by Jane Haddam
“AP?”
“Advanced placement. It’s essentially a college course you can take in high school, and then you take a test from the same people who do the SATs and if you get a good-enough grade you get credit from whatever college you go to. People use them to get rid of the distribution requirements the colleges all have so that they can take stuff they like instead of stuff they just have to take. Starting junior year, people take three or four of them at a time. They don’t have time to sleep. And then, you know, if you take speed, it keeps you up; so you need downers if you want to sleep at all. Michael was making a mint.”
Gregor considered this. “Did the police check that out? Drugs in his system? People he might have been connected to? Where did he get the drugs to sell?”
“I haven’t got a clue,” Mark said. “My best guess would be Boston, but he’s not from there, so maybe not. He’s from some place in Connecticut, but not a town I know.”
“What about the suicide?” Gregor said. Mark had abandoned his second sandwich only half-eaten, and that was nearly impossible because the sandwiches were only abouttwo inches long. “Did it make sense to you that Michael would commit suicide? Had he been depressed?”
“Not exactly. Maybe. It’s hard to explain.”
“Were you surprised?’
“Was I surprised to find his body hanging from the ceiling of our room?” Mark asked. “Hell, yes, I was surprised. You’d have been, too. I had no idea—they don’t show what it really looks like in movies. And they don’t show … he’d sh——God, I have no idea what the right word for it is. He’d shit himself. Sorry for my language.”
“That’s all right. I expect he’d pissed himself, too.”
“Right,” Mark said. “If I ever get to make movies, I’m going to show it the way it really is, and it’s ugly as hell. I went out in the hall and got sick, but all I’d had was coffee and so mostly I just dry heaved. I think I did it for hours.”
“I think that’s perfectly normal. I didn’t mean were you surprised to find the body; I mean were you surprised to hear that Michael Feyre had killed himself.”
“Oh,” Mark said. “I don’t know. He was … uh… he was having an affair with Alice Makepeace.”
The name sounded vaguely familiar but not familiar enough. “This was another student?”
“Alice is the headmaster’s wife,” Mark said. “She’s, well. I don’t know. Maybe you’ll get a chance to meet her. She’s something else.”
“Young?”
“In her forties, I’d think. Madonna is in her forties. That can be all right.”
“I’m sure it can. Did he tell you he was having this affair with the headmaster’s wife?”
“He didn’t have to,” Mark said. “Everybody on campus knew about it. And I do mean everybody. Peter Makepeace must have known about it, too. It was practically up on a billboard. Except nobody ever talked about it directly, if you know what I mean.”
“I think I do,” Gregor said. “Was there a reason for this? Was Alice Makepeace using drugs?”
“Maybe,” Mark said, “but I don’t think that was the point. According to the rumors, this wasn’t the first time and Michael wasn’t the first kid. She makes a habit of it.”
“A habit of sleeping with students?”
“A habit of sleeping with a particular kind of student—with scholarship students. The last two were African American.”
“But Michael Feyre wasn’t a scholarship student, was he? I have a contact in Boston who said that Michael Feyre’s mother won—”
“The Powerball, yeah, for like three hundred million dollars or something. I met her. She’s nice. But Michael was like a cliché, for God’s sake. White trash nation. Right down to the air guitar concerts to Lynyrd Skynyrd.”
Gregor had no idea who Lynyrd Skynyrd was, but he didn’t think it was a good move to say so. “So you think he might have been depressed enough about this affair with Alice Makepeace to commit suicide?”
“I think he might have been if she’d wanted to break it off,” Mark said. “The tiling is I don’t think she did want to break it off. I mean, I didn’t talk to her about it, but he wasn’t acting like that. And he was obsessed with her. More white trash nation. It was like one of those stalker movies.”
“People who are stalked don’t usually want to be,” Gregor said.
“She did,” Mark was adamant. “She used to send him messages on the voice mail. I’d get them sometimes by mistake if I got back to the room before he did. She set up the meetings more often than he did. I think she wanted to talk to me about it.”
