[Oxrun Station] The Bloodwind (6 page)

Janice squealed; Greg grunted and grabbed for Pat's
leg to give it a squeeze that almost made her wince.
And Pat, still biting her lip, could only close her eyes.

"That," Constable continued, oblivious to the grow
ing commotion, "three new departments be created com
mencing with the fall term: Theater Arts, Music, and
the Fine Arts. Dr. Danvers will chair the first, Dr.
DiSelleone
the second, and Dr. Shavers the third. It is further directed that the implementation of this directive
be done with the understanding ..."

Pat did not hear the rest. In spite of her resolution not to show weakness, not to break down and bawl if
she had won, there was an abrupt surge of moisture at
her eyes and a burning behind them, and it took several clumsy stabs with her fingers before she was able to see
clearly again. Could see Greg beaming as if he'd just
been chosen to show at the Met, Janice weeping openly
into a lavender handkerchief, the others astonished enough to begin whispering and reaching across the table to shake her and Greg's hands before the dean
had completed the Trustees' resolution. Whispering,
shaking hands, and glancing fearfully at Danvers' still
vacant seat.
Then talking.
Loudly.
Chairs shifted and
the table nudged.
The room growing suddenly brighter,
almost too bright to bear.

She felt her cheeks aching, her jaw the same, but she
kept enough presence of mind to accept Constable's
offered hand and thank him without babbling. The dean nodded once and slowly swept his papers back into the
folder. He was not the most diplomatic of men
nor
the
most beloved on campus, but he was sufficiently sensi
tive to know when he had become superfluous, and
when the control he had over the meeting was no longer
in his hands.

He
rose
, then, after a perfunctory adjournment no one listened to, smiled grandly as if the entire affair
had been his idea, and had taken two steps around the table when the door slammed open, smashing into the
wall and jarring one of the framed prints loose. It fell to
the floor, the glass shattering on impact.

A shocked silence; only the dying wind.

Pat was on her feet; Greg half-risen.

Danvers, his
houndstooth
jacket open, his blue silk
tie yanked away from his collar, glared directly at her.
His lips were quivering, and a prominent tic half-closed
his right eye. It was Pat's first confused impression the
man had been drinking.

"Dr. Danvers!" Constable said, his voice cracking in admonition.

Danvers ignored him. He lurched over the threshold
and grabbed hold of the back of his chair.

"Danvers, explain yourself at once!"

He swayed, looked to the dean as if he didn't see
him, looked back to Pat and jabbed a finger at her.
"Thought you'd lost, didn't you?" he demanded, his
customary whine laced now with venom. "Thought you'd
bloody lost, am I right, Shavers?"

Pat shook her head in bewilderment, looking first to
Constable, then to Greg. "Ford, I don't understand you. I . . . what are you
—"

The man's face was deep red with rage, and he cut
her off with a vicious chop at the air, his other hand
leaving the chair and reaching back for the doorframe.
"You know damned well what I mean."

"I don't, Ford," she said, suddenly afraid, aware
that Stephen and Greg were moving slowly toward him
around the outside of the room. "I haven't the slightest
—"

"You thought you'd
lost,
so you . . ." He looked
around helplessly, enraged momentum slowing him, but
not calming. "Well, you won't get away with it, Shav
ers, not by half."

"Get away with what?" Constable said. "What are
you accusing this woman of, Danvers?"

"You'll see, you'll see," Danvers sputtered and backed
into the corridor. "Just come outside, the lot of you.
Just come outside and see what the precious little lady
has done to her betters."

"Greg?" She reached for him and he took her hand.

"Now!"
Danvers demanded. "Right now, so you can talk to the police."

It
was the silence more than the cold that caused tremors to skitter along Pat's arms, that snapped her
head in small jerks from one face to
another, that
made
her wish someone would scream.

They had followed Danvers
timorously,
half afraid he would turn on them with some sort of weapon, yet too curious to remain behind in the safety of the building.
They'd taken the stairs to the lobby
—
moonbright
and
glittering and snaked across with shadows—and out the
side door to the parking lot. There wasn't enough room
for all of them on the narrow stoop, so several had
stepped down to the pavement, several more to the wide
concrete apron that surrounded the blacktop.

And no one spoke.

The frantic whispering was choked off, Constable's
irritated grunts smothered, and Danvers had suddenly
reined in his imprecations and accusations, his arm-
flailing melodramatics that called down retribution from
the gods of his nightmares. They stood in small groups and kept their own counsel, pale images of themselves
under the gooseneck lampposts that rose from each
corner of the lot. The snow a foot deep on the ground
seemed imbedded with mica, the stars distant and harsh.
There was muffled sound from the Union, but no one listened. They watched, instead, as two patrol cars
flared their
rooflights
and turned faces purple, the snow
bloodstained, the air far colder than it ought to have been.

