The Headmaster's Wife

by Jane Haddam

  “Because you do not interfere between a husband and a -wife.”

  “Exactly,” Gregor said. “And that was what I was thinking about with Howard. Because he got big, you know, as big as he is now, as big as his father was. And one day he was sixteen or so and not only just as big as Mikhel but twenty years younger, and he was playing football, so he was in shape. We were coming home from school together one afternoon in early May, a beautiful afternoon, even places like Cavanaugh Street was then looked good, and when we camearound the corner into the neighborhood, Mikhel and Howard’s mother were standing out in front of our building. I have no idea what happened or what started the fight. With men like that there isn’t much need to start one. I don’t know that Howard knew what started it either. We came around the corner, and just as we did Mikhel grabbed Howard’s mother by the front of her dress and hit her in the side of the head with his fist. It was insane. There had to be a dozen people on the street. Nobody did anything. Mikhel had a grip on her dress and he was pulling her toward him and then hitting her away over and over again, and there was blood coming out of her ear and her head was whipping back and forth—”

  “Tcha,” Tibor said again.

  “And Howard didn’t run. He didn’t shout. He just walked up to them, dropped his books on the ground, picked his father up from behind, by his belt and his shirt, just lifted him up into the air and threw him across the street—all the way across the street. Mikhel landed on somebody’s stoop. It might have been the building where Lida’s family lived. He slid down the stoop stairs to the sidewalk, and Howard walked over to him, picked him up, put him back on his feet, and said, ‘Enough.’ That was it. ‘Enough.’ We never heard Mikhel beat that woman up again, and we never saw her hurt again, ever.”

  “That is the first creditable thing I have ever heard about Howard Kashinian,” Tibor said.

  “There are lots of creditable things about Howard,” Gregor said. “You just don’t want to let him near your stock trades. He’s a crook. But the thing is, that’s what Windsor reminded me of, the town of Windsor and what I’ve heard so far about the school. It reminded me of the day Howard Kashinian took on his father.”

  “And this is supposed to make me feel better, as if you were making sense?”

  “I think so,” Gregor said. “I think it’s the key to what’s wrong with Mark DeAvecca and what’s wrong with this place and what’s wrong with the country. How’s that for megalomania?”

  “I think you should get Bennis to talk to you again, Krekor; you are becoming a crank.”

  “Maybe. But I do know that I’ve decided what I think I’m supposed to be doing up here. I’ve got a mission.”

  “Which is?”

  “Which is to get Mark DeAvecca to drop out of school. He can drop back in next fall. He needs to get away from here.”

  “And do you think his mother will agree with you about this?”

  “She will when she sees him,” Gregor said. “Celebrating diversity. That’s the problem.”

  “You are once again making no sense, Krekor.”

  “Never mind. I’m glad you were in. It helped to talk to you.”

  “It would help you more if you could talk to Bennis, Krekor. She would even understand the things you are saying.”

  “She might, but she wouldn’t talk back.”

  Tibor said something that sounded like tcha once again, except that his tone was even more negative. Gregor hung up and stared at the phone for a moment. He should call Bennis. He knew he should. He should call precisely because she wasn’t talking to him, and he didn’t know why. There was something deeply dangerous about letting this go. He tried, one more time, to consider the possibility that Bennis would leave Cavanaugh Street, put all her things into boxes, call for a moving company, buy a train ticket to Bryn Mawr or a plane ticket to Paris. He thought of the other side of the bed empty and the apartment under his feet with nobody but Tibor in it, ever, or a stranger to replace Tibor when the church and its rectory apartment were rebuilt. He got a pain in his stomach again but no answers. He wished he knew what Bennis wanted of him. He couldn’t make himself ask.

  He put his hand on the phone, picked up the receiver, listened to the dial tone in his ear. He put the phone back and stared at it. It was a green phone, “avocado” in decorating terms. It matched the wallpaper and the quilt spread out on the bed. It did not match the pen holder, which was made outof wood and not plastic, as it would have been in any ordinary hotel. He got up and walked over to the window.

  “Bullshit,” he said, out loud.

  He had no idea if he was talking about Windsor, Massachusetts, or himself.