Gregor was curious. “You only think?”
“She came down to the computer room this morning when I was there alone. I was blasting space aliens out of the sky to get rid of my aggression, if you catch my drift. She came to the door and waited, and I pretended not to see her.”
“Why?”
“Because she creeps me out. She’s one of those people. It’s like talking to a pod person. And I really didn’t want to talk about Michael to her. It just seemed wrong.” Markblinked twice and then put his head in his hands. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I really was having a good day, and now I’m dizzy again. It’s just the sleep. I can’t sleep.”
Gregor leaned closer to get a better look. Mark’s face had gone as white as chalk. Gregor had heard that cliché a thousand times, but this was the first time he’d ever seen a person who fit it. Mark’s pupils were dilated, too, and the whites around them were shot through with red. The muscles in his shoulders were twitching.
“Mark,” he asked, “are you sure you didn’t take something? Just before you met me, maybe, or while you were in the bathroom?”
“No. Christ. I wish they’d just do a drug test and get it over with. I’m not taking anything. I’m not—I’m just like this. Almost all the time now. It just is.”
Mark was swaying in his chair. Gregor pulled at his arm.
“Come on,” he said. “Lie down. You look like you need to.”
Mark swayed to his feet, blinking. “My head is full of fuzz. All the time. And I can’t read. Did I tell you that? I sit down with a book and read the page, but I can’t remember what’s on it. I finish the page and it’s as if I’d never read it and that’s nuts because it used to be that I didn’t even have to pay attention. I could read the page and then later I could sort of remember what it looked like. I could sort of project it on the back of my eyelids and read it again. Like that. And now I can’t remember anything, and I can’t understand anything. At least not most of the time. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
Gregor pushed Mark over to the bed and then onto it. “Try lying down for a while,” he said, but he might as well not have. Mark hit the bed and seemed to be instantaneously asleep. Gregor would have thought he’d passed out if it hadn’t been for the fact that his breathing was more regular than it had been at any other time in their conversation today and the further fact that he was snoring.
Gregor sat down on the edge of the bed and checked him over. He was sleeping, that was all. He was as soundly and thoroughly asleep as Rip Van Winkle.
At first Gregor thought he would wake Mark DeAvecca before he had to go out to his dinner meeting; but when the time came, he found that impossible to do. It wasn’t that Mark wouldn’t wake up. If that had been the case, Gregor would have canceled his dinner appointment and called an ambulance. It was more that he couldn’t bear to wake him. The boy looked healthier and more peaceful than he had all day. Gregor wondered why he couldn’t sleep in the normal run of things. He was certainly sleeping now.
Gregor picked up the phone and called the Windsor Police Service, just to make sure they knew he was coming. Then he called the desk to ask that somebody call the room at seven-thirty to wake Mark. That school had to have a curfew of some kind, although Gregor was slowly beginning to accept the possibility that Windsor ran on very different assumptions than most of the rest of the world. He found an extra blanket i
n the closet and threw it over Mark’s body, thinking that the kid was built like a defensive linebacker. Even the underweight didn’t disguise that.
Gregor went downstairs, left his key at the desk, and then headed out the front door to Main Street. It was, if anything, worse than he’d thought when he’d first seen it. It was the epitome of the sort of place built by people who recoil in horror from “suburbs,” by which they mean places with housing subdivisions. There was a bookstore. Its windows displayed hardcover books in matte jackets with muted impressionistic paintings used as the backdrop to titles that made no sense: Electric Pumpkins, Love in Aspic, The Poetics of Dystopia. A sign near the door said: THE EXCELLENT BECOMES THE PERMANENT. A few doors down there was a candle store, and a few doors down from that was a clothing store for women showing models in the window wearing good tweed skirts and cashmere sweaters. Gregor thought that if he stopped a dozen people at random, one right afterthe other, he’d find out that all of them listened to National Public Radio and owned a copy of Chocolat.
