The Headmaster's Wife

by Jane Haddam

  Eventually, he’d made a few phone calls. He didn’t know anybody in the Windsor Police. He hadn’t even known there was a town called Windsor in Massachusetts until Mark called. He did know many people in the Boston Police, and Boston was close enough, the city of which Windsor was a suburb. Everything was Webs these days, cities most of all. He was old enough to remember when the suburbs were an embarrassment that nobody from the city ever wanted to admit to having come from.

  The man he finally found in Boston was named Walter Cray. He’d trained for the Bureau once about twenty years ago—Gregor would have been a very new special agent and no longer at Quantico—and then decided it wasn’t for him. He’d come back to Boston and joined the police. He’d kept in touch with two of the members of his training class, and one of those was a good friend of Gregor’s from their days on kidnapping detail.

  “Definitely a suicide,” Walter Cray had said, when he’d had a chance to look into the situation and call back. “I’ve had an earful of the forsenics all morning. No chance of anything but suicide—”

  “There’s always a chance, though, isn’t there?” Gregor interrupted.

  “If you want to think Agatha Christie, yes. If you want to think real life, no. Kid hung himself from one of those sprinkler pipes. In his dorm room at, let’s see, Hayes House. He stood on a drafting stool. You know what those are? Like bar stools, and almost as tall, but a little more sturdy.”

  “Yes, I think I do know what those are. The stool was in the room when they found him?”

  “Kicked away to the side and in the room,” Walter said. “It was the roommate who found him. My guy in Windsor says the roommate is a mess, drugged to the gills in all likelihood, but of course they can’t go barging in there and accusing him of it. Don’t ever think that money doesn’t matter, even in the drug war. It matters in more ways than you’d think.”

  “I know,” Gregor said. “What about the note?”

  There was a pause on the other end of the line. “Okay,” Walter said, “that was the peculiar thing. There wasn’t any note.”

  “It’s not all that peculiar for there not to be a note, surely,” Gregor said. “Lots of suicides don’t leave notes.”

  “True enough,” Walter said, “but then you’ve got to look at the room. It was tossed, no matter what those people say about how messy the boys were.”

  “Tossed?”

  “Ripped to shreds. And the window was left open.”

  “In below-zero temperatures?” Gregor interrupted.

  “Right,” Walter said, “and the room was freezing.”

  Gregor threw it away. As if someone was trying to disguise a time of death, which doesn’t make sense with a suicide.

  “I know,” Walter said, “it’s one of the things the guys in Windsor aren’t happy about. They’re also not happy about the location. You know anything about Windsor Academy?”

  “No.” Gregor’s knowledge of upscale private schools was limited to the things he’d heard in the Bureau and from Bennis, and he couldn’t keep them straight in his head for any amount of time longer than necessary to make a polite noise in a conversation that bored him.

  “Windsor used to be a girls’ school,” Walter said. “Then, around 1975, it went coed; and when it did it rewrote its mission somewhat. Not that it hadn’t always been sort of liberal, you understand.”

  “What do you mean by ‘liberal’? Do you mean the rules were relaxed?”

  “Well, that too. No, I mean liberal politically. And not just liberal. You’ve heard all those stories about private schools where the alumni refused to speak to Franklin Roosevelt because he was a traitor to his class. There are schools that make a habit of being a traitor to their class. Windsor was always one of them: in favor of the New Deal; in favor of the welfare state.”

  “That’s a positive thing, surely,” Gregor said. “What would you want instead?”

  “Not saying I’d want anything,” Walter said. “I’m just trying to put you in the picture. After 1975, Windsor went not just liberal but right out on the limb of limousine radical. Not as radical as some place like Putney, you know, where the kids run a farm and do manual labor because it’s good for them—”

  “At thirty thousand dollars a year?”

