by Jane Haddam
Mark nodded to Gregor as he came in, said, “I’ve got to go” into the phone, and switched it off. “I was talking to Geoff,” he said. Then, looking around and not too sure of who knew what, “He’s my little brother. He’s got Grandma wrapped, by the way. She’s letting him play video games and eat TV dinners nonstop.”
“I told her she could,” Liz said.
“Cool,” Mark said.
Dr. Copeland waved the folder he was carrying in the air. “Well,” he said, “we ought to get started. Mark, I want to warn you, right now, that what you’re about to hear is probably going to be very disturbing. Dr. Elliot is of the opinion that you should not be told about it at all.”
“I shouldn’t be told about my medical condition?” Mark said. Now he did look sick. “What’s wrong with me? Is it terminal?”
“I told you this was irresponsible,” Brenda Elliot said.
Gregor knew what it was Mark was worried about. “Relax,” he said, “you’ve got no serious medical condition, terminal or otherwise, except maybe an allergy to caffeine; and then it’s just a question of staying off. It’s not that kind of news.”
“So what kind of news is it?” Mark asked.
Dr. Copeland plunged in again. “We did a number of standard tests,” he said, “and they all came out negative, exceptfor the caffeine toxicity, which was abnormally high. High enough to have killed you on its own, by the way. Now, some of the symptoms you’ve been reporting—high levels of anxiety, for instance, and abnormal sweating—can be traced to the caffeine allergy coupled with the fact that you seem to have been ingesting a lot of the stuff you’re allergic to.”
“Do you know what’s been going on here?” Liz asked, addressing herself to Brenda Elliot. “Teachers saw him in class with body tremors and sweat pouring down his body and nobody even sent him to the infirmary. He went to the infirmary on his own power with a strep throat bad enough to take over Taiwan, and they didn’t even do a throat culture.”
“Excuse me,” Dr. Copeland said, “some of the symptoms are unlikely to be the result of caffeine poisoning alone. Oh, they could be if the caffeine poisoning were as acute as it was last night, or close to, but if it had been, he’d have been hospitalized long ago. I’m thinking of the memory losses, and the body tremors, and the blackouts. We did test for Parkinson’s disease.”
“Jesus,” Mark said.
“And the tests came back negative,” Dr. Copeland went on. “You really don’t have anything medically wrong with you. I’d be interested in knowing, though, when those symptoms started: the tremors, the blackouts, those.”
Mark thought about it. “After Christmas,” he said finally. “Before then I was nervous all the time, and I couldn’t pay attention to anything, but that was about it. And it was that way all through Christmas, too—”
“Were you drinking a lot of caffeine over the Christmas break?” Dr. Copeland asked.
Mark looked sheepish. “Yeah, well, but not intentionally. I mean, I was drinking Mountain Dew, and I didn’t know it had caffeine in it until the vacation was nearly over, and I’d been drinking nearly a case a day.”
“What?” Liz said.
“Well, it was in the pantry,” Mark said.
“Go back to the symptoms,” Dr. Copeland said. “You say they started after Christmas.”
“Yeah, right, after Christmas break. First I was just sick a lot. I’d get stomach cramps something awful. Then I lost my appetite. I didn’t want to eat anything. I’d have coffee and put a ton of sugar in it and that would be it most of the day. Then about a week or so later it got really weird. I mean, really, really weird.” He looked at Gregor. “Like it was yesterday when I saw you,” he said. “Only worse, sometimes.”
“All right,” Dr. Copeland said, “then we have to assume that this started soon after you got back to school after Christmas break. We’re going to want to take a few locks of your hair for analysis.”
“My hair, why?”
“Because it will give us a fair idea of how long this has been going on and to what extent,” Dr. Copeland said. “Mind you, this isn’t my area of expertise. If you’d asked me the day before yesterday if I expected ever to encounter a case of this kind throughout my entire career, I’d have said no. But here we are.”
“Where are we?” Mark said.
“I still think we should wait until we have these results analyzed by experts,” Brenda Elliot said. “It’s ridiculous to get the boy worked up over what may very well be a false alarm.”
