by Jane Haddam
“That piece of information was all over the cafeteria this morning,” Edith said.
“—and,” Melissa went on, “his stepfather is going to be arriving today. The publicity is going to be awful no matter what happened to Mark. I’m surprised it hasn’t started yet.”
“Maybe,” Edith said. “Did you ever wonder, though, what Mark DeAvecca knew about Michael Feyre’s relationship with Alice?”
“Everybody knew about Michael’s relationship with Alice,” Cherie said.
“Of course they did,” Edith said, “but Mark was Michael’s roommate. Michael could have talked in his sleep for all we know. I know Michael didn’t seem the type, but you never know. Or they could have confided in each other.”
“Michael could have confided in Mark?” Cherie said. “It’s more likely that they made a suicide pact. Mark stayed away from Michael as much as he could. That’s one of the reasons why I never believed that Mark was on drugs. Drug addicts don’t avoid the best dealers in their vicinity; they cultivate them. But Mark could never stand to be around Michael, not even for a few hours.”
“Still,” Edith said. Then she shook her head. “Maybe the answer is something much simpler. Maybe it’s just that this latest … event … takes the spotlight off Michael Feyre and anything he might have done while he was here. Maybe it just changes the subject, and that’s enough for Peter.”
“I can see it now,” Melissa said. “Peter secretly poisons Mark DeAvecca’s coffee in the hopes that in the wake of this dramatic new death, public scrutiny will be distracted from the serial depredations of his own wife….”
“No,” Cherie said, “there you go again. If the coffee was poisoned, things would be worse for Peter and not better.” “There’s also the obvious,” Edith said. “If you wanted to poison somebody to take the public’s mind off your wife’s love affairs, you’d poison somebody other than your wife’s lover’s roommate.”
“They weren’t love affairs,” Cherie said, “not really. They weren’t that clean. I don’t believe they were even about sex.”
“Whatever,” Melissa said.
Edith shifted a little in her chair. “It must have been something that happened by accident,” she said, “or that he could make seem as if it had happened by accident or by Mark’s intention. It could be another suicide attempt. It would fit. Mark has been depressed for months.”
“Two suicides would be better than one? I thought you just said they wouldn’t be,” Cherie said.
“No, I said that attempted murder was worse than successful suicide,” Edith said, “but it’s hard to tell how the board will react in cases like this. And of course Peter hasn’t just to think of his job here. He has to think of where he’ll go in the long run, what the next place will be. There’s a difference between not being able to go on at Windsor and not being able to stay in the network at all.”
“Does Peter want to stay in the network?” Cherie asked. “I think it’s incredible the way we all are. We get into this place, and it’s as if we forget that there’s life outside it.”
Edith shrugged. “There aren’t all that many jobs that are congenial to do or that many where you can be with people you respect. Everybody can’t teach in one of the better universities. Have either of you seen Alice today at all?”
“We haven’t been out at all,” Melissa said.
“I thought you might have seen her through the window. She wasn’t at breakfast. It was the oddest breakfast. It was better attended than breakfasts usually are, probably because people wanted to find out any news they could, but the two of you weren’t there, and Sheldon wasn’t there, and Alice wasn’t there, and Peter wasn’t there either. I suppose Peter has some excuse. He must have been up until the early hours of the morning.”
“I think we had an excuse, too,” Melissa said.
Edith didn’t argue with her. Cherie’s apartment looked out onto the quad, and at just that moment Alice Makepeace had come out of President’s House, her enormous black cape wrapped around her body like a heavy wool blanket around a victim fished out of a river in winter, her red hair gleaming like rouged bronze even without the help of the sun. She dyed it, of course, Edith thought, but it worked nonetheless. It took people’s attention away from her face, and her words, and her attitude. Alice went around to the side of President’s House to where the parking lot was. Edith supposed she was going to her car.
“There’s Alice on her way out,” she said. “Maybe she’s gone to pay the obligatory call on the student in the hospital.”
“If she is,” Cherie said, “I hope Mark throws her out of his room.”
3
Diagonally across the quad, in Barrett House, Marta Coelho saw Alice Makepeace leave, too, although it took straining and leaning to follow her movements to the parking lot, and even then Marta only managed to be sure that she could see the bright red hair. Then she withdrew into the Barrett living room and counted to one hundred with potatoes, the way they used to count seconds when she was a child. The last thing she wanted this morning was to run into Alice in any capacity at all. In the last few days, Marta had been feeling more and more as if she had to leave this place, no matter what the consequences. Even going home would be better than staying here, even though she knew she would die at home. She could no more go back to living that life among those people than she could sprout wings and fly. The problem was she couldn’t stay here either, not without losing her mind. She thought she might have lost her mind already.
