“That means he’s either important, or afraid of his wife. Who else besides the Prof?”
Her eyes filled with tears. “Oh, Carmine, really! We are all feeling the strain! All hoping and praying that if this – this monster strikes again, he won’t implicate the Hug. Morale is so low that the research is suffering dreadfully. Chandra and Satsuma are muttering about moving away, and Chandra in particular is our bright, light hope. Eustace has had another focal seizure – even the Prof cheered up. It’s Nobel Prize material.”
“One up for the Hug,” said Carmine dryly. His face changed, he dropped to his knees in front of her chair and took her hands. “You’re holding something back, and it’s about you. Tell me.”
She twisted away. “Why should I be troubled?” she asked.
“Because you’re driving to and from work. I see the Corvette in the Hug parking lot – I drive past quite often these days.”
“Oh, that! It’s getting too cold to walk.”
“That’s not what my little bird says about you.”
She got to her feet, walked across to the window. “It’s just silly. Imaginitis.”
“What’s imaginitis?” he asked, coming to stand beside her.
He radiated warmth; she had noticed it before, and found it curiously comforting. “Oh, well -” she said, stopped, then hurried on as if to get the words out before she could regret them. “I was being followed home each evening.”
He didn’t laugh, though he didn’t tense either. “How do you know? Did you see someone?”
“No, no one. That’s the frightening part. I’d hear the rustle of footsteps through the dead leaves, and they’d stop when I stopped, but not quite quickly enough. Yet – no one!”
“Spooky, huh?”
“Yes.”
He sighed, put his arm around her and led her to an easy chair, gave her another cognac. “You’re not the kind to panic, and I doubt it’s imaginitis. However, I don’t think it’s the Monster. Lock up that grunty pig of a car. My mother’s got an old Merc she doesn’t use, you can have that. No temptation to the local hoods, and maybe your stalker will get the message.”
“I couldn’t impose like that.”
“It’s no imposition. Come on, I’ll follow you home and see you in your door. The Merc will be there in the morning.”
“In England,” she said as he walked her to the Corvette, “a Merc would be a Mercedes-Benz.”
“Here,” he said, opening her door, “it’s a Mercury. You’ve had two cognacs and you’ve got a police lieutenant on your tail, so drive carefully.”
He was so kind, so generous. Desdemona eased the bright red sports car away from the curb the moment Carmine was in his Ford, and drove home conscious of the fact that her fear had vanished. Was that all it took? A strong man on one’s side?
He supervised the locking up of the Corvette, then escorted her to the front door.
“I’ll be all right now,” she said, and held out her hand.
“Oh, no, I’ll check upstairs too.”
“It’s pretty messy,” she said, commencing to climb the stairs.
But the mess that met her eyes wasn’t what she had meant. Her work box was on the floor, its contents scattered far and wide, and her new piece of embroidery, a priest’s chasuble, was draped across her chair slashed to ribbons.
Desdemona reeled, was steadied. “My work, my beautiful work!” she whispered. “He didn’t go this far before.”
“You mean he’s been in here before?”
“Yes, at least twice. He moved my work, but he didn’t ruin it. Oh, Carmine!”
“Here, sit down.” He pushed her into another chair and went to the phone. “Mike?” he asked somone. “Delmonico. I need two men to watch a witness. Yesterday, understand?”
His calm was unimpaired, but he prowled all the way around the work chair without touching anything, then sat on the arm of her chair. “It’s an unusual hobby,” he said then, casually.
“I love it.”
“So it’s a heartbreak to see this. Were you working on it when he visited earlier?”
“No, I was doing a sideboard cloth for Chuck Ponsonby. Very elegant, but not the same kind of thing as this. I gave it to him a week ago. He was delighted.”
He said nothing further until the flashing lights of a squad car reflected through the front windows, then patted her shoulder and left, apparently to give the men instructions.
“There’s one guy just outside your own door at the top here, and another at the top of the back stairs. You’ll be safe,” he said when he returned. “I’ll drop off the Merc first thing, but you won’t be able to go straight in to work. Leave everything exactly as it is until my technicians get here in the morning to see if our destructive friend left any clues behind.”
“He did the first time,” she said.
“What?” he asked sharply, and she knew he was asking what clue, not simply exclaiming. Carmine on the job didn’t waste time.
“A tiny bunch of short black hairs.”
His face went suddenly expressionless. “I see.” Then he was gone, as if he didn’t know what to say to leave her.
Desdemona went to bed, though not to sleep.
Part Two
December 1965
Chapter 7
Wednesday, December 1st, 1965
The students tumbled out of Travis High in hundreds, some to walk short distances to their homes in the Hollow, some to board dozens of school buses lined up along Twentieth and around the corners into Paine. In the old days they would simply have gone to any bus serving their particular destination, but ever since the advent of the Connecticut Monster each student was given a particular bus, emblazoned by a number. The driver was provided with a list of names and was under orders not to move until every student was aboard. So careful had the administration of Travis become that an absent student’s name was erased from the day’s list before it was given to the driver. Going to school was not such a problem; what everyone feared was going home.
Travis was the biggest public high school in Holloman, its intake spreading from the Hollow to the northern outskirts of the city on this western side. The majority of the students were black, but not by many, and while there were occasional racial problems there, the bulk of the students mixed and mingled according to their personal affinities. So while the Black Brigade had its supporters at Travis High, various churches and societies did too, as well as those individuals who trod a midline of reasonable grades and no trouble. Any teacher on the staff would have said that hormones caused more problems than race.
Though it was the Catholic high schools under strictest police attention, Travis hadn’t been neglected. When Francine Murray, a sixteen-year-old sophomore who lived out in the Valley, failed to board her bus, its driver climbed out and ran to the Holloman squad car parked on the sidewalk near the front gates. Within moments a controlled chaos reigned; buses were pulled over as uniformed men asked if Francine Murray was a passenger, others asked for Francine’s friends to come forward, and Carmine Delmonico was racing to Travis High with Corey and Abe.
Not that he forgot the Hug. Before the Ford took off he gave Marciano instructions to make sure that everyone at the Hug was present and accounted for. “I know we can’t afford to send a car there, so call Miss Dupre and tell her from me that I want every last one of them tagged down to visits to the john. You can trust her, Danny, but don’t tell her more than you have to.”
Having searched the vast and rambling school from attics to gymnasiums, the teachers were huddled in the yard while Derek Daiman, the highly respected black principal, paced up and down. Squad cars were still arriving as other schools were pronounced free of missing students, their contingents of cops dispersing to question everybody they could see, search Travis all over again, round up milling students dying of curiosity.