The Headmaster's Wife (49 page)

James laughed. “Thank you very much, but now you're going straight off a cliff. Will you come? I don't think I can stand another day by myself in this godforsaken place.”

“I'll pick you up for dinner. We'll go somewhere decent so that you don't have to risk being poisoned in the cafeteria. And yes, I will stay.”

“Thank you. Bring along that material from the Matthew Shepard Scholarship Fund you wanted me to look at and I'll look at it.”

“I think the world is coming to an end,” David said.

No,
James wanted to say,
only
my
world is coming to an end;
but that sounded silly and melodramatic even in his own head, so he let it go. “I have to get off the phone,” he said. “That's Alice coming up the walk, and she doesn't look happy. This is what I really need you for, interviews with Alice. God only knows what it's about this time.”

“Murders,” David suggested.

James laughed. “Alice wouldn't even notice them if they didn't threaten to upset her daily routine. Specifically, her routine of sleeping with students. Never mind. I'll see you tonight.”

He put the phone back in its cradle and watched Alice coming steadily down the path to Doyle House. For some reason she looked shorter than he remembered her, and he was only remembering her from the night before. Maybe she was wearing lower heels. If she was, it had to have some significance, like respect for the dead. Alice liked her heels tobe as high and as spiked as possible. She talked a good game of feminism, but she preferred to see herself as a dominatrix.

James saw no reason to wait until the last minute. It wasn't as if Alice would go away or the meeting would get more pleasant the more complicated he made her approach. He left his apartment and went out to open the Doyle House front door. Alice really did look shorter than he remembered her. She also looked nervous, and James couldn't remember ever having seen her look nervous.

“Looking for me?” he asked her. The air was frigid. Keeping the door open like this made his teeth ache with the cold.

“Of course I'm looking for you,” she said, brushing past him.

He closed the door and followed her down to his own apartment. She wouldn't expect the door to be locked. It wasn't. She sailed on through, leaving him to close it behind them.

“Gregor Demarkian is making the police take fingerprints,” she said, as soon as he'd come into his own living room.

“Why do you think Gregor Demarkian is making them?” James asked. “There's been a murder. I believe it's customary for police to take fingerprints.”

“I think he's directing the whole thing. He's giving them ideas. And, of course, he's getting the ideas from Mark. He thinks he knows Mark DeAvecca better than we do.”

“Well, he does, doesn't he? He's a friend of the family.”

“I don't care how close he is to the family. You never really know a person until you've lived with him, and we've lived with him. He hasn't.”

“From the reports I've heard over the last few days,” James said, “we haven't really been living with him either. He's not been himself.”

“It's a lot of nonsense,” Alice said. “It's an excuse. People don't change their personalities, even on drugs. They just become more like themselves. And caffeine is just a drug.”

“I suppose arsenic is also just a drug,” James said, “but its effects can be severe.”

“Peter is over at the business office. The police havepulled all the house accounts, including Edith's. And the student accounts, too. Eloise in the business office says she thinks they're looking for regular payouts because that would mean somebody was being blackmailed. It's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard of in my life. Michael didn't care about money. He had a ton of it; but even if he hadn't, he wouldn't have cared. He was used to doing without it.”

James said nothing. When Alice got onto the subject of Michael, it was impossible to get a word in edgewise. He wanted a cup of coffee, but he didn't want to make it because he didn't want to offer Alice one. He didn't want to give her an excuse to stay longer than she otherwise might have.

“Besides,” she was saying, “what do they think they're going to find in Edith's accounts? They were meticulous. Everybody knows that. She was legendary in the way she kept them. And those notes she used to write to people when theirs weren't perfectly done. Like it was any of her business. And do they really think Edith would be paying somebody blackmail? For what? Maybe she read Harry Potter books in secret and or went to Vin Diesel movies. And then, of course, there are the students. What they think they're going to find there is beyond me, too. I mean, of course they're going to find regular withdrawals of money. Most of them withdraw cash every Friday afternoon like clockwork. For the weekend. And God only knows, if the students were going to pay blackmail, they'd have enough money to do it. Their parents give them enough cash to found small businesses.”

