by Jane Haddam
“But this Michael Feyre,” Gregor said. “He wasn’t old money, was he? Walter Cray said that his mother—”
“Won the Powerball, yeah. Have you met her?”
“I’ve never even seen her,” Gregor said. “I’d never even heard of her until I talked to Walter Cray.”
“Well,” Brian said, “she’s a gas, really. She’s real young for having a fifteen-, sixteen-year-old kid. She must have been sixteen herself when she had him. And she looks like just what she was, except that her clothes are better. She looks like a high-school-drop-out single mother who works in a convenience store. And she’s ignorant as hell in a lot of ways, but she’s not stupid.”
“She sounds more interesting all the time.”
“Oh, she’s interesting all right,” Brian said. “And what’sbetter is, she’s here. She’s been here for a couple of days. She has to arrange for her son’s body to get back home for one thing, but I don’t think that explains it. I think she’s looking for something.”
“Looking for what?”
“I don’t know exactly. Maybe an explanation. Maybe she doesn’t believe he committed suicide. Although, let me say again—”
“I know, there’s no question.”
“Right, there really isn’t one. But she’s his mother. Mothers aren’t always rational about sons. If they were, they’d probably kill them at birth.”
“So she’s here, and she’s looking for something. And Mark DeAvecca is here, and he’s looking for something too, he just doesn’t know what. And he’s acting very oddly. And Michael Feyre was dealing drugs, and nobody could catch him at it. And I’m here. What’s wrong with this picture?”
“What’s wrong is that the press isn’t here,” Brian said. “They’re good at covering things up over there, but this is a miracle. You know what the scary thing is? If they’re careful, the press may never be here.”
“Are they careful?”
“Not particularly. It’s a weird place over there. I don’t like it. Almost nobody in town does. They talk a really good game about ‘diversity’ and ’inclusion,’ but it’s money that talks at that place, and they don’t ever let you forget it. If you’ve got the cash, you can be a drugged-out crack addict with a D average, and they’ll do everything but change your underwear to help you to stay; but you come in on a scholarship, and they’ll find a way to get rid of you if they have to, unless you’re one of those ultimate scholastic stars that could have gotten into Harvard without bothering with high school at all. It used to be a girls’ school, did you know that?”
“No.”
“I liked it better when it was a girls’ school. It was still stuck-up as all hell, but it was a kind of stuck-up I could get.
It didn’t tell you how wonderfully committed to fairness and social justice it was while stabbing you in the back.”
“You, personally?”
The food had arrived. Gregor sat back a little to let Sheila put his cheeseburger in front of him. It was the size of the old Volkswagen bug and buried in a mountain of french fries that could have shown up on satellite pictures from space. Brian asked for another beer.
“Not me personally,” he said, studying his pastrami sandwich. “It was a nephew of mine. Bright kid. Lived down on the other side of Boston, too far to commute really. Got himself a scholarship to come up here, covered practically the whole thing. End of his first year, he’s got a B minus average, and they decided that ’he has not shown the ability to succeed in a sophomore year at Windsor.’ A B minus average. Can you believe that? What’s wrong with a B minus average? So I checked into it a little. There were two dozen kids in his class with averages of B minus or less. Only three were asked to leave. Every one of them was on a scholarship. And nobody on a scholarship with a B minus or less was allowed to stay. But lots of people with less were allowed to stay, and all of them had money.”
“How did you get that information?”
Brian shrugged. “The secretaries live in town, don’t they, and they didn’t migrate here from Boston or New York. They’re local. And most of them are Catholics.”
Gregor thought it was probably not an easy time to be a Catholic in the Greater Boston Metropolitan Area, but he let it go. Brian was ripping apart his pastrami as if he were a saber-toothed tiger going at raw meat.
