The Chill (5 page)

“I wouldn’t dream of it, Miss Sutherland.”

“Dean Sutherland, if you please.”

I went and read the bulletin board beside the information booth. The jolly promises of student activities, dances and get-togethers and poetry clubs and breakfasts where French was spoken, only saddened me. It was partly because my own attempt at college hadn’t worked out, partly because I’d just put the kibosh on Dolly’s.

A girl wearing horn-rimmed glasses, and a big young fellow in a varsity sweater drifted in from outside and leaned against the wall. She was explaining something to him, something about Achilles and the tortoise. Achilles was chasing the tortoise, it seemed, but according to Zeno he would never catch it. The space between them was divisible into an infinite number of parts; therefore it would take Achilles an infinite period
of time to traverse it. By that time the tortoise would be somewhere else.

The young man nodded. “I see that.”

“But it isn’t so,” the girl cried. “The infinite divisibility of space is merely theoretical. It doesn’t affect actual
movement
across space.”

“I don’t get it, Heidi.”

“Of course you do. Imagine yourself on the football field. You’re on the twenty-yard line and there’s a tortoise crawling away from you toward the thirty-yard line.”

I stopped listening. Dolly was coming up the outside steps toward the glass door, a dark-haired girl in a plaid skirt and a cardigan. She leaned on the door for a moment before she pushed it open. She seemed to have gone to pieces to some extent since Fargo had taken her picture. Her skin was sallow, her hair not recently brushed. Her dark uncertain glance slid over me without appearing to take me in.

She stopped short before she reached Dean Sutherland’s office. Turning in a sudden movement, she started for the front door. She stopped again, between me and the two philosophers, and stood considering. I was struck by her faintly sullen beauty, her eyes dark and blind with thought. She turned around once more and trudged back along the hallway to meet her fate.

The office door closed behind her. I strolled past it after a while and heard the murmur of female voices inside, but nothing intelligible. From Dean Bradshaw’s office across the hall the heads of departments emerged in a body. In spite of their glasses and their foreheads and their scholars’ stoops, they looked a little like schoolboys let out for recess.

A woman with a short razorblade haircut came into the building and drew all their eyes. Her ash-blonde hair shone against the deep tan of her face. She attached herself to a man standing by himself in the doorway of the Dean’s office.

He seemed less interested in her than she was in him. His
good looks were rather gentle and melancholy, the kind that excite maternal passions in women. Though his brown wavy hair was graying at the temples, he looked rather like a college boy who twenty years after graduation glanced up from his books and found himself middle-aged.

Dean Sutherland opened the door of her office and made a sign to him. “Can you spare me a minute, Dr. Bradshaw? Something serious has come up.” She was pale and grim, like a reluctant executioner.

He excused himself. The two Deans shut themselves up with Dolly. The woman with the short and shining haircut frowned at the closed door. Then she gave me an appraising glance, as if she was looking for a substitute for Bradshaw. She had a promising mouth and good legs and a restless predatory air. Her clothes had style.

“Looking for someone?” she said.

“Just waiting.”

“For Lefty or for Godot? It makes a difference.”

“For Lefty Godot. The pitcher.”

“The pitcher in the rye?”

“He prefers bourbon.”

“So do I,” she said. “You sound like an anti-intellectual to me, Mr.—”

“Archer. Didn’t I pass the test?”

“It depends on who does the grading.”

“I’ve been thinking maybe I ought to go back to school. You make it seem attractive, and besides I feel so out of things when my intellectual friends are talking about Jack Kerouac and Eugene Burdick and other great writers, and I can’t read. Seriously, if I were thinking of going back to college, would you recommend this place?”

She gave me another of her appraising looks. “Not for you, Mr. Archer. I think you’d feel more at home in some larger urban university, like Berkeley or Chicago. I went to Chicago myself. This college presents quite a contrast.”

“In what way?”

“Innumerable ways. The quotient of sophistication here is very low, for one thing. This used to be a denominational college, and the moral atmosphere is still in Victorian stays.” As if to demonstrate that she was not, she shifted her pelvis. “They tell me when Dylan Thomas visited here—but perhaps we’d better not go into that.
De mortuis nil nisi bonum.”