There was nothing for it. James had to have coffee. He started toward the kitchen and offered some to Alice. “Percolated, not instant,” he promised. “And not Starbucks.”

“What I really need is a shot of Scotch,” Alice said. “Yes, all right, thank you. Coffee would be good. Although I don't see how anybody around here is ever going to drink coffee again with those rumors about Mark DeAvecca being poisoned by it. And Edith. For God's sake. Who would want to kill Edith? If he wasn't in the hospital, I'd have bet on Mark DeAvecca. She was going to give him a C minus in German.”

“And you think he'd kill her for that?”

“It would have gotten him thrown out of school,” Alice said. “You know what the policy is around here. Oh, I don't know. I just want them to get out of here. And the media. They're all over the place. We've managed to keep them off campus only by threatening a lawsuit, but that isn't going to last long. Have they taken your fingerprints yet?”

“Not yet, no,” James said. “But it's early yet, if they've just started. Maybe they just haven't gotten around to me.”

“I think they started with the people who were in the library last night. Did you know I was there? Not when she fell. I didn't see her fall. Afterward.”

James made noncommittal noises. He knew that Alice had had a run-in with Gregor Demarkian. Everybody knew.

“If you ask me, he made the whole thing up,” Alice said. “Right on the spot like that, saying it was cyanide. He couldn't possibly have known. He was just trying to make this a bigger mess than it already was and to get himself hired as a consultant so that he could snoop around here all he wanted to. I can't stand the mother either. The voice of reason on cable TV. You know what else he asked for? The lost-and-found reports.”

“This was Mr. Demarkian again?” James asked.

“Of course it's Mr. Demarkian again. Oh, it's all too much. It's ridiculous. Nobody murdered Edith, and the only thing that's wrong with Mark is that he's a spoiled rich kid who just couldn't cut it. We're being ripped up and torn to shreds because Liz Toliver has no intention of letting her little darling get a rejection letter from Yale. Or wherever it is he wants to go.”

“UCLA, last I heard.”

“God, that figures. Not even someplace decent, like Berkeley. I can't stand it. I really can't stand it. The media isn't here, but the police are. They're all over the place, and now they've cordoned off the whole area around Maverick Pond—”

“Maverick Pond? Why? Nobody ever goes there this time of year.”

“Of course I know that,” Alice said. “And you know it. Every sensible person knows it. But Mark DeAvecca is saying he saw somebody there, passed out in the evergreenbushes, the night Michael Feyre died; and of course you know who he's saying it is, don't you? Me. That's who he's saying it is. As if I've ever passed out from anything in my life. As if two dozen people didn't see me that night, not including my husband. Oh, God. And of course Peter is putting up with this. He's putting up with everything. He's a complete rag where the police are concerned.”

The coffee was finished. James poured two cups. He took his black, but he put not only the cups but the sugar bowl and creamer on the tray he was making ready. He brought the tray into the living room and put it down on the coffee table.

Alice was staring out the window at the quad. “I've got to go,” she said. “I just thought you ought to know what was going on. Is going on. They're going to wreck this place. It's happening already. Parents have been showing up all morning. Students are leaving right and left. I don't care if Peter is fired. He's been fired before. There's life after Windsor. But I hate giving that awful little snot his victory.”

Alice pulled her cape more closely around her neck and marched to the door. Her coffee was waiting on the tray. She didn't even look at it. She opened the door and went out, not bothering to say good-bye. James sat down in front of the two full cups of coffee and sighed. She hadn't even told him why she'd come to talk to him. Maybe she hadn't had a reason. Maybe he'd just been available. In any event he was now going to waste a perfectly good cup of expensive ground roast, and that summed up his relationship with Alice—and Alice's relationships with everybody—perfectly.

