by Jane Haddam
“Don’t bet on it, Mr. Demarkian. I have no intention of going back to prison.”
“That may not be up to you.”
Philip smiled again. It was one of the eeriest smiles Gregor had ever seen. “You came to ask me about the night Michael Feyre died. Why don’t you ask me?”
Gregor was aware that something was wrong here. Philip Candor—he had to think of this man as Philip Candor; he was too unlike the boy Leland Beech had been to share the same name—was hiding something. Gregor wondered if he’d taken that name, Candor, on purpose. He probably had.
“All right,” Gregor said. “The night Michael Feyre died, Mark DeAvecca was in the library, in the catwalk nook we found Edith Braxner in last night just before she fell to her death. He says that he looked out the window there and saw somebody lying under a small stand of evergreens, somebody wearing black from head to foot. He came out of the library and went down to see who it was because, he said, he thought the person might have been drinking and passed out, and it was cold—”
“It was freezing,” Philip said. “It was under nine below.”
“Quite. Mark got to the evergreens and found nothing there. He then came back through the faculty wing of the library and stopped for a moment to talk to Marta Coelho. Then he came on out the front and started to cross the quad and ran into you. He said he told you all about it.”
“He did.”
“And did you believe him?”
“No,” Philip said. “He wasn’t in good shape. We’ve heard all about the caffeine and arsenic poisoning now, but at the time I simply assumed he was wasted. And hallucinating. But just in case, after I sent him back to Hayes House, I went out to check.”
“Did you? Did you find anything?”
“No,” Philip said. “There was nobody at or under the evergreens when I looked, and there was no sign that anybody had been there. No footprints in the snow. Nothing like that, at least that I could see. Of course, even if somebody had been there when Mark looked out from the library, there might not have been any traces left behind. The ground was solid with ice. We’d had a couple of bad storms right before.”
“So you thought, what? That Mark was hallucinating?”
“I thought he was behaving fairly normally for a habitual druggie. He may have been hallucinating. He may just have seen something and misinterpreted it. My only concern was in case there really was someone passed out there because in that weather they could easily have frozen to death if they’d slept there overnight. So I checked, and there was nothing.”
“What about the description Mark gave? Somebody all in black, from head to foot.”
“It sounds like Alice, doesn’t it?” Philip said. “You must have seen her by now, last night if not before. She’s always wandering around in that cape and black leather pants as if she thinks she’s about to be cast in a movie with the young Marlon Brando. But it needn’t have been Alice. Black is very fashionable around here. People think it distinguishes them from the rah-rah cheerleader types they came here to escape. They think it’s intellectual.”
Philip Candor would not be susceptible to that kind of symbolism, Gregor thought. He switched directions. “According to Mark, Michael Feyre had a habit of blackmailing people, specifically women, by threatening to expose the fact that they’d bought drugs from him and taking payment for the blackmail in sexual favors.”
Now Philip looked very, very amused. “You mean in blow jobs? Yes, Mr. Demarkian, I’d heard all about that. But it wasn’t just blackmail about the drugs, and it wasn’t just women, and it wasn’t just sex. Michael was an out-and-out psychopath, the proverbial bad seed. He had no conscience at all, and he had a limitless appetite for sadism.”
“Did he find out about your secret? Did he threaten to expose the fact that you are actually Leland Beech.”
“No,” Philip said. “I’m not a fool, Mr. Demarkian. I don’t keep reminders of that part of my life lying around loose forpeople to find. There’s nothing to connect me to Leland Beech here or anywhere else in the state of Massachusetts. To expose me, Michael would have had to be someone like you, someone with a connection to the case, or a true-crime buff who watched all the little documentaries on Court TV and A&E and the Unsolved Mysteries episodes. I’ve—well, we’ve, my family and myself—we’ve been the subject of one of those episodes and of an episode of City Confidential. I watched them both. More stupidity.”
“And Michael had not watched them?”