He checked the note he’d written to himself with the directions to the police station, walked up four blocks, and stopped for a moment to look across the road. That was the Windsor Academy campus right there. No gates set it off from the town proper, and no security service seemed to be active to keep the locals out. With the exception of one large, college Gothic building off toward the left, the Windsor Academy buildings were all large and studiously “Colonial,” the kind of thing that might have served as a mansion in pre-Revolutionary Massachusetts, except that they were all larger. Some of them, though, were probably authentic. The ones on Main Street proper almost certainly were. The rest of the campus had been configured to blend in with them. No, Gregor thought, he really didn’t like exaggerated respect for history.
He checked his directions again, walked down another block and a half, and turned left into a street full of large, Colonial houses set back on wide lawns. If you really want to know if a house was built in Colonial America, Bennis had told him, check out how far it is from the road. Real Colonial houses have no front lawns. They sit right up against the thoroughfare. These houses, Gregor decided, were reproductions, or at best from the early nineteenth century, when lawns had come into fashion.
He went down three blocks, checked the street sign—Muldor—and turned left again. The police station was a small, brick building hidden tastefully behind a box hedge nearly tall enough to obscure the building completely. The only way to tell that a police station was behind that hedge was to read the sign at the end of the drive.
Gregor walked up the drive to the front door. It was a very modern brick building, but it had a steep, pitched roof, as if that would be enough to make it look like a residence. Here was another way to tell the difference between a suburb and a real small town. In a real small town, the police station would have been right out front on Main Street, next door tothe Town Hall and the public library. Well, the public library was on Main Street here; it was right across from Windsor Academy.
Gregor gave his name to the young woman at the desk, and she spoke quietly into a microphone, A moment later a large, beefy man in a badly fitting black suit came out of the corridor behind the desk and held out his hand.
“Mr. Demarkian? I’m very glad to meet you. I’m Brian Sheehy. Walter Cray can’t stop talking about you.”
“I’m not sure if that’s good or bad,” Gregor said.
“Well, Walt’s impressed, and that’s not usual. Look, I’m just getting off, I’m starving, and I need a beer and I need a cigarette—” The young woman at the desk clucked, and Brian Sheehy ignored her. “There’s a place about three blocks down and around the corner, if you wouldn’t mind. And you don’t mind a place where they allow smoking.”
“I don’t mind,” Gregor said.
“It’s not one of those places on Main Street,” Brian Sheehy said. “No sprouts. No spinach salads. You don’t look like an organic vegetable guy to me.”
“I’m not,”
“I’m going up to Doheney’s,” Brian told the young woman at the desk, “then I’m going home. I’m on my cell phone.”
“Okay,” she said.
Brian shooed Gregor toward the door. “Only thing is, I want to make one thing clear up front. There’s a lot going on with this, but what isn’t going on is a murder. Walter said you understood that, right? We checked into it every way we could, and there’s nothing there that even makes a murder possible. You can see the reports if you want. This one is not a doubtful case.”
“I do understand that,” Gregor said, as he found himself outside on the front steps again. He kept forgetting how dark it got and how early in February in New England. “I haven’t come to investigate a murder. I haven’t come to investigate anything. I came because Mark DeAvecca asked me to.”
“Yeah, the roommate,” Brian said.
“What do you think about the roommate?”
“Serious stoner,” Brian said automatically. “Whacked to the gills practically all the time. Someday he’s going to start convulsing, and then it’s just going to be a matter of whether they get him to the hospital on time.”
They were out on the street again. There was snow on the ground, but even in the darkness it didn’t look soft. “The thing is,” Gregor said, “I know the kid.”
“Don’t you ever think that,” Brian said. “I’ve heard it a million times. Even the ones you know get caught, more often than you’d think.”
“I know that,” Gregor said, “but I’ve also just spent the last hour and a half talking to him. He knows everybody thinks he’s using. He offered to take a drug test.”
