by Jane Haddam
3
Mark DeAvecca was waiting for him at the front door of the Windsor Inn when he got there, but in the first few moments getting out of the cab, Gregor didn’t recognize him. The cabby put his suitcase on the inn’s front step and took his fare and tip without comment. Gregor watched what lookedlike a homeless man hovering in the background, shifting restlessly from foot to foot as if he were on speed. Then the cabby retreated and the homeless man came forward. Gregor was just about to turn away brusquely and grab his suitcase when he realized it was Mark.
“Good God,” he said, “what’s happened to you?”
“Excuse me?” Mark looked confused. Gregor saw immediately what Walter Cray had been referring to on the phone. Mark not only looked drugged out, he looked as if he had been drugged out nonstop for months. His hair was matted with sweat. His clothes were not quite clean. There was a stain running down the front of his yellow cotton sweater, and it was so dingy and stretched out of shape it was barely possible to tell that it had once been expensive. He rubbed the palms of his hands together compulsively. “I think I need more coffee,” Mark said. “I think I’m falling asleep.”
Gregor thought he was on the verge of passing out, but he didn’t say so. He motioned toward the front door with his head and started inside. Mark followed him, much too slowly, looking completely disoriented. Gregor stopped at the front desk and got the key from a bored-looking man who took the time to look past Gregor’s shoulder at Mark. The look of distaste was palpable.
“Room two seventeen,” the man said.
Gregor headed for the elevators with Mark still in tow. They were self-service elevators. That was a good thing because the few other guests in the lobby were looking at Mark very oddly, and Gregor didn’t blame them.
“I told you this was a nice place,” Mark said, getting into the elevator beside Gregor. He looked dubiously at Gregor’s case. “Would you like me to carry that? I always carry my mom’s suitcases, or I used to before she married Jimmy. I’m sorry I didn’t say anything before.”
“That’s all right.” Gregor kept a grip on his case. Mark did not look capable of carrying anything for very long.
They got to the second floor. The elevator doors opened. They got out and walked down the hall, Gregor watching the numbers of the doors and moving slowly because Markseemed to be having a hard time moving. They got to room 217 and Gregor unlocked the door.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” he asked Mark, even though he knew the answer to that one. Mark was not all right. He wasn’t even close to all right.
Mark came in behind him and headed across the room to the chairs near the window. He sat down and shook his head. “I’m fine,” he said. “I’m actually having a pretty good day. Sometimes I can’t think at all, but it’s not like that now. I’m just so tired. And I’ve got a sore throat. And I’ve got work jobs.”
“Work jobs?”
“Yeah,” Mark said. “It’s—it’s sort of like detention. When you screw up, they give you work jobs to do to make up for the infraction.”
Mark didn’t look capable of making his bed, never mind doing something called “work jobs.” Gregor threw his suitcase on the bed and opened it. “You’re a mess,” he said. “Have you got any idea what you look like? What’s happened to you?”
Mark put his face in his hands. “You know,” he said. “I know what everybody thinks, and it isn’t true. I’m not taking drugs, unless you count caffeine as a drug, which I guess it is, but you know what I mean. I just can’t remember things. I keep losing things. I’ve lost my student ID twice, and I need that to get my allowance out of my student account. I just forget.”
Gregor came to the edge of the bed and sat down. “Mark, if you’re not on drugs, there’s something seriously and truly wrong with you. You need to be hospitalized or something. You’re—”
“I know,” Mark said. “I found this thing, we studied it in biology, called Huntington’s chorea. It fits perfectly. But it can’t be that because there isn’t anybody in my family with it. I thought maybe my dad, you know, might have had it, because he died so young maybe it just hadn’t shown up yet; but then one of his parents had to have had it, and my dad’s mom is still alive and she’s fine, and my dad’s dad died at sixty something and he never had it. So it can’t be that.”
“What does your mother say?”