It gave James a great deal of satisfaction to think that if David had been here, even if they were caught in a tornado, he'd have been polite about the coffee.

Out in the quad Alice Makepeace found herself suddenly at a peak of anger so high and so sharp that she was stopped in her tracks. She was too angry to move, unless she could havehit somebody, and there was nobody around to hit. There were times when she understood violence. She really did. There were times when even the death penalty felt like a viable option. At the moment there was no death penalty in Massachusetts, and she belonged to an organization dedicated to keeping it out. She belonged to too many organizations. She couldn't remember what half of them did anymore.

She went around the side of Ridenour Library and stopped. The police were there, cordoning off Maverick Pond with yellow police tape, as if it were a crime scene. But it wasn't a crime scene. If it had been, somebody would have told her There would be ambulances as well as police cars. She watched the men stringing the yellow tape on thin poles they were hammering into the ground, through the snow and ice. On television shows, they used sawhorses. She supposed they couldn't use sawhorses here. They'd skid on the ice.

She truly hated this. She hated everything about it. She hated the fact that they had taken her fingerprints, as if she were living in a police state. Maybe she was living in a police state. What else explained the fact that they could manufacture a murder case out of whole cloth, get it on the media in hours, and then treat them all like criminals?

She scanned the little crowd around the pond for any sign of Gregor Demarkian but didn't find him. The police were nothing but that man's puppets, and that man was Mark DeAvecca's puppet, and none of them were worth a tenth of what Michael Feyre might have been if he hadn't capitulated to the culture of Windsor Academy and all the places like it. There was a way of blaming it all on white male patriarchal hegemony, she just couldn't think what that way was yet.

The truth was, she couldn't think at all. She turned around and walked back through the quad. There were more police, all of a sudden. She realized they were talking to students and parents on the steps of the Houses, writing things down in notebooks. She wanted to choke. She wanted to walk over to one of them, rip his notebook out of his hand, and demand that he leave her campus. She wanted to
do
something for once, instead of waiting around for something to be done to her, the way she had been since she'd first heard Michael was dead. She knew that he had died for love of her. He had committed suicide because she was about to break off their relationship, because she had found him wanting.

She got to the door of President's House just as Sarah Lavenham and her mother were finishing their talk with the policeman outside Deverman House. Sarah had an enormous duffle bag. Her mother had a large box too full to close. Alice went up the steps to the President's House front door and let herself inside. Peter would be away. He would be away all day. The last thing she wanted to do now was to see him.

The first thing she wanted to do was to have sex, and not sex with herself either. She had always despised masturbation. Masturbation was for people who couldn't find partners, and she could always find partners. Masturbation was far too safe, even if you left the doors unlocked and risked being discovered in the act. Sex was danger before it was anything else. It was hanging off the edge of a cliff. It was risking the real, not only exposure but obliteration. Michael had been the best at that that she had ever had. He had felt more real than any other person she had ever known. When she had been afraid with him, she had known it was neither an act nor an exaggeration. She had been afraid because she had good reason to be afraid.

She went upstairs to the bedroom she shared with Peter and took off her cape. She sat down on the edge of the bed and looked at the mounds the pillows made under the bedspread. She rubbed her hands together and then ran them through her hair.

She was afraid now because she had good reason to be afraid. She was scared to death.

Gregor was standing just behind Ridenour Library watching the police set up corridors and perimeters on his orders. It was going to take some time to make sure the area was securely cordoned off, mostly because he didn't really know what the area was or even what it was supposed to contain. He only knew there had to be something.

“It would make it a lot easier if we knew what we were protecting,” Brian Sheehy said at one point in the proceedings. Gregor knew he wasn't really pressing. He was having the time of his life, watching the whole of the Windsor Academy campus fill up with uniformed men and seven different media vans, including one from the BBC World Service, arrayed on Main Street to film it. It was always dangerous to indulge a need for revenge, Gregor thought, but in this case it suited his purpose for Brian to do so. He wasn't about to complain.