The Headmaster's Wife (58 page)

“A week? I think students have much more money now than when I was one,” Tibor said.

“I'm sure they do,” Gregor said. “But they'd stayed at Windsor a lot longer than they had anywhere else because they were making a lot more money and it was a lot easier. Then, when Mark and Michael Feyre started school this fall, things started to fall apart. First they made a mistake with Mark and made a withdrawal at a time he knew he couldn't have made it himself. It didn't matter that they'd forged his signature on the account book. He knew where he had been at the time he was supposed to have been signing it, several miles away in Boston. So the first thing they had to do was to neutralize him so that he couldn't pursue it, and Cherie took care of that by making him sick with arsenic. Then, while he was in the infirmary, she went up to his room and tampered with his multivitamin capsules by putting a very small amount of arsenic into each one. That kept him sick, and it kept him screwed up, and they figured that if that went on long enough, he'd flunk out or be asked to leave. Which is probably what would have happened if it hadn't been for Michael Feyre.”

“Ah,” Tibor said. “The boy whose mother won the lottery. That was on CNN.”

“Yes, the boy whose mother won the lottery,” Gregor said. “Unfortunately, he was an out-and-out psychopath. He was a bully and worse. And everybody knew it. At some point he found out what Cherie and Melissa were doing, and he got hold, not only of a whole bunch of stolen student IDs that were all of students in Hayes House, but of the bank card for the secret account as well. He stole it and he told Cherie Wardrop that if she wanted it back she had to go get it for herself. He threw it under a stand of evergreens out near a pond at the back end of the Windsor campus. She went out there to try to get it back, and Mark saw her from a window in the library, lying flat on her stomach and trying to push herself under the branches. He thought she was a student or somebody from town passed out. It was Friday. He figured somebody had been drinking. By the time he got out there, Cherie was gone, and he started to think he was hallucinating. Except something about the scene bothered the hell out of him and went on bothering him.

“In the meantime Cherie had gone back to Hayes House and gone up to see Michael Feyre. According to her, he told her that since she was too stupid to find the cards for herself, he'd give them to her, but only if she ‘serviced' him. What he wanted was to have her tie him up and put a noose around his neck, to, uh—”

“Autoasphyxiation erotica,” Tibor said. “I am not a child, Krekor. I read the papers. They tie themselves so that they are almost strangling and that gives them a bigger orgasm. Or they think so. I have never tried it. I think it's very stupid. Every year there's another case at UPenn or Penn State, and the silly boy ends up dead.”

“Yes, well, Michael Feyre had no intention of ending up dead. He always made sure to have women there for safeties. And there were always women. He was good at sexual blackmail, our Michael. Cherie said he warned her that if she tried anything funny, the cards were where somebody would be able to find them; and she wouldn't know where toget them on her own. But she didn't believe him. She thought he either had the cards on his person somewhere, or in the room, or that they were right there under the evergreens where he said he'd put them. So as soon as she got the scene all set, instead of unzipping his fly and giving him the blow job she was supposed to give him, she kicked the chair out from under him and let him hang. Then she searched the room, and when she couldn't find anything, she decided the cards were under the evergreens, and there wasn't anything she had to worry about. She went back downstairs to her apartment. Mark came home and found Michael hanging and dead. End of problem.”

“But not end of problem,” Tibor said, “or you wouldn't be telling me this.”

“Right,” Gregor said. “Mark was still disturbed about the death of his roommate, and he was disturbed about what he'd seen out the library window, and he called me. But he didn't think Michael had been murdered. He thought Michael had killed himself over Alice Makepeace.”

“Alice Makepeace?”

“The headmaster's wife.”

Tibor brightened. “The one with the red hair who was on the news this morning? She's a compelling woman, Krekor. Very odd when she talks, but very compelling. This Michael Feyre had an unrequited love for her, and Mark thought he had killed himself for love of her?”

