Ultimate Thriller Box Set - Crouch Blake - Страница 84
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Crossing the room, I stopped at the door. There was no peephole, so I asked, “Who is it?”
“Melody Terrence.” I opened the door to a striking longhaired brunette, far too young and pretty to be an innkeeper.
“Hi there,” I said.
“You guys settling in all right?” she asked.
“We sure are.”
“Well, I just came to let you know that we’re serving dinner in thirty minutes, if you’re interested. Danny forgot to put the sign up again.”
“Thanks for the invitation.”
“Will you be joining us? There’s a cozy dining room downstairs, and Danny’s been smoking a bird all day. We’ll have fresh vegetables, homemade biscuits —”
“It sounds wonderful,” I said. “We’ll see you there.”
“Excellent.” She smiled and walked down the hall to the next room. I closed the door.
Walter had placed a stack of shirts into a drawer, and, slamming it, he looked up at me, smoldering. “You call yourself a crime writer? Think we should go down and meet all the guests? What if someone recognizes you, Andy? If it ever got out that Orson, the Heart Surgeon” — he whispered the infamous title — “was your brother, and lived in Woodside, someone could put two and two together. They might remember that you were here in Vermont around the same time David Parker disappeared. And, you know, that’s all it’d take to put the FBI on our ass.” Walter moved into the dormer. His back turned, he looked into the woods, dark now that the sun had set. If the moon was up, it had yet to rise above the mountains and spread its meek light.
I moved across the room to my friend.
“Walter,” I said, but he didn’t turn around. “What? You scared?”
“We can’t fuck anything up,” he said. “Not one thing.”
Staring out into the Vermont night, the foreign darkness lodged a splinter of homesickness in my heart. A child again, I acknowledged the nostalgic pain, and then it passed.
“Thank you for coming,” I said, my hand on his shoulder. “You didn’t have to do this, Walter. I’m never gonna forget it.”
He turned back and faced me. “It has nothing to do with you,” he said. “Nothing.”
On a cold, cloudy Thursday, at eleven o’clock in the morning, I parked Walter’s Cadillac in downtown Woodside and set out at a keen pace for the campus. Two-and three-story buildings lined both sides of the street, which was quite busy for a small town. People filled the sidewalks, sitting on benches, gliding along on Roller-blades, on gazing into storefront windows. Most were students, and they vivified the town, easily identifiable by their backpacks and the unbridled, merry apathy in their faces.
I passed a drugstore, the Woodside General Store, the Valley Cafe, several apparel stores, and a coffee shop called Beans n’ Bagels, in front of which, canopied tables cluttered the sidewalk. It was the liveliest store by far, brimming with caffeine junkies and quirky music. The rich smell of roasted coffee beans mingled with the air outside the open vestibule. I would’ve bought myself a cup had I not downed two at the Woodside Inn, where Walter still slept in our room, drained from the previous day of driving.
The buildings ended, but the sidewalk continued from the downtown toward the wooded campus. I could now see the mountains that surrounded the town, the highest slopes already white with early snow. I wondered how many students had skipped classes for a day of skiing. A steely wind made my eyes water and I zipped my leather jacket all the way up to my chin and dug my hands into the warm pockets.
A brick walkway veered off from the main sidewalk toward a group of brick buildings. Heading up the walkway, I reached a hexagonal white gazebo within several minutes. It appeared to stand in the exact center of campus, as most of the buildings, each not more than forty yards away, surrounded it. Plaques had been nailed to each side of the gazebo, engraved with WOODSIDE COLLEGE, EST. 1800.”
I passed beneath the portico of a stone-columned building, the largest of the ten or so in the vicinity, and walked up the steps. A great clock surmounted the roof, surrounded by scaffolding, its black hands stuck suspiciously on 4:20.
Inside, the building was dim and stale. The floor was constructed of burnished marble, and the walls of the foyer, wooden and intricately carved, were adorned with large portraits of former deans, founders, and dead professors. A life-size statue stood in the center of the circular room, staring vacuously at me. I didn’t stop to see who he was.
Glass double doors led into the office of the university registrar. I caught my reflection as I pushed them open — my hair and recent beard now brown, a pair of wire-framed spectacles on the bridge of my nose. In jeans and wearing a faded denim shirt under my jacket, I looked nothing like myself.
In the bright windowless room, there were several open cubicles, each holding a desk and portioned off from the cubicle next to it. I walked to the closest one, where a woman typed fervidly on a computer. She looked up from the screen and smiled as I approached.
“May I help you?” she asked. I sat down in the chair before her desk. The constant pecking of fingers on keyboards would’ve driven me insane.
“I need a campus map, a class directory for this semester, and a campus phone book.”
She opened a filing cabinet and withdrew a booklet and a blue pamphlet.
“Here’s a map and here’s the phone book,” she said, setting the items on her tidy desk. “I’ll have to get a class directory from the closet.” She walked across the room, mumbling something to another secretary as she passed. I opened the phone book. It was only fifty pages thick, with the faculty listings in the first ten pages and those of the two thousand students in the remaining forty. I thumbed through it to the P’s.
I skipped over the entries for Page and Paine, then spotted “Parker, David L.” The information given beneath the name was sparse — only an office number — Gerard 209 — and a corresponding phone number.
The woman returned and handed me a directory of classes. “Here you are, sir.”
“Thanks. Are the students in class today?” I asked, rising.
She shook her head doubtfully. “They’re supposed to be,” she said, “but this is the first cold snap of the season, so a fair number probably played hooky to go skiing.”
I thanked her again, then walked out of the office and into the foyer, where I passed three college girls standing in a circle beside the statue, whispering to each other. Exiting the building, I walked through snow flurries to the gazebo and sat down on the bench that circumnavigated the interior of the structure. First, I unfolded the map and located Gerard Hall. I could see it from where I sat, a two-story building that displayed the same charmingly decrepit brick as the others.
With hot breath, I warmed my hands, then opened the directory of classes, a thick booklet, its first ten pages crammed with mountains of information regarding registering for classes and buying books. I found an alphabetical listing of the classes and their schedules, and flipping through anthropology, biology, communications, English, and French, stopped finally at the roster of history classes for fall ’96. There was a full page of history courses, and I skimmed down the list until I saw his name:
Hist 089 History of Rome LEC 3.0 35
26229 001 TR 11:00AM-12:15PM HD 107 Parker, D.L.
It appeared to be the only course he taught, and, glancing at my watch, I realized that it was currently in session.
According to the building abbreviation key, HD stood for Howard Hall. I found it on the blue map. Just twenty yards away, it was one of the closest buildings to the gazebo. An apprehensive knocking started in my chest as I looked down the walkway leading to its entrance.
Before I could dissuade myself, I was walking down the steps, away from the gazebo, heading toward Howard Hall. To the left of the registrar’s building, it made up the eastern wall of the quasi courtyard surrounding the gazebo. Two students smoked on the steps, and I passed them and touched the door, thinking, What if this isn’t him? Then I’ll go to prison, and Walter and his family will die.
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