Dr. Copeland stepped in. “When you were brought in last night, after the danger was passed, Mr. Demarkian suggested to the doctor on duty that we should screen you for arsenic poisoning.”
“Arsenic? Somebody has been giving me arsenic?”
“Yes, that much we know for sure,” Dr. Copeland said. “The issue now is, how much arsenic and how long have they been giving it to you. The human body can take quite a bit of arsenic if it’s delivered in small doses over time, and it will develop a tolerance for it. The symptoms you’ve been reporting, and the ones Mr. Demarkian also reported on seeing you yesterday, do seem to indicate a slow and steady delivery of—”
“Somebody’s been poisoning me with arsenic,” Mark marveled. Then he brightened. “Cool!”
Liz stared at the ceiling. “Dr. Elliot’s of the opinion that you’re a child. I’m of the opinion that you’re impossible.”
“We do have to check,” Dr. Copeland said. “Arsenic can cause long-term problems, especially in the liver and kidneys. And you’re not going anywhere for the next couple of days. For one thing it’s going to take a while for that stuff to work its way out of your system. I know you feel better. You probably feel a lot better. If you’ve been getting doses of arsenic at least daily for weeks, then going a day or so without one is going to make you feel better. You’re not going to be better, though, for weeks and maybe not months. So that’s the first reason I don’t want you to go back to school.”
“What’s the second reason?” Mark asked.
“Well,” Dr. Copeland said, “arsenic is not a child’s toy. I suppose it’s possible that somebody gave it to you as a prank, but it’s not very likely, is it? Most people do know that arsenic is a poison, and that it can kill you. I think we have to assume either that somebody wanted you dead, or that they wanted you very sick and didn’t care if they risked making you dead as a consequence. We’re having more tests run on what we pumped out of you last night. I think we’re going to find a really big dose of arsenic, enough to have killed you in the ordinary course of events. You were very lucky.”
“I’m the world champion upchucker,” Mark said. “Ask any of the nurses on this floor.”
“Be grateful,” Dr. Copeland said.
“You’re all jumping to conclusions,” Dr. Elliot said. “The idea that somebody at Windsor Academy would feed a student arsenic over the course of weeks is absolutely ridiculous. You’re blowing what’s probably a mistake into a first-rate scandal, and if you think that’s to Mark’s benefit, you’re quite wrong.”
Everybody ignored her. Liz went over to the bed and began stroking Mark’s hair again. When she didn’t look ready to kill him, she looked as if she adored him. Mark looked as if he knew it.
“You know,” Mark said, with beaming satisfaction, “thisis really awesome. I mean it. This is the coolest thing that has ever happened to me.”
3
It was nearly three quarters of an hour later before they were all ready to leave. Brenda Elliot waited until Dr. Copeland left and only then departed, shaking her head and muttering all the way. Her back was stiff with disapproval. Her face was a mask of anger. She was not a woman who took well to people questioning her authority, and she was not a woman who felt all that secure in what authority she had.
It was darkening in the outside world again. Gregor couldn’t get over how quickly the sun faded, even this close to spring. In the dimming light, he could see the start of an early March snow, random fl
akes floating downward lazily. It didn’t look like the start of a serious storm. One of the nurses had delivered a trayful of carefully bland foods. Mark had complained of being hungry again, but even Jimmy had rejected the idea of another run to McDonald’s. The tray had clear chicken broth, dry white toast, and what looked like vanilla pudding. Mark picked at it without much enthusiasm. Liz and Jimmy talked quietly by the window. Gregor sat in the green plastic upholstered chair, thinking.
“We’re going to go get something to eat,” Liz said finally. “We’ve got an idea we want to talk over. You’d be welcome to come with us, though, Gregor, if you’re hungry. Or you can stay and keep Mark company until we get back.”
“I’ll stay and keep Mark company,” Gregor said.
“Try to talk some sense into his head,” Liz said. “It never works when I do it, but I figure there’s always a chance.”
