Hardscrabble Road by Jane Haddam Page A

She was tall and thin, which helped.
     She had good bones in her face, and thick darkish-blond hair that didn’t look as if it were going to be in need of Rogaine
     anytime soon. It was just that, working at the university, there was a tendency to let yourself go, to skip the makeup,to pull your hair back in something sensible instead of having it cut and colored properly. At the moment, her dirty-blond
     hair was more than a little gray. She was fifty-two years old, and although she didn’t quite look it— thank God for whatever
     genetic blessing she’d gotten that had made her face so slow to wrinkle—she felt it more and more often these days. She wasn’t
     tired in the physical sense. She had always been very physically vigorous, and she was still. She was exhausted to the point
     of collapse in the psychological sense, and that was—that was—. She couldn’t think of what that was. She had noun disease.
     The names of things escaped her. She only wished that the names of people would escape her, but she had no such luck.
    On the car radio, turned up far too high for her to concentrate on the road, The Drew Harrigan Show was just going off the
     air. The host wasn’t Drew Harrigan this time, because he was blessedly in rehab. The replacement was a jokey-sounding Southerner
     who had nothing like Drew Harrigan’s sense of comic timing, or delivery. He also had nothing like Drew Harrigan’s scope of
     content in commentary, which was nothing if not a relief. Alison had listened to the whole last hour of the program, and there
     hadn’t been a word about her in it. There hadn’t been a word about her in the rest of the program, either, any of the three
     other hours of it, because if there had been, somebody would have shown up at her office door to tell her about it.
    She peered through the windshield at the road ahead of her, full of cars moving not very fast under streetlights that needed
     to be brighter. She did not look down at the piles of folders and papers next to her on the front passenger seat. Some of
     them were student papers, assignments to correct from the courses she taught in Intellectual History of the High Middle Ages
     and Christian Theology and Jewish Scholarship in the Period of the Crusades. Some of them were forms and proposals related
     to the attempt to establish Medieval Studies as an interdisciplinary minor. Some of them were just housekeeping: forms to
     sign for her advisees, forms to file about failures and excessive absences, forms to file for the faculty health plan and
     the faculty Senate Committee on the Curriculum and the university search committee for a new dean of the College of Arts and
     Sciences. The ones she didn’t want to look at were the ones related to her Drew Harrigan problem.
    Out on the street, traffic lights went from red to green without much happening. Policemen parked at the curb in squad cars
     that were like taxis with their off-duty lights on, not available for business. Homeless people walked carefully close to
     the walls of buildings, like nuns in medieval convents, taught that walking in the open was a sign of arrogance and pride.
     Alison wondered just how cold it was out there. Minus something, she was sure, because she’d been hearing about it all day.
     She wondered how many of the homeless people she saw would still be alive in the morning, and thenshe wondered at herself, and all the other drivers on this road, including the policemen in their parked car. They all knew
     what happened in weather like this. They all knew they were looking at people who were scheduled to die, just as surely as
     anybody had ever been scheduled to die in the death chamber. Alison was sure that a good number of these people would write
     letters of protest, or even show up and carry signs, if someone was about to be executed. Out here they did nothing except
     turn off whatever part of their brain actually saw these people they were looking at. They were the