“Do you teach Latin?”

“No, I have small Latin and less Greek. I try to teach modern languages. My name is Helen Haggerty, by the way. As I was saying, I wouldn’t really recommend Pacific Point to you. The standards are improving every year, but there’s still a great deal of dead wood around. You can see some of it from here.”

She cast a sardonic glance toward the entrance, where five or six of her fellow professors were conducting a post-mortem of their conference with the Dean.

“That was Dean Bradshaw you were talking to, wasn’t it?”

“Yes. Is he the one you want to see?”

“Among others.”

“Don’t be put off by his rather forbidding exterior. He’s a fine scholar—the only Harvard doctor on the faculty—and he can advise you better than I ever could. But tell me honestly, are you really serious about going back to college? Aren’t you kidding me a little?”

“Maybe a little.”

“You could kid me more effectively over a drink. And I could use a drink, preferably bourbon.”

“It’s a handsome offer.” And a sudden one, I thought. “Give me a rain check, will you? Right now I have to wait for Lefty Godot.”

She looked more disappointed than she had any right to be. We parted on fairly good, mutually suspicious terms.

The fatal door I was watching opened at last. Dolly backed out thanking the two Deans effusively, and practically curtsying.
But I saw when she turned around and headed for the entrance that her face was white and set.

I went after her, feeling a little foolish. The situation reminded me of a girl I used to follow home from Junior High. I never did work up enough nerve to ask her for the privilege of carrying her books. But I began to identify Dolly with that unattainable girl whose name I couldn’t even remember now.

She hurried along the mall that bisected the campus, and started up the steps of the library building. I caught up with her.

“Mrs. Kincaid?”

She stopped as though I had shot her. I took her arm instinctively. She flung away my hand, and opened her mouth as if to call out for help. No sound came out. The other students around us, passing on the wide mall or chatting on the steps, paid no attention to her silent scream.

“I’d like very much to talk to you, Mrs. Kincaid.”

She pushed her hair back, so forcefully that one of her eyes slanted up and gave her a Eurasian look. “Who are you?”

“A friend of your husband’s. You’ve given Alex a bad three weeks.”

“I suppose I have,” she said, as if she had only just thought of it.

“You must have had a bad three weeks yourself, if you’re fond of him at all. Are you?”

“Am I what?” She seemed to be slightly dazed.

“Fond of Alex.”

“I don’t know. I haven’t had time to think about it. I don’t wish to discuss it, with you or anyone. Are you really a friend of Alex’s?”

“I think I can claim to be. He doesn’t understand what you’re doing to him. He’s a pretty sad young man.”

“No doubt he caught it from me. Spreading ruin is my specialty.”

“It doesn’t have to be. Why don’t you call it off, whatever
you’re doing, and give it another try with Alex? He’s waiting for you here in town right now.”

“He can wait till doomsday, I’m not going back to him.”

Her young voice was surprisingly firm, almost harsh. There was something about her eyes I didn’t like. They were wide and dry and fixed, eyes which had forgotten how to cry.

“Did Alex hurt you in some way?”

“He wouldn’t hurt a fly. You know that, if you’re really a friend of his. He’s a nice harmless boy, and
I
don’t want to hurt
him.”
She added with conscious drama: “Tell him to congratulate himself on his narrow escape.”

“Is that the only message you have for your husband?”

“He isn’t my husband, not really. Tell him to get an annulment. Tell him I’m not ready to settle down. Tell him I’ve decided to finish my education.”

She made it sound like a solitary trip to the moon, one-way.

I went back to the Administration Building. The imitation flagstone pavement of the mall was flat and smooth, but I had the feeling that I was walking knee-deep in gopher holes. Dean Sutherland’s door was closed and, when I knocked, her “Come in” was delayed and rather muffled.

Dean Bradshaw was still with her, looking more than ever like a college student on whom light frost had fallen during the night.

She was flushed, and her eyes were bright emerald green. “This is Mr. Archer, Brad, the detective I told you about.”

He gave my hand a fiercely competitive grip. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, sir. Actually,” he said with an attempt at a smile, “it’s rather a mixed pleasure under the circumstances. I very much regret the necessity of your coming here to our campus.”

