The Headmaster's Wife (53 page)

“I hope it's going to work this time,” Jason said. “We've got to do something. It's all over the national news.”

“I don't think there's much you can do with a murder investigation. And this
is
a murder investigation now that Edith is dead. You might as well be prepared for it. It may turn out that Michael Feyre was murdered, too.”

“I'm more interested in that other one, the kid who didn't die. The one whose mother is a newspaper reporter or whatever she is.”

“She's a columnist. I think you're very intelligent. That's the one I'd worry about, too.”

“And?”

“And we have absolutely no control over her whatsoever and probably can't get it. I think we're going to have to face the fact that we lost the ability to control this mess days ago, and we're not going to get it back. Parents have been arriving all day taking their children out of school. I think they'll go on arriving for some time now.”

“Taking their children out permanently?”

“I don't know. You'd have to talk to the bursar, or the dean of academic affairs, or whoever they're talking to. They're not talking to me.”

“Are they talking to Alice?”

“I doubt it. She isn't the kind of woman people confide in.”

There was a silence on the other end of the line. Peter could imagine what was going on in Jason's head. Jason had had an affair with Alice himself that first year they were at Windsor before he'd been elevated to the chairmanship of the board. That was back before Alice had settled on her modus operandi, and her conviction that only working-class boys could give her real orgasms.

“Peter?”

“I'm here.”

“Say something. You're close to this situation. I'm not. Tell me what you're thinking about. Give me a clue.”

“I was thinking about orgasms.”

“What?”

“Orgasms,” Peter repeated. “Orgasms are supposed to be great releases. You're supposed to lose all sense of yourself, to get lost in the moment. I don't think I've ever had one, although I've ejaculated often enough.”

“I think you're losing your grip.”

“Maybe. I think I'll quit this job now before you get around to firing me next week. You will get around to firing me. And I find, thinking about this, that I don't really care one way or the other what happens to Windsor Academy. I just know I don't want to be the one to deal with it.”

“Well,” Jason said, “the board will of course consider the submission of your resignation—”

“No, Jason, I'm not submitting my resignation. I'm quitting. Right here. Right now. As of this moment. I'm done. Get somebody else to deal with this mess. I won't.”

“You can't do that,” Jason said automatically. “You've got a contract. You're required to give us notice. If you walk out, we could sue you.”

“Go right ahead. I don't own much. Most of what we have is Alice's, and most of it's untouchable.”

“You'll never work in another school.”

“No,” Peter said, “I won't. Thank God.”

“This is completely and utterly irresponsible.”

“Of course it is,” Peter said, “and I've been responsible all my life. And now I've stopped. I really have stopped, Jason. I don't want to do this anymore. I don't want to do anything anymore.”

“But you can't—” Jason said.

Peter hung up the phone in his ear.

He had had no idea that he was going to do what he had just done, but he was very happy he had done it. It was the right note, the note he had been looking for all day. He went out of the study into the living room. He wondered where Alice was, and what she was doing. He wondered if it would matter to her one way or the other if she came in and found him dead on the floor. The furniture all belonged to the school. A headmaster was no different than any other faculty member in a boarding school. His life belonged to the school, twenty-four seven. He owned nothing but what he wore. His housing, his furniture, even his food were all provided.

He went to the living room fireplace and looked at the rifles there. They were perfectly useful rifles as far as he knew. They had not been disabled in any way, although they contained no ammunition. There was something so alluringly English about guns over a fireplace; even a school as “progressive” as Windsor had not been able to resist using them. He could go into Boston and buy ammunition. He didn't think he would.

The sensible thing would be to hang himself, as Michael Feyre was supposed to have done, to put a rope from the utility room over the sprinkler system pipes and stand on a chair and then kick the chair out from under him. He looked at the sprinkler pipes. They looked fragile. They probably weren't. He went out into the hall again and then to the back where the kitchen was. The utility room was just through the kitchen near the backdoor. He went in and stood next to the washing machine and looked at the coil of rope where it sat on the shelf above the freezer and had satthe whole time he had been at Windsor. He tried to imagine it as a snake, the way horror novelists were supposed to like to do. He had never read a horror novel either. There were so many things he had never done. There were so many things he would never do. It wasn't true that where there was life there was hope. Some people left some things far too late.

All of a sudden a song popped into his head, a song from his early adolescence, that had been big on the radio when he was a teenager and had stuck with him in spite of the fact that he'd thought at the time that the music was stupid and the lyrics were stupider. “Sixteen Tons,” that was what it was called, all about selling your soul to the company store, sung by somebody called Tennessee Ernie Ford. There was a lot of bass, and not much melody. The whole thing was brain-dead and repetitive. He couldn't get it out of his head.

He'd sold his soul to the company store, all right. He was going to go on selling it, too, because he knew now that he did not have the courage even to commit suicide. He would not load one of the guns in the living room. He would not throw this coil of rope over the sprinkler system pipes. He would not down an entire prescription bottle of whatever Alice might have in the medicine cabinet upstairs. He had used up what little store of courage he'd had when he'd quit his job, and now he regretted even that.

He sat down on the utility room floor abruptly, slamming his coccyx against the floor tiles with such force that he was sure he'd broken it. There was pain, but it felt very far away. Mostly there was nothing, this room, this floor, the sight of his long-fingered hands on his knees, nothing and nobody, nowhere. It didn't matter. He would not kill himself. He would not leave this world he was used to. He might leave Alice, if she didn't leave him, but he would trade her in for another woman of the same type, if perhaps with more sexual discretion. He had nowhere to go. What was worse, he had nothing he really wanted. He couldn't abscond to the Bahamas or take up the bongo drums and become a Beatnikor take to drink and end up on Skid Row. Sartre had had it right. There was no exit, and hell was other people.