She also thought that it might all be a hat trick. She hadn’t had anything to eat this morning. She’d gone to the cafeteria first thing, but she’d no sooner gotten there than she hadheard the news about Mark DeAvecca, and the speculations about him, too, as if whatever had happened had been an episode on a soap opera. The ultimate reality TV, she had thought, and then realized that she’d never actually seen any reality TV. It seemed to fit anyway, and it made her feel a little sick. They were talking about how he had vomited on Sheldon’s ceiling and gone into convulsions that looked as if he were being electrocuted, and they were doing it in the tones they might use to discuss Martha Stewart’s problems with the SEC. Nobody was even talking about counselors, or the trauma the students were likely to feel, and those were usually the first two things anybody at Windsor thought of when anything untoward happened. It didn’t even have to be something untoward happening to one of their own.
She hadn’t been able to eat. That was all there was to it. She hadn’t been able to sit still in that room and listen to everybody talking about Mark and the vomit and the convulsions and the possibility that Mark’s mother and stepfather would descend, a plague of locusts in their own right, to make a mess of the Windsor Academy campus and everything it stood for. She didn’t like the boy. In many ways she truly hated him. She thought he was the picture of everything a school like Windsor should refuse to have anything to do with. She still didn’t think they ought to talk about him like that when he had nearly died.
She’d come back to Barrett House and tried to make do on her own. For some reason she had no food in the house to speak of. She had a little cluster of grapes and some mineral water in the refrigerator. She had a bag of organic blue com tortillas on the counter next to the stove. She’d tried to eat the tortillas and been forced to admit, in no time at all, that they were completely awful. She had never gotten used to the food these people ate, the food she was supposed to eat now that she was one of them. She’d lost twenty pounds since coming to Windsor from the simple fact that she could not allow herself to be seen in public eating things like cheeseburgers, and half the time she couldn’t force herself to stuff down vegan tarts and organically grown beet saladno matter how hungry she was. What she needed to do now was to run into Boston to a diner where nobody knew who she was. That way she could eat french fries until she was sick and not have to explain herself to anybody.
She was just coming out of the quad-side front door when she saw the woman coming in from wh
at must have been East Gate and start across the long, diagonal path in the direction of what Marta was sure would eventually be President’s House. She put aside her annoyance at the name—why call something “East Gate” when there was no fence for it to be a gate of?—and stopped to stare. There was really no way to mistake this woman, in spite of the fact that she wasn’t dressed in heels or covered with makeup the way she was on CNN. This was Elizabeth Toliver, Mark DeAvecca’s mother. She was walking very quickly. Marta had the impression that if she could have, she would have run.
Marta had no idea what got into her. She wasn’t a celebrity hound. Elizabeth Toliver wasn’t even somebody whose work she respected much. Marta felt propelled by forces beyond her control down the porch steps, into the quad, along the path most likely to intersect with Ms. Toliver on her way to whatever she was going to do at Peter Makepeace’s house. They collided at the quad’s center, the place where the center paths all came together. Ms. Toliver hadn’t been paying attention. She looked startled to see anybody else in the quad.
“Excuse me,” she said.
“Excuse me.” Marta thought she sounded lame. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to bother you. You’re Ms. Toliver, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” Liz Toliver said. “I’m sorry I can’t stop to talk, but I have an appointment.”
“Oh, I didn’t mean to bother you,” Marta said. “I’m Marta Coelho; I’m Mark’s history teacher.”
Liz Toliver stopped looking as if she were about to take flight. “Oh,” she said, “yes. Mark’s told me about you.”
It was a noncommittal line. Marta had the uncomfortable feeling that what Mark had told his mother was not good, but how could it be otherwise? She was getting used to thefact that when students didn’t do well, they blamed their failures on their teachers and not on their own lack of commitment to academic work.
Marta shifted to the other foot. “Well,” she said, “I didn’t mean to keep you. I just meant to say that I hope Mark is recovering from, well, whatever it was. They haven’t really told us much of anything, you see, except that it wasn’t a drug overdose. Food poisoning, somebody said in the cafeteria this morning.”
“Mark’s fine,” Liz Toliver said, “I just came from his room. He’s had a very quiet night. There doesn’t seem to be any chance of permanent damage from the incident last night.”
“Well, good,” Marta said. “I mean, he’s been so sick so often this term, hasn’t he? Much sicker than most students are, even in a bad winter. And that thing with the shakes, you know, and the tremors—”
“What?” Liz asked.
Marta blinked. “The shakes,” she said. “I told the infirmary about it. I thought they must have told you. He’d come to class and he’d have the shakes, and there would be sweat coming off his forehead in waves really. We do have a number of first-year students who have hygiene problems, but Mark was the worst I’ve ever seen. Although of course I’ve only been here this one year—”
“Why is having the shakes a hygiene problem?” Liz Toliver asked.
“What?” Marta asked.
“Never mind,” Liz Toliver said. “Do you think you were the only one who noticed it? Was it just in your class?”
“Oh, no,” Marta said, “it wasn’t in class at all necessarily. He had them the night, the night—yes. Well, the night his roommate committed suicide. I don’t know if you know about that, if Mark told you—”
“I even got a formal notice from the school. Yes, I heard about that. He had them the night the boy killed himself? Why did you see him at night?”
