The Headmaster's Wife (52 page)

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 looked, 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.”

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.

Fear,
he thought again. He just wanted to break free, one time, and not be running on fear. Fear of the past. Fear of the present. Fear of the future. Fear of living, because the longer you lived the more chances you had to screw up.

He put the phone down, picked up the receiver, and punched in the number for Jason Barclay's Manhattan office. Jason Barclay was the president of the Windsor Academy Board of Trustees. Peter was sure he was expecting this call. Somebody would have been keeping him informed about the progress of the police investigation. He would have heard about the police tape going up around Maverick Pond, even if he hadn't seen it for himself on CNN.

The phone was picked up on the other end by Adele, Jason's secretary. Peter told her who he was and waited. He did not have to wait long.

“Well,” Jason said, when he came on the line, “what's going on?”

“The best information is that they're going to make an arrest sometime this afternoon,” Peter said.

“Arrest of who?” Jason asked.

Peter corrected the pronoun in his head. Then he wondered why the women who graduated from “good schools” had no trouble remembering the grammar they were taught as students, but the men always did.

“I don't know who the chief suspect is at the moment,” Peter said. “It's not the kind of thing they're telling me.”

“You should have made it your business to find out.”

“I have made it my business to find out,” Peter said, “but as far as I can tell, Demarkian isn't telling anybody—not even the police.”

“We have somebody in the Windsor Police Service, don't we?”

“In the mayor's office,” Peter said. “And in the prosecutor's office. It works, most of the time.”