The Headmaster's Wife

by Jane Haddam

  “We’d be better off without whom?” Marta asked. “What are you talking about?”

  “We’d be better off without people like you,” James said. The roaring was gone from his ears. The panic was gone from his body. He was simply more angry than he had ever been in his life. “Don’t you think we all know what you are?” he said. “You got yourself a degree, and you think you can reinvent yourself as better than what you came from, but it’s not working. You don’t have the fiber. You don’t even have the imagination.”

  Marta looked close to tears, but not so close that she was willing to stop. “There’s no reason to shoot the messenger,” she said, looking away from him. “Don’t you realize that if I saw you, somebody else may have too? Not that day, of course, but another day. And he winked at me. He winked at me, James. He didn’t care that I knew. He could have told anyone.”

  “If I were you, I’d go back to whatever godforsaken town you came from and get a job at a community college where the demands of your work will match your skills,” James said.

  Marta was still looking away. James knew she would not look back. He had his tray fully loaded. He need do nothing but bring it back to the kitchen, scrape off his plates, and leave. There it was again, that drive to egalitarianism. He couldn’t abide the ritual of scraping off his plates.

  “I don’t know what you think you’re doing,” he told Marta Coelho, “but I can tell you for certain that you won’t get away with it.”

  2

  It was seven thirty when the phone in Gregor Demarkian’s room at the Windsor Inn began ringing, and it rang a dozen times before Mark DeAvecca managed to get himself awake enough to pick it up.

  “This is the front desk,” a voice chirped at him. “This is your wake-up call. It’s now seven thirty.”

  For a few long minutes, Mark was completely disoriented. He didn’t think they gave wake-up calls in the dorm, and the world outside the windows he could see was far too dark for it to be seven thirty in the morning. Besides, he didn’t get up at seven thirty. If he did, he missed breakfast or classes and spent the rest of the day in a complete mess. He sat up and looked around, feeling increasingly uneasy. There had been at least three times in the last two months when he’d woken up in his dorm room bed and not been able to remember how he’d gotten there, or why he’d gone to sleep, or when. The thing was he didn’t feel now the way he’d felt on all those occasions. He actually felt pretty well. His head wasn’t full of fuzz, or not as full of it as it tended to be these days. He wasn’t suicidally depressed, which he’d come to think of as the background music to his present life. He was very tired, but a couple of hours napping wasn’t likely to cure several months’ worth of not sleeping, so that didn’t worry him.

  He turned on the light next to the bed. Then he sat up and looked around. The room service trays were still on the table near the window. He got up, went to the table, and sat down. He opened another bottle of Perrier and then another still. He was so thirsty, he was nearly frantic with it. He downed the first bottle in a couple of seconds and then started on the second. He took the lid off the sandwich plate and took out four roast beefs and another four tunas. Then he put them back and put the lid to the side. He was going to eat them all. There was no use pretending he wasn’t. He’d missed dinner, and he was suddenly completely ravenous.

  When he’d finished the sandwiches, he looked at the soup. It was cold, but he didn’t think he cared. He unwrapped the spoon from its napkin package and finished the soup off, too. He felt a little guilty. He would have to make it up to Mr. Demarkian. If his mother had seen him behave like this, she’d probably have killed him.

  Or maybe not. Mark found it hard to tell what his mother would and wouldn’t do.

  He went into the bathroom and washed his face. He really was tired. He had that drained-of-blood feeling that made ithard for him to move. He didn’t have the panic he’d been living with for so long though, and the way the head fuzz had abated was truly miraculous. Not that it was entirely gone. He could tell he wasn’t functioning the way he remembered functioning before he’d come to Windsor, but for just this second he felt only ordinarily sick. He was also really glad that he’d had a shower. He didn’t like feeling dirty. At home he sometimes showered twice a day. He didn’t understand why, up here, he forgot about showering entirely, or remembered but felt too tired and confused to bother.

  He went back into the bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed. Seven thirty must mean seven thirty at night. That meant he’d missed dorm check-in at five. That meant he was going to be in enormous trouble with Sheldon yet again. He was always in trouble with Sheldon for something. His room wasn’t clean enough. He didn’t socialize with the students in his own house enough. His clothes were a mess. Sheldon was one of the people on this campus he truly hated, but if he thought about it long enough, he had to admit that there were very few people—at least among the faculty and administration—that he didn’t hate. Except that “hate” was the wrong word, he thought. It was the word people used for what he was feeling, but it wasn’t the right one even so. It was more that there were people he felt in danger from. He had no idea what kind of danger or why it should be directed at him.

  I’m acting nuts again, he thought. He got up and looked through the drawers of the nightstand and the table with the room service stuff on it until he found the complimentary notepad and a pen with the name of the Windsor Inn printed on it. He sat down and printed, very carefully, in block letters:

  Dear Mr. Demarkian:

  Hi. I had to go back to school. I missed first

  check-in. I ate all yourfood. I’m sorry about that.

  Can we meet tomorrow and talk? I get out of

  classes at three.

  Thanks.