  “Yeah, I know. That’s what I thought. Anyway, not that radical, but radical anyway. They’ve got a Socialist Club at Windsor. They’ve even got a Liberal Club, They don’t have a conservative club, and you’re not going to find anybody admitting to voting Republican. They’re big on ‘diversity’ in the most obvious modern sense of the word. They go out of their way to attract African-American and Hispanic students—”

  “But there’s nothing wrong with that either,” Gregor said. “None of this sounds in the least bit negative—”

  “It’s because I can’t explain it very well,” Walter said.

  “It’s, I don’t know, very—fake, in a way. It’s hard to put a finger on it. Are you intending to go up there?”

  “I was thinking of it, yes.”

  “You’ll see in a day or two. It’s impossible not to see. It’s an attitude. It’s like a miasma almost.”

  “You’ve been there?”

  “We took our daughter up to look at the place,” Walter said. “She ended up at Exeter with a nice scholarship. We’re very proud of her.”

  “You must be.”

  “She hated Windsor on sight,” Walter said, “and I don’t blame her. It’s all so—forced. As if everything’s intentional. It’s all so self-consciously on the right side. I’m making a hash of this. The thing is, about the kid who died.”

  “Michael Feyre.” Gregor had written it down.

  “Right, Michael Feyre,” Walter said. “He’s the kind of kid Windsor goes looking for, except that he’s white, which means they never would have had him if he hadn’t had money. I’m making even more of a hash of this. Michael Feyre was born to a single mother in some godforsaken small town in northwest Connecticut, one of those women who get pregnant for the first time at fifteen and work in convenience stores. Windsor likes poor kids, but Windsor prefers their poor kids to be minorities. You know what I mean? It was one of the things my daughter picked up on and didn’t like.”

  “But they accepted this Michael Feyre,” Gregor said.

  “Not as a poor kid,” Walter said, “that’s the intriguing thing. Michael Feyre’s mother is named Delilah. She goes by ‘Dee.’ She’s famous in New England. She was all over the papers here because she won the lottery. And not just the lottery. She won a nine-figure Powerball jackpot.”

  “Nine figures?”

  “Something like three hundred million dollars,” Walter said. “I don’t remember the exact amount. She worked in this convenience store. One night she got off work and bought six Powerball tickets—and kazam. Trailer park to anything she wants in half an hour. She went on Jay Leno, I think.”

  “My God,” Gregor said.

  “Well, people do win the damn things,” Walter said. “And she did the kind of thing people do when they win, I guess, including sending the kids to private schools. I don’t know why she sent Michael to Windsor, but she did. And now he’s dead. And she’s not much interested in fading into the sunset.”

  “She thinks he was murdered?” Gregor said.

  “Not exactly, from what I can figure out,” Walter said, “but she thinks something is screwy up there and that there are things they aren’t telling her, and she’s probably right. Those schools have a near mania about lawsuits, and she’s in a position to launch a good one and never feel the pain. And that’s why the Windsor cops are so nervous. On the one side, they’ve got the school, with serious old money and serious power behind it. On the other side, they’ve got Dee Feyre, who’s hopping mad and possessed of huge gobs of money, plus pretty damned savvy about how to use the papers to get her story out. The school has managed to keep the lid on it for the past week, but that’s not going to last long. I’ll bet you anything that by Saturd
ay, the story’s going to be all over everywhere, and then the shit is really going to hit the fan. You going to go up there and make it worse?”

  “Maybe,” Gregor said.

  “You want a contact in the Windsor Police?”

  “I don’t want them to feel that I’m stepping on their toes,” Gregor said. “I’m not going up there to interfere with their investigation. I happen to know the family of Michael Feyre’s roommate.”

  “DeAvecca,” Walter said, laughing. “I forgot about that. The roommate is Elizabeth Toliver’s son and Jimmy Card’s stepson. More shit-hits-the-fan material.”

  “I agree. Mark’s distraught.”

  “I can bet. And high as a kite, if my guy is to be believed. Listen, let me give you Brian Sheehy’s number. He’s chief of police. He won’t mind your coming up. Hell, he just might welcome it. It wouldn’t hurt him any to have somebody to take the heat off when the going gets rough, and it most definitely is going to get rough,”

  “I’m not going up to investigate,” Gregor said.