“Not unrequited, no,” Gregor said. “Alice Makepeace made a habit of sleeping with students. Michael was the flavor of the month, and everybody knew it. And Alice is Alice. She
is
a very compelling person, the person everybody pays attention to. So everybody, Mark included, thought that whatever had happened to Michael Feyre had happened because of Alice Makepeace, which suited Cherie and Melissa just fine. Then, Mark asked me up to school, and Cherie and Melissa knew that I was going to hear about the 'hallucination,' the person under the evergreens near the pond, and they decided they just couldn't risk him talking to me. So when he got back to the dorm on the night I arrived, Cherieinvited him in for coffee, spiked the coffee with a lot more arsenic than he could handle, and gave him a prepackaged ice cream sundae with chocolate chips in it, which she'd doctored beforehand with chunks of caffeine tablets. That way, when Mark died throwing up all over creation, the hospital would find the chunks and assume caffeine poisoning. They wouldn't need to look any further. It was sheer accident and Mark's good luck that he started throwing up so soon he got most of it out of his system, and I showed up on the scene and made sure he got to the hospital on time. You wouldn't believe how hard Cherie tried not to call nine-one-one. She told me she had to get permission from President's House. She dithered. I thought she was a damned fool. She was just trying to make sure she got the job done, which she didn't. There was so much luck in this, it makes me sick to think about it.”

“There was also another murder, yes? Edith. I have never known anyone named Edith. I have always thought it was a beautiful name.”

“Yes, well,” Gregor said, “Edith. The official explanation is that Edith knew there was something wrong with the Hayes House accounts, and that was why Cherie had to kill her. And I think that's mostly true. She was notorious on campus for checking the accounts. Her own accounts were pristine. She wrote scolding little notes to people on the mess theirs were in. She undoubtedly noticed quite a lot. She seems to have been a noticing kind of woman. But I'll bet anything that that wasn't all of it. When she died, she was up on that catwalk in the library where Mark had looked out and seen Cherie trying to get those cards. I wonder if she'd seen the same tiling on the same night from another angle.”

“How will you find out?”

“I won't find out,” Gregor said. “Some things will have to remain mysterious. There's never a murder investigation where you know everything you wish you knew. I'll be happy to find out what Cherie put the cyanide in, what Edith ingested up there on the catwalk that caused her to die. Cherie's kept her mouth shut on that one, and I don't blameher. Edith's the death she's most likely to get sent away for good for, if they can convict her for it. She must have been in a hurry, though. Cyanide is a lot quicker than arsenic and a lot surer, too.”

Linda Melajian came over and put their big entrée plates down in front of them. Then she picked up the salad plates in a stack. “Look at that,” she told Gregor. “Mom really went to town on the french fries. She says she doesn't want Bennis to think you didn't get enough cholesterol while she was away. Are you going to have dessert? I want to reserve enough hot fudge if you are, since you seem to be intent on killing yourself tonight.”

“I never eat hot fudge,” Gregor said.

“I do,” Tibor said. “You could reserve enough for me.”

“Some people just don't know what's good for them,” Linda Melajian said, walking off with the salad plates.

Gregor looked down at his steak and then across at Tibor's yaprak sarma and decided he'd made the right choice. He needed red meat, and close to raw, and lots of it. Linda came back with their glasses of wine, and he drank half of his in a single gulp.

“Right,” she said. “I'll get you another one.”

Then she was gone again.

Gregor looked around the Ararat. It was filled with people he knew, most of them people he had known almost all his life. He could remember Lida and Sheila and Hannah as girls, walking home from school in wool jumpers with white blouses underneath them, wearing those thick-soled, black tie-up shoes that were supposed to be good for your feet. Bennis hadn't even been born then; and when she was born, she wouldn't have worn those shoes. While he was plugging away in graduate school, she had been wearing crinolines and white gloves and learning to be polite at dancing class. Did that matter? He didn't know that it did. He wished he understood what made up identity and how much of it had to do with nothing but sheer idiosyncratic perversity.

“Women,” he told Fr. Tibor Kasparian, “are nuts.”