That's trite,
he thought.

Then he put his head down on his knees and began to cry.

For Philip Candor life had become both simple and purposeful. As soon as Gregor Demarkian had left his apartment, Philip had gone into action. He had given his situation a great deal of thought. He had seen too many people who had gone “underground” only to be discovered in middle age and dragged back to face the spotlight. In his case he was branded with an identity he had never chosen for himself or wanted to choose for himself. When all that happened in Idaho he had been not much more than a child, and he had not been on some crusade to rob banks for the revolution or blow up town houses for world peace or destroy federal office buildings to strike a blow against One World Government. He'd been doing nothing but protecting himself and his family from armed men who were determined to kill them, and who had proved that determination a hundred times by firing shots right past their gate and into their house. It was true that you didn't really have a right to self-defense against government officers who had come to arrest you, but they hadn't come to arrest him, and he hadn't fully understood what they were doing at the gate or why they had a right to be there. He had had no source of information about the outside world except his father—and, let's admit it, his father was a raving nut. Philip thought he had known that even then, or at least suspected it.

The problem was that Philip didn't want to turn himself in, didn't want to risk the chance that he would not get a new trial after all, didn't want to spend even a single day more than he already had in federal prison. They were supposed to be cushy berths, federal prisons, but Philip knew better.

They were brutal places, and the fact that you didn't have to worry so much about getting porked up the ass by a man convicted of beating his baby to death did not make them easier to endure. Prison was the death of civilization. It was the place where you ceased to be a human being. It was the place where he himself had been frozen in time, so that it wasn't until he'd walked out the door and gone on his own that he'd begun to change in the ways he had needed to change in order to grow up. He was not sorry that he had killed the two officers he had killed. He had only returned fire when fired upon. He was sorry that he had had to leave his brothers with his mother and the same vicious isolation he had experienced himself. He had a terrible feeling he knew what they would be like now if he could ever risk the chance of seeing them.

Fortunately, he was prepared for this, and he knew enough about the game to know what he must and must not do. He took his wallet out and left it on the coffee table in the living room, taking only the bills in the fold. He left everything else: ID card, driver's license, credit cards, health insurance card, library card. He got an American Airlines flight bag out of his closet and looked under the stiff plastic shape board in the bottom. He had another wallet with another driver's license in it, in the name of Joseph Baldwin, from the state of Colorado. There was also a bank debit card and a small key to a safe-deposit box in a bank in Chicago. The safe-deposit box held the rest of his identity cards, but no other bank debit cards. It was too hard to service two of those at once. He would have to go to Chicago first and get a safety net and set up yet another bank account. He could never be too careful.

He had ditched his clothes in the bedroom, then thought better of it and deposited them carefully in the hamper. He had changed his shoes and packed his favorite pair of sneakers and a good dress pair. He had filled the airline bag with all the underwear he could cram into it and a few things he might need to change. It was better to carry as little as possible. What you carried weighed you down. He dressed in chinos and a sweatshirt. He found the contact lenses that changed his blue eyes to a deep brown and popped them in. He found the dye comb and ran it through his hair. Joseph Baldwin was supposed to be a blond. He couldn't really get that good an effect with a dye comb, but he could at least make his hair nothing like it was now.

He had stepped away from the mirror and looked himself over. The idea was not to completely transform his appearance. It was to look uninteresting so that nobody paid attention to anything you did. People could only see what they looked at.

Then he had gone back out into the living room and gotten the gun from the drawer in which he'd put it. He was not a naturally violent man. He was not a revolutionary. He wasn't even a fugitive, at least not in his own mind. He was somebody named Philip Candor, not somebody named Leland Beech. He was a teacher of mathematics with a good degree from a Little Three college, not a back country yahoo surviving on roots, berries, populism, and conspiracy theories.

Joseph Baldwin, he reminded himself now.

The other car was parked in a garage in Boston, the space paid for by the month on Joseph Baldwin's account. He stopped in during the summers to take it out, a man who lived in Colorado and came to Boston to see his parents during the vacations when he didn't have to teach school. The men who worked in the garage were mostly transients. They saw hundreds of people a day, dozens who had long-term parking deals. They wouldn't remember him from one day to the next, if any of them bothered to look at him at all. He went up to the top floor, where the long-terms were kept, and got into a silver gray Volkswagen Golf. The trick was never to buy a memorable car or one in a memorable color. Philip Candor's car back at Windsor, however,
was
memorable. It was a bright yellow Jeep Wrangler, as noticeable on Main Street as a circus elephant would have been, if Windsor had allowed circuses. It didn't. It considered circuses to be hotbeds of animal abuse.

He eased the car out of its space and down the ramps. He turned on the news and listened for any sound of his name. There was none. There was a lot on the investigation at Windsor Academy, but either the feds were slow on the uptake—not an unusual occurrence in his experience—or Demarkian hadn't called them yet. Since he couldn't believe the second, he had to assume the first. That gave him a little tune. If he was careful, if he never drove any faster than the speed limit, if he did not do what they would expect him to do, he ought to be out of their line of sight long before they realized he was gone.

He was going to miss it though. He knew that. He liked the life he had built for himself. He liked teaching, and he liked mathematics. He had quite a bit of money put aside, but not enough so that he would never have to work again. Teachers didn't make that kind of cash, and although his stabs at the stock market had been lucrative, he was nobody's Warren Buffett. He would have to find something to do, and inevitably it would be less pleasant work than what he had become used to.