Mark looked up. “I haven’t said anything to my mother. Well, I mean, yeah, I have, sort of. But I haven’t, you know, made a thing about it. It’s hard to explain. She thinks I look pale, so she got me these vitamins.” He rooted around in his coat and came up with a prescription bottle. He shook the last capsule onto his hand. “I’d better take this. I don’t think it does any good. And maybe they’re right, do you know what I mean? Maybe it’s just me. Maybe I’m just too stupid to be here.”
“You’re one of the least stupid people I’ve ever met in my life.”
“I’d have said I was smart enough before I got here, but I don’t know anymore. Do you know what I did last week?”
“No.”
“I got a zero on a quiz,” Mark said. “A history quiz. An American history quiz. It’s usually my best subject. And the other weird thing was that it was on the election of 1800: Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. I read a book about it last summer. And I couldn’t remember any of it. I sat there and looked at the paper and none of it made any sense at all. And of course they think I didn’t study a damn, except that I did, and it just didn’t matter. My mind went completely blank. I got questions wrong on stuff I knew cold before I ever came to Windsor. Maybe it’s psychological. Maybe I just don’t want to be here.”
“Why don’t you leave then? I can’t believe your mother would insist on your staying if she knew you didn’t want to.”
Mark looked away. “That would be quitting. I don’t like to quit.”
“Better quitting than killing yourself,” Gregor said. He looked back at the clothes in his suitcase. “Look, we’re more or less the same size—I’m heavier than you are and a bit taller, but I’ve got some things that will work. Sweatpants.”
“You wear sweatpants?”
“Sometimes. It seemed like a good idea to bring some. You could fit into those. And I’ve got a sweatshirt. And some brand-new boxer shorts still in their store bag. Go take ashower, and I’ll order us some room service. When was the last time you had something to eat? You look like you’ve lost twenty pounds.”
“I went to lunch,” Mark said. “I think we had pasta. I don’t remember. Did I tell you about that on the phone? I can’t remember anything.”
“You said something about it, yes.” Gregor got up and started looking through his things. The sweatpants were black. The sweatshirt was a deep maroon. Bennis must have picked it out for him. He put both of those on the bed and went looking for the bag with the boxer shorts in it.
“It’s not just that Michael died,” Mark said. “I can still see it in my head. It was incredible. And they wanted to put me back in that room. Did I tell you? The police are finished so they wanted me to move back in. They still want me to move back in. The dorms are all full. They don’t have any place else to put me.”
“Where have you been staying while the police did their work?” Gregor found the shorts. Socks, he thought, and went looking for those.
“I’ve been staying with one of the houseparents. He’s not married or anything, so he’s got some extra space. But that’s not a good situation because he hates me. God, I sound stupid. I sound like one of those complete fuckups who are always complaining about how everybody hates them, but the real truth of it is that they’re fuckups.”
“What is it you’ve been—screwing up while you’ve been staying with this houseparent?”
“What? Oh well, I’m sort of a slob. I’ve always been a slob. That’s not new to Windsor. But the thing is, I don’t know. I don’t know how to explain it. They think I’m not smart enough to be here. And they think—”
�
��What?”
“I don’t know,” Mark said. He tried straightening his spine, but it was a halfhearted effort. “I know Michael committed suicide, Mr. Demarkian. I know it’s not a murder, okay? But there are things, things I think I saw—”
“You only think?”
“I could have been hallucinating,” Mark said. “I think I do that sometimes. I’m not sure. And sometimes I black out. Did I tell you about that, about blacking out?”
“No.”
“One day I was crossing the street right out on Main Street here, or I think I was, I think I must have been. The thing is, I can’t remember it. I don’t know how I got there. It was the middle of the afternoon and there was a lot of traffic and I just sort of … came to in the middle of this intersection. And people were honking at me and giving me the finger and screaming at me. I don’t know how I got there. I don’t know how long I was standing there. I was just standing there, not moving. And I don’t know why.”