“Michael’s tastes in entertainment ran mostly to the pornographic. He was not all that bright, Mr. Demarkian. And he had nothing at all in the way of cultural literacy. He didn’t read newspapers. He would have looked on City Confidential as just another newspaper, even if it is a television show. And I’m way out of his league. A lot of people here weren’t though.”
“Weren’t out of his league?”
“Exactly.”
“Such as who? Who do you think Michael Feyre had information on?”
“James Hallwood, for one,” Philip said. “He was definitely pushing Hallwood on the drugs, if nothing else. There’s no other way to explain the grade he got in English. Hallwood is not a pushover. He’s never heard of grade inflation. Michael should have been flunking that course. He wasn’t coming close.”
Gregor checked his notebook. “Hallwood is Mark’s English teacher?”
“And Michael’s, yes. He does most of the sophomore English classes.”
“Who else?”
“I don’t really know, Mr. Demarkian. I only know who was nervous, and I probably don’t know everybody who was nervous. Marta, for instance, was very nervous. But I can’t see her buying drugs, and she doesn’t strike me as the kind of person who has a deep, dark secret.”
“What about Alice Makepeace?”
Philip laughed. “Michael was already getting everything he wanted out of Alice, and probably more.”
“She was sleeping with a student. She would have been rightly afraid of having that exposed.”
“Maybe,” Philip said, “but I don’t see why she’d suddenly be afraid of that with Michael when she was never afraid of it before. Michael wasn’t the first one. There’ve been a string of them. It’s what she does. I always thought she’d be happier than not to get thrown out of this place. I don’t think her idea of a good time was growing old as a headmaster’s wife.”
“What about the houseparents in Hayes? Cherie Wardrop and Sheldon—nobody has ever used any name for him but Sheldon.”
“Sheldon LeRouve. No, nobody does use any other name for him. A bitter, small-minded, spiteful man. The first time I ever had any sympathy for Mark DeAvecca was when he got stuck rooming with Sheldon. Cherie is gay and lives with her partner, Melissa.”
“I know that. I’ve been in their apartment.”
“So you must have been,” Philip said. “They seem nice enough. They’re school hoppers, though, which never makes administrations happy.”
“What’s a school hopper?”
“A faculty member who hops from school to school. Schools are like businesses. They like to keep a stable workforce as much as possible. And most teachers like to find a congenial place and stay in it. Some teachers get restless and move from school to school. They want different areas of the country or different educational philosophies or different people to talk to. It’s a way of relieving boredom, mostly. With Cherie, I think Peter Makepeace thought that since she’d be able to share faculty housing with Melissa, which wasn’t the case in most schools, she’d be more likely to stay here. It might be true. It also might be that it is Melissa who wants to move and not Cherie. Cherie’s got a good degree in biology and a good teaching record. She could probably finda job anywhere except a religious school that wouldn’t tolerate her sexual orientation.”
“And any other school would?”
“She may just not have mentioned it,” Philip said. “She’d have been living in faculty housing, and Melissa would have been living on her own. They c
ould have kept it a secret if they wanted to. But they don’t need to keep it secret here. So that couldn’t be a reason for Michael Feyre to blackmail her.”
“What about Edith Braxner?” Gregor asked. “Could Michael have been blackmailing her?”
“Not likely. Edith was our resident saint. She’s the only person in the history of Windsor Academy ever to turn in house accounts that actually balanced.”
“House accounts?”
“The houseparents have to turn in house accounts,” Philip said. “We’ve got operating budgets for the Houses for things like Christmas parties and birthday parties for the boarding students and that kind of thing. They’re not large and they’re not important, but Edith kept them down to the penny. The student accounts, too. That’s what our boarding students do for money. They have House accounts they can draw from. The houseparents act as bankers, and we’re always shelling out cash and forgetting who we shelled it out to and having to backtrack. There’s a memo from administration every month, but Edith never got one. Her student accounts were perfect. And she was a demon about maintaining the heirlooms.”
