[Oxrun Station] The Bloodwind (3 page)

He was indeed amazing
—just like her performance
the night before.

She had been at the Chancellor Inn with Greg, Ste
phen
DiSelleone
and Janice
Reaster
. It was Janice's
twenty-ninth birthday, and the intention had been to
have a quiet celebration while Janice
—who was a lec
turer and art historian—bemoaned her imminent plunge
into the infamous thirties. Within an hour after they'd
ordered, however, as more of the faculty had wandered
in with spouses and dates, the party had blossomed to a
boisterous two dozen.
DiSelleone
took to the
piano,
Janice to her quavering voice, and what had once been
a grand farmhouse trembled for hours.

She had drunk too much, flirted too often, had eased
her car from the parking lot just after midnight so incredibly slowly she hadn't believed she was really
driving. It hadn't been a long ride
—one block north to
Steuben, right one block to Northland, and a time-
frozen skid as she wrenched the station wagon left.

The snow.
And the wind.
And someone . . .

A clumsy U-turn to remind her of her condition, and
a near-collision with
Stillworth's
tin garbage can to send her further into panic.

Amazing she had not slammed into a tree.

Amazing she'd been able to get into the driveway at
all, much less manage it so the car was facing back out
toward the street.

God takes care of little children and idiots, she thought
as she walked, and was halfway up the drive when
something about the car struck her as being wrong. It
was small, squared, all of a dove grey with a chrome luggage rack on top. And it was clean.
Perfectly clean.
She looked over her shoulder and saw only the tracks of
her boots in the light dusting that covered the blacktop.
There were no tire marks, no bird tracks, no indication
of any kind that anything mechanical or otherwise had come back here since the end of the flurry. Kelly and Abbey, she realized, must have parked their cars at the curb instead of in the garage, though she did not recall
seeing it when she'd come home last night. And Lin
coln had evidently decided a good wind would do his
work for him before the next fall broke from the clouds.

She shook her head once and sharply, dispelling an
image of a giant picking up the station wagon and
carrying it safely back here. That was foolish. She had
driven it here herself. And it had been snowing; it had
been windy, and she had sat here watching it while she'd tried to rein her nerves.

So it must have been the wind that had erased the
car's tracks. That only made sense. Nevertheless, the
unsettling sensation prodded her into walking around the vehicle slowly, checking the tires, brushing stray
flakes from the edges of the window . . . and stopped
when she saw the dent in the passenger door.

"God . . .
damn!"
She crouched and traced the con
cavity with a finger. The
surface hadn't been cracked,
nor were
there any signs of whatever it was she'd
struck: no pieces of bark, no chips of chrome or paint,
just a shallow indentation centered and oval. She straight
ened and jammed her hands on her hips. "I don't
believe
it. My god, I don't believe it."

She kicked at the door with the side of her foot and
boxed an ear with an open palm. Then she stalked back
to the driver's door and yanked it open, slid in with a
scowl. It took her several moments before she could
insert the key and fire the engine. Another full minute
before her hands stopped trembling in rage. It certainly
wasn't the first time she'd drunk too much at a party,
but she had never before been so befuddled that she'd endangered herself to the point of having an accident
without even knowing it.

She thought of the wind, of the grumbling, of the snow.

Her anger turned to Greg
—why had he permitted her
to drive home in her condition? She didn't recall him
emptying his glass so terribly often. So why the hell
hadn't he stopped her? Why hadn't he at least gone with
her, or forced her to walk home, or filled her with black
coffee before letting her out?

She held her breath, her cheeks puffed and her fin
gers strangling the beveled steering wheel.

Her eyes closed tightly and she directed herself to
review the drive home, from the moment she had backed
cautiously onto Chancellor Avenue to the moment she
had backed into the driveway. And her eyes snapped
open as she bit down hard on the inside of her cheek
—
she could not remember. Somewhere during the drive
she had struck something hard enough to damage her
car. But she could not remember it. Unless it was . . . the garbage can. Instead of narrowly missing it, she
must have sideswiped it. She must have. But the memory
of the impact was just not there.

Her shoulders slumped as a slithering cold not born
of the winter or the snow made its way into her stomach
and curled there, aching. It was the pressure, of course.
Bucking the system and fighting her memories and
battling her parents and fending off Greg
—it was the
pressure, just the pressure that had lashed down her
caution and allowed her all that drink.

And the consequence of that was a kind of selective amnesia induced by the liquor, and made firm by guilt.
She did not want to remember having the accident
because it was stupid and it was embarrassing and it
underscored something that might possibly become a
problem.

With no desire to remember . . . she didn't.

"Yes," she whispered, and
grinned
her relief.
"God,
what a fool!"

She shifted to a less rigid, more comfortable position,
glanced around the car, and scowled at the small peb
bles lying on the black mat on the passenger side. Figures, she thought; for all the work she put into
keeping the car clean, her stumbling around the last few
days had soured even mat. She thought to open the
other door and brush them out, changed her mind and
decided to do it later. After she came home and apolo
gized to
Stillworth
. She would offer to buy him a new garbage can, and he would be furious, as usual, but she would take the fury as part of her punishment. For now
she was thankful she hadn't found any blood.