  “He won’t care. I’ll give him a call and tell him you’re coming. I mean it, he’ll think you’re a godsend. They’re all holding their breath down there. It’s only a matter of time.”

  “Right,” Gregor said. Then he thought to wonder what it was that Walter Cray wasn’t telling him.

  2

  It wasn’t only Walter Cray. It was Mark DeAvecca who wasn’t telling him things, although he thought that with Mark it might be the result of the confusion that seemed to have taken over his entire personality since the last time Gregor had seen him. He tried to discuss that with Bennis, too, but she never got interested. He would start and she would interrupt him with questions about the kind of trivialities she’d never bothered to think about before. Did they have enough toilet paper on hand or should she pick some up when she and Donna went out to the Costco warehouse store on Saturday? Did he think it made sense to switch the can shelf in the pantry with the jar shelf? Which did he prefer, the blue stoneware plates or the white china ones? It was like living with a lobotomized Martha Stewart before the indictment. Bennis talked about vegetables. She talked about cutlery. She talked about the drapes in the living room. She even managed to deliver a somewhat spirited monologue on the relative merits of paper versus cloth napkins. Other than that, she was oddly disconnected, as if all the things that would ordinarily matter to her—the people on Cavanaugh Street, the news, Gregor himself—had been wiped clean from her mind. It was eerie living with her. It was as if she had become a ghost.

  “I thought she’d be glad I’m taking an interest in Mark’s problem,” he told Fr. Tibor Kasparian at the train station ashe was getting ready to board the Amtrak to Boston. “The day before yesterday, she was telling me she wanted me to go back to work. And here I am. Not exactly back to work, but at least doing something of the sort of thing she had in mind. And she still isn’t speaking to me.”

  “I thought you said she was speaking to you, Krekor,” Tibor said, “only not in a very good way.”

  “It’s like living with a robot,” Gregor said. “I don’t know what she expects of me. I don’t know what she wants anymore.”

  “She wants you to say something about that remark about marriage,” Tibor said.

  Gregor brushed it off. “She didn’t exactly leap for joy at it the first time I said it. I’d say that this relationship was just on the way out. It happens. Except that two days ago, it was fine. And I can’t see Bennis ending a relationship in less than thirty thousand words.”

  “Your train is here, Krekor,” Tibor said.

  His train was there. It had been there all along. He got onto it with his head still mired in confusion. He couldn’t remember how long it had been since he’d started a case with this little interest in its outcome. Except that it wasn’t a case, he reminded himself. He was only going to Massachusetts because there was no danger it would ever become a case. He stowed his suitcase above his head in first class and thought about just how badly it was packed. Bennis usually packed for him. This time, she had barely glanced at the case lying open on the bed. The clothes had piled up in it without order or organization. Gregor had no idea how women got so many clothes into suitcases. When he packed, the damned things filled up before he had half of what he needed. He thought he might have been trying to look pitiful in the bedroom while he worked, but he wasn’t sure. Looking pitiful was not something he was good at. He was too tall, and he had spent too many years cultivating an aura of competence and decisiveness. Bennis, at any rate, did not seem to notice. She went in and out, back and forth, and ten minutes before he was due to leave, she left herself and wentdown the street to he knew not where. Maybe she had gone to Donna’s so that she wouldn’t be around to be forced to kiss him good-bye.

  Gregor had brought the material he’d amassed on Windsor Academy to look over on his trip, but he couldn’t make himself concentrate on it. He had a nice little pile, both printed off the Web site and cadged from a friend of Bennis’s in Philadelphia who ran the guidance department of a private elementary school. It was a good thing he’d been introduced to the woman already. Bennis didn’t mention her when he mentioned Windsor Academy, and she didn’t offer to make a call and grease the wheels when Gregor mentioned her himself. Come to think of it, Gregor thought, Bennis herself probably knew something about Windsor Academy and half its Board of Trustees. She hadn’t mentioned that either.

