The Headmaster's Wife

by Jane Haddam

  I’m driving myself crazy, Marta thought. She slung her tote bag over her arm and went out, down the corridor toward the front of the library where the door opened onto the quad. She thought about the night Michael had died and about Alice Makepeace going out the wrong door when she said she was going home. She let herself into the big, open front foyer and waved to the women at the desk. She could never remember their names, although she’d probably talked to both of them dozens of times, in the library and out. She went out the front door into the quad. It looked deserted. The lights were on along the pathways. It was already getting dark.

  If she went back to her apartment now, she’d have one ofthose nights when she just wanted to throw something, hit something, do something. She did not understand people like Michael Feyre, who committed suicide, but she did understand people who committed murder. She could cheerfully have murdered two dozen of the students on this campus and called the world a better place for it.

  There were lights on in some of the faculty apartments. She stopped where she was and looked toward Martinson House, the house she herself had always wanted to live in because it was closest to the library’s front door and the largest and most elaborate in its design. Not only were the lights in Philip Candor’s room on, she could see Philip himself pacing back and forth in his living room, his head bopping from side to side. He wouldn’t be listening to opera either. He wouldn’t even be listening to the Beatles or Chuck Berry, who had become the standard guilty pleasures for people who taught in places like Windsor Academy. That was the power of the Baby Boom. There were so many of them, they could incorporate their music even into the halls of Intelligent Taste.

  Marta did not stop to wonder why, when she had a problem or needed to feel steadied in a storm, she always went to Philip Candor. She didn’t stop to wonder why everybody on campus went to Philip in the same circumstances, so that he served as the unofficial anchor of Windsor Academy. It had been going on for so long, it felt natural. Philip Candor was a very steady and straightforward person.

  She went up the front steps of Martinson House and into the hall. She went down the back hall and stopped at Philip’s door. He was listening, she thought, to Eminem. She only knew it was Eminem because Philip had once told her.

  She knocked twice and waited. The music was not turned up very high. She was sure he could hear her. Then again Philip sometimes didn’t answer if he didn’t want to answer.

  The music stopped. The door opened. Philip looked out. He was, Marta thought, the calmest person she had ever known.

  He stepped back and held the door all the way open.

  “Marta,” he said, “don’t tell me you’re worried about Gregor Demarkian, too.”

  “Who?”

  “Never mind.” Philip closed the door behind her. “I’ve had a few visits today, that’s all. I thought you must have been hanging out in the faculty lounge with practically everybody else. Can I get you some coffee? Or tea. I’ve got herb tea, if you want it.”

  “Oh, yes,” Marta said. “I would like herb tea. Camomile, if you have it.”

  “I always have it.”

  “I don’t like the faculty lounge,” Marta said, sitting on the edge of the couch. There were two things you learned early in your acquaintance with Philip Candor. You didn’t sit in his favorite chair, and you didn’t ask him to put out his cigarette in his own apartment. He had a cigarette going now. He always had one going.

  “I don’t like the faculty lounge much myself,” he said. “They don’t let me smoke there, but that can’t be your problem.”

  “No, no, of course not. It’s just—I don’t know. I feel on display, as if I had to put on a performance: dedicated prep school teacher with all the right attitudes.”

  “So what’s the problem? Don’t you have all the right attitudes?”

  “I don’t know,” Marta said. “Maybe not. Sometimes I just get so angry here I don’t know what to do with myself. I mean, here’s this beautiful school, with every possible facility, and there are all these kids, with parents with money and with opportunities I couldn’t have dreamed of when I was their age, and, I don’t know. So many of them don’t deserve it. I would have killed for a place like this when I was their age. I didn’t even know places like this existed.”

  Philip came back with a teacup and a small plate to put it on instead of a saucer. Marta didn’t bother to be surprised. Philip always had hot water ready and cookies from the bakery on Main Street. If he’d had a house of his own instead of a faculty apartment, he’d have had a fire in the fireplace, too.