SHORTLY after the turn of the twentieth century,
Ephraim
Hawksted
and a handful of his closest associ
ates decided the children of
Oxrun
Station should not
have to be denied a superior post-secondary education
simply because they happened to live in a remote sec
tion of the state where travel was difficult and expecta
tions high. He was also the guardian of a long-standing
grudge born the afternoon he'd been refused entrance to both Harvard and Yale (Princeton, of course, was out of
the question, being out of New England). Though he could
have attended any one of the smaller and no less presti
gious colleges in the Northeast, the gall of the twin
giants in forbidding him study soured him to the point
that he'd made his fortune without a degree. He regret
ted it. He felt incomplete. And despite any number of examples of similar men with similar successes, he felt
almost embarrassed there was no sheepskin on his wall.

He called in debts, then, favors owed and obligations
outstanding, and within twelve months had founded a
two-year community college which, for its time and
ambition, proved singularly more than adequate for the
training of dedicated teachers and shrewd mid-level
businessmen.

It wasn't until the end of the Second World War,
however, that it became evident to
Hawksted
that not
only was two years insufficient for the contemporary
world, but also the students themselves were increas
ingly reluctant to transfer to other institutions. The mark
of
Oxrun
had taken firm hold of one arm, while the
other was in the grip of their unquestionably remarkable
education.

On his deathbed the old man suggested two years
double to four, and when he finally died in 1953 no one
complained publicly when the school's name was
changed
—especially in light of the trust he had established to maintain the facilities independent of the va
garies of economic and enrollment flux. The only
conditions were two: that all the trustees
be
natives of the Station, and none of them be graduates of Harvard
or Yale.

The two-hundred-acre campus was two miles east of
the last street on Chancellor Avenue, a stretch of road
on the way to the depot bordered by thick woodland on
the right and barriers of the Station's estates on the left. Pat paid little more than automatic heed to the blur of
brown as she drove. She concentrated instead on the
slight damage to her station wagon, on the upcoming
meeting, on the work she needed to begin with her
classes. Her radio was tuned to a classical-music sta
tion, and the passages of strings, the lilt of muted
horns, lulled her, calmed her, and when she turned right
between a pair of massive stone pillars topped by flar
ing eagles she was almost ready to face it all without
shrieking. Her grip loosened on the wheel, her spine grew less rigid, and as the road canted upward to a
gentle incline she rolled down the window to catch the
sharp scent of pines that lined the narrow blacktop.

A
mile,
and
Hawksted
broke from the forest.

And there was so much ground-snow her eyes began
to water before she had time to squint.

The campus' main plant had been constructed on a
deep step in the hillside. The central building was a three-sided rectangle whose base was well over a hun
dred yards long, its quadrangle reaching to the edge of
the flatland and sweeping down through white-jacketed
hickory and birch, elm and evergreen to the forest
proper. It was of large-block brownstone with broad-
silled
casement windows, towers that split each of, the three sides into thirds and added a fourth story double-peaked and imposing. At the school's founding all the
rooms had been used for classes; now they were dorms
—
front-to-back suites with a large room facing the quad
and two bedrooms in back that held two students each. From the central tower east the rooms were occupied by
women; west was reserved for
Hawksted's
men. There
was also a belowground level marked by half-windows that never opened and a smothering view of sun-blotting
shrubs. This was the home of several professorial of
fices, and classrooms for courses in business, religion,
philosophy and logic.

Aside from the main structure, and connected to it by
underground tunnels well-lighted and walnut-paneled,
were four additional buildings raised just after the school
had begun its four-year program. On the left as Pat
approached were two immense brick-and-turreted squares
three stores high, one behind the other. The nearer
housed English, History, and eleven foreign languages;
the one in back belonged to all the laboratory sciences. On the right beyond the western arm was the Student
Union behind, the refurbished auditorium and Fine Arts
directly in front. Upslope of the Union was a glass-and-marble library so architecturally uninspired it made the
rest of the facilities seem almost grand.

A chapel on the hillside overlooking the campus.
White stone and Gothic, cloisters and thick oak.

The playing fields to the east, behind a wall of spruce, and used by the high school when
Hawksted's 
teams
 
were visiting. There was also a mammoth gym
nasium, cold and generally damp, an unspoken reminder
 
of where the school's sympathies lay.

Pat hesitated as the road finally came to an end.
 
Immediately to her left was a large circular parking lot
 
already 
jammed.
 There was another alongside Fine Arts,
 
but to use it would deny her a walk across campus. She
 
thought of the dent and the jibes it would produce from
 
those who'd seen her drinking, and spent the next ten
 
minutes creeping between rows before she found a proper
 
space.

A moment, then, to pat the dashboard for luck, and
 
she was out and walking briskly, up a dozen stone steps
 
to the quad's inner sidewalk.

