The Headmaster's Wife

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The Headmaster's Wife Page 40

by Jane Haddam


  Mark cleared his throat. “Mr. Demarkian? I’d sort of appreciate it if you didn’t tell my mother that I’d come straight here, you know, from the hospital. I mean, she’s going to know I left and all, but it would probably be better if she thought I went back to the dorm.”

  “She’s going to know you came here no matter what I say,” Gregor told him patiently. “Look around.”

  “She’s here?”

  “No, Mark. How did you know to come here?”

  “Oh, I was watching this story about it on CNN, there’s this breaking news thing—oh. Ah. We’re being filmed.”

  “Exactly. It’s a testimony to the professional competence of Brian Sheehy’s men that you managed to get all the way here without getting nailed by a reporter with a microphone. How did you get here, by the way? Everything is supposed to be blocked off.”

  “I came in through Hayes House. You can’t really block off this campus. You’d need an army. Then I came through the library and out the faculty wing. They’ve got the main reading room closed, but you can get to the wing through the foyer.”

  Gregor turned around. “There’s a guard by the wing door,” he said.

  Mark shrugged. “I sort of went through Marta Coelho’s office and out the window.”

  “Sort of?”

  “Well, for God’s sake, Mr. Demarkian. I mean, the only reason you’re here to begin with, and the police aren’t just dicking around pretending like nothing’s wrong, is me. Right? I was the first one to get it. And I brought you here. I’m not going to sit in a room two miles away and watch everybody else get on TV.”

  “I thought you didn’t want to be on TV because your mother would see you.”

  “Nah, I don’t mind being on TV. And don’t tell me I should still be in the hospital. If we had an HMO like everybody else, I’d have been out yesterday. I’m fine. I feel like I’ve taken my life back. You have no idea what a relief it is.”

  “For your information,” Gregor said, “Michael’s mother knew there was something wrong. She talked to me, too.”

  “Before you got here?”

  “No,” Gregor said, “since.”

  “There,” Mark said, satisfied. “What are they doing down there anyway? That guy’s going to kill himself if he keeps that up.”

  “They’re trying to get under that stand of evergreens to see if something’s been left there,” Gregor said. “We think—I think, might be more accurate—that the figure you thought was passed out in the snow, or dead, the night your roommate died was trying to get something your roommate had put there. Deliberately put there. Let me ask you something. Were you ever aware of Michael using the room you shared with him for, ah, assignations?”

  “You mean for sex?” Mark looked amused. “Yeah, he did. Not much, you know, because he and Alice went to her place most of the time. Peter isn’t much in evidence in the middle of the day. But she came up to the room sometimes.”

  “Did you ever walk in on them?”

  “No. I can hear through the door, if I put my ear against it and listen. And they’d go up there during the time when the dorms are supposed to be locked and off-limits. She could get keys. But they went up there other times, too.”

  “Did he ever have anybody in there besides Alice Makepeace?”

  “Well,” Mark said, “if you listened to Michael, he’d done every female on campus with the exception of a couple he thought were too ugly. Those, he said, he got to blow him off. It was the way he talked. You could believe it or not, depending on what you wanted. I just tried to stay out of his way. You know, that guy is going about it all wrong. He’s going to end up dead and you’re not going to find what you want to find. What do you want to find?”

  “I’m not a hundred percent sure. A wallet, I think.”

  “Michael put his wallet under there? Why?”

  “Not his wallet, no,” Gregor said.

  They had both turned to look at the operation at the evergreens. It was not going well. The first police officer had retired from the fray, and a new one, smaller, slighter, and more wiry, was making the attempt. Like the first man, he was starting by trying to slide in on his back. The alternative would have required him to press his face into the new snow and then down to the icy crust beneath it. He got less than half his body under the branches before he had to stop.

  “That’s really crazy,” Mark said. “He can’t do it that way. Why don’t you just let me go in and get it?”