“The thing is,” he said, while Gregor accepted the second round of beers from Sheila, “I’ve got to tell you the truth. I can’t do anything about it because it would mean my job in the long run, but I’d love to see something happen that would make the shit hit the fan at that place. The sooner the better. There gets to be a point where I just don’t feel like putting up with their bullshit anymore.”
Chapter Five
1
There were very few things that James Hallwood didn’t like about living at Windsor Academy, but there was one thing he truly hated, and that was the requirement that all teachers eat lunch and dinner in the common cafeteria with the students throughout the school term. His faculty apartment had a perfectly respectable kitchen. It was more than respectable. He’d had expensive apartments in Boston that had had fewer amenities and even more expensive flats in London where it had been impossible to cook at all. He objected to everything about the common cafeteria. The food was invariably bad. That went without saying. Institutional food was always bad. The public exposure was at the least annoying and often repressive. He found himself picking over wilted salads or overcooked cod, more aware than he wanted to be that people were staring at him. Students and faculty both stared. David said that was because he was “gay”—God, how he hated that word “gay;” he used it, but he hated it—but he knew it was because he was something else, something far worse in this place. Nobody at Windsor Academy cared whether he was gay or not. They cared that he was an elitist.
I am an elitist, James told himself, as he packed himself into his coat and scarf to make the trek over to the Student Center. It was egregious. If they had to make them all eat together in the common cafeteria, the least they could have done was to put the common cafeteria somewhere convenient, on the quad, instead of out in back with all the classroom buildings. The other thing they could have done was to set dinner at a reasonable hour instead of at five thirty. He had no idea why the school—and not only this school; every school he had ever been involved with—felt the need to feed its students as if they were day laborers in Liverpool who couldn’t wait for tea. He only wished that they could establish the kind of tradition here that they had at places like Exeter, where everyone ate at tables with tablecloths, and students took turns being waiters. That was probably elitism, too.
He let himself out the back door of Doyle House, then went down the path to the left and across the broad field to the Student Center. To his left, he could just see the top of Maverick Pond, down at the bottom of the slope that made it possible for the library to have an “above-grade lower level.” He made a face at the memory of all those recruiting brochures and alumni bulletins and bent his head against the wind coming up from the open expanse to his left. Of course it was only relatively open. On the other side of the pond there were about two hundred feet of open ground. Then there was a high fence, and on the other side of that fence was some town building James had never understood the function of. He only knew it wasn’t Windsor-Wellman High School, the local public school, which was from all reports a godforsaken place without facilities or standards. On the one hand, it was odd that a town as rich as Windsor, Massachusetts, wouldn’t spend what it had to to make its high school a first-rate place. On the other, the whole situation seemed entirely typical. James had never seen the point in public schools on any level but the most elementary, and that in spite of the fact that he had gone to one.
He had a copy of The Portrait of a Lady stuffed into his coat pocket in the hope that he would be able to sit off by himself and read for the obligatory half hour; but as soon as he got to the Student Center’s door, he saw that thatwouldn’t be possible. Marta
Coelho was waiting for him. She must have seen him come up the walk. He made no effort to hide his annoyance. He knew he didn’t have to; Marta would never pick up on it. She was one of those people who was completely tone-deaf when it came to social intercourse. At a place like this, she was worse than tone-deaf. She was every cliché he could remember: a fish out of water, a bull in a china shop, a fifth wheel. Why they hadn’t noticed when they’d hired her how bad the fit would be, he couldn’t understand, but he’d been around long enough to know it happened all the time. And then, some of the most unlikely people ended up fitting perfectly well, even if you couldn’t figure out how or why. Look at Philip Candor. James began to unbutton his coat as he reached the door. Marta was standing just inside it, shifting from one foot to the other like a schoolgirl called in to the principal’s office for cutting class and breaking school rules.
James stepped through the glass door. The air around him went from being much too cold to being much too warm. He got his coat the rest of the way unbuttoned and shrugged it off.
