The Headmaster's Wife
Page 1
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CRITICAL ACCLAIM FOR
JANE HADDAM’S
GREGOR DEMARKIAN MYSTERIES
“Dazzlingly ingenious, Jane Haddam’s novels provide style, humor, and philosophy—they’re real spellbinders, sparklingly written and smashingly plotted.”
—The Drood Review
THE HEADMASTER’S WIFE
“Gregor, like the series itself, shows no signs of stopping.”
—Booklist
“Sharp, intelligent, and inventive … the kind of mysteries a Dorothy L. Sayers or a Josephine Tey might have been proud to come up with in the genre’s so-called Golden Age … Like a good cabinet maker, Haddam knows exactly how to cut and polish her material into art.”
—Chicago Tribune
“Fans of Jane Haddam’s Gregor Demarkian mystery stories will be pleased that the celebrated FBI agent is back to crack another case … Intelligently written and well-paced … Haddam handles multiple murders and complex story lines in a masterful way that makes this tale a worthwhile read.”
—Indianapolis Star More…
CONSPIRACY THEORY
“Haddam plays the mystery game like a master.”
—Chicago Tribune
“Haddam, a prolific writer (before the Demarkian novels, she wrote under an assortment of pseudonyms), likes to tackle big themes in this series, and devotees of strongly written, intelligent mysteries drawn from the headlines will be pleased to find that she remains hard at work.”
—Booklist
“[A] fascinating study in conspiracies and those who adhere to them … the book is as up-to-date as today’s headlines.”
—Romantic Times
SOMEBODY ELSE’S MUSIC
“Crisp character development and a roadrunner-swift plot.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Haddam keeps her long-running series fresh by developing suspects and victims who are as fascinating and entertaining as her recurring cast… This is one of Haddam’s best Demarkian outings yet … Riveting!”
—January Magazine
“News of a new Jane Haddam mystery is music to the ears of her fans … Whether it’s read as next in the series or a stand-alone, Somebody Else’s Music is a standout.”
—The Drood Review
TRUE BELIEVERS
“Haddam is a fine and compassionate writer, and Demarkian, the retired chief of the FBI’s Behavioral Sciences Unit who now solves crimes in his spare time, is one of the more interesting series leads in the mystery marketplace. It’s a pleasure to find a solid mystery combined with engaging discussions of issues outside the genre … A guaranteed winner.”
—Booklist
“Haddam’s large cast pulses with petty jealousies, vanities, and fears as they confront the mysteries of life and religion. This is an engrossingly complex mystery that should win further acclaim for its prolific and talented author.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
SKELETON KEY
“A delightful read for lovers of classic crime stories.”
—Romantic Times
“[A] smoothly running mystery marked by lively characters, good descriptions, and enough misdirection to keep a reader’s interest high.”
—Publishers Weekly
“A sophisticated style, excellent delivery, and riveting plot make this an excellent choice for all collections.”
—Library Journal
“A real winner… Sure to grab readers from the first page … A fine entry in a fine series.”
—Booklist
The Gregor Demarkian Books by
Jane Haddam
Not a Creature Was Stirring
Precious Blood
Act of Darkness
Quoth the Raven
A Great Day for the Deadly
Feast of Murder
A Stillness in Bethlehem
Murder Superior
Dead Old Dead
Festival of Deaths
Bleeding Hearts
Fountain of Death
And One to Die On
Baptism in Blood
Deadly Beloved
Skeleton Key
True Believers
Somebody Else’s Music
Conspiracy Theory
The Headmasters Wife
JANE HADDAM
St. Martin’s Paperbacks
NOTE: If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”
THE HEADMASTER’S WIFE
Copyright © 2005 by Orania Papazoglou.
Excerpt from Hardscrabble Road © 2006 by Orania Papazoglou.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address St Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2004057824
ISBN: 0-312-98911-3
EAN: 9780312-98911-8
Printed in the United States of America
St. Martin’s Press hardcover edition / April 2005
St. Martin’s Paperbacks edition / February 2006
St. Martin’s Paperbacks are published by St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
For Matt
—with my fingers crossed
People are never so sincere as when they assume their own moral superiority.
—Thomas Sowell
Every individual human being … carries within him … an ideal man … and it is his life’s task to be… in harmony with the unchanging unity of this ideal.
—Friedrich Schiller
Totus mundus facit histrionem.
