The Headmaster's Wife (18 page)

“And they don't do anything about it?”

“You don't go accusing people of being drugged out if you can't prove it,” Mark said. “Especially if their parents are wealthy and not averse to taking you to court. They do something if they actually catch someone with the stuff on them. Not otherwise.”

Gregor considered this. “If your roommate was a dealer, wouldn't he have had the stuff on him, at least sometimes?”

Mark picked up the cover of the sandwich tray again and got another roast beef with horseradish. “Can I have one of these Perriers?” he asked. Gregor nodded, and Mark opened a small Perrier bottle and poured half the contents in one of the clear water glasses that had come with the tray. “The thing about Michael and his dealing,” he said, “is that we came to an understanding right away. Michael didn't bring that stuff into our room—ever. He probably wouldn't have anyway because of the searches—

“Searches?”

“They search your room,” Mark said. “They don't tell you about it, and they never talk about it unless they find something, but they search it. They're not that good at it either. It's easy to tell. They put all my stuff back in the wrong places. Never assume that just because somebody's a slob, he doesn't remember where his stuff was.”

“When they searched your room, they were looking for Michael Feyre's drugs?”

“Hell, no. They were looking for
my
drugs. They all think I'm using, too. Either that or they think I'm stupid.”

“I know. I called your mother.”

“I expected that. That's okay She'll come up, and I'll talk to her. Anyway, Michael and I had this deal. I don't know where he kept his stuff, but he was making anywhere from five hundred to a thousand dollars a week—”

“How
much? How big
is
this school?”

“We've got maybe three hundred fifty kids. But we've got faculty, too, you know.”

“You think there were faculty members buying drugs from Michael Feyre?”

“Yeah,” Mark said. “But the big business was speed. Michael talked about it all the time. He didn't like speed. He said it made him nervous. He couldn't see why anybody bothered. I could. They do it for the same reason I drink coffee. There's a lot of work here. People load themselves up with AP courses and honors courses—”

“AP?”

“Advanced placement. It's essentially a college course you can take in high school, and then you take a test from the same people who do the SATs and if you get a good-enough grade you get credit from whatever college you go to. People use them to get rid of the distribution requirements the colleges all have so that they can take stuff they like instead of stuff they just have to take. Starting junior year, people take three or four of them at a time. They don't have time to sleep. And then, you know, if you take speed, it keeps you up; so you need downers if you want to sleep at all. Michael was making a mint.”

Gregor considered this. “Did the police check that out? Drugs in his system? People he might have been connected to? Where did he get the drugs to sell?”

“I haven't got a clue,” Mark said. “My best guess would be Boston, but he's not from there, so maybe not. He's from some place in Connecticut, but not a town I know.”

“What about the suicide?” Gregor said. Mark had abandoned his second sandwich only half-eaten, and that was nearly impossible because the sandwiches were only abouttwo inches long. “Did it make sense to you that Michael would commit suicide? Had he been depressed?”

“Not exactly. Maybe. It's hard to explain.”

“Were you surprised?'

“Was I surprised to find his body hanging from the ceiling of our room?” Mark asked. “Hell, yes, I was surprised. You'd have been, too. I had no idea—they don't show what it really looks like in movies. And they don't show … he'd sh——God, I have no idea what the right word for it is. He'd shit himself. Sorry for my language.”

“That's all right. I expect he'd pissed himself, too.”

“Right,” Mark said. “If I ever get to make movies, I'm going to show it the way it really is, and it's ugly as hell. I went out in the hall and got sick, but all I'd had was coffee and so mostly I just dry heaved. I think I did it for hours.”

“I think that's perfectly normal. I didn't mean were you surprised to find the body; I mean were you surprised to hear that Michael Feyre had killed himself.”

“Oh,” Mark said. “I don't know. He was … uh… he was having an affair with Alice Makepeace.”

The name sounded vaguely familiar but not familiar enough. “This was another student?”