  Mark

  He looked at the note and shook his head. Here was something that had not been changed by a nap in Gregor Demarkian’s room. His handwriting still looked like it belonged to a stroke victim. I wonder what the hell is wrong with my hands, he thought, and then, I wonder what the hell is wrong with my head.

  He found his jacket and put it on. He put his note on the bed’s pillow so that Gregor Demarkian couldn’t fail to find it. Then he went out into the hall and down the stairs to the lobby and the street. He would have taken the elevator if he’d remembered there was one. He was still that tired. Whatever. It didn’t matter. Nothing did.

  He went down Main Street more quickly than he’d walked for months, more quickly than he’d walked since Christmas vacation, when he’d actually started to feel a lot better after he’d been home for a week and a half. He thought about going directly to Hayes House—it was right there on Main Street, one of the houses that faced the town—but he didn’t have any coffee or Coke or Mountain Dew at Sheldon’s apartment, and he knew Sheldon resented the hell out of him whenever he asked to borrow what Sheldon himself had, and he knew that he wouldn’t be able to stay awake long enough to do any reading if he didn’t get hold of some caffeine. As for Sheldon, it didn’t matter either. Sheldon was going to be no more angry with him for coming in at eleven than if he’d come in at eight. He might as well go to the Student Center and get some coffee in peace before he had to face Round Thirty-seven of the Great Dorm War.

  He turned in at Lytton House, cut around to the side of it, and crossed the quad. Then he ducked between Martinson and Doyle and out onto the path leading to the Student Center. It was unbelievably cold. He remembered it being cold, but not this cold, not even the other night when he’d been wandering around in his fog. That was the night Michael died, which was something he didn’t like to think about but did. He found it impossible not to think about it. He wished he could read. Before he’d come to Windsor, he’d spentnearly all his time reading. Now he could barely understand the words on a page of a Terry Pratchett novel.

  If he hadn’t been so tired, he’d have run. He tried to force walk, but that didn’t work either. His joints ached. He settled for pushing himself just a
little to go just a bit faster, and then he was in the breezeway in the warm and he could see the big stainless steel coffee servers lined up against the back wall, standing on clean white tablecloths.

  He went into the cafeteria proper and suddenly felt enormously tired, so tired he could barely remain standing. He sat down in the nearest chair and tried breathing slowly and deeply. Sometimes it helped. Sometimes it didn’t. He didn’t understand why the head fuzz was better, but the fatigue was worse. He put his head in his hands and tried to count. He had no idea what he thought that was going to do. He just needed to work up the energy to get across the room to where the coffee was.

  “Mark?”

  If he’d had to pick the voice he least wanted to hear, at this moment or at any other, he would surely have picked this particular voice. He didn’t have to look up to see who it was. Nobody on earth sounded like Alice Makepeace except Alice Makepeace. That was true even though her accent was a boarding-school cliché.

  “Sorry,” he said, taking his face out of his hands. “I know I didn’t show for check-in. I’ll explain it to Sheldon when I get back to Hayes. I just wanted a cup of coffee. I don’t have any back at Hayes.”

  “You don’t look like you can make it across the room to get coffee,” Alice said.

  “I’m a little tired.”

  “You’re always tired.” She stood there, not saying anything. Mark had the impression that there was something he was supposed to do, but he didn’t know what. “Look,” she said, “I’ll get you some coffee. Black you take it, don’t you? And sugar?”

  “As much sugar as I can get,” Mark said. “And one of the big cups. Thank you. I’m sorry I’m not really functioning here.”

  Alice Makepeace made no comment on that. Nobody here ever made any comment when he said things like that, and he knew why. They didn’t think he wasn’t “functioning,” and they didn’t think he was tired; they thought he was either drugged up or screwing off.

  The jacket he was wearing felt too hot. He didn’t know why he hadn’t noticed it before. He took it off and put it on the back of his chair. Only half the lights in the cafeteria were on. He didn’t like this room. He missed the cafeteria at his old school in Connecticut, Rumsey Hall, which was big and open and shabby in the way that places got when they were regularly overrun with small boys. How long did it take to get a cup of coffee? What did Alice Makepeace want from him?

  He looked up and she was back, holding a large coffee in one hand for him and a small one in the other for herself. Hers would probably be decaf. She was one of those people who was always very careful to eat and drink in a “healthful” way and to make damned sure that everybody around her knew it.

  She sat down. He swatted at his coffee with the plastic stirrer she had brought him.

  “So,” she said. “I’ve been wanting to talk to you.”

  “Everybody wants to talk to me,” he said. “No offense, but I’ve already told the police and Mr. Makepeace everything I know. Michael was my roommate, not my clone. I didn’t really know that much about him. And I didn’t see much of anything when I—when. You know when. It all happened really fast, and I wasn’t noticing much. I just wanted to get out of there.”

  “You noticed enough to think it might not be a suicide,” Alice said.

  Mark took a long drink of coffee. It scalded his throat. “I don’t think it wasn’t suicide. The police said it has to be suicide.”

  “But you don’t think so.”

  “No, that’s not right. Michael committed suicide. Of course I think Michael committed suicide.”