“What are the heirlooms?”
“Go into the common room here and see,” Philip said. “We’ve got at least four pieces of seriously expensive furniture, art furniture, really. Lytton, where Edith lived, has a table that belonged to Henry David Thoreau. It’s worth thousands of dollars. All the Houses have antiques. The insurance company must have a cow knowing they’re around where students can get to them. But Edith’s House always has the best ones because she’s the only one of us who really is diligent about caring for them. Was. I’ll admit it, she’s one of the few people I know here I’m sorry to see gone.”
Gregor stood up. “You’ve been very helpful,” he said. “I need to know where to find Doyle House. That should be the next one closer to the library from here, yes?”
“Yes,” Philip said.
“I will have to tell the police where you are and who you are.”
“I know,” Philip said, “I didn’t expect anything else. But you’ve got no way of holding me here against my will, Mr. Demarkian. I’m younger than you are and stronger than you are, and if it ever came down to a fight, I’d win. So I suggest that you leave here and make your call from next door. And I’ll do what I have to do.”
“If you’re thinking of staging some kind of confrontation, it would be very foolish.”
“I gave up staging confrontations years ago.”
“If you’re thinking of running, that would be very foolish, too.”
“Would it? Well, it probably would be. Good-bye, Mr. Demarkian. I hope you found it interesting.”
Gregor was about to say he had when he found himself deposited unceremoniously onto the porch. Philip Candor had ushered him out of the apartment and out of Martinson House so adeptly that he’d hardly noticed he was moving.
2
Gregor made the call to Brian Sheehy and then to the federal fugitive hotline from his cell phone, but what Philip Candor had said was true. He had no way of holding him against his will, and not much he could do to keep Philip from leaving if he wanted to leave. Even if he stood here in the quad and watched the door he’d just come out of, Philip could probably go through a different door or out a window or a fire escape. He stood for a moment or two, looking at Martinson House, but in the end he felt silly. He thought it mattered enormously that Philip Candor be returned to his identity as Leland Beech and sent back to prison. He just didn’t see that there was anything else he could do to make it happen.
He made his way along the frozen paths to Doyle House’s front door and rang that bell. He’d barely put his finger to the button when the door was flung open and he found himself staring at a tall, thin, elegant man in impeccable tailoring, holding a sheaf of papers in one hand.
“Mr. Demarkian,” the man said. “Mr. Demarkian. I went over to the inn a little while ago looking for you, but you’d already gone out. I’m James Hallwood.”
This was almost too convenient to be believed, but Gregor didn’t think he ought to turn down good luck. He didn’t have that much of it. James Hallwood was standing back and motioning him inside. Gregor went, wondering what the papers were. James closed the door behind them both.
“It’s very difficult to know what the right thing to do might be,” James said. “You think and you think. And, of course, if I’d received this paper, Michael’s paper, at any other time, I would have brought it to the attention of the administration. Ever since Columbine, we’re all very careful to focus on any sign of impending violence. But then he was dead. You can see that, can’t you? There was no point making a fuss of it if he was dead. It would only have hurt his family to no good purpose.”
Gregor noticed that James Hallwood was not leading him into an apartment. He had opted instead to go to the large Doyle House living room, a gigantic empty space with more couches than Gregor would have thought any room needed. There was also a television set, tucked in between the shelves of a built-in bookcase. It was not a large television set, and it had dust on it. James motioned for him to sit down.
“Don’t worry,” he said, “they’re not anywhere around at this hour of the day. On days when class is in session, they’re not permitted in the Houses after breakfast until two thirty. That’s to make sure that none of them hide. There are no classes today, of course, but they’re all at an assembly at the moment. We’ll have the grief counselors in any minute now.”
“Other faculty members can be here, can’t they?” Gregor said. “Houses have more than one houseparent, as far as I can tell.”