“Alice is the headmaster's wife,” Mark said. “She's, well. I don't know. Maybe you'll get a chance to meet her. She's something else.”

“Young?”

“In her forties, I'd think. Madonna is in her forties. That can be all right.”

“I'm sure it can. Did he tell you he was having this affair with the headmaster's wife?”

“He didn't have to,” Mark said. “Everybody on campus knew about it. And I do mean everybody. Peter Makepeace must have known about it, too. It was practically up on a billboard. Except nobody ever talked about it directly, if you know what I mean.”

“I think I do,” Gregor said. “Was there a reason for this? Was Alice Makepeace using drugs?”

“Maybe,” Mark said, “but I don't think that was the point. According to the rumors, this wasn't the first time and Michael wasn't the first kid. She makes a habit of it.”

“A habit of sleeping with students?”

“A habit of sleeping with a particular kind of student—with scholarship students. The last two were African American.”

“But Michael Feyre wasn't a scholarship student, was he? I have a contact in Boston who said that Michael Feyre's mother won—”

“The Powerball, yeah, for like three hundred million dollars or something. I met her. She's nice. But Michael was like a cliché, for God's sake. White trash nation. Right down to the air guitar concerts to Lynyrd Skynyrd.”

Gregor had no idea who Lynyrd Skynyrd was, but he didn't think it was a good move to say so. “So you think he might have been depressed enough about this affair with Alice Makepeace to commit suicide?”

“I think he might have been if she'd wanted to break it off,” Mark said. “The tiling is I don't think she did want to break it off. I mean, I didn't talk to her about it, but he wasn't acting like that. And he was obsessed with her. More white trash nation. It was like one of those stalker movies.”

“People who are stalked don't usually want to be,” Gregor said.

“She did,” Mark was adamant. “She used to send him messages on the voice mail. I'd get them sometimes by mistake if I got back to the room before he did. She set up the meetings more often than he did. I think she wanted to talk to me about it.”

Gregor was curious. “You only think?”

“She came down to the computer room this morning when I was there alone. I was blasting space aliens out of the sky to get rid of my aggression, if you catch my drift. She came to the door and waited, and I pretended not to see her.”

“Why?”

“Because she creeps me out. She's one of those people. It's like talking to a pod person. And I really didn't want to talk about Michael to her. It just seemed wrong.” Markblinked twice and then put his head in his hands. “I'm sorry,” he said. “I really was having a good day, and now I'm dizzy again. It's just the sleep. I can't sleep.”

Gregor leaned closer to get a better look. Mark's face had gone as white as chalk. Gregor had heard that cliché a thousand times, but this was the first time he'd ever seen a person who fit it. Mark's pupils were dilated, too, and the whites around them were shot through with red. The muscles in his shoulders were twitching.

“Mark,” he asked, “are you sure you didn't take something? Just before you met me, maybe, or while you were in the bathroom?”

“No. Christ. I wish they'd just do a drug test and get it over with. I'm not taking anything. I'm not—I'm just like this. Almost all the time now. It just is.”

Mark was swaying in his chair. Gregor pulled at his arm.

“Come on,” he said. “Lie down. You look like you need to.”

Mark swayed to his feet, blinking. “My head is full of fuzz. All the time. And I can't read. Did I tell you that? I sit down with a book and read the page, but I can't remember what's on it. I finish the page and it's as if I'd never read it and that's nuts because it used to be that I didn't even have to pay attention. I could read the page and then later I could sort of remember what it looked like. I could sort of project it on the back of my eyelids and read it again. Like that. And now I can't remember anything, and I can't understand anything. At least not most of the time. I don't know what's wrong with me.”

Gregor pushed Mark over to the bed and then onto it. “Try lying down for a while,” he said, but he might as well not have. Mark hit the bed and seemed to be instantaneously asleep. Gregor would have thought he'd passed out if it hadn't been for the fact that his breathing was more regular than it had been at any other time in their conversation today and the further fact that he was snoring.