She went over to Mark’s bed and kissed him on the forehead, which he responded to mostly by ignoring it. Jimmy waved, without expecting Mark to wave back. Gregor waited until they were safely out in the hall.
“Well,” he said, “do you really think it’s ‘cool’ that somebody gave you arsenic?”
“Hell, yes,” Mark said.
“You could have died.”
“But I didn’t, did I?” Mark sat up a little straighter and pushed the tray table away. “Look, I’m not going to last at Windsor past the end of this year. If Mom has her way, I’m not going to last past the end of this week. But the thing is, even without all this crap, it was all wrong. I’m all wrong. I don’t fit, and they can’t stand it.”
“They? You mean the school?”
“Yeah,” Mark said. “I’ve been thinking about it. I mean, mostly, the last few months, I’ve just been depressed about it. The general consensus around here is that it was a fluke I ever got in. I’m not all that bright, and I’m a slacker. And maybe it’s true, but there are people like that here, and they don’t have any trouble. I have trouble. I don’t think like the people here. Well, I mean, the faculty and the administration. I just don’t. I think they pretty much decided back in November that they wanted to get rid of me. I could tell. I just couldn’t admit it.”
“You don’t mean that you think somebody at the school would poison you to get you to leave?” Gregor said. “That’s hardly sane, is it? All they’d have to do is trump up an excuse to expel you. I doubt if it would be that hard.”
“They wouldn’t even have to do that,” Mark said. “They don’t have to have any excuse at all. They just have to say that they think you’re ‘unsuitable’ and not ask you back for the next year. Everything is contingent here. There aren’t any standards, you know, regular ones like you’d have in a college, where if you had a C average you’d be okay and if you had a D you’d be flunking out. There’s a story that they got rid of a girl last year who had straight As and boards in the stratosphere, but who wanted to go to one of the service academies and wouldn’t change her mind and opt for the Ivy League. I don’t know if it’s true.”
“If it is true, it’s a very nasty story,” Gregor said. “But this still doesn’t deal with the poisoning. And you were poisoned, Mark. There had to be a motive for that.”
“I know. I’m just saying, if I have to go out anyway, I want to go out in a blaze of legend, if you know what I mean. Except they will probably ask me back now because they’ll be afraid that Mom will sue them if they don’t. But Mom won’t send me back, so the issue is decided anyway.”
“Do you have any idea why somebody would want to kill you?”
“For real?” Mark said. “Of course I don’t. I don’t even have enough property to leave a will. I don’t have any enemies that I know of. There’s no reason for anybody to kill me.”
“But somebody wanted to.”
“Apparently, yeah.”
“More than apparently,” Gregor said. “Of course, there’s always the possibility that the idea was just to disable you. Either way, it sounds pretty desperate. Did something happen after you came back from Christmas break?”
“Happen how? Lots of things happened.”
“I mean did something change,” Gregor said. “I’m told that Michael Feyre sold drugs, that he was having an affair with the headmaster’s wife, that he was something of a bad actor, but I don’t really know what was going on. You might. You roomed with him.”
“You think that’s what this is about? Michael?”
“Don’t you?” Gregor said. “There may be no reason for anybody to want to kill you, but a drug dealer has lots of people with knives out for him. It goes with the territory.”
“I guess,” Mark said. “I don’t know what you want me to say. Michael and Alice were not exactly discreet, but they never were. Alice was doing that thing, you know, talking politics instead of talking dirty. Like that Woody Allen movie. He was selling stuff to at least one of the teachers, did I tell you that?”
“No,” Gregor said. “Do you mean he was giving drugs to Alice Makepeace?”
“Well, yeah, maybe,” Mark said. “I mean, that goes without saying. But no, he was selling to at least one member of the faculty and maybe more. He told me about it one night after lights out. About how one of the teachers had to gethigh to get it up. Sorry, but that’s what he said. He didn’t say which teacher.”
“And what about last night?” Gregor asked. “What was different about last night?”
“Nothing,” Mark said. He looked suddenly and irrevocably tired. “The only thing that’s been different since Michael died is that I called you. It got around. People weren’t happy. And, you know, it made me think—about the hallucination.”