  Alice stared at him. She had a truly awesome stare. It was eerie in a way. He didn’t like it directed at him. He did know what Michael had been thinking to sleep with her though. She was beautiful and one of those people who were always the center of attention. “People who glow in the dark,” his mother liked to call them. They walked into a room, and nobody wanted to look at anybody else.

  Alice took a sip of her coffee. “I find that hard to believe,” she said. “If you didn’t think there was at least a chance that Michael may have been murdered, why did you bring that Mr. Demarkian to Windsor?”

  “Not to investigate a murder,” Mark said quickly.

  “But that’s what he does, isn’t that true? He investigates murders.”

  “He does when he’s working,” Mark said. “He doesn’t all the time.”

  “And he’s not working here?”

  The head fuzz was back. Mark could feel it. He looked down at the coffee and saw that he’d already drunk half the cup. He was going to have to get another one before he went back to Hayes. Alice Makepeace was staring at him again. He felt sick.

  “Look,” he said, “he’s here because I needed somebody to hold my hand, and I didn’t want it to be my mother because I thought she’d get all upset and want to haul me out of school. She is all upset. I’ve talked to her twice.”

  “And you don’t want to be hauled out of school? I find that a little surprising. You don’t seem to like it here.”

  “I like it fine,” Mark said. He didn’t know if that was true.

  “Most of your teachers think you’re completely out of place here, and I have to say I agree. You don’t fit the school very well.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You must know that we talk about it. And evaluations are coming up. It will be part of the meeting the faculty has on you.”

  “I’m sure.” He shifted in his seat. The coffee was almost gone. He was sucking it down like air. The head fuzz wasback in force. So was the feeling that he had lost control of all his muscles. He was twitching. “I’ve got to get more coffee and go back to the house,” he said. “Sheldon’s going to have a fit as it is. I might as well not keep him waiting.”

  “I want to talk to you,” she said again.

  “You are talking to me,” Mark pointed out. “You’ve been talking to me. You’ve been telling me I don’t fit the school.”

  “I was thinking that there might be another reason for you to ask Mr. Demarkian here. Not because you had reason to think that Michael was murdered, but because you wanted to expose me.”

  “Expose you?”

  “I know that you were … a little jealous … of Michael’s relationship with me,” Alice said, very carefully. “I know it felt like favoritism to you, that you would have taken his place if you could have. He told me—”

  “He said I had the hots for your

  “I don’t think ’had the hots for’ is an accurate description of what he meant or of what I saw. And I did see it, Mark. It was impossible to miss, even if you’ve never admitted it to yourself.”

  Mark started to get up. “I have to get another cup of coffee,” he said. “I’ve finished this one. I’ve got to go back to Hayes House.”

  “Sit down, Mark.”

  “I’m not going to continue this conversation, Mrs. Makepeace.”

  “Alice. You know to call me Alice.”

  “I don’t want to call you Alice. I don’t want to call Miss Wardrop Cherie. I don’t want to call Mr. Hallwood James. I just want to get my coffee and go back to my dorm. Get out of my way.”

  “You can barely stand up,” Alice said. She put the palm of her hand against his chest and pushed gently. He sat back down again. “You’re dizzy as hell.”

  “I haven’t been feeling well all day.”

  “It matters that you don’t fit in at this school,” Alice said.

  “You don’t have the loyalty to it that we expect of students here. And that’s what worries me. That you’re angry with us; that you’d like to see us fail—”

  “Fail at what?”

  “Fail as a school. Close down. Or be mired in an enormous scandal. That’s why you’ve brought Gregor Demarkian here, to bring the attention of the press on the school. To tell tales about what may or may not have been going on between Michael and myself.”

  “For Christ’s sake,” Mark said, “my mother writes a regular column
for The New York Times. She’s a talking head on CNN three times a week. If I wanted to bring the attention of the press on Windsor Academy, I wouldn’t have to go roundabout by bringing Mr. Demarkian here. I could just call Dan Rather and talk to him. He was at my christening. And my last birthday party. And everybody knows what was going on between you and Michael.”

  “I don’t think they do, Mark, no. I think they thought as you do, that it was merely a physical thing. It wasn’t. Michael was very important to me.”

  “I have to go back to Hayes House.”

  “Have you any idea how hard it is to find somebody who completes you, who makes you the human being you thought you never would be able to be, and to have that someone be beyond your reach? Repression and social convention are terrible things, Mark. They’re much more tyrannous than dictatorships, or poverty, or war. They’re worse because they come from inside yourself.”

  “I can’t believe you think that you’re worse off because people would laugh at you if you left your husband for a sixteen-year-old kid than you would be if you’d lived under Hitler.”

  “It’s one of the reasons you don’t really belong here,” Alice said; “you don’t understand the hermeneutics of oppression. You really don’t. We’ve tried to teach it to you, but you resist it. You’re like so many people. You aren’t willing to give up your white skin privilege, your white male privilege. Michael wasn’t like that.”

  “Michael was in way over his head,” Mark said carefully. “I don’t know what you want from me.”

  “I want you to promise that you will not tell Gregor Demarkian about the relationship between Michael and myself.”

  “What if I already have?”

  “Then there’s nothing I can do about it, is there? But I don’t think you have. I think if you had told him, I’d know about it already. The news would be out.”