The parking lot was small, holding at most two dozen cars nose-in around its perimeter. Now it was virtually
empty, and on the far side, alone and in half-shadow, was Danvers' vehicle. An old one, simply black, far
beyond its prime though all of them knew it had been
lovingly treated. Now it had changed, and as soon as
Pat saw what had been done she pressed a fist to her
mouth and turned her face to Greg's arm as though
denying the sight, denying the presence she felt lurking
in the trees.

There was very little left that had not been destroyed.
Windshield and windows had been smashed inward,
shards and powdered glass glittering on the
seatcovers
;
the hood and trunk had been battered and crumpled, the doors dented so deeply the paint had cracked and flaked off to the ground; the grille was twisted from the center outward, headlamps and taillights shattered to dust, and
the hubcaps had been wrenched off and folded in half,
tossed into the
snowbank
brown with slush. All the tires
were flat, though there was no sign of slashing. The
only sound a faint dripping from the radiator's ruins.

DiSelleone
spoke first: "Jesus . . . Christ." It was
less than a prayer, more a horrified whisper.

Danvers had moved to the center of the lot, arms
limp at his sides, his oversized head lowered in defeat.
A broad-shouldered patrolman
—Pat recognized him as
Fred Borg—had left the warmth of his vehicle and was
talking with the professor quietly. A small crowd of students, drawn by the spinning lights, had started to
gather on the pavement, in the snow, but they too were
silent, were staring, their faces only segments of shad
ows as they watched and they waited.

Pat had lost all track of the time. She only knew she
was outside without a coat, without her gloves, and her hands were beginning to tremble violently at her waist. Yet she made no move to return inside. Like the others,
she waited, listening to speculations and avoiding the
few glances that stole her way and retreated. Then
Danvers turned slowly, heavily, Borg at his side, and
they walked to the patrol car, where they were joined by Dean Constable.

And again a long wait, punctuated by coughing, a
sneeze, a nervous giggle. Then Borg reached into his front seat and pulled something out. Pat stifled a gasp
and grabbed for Greg's arm. It was a large wooden mallet.
Her mallet.
And embedded in its face were sparkling eyes of glass.

Danvers looked straight at her, and Borg walked over
to talk.

They waited in the second-floor corridor while Borg sat with Danvers and the dean in the conference room.
One by one they were summoned in for their state
ments, entering quickly and leaving the same way be
cause no one could say anything except that Pat had not
eaten with them during the recess.

She took the chair at the foot of the table. Borg, his
cap pushed back on his head, his pencil almost invisible
in the grip of his right hand, sat beside her, nodding,
half-apologizing in the tone of his questions.

"I was in my office," she said, staring at her hands
clasped on the table. "I'd dozed off. I wasn't hungry.
Good god, Fred, you don't think
—"

"Don't be silly, no," he said quietly, glancing over
to Danvers, who was sitting in the far corner and ignor
ing the ministrations of three of his cronies. "It'd take
you all day to do something like that, and the way I see
it, there was only about thirty, forty minutes for it to get
done. Nope. I don't see it."

Her spine grew less rigid. "What
do
you see, Fred?"

"I see a gang of them, that's what I see. Five or six, maybe, I don't know. There is the mallet, though. It is
yours, right?"

Her initials had been carved into the underside of the
head. She had no choice; she nodded. "But the studio
wasn't locked. Anyone could have gone in and picked it
up."

"Yep."
He scribbled something in his notepad, looked
again at Danvers. "He don't like you very much, Dr.
Shavers."

"I know. He hasn't liked me since the first day I walked in here."

"Easy to see why he blamed you, though." He
flipped a page over.
"Cutting his department in three.
I
can see it.''

She said nothing.

"Sleeping, huh?"

"
Damnit
, Fred ..."

"Yeah, I know. And I suppose you didn't hear anything?"

"No. I was ... I was having nightmares." The
smile was weak.
"Nerves.
I didn't hear about the new
department until after the break was over."

"Congratulations."

"Thank you."

"You can go now. Stockton wants any more from you, he'll call."

She was the last, she was numb, but she wanted to
talk to Danvers, to say something to him if she could.
He looked so deflated, so beaten in the corner, that she
couldn't hold his accusation against him. Greg, how
ever, deterred her with a touch to her arm, handed her
coat and hat and white cashmere muffler. He was right,
and she knew it as she followed him downstairs. Dan
vers would hear nothing now but the sound of his own
grief, the beat of his own bewilderment. Nevertheless,
she hated leaving him there with sycophants and phonies.