“Yes, yes they do,” James said. “But you don’t have to worry about that either. Linda and Donald Corby are away for the day. They’ve gone to visit Linda’s mother. About to jump ship, if you ask me, although I don’t expect there’s going to be much of a ship to jump by the end of the week. The news is out now. It’s all over the place. This school will be on the verge of collapse by tomorrow morning. I wanted to show you these, both of them. The first one is Mark DeAvecca’s. The second one is Michael Feyre’s. They’re short stories they wrote for my English class a few weeks ago. Take a look.”
Gregor sat down on one of the big couches, took off his coat again—this was what he hated most about winter, getting in and out of all the extra clothes—and read the first few paragraphs of the story on the top.
That year the snow came down in thick white mats like lace doilies, shutting out the mountains, Martin Francis thought he had reached a place in life where only good things could happen to him, and the best of those things was Andrea Marl. It didn’t matter to him that Andrea Marl was twenty years older than he was, any more than it mattered to him that she was married. He cared only that she ask him into her bedroom every Wednesday afternoon during the study break, and that her husband always be away in Boston until very late on Wednesday evening.
“That’s remarkable,” Gregor said. “Mark wrote this?”
James Hallwood nodded impatiently. “Yes, yes. Whatever else we may all want to say about Mark DeAvecca, he writes like a professional. Better than his mother does, and she’s been at it and getting paid for it for longer than he’s been born. But that’s not the point. Look at the other one.”
Gregor ran through page after page—Mark had written a very long story—and finally came to the last few, badly typed and almost illegible under a cascade of Inkjet printer smear. The first few lines were impossible to read. The next few were not, but he wished they were.
… take an axe straight to her cunt smash it open and see it bleed and fuck the whole slimy garbage of entrails and pussy and …
Gregor put the papers down on his lap. “For God’s sake.”
“It’s hard to read, I know it is,” James Hallwood said. “It took me three tries before I managed to get through it. But I did get through it. And that’s when I realized.”
“Realized what?” Gregor said. “That Michael Feyre was apparently deeply mentall
y disturbed? I think everybody knew that already.”
“They did,” James Hallwood said, “but that’s not the point either. The point is that those two, uh, papers, are about the same thing. Or they’re supposed to be. They’re about Michael having sex with a faculty member. And Michael’s paper is so awful that you don’t pay attention to details after a while because your mind is reeling. But if you do pay attention to details, you see it. Mark wrote his paper about Michael and Alice. Michael wrote his paper about himself and someone else.”
Gregor looked down at the papers on his lap again. He didn’t want to read any more of Michael Feyre’s. James leaned forward, impatient.
“Look at that,” he said, flipping to the next to the last page and pointing to the middle paragraph. “Look at it. He says he wants to take an Exacto knife to her tattoo, do you see that?”
What Gregor saw was a sentence that had that information in it, but a lot of other words as well, most of them obscene.
“I see it,” he said.
“Whoever it is, she has a tattoo on her inner right thigh. A tattoo of numbers: 75744210. He says it right here.”
“It might still refer to Mrs. Makepeace,” Gregor said.
“No, it couldn’t. Alice does not have tattoos, and I know she doesn’t have them on her inner thighs. We have a pool here, and I’ve seen her swim.”
“It could refer to someone he knew before he ever came here,” Gregor said, “or someone he knows in town rather than in school. Or it could refer to a student.”
“No,” James said again. He grabbed the papers and rifled through them another time. “Look here. Sit in class and watch her teach see her naked tell her next time she should strip right there and then get the knife, get something serious and cut her eyes … It sounds like one of his teachers, doesn’t it? One of his teachers here.”
“Maybe,” Gregor said cautiously. “Did Michael have many women teachers?”
“He had Edith,” James said. “Not that I think for a moment that this could be Edith. She’s not the type to give in to sexual blackmail, and she’s not the type for a boy like that to want to, well, to do what he’s suggesting he did here. And I can’t imagine Edith had a tattoo, although they’ll find that out at the autopsy, won’t they?”