Hardscrabble Road by Jane Haddam Page B

same way with the lines
     of people at the soup kitchen doors and out in front of the Goodwill before it opened. She was, too. It was all well and good
     to label people bleeding heart liberals, but she didn’t think anybody whose heart was bleeding could be so… oblivious to what
     was going on out here.
    There was a little break in the gridlock and she inched the car forward, through the intersection, before coming to a near
     stop again. Whoever had programmed the traffic lights in this part of town either hadn’t known what he was doing or had done
     it so long ago that the traffic patterns he had worked to control had no relations to the ones that existed now. She had only
     another two blocks to go before she got to her turn, and then another block and a half before she got to her building. It
     wasn’t as if she had to go far. It was just that, trapped in the car like this, she found it too hard not to think.
    She was, she thought, the last person at the university who should be having a Drew Harrigan problem. Jig Tyler, yes, of course—as
     far as she was concerned, Jig Tyler should be having a problem with all sane people, the ones who weren’t living in a fantasy
     of global revolution resulting in a golden age led by Plato’s philosopher-kings. She’d once spent five minutes contemplating
     what life would be like under the rule of Jig’s philosopher-kings, and the vision had been so acute she’d wanted to lie down
     on the couch and do nothing but watch Miss Marple movies for a month. Of course, there weren’t that many Miss Marple movies.
     She would have had to watch the same ones over and over again. There were only so many times she could stand to contemplate
     Margaret Rutherford’s marriage of convenience to Stringer Davis. For some reason she had never been able to understand, she
     was unable to see a large, fat woman with a small, thin man without imagining them naked and together, as if there was a glitch
     in her brain that needed to work out the logistics of something that was none of her business. Most of the time she found
     it impossible to imagine people together. When people had dragged her along to porn movies—or erotica, if they were the expensive
     kind—she’d just gone unfocused when those parts came on the screen, and ended up not remembering anything at all.
    I’m insane
, she thought now.
I’m truly and irrevocably insane
. The light at the next intersection was suddenly green, and
     the traffic was suddenlysparse. She sailed through both—okay, with the second one bleeding through the yellow into the red a little, but she couldn’t
     help herself—and turned onto her street. On the side streets like this, there were not so many homeless people, or not so
     many lights illuminating them.
    There was a space at the curb, the perfect space for a Mini. There was an SUV in the space behind the open one and an SUV
     in the space in front, and both of them were over their limits. Alison pulled in between them and asked herself if she was
     absolutely sure that the automobile insurance she had would replace the car if one of the SUVs ran over it trying to get out
     in the morning. The reason she shouldn’t be having a Drew Harrigan problem was simple. She wasn’t in the Women’s Studies Department,
     which he hated. She didn’t even like the Women’s Studies Department, and the people who taught there didn’t like her. She
     wasn’t a socialist. She wasn’t a Communist. She wasn’t even a Democrat. She always registered Independent, which in her case
     meant she had no idea what side she was on, and didn’t want to think about it. She wasn’t any of the things Drew Harrigan
     hated except, maybe, a professor in a field he probably thought was “useless,” meaning medieval literature. It made no sense
     to her that she would have ended up in the mess she had ended up in, and all because of a vendetta that had no foundation
     in anything she could think of,