“Mark, listen to me.” Gregor sat down on the edge of the bed again. “You really do need to be in the hospital. There’s got to be something physically wrong with you.”
“I think so, too, but I can’t imagine what,” Mark said. “I must have looked through that medical book twenty times. More. Huntington’s chorea was the only thing I came up with. And I feel like such a jerk, do you know what I mean? I don’t fail at things. I really don’t. Except now that’s all I do. And then Michael—His hand came up and fluttered in the air. He shrugged. “I don’t know how to explain it. But there’s something wrong. And there was that thing I saw, and maybe it was a hallucination, but I don’t think so. So I thought, you know, you could come up and check into it”
“I did come up.”
“Yeah, I know. Thank you. I’m sorry to be such a… whatever. To be so out of it. I’m not all the time, you know. Sometimes I’m half-sane for a couple of days, and then it goes back like this.”
“Take a shower,” Gregor said. He got up and threw the boxer shorts and sweat clothes into Mark’s lap. “You’ll feel better when you get cleaned up. I’ll call for room service. Is there something you’d particularly like to eat?”
“Just coffee,” Mark said. “I don’t have an appetite much these days.”
“Take a shower,” Gregor said.
Mark bunched the clothes into his hands and stood up. He swayed when he got to his feet. For one nervous moment, Gregor was afraid he was going to fall over. Then he righted himself and began to walk across the room to the bathroom. He walked, Gregor thought, like an old man. Father Tibor, who was at least middle-aged and who had led a very hard life in the Soviet Union before coming to America, was more steady on his feet.
Mark went into the bathroom and shut the door. Gregor waited to hear the sound of the shower going on. When he did hear it, he went around the side of the bed to where the phone was and took it off the hook. It was a good thing that it was almost impossible to hear human speech over the sound of running water. He got out his address book and flipped through it. He did not want to call room service right off.
The phone was picked up on the other end by a secretary, which he had been expecting. People like Elizabeth Toliver did not answer their own phones, especially in the middle of a working day when they were in their offices.
“This is Gregor Demarkian,” Gregor said. “If Liz is available, I’d appreciate it very much if she’d talk to me. Tell her I’m up in Windsor, Massachusetts, and I’ve got something to tell her about Mark.”
The secretary made all the right noises, and Gregor sat back to wait until Liz picked up. He hoped Mark was going to take a very long shower.
Chapter Three
1
Barrett House was a girls’ dorm, and under most circumstances Marta Coelho found it unbearable. Today, with classes called off and an edict come down from on high that they were all supposed to spend the afternoon in their offices “making themselves available” to “any student in need,” she thought it was a kind of haven. Marta did not like being in her office when she had no papers to grade. She couldn’t sit there reading the way some of the other faculty did, and she was no good at inventing activities for herself to do during office hours. Some teachers just forced appointments, calling out one student or the other and insisting that he had to show up and be seen, or scheduling makeup quizzes and exams so that they coincided with the time spent sitting at their desks. Still other teachers had students who actually wanted to visit. Marta didn’t know what to think about that. She had always expected to be a good teacher. She was very competent in her field. Even stuck here in the suburbs of Boston in this joke of a job she had written two papers and submitted them to conferences for the summer. She tried to keep out of her mind the fact that institutions mattered. No matter how good her papers were, they would be judged wanting next to papers from faculty at colleges and universities and even more wanting next to those from faculty at good collegesand universities. Academia was a hierarchy. It was no wonder that so many academics were obsessed with gender, race, and especially class. They lived in the only caste society in America. The stratification was far worse on campuses and among them than it would ever be in America at large. Marta knew because she had come from the bottom of that particular pyramid in the real world, and yet she had been able to negotiate it. There was no way to negotiate this. Judgment came down from on high. You were “placed,” and depending on where you were placed, you knew what you were allowed to expect. The knowledge made her skin crawl, but she could never completely suppress it. It wasn’t fair. That was the problem. That was the kind of thing that kept going through her head. It wasn’t fair—as if she were a four-year-old with a problem on the playground instead of a grown-up with a Ph.D. and a job, a life, and a future. She had to keep telling herself that. She had a future, even if it wasn’t a future she much wanted to reach.
