The Book of Kills (12 page)

“Weren’t they all driven away?”

“The principal tribe. A few were left, half breeds, those who wandered in afterward and stayed.”

“So?”

“Approximately nineteen Indians were slain in a period of five years.”

Maudit had the gift of paying attention. Orion told him of the evidence he had gathered. He knew who the killer was.

“I think the statute of limitations must have run out. To say nothing of the killer.”

“This is a moral matter!” Orion regained his composure. “The story has never been told. It must be told now.”

“You say you have evidence.”

“When I produce it, will you write the story?”

“If it holds water.”

The bargain thus struck, Orion had another scotch and water. The consternation this revelation would cause Leone was only one of its charms. The main target remained the main target. This story of the serial killer, along with the doubts that could be raised about the legitimacy of the university’s title to its land, would have a cumulative impact. With Leone he had spoken of compensation. Of course the lawyer took him to mean money. Well, if there was money to be had, he would take it, but there were deeper, more satisfying compensations. Even in his elation, Orion did not think of what he was doing as revenge.

“I’VE SEEN THEM TOGETHER.
In the library. It’s all like it was before . . .”

“He has to use the library.”

“Marcia.” Scott Byers looked at her with tragic sympathy. Scott said he loved her; he pestered her to death, threatening to carry her off where Orion could never find them, but he left her cold. Scott was right about Orion. He walked all over her and she kept coming back for more. Of course she blamed it on Laverne.

The only reason she had told Orion about Scott Byers was that he insisted on telling her all about Laverne, the daughter of his professor, as if he were trying to say what he had put aside for her. He said all this with undisguised regret, as if she were to blame for thwarting his life. How could she keep quiet about Scott in such circumstances? Orion had feigned disinterest.

“He’s a graduate student too. In mathematics.”

Orion began to refer to him as X, the Unknown Quantity, as if he didn’t believe her. But the time he came into the Huddle and found her having a coffee with Scott during her break, he saw that X was real. Seeing them together, Orion came and stood beside the table with an odd expression on his face as he looked down at the seated Scott. Scott looking up at him as if
he were a waiter interrupting a conversation. Marcia could see that, objectively speaking, Scott was by far the better looking. When he got up to shake Orion’s hand he was a head taller. He left them, husband and wife, but Orion took a different chair from the one Scott had sat in.

“Who’s he?”

“I’ve told you about him.”

“The loser?”

“If you’re the winner.”

He laid his hand on hers, and emotion swept over her. Orion was not a demonstrative man, and she really didn’t ask much. The feel of his claiming hand on hers wiped away any remote feelings of regret she might have had talking again with Scott.

“I don’t want him bothering you.”

“Don’t worry.”

“Worry? No, I won’t worry.”

How swiftly he changed, one moment almost tender, the next threatening. Even so, the point she had wanted to make had been made, and by accident. He had Laverne in his past, she had Scott. She said to him then, “And I don’t want Laverne bothering you.”

“Who’s Laverne?” His hand returned to hers.

He had been curious about Scott. He looked him up and got to know him a bit. Marcia heard this from Scott himself. Scott thought Orion was nuts about the Indian stuff and maybe he was, but it had become an obsession with him. When he included Laverne in his big campaign, she asked Scott to come along. Orion seemed to think he had asked Scott to come. He had certainly filled his ear with his theories. During their infrequent conversations, she and Scott went into the student lounge, out of the Huddle. It would look worse if Orion came
upon them there, but he never did. It was there that Scott gave her the shock of her life.

“What else does he have?” Scott asked. They had been talking of the series of incidents that had been put in motion by Orion. Scott had not been involved in meeting the chancellor’s plane and at the time he had felt awful about it, but his candidacy orals of course took precedence. Marcia had the feeling now he was glad he hadn’t taken part.

“What do you mean?”

Scott looked at her, then looked away. “Sometimes I’ve wondered what I would have done with my life if I’d been cut out of the doctoral program.”

“But you passed your orals.”

He was looking directly at her now. “What is Orion going to do?”

“Do? What he’s always done.”

“Good God, hasn’t he told you?”

“Told me what?”

He had not imagined that it would fall to him to give her the news that her husband had been dropped from the graduate program in history. Orion was out. His academic career was finished. Marcia stared at Scott. Would he have made up such a thing? But she knew it was true. Little things Orion had done lately, things he’d said, now made sense as they had not before. She rose from her chair. Scott tried to take her hand, make her stay, but she wrenched free and ran back into the Huddle. She locked herself in the Ladies and stared at the featureless panel before her. It was blank as her mind, blank as her soul. Worse than Orion’s expulsion was the fact that he had kept it from her for a week.

She told the manager she was ill and had to go home. It was
all she could do not to quit then and there, walk away from the Huddle as Orion had to walk away from history. She put on her coat, pulled its hood over her head, and went outside, walking toward the library. The concourse of the library offered protection from the weather and did not divert her from her destination. She had been walking swiftly as if she were trying to escape from the shattering news that Scott had given her. Now suddenly she felt near collapse. She managed to get to one of the benches in the concourse, sliding across its smooth surface because of the way she had almost fallen on it. She sat there like an alien from another world while students went in and out of the automatic doors to the library.