  New England went by in a blur of ice and dangerously weighted overhead wires. He had never really liked Connecticut, and he liked Massachusetts even less. They were both far too enraptured by their revolutionary past and far too little interested in being revolutionary. He tried to read through the copies of the Windsor Academy Chronicles Bennis’s friend had given him. They were copies of the kind of thing colleges sent to alumni to keep their interest up in contributing to their alma mater. The stories were all laudatory and studiously noncontroversial. The back of each issue was taken up by year-by-year class reports that all read as if their writers chirped when they spoke. Gregor got similar magazines from the University of Pennsylvania four times a year. He wondered what it was about class notes that nobody could ever tell the truth in them. They would announce that old Sheldon DeWitt had died suddenly in his home at the much-too-early age of fifty-four. They would not mention that Sheldon had drunk himself to death after being released from federal prison after serving a ten-year term for a stock-fraud scheme that had destroyed the venerable brokerage house where he’d worked for two decades. It was even odder when you realized that Sheldon’s story had been all over thenews when it happened and the subject of a true-crime book and a made-for-television movie.

  Gregor Demarkian didn’t recognize any of the names in the class notes section of the Windsor Academy Chronicles. He didn’t know if that was because he really didn’t know them or because he couldn’t focus. He found himself wondering if Bennis would have known them. There were times when he thought Bennis knew everybody on the planet, or at least everybody who might at any time have had any reason to be called “prominent.” Maybe he was just thinking about Bennis, with an excuse or without one. He had been thinking about Bennis more often than not now for over ten years. He was sure that, although relationships changed, this one would not change like this, this fast, over just one remark he’d made about marriage—or something. He was, he realized, completely unsteady. He wanted to get out his cell phone and call Bennis now, wherever she was, and demand an explanation. He didn’t do it because he was afraid she’d give him one.

  When he got to Boston, he had two choices. He could take public transportation—first the MTA, then a trolley out to Windsor—or he could take a cab, which would cost an arm and a leg. He decided on the cab. He didn’t care about the money, and he was too old to leap nimbly on and off sub-way cars. He stood in the cab line less than a minute before he found somebody willing to go out to the suburbs; and as soon as he got settled in the backseat, he got out his cell phone and
called, not Bennis—although his fingers almost did it all by themselves—but Mark DeAvecca. The first number he called gave him an answering machine. He checked his book again and called the second one, which turned out to be Mark’s cell phone. It rang and rang. Gregor checked his watch. Maybe he was in class. It was only two o’clock. He hung up and checked the book again. Mark had a pager number. It was incredible the way these kids were wired up these days. Gregor searched around his pockets until he found his own pager and sent up a silent prayer that

  Mark would be able to receive actual messages on his. Then he typed in:

  HAVE ARRIVED, ON WAY TO WINDSOR INN and sent the thing.

  That is, he thought he sent it. He was never entirely sure. This was something else he needed Bennis for. Bennis understood the machines. Tibor understood the machines. Gregor was awash in a sea of his own ignorance. If the time ever came for a truly paperless society, he would be dead meat, lost and homeless without a clue as to how to work his own pager.

  Boston became the Boston suburbs. It barely mattered, at first, since city block blended into city block without change. Then the landscape got greener, and the houses got farther apart, and the architecture became clapboard and Federalist instead of brick and generic. There were signs everywhere marking historic sites. He got out the Windsor Academy Chronicles again, but they made no more sense to him now than they had on the train.

  What bothered him, deep down, was that his relationship with Bennis had changed as the result of that one small comment, and that would mean that it had never been what he thought it was all this time. It was not the kind of thing he was good at thinking about. It was not logical. It was not linear. It was not sane. It was information in a language he didn’t think he knew how to speak. It made him feel hollow, as if his rib cage were an echo chamber, and all it was doing was delivering bad news.