  “That’s all I’d need,” Gregor said. “Your mother having a fit at me because you’d ended up in the hospital again, cut to ribbons by evergreen needles.”

  “I wouldn’t be cut to ribbons,” Mark said. “It’s just a matter of doing it right. Come on. I’ll find whatever it is. I’ll do it for Alice.”

  “What?”

  “Alice,” Mark said. “She’s just over there. She’s inspired me. The most beautiful woman on campus.”

  Gregor turned to look at Alice Makepeace, standing with the crowd at the edge of the library. Her red hair gleamed in the sun. Her black cape floated in the wind. She was the most noticeable person on the scene.

  He turned back and saw that Mark had already left him, skidding down the hill on what he now realized were scuffed, brown penny loafers. Snow was flying everywhere. If Liz didn’t kill him for letting Mark be here at all, she was going to kill Mark for going out into ankle-deep snow in penny loafers and what appeared to be no socks. Gregor hurried down the hill after him. His own footwear was not exactly ideal. He consoled himself with the thought that wingtips, unlike penny loafers, had shoelaces. Why that should matter, he didn’t know.

  He got to the bottom of the hill just as Mark was saying, “Think of it like you were retrieving a baseball. You’ve gotto get baseballs out of all sorts of places, right. Would you do that on your back? Would you do that humping your body up and down like you were a horny squirrel who needed glasses?”

  Gregor coughed.

  The wiry young police officer looked interested. “Baseballs,” he said. “Yeah.”

  The police officer got down on the ground again, this time flat on his stomach. There was, Gregor realized, a lot of snow, much more than there seemed to be when you were standing up. Lying facedown, the police officer’s face was crammed into it. When he tried to slide under the branches, it got up his nose.

  “Don’t push yourself,” Mark said. “Pull yourself. Keep yourself flat. Hold your breath if you have to. It’s only going to be for a couple of seconds.”

  The police officer stood up. “Jesus,” he said, “you try it. I’m going to drown.”

  “Okay,” Mark said.

  Gregor should have realized what Mark was going to do. If he had, he would have stopped him. Mark was on the ground before anybody realized what was happening. Brian Sheehy saw what was going on and hurried forward. The wiry young policeman shot out a hand to stop his progress. They were all too late. Mark went flat on his face and stomach, shot out his right arm, and pulled himself under the evergreens.

  “Crap,” he said as he disappeared from view and then, “Got it.”

  A second later he had pulled himself out again, this time by sticking out his left arm and pulling the other way. When he got to his knees, he was holding the wallet between his teeth, and the entire front of his sweater was coated with snow. In a minute, Gregor knew, the snow would melt and he’d be soaking wet.

  “Take it,” Mark said, handing it to Gregor. “If it’s not what you want, I’ll have to go in again. Because you can’t see anything under there, not the way you have to be lying tofit. That’s not Michael’s wallet by the way. I’ve seen his wallet a million times. It doesn’t look anything like that.”

  Gregor hadn’t expected it to be Michael Feyre’s wallet. He hadn’t expected it to have anything in the way of money or credit cards in it either. He took it from Mark and bent it back and forth in his hands. It was stiff with plastic cards, but none of them were in the cardholders.

  Mark look
ed, curious. “Where are they? I could feel them, but they’re not there.”

  Gregor felt along the inside edges at the crease between the cardholder pocket and the fold for paper money. He found the slit in the lining without too much trouble. He stuck his fingers in and came out with a thick stack of Windsor Academy student ID cards. There were ten of them, all of boys.

  “Holy crap,” Mark said. “That’s my lost card. That’s Michael’s card.”

  “I expected that would be here,” Gregor said. “Michael lost his card. Then he figured out who had it.” He shuffled through the cards quickly, and toward the middle he found the anomaly, the one he had been looking for. This was not a photo ID, and it was not a Windsor Academy card. It was a VISA debit card issued by something called the First National City Bank of Sheboygan, Wisconsin.