“When he offers where he’s likely to get taken up on it, get back to me.”
“I will. It may be soon. I called his mother. When she gets here, she may insist.”
“I don’t get this boarding school thing,” Brian said. “It’s bad enough when they’re eighteen and want to go away to college. Why would you want your kid to go away when he was only fourteen?”
“In this case I think it was the kid who wanted to go away,” Gregor said. “Get out. Be independent. He’s that kind of kid. But the thing is, I did talk to him for over an hour. And the way he is, the way he behaves—yes, I can see the presumption that he’s using. But the more I watched him, the less that seemed like what was going on. I hate to tell you what did seem to be going on.”
“What?”
“Alzheimer’s disease.”
“In a fourteen-year-old kid?”
“He’s sixteen,” Gregor said. “He turned sixteen in January. But yes, I understand. I don’t really mean I think he has Alzheimer’s disease. I meant that if you spend enough time with him, that’s the way he comes off. Not like somebody who’s drugged. He goes in and out of focus, for one thing. He’ll be just fine, and then ten minutes later his mind willstart to wander and his speech will get thick. Then ten minutes later he’ll be fine again. Unless you know of a drug that works on a time-release basis, that doesn’t sound like substance abuse.”
They were suddenly outside a small building close to the street with a plain, plate-glass storefront. If Gregor had had to make a bet on it, he would have said nothing that looked like this remained in the town limits of Windsor. There was gilt stencil lettering across the plate glass: DOHENEY’S RESTAURANT. It looked less like a restaurant than a bar.
“Here we are,” Brian said, opening the glass door to let Gregor go in ahead of him. Doheney’s Restaurant was as dark inside as the street was outside and maybe darker. The few lights were low and concealed behind amber globes. Brian went to the back and slid into a wooden booth.
“I’m impressed,” Gregor said, sliding in on the other side. “I would never have guessed you could find a place like this in this town.”
“There’re still a few of us here from the old days,” Brian said, waving at a waitress. “Those of us who go to Our Lady of Grace instead of the First Unitarian Church. I don’t get Unitarians any more than
I get boarding schools. Here’s Sheila. You want a beer?”
Gregor hadn’t had a beer in ten years. “Sure,” he said, “whatever they’ve got on tap.”
“They’ve got rat piss on tap,” Brian said. “Sheila, get the man a Heineken. And get me a hot pastrami on a roll with Russian dressing. You want something like that, Mr. Demarkian?”
“Gregor,” Gregor said automatically. “How about a cheeseburger and fries?”
“Cheeseburgers come with fries,” Sheila said. Then she thought about it for a moment. “Everything comes with fries.”
“Right,” Gregor said.
Sheila waltzed off, and Brian began moving the sugar cannister around on the wooden table. It was an old-fashioned diner cannister, made of glass with a stainlesssteel top. “So what is it?” Brian said. “If he’s not a stoner, what do you think is wrong with him?”
“I don’t know,” Gregor said. “That’s what I came up to find out really. I like the kid. He’s not acting like himself. He worries me.”
“If I liked the kid, I’d worry about him, too,” Brian said, “but I’d worry about—”
“Drugs, I know. He did tell me some interesting things though before I came out this evening. He said that Michael Feyre was dealing drugs. Is that true?”
“Yeah,” Brian said. “We couldn’t have proved it, but I’d bet anything. Not that we could have done anything about it.”
“Why not?”
Brian laughed. “Look, this place is backed by serious money, you understand? Rockefeller money. Vanderbilt money. Roosevelt money. Some of the Kennedy kids went there. When they want to hush things up, they don’t bother to schmooze around with me; they schmooze around with the governor. Or better. We stay off that campus. We have to. And if we pick up one of the kids in town, we go by the book, keep the papers out of it, make sure he gets probation, and then they just send him home.”
The beers came. Sheila put them down next to two clean glasses and walked away again.