“What hallucination?”
“I told you yesterday. The night Michael died I saw this thing, only it didn’t seem real, it seemed like a hallucination. That’s why I wanted you to come. I figured you could find out if it was real or not. Only now that I mostly feel better-well, no. I’m not sure it was real. I’m just not so sure it probably wasn’t.”
“If what was real?” Gregor asked, patiently.
“What you need to do,” Mark said, “is go to the library and go up to the second floor to the catwalk. If you go along the catwalk, it ends at this little window space, this arched space, that looks out over Maverick Pond. I was there the night Michael died. I was trying to read but I wasn’t getting very far, and I looked out the window there and I saw what looked like a body lying on the ground under this little stand of evergreens at the end of the pond. It was freezing. It was way below zero, actually. And it was Friday. I thought that whoever it was had had too much to drink or, you know, something else, and had passed out; and if somebody didn’t do something, he’d freeze to death out there. So—”
“So?”
“So I went out to wake him up,” Mark said. “I figured I’d push him until I could get him moving, and then when I saw who it was I’d know where he was supposed to go. Only when I got out there, he was gone.”
“You’re sure it was a he?”
“No,” Mark said. “I’m not even sure it was a student. Whoever it was was dressed all in black, but that isn’t odd because there are lots of people here who do that kind ofthing, you know, to show how different they are. People around here like to show how different they are.”
“Do they?” Gregor said drily.
“And whoever it was was too big—no, that’s not it. Too solid. It’s not that he seemed tall. You couldn’t really tell with him lying down like that. But whoever it was seemed big somehow; solid; it was odd. But then I went down there and no one was there, and there wasn’t any sign anyone had ever been there. I mean, you know, maybe there wouldn’t have been because the snow was hard out there, and you wouldn’t get footprints. I don’t think I left any, but still…”
“You have any idea what bothered you so much about it that you thought you needed me here?”
“Was it wrong to call?” Mark said. “I thought it was pushing it myself, but I was scared to death. I
thought I was going crazy.”
“No, I’m glad you called me,” Gregor said. “I’m just wondering what it was about that particular incident that bothered you so much.”
“I don’t know.” Mark yawned. “I’m sorry, Mr. Demarkian. I’m falling apart here. At least I don’t feel like I’m going nuts. But I don’t know what it was. You might talk to Mr. Candor about it. I saw him on my way back to Hayes House and told him all about it. He probably remembers what I said better than I do.”
“All right,” Gregor said, but Mark was already asleep, sitting up in bed and yet completely relaxed, asleep the way children sometimes fell asleep, with complete and unreserved abandon.
Gregor got his coat and made some calculations in his head about just how hard it was going to be to get Brian Sheehy alone in the next forty five minutes.
Chapter Six
1
Peter Makepeace had lived at President’s House for a decade, but he’d never taken the time to really look at it before. It was, as headmasters’ houses went, neither all that large nor all that impressive. At some of the more prestigious boys’ schools, the headmaster got a house made of stone and built to resemble an Oxford University college. Windsor, on the other hand, had started its life as a girls’ school, and it suffered from many of the things that had made the girls’ schools less impressive and imposing than the institutions the very same parents had supported for their sons. There was, for instance, the conceit that the dorms were really houses, and the school itself really a home. The only building on the entire campus that was not built to ape domesticity was the library, which had been given by Margaret Milbourne Ridenour, who had bitterly resented her exile to Windsor in the days when no coeducation was available and children were shipped off to boarding schools whether they liked it or not. There was a portrait of old Margaret in the library’s foyer. Peter honestly believed he had never seen a more sour, less satisfied human being. He didn’t think she’d be any less sour if she were sent to Windsor today, with its commitment to progressive education, its self-conscious egalitarianism, its pride in the interest its students took in allforms of political causes. Old Margaret was something of a fascist and even more of a traditionalist. She had wanted Windsor to look like, and be like, the Exeter her brothers had been sent to. It hadn’t then. It didn’t now. It never would.