“You don’t know how glad I am to see you,” Marta said, looking around at the students milling and streaming through the long breezeway corridor. James looked at them, too. They looked … scruffy. They always looked scruffy. There was no dress code here. It would have been considered another form of elitism. The result was that the students felt free to wander around in jeans and T-shirts and sneakers. Everyone looked sloppy. Even students who worked hard at taking care of themselves looked sloppy.
James put his coat over his arm and started to move toward the cafeteria. He had no intention of spending even a minute longer in this place than he absolutely had to. “Surely it can’t be that big a miracle to find me at dinner,” he said.
Marta was hurrying to keep up. “I wanted to talk to you about something,” she said. “Something Philip Candor told me, and then somebody else confirmed it. Edith, I think. Edith always knows everything, have you ever noticed that?”
“Everybody always knows everything in this place,” James said. He had forged ahead steadily, and now he was at the back of the cafeteria line. There was a stack of plastic trays. He took one. If it had been up to him to redesign this place, he would have started by getting rid of all the plastic.
Marta picked up her own plastic tray. “I don’t know that we should talk about it here,” she said. “I mean, in line. Where too many people could hear.”
“My dear woman,” James said, “if you heard whatever this is from Philip, and then again from Edith, there isn’t a person in this school who doesn’t know what it is already, except perhaps for people who’ve been away all day or shut up at home and without contact with the rest of the school.”
“Have you heard about it already?” Marta asked. “About Gregor Demarkian?”
“I’ve been shut up at home,” James said drily. He had just been presented with the choice of entrée: fish fried in some kind of batter; chicken with a sauce on it that looked as if it had come straight out of a sump pump; large wedges of vegetarian omelet. He took the omelet. He’d have the least trouble looking at it throughout his purgatory at dinner, and then he could go home and cook something edible for himself. “I have heard of Gregor Demarkian though,” he said. “He’s that detective. He was on that television program American Justice.”
“Oh, do you watch those?” Marta asked. She had chosen the chicken and the limp green beans that must have come from a can, and the glutinous rice they served with an enormous ice cream scoop. It was hard for James to watch. “I watch those, too. And City Confidential. And the other things on Court TV. You’re right, he has been on some of those. I even heard that they wanted to give him his own show, but he turned it down. Could we go over there to that corner? There’s an empty table. I really don’t want to be—crowded.”
No, James thought, of course she doesn’t want to be crowded. He went toward the corner anyway. He didn’t want to be crowded himself. He didn’t want to talk to anybody. He put his tray down and sat in front of it. Then he very carefully began to take the plates off the tray and put them directly on the table. If there was one thing he wouldn’t do in the cause of antielitism, which he didn’t believe in anyway, it was eat directly off a cafeteria tray The table itself was made of nothing known to nature, and laminated on top of that, and bolted into the wall, but there was nothing he could do about that.
Marta sat down. She didn’t bother to take her plates off her tray. James hadn’t expected her to. “Gregor Demarkian,” she said, “is in town. Here. In Windsor. Earlier today, Edith heard that he was coming, and she told Philip, and then Philip saw him on Main Street near the Windsor Inn, which I suppose is where he must be staying.”
“Really?” James cocked an eyebrow. He’d taken great pains to learn to do that when he was younger, and now he did it all the time without thinking. “That’s surprising. From what I remember, Mr. Demarkian is a consultant to police departments, who call him in when they have homicide cases they’re having trouble with. I thought our local police had decided without doubt that Michael Feyre committed suicide.”
“Oh, they have,” Marta said. “At least, as far as I know they have. The police didn’t bring him here; Mark DeAvecca did.”
“Did he? How did he manage that?”
“Oh, Demarkian is a friend of the family or something. You know what it’s like in this place. The students. Their parents. It makes me sick sometimes, it really does. Don’t mind me. I’ve been in a mood for days. Before Michael Feyre died really. And now I just don’t know what to think. It bothers me, this Demarkian person being here.”