—Anonymous, said to have been written on the wall of the Globe Theatre in the time of Shakespeare
Prologue
1
Later, Mark DeAvecca would say that he could see the body from the moment he first looked out the narrow arched Gothic window at the north end of the Ridenour Library’s narrow catwalk—he could see it lying there, on the snow, under the stand of evergreens near the pond. It wasn’t true. The body wasn’t a body. It was alive. If Mark had been able to stand next to it, he could have heard it breathing, in and out, in and out, in a ragged contrapuntal staccato that sounded a little like broken bells. He could have felt the fear, too—or maybe not, since his own fear was as all-encompassing as anything he had ever felt in his life. His head was full of fuzz. The muscles in his hands were twitching spasmodically. He was so tired, it was as if all the blood had been drained from his body. He kept closing his eyes and trying to think of the word. What came into his head were scenes from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Bats with human heads and fangs seemed to be hovering around his head. They darted away to hide in the stone arches in the ceiling whenever he turned to look for them. He closed his eyes and counted to ten. He flexed his hands and felt the pain in his joints like needles under his skin. Exsanguinated, he thought. That’s the word I want.
It was nine o’clock on the night of Friday, February 7, 2003, and as cold as Mark could ever remember it being. It was so
cold there was ice on the inside of the window he was sitting next to and ice on the stone frame around it. The glass was leaded and heavy. That was supposed to mean something. He couldn’t remember what. Usually he came up here when he couldn’t face one more person wanting to look into the deepest reaches of his soul. Today he only wanted to read two short pages in The Complete Guide to Family Healthy a book he had been carrying around with him for five days. It was big, and heavy, and awkward, and there was always the danger that somebody would notice it and ask what it was about.
It wouldn’t be so bad if they ever came up with anything except clichés, he thought. What does it mean that they look into the deepest reaches of my soul and come up with clichés?
The book was lying on the floor. He was sitting on the floor. The floor was made of stone and was as icy as the stone frame around the window. He flipped the book open to the double-page spread on Huntington’s chorea and rubbed the side of his face until the skin under the stubble started to bum.
Depression, he thought. Yes, Mood swings. Twitching. Inability to concentrate. Memory loss. Clumsiness. Forgetfulness. Nervousness. Mental deterioration. Yes and yes and yes and yes and yes. The problem was, there was a single no, and it was the answer to the most important question.
“Huntington’s chorea is caused by a single dominant gene.”
Dominant, Mark thought. Dominant means it always exhibits. If you have it, it exhibits. And you had to have had a parent who’d had it, and parent would have exhibited.
Mark put his head down between his knees and tried to breathe. He had no idea why he wanted to believe he had Huntington’s chorea instead of a simple mental illness, schizophrenia, something. He was very sure he was going crazy. He had been away at school now for five months, and in that time he seemed to have managed a 180-degree personality turn. He no longer recognized himself in the mirror. He no longer recognized himself as a human being. If he’d been allowed to have a cell phone, he’d have called his mother five times a day just to hear her voice. After about a week of that, she’d probably have driven up here to Massachusetts to get him.
Maybe I should go home, he thought. Maybe they’re right and I just don’t belong here.
Out in the quad somewhere, the carillon was ringing. It did something or other every quarter hour and tolled the hours when they came. It went on all night, so that if you lived in Hayes House or Martinson, in one of the rooms facing the chapel, it could wake you up from a sound sleep. Mark’s hands were twitching. Sometimes his shoulders twitched, too, and sometimes the joints in his hands just felt so thick and out of sync that he found it hard to move them. It would be giving up to go home, and that much about him had not changed. He did not give up, not ever. The one time he had wanted to—in that first year after his father had died, when life had seemed like a tunnel without end—he had known, with the kind of absolute clarity most adults couldn’t manage to save their lives, that to do it would be to die himself. He’d been less than ten years old.
There has to be something wrong with me, he thought. It can’t just all be in my head.
But that wasn’t true, and he knew it; and so he unwound his body and began to get up. There was nothing to do but go to work and salvage what he could, even if it wasn’t much. He didn’t understand a word of what he read anymore. He’d finish a page and couldn’t remember if he’d been reading John Donne or his biology textbook. He drilled himself for hour after hour in German, or got Fraulein Lieden to do it with him, and half an hour after he was finished it was as if none of it had ever happened. It was cold, but he was sweating like a pig. The sweat was pouring down his back as if he’d just run the Boston Marathon. He was tired, but he knew that if he lay down he would not be able to go to sleep for hours. He had had at least six cups of coffee since lunch; but if coffee was supposed to wake you up, it didn’t work on him. He was the walking dead.
He looked out the window again and for the first time thought it was odd. There was a … person … lying there in the snow, alone, under the trees. It was a person dressed in black, but there was nothing unusual about that. Half the school liked to dress in black and to pretend to be alienated from all things material and capitalistic. Maybe whoever it was had passed out. It was Friday, and the school was supposed to be drug and alcohol free, but Mark knew what that was worth. There was enough marijuana in Hayes House alone to supply a hospital full of terminal cancer patients. If you got caught at it they sent you to intervention, and after a few months they asked you to write up the story of how you beat addiction for the Windsor Chronicle. Mark knew people who had beaten addiction three or four times, although they’d only been allowed to write about it once, at the beginning. It was like the pictures the Chronicle ran about the memorial service for 9/11. The real pictures had been ruined somehow, and so the school had had them all go back into the quad and pretend to be doing it again, so there would be photographs for the story about how sensitively the school was handling terrorism issues.