  2

  In the end Gregor went out because he had nothing else to do and because he was not the kind of person who took pills or drank seriously in order to calm his nerves. It was only half past eight, and he was as revved up and restless as he had been after breakfast this morning. He was not tired. He thought he ought to be exhausted, considering the day he’d had, all the traveling and all the stress. He couldn’t stop moving. He paced back and forth across his room until he began to worry that whoever had the room under him would call the desk to complain. His mind jumped from Windsor to Howard to Mark to Bennis and back to Mark again. He tried to stand still looking out on Main Street at the traffic moving slowly, bumper to bumper, from one end of the area he still thought of as “precious” to the other. He found himself craning slightly to his left to catch the start of the Windsor Academy grounds, as if he expected something revelatory to happen there: Mark bursting out of one of the gates screaming, “Free at last!” at the top of his lungs; Brian Sheehy finally giving in and torching the place; Liz Toliver showing up on her white charger to do … what? He didn’t know what he expected Liz to do when she got here. He only hoped she’d take her son home, whether he wanted to go or not.

  Gregor got his coat, put it back on, and went out into the hall again. He wanted to walk. It would clear his head. He went downstairs, left the key at the desk for the second time since he’d checked in less than five hours ago, and went back out onto Main Street. This time, though, he didn’t stay on theinn’s side of the street. He crossed at the nearest crosswalk, which was not hard, because the people in cars seemed to assume that the pedestrian right-of-way was absolute. As soon as he stepped into the zebra walk, traffic came to a halt. He crossed without having to wait.

  On the other side there was a pharmacy, then a video store, then the first of the enormous Colonial houses that were the town-side face of the Windsor Academy campus. He tried to count along the street to see how many there were, but he couldn’t see far enough. Windsor was curiously flat for a New England town. Some of the houses were Greek Revival and had pillars meant to mimic the facade of the Parthenon. Some of the houses were older than that and as plain as the plain thinking that the old Massachusetts Unitarians had put so much store in. Most of the windows in the houses were lit up. Gregor supposed that most students would be in their rooms studying at this time of night.

  He came to a wrought-iron fence and a sign that said EAST GATE, but it wasn’t a gate. There was only an opening in the bars beneath a wrought-iron arch, a stylized gate, not a real one. That seemed terribly symbolic in some way he couldn’t figure out. He let it go and went through into a small parking lot along one side of a large, gray building discreetly marked with a sign that said ADMISSIONS.

  He went through the parking lot into what was obviously a standard campus quadrangle and waited. Surely there were guards here somewhere. There didn’t appear to be. Nobody came out to challenge his presence on campus. Nobody stopped him from walking into the quad’s center and looking around. He looked at the buildings on every side. It was their backs that fronted the quad, which he found very odd. He wasn’t all that familiar with campuses—he’d been a commuter student at the University of Pennsylvania, and too overloaded with work at Harvard Business School to pay much attention to Harvard Yard—but he’d always had the impress
ion that buildings faced quads. The arrangement here felt slightly off. So did the big Gothic building to his right, which didn’t look as if it belonged on the same campus.

  He walked through on the path, between two large white houses and out to the other side. The path continued to his left until it reached a large building with several articulated wings. To his right there was open space that went down to a midsized pond. The building with articulated wings was relatively new, but it had been designed to “blend” with all that authentic Colonial. The pond was frozen over and obscured by thick stands of evergreens. He looked but didn’t see any sign of sports facilities. There were no cages for batters to stand in for baseball. There were no goalposts for football. There was nothing that looked like it could have held a basketball court.

  He walked a little ways toward the building with articulated wings and then stopped. He could see no point in going there. He didn’t know what it was; and although it was lit up, it seemed to be deserted. He went back into the quad and paid more attention to the Gothic building. It said RIDENOUR LIBRARY on the front. He knew the name Ridenour from somewhere; he wasn’t sure where. The library looked as deserted as the newer buildings. Only the Houses looked inhabited, and he assumed they were all dorms.

  I wish I knew what I was doing here, he thought. Then he remembered something Mark had told him and tried to figure out which of the houses was the one Mark lived in. It was one of the ones that fronted on Main Street, he remembered that. It was the one next to the one next to West Gate. He remembered that, too. West Gate defined the western end of campus, so the last house on the other side would be that one, and the next one closer to him would be Hayes, where Mark lived. Gregor went down the path in that direction.