A pause.
 
She turned and looked back toward the
 
woodland, caught the wink of a windshield far down on
 
Chancellor Avenue. 
Frowned.
 Rubbed the back of her
 
neck absently and turned back to face the quad.

And smiled as if she'd just returned from an extended
 
vacation, tucking her handbag against her chest and
 
hugging herself warmly.
 
It was quiet here, but of a far
 
different degree than she felt in her home. A few win
dows were open and she could hear radios muttering; students were on the Walk, laughing, talking, scooping
 
snow from the buried lawn and pelting it at friends. 
From the chapel she could hear the carillon in one of its morning concerts, the melody almost solemn, the bells sounding medieval. 
A quiet.
 
A peace.
 
A pleasant jolt to 
the nerves and a goading of the mind without opening a
 
book or taking a lecture.

In more ways than she found it comfortable to admit
 
it was the perfect hideaway; a liberal arts school and one
 
of the last where knowledge could be pursued for the pure sake of that knowledge, where the outside world
 
was admitted only by invitation. With less than nine
 
hundred students living in or commuting, it had devel
oped a fierce pride in its independence that reached far
 
beyond graduation. The faculty, too, was loyal, though neither blind nor hidebound, and the few individuals in
 
both camps who found the intensity stifling seldom 
lasted longer than their first winter term.

Suddenly she heard a voice above her shout "Fire!"
 
She continued walking, though a blush reached her 
cheeks and her chin ducked toward her chest. It was a
 
young man's shout, and a signal that a woman was on
 
the Long Walk, a woman much older than the women who attended. Then another voice grumbled, "Hell, it's
 only a 
prof
," and Pat lifted her head to laugh at the pricking of her ego.

A beautiful day, she thought, in spite of the begin
ning, and with a mocking backward wave she passed
 
under the archway in the far right corner.

Stopped in her tracks when the Fine Arts building
 
caught her.

The Student Union was two stories and unadorned;
 
Fine Arts, however, was a triplet of English and Sci
ence: dark brick with marble trim, a turret at each high
 
corner, its most distinctive feature a white stone mar
quee curved around the front and supported by squared
 
pillars. A series of double glass doors opened onto a
 
crescent lobby done in soft reds and 
golds
, centered by
 
a chandelier now unlighted and teardrop. Directly across
 
the black-and-white-checkered floor was the college's auditorium, giving Pat a constant impression of a squat,
 
fat cylinder rammed down the building's throat. It was
 
the home of film festivals, meetings of every 
descrip
tion college
 
and village, the school's vaunted amateur
 
theater, and Ford Danvers' drama classes that seemed to
 
her more often than not to be somewhat clumsy exer
cises in primal group therapy.

To the left and right of the bulging wine wall were staircases that wound to the second and third floors; and
 
against the far left wall a warren of postboxes behind
 
narrow glass eyes. She checked her own apprehensively, released a quick-held breath when she saw it 
was empty. No pink slip. No memo. That had to be a
 good sign.

She grinned self-consciously at herself as she 
un
wrapped
 
her muffler, hurried to the near stairwell and
 
began the climb. Her boots cracked loudly on the metal-
tipped stone, the slot-windows at the landing laddering
 
the floor. The woolen cap was swept off and jammed
 
into a pocket. Gloves next, and her topcoat unbuttoned. She shivered in spite of the warmth; she held the brass railing though there was plenty of light. She could hear muffled voices, a distant laugh, something falling. And
 
when she reached the second floor she stopped and listened harder.

She thought she heard her name. She looked back down, frowning, wondering, 
decided
 it was nerves.

Coffee, she prescribed, and rushed along the corridor
 
that wound round the auditorium's wall, heavy pine 
doors inserted there and chain-locked. Around the out
side were the lecture halls, offices, and in the back a handful of studios that hadn't been relegated to the
 uppermost story.

She didn't like the silence. It was too expectant. It
 
seemed to be waiting.

She wished she had brought Homer; if nothing else 
he would make her seem properly foolish.

Her own
 
office was at the 
lefthand
 front corner, 
frosted glass on the door and her name typed off-center
 
on a three-by-five card taped to the dark frame. She
 
unlocked it, walked in, and before taking off her coat
 
plugged in a coffee pot she kept filled and ready. Then
 
she stripped off her coat and hung it on a wall peg.
 
Thought for a second before slumping into a worn 
swivel chair behind her glass-topped desk.
 
The wall
 
opposite was shelved to the ceiling, books and papers
 
and sketch pads in profusion; the wall behind was cov
ered with photographs of sculptures she'd taken around
 
the country, a few tiny oils from her own students and Greg's, sketches of projects she intended to begin when
ever she had the time, and a blank space in the center
 where Lauren's picture had been tacked until she'd taken it down last summer.

She sighed wearily, blinked slowly, with a push of 
her left hand shoved open the window that overlooked the slope. The cold tightened her arm as it drifted over
 
the radiator, vanquished the must that had invaded the
 room.