Everything about this place is fake, Mark thought—and he was almost himself again for that split second. Then the feeling faded, and the insight along with it, and he pressed his face to the glass and tried to get a better look at the person in black lying under the tree, not moving.
If he lies there long enough, he could freeze to death, Mark thought, but there was something wrong with that, something he couldn’t quite put his finger on. There was something wrong with the body lying under the trees. Mark was sure that it wasn’t a student, although he wasn’t sure why he was sure. The person was big, but a lot of the seniors were bigger. He tried to imagine a Windsor Academy teacher getting smashed on vodka and grass and passing out on the ice twenty feet from Maverick Pond, but it didn’t compute. The faculty drank mineral water they bought from a small local company run as a cooperative and talked about how important it was not to allow the liquor companies to invade the rain forest. They didn’t wear black either. They preferred earth tones and Polo shirts and books most people found too boring to read.
Something is wrong, he thought, but he was drifting in and out of consciousness again, in and out of coherency. If he didn’t get moving, he’d find himself trapped up here after lights out. He’d already done that once this term and been handed sixteen hours of work jobs because of it. They had been absolutely convinced that he’d done it on purpose because they’d rung the bell three times and sent a librarian through the stacks calling out for anybody who might not be paying attention. He hadn’t done it on purpose though. He’d just zoned out. He’d just stopped existing in this body and been somewhere else, except not, because he couldn’t remember anything else. If he’d believed in ghosts, he would have thought he was one.
He took another look out at the black figure under the trees, then bent over and picked up his book.
If he went the long way around back to Hayes House, he could stop to see if whoever it was needed any help.
2
Marta Coelho had been grading papers for four hours, and she still wasn’t close to done. Her eyes hurt. Her arms hurt, too. Mostly she found herself thinking obsessively about the fact that she had never spent a Friday night not working, at least not during term time, in this entire academic year. It was the kind of thing that, phrased in the right way, she would have thought of as a good thing about Windsor Academy before she had come to it, but like most of those things—and there had been a lot of them—it now felt egregiously wrong. She found it hard to believe that she had defended her dissertation only eighteen months ago, and that her dissertation committee—at Yale—had been absolutely certain that she’d find a faculty place within the year. If you couldn’t find a university job with a degree from Yale, what did you need to do to find one? It was hard to remember, now, that this particular job had seemed like a godsend when it was offered to her because she was up to her eyeballs in debt from college and grad school and close to being evicted from her apartment. It was hard to remember the things she had told herself when she�
�d written the acceptance letter and walked down Chapel Street to mail it. Bright, committed prep school students had to be better to teach than bored, not-so-bright college students stuck at a fourth-rate state college and wanting only to get through their core courses as quickly and painlessly as possible. A school committed to equality, diversity, and truly innovative ideas in education had to be better than the routinely brutal mediocrity of the high school she had escaped for Wellesley and then the Ivy League. Had to be, had to be, she thought now. There was nothing that anything had to be. Life sucked, as the kids liked to say, and you couldn’t even make yourself feel better about it by thinking about sex.
The office was a high-ceilinged room on the first floor of the Ridenour Library, the one building on campus that looked like it belonged on a campus. The lights above her head hung down on long, dark poles and ended in wide globes that gave out too much light. She could see her reflection in the leaded-glass windows in front of her desk, and her head looked as if it were encased in a helmet of light. I should dye it a different color one of these days, she thought absently. Then she tapped the stack of papers in front of her, the ungraded ones, ten to twelve pages each, researched and footnoted. It was impossible to explain to anybody who hadn’t had to put up with it just how bone-numbingly boring it all really was, day after day with these kids whose lives had been so perfect they might as well have been produced by Disney. She’d heard all the stories about alcoholic mothers and absent fathers, but she didn’t believe any of it. It was the kind of thing rich people liked to say about themselves in order to appear to be Suffering, and therefore all that much more Virtuous. She knew something about alcoholism and absence. Alcoholism was her father getting fired from his fourth job in two years. Absence was the ritual placement in foster care, three months here, five months there, over and over again—never the same family; never the same school bus; but always the same school—so that everybody knew, all the other students, all the teachers, and she would walk the halls very careful never to let her body touch another person or another thing. If she hadn’t been a truly extraordinary person—far and away better than those boarding school girls she’d met when she first went to Wellesley—if she hadn’t been unlike everybody and everything around her, she would never have ended up where she had. She’d have been waiting tables back in Providence the way her sister still did. Marta couldn’t remember how long she had gone on thinking of herself as a truly extraordinary person. She did remember when she had stopped. It was on that day she had walked down Chapel Street to mail the letter telling Windsor Academy that she would be happy to teach American History and serve as a dorm parent in Barrett House for the next full school year.