  They weren’t allowed to light fires in the fireplaces of the faculty apartments, although some people did it. It caused too much havoc with the fire insurance.

  Marta put her teacup down on the coffee table. It took at least five minutes before it tasted like anything. “The thing is,” she said, “I was wondering. They really are sure that Michael Feyre committed suicide, aren’t they?”

  “From what I’ve heard, yes,” Philip said. “In fact, definitely yes, and I got that from one of the women in the dispatcher’s office, not from Peter Makepeace. It wasn’t the kind of thing somebody else would have found easy to stage.”

  “That’s what I thought. Somebody said something about the tongue and the eyes, you know, but I didn’t understand it. And no, don’t explain it. I don’t even like thinking about it. It’s not about that anyway. It’s not about what makes them sure Michael didn’t commit suicide.”

  “What is it about?”

  Marta looked down at her hands. “It’s about Alice Makepeace.”

  “Ah.”

  “Oh, don’t say ’ah,’ Philip. Everybody on campus knew she was sleeping with that boy, and from what I’ve heard there have been other boys. And she’s, I don’t know, she’s such a compelling person, isn’t she? She’s somebody you have to pay attention to.”

  “She’s very beautiful, even at forty-five,” Philip said, “and she’s the headmaster’s wife. Of course you have to pay attention to her.”

  “You know what I mean. She commands attention. She does. She’s just one of those people, charismatic people, something.”

  “And that’s what you were thinking about, Alice Makepeace?”

  “What? Oh no. It was about the night Michael Feyre died. I saw her the night Michael Feyre died.”

  “Where?”

  “In the library,” Marta said. “Not in the library proper butin the office and classroom wing. I was correcting papers, and she came in to talk to me.”

  “What about?”

  Marta shrugged. “Not anything, really. I’d just seen Mark, you see, and I was in a bad mood, so I was talking about Mark. And she was making excuses for him or some-tiling. I don’t know. That kid ought to be expelled.”

  “Maybe. What about Alice? It doesn’t sound like she was doing much of anything.”

  “Oh, she wasn’t,” Marta said. “It wasn’t that. It was after she left. She left by the wrong door.”

  “What do you mean, the wrong door?”

  “She said she was going home. But to get home, it makes the most sense to go into the library proper and through the library foyer and out the front door. I mean, President’s House is right across the quad. But she went out the other door, out the back.”

  “Out the back or out the side?”

  “Out the back,” Marta said. “To get to the side door, she’d have had to go down the corridor the same way from my office as she would to get out the front, she’d just have had to stop earlier. But she went the other way. There isn’t anything there but the back way out. And I couldn’t help but think it was odd, and I didn’t know about Michael Feyre then, that he was dead.”

  “What time was it?”

  “It was about nine, or maybe nine fifteen or nine thirty. I don’t really remember, but somewhere in there, because when the carillon rang ten I came back home. But the carillon had rung nine. I stopped to listen to it. And the whole thing was nuts, really.
It was below zero.”

  “It was minus nine,” Philip said.

  “Well, then,” Marta said, “why would she want to go out the back door like that? There’s nothing out there except Maverick Pond, and she couldn’t have been going skating at that time of night But that’s the way she went, looking like Batgirl in that ridiculous cape.”

  “She wasn’t with anybody?”

  “Not when she was in my office, no. Oh, I don’t know,” Marta said. “I feel completely stupid. I mean, who cares what she did. Maybe she’s got another boy. Maybe that’s why Michael killed himself, because she’d thrown him over—”

  “I don’t think I’d say that if I were you,” Philip said. “Peter would go crazy, and so would the newspapers if they ever heard a rumor like that. It’s a damned miracle the newspapers haven’t gone crazy yet.”

  “But it doesn’t matter, right?” Marta said. “It doesn’t matter where she was or why she was there. Maybe she wasn’t anywhere. Maybe it was all part of the mystique, or maybe she made a mistake about which way to go and didn’t want to admit it to me. Who knows why she does what she does? And if it doesn’t have anything to do with why Michael died, there’s no point in being all worked up about it.”