She did not really belong here. She only worked here. She had been raised in the shadow of the university, it had haunted her life, but it was strange to her, she had little sense of its inner workings. Orion had talked endlessly about his graduate work, joined by fellow students, and Marcia had listened. What was clear was that Orion was engaged in an apprenticeship which would qualify him to spend his life as a college teacher. That was what drove him, and the others. His ambition defined their married life. Marcia had had no intimation that Orion was in trouble. He grumbled about everything, the professors, the chair, the director of graduate studies—but they all did that. It was the way she and the others complained about the management in the Huddle. Orion had been fired. But what exactly did it mean?

As if in a dream, she watched the automatic doors open and Orion come through them. He did not see her at first and nothing in his manner would have told her that Scott’s story was true. Then he saw her. He stopped as if he meant to disappear inside again, but then he came toward her.

“What are you doing here?”

“I don’t feel well. I’m going home.”

He considered this, frowning. He looked at his watch. She waited.

“Can you get home alone all right?”

“I just saw Scott Byers.”

His frown deepened. He looked around and seemed to decide this wasn’t the place to repeat his warning. He still had not commented on Scott’s presence on Saturday when they had watched the halftime interruption on television.

“He told me that you’ve been thrown out of the history program.”

Orion grabbed her elbow, pulled her to her feet, and began to propel her at a great rate toward the eastern exit. Students turned to look as they hurried past. His grip had slipped to her upper arm and he squeezed it painfully. At the door, he used her as a runner uses a blocker, slamming her body against the bar and through the door. Outside, he steered her to the marble ledge that surrounded the library and sat her on it.

“What the hell has Scott been telling you?”

“Is it true?”

“I told you to stay away from him.”

“Are you out of the graduate program?”

He struck her, with his open gloved hand, and her head snapped back. She felt the taste of blood in her mouth. He looked ferociously at her, as if he wanted to kill her, to silence her, to get rid of her questions. Marcia leapt to her feet and ran diagonally across the grass toward the bus stop. She did not even pause when she got to the road but went on to the parking lot, oblivious of the horns that blared at her. She did not care if she was run over. She didn’t care about anything. Her lip
had begun to swell as if she had been given novocaine, and the taste of blood persisted.

When she unlocked the front door she had little memory of how she had gotten there. She was sobbing and her face felt misshapen. Inside, she bolted the door and fell weeping on the living room couch, not even bothering to take off her coat. What Scott had told her meant nothing now. Orion had struck her, in public, had hustled her out of the library as if she were an intruder, and then had hit her there when anyone might have seen. She shriveled under the remembered humiliation. She made herself as small as possible and tried to think of nothing at all.

How much later the pounding on the front door began she could not have said. She sat up immediately, terrified. If he would hit her in public, what would he do to her here? She was on her feet, thinking of escaping out the back way. As she crept past the front door, she heard a voice. She stopped. Scott? She rushed to the door and opened it, then fell back. Orion came in and looked at her strangely. “What’s wrong with you?”

She moved away from him, cowering. Something almost like tenderness came into his face. He took her trembling and half hysterical in his arms.

“You hit me!”

He held her close, nodding his head. After a time, when she was calm, he eased her away and looked at her face. Slowly he lowered his lips to her swollen mouth.

TORSION, FROM THE NOTRE
Dame Foundation, the department of the administration responsible for amassing the giant endowment that had put the university far out in front of other Catholic institutions and among the top handful of all universities, was not a man inclined to rest on his laurels. Or at the moment on his backside. He paced the waiting room outside the chancellor’s office as if to emphasize the importance of this unscheduled appointment. The call he had received from Tulsa allowed for no delay. And then the chancellor was standing in the door of his office, breathing through his mouth, looking warily at Torsion.

“What is it, Xavier?”

Torsion lifted a finger to his lips to stop the chancellor from saying anything and together they went into his office. Torsion pulled the door shut.

“I have just received a call from Schippers. Tulsa,” he added quickly, lest the chancellor not remember. “Oil. Schippers Hall. A half-million-dollar pledge in the current drive to be doubled as our goal is neared to a maximum of five million dollars.”

“Of course I know who Schippers is.”

“He wishes to see you this afternoon.”

“But you said he called from Tulsa.”

“On the way to the airport to board his jet. He has business in Chicago and then will come on here.”

The chancellor remembered Schippers’s remark that the university really should have its own Lear jet. If only he had acted on that before the Hong Kong trip. A glint came into the chancellor’s eye. He would mention a university Lear when the kidnapping came up, as it surely must.

“I hope you assured him I was unharmed.”

Torsion looked at the nominal chief officer of the university in all its many divisions and departments and far-flung enterprises, its property in all the foreign cities where Notre Dame students spent a year abroad, its television and filming activities, the ever-growing marketing of apparel with the university’s logo. Notre Dame was a big business as well as a university, and the chancellor was in charge of it all. Up to a point. What CEO can know every detail of his organization? True, true, but Torsion considered the Notre Dame Foundation as the sine qua non of everything else. Without the generosity of donors . . . He did not want to think of it.