“I don’t see why,” James said. The vegetable omelet was inedible, but he’d expected that. The coffee was undrinkable, too, but he forced himself to drink it because the Windsor Academy coffee had one thing to be said in its favor. It was some of the strongest coffee he had ever had outside of Istanbul. “I don’t see what business it is of ours if Mark DeAvecca wants to ask a family friend to come here to visit, even if the family friend is Gregor Demarkian. Gregor Demarkian can’t change the fact that Michael Feyre committed suicide.”
“No, he can’t change it,” Marta said, “but there are other things, aren’t there? There’s all that stuff about Alice, for example.”
“Marta, ’all that stuff about Alice,’ as you put it, has been going on for a long time. It didn’t start with Michael Feyre, and I doubt if it will finish with him.”
“It will if it causes the school to fail,” Marta said. “This isn’t Exeter, you know. We don’t have that kind of an endowment. If that kind of thing gets out—”
“If it gets out, Peter will be fired and he and Alice will go off somewhere, and we’ll get a new headmaster whose wife is fifty-six and looks like a long-haul trucker. That’s all. You’ve got nothing to worry about on that score.”
“Well, there are other things, too,” Marta said. “There are the things about the drugs.”
“‘The things about the drugs’?”
“That he was selling drugs.”
“Marta, students sell drugs to each other in every school in the country. Schools don’t fail over incidents like that; they just expel the students.”
“But he wasn’t just selling drugs to students,” Marta said. “He was selling drugs to faculty. He was selling drugs to you.”
It was odd, James thought, but just a second ago he had considered this room far too warm. Now it seemed far too cold. His plates were still spread out on the table. The vegetable omelet still looked heavy and wet at the same time. The coffee still looked too dark to really be coffee. There was a lot of noise. It seemed to be coming from another room, through a wind tunnel, broadcast by a bad microphone.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.
“Oh, James, for God’s sake,” Marta said. “What do you think, that I want to turn you in? If I did, I’d have done it already. And it wouldn’t matter in this place anyway. You know what they’re like. You’ve been here a
lot longer than I have.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” James saidagain. He picked up the plate with the omelet on it and put it back on the tray. It was very important to move slowly, and with seriousness, to not appear to be hurrying. He wanted to take the plate with the omelet on it and smash it over Marta Coelho’s head, but it was the kind of thing he would never do.
Marta had pushed her tray away from her into the middle of the table. “James, please, behave like a sane person. Somebody around here has to. You bought amphetamines from Michael Feyre. I saw you. In Ridenour Library not two weeks ago. My office—”
“Everybody’s office is in that wing,” James said. “You’re mistaken.”
“I’m not mistaken, and you know it.” Marta stopped. Her voice had risen. She’d become aware of it. Nobody else seemed to have noticed. “I’m not mistaken,” she said again. “I heard the whole conversation. Six something-or-the-others of crystal methamphetamine. I don’t remember the word he used. Two hundred dollars. And I couldn’t believe it, you know, so I went out into the hall so that I could hear better, and you were right there. You didn’t even have your office door closed. I suppose you must have thought the wing was empty—”
“You’re mistaken,” James said again. He was saying things again and again. He was repeating himself. There was a roaring in his ears, like the sound you heard when you held a shell up to your head to hear the ocean. He put the coffee cup and saucer back on the tray. He put his utensils back on the tray. He felt as if he were proceeding by rote. He was a paint-by-numbers picture. All he had to do was fill in the outline and he would turn into a real boy.
“Michael saw me,” Marta said. “He winked at me. James, will you please, please make sense here? This isn’t a game. That boy is dead—”
“And nobody killed him,” James said savagely. “He committed suicide, which, if you ask me, was entirely predictable. He was a jumped-up piece of white trash, and no lottery jackpot was ever going to change that. When he knew it was true, he cut himself off. I wish more of them would have the guts to cut themselves off. We’d be better off without them.”