The Headmaster's Wife (17 page)

“I don't think so. I think that at the very least Peter will end up getting fired. The board will have to do that to cover its ass.”

“Maybe,” Cherie said. Then she looked up at President's House. “Maybe they're in there right now listening to everything we have to say. I've always thought Alice would do that if she could, spy on everybody, I mean. Not for any reason, but just because she likes to know things. But that's what I mean, you see. It's as if there's something basically
wrong,
and I always knew it was there, but I never realized it mattered until Michael died.”

“Let's get back over to Hayes,” Melissa said. “I don't believe anybody has spy cameras, but I wouldn't put it past them to be listening at windows.”

Melissa went around the side of the car to the walk, and Cherie followed. It wasn't a long walk from here. Hayes was just down the pathway in the middle of the Main Street side of the quad. When they came into the quad proper, Cherie saw that most of the dorms were lit up almost as spectacularly as President's House was. Maybe everybody needed more light than usual to get through the evenings these days.

They pushed out onto the walk, past President's House, past any conceivable danger.

“Anyway,” Cherie said. “The police have finally gone and aren't coming back, as far as I know. I hated all that questioning, and everybody keeping their mouths shut about Alice. Everybody. I was really impressed. I thought somebody would have to go at it, if only out of spite. And nobody said a word.”

“Maybe they thought it would shut the place down, just like you, and they didn't want to risk it.”

“There are people who wouldn't have cared. Marta Coelho. God, I know we're supposed to show solidarity with all women, but that one really blows my corks. Oh, it's just too, too tragic. There she is, with her fine mind and her doctorate from Yale, stuck in this wretched, tenth-rate place.”

“You're exaggerating.”

“Not by much. She wouldn't care if this place was shut down. She wouldn't care about getting Alice in trouble either. She can't stand her.”

“You can't stand her.”

“It's not in the same way,” Cherie said. “Marta—resents her. Do you know what I mean? It matters like hell to Marta, all that East Coast crap, the old families and the everybody knows everybody and all that bullshit. She'd stab Alice in the back if she could. I can't believe she didn't say anything when the police were here.”

“Did the police even interview her? I thought it was just those of us in Hayes and Michael's teachers. Is she one of Michael's teachers?”

“I don't know. But even if she isn't, she could have asked to talk to them, gotten one of them aside on one of those days when they were crawling all over campus. It's the kind of thing she would do, don't you think?”

“I haven't spent that much time thinking about Marta Coelho,” Melissa said. “I just thank God every once in a while that she isn't gay. Are we intending to go home? Because if we are, we ought to turn in here.”

Cherie looked around. She'd missed the turnoff in the path for Hayes House. She backtracked and began going up the walk to the backdoor. It bothered her no end that the Houses were arranged like this, with their backdoors facing the quads. Yes, the front doors faced roads that cars could travel on, but the quad was the true face of the campus, and Cherie thought the front doors should face that. Besides, the front of the library faced the quad.

If you stay at a boarding school long enough, you'll start thinking in trivialities,
she thought. She got out her key and opened up, letting herself into the long back hall. The lights were on here, too, although they rarely were unless someone was passing through directly. She wondered if people were forgetting to turn them off or if they had left them on deliberately to drive out the dark. She took out the key to their apartment and began fiddling with it—it stuck, as usual—as Sheldon came around from the front and saw them there.

“Oh, good,” he said. “We've been looking all over for you two. Have you seen Mark?”

“Mark DeAvecca?”

“He's the only Mark we've got in this house.”

The key caught. Cherie pushed the door open. “We'vebeen in Boston all day. We haven't seen anybody. Why? Has he gone missing?”

“He didn't sign the book this afternoon. And it's nearly five.”

Cherie put the key back into her bag. “People fail to sign the book all the time,” she said. “You know what afternoons are like around this place. He's probably over in the library or the Student Center. He's probably just trying to stay out of your hair.”

“I'm all in favor of him staying out of my hair, but Peter's adamant. Everybody has to sign the book. It's the police and all that. He doesn't want us to look lax.”

“Not having a fit when a sixteen-year-old boy doesn't check in at home some afternoon isn't looking lax. It's not looking hysterical.”

“It doesn't matter,” Sheldon said. “I don't give a damn one way or the other. That kid is the single most irresponsible student I've ever seen, never mind the obvious, which is that he's far too screwed up most of the time to function. I wish they'd throw him out of here, although I don't suppose there's any chance of that now. The school would look like God knows what if they threw him out in the wake of this.”

“He's probably around somewhere. He'll be in for curfew. Just relax.”

“I can't relax,” Sheldon said. “Peter isn't relaxed. And you don't have Mark staying in your apartment.”

Sheldon turned around and walked off. Cherie watched him go without regret. He was not one of her favorite people, and he was not the person she would have chosen to share a campus house with if she'd had the choice of who would get what apartment where.

She went into her own apartment, waited until Melissa came in after her, and closed up. It was only then that it occurred to her that what Mark DeAvecca really seemed to be most of the time was not stoned, but depressed, and that depressed people sometimes committed suicide.

