Archer - The Chill Part 4

She was a good-looking woman in spite of this. Her face was finely chiseled. The front of her blouse curved out over her desk like a spinnaker going downwind.

"Come in," she said with a severity that I was getting used to. "What are you waiting for?"

Her fine eyes had me hypnotized. Looking into them was like looking into the beautiful core of an iceberg, all green ice and cold blazing light.

"Sit down," she said. "What is your problem?"

I told her who I was and why I was there.

"But we have no Dolly McGee or Dolly Kincaid on campus."

"She must be using a third name, then. I know she's a student here. She has a job driving for Dean Bradshaw's mother." I showed her my photograph.

"But this is Dorothy Smith. Why would she register with us under a false name?"

"That's what her husband would like to know."

"Is this her husband in the picture with her?"

"Yes."

"He appears to be a nice enough boy."

"Apparently she didn't think so."

"I wonder why." Her eyes were looking past me, and I felt cheated. "As a matter of fact, I don't see how she _could_ register under a false name, unless she came to us with forged credentials." She rose abruptly. "Excuse me for a minute, Mr. Archer."

She went into the next room, where filing cabinets stood like upended metal coffins, and came back with a folder which she opened on her desk. There wasn't much in it.

"I see," she said more or less to herself. "She's been admitted provisionally. There's a note here to the effect that her transcript is on the way."

"How long is provisional admission good for?"

"Until the end of September." She consulted her desk calendar. "That gives her nine days to come up with a transcript. But she'll have to come up with an explanation rather sooner. We don't look with favor on this sort of deception. And I had the impression that she was a straightforward girl." Her mouth turned down at the corners.

"You know her personally, Dean Sutherland?"

"I make a point of contacting all the new girls. I went out of my way to be useful to Miss or Mrs. Smith-Kincaid. In fact I helped to get her a part-time job in the library."

"And the job with old Mrs. Bradshaw?"

She nodded. "She heard that there was an opening there, and I recommended her." She looked at her watch. "She may be over there now."

"She isn't. I just came from Mrs. Bradshaw's. Your Dean lives pretty high on the hog, by the way. I thought academic salaries were too low."

"They are. Dean Bradshaw comes from a wealthy old family. What was his mother's reaction to this?" She made an impatient gesture which somehow included me.

"She seemed to take it in stride. She's a smart old woman."

"I'm glad you found her so," she said, as if she had had other kinds of experience with Mrs. Bradshaw. "Well, I suppose rd better see if Mrs. Smith-Kincaid is in the library."

"I could go over there and ask."

"I think not. I had better talk to her first, and try to find out what's going on in her little head."

"I didn't want to make trouble for her."

"Of course not, and you didn't. The trouble is and was there. You merely uncovered it. I'm grateful to you for that."

"Could your grat.i.tude," I said carefully, "possibly take the form of letting me talk to her first?"

"I'm afraid not."

"I've had a lot of experience getting the facts out of people." It was the wrong thing to say. Her mouth turned down at the corners again. Her bosom changed from a promise to a threat.

"I've had experience, too, a good many years of it, and I am a trained counselor. If you'll be good enough to wait outside, I'm going to try and phone her at the library." She flung a last shaft as I went out: "And please don't try to intercept her on the way here."

"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 gettogethers 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 gla.s.ses, 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 s.p.a.ce 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 s.p.a.ce is merely theoretical. It doesn't affect actual _movement_ across s.p.a.ce."

"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 gla.s.s 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 gla.s.ses 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 pa.s.sions 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 s.h.i.+ning haircut frowned at the closed door. Then she gave me an appraising glance, as if she was looking for a subst.i.tute 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 G.o.dot? It makes a difference."

"For Lefty G.o.dot. 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 pa.s.s 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 Burd.i.c.k 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 s.h.i.+fted 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 G.o.dot."

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, pa.s.sing 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 m.u.f.fled.

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 compet.i.tive 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 circ.u.mstances. I very much regret the necessity of your coming here to our campus."