  “What’s that?” It was Brian Sheehy, moving in from the hill. A lot of people were moving in, including Danny Kelly and several uniformed police officers. “That’s a bank card. Who’s M. C. Medwar? Do we have an M. C. Medwar in this case?”

  “It all depends on how you look at it,” Gregor said. Then he handed the wallet, and its contents, to Brian Sheehy. “There it is, everything Michael Feyre needed to hang somebody with and what got him hanged himself. I knew there was only one person who could possibly have done all this. I just couldn’t figure out why.”

  Chapter Six

  1

  Oddly, Peter Makepeace was calmer than he had ever been before in his life. He was calmer than he had been on the day he had interviewed for this job, in spite of the fact that he had known, at that interview, that there was virtually no chance that he would be turned away. It seemed to him now that he had spent his entire life afraid. As a boy, he had been afraid that he would not measure up to his father’s idea of what Makepeace boys were supposed to be. He would not be athletic enough, or socially graceful enough, or intellectually easeful enough. It was ease, not achievement, that mattered in the Makepeace boys when it came to education. It was not acceptable to fail, but it was also not acceptable to swot. Peter had had disturbing tendencies toward swotting that he had only put down with great difficulty. If he had been born into another kind of family, or aspired to another kind of life, he would have done graduate work in philosophy and written a book on aesthetics. He had tried to do just that a few years ago when being who and what he was had suddenly seemed not nearly enough, but it was too late. Whatever spark he might have had for it when he was first in college was gone now. He had been unable to think of anything to say that wasn’t a cliché.

  He had no idea why he was thinking about aestheticsnow, but he was, and at the back of it was the greatest revelation he had ever had about himself as a human being. He was a coward. There was no other word for it. He had not only lived on fear, he had let it rule him, even when the smallest effort at thought would have revealed his fears to be mostly fantasies. Maybe the truth was that he had loved fear, but that didn’t feel quite right. It was more a lack of imagination. He had never been able to picture himself as other than what he was. When he had tried, he had felt as if he were sinking into an abyss. His father would have had no respect for him if he had become the greatest professor of philosophy in the Western world and written the greatest work of modern philosophy. In the end he would have had no respect for himself if he had done those things either. The problem was he had no respect for himself for having not done them or for having done what he had actually done.

  My self-esteem is a cesspit, he thought, and almost laughed. He remembered, at the last minute, that he was still standing outside. He had only thought of going back to President’s House and making the calls he needed to make. He didn’t want Gregor Demarkian or that repulsive police chief to start staring at him as if he were a lunatic or, worse yet, think that he had murdered Edith Braxton and tried to poison Mark DeAvecca. They thought Alice had done both, Peter knew that. If he were completely honest with himself, he thought so, too. Alice was a profoundly foolish woman, foolish to the point of being dangerous, but she was not a coward.

  He turned carefully away from the scene where Mark was standing in his cotton crewneck sweater—that kid was a mess; he couldn’t even remember to wear a coat in subzero temperatures—and began to make his way back up the hill to the library and then from the library to the quad. There were phone calls he needed to make, people he had to talk to, arrangements he had to finalize. He saw Alice on the other side of the hill, but he didn’t go to her. She didn’t need him. She never needed him. He didn’t want her. It was all going to be bad enough without hearing in her his father’s voice.

  After he had been afraid of disappointing his father, he had been afraid of disappointing his “friends.” He understood now that these people were not friends as the word was ordinarily defined. They were not people he was particularly close to or for whom he felt a particular responsibility. Rather, they were men and women he had grown up with, in that peculiar world where nobody was really rich but private schools and subscriptions to the symphony were assumed as a matter of course. He tried to think of himself outside of that world and couldn’t. It had its own rules and its own language, as any world did, and he knew neither the rules nor the language for any other.

  He got all the way across the quad without being stopped. He had expected somebody, parents arriving to take their children if no one else, to insist that he explain it all on the spot. He was grateful that it didn’t happen. He got to President’s House and climbed the front steps. He went into the foyer and down the hall to the study. He had other pictures of Alice, ones he hadn’t burned. He didn’t go looking for them.