Gregor sat down on the edge of the bed and checked him over. He was sleeping, that was all. He was as soundly and thoroughly asleep as Rip Van Winkle.

At first Gregor thought he would wake Mark DeAvecca before he had to go out to his dinner meeting; but when the time came, he found that impossible to do. It wasn't that Mark wouldn't wake up. If that had been the case, Gregor would have canceled his dinner appointment and called an ambulance. It was more that he couldn't bear to wake him. The boy looked healthier and more peaceful than he had all day. Gregor wondered why he couldn't sleep in the normal run of things. He was certainly sleeping now.

Gregor picked up the phone and called the Windsor Police Service, just to make sure they knew he was coming. Then he called the desk to ask that somebody call the room at seven-thirty to wake Mark. That school had to have a curfew of some kind, although Gregor was slowly beginning to accept the possibility that Windsor ran on very different assumptions than most of the rest of the world. He found an extra blanket in the closet and threw it over Mark's body, thinking that the kid was built like a defensive linebacker. Even the underweight didn't disguise that.

Gregor went downstairs, left his key at the desk, and then headed out the front door to Main Street. It was, if anything, worse than he'd thought when he'd first seen it. It was the epitome of the sort of place built by people who recoil in horror from “suburbs,” by which they mean places with housing subdivisions. There was a bookstore. Its windows displayed hardcover books in matte jackets with muted impressionistic paintings used as the backdrop to titles that made no sense:
Electric Pumpkins, Love in Aspic, The Poetics of Dystopia.
A sign near the door said:
THE EXCELLENT BECOMES THE PERMANENT.
A few doors down there was a candle store, and a few doors down from that was a clothing store for women showing models in the window wearing good tweed skirts and cashmere sweaters. Gregor thought that if he stopped a dozen people at random, one right afterthe other, he'd find out that all of them listened to National Public Radio and owned a copy of
Chocolat.

He checked the note he'd written to himself with the directions to the police station, walked up four blocks, and stopped for a moment to look across the road. That was the Windsor Academy campus right there. No gates set it off from the town proper, and no security service seemed to be active to keep the locals out. With the exception of one large, college Gothic building off toward the left, the Windsor Academy buildings were all large and studiously “Colonial,” the kind of thing that might have served as a mansion in pre-Revolutionary Massachusetts, except that they were all larger. Some of them, though, were probably authentic. The ones on Main Street proper almost certainly were. The rest of the campus had been configured to blend in with them. No, Gregor thought, he really didn't like exaggerated respect for history.

He checked his directions again, walked down another block and a half, and turned left into a street full of large, Colonial houses set back on wide lawns. If you really want to know if a house was built in Colonial America, Bennis had told him, check out how far it is from the road. Real Colonial houses have no front lawns. They sit right up against the thoroughfare. These houses, Gregor decided, were reproductions, or at best from the early nineteenth century, when lawns had come into fashion.

He went down three blocks, checked the street sign—Muldor—and turned left again. The police station was a small, brick building hidden tastefully behind a box hedge nearly tall enough to obscure the building completely. The only way to tell that a police station was behind that hedge was to read the sign at the end of the drive.

Gregor walked up the drive to the front door. It was a very modern brick building, but it had a steep, pitched roof, as if that would be enough to make it look like a residence. Here was another way to tell the difference between a suburb and a real small town. In a real small town, the police station would have been right out front on Main Street, next door tothe Town Hall and the public library. Well, the public library was on Main Street here; it was right across from Windsor Academy.

Gregor gave his name to the young woman at the desk, and she spoke quietly into a microphone, A moment later a large, beefy man in a badly fitting black suit came out of the corridor behind the desk and held out his hand.

“Mr. Demarkian? I'm very glad to meet you. I'm Brian Sheehy. Walter Cray can't stop talking about you.”