Three days later, out in the wilds of Litchfield County, Connecticut, Mark DeAvecca was bored. Everybody always said that they wished school was over, but he'd been around long enough to know that when school was over there was never anything to do. What was worse, he was feeling really good, and really restless, and yet his mother and his doctor both wanted him to “rest.” He had been resting for about a week, and he was in the mood where he understood why some people felt the need to do physical damage to furniture. His mother had gone into the city. His brother, Geoff, was asleep, spending his long spring vacation from Rumsey by staying up as late as he could get away with and then crashing for most of the day. Jimmy was in the big loft over the family room, banging away on the piano, composing something.

Mark left the house without telling anybody, half walked and half jogged the three and a half miles into the Depot, and bought a
New York Times.
Alice Makepeace's picture was on the front page in a story telling how she'd left her husband in the row over “the events at Windsor Academy.” There was more coverage of the case on the inside pages, and Mark found himself thinking that it figured. Alice being Alice, even
The New York Times
thought she was more newsworthy than the discovery of what Edith Braxner had eaten that was full of cyanide, or the fact that Windsor Academy would be closed for the rest of this academic year but would open in the fall. Mark wondered who they would get to be headmaster. He thought if they had any sense, they would get one without a wife.

He jogged most of the way back home and came in to hear that there didn't seem to be any piano pounding coming from the loft. He threw his jacket over a hook in the mudroom, went through the family room to the circular stairs, and ran up.

“Hey,” he said.

Jimmy was sitting at the piano, making furious notes on a sheet of lined music paper. Mark leaned against the nearest couch.

“Hey,” Jimmy said, looking up, “don't you ever sit all the way down? You make me tired just looking at you.”

“I went into the Depot and bought the
Times,”
Mark said. “Don't tell Mom. She'll have a cow. They found out what Dr. Braxner ate.”

“What did she eat? Who's Dr. Braxner?”

“The one who died at school, you know, while you were there. Didn't you pay any attention at all?”

“Mostly I was paying attention to your mother, who wasn't exactly in a good mood, and to you. Who'd almost died. I remember that part.”

“Yeah, well, they killed Dr. Braxner later when I was in the hospital. I was thinking, you know, that if this had been an Agatha Christie book, I'd have been the murderer. That would have been cool.”

“Somehow I can't see you as a murderer.”

“I can't either,” Mark said, “but I'm not in a novel. Anyway, they put the cyanide in a chocolate-covered cherry. That's what the
Times
said, anyway. Dr. Braxner liked candy. She couldn't have known that Cherie was stealing from the school if she took it though. The
Times
said somebody saw Cherie give it to her in the cafeteria at dinner that night. One of the kitchen staff, not somebody I know. I bet they can't prove it though. I mean, they can show she had the cyanide, right, but how can they be sure it was in the chocolate-covered cherry? How do they do those things?”

“Don't ask me,” Jimmy said, “ask Mr. Demarkian the next time you talk to him. Is it all that important?”

“I'd like to see them both go to jail,” Mark said, “preferably forever. I mean, I'm not for the death penalty, but I'd just as soon not have them wandering around loose where they can feed me more cyanide, if you know what I mean.”

“Absolutely. Listen. I want to talk to you about something.”

“Shoot.”

Jimmy put the music paper away and turned so that he was sitting on the piano bench with his back to the piano now. Before Jimmy had married Mark's mother, this loft had been used as a haphazard storage space. Mark thought he liked it much better as a music room. Maybe he could talk Jimmy into driving him into the mall in Danbury for the afternoon. Jimmy didn't like to go to malls. Enough people still thought of him as a celebrity so that he couldn't really do that without getting mobbed. Mark just thought he was going to go crazy if he didn't get to do something interesting soon.

“It's about next year,” Jimmy said, “about you and school—among other things.”

“I thought that was all set,” Mark said. “Mom is paranoid and doesn't want me living away from home next year. She's already talked to Canterbury. I don't mind the idea of going to Canterbury. It's a good school. And I've got friends from Rumsey there.”