  “But you are worked up about it.”

  “Yes,” Marta said, “yes, I am. I’m worked up about her. I’m worked up about Mark DeAvecca. I’m worked up about being here. I have no idea what I’m doing here. Did I tell you that? Sometimes I wake up in the morning and I don’t even know where I am. I sit up in bed and for half a minute I think I’m back in my apartment in New Haven.”

  “Would you rather be?”

  “I don’t know. It wasn’t too pleasant at the end there. Everybody was getting jobs, but I wasn’t. I’ve got to ask myself about that, too. Why I wasn’t. I don’t know. Maybe I’m obsessing about Alice because I don’t want to admit that I’m sitting here in February without a hope in hell of being anywhere but here next year—if I’m even asked back next year.”

  “You’ll be asked back.”

  “Don’t you hate it though? Don’t you hate the uncertainty of it? It’s that way for the students, too. You never know from one year to the next whether you can stay on. They don’t either. It’s all so up in the air. And the standards are all so—fuzzy. In graduate school it was just a matter of grade-point averages. As long as I maintained a B average, I couldstay. Here it’s about things and I don’t even know what they mean: meaningful interaction, dedication to the mission of the school. Nonsense.”

  “You’ll get asked back,” Philip said again. “Maybe you shouldn’t come back. Maybe you ought to go out and do something else, something besides teaching, something besides academia.”

  “I wouldn’t know what to do. This is what I’ve always been good at.”

  “Teaching?”

  “No,” Marta said. “School. Even when I was very little, that was what I was good at. I don’t think I’ve ever been really uncomfortable in a school before, not even in my freshman year at Wellesley. And I don’t understand it. If I could have invented a place for myself, if I could have put together a group of people, it would have been just like here. And I hate it. And all I can think of is that it’s all about the job. I don’t know.”

  “Drink your tea,” Philip said. “It’s going to get cold.”

  Marta looked down into the cup and saw the tea bag still floating there. She hadn’t taken off her coat either. All of a sudden it felt heavy and hot on her shoulders. She stood up and shrugged it off.

  “We all spend too much time thinking about Alice Makepeace anyway,” she said. “I don’t know why we do it.”

  2

  Cherie Wardrop had spent the first two days after Michael Feyre died doing what she was expected to do: staying in her apartment in Hayes House or in her office in Ridenour Library, waiting for students to come to see her and pour out their hearts. No students had, but she hadn’t expected them to. She thought that the school’s near mania on the subject of therapy was silly in the extreme. Most people grieved by doing something moronic in a spasm of emotion and then forgetting as much as possible the thing that had made themgrieve in the first place. Most of the students would not have been grieving for Michael Feyre in any case. He hadn’t been well-liked or even well-known. What they really felt was shock and titillation, the same emotions they would have felt if somebody had had to have an abortion or leave school because he’d been caught stealing from the campus store. The students weren’t upset or traumatized; they were excited. You could hear the revved-up energy in their voices wherever they gathered together, even when you couldn’t make out the words. They were excited and almost pleased, the way they would have been if the news had been about a celebrity instead of a fellow student. Or maybe not. These kids were not impressed with celebrities. Too many of them had celebrities for parents. Still, Cherie thought, their reactions would have been different if Michael had been murdered instead of the victim of suicide. Their reactions had been different in those short twenty-four hours when the cause of death had still been in doubt.

  Now Cherie pulled into her parking space behind President’s House and shut off the engine. She’d done what she was expected to do for as long as she could, but today it had just been impossible. She’d gone to her office, sat waiting and staring out the window for half an hour, and then decided that she’d had enough. She’d packed up her things, gone back to the apartment, and gotten Melissa out of bed. Melissa was an anomaly, an artist without discipline. She maintained a schedule when Cherie maintained one, but as soon as Cherie was at loose ends, Melissa was sleeping in until noon. Cherie had had to pull the covers off her to get her to move, and even then she’d had to threaten a bowl of cold water. Only once she’d heard the sound of the shower going on had Cherie felt free to settle down in the living room. She was distressed to find that Melissa’s small stack of papers next to the computer—the collection of short stories she was writing under contract to Woman Vistas Press—hadn’t grown by a single sheet since the night Michael Feyre had died.

