrees. His book. His reputation. Nobody ever wondered what, Alice Elkinson was doing at Independence College. But think about it. She got her degree from Berkeley. She got tenure here so fast and so young, I had to assume that her publications and her professional reputation were exceptional. I don’t care what kind of reputation the Program has. Bennis was right. People like that don’t end up at places like this. They go to big-name universities.”
“Unless they’re in a hurry,” Bennis said. “That’s what it was, wasn’t it? Youngest tenured faculty member. Youngest Head of Program. And then—”
“Up and out,” Gregor agreed. “And Donegal Steele. The significant point about Donegal Steele wasn’t how awful his behavior was. It was that he’d told lies about Ms. Flint—Mrs. Carroll?—and been believed. He was a convincing man. He really could have ruined her.”
“Well, this will ruin her,” Evie said. “What was all that stuff about Dr. Branch? When Markham left Concord Hall, he was saying her name over and over again and cursing under his breath.”
Gregor laughed. “Oh, that. Well, this morning Dr. Branch talked to David Markham and me at breakfast. She had a lot of information. The only way she could have gotten it was by doing a lot of snooping on her own, which I wouldn’t put past her. Your Dr. Branch, I’m afraid, is addicted to various forms of nonmonetary blackmail. There are a couple of buckets of lye missing, and a bat suit. My guess is that Dr. Crockett tried to destroy the bat suit to protect Dr. Elkinson, but my guess is also that he wouldn’t have bothered if Dr. Branch hadn’t seen it first. As to the lye—” Gregor shrugged. “Either Katherine Branch moved it herself to put the fear of God into Alice Elkinson, or Dr. Crockett moved it after he found out Dr. Branch knew it was there. Markham will work it out. I’ve told him where to look.”
“And Katherine Branch will testify,” Bennis said. “Take a look at it, everybody. This is Gregor Demarkian’s Great and Inscrutable Detective Act. It makes me nuts.”
“What about that sweater,” Evie Westerman asked, “is it one hundred percent cashmere, or do you go for Lycra in the neck?”
Out in the foyer, a grandfather clock pealed the first of its four bongs to announce the time as quarter to twelve. A second later, all the pendulum clocks on campus seemed to start in at once and the carillon began to toll. Jack Carroll stood up, pulled his hood out of his belt, and put it on. Chessey stood up after him, searching vaguely for her mask.
“Gotta go,” Jack said. “Last real frivolity before law school.”
“Law school,” Chessey breathed reverently.
Evie Westerman blew a raspberry.
Gregor got up, held a hand out to help Tibor to his feet, and followed the students into the Lexington House foyer. Just as they got there, somebody doused the lights.
“Here we go,” Bennis said from somewhere behind them. “I’ve finally gotten rid of Evie. She has to march.”
IN THE QUAD, THERE were now so many torches the college looked on fire. Torches and people, costumes and silence: it was eerie to watch, that stream of heads and fire moving east toward the Scaffold. Gregor found himself wondering what it had been like the first time, and sure it had been nothing like this. That would have been a rite of politics. This was a celebration of mortality and sex. Gregor moved Tibor and himself into the crowd, keeping his hand on the priest’s shoulder, watching for signs of Jack Carroll’s tall, broad figure at the front. Someone had given Jack a torch and he was holding it higher than all the others, waving it in the air like an exploding firework he had mysteriously managed to bring under control.
They moved across the quad and then around the sides of Concord Hall and out onto Minuteman Field. The air was thick with the smell of kerosene and sharp cold with the lateness of the year. Freddie and his friends had managed to replace the effigy in time. In the light from the moving torches, it looked not only more outrageous than the first had been, but more outrageous than the disguised body of Donegal Steele had been. The new costume from the drama department was scarlet red and plush. The new jack-o’-lantern head was a monstrous mutant twice the size of the old.
Gregor stopped at the edge of the field and let the students behind him surge past. He still had his hand on Tibor’s shoulder and intended to keep it there. Tibor had been much too quiet, and he had been looking depressed.
“What is it?” he said, while the rest of the crowd began to press toward the mountain of logs. “Are you worrying about all that stuff you told me this evening?”
Father Tibor Kasparian sighed. “No, Krekor. It is something else I have to tell you now. Something closer to home.”
“What is it?”
Tibor scuffled his feet in the dirt. “Well, Krekor, do you remember, when we first went into Lexington House, I disappeared for a while?”
“Of course I do. I thought you went to the bathroom.”
“Well, yes, Krekor. I did that, too. I went to the bathroom. But mostly what I did was to call Lida. To make sure everything was all right.”
“And?”
“And everything was not all right, Krekor. They have had a robbery. They have had a man in a suit like the Terminator who came in and tried to take Lida’s diamond necklace and her engagement ring.”
“Those doors,” Gregor exploded. He grabbed Tibor by both shoulders and turned the little priest around to face him. It didn’t do much good. The torches were fine for illuminating the big picture, the bonfire pile and the effigy and the craggy face of the outcrop. They did more to hide Tibor’s face than to reveal it. And then Gregor caught it, the only significant word, the truly insane thing. “What do you mean tried,” he demanded. “Tried?”
Tibor took a deep breath. “Well, Krekor, you see, he did not get away with it. Lida hit him. With Bobby Costikian’s magic Jedi sword.”
“With—”
“And then when he was down, old George Tekemanian jumped on his chest and kicked him in the—in the—”
“Oh, dear sweet Lord Jesus, “Gregor said. “What are those two, crazy? They could have been killed.”
“No, Krekor, they could not have been killed. The man was keeping his gun in his pocket. Donna Moradanyan got it after George—”
“Tibor.”
“It is all right, Krekor. Lida let me talk to the policeman who came when they called. The man was being taken away and everything was calm again. Lida said the children were all very excited and impressed.”
Very excited and impressed. Gregor could just imagine it. In fact, that was the problem. He could imagine it exactly. Lida Arkmanian. Bobby Costikian’s magic Jedi sword. He gripped Tibor’s shoulders more tightly and started to say what he should have said all the way back on Cavanaugh Street, to berate and explain, to finally make his point—but he didn’t have the chance. There was a shout from the front of the crowd. When Gregor looked up, he saw Jack Carroll in full bat regalia in a cleared space right in front of the log mountain. He looked so tall, he must have been standing on something, but Gregor couldn’t see what. The smell of kerosene was now almost overpowering. Jack lifted his torch, swung it around and around his head, and threw it at the wood.
For a second, it seemed like nothing had happened, the maneuver had not worked. Then a thin stream of flame shot up, and another, and another. Torches began to fly through the air, arcing and landing like rockets. It took no time at all for critical mass to be reached and the whole thing to explode.
It wasn’t really an explosion, of course. It was only light and heat, so much light and heat, roaring at the sky. Above their heads, Lenore, who had been circling close to the jack-o’-lantern, widened her arc. His, Gregor corrected himself mentally, and then gave it up.
The bonfire was beautiful.
It could have been a star.
It could have been the sun.