  He thought, instead, of a man who had taught at Windsor one of the first years he was here. His name had been Steve something. The silly custom of using only first names often meant that he couldn’t remember anyone’s last name. It didn’t matter. Steve was just about to defend his dissertation at MIT in something called “behavioral psychology,” and the school had hired him to teach one half-year course in psychology and three sections of intro biology. If they hadn’t been in a bind, with their regular biology teacher out sick with uterine cancer on no notice at all, they would never have hired him. Steve most definitely did not fit the Windsor ethos. In fact, Peter thought now, Mark DeAvecca reminded him a little of Steve—or at least Mark did when he wasn’t being odd on whatever it was he was being stoned out on. The two of them had the same odd attitude to all things intellectual, and the same air of being absolutely at home with Shakespeare as well as Homer Simpson.

  It was the at-homeness that Peter was thinking about now. He was at home in his own world among his own people, butoutside of that he was uncomfortable everywhere. Steve had been comfortable no matter where he was, and in spite of the fact that he didn’t fit and that he must have known that people disapproved of him, he didn’t seem to care. There were teachers here who made it a policy to show enthusiasm for the things “the kids” really liked, as a way of staying relevant. They pretended to love Spiderman and Triple X and the music of Jack Off Jill. The operative word was “pretended.” It was a conscious decision, and it was made on the assumption that these same kids would one day abandon their enthusiasm for all that and choose to like jazz and Robert Altman instead.

  Steve had not needed to pretend, not in either direction. In spite of the fact that he was a “science person,” he had a knowledge of English literature that was both wide and deep. He had read Jane Austen and Henry James with insight and understanding. He had also read Stephen King and Isaac Asimov. He made none of the kinds of distinctions Peter was used to seeing academics make when they dealt with popular culture. He didn’t pick out one small esoteric corner of science fiction or horror, one little group of authors most people had never heard of, to heap with praise and compare to Dante. He enjoyed both Stanislaw Lern and space operas.

  In fact, Peter thought, “enjoyment” was the word for Steve. Steve enjoyed himself. He enjoyed his research. He enjoyed his teaching. He
enjoyed reading and music and politics and debating. There must have been some things that left him cold, but Peter couldn’t remember ever having found any.

  I do not enjoy myself, Peter thought, and that was true. He had never in his life enjoyed himself in the way Steve did every day. Steve had successfully defended his dissertation and gone off to the University of California at Santa Barbara to work with a woman named Leda Cosmides, who was the most important researcher in his field. Peter was sure he was enjoying himself there, too. California was the place where everybody was supposed to enjoy himself. Steve enjoyed Big Macs and Whoppers, chain-restaurant tacos, and thebest food in Boston when it was provided by the Board of Trustees. He enjoyed PBS documentaries on the glories of Rome and the continuing advantages of South Park, Colorado. He enjoyed “Song of Joy” and “Sugar, Sugar.”

  “He makes no distinctions,” Alice had said, with distaste, at the time—and at the time he had agreed with her and shared that distaste. When he wasn’t sharing the distaste, he was feeling either annoyed or frightened. He was frightened of Steve because Steve was so damned anarchic. He was annoyed with Steve because Steve threatened to undo all the work they did at Windsor to turn their children into serious, successful adults.

  Fear, Peter thought again. He picked up the phone and felt the weight of it in his hand. It was an old-fashioned sort of phone. It was heavy. He wished he could get Steve back, right now, just to talk to him. He wished he remembered some of the things Steve had been so enthusiastic about, the authors, the television shows, the music. He thought about going out to exit 30 on 1-95 and getting himself a Big Mac, but he couldn’t really see himself eating it. He’d never developed the taste for that kind of thing. He’d trained himself too well to think of that kind of tiling as anything but a walking heart attack.

 

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