And she hated it twenty minutes later when she and Gr
eg, Stephen and Janice, took their places in a Mari
ner Cove booth.

The Cove
—the left half a restaurant catering mostly
to families, the right half a lounge catering to quiet
drinkers—sat back from Chancellor Avenue to face the
length of Centre Street, the community's business ave
nue. The streetlamps were harsh without foliage to mute
them
,
shoplights
either dark or etched into cold plate
glass as the hour crawled toward nine. There was little
traffic now, and what pedestrians strayed outside moved swiftly, hunched as if goaded by a stiff
stormwind
. The
police station was on the corner diagonal, the Town Hall two lots to the Cove's left.

And for the Cove, red brick and white trim in imita
tion of Monticello, it was a slow night, a January night, when the bartender in red velvet and the waitresses in
nautical black wanted nothing more than to go home and warm their feet by a fire.

Pat sympathized, thinking as she stared at her gin-and-
tonic that the way she felt now she'd never be warm again.

They were in a booth as far from the entrance as they
could find. The bar was in the center, encircled by round tables and captain's chairs padded with black leather; the walls were a deep wine textured to the
touch, the booths themselves partially obscured by drap
eries of fish netting. Mahogany, ebony, squared posts
and carriage lamps, on each of the tables fat candles in red chimneys. The restaurant had closed down an hour
ago, and there was nothing left now but the clinking of
glass and ice, the soft footfalls of a waitress, a whisper
or two, no music at all.

Greg sat beside her on the outside, Stephen and Janice opposite. They had downed their first drinks
without bothering for taste, had ordered a second round
and were sipping them slowly.

"I don't believe it," Pat said finally, shaking her head.

"You saw what you saw," Stephen said. His black
hair was cropped close to his skull, his eyes
deepset
,
his
cheeks hollow. Most of his female students were in love with him, most of them jealous of the way he looked at
Janice and smiled.

"No, I don't mean that," she said. "I mean, why me? My god, he must have known already what had been decided, for crying out loud. I can tell that now from the way he acted at the beginning. But why . . . why blame me?"

Stephen considered,
then
sketched a circle in the air
around his temple. Janice poked him hard. "Don't be silly, Steve. It isn't fair to him."

He frowned. "Isn't fair to him?
To Danvers?
Jesus."
And he looked to Greg for support against illogic and
women. "Look, Pat, the man doesn't like you, pure and simple. You beat him out of his precious little fiefdom, with"
—he grinned immodestly—"another
chunk gone he probably didn't expect. Plus, you're a
woman. You're taller than he is by a head—and stop
smiling, it's true. You know he's a refugee from the
nineteenth century. God, his forebears practically set
tled this place in the year zero."

"All right," she said reluctantly. "I can see all that, but I don't have to like it, okay?" Stephen nodded, Janice shrugged. "But what I still want to know is
—who? Who would do a thing like that?"

"Oh, come on," Greg said, just short of impatiently,
as if the culprit was too obvious to mention. "Who else
could it be, huh? Ford may be one of the best in his
field
—and let's give him that, the poor dope—but he's certainly not going to win the Mr. Chips Award. He's
been tough on us, but he's wicked with his so-called
actors and actresses, and I'm really surprised they haven't
had a crack at him before."

"Tell me about it," Stephen said, pushing back into
the corner of the booth. "In spite of my extreme beauty,
believe it or not there are kids who don't much like me,
either."

"I believe it," Janice muttered, and took an elbow
lightly in her ribs.

"And Pat, too," the musician continued.

"Who?
Me?" She smiled, but didn't feel it.

"Sure," said Greg, staring at a point over Janice's
head. "You should hear . . ."He stopped and shrugged.

"Hear what?" she said, curiosity overcoming a grow
ing distaste for the subject. "Come on, you started to say something. What is it?"

"Well . . . your Three Musketeers aren't exactly
camping on your doorstep these past couple of months,
are they?"

She blinked her astonishment. He couldn't be talking
about Oliver and the others, but the expression on his
face told her he was. "No," she said in swift denial. "No."

"The show," Greg reminded her gently.

"But I've told them a hundred times how long it takes to arrange something like that!"

"Pat, you and I understand these things. But think back for a minute. Try to remember what it was like when you first started, when you were so sure you'd take the world by storm every gallery owner in New
York would be falling all over themselves trying to sign
you on. And let's face it,
m'dear
,
Fallchurch
and Har
riet especially aren't the most stable people in the world.
And they're kids! My god, we all keep forgetting that. I
do it, too. We see these eager young students with all
that talent, we talk to them, we learn about them, and we forget they haven't a clue about what the world's
like. Kids, no matter how old they are, no matter how
much they've traveled on Mommy and Daddy's money."