“The kind of work I do has to be done,” I said a little defensively. “Mrs. Kincaid ran out on her husband, and some explanation is due him. Did she give any to you?”

Dean Sutherland put on her grim face. “She’s not returning
to him. She found out something on their wedding night so dreadful—”

Bradshaw raised his hand. “Wait a minute, Laura. The facts she divulged to you are in the nature of professional confidences. We certainly don’t want this chap running back to her husband with them. The poor girl is frightened enough as it is.”

“Frightened of her husband? I find that hard to believe,” I said.

“She didn’t pour out her heart to you,” Laura Sutherland cried warmly. “Why do you suppose the poor child used a fake name? She was mortally afraid that he would track her down.”

“You’re being melodramatic, you know.” Bradshaw’s tone was indulgent. “The boy can’t be as bad as all that.”

“You didn’t hear her, Brad. She told me things, as woman to woman, that I haven’t even told you, and I don’t intend to.”

I said: “Perhaps she was lying.”

“She most assuredly was not! I know the truth when I hear it And my advice to you is to go back to that husband of hers, wherever he is, and tell him that you haven’t been able to find her. She’ll be safer and happier if you do.”

“She seems to be safe enough. She certainly isn’t happy. I talked to her outside for a minute.”

Bradshaw tilted his head in my direction. “What did she say?”

“Nothing sensational. She made no accusations against Kincaid. In fact she blamed herself for the breakup. She says she wants to go on with her education.”

“Good.”

“Are you going to let her stay here?”

Bradshaw nodded. “We’ve decided to overlook her little deception. We believe in giving young people a certain amount of leeway, so long as it doesn’t impinge on the rights of others. She can stay, at least for the present, and continue to use her
pseudonym if she likes.” He added with dry academic humor: “‘A rose by any other name,’ you know.”

“She’s going to have her transcripts sent to us right away,” Dean Sutherland said. “Apparently she’s had two years of junior college and a semester at the university.”

“What’s she planning to study here?”

“Dolly is majoring in psychology. According to Professor Haggerty, she has a flair for it.”

“How would Professor Haggerty know that?”

“She’s Dolly’s academic counselor. Apparently Dolly is deeply interested in criminal and abnormal psychology.”

For some reason I thought of Chuck Begley’s bearded head, with eyes opaque as a statue’s. “When you were talking with Dolly, did she say anything about a man named Begley?”

“Begley?” They looked at each other and then at me. “Who,” she asked, “is Begley?”

“It’s possible he’s her father. At any rate he had something to do with her leaving her husband. Incidentally I wouldn’t put too much stock in her husband’s Asiatic perversions or whatever it was she accused him of. He’s a clean boy, and he respects her.”

“You’re entitled to your opinion,” Laura Sutherland said, as though I wasn’t. “But please don’t act on it precipitately. Dolly is a sensitive young woman, and something has happened to shake her very deeply. You’ll be doing them both a service by keeping them apart.”

“I agree,” Bradshaw said solemnly.

“The trouble is, I’m being paid to bring them together. But I’ll think about it, and talk it over with Alex.”

I
N THE PARKING LOT
behind the building Professor Helen Haggerty was sitting at the wheel of the new black Thunderbird convertible. She had put the top down and parked it beside my car, as if for contrast. The late afternoon sunlight slanting across the foothills glinted on her hair and eyes and teeth. “Hello again.”

“Hello again.”

I said. “Are you waiting for me?”

“Only if you’re left-handed.”

“I’m ambidextrous.”

“You would be. You threw me a bit of a curve just now.”

“I did?”

“I know who you are.” She patted a folded newspaper on the leather seat beside her. The visible headline said: “Mrs. Perrine Acquitted.” Helen Haggerty said: “I think it’s very exciting. The paper credits you with getting her off. But it’s not quite clear how you did it.”

“I simply told the truth, and evidently the jury believed me. At the time the alleged larceny was committed here in Pacific Point, I had Mrs. Perrine under close surveillance in Oakland.”

“What for? Another larceny?”

“It wouldn’t be fair to say.”