  They were all too wound up, that was the problem. Theboy was dead. The administration was dealing with it by canceling classes and behaving as if they were all in a public service announcement about mental health maintenance, and nobody wanted to admit the level of anxiety they were feeling, not only about the trauma itself, but about the possibility that the school might not survive the firestorm. There was going to be a firestorm, and Cherie knew it. Even though it hadn’t happened yet, she could feel it coming. It made it impossible for her to do the petty housekeeping chores, the house accounts, the student accounts. Edith Braxner had scolded her more than once for the mess her accounts were in. She couldn’t make herself take them seriously, and today, trying to focus on them in the wake of Michael’s dying and the unbearable nervousness that affected everybody and anybody, she’d finally just given up on them and tossed them into the back of a drawer.

  Cherie prodded Melissa, fast asleep in the passenger seat. It had been a very good day. They had gone into Boston and seen the first in a daylong film marathon of women’s independent productions. Then they had ducked out of that and gone to eat sushi at a little place they knew in Cambridge. Then they’d dropped in at the New Words Bookstore in Cambridge and melted plastic until they’d felt guilty about it. Then they’d gone back to the film marathon and seen a movie about a woman coming out in India, which in the end had been too bloody and violent for them to enjoy watching. They were, Cherie thought, completely American. They wanted their endings happy and their heroines’ quests triumphant.

  Cherie prodded Melissa again. Outside the car, it was almost dark. Lights were on in President’s House. Cherie thought that if she were Peter Makepeace—or Alice—she might have been happier with all the lights on, too. She prodded Melissa for a third time. Melissa moved.

  “Wake up,” Cherie said. “We’re home. And I’ve been thinking about Sodom and Gomorrah.”

  “What?” M
elissa stretched.

  “I’ve been thinking about Sodom and Gomorrah,” Cheriesaid. “I was thinking about what we’d talked about the other night, do you remember? About how the scandal would get out eventually, and the school could be forced to close, and how everybody knew that but everybody was trying very hard not to notice it?”

  Melissa opened her eyes. “Christ, Peter’s got that place lit up like he’s never heard of an energy crisis. What’s wrong with him?”

  “Maybe it’s Alice. Maybe they’re both looking over their shoulders. I’d be scared as hell if I was either one of them.”

  “That’s still no reason to waste electricity.”

  Cherie sighed. “I was thinking about Sodom and Gomorrah,” she said again. “I was thinking about how this place could be shut down, and that it wouldn’t be such a bad idea, that it was like Sodom and Gomorrah. That this place is so—filthy—that maybe shutting it down is the only thing that could clean it.”

  “Filthy?” Now Melissa was thoroughly awake. She sat up straight in her seat and stared. “What’s this about? Are you going Midwest on me again? Are you having guilt feelings about not playing by the midwestern married lady book?”

  “I don’t think so,” Cherie said. “I mean, I thought I might be at first, but then it occurred to me that I don’t think the place is filthy because it lets us get away with what we do. It isn’t about that. It’s about Mark moving back into his room.”

  “The room where Michael Feyre died?”

  “That’s the only room he’s got,” Cherie said. “We got the news this morning from administration. Well, from Peter, really, even though nobody ever said so. It’s incredible the way they hold tight to information around this place. But that’s the idea. The police are finished with the room. The staff is going to go in there and clean. They want Mark back in the room before the end of the week because there’s no place else for him to stay. It’s nonsense, really; he’s staying with Sheldon. Sheldon doesn’t want him around anymore. Nobody wants him around, but that doesn’t mean they should be sending the kid back to the room he found a dead body in.”