  When he came to the house he thought was Hayes, he hesitated. It wasn’t late, that was true, but he wasn’t sure that students were allowed to receive visitors on school nights or at all if the visitors hadn’t been cleared in advance. If he was running a boarding school for teenagers, that was the kind of rule he’d put in force. On the other hand, if he was running a boarding school for teenagers, he wouldn’t leave the campus open to the town the way this one was. It surprised him thatthey hadn’t had a murder here yet or a kidnapping. A serial killer could waltz in at will and snatch anybody he wanted to. There would be no way to stop him.

  He mounted the two shallow steps to the backdoor and stopped. He could hear noise inside, shouting, anger. For a split second, he was having that flashback to the old Cavanaugh Street all over again. Someone was furious and not doing anything to hide it. Nothing seemed to be breaking though. No furniture seemed to be flying. He went right up to the door and found the bell and rang it. The shouting was much closer now. Whoever was angry was angry on the ground floor, not upstairs in one of the rooms.

  He was just about to ring again, sure that nobody had heard him the first time because of the noise, when the door was yanked open by a small man with thinning hair.

  “Who the hell are you?” he asked. “What the hell are you doing here at this time of night?”

  “I’m Gregor Demarkian,” Gregor said. “I’m looking for Mark DeAvecca, if it isn’t too late to talk to him.”

  “You’re looking for Mark DeAvecca,” the small man said. “What the fucking hell.”

  An even smaller woman came running out from somewhere toward the back of the house. “Sheldon, for God’s sake. You’ve got to do something.”

  “I will do something,” Sheldon said. “I’m going to kick that little asshole’s ass from here to New York.”

  “Sheldon, pleased.”

  “I’ve come at a bad time,” Gregor said. “I’m looking for Mark DeAvecca. I was just wondering—”

  The small woman looked at him, her eyes wide. “You’re Gregor Demarkian,” she said. “Edith and I were just discussing you. Edith Braxner. I’m sorry. I know I’m not making any sense. Come in. Please come in.”

  “You can’t let some idiot off the street into the house because you talked about him with Edith,” Sheldon said.

  “Shut up,” the woman said. “Oh, God. I don’t know what we’re going to do, Mr. Demarkian. I’m Cherie Wardrop. I’m Mark’s biology teacher. Mark is—”

  “Mark is throwing up all the hell over my bathroom and you know as well as I do that he’s not going to clean up after himself,” Sheldon said. “Gregor Demarkian isn’t going to clean up after him either. There is vomit all over my bathroom. There’s vomit on the goddamned ceiling in my bathroom—”

  “Projectile vomiting?” Gregor asked. “Bad enough to reach a, what, twenty-foot ceiling?”

  “Come with me,” Cherie said, grabbing him by his arm.

  Gregor let himself be pushed along, down a narrow hall lined with coat hooks and littered with snow boots, to a small door that stood open at the end. By now he was aware that they had an audience. A little crowd of students was clutched together near the door where he’d come in, spilling out of a corridor that would probably lead to the main rooms of the house and the stairs to the bedrooms upstairs. Gregor paid very little attention to them.

  Cherie pulled him through the door at the end and into Sheldon’s apartment. Gregor noticed that it was small and meticulously neat, but not much else about it. If Sheldon had taste, it was not the sort of taste that leapt out at you.

  Cherie pulled him into another narrow hall and then into a bathroom, and right from the beginning Gregor saw two things completely clearly. One was that Mark had indeed been vomiting, and there was indeed vomit everywhere, even on the ceiling. There was vomit all over Mark, too, down the front of the sweatshirt he had borrowed from Gregor, down his arms, on his hands, on his shoes. The bathroom was the kind of mess that couldn’t be cleaned up without professional help.

  The second thing Gregor noticed was that Mark was not vomiting any longer. He was convulsing. His eyes were bugging out of his head. His body was arched and snapping as if he were being electrocuted, over and over again.

  “Call nine-one-one,” he told Cherie. “Do it now.”

  He got to his knees and grabbed Mark in the middle of a snap. It was hard as hell to hold onto him. He was whipping around like a rag doll and stiff and dangerous at the sametime. Gregor grabbed his head and got it wedged between his arm and his side. He forced Mark’s mouth open and grabbed the tongue, then held it down with his thumb.