The problem was this: it was four o’clock in the afternoon, and Ridenour Library was deserted. The campus was not much livelier. Marta was sure that if she went over to the Student Center she would find people in the cafeteria and the computer rooms, but they were not the people she wanted to see. They were students, or the kind of faculty who liked to prowl student hangouts and scold the people they found about wasting their time. Marta often felt the urge to scold herself, but she held back. She didn’t like to get into face-to-face conflicts with kids whose parents could buy and sell the endowment. She didn’t like face-to-face conflicts with anyone. Today she was particularly worried about face-to-face conflicts, or anything else, with Mark DeAvecca because Mark DeAvecca was making her feel guilty. Of course she never wanted face-to-face anything with Mark. He made her so angry; she had a hard time not spitting at him. Now, though, he could genuinely claim to be distraught. Anybody would have been distraught to find what he’d found in his room. Marta thought she herself would have been completely out of her mind for weeks. Sometimes she evenimagined it: Michael with his eyes bulging and his tongue hanging out. That was what people had been saying on campus for days. Of course none of them had been there, except for Mark and a couple of the students on his dorm floor, and the faculty houseparents, and the police, and the administrators. Christ Marta thought, there must have been a crowd. It wasn’t any of those people who were telling stories about what Michael had looked like though. Mark wasn’t telling stories. Mark wasn’t talking to anybody at all; and Marta had heard, from more than one other faculty member, that he had even stopped the restless roaming around campus that had driven them all so crazy.
“It’s like he’s gone into a cocoon,” Claire Hadderly had said, leaning against the coffee cart in the faculty lounge at the end of this very corridor. “Maybe when he emerges, he’ll be a butterfly that doesn’t stink.”
He still stinks, Marta thought. She had seen him this morning, walking across the quad by himself and looking for god only knew what. He was so aimless. He was so useless, really. If she had been a different sort of person, with different priorities, sh
e would have wanted to shake him.
Now she walked out of her office into the corridor and listened. It sounded as if half of everybody had gone home. James Hallwood was still in his office. Marta could hear the sound of opera coming out his open door. It wasn’t turned up full blast the way it often was when he was in his apartment—all the students in his house complained about it—but it was clear enough so that Marta could even identify the opera under way. It was Aida, with Leontyne Price in the lead, singing at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. James would call it a “venerable recording,” and then explain why it was so much better than the more modern recordings made in Germany and Spain. That had been among the hardest things she had ever had to learn. It wasn’t enough to prefer opera and classical to hip-hop and early sixties movie music, or Italian films to Hollywood blockbusters, or serious literature to best sellers. You had to be able to distinguish between even the supposedly important. You had to prefer Paganini to Beethoven, Leontyne Price in Aida to Beverly Sills in Aida, the novels of Paul Auster to the novels of Jonathan Franzen. Taste was an intricate web, and the first rule for surviving inside it was never to admit that you knew you were talking about “taste.”
Marta went back into her office. Her books were neatly stacked on her desk. Her correcting was arranged in folders. There was nothing she needed to do about either. The rest of the week stretched in front of her like an abyss. She hated having time to think. She put the correcting folders into her cordovan leather tote bag and got her coat off the back of her chair. If she’d seen herself walking down Main Street in Windsor, she would have dismissed herself as being just another one of those NPR ladies, those women who infested every upscale suburb on the East Coast. High boots with stack heels. Long, wool skirt in the winter that changed to a long, cotton one with a print in every other season. Good cashmere twinset under a good wool coat. In spring and summer, the twinset would be made of heavy cotton, in carefully calibrated colors. This was a uniform, just as the fondness for opera and Paul Auster was a uniform. It was important to have your cotton sweaters in watermelon and teal instead of red and blue.