Somewhere in the world, there is sanity,
Gregor Demarkian thought, sitting by his window looking out on the Main Street of Windsor, Massachusetts, while Mark took the longest shower in history. Windsor itself looked very sane—too sane, really, the kind of sane where people assume that everybody will naturally be “intelligent” about their “choices” and always choose not to engage in “inappropriate” behavior. There was a streak in him, Gregor knew, of the kind of rebellious teenager who wrecks his life just to make the locals tear their hair. It was interesting that it had only shown up in his fifties. When he'd actually been a teenager, he'd been very straight arrow and conscientious. On the other hand, the world in which he had had to be straight arrow and conscientious had not been like this one. None of his teachers would ever have talked about “choices” or worried about what was “appropriate.” If he'd acted like an idiot, they'd have told him he was acting like an idiot. If he'd done something they didn't like, they'd have told him he'd done something they didn't like, and why, and he'd have been free to tell them why he thought they were wrong. That was, he thought, the key. He got the feeling in places like Windsor that the game was rigged. For all the talk about choices, the people who ran places like this didn't actuallybelieve in choice. “We teach students to evaluate all the options and make the choices that are right for them.” That was a line from the Windsor Academy material he'd gotten from the guidance counselor. He had a feeling it wasn't true. In fact it was something worse than not true. If students were really supposed to evaluate all the options and to make their own choices, then some of them would choose to stay drugged to the gills most of the time, and others would have sex and maybe babies at fifteen, and others would drop out of the whole college admissions game and become carpenters. Gregor was fairly sure that neither the school nor the parents would put up with any of that. What was wrong, he wondered, with admitting that adolescents didn't always know what was good for them, that they had to have their choices cut off, sometimes just to make sure they could make it through to the next phase of their lives? What was the point of pretending to an equality that you had no intention of allowing to exist? His old-fashioned school was more—honorable—than this, and in its way more respectful of him than this kind of thing could ever be. At least it had accepted him as a fully human being who had a right not to be manipulated.

I'm making all this up out of nothing,
he thought, looking down on Main Street some more. There were too many cars. Traffic was barely moving. In spite of all the care that had been taken to make Windsor look like a real small town, there was no disguising the fact that it was a suburb of Boston. He really was making all this up. He knew nothing at all about Windsor or Windsor Academy. He was extrapolating not even from what he'd read, but from the feeling of unease it gave him. There were suburbs like this outside Philadelphia, too. They weren't the best suburbs, where serious old money lived. Those places were as bald and un-apologetic as the worst of Philadelphia's bad neighborhoods. The suburbs he was thinking of were the ones—

There was a knock on the door, and he went to answer it. The knock on the door was room service. A young womanwheeled a cart in and unloaded it on the small, round table near the window he'd been looking out of. He gave her a dollar and she thanked him in a cheerful, uncomplicated way that did a lot to calm his nerves. He checked the soup tureen and looked under the cover of the plate of sandwiches he had ordered. They were the oddest, most precious sandwiches he had ever seen, little bite-sized triangles, carefully composed. The roast beef had something that looked like horseradish on it, except that the horseradish had little flecks of green in it. The tuna salad had little flecks of green in it, too. He wondered where the recipes for this sort of thing came from. Maybe there really were people who took Martha Stewart seriously, even outside the SEC. He wasn't making sense again. He wasn't making sense at all. The simple fact was that places like Windsor made him angry in an elemental, primal way that could not be explained, or controlled, by reason, and he really didn't know why that was.

The bathroom door opened and Mark came out, looking fifty times better than he had and trying, without much success, to dry his hair on a towel. Mark had a lot of hair—not because he'd left it long; he could have used a haircut—but only because he looked ragged, not because his hair was at his shoulders, but because it was so thick. Gregor had a memory of his mother saying that Mark didn't need his hair cut so much as he needed it mowed.

Mark let the towel drop to his shoulders. “Sorry to take so long,” he said. “I zoned out a little.”

“What does that mean, ‘zoned out'?”

Mark shrugged. “Zoned out. I sort of lost track of time, and of where I was, that kind of thing. I've been doing it a lot lately.”

“You look a lot better than you did, and you looked very bad.”

“I know,” Mark said. He walked over to the table and raised the lids on the soup and sandwiches.

“Have a sandwich,” Gregor told him.

Mark reached in and took one of the roast beef withhorseradish. “They must get this place to cater for events over at school. They have these sandwiches all the time. The roast beef ones are good.”

“You could eat a little. You look thin.”

Mark swayed a little and then blinked. He put his hand on the back of a chair to steady himself and then sat down, abruptly, as if his legs had given way beneath him. “Sorry,” he said, “I'm just tired.”

“You looked dizzy.”

“I was dizzy. Am. Am dizzy. Sorry. It's just that I'm tired, really. I can't seem to sleep up here, or at least not much. I'm running on caffeine and adrenaline half the time, and even that doesn't help more often than not. Thank you for coming up here. I needed somebody to talk to.”

“You used to be able to talk to your mother.”

“I can still talk to my mother. I just don't want to at the moment.” Mark shook his head. “Not that I'm not going to have to,” he said. “She's going to hear about this eventually. Then she's probably going to ride into town in a tank and blow some things up. Did I tell you she really hates Windsor Academy?”

“No, but it doesn't surprise me.”

“She came up for Parents Day in October and nearly brained my adviser with a plate. Not that I really minded much, you understand. My adviser makes my skin crawl.”

“Maybe you should get a new adviser.”

“It's not that easy,” Mark said. “Look, the thing is, I've been up here since September, right? Okay, I don't like it much, it was probably the wrong place, but, you know, anybody can do anything for a year. What's the sense in cutting and running before the year is over? What's the sense of quitting?”

“It's not cutting and running to recognize the fact that you're sick,” Gregor said. “And if you're telling me the truth and you're not taking drugs—”

“I
am
telling you the truth. I'd never take drugs. In the first place, I'm not stupid. In the second place, my dad would probably come back to haunt me. He made it through the sixties in college without ever taking a toke on a joint.”

“You know the lingo.”

“Everybody knows the lingo. And Michael—Michael Feyre, my roommate—he was the biggest dealer on campus. You have no idea.”

“There are a lot of drugs on this campus?”

Mark shrugged. “There are more than I'm used to. At Rumsey Hall you'd hear rumors about people sometimes, but I never actually saw anybody using the whole eight years I was there. Up here there are people who come to class stoned, and everybody knows it, even the teachers.”