  “Jesus Christ,” he said, “what’s wrong with you people?”

  “I can’t call nine-one-one,” Cherie said, “I have to clear it with President’s House first. Those are the rules, and we can’t—”

  “Call nine-one-one or I’ll do it for you, with one hand if I have to,” Gregor said. “Can’t you see he’s not sick to his stomach? He’s having convulsions. He could die from them. He could be permanently brain damaged. How long has he been like this?”

  “He was fine ten minutes ago,” Cherie said frantically. “He came in and he wanted a cup of coffee, but he didn’t want to ask Sheldon because Sheldon, Sheldon—”

  “Because Sheldon is a selfish prick who didn’t want him to think that just because he was bunking in Sheldon’s apartment he could have free rein with Sheldon’s stuff,” Sheldon said, “and Sheldon was right as rain because this kid is a selfish asshole slacker who thinks the world owes him a living.”

  “He was fine,” Cherie said, in tears. “He wanted some coffee, so I made him some, and he took it back here because he’s been staying here since Michael died, and then the next thing I knew Sheldon was screaming and Mark was throwing up and everything was a mess and I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do.”

  “Call nine-one-one,” Gregor said again.

  Mark’s body had stopped snapping. This wave of convulsions was over. That didn’t mean another wave couldn’t start in thirty seconds or less. Cherie stared down at Mark’s inert body. Mark’s chest was rising and falling, rhythmically and deeply. Gregor thought that was the best sign he’d had since he’d walked into this room. Cherie bit
her lip.

  “I’ve got to call President’s House,” she said. “I have to. And I will. But I’ll call nine-one-one first.”

  The man named Sheldon said nothing. He had the kind of look on his face that people have when they think they’re the victim of a con. Gregor realized that if Mark DeAvecca had shown every sign of collapsing with a heart attack, this man Sheldon would have thought it was just another ruse.

  Part Two

  The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart.

  —Fernando Pessoa

  Human beings know neither how to rejoice properly, nor how to grieve properly, for they do not understand the distance between good and evil

  —Saint John of the Cross

  We’re on a mission from God.

  —Elwood Blues

  Chapter One

  1

  By the time Liz Toliver showed up to find out what was happening to her son, it was nearly midnight, Mark was “resting comfortably,” and Gregor Demarkian thought he was going to fall over from exhaustion. He should have gone back to the inn an hour ago. He could have taken a comfortable seat in the lobby and waited for Liz to arrive. It would have been at least as compassionate as what he had done and far more sensible. This way Liz had had to arrive at the inn’s front desk to be given a note about Mark and how to find him, and the note would of necessity have been brief and uninformative. Gregor didn’t know how uninformative, since he had had to phone it in from the hospital once Mark was out of danger and he could think about something besides what he would say if Mark died and he had to tell Liz about it. He had been careful to give the desk clerk at the inn a complete and exhaustive text to pass on, but he didn’t trust it. The desk clerk was one of those people—he was running into more and more of them in Windsor—who seemed to run fueled by a barely concealed resentment of the school and all it stood for. There was no way to disguise the fact that he was “connected” to the school, even though it was only to the extent of being the friend of a family of a student. When he wasn’t worrying about Mark, Gregor couldn’t help noticing that itwas a nasty situation. The police and the firefighters would do their jobs because, by and large, they would be the kind of men for whom the job mattered more than the worthiness of the people receiving its benefits. There were other people to be considered though. The school couldn’t survive without support services, and support services were delivered by dozens of men and women, the vast majority of whom seemed to be of the opinion that they’d be better off if the school and all its people vanished from the face of the earth. Gregor had seen it every place he went, on his two brief walks up and down Main Street. He had seen it here, in the hospital, in the way the nurses’ faces got blank and the emergency room doctor’s spine got stiff as soon as they all understood that Mark was a Windsor Academy student. The emergency room doctor was a solemn, intelligent, and very young man who had obviously come to America from India or Pakistan. His distaste for Windsor and all its works was palpable. There was something about him that made Gregor trust his professionalism, but that was all that made Gregor confident that Mark would be well served in this place. No, he thought now, that’s not fair. Nurses and doctors, like policemen and firemen, usually valued the job more than the worthiness of the people receiving its benefits.