“It was in the library,” Marta said. “I’ve got an office in the faculty wing in the library. He came through.”
Liz Toliver turned around until she was looking at Ridenour. “That’s the library?” she asked.
“Yes,” Marta said. “Yes, of course. But there’s no reason to be upset, Ms. Toliver. It’s just another indication, you see, of why Mark isn’t really suited to be here. We’ve all discussed it this year. He just doesn’t fit. And the hygiene problems, and the getting sick, well, they’re symptoms. I don’t mean last night was a symptom. That sounds like it was a terrible accident. We warn them about keeping food in their rooms when it could go bad, but they never listen of course. But the other things—”
“I have an appointment,” Liz Toliver said again, moving in the direction of President’s House. “Mark is going to be quite well. I’ll convey your good wishes.”
“You should take him out before we’re forced to ask him to leave,” Marta pushed on. “You must see it would be better. What good is it going to do to insist on keeping him here when he’s not really suited for this level of academic work? There’s no shame in admitting that he’s just not bright enough to compete on this level. It’s—”
But she was gone. Marta had no idea how long she had been gone. She was more than halfway to President’s House, but she moved very quickly. Maybe it had been no time at all. Marta’s mouth felt dry. Her lips felt chapped. She was sure she had said things she should not have said. She’d only told the truth though. She was sure of that.
She’d only told the truth, and she thought somebody around here ought to start telling it, all the time, to everybody.
Chapter Three
1
Gregor Demarkian was not a man who “slept in,” not ever, not even when he’d been up most of the night before. He could remember mornings in his early days at the FBI, when he’d been on kidnapping detail all night, when he’d insisted on showing up at the office on time to file his paperwork and only going home later for a short nap. He could remember mornings in that last sad year when his wife was dying of the uterine cancer they had caught far too late to do anything about. There would be a crisis, and he would go to her hospital room and sit, hour after hour in the darkness. Her small square of the room would be closed off by a white curtain. Behind the faux-Danish Modern chair he sat in would be a half wall of windows, looking out on the cemetery that every hospital seemed to be built beside. Her breathing would be labored but steady. The machines would wink and blink and let off small hiccoughy beeps at random intervals. Then the sun would come up, and the day nurse would check in to see how everything was going, and Gregor, reassured yet again that Elizabeth was not likely to die anytime in the next few hours, would go off to the coffee shop on the first floor to put enough coffee into himself to keep going. And he had kept going. That was the thing. It had never occurred to him in that year to reset the alarm clock for a later hour, eventhough he was on leave and had no office to go to. Productive people got up at five thirty or six and started the day. He had always been a productive person.
It was quarter after nine when Brian Sheehy’s call came through to Gregor’s room at the Windsor Inn, and Gregor was still fast asleep across his bed and still dressed in the clothes he’d worn the night before. It had been after three by the time he’d gotten in. Even Liz had left earlier, waiting only long enough for Mark to waken slightly so that she could tell him she was there. Mark hadn’t woken for long. He’d barely opened a single eyelid, and he hadn’t seemed to be surprised that his mother was next to him, running her hands through his hair. Gregor thought Mark didn’t know where he was. He woke to find his mother beside him and assumed he was in his own home in his own bed. Gregor didn’t blame him. Mark went back to sleep. Gregor went back to waiting for Dr. Niazi’s replacement to give him some idea of where the tests that took longer to read were heading. At three, he’d finally given up. Not only was he annoying the hospital staff—although he tried to do as little of that as possible; he wasn’t nagging—but the results that were coming back in dribs and drabs all said the same thing, and that was that there was no sign of anything in Mark’s body but the caffeine.
“He does have strep throat,” the second-shift doctor told Gregor at one point, trying his best to be polite when he was far too busy to be discussing test results with the patient’s mother’s designated “representative.” “It’s a ver
y bad strep throat, too, and he’s probably had it for weeks or even months. His throat’s so sore, I’m surprised he was able to talk.”
Strep throat was not the kind of tiling Gregor was looking for. As far as he knew, it wasn’t possible for one person to give another strep throat in an attempt to weaken or kill him. The longer he thought about the amount of caffeine in Mark’s system, however, the more sure he was that Mark hadn’t ingested it all by himself, not even accidentally. It wasn’t impossible that a student of Mark’s age and ambitionwould take caffeine tablets in an attempt to stay awake long enough to get extra work done or to study more thoroughly for a test. What seemed impossible to Gregor was that a student of Mark’s intelligence wouldn’t know that he risked injury or death by taking what appeared to have been a handful of the things. Gregor was sure that Mark had not been intent on committing suicide. There was nothing suicidal about the kid who had turned up to greet him at the Windsor Inn yesterday, no matter how much of a mess he was otherwise. There was nothing stupid about that kid either. The problem was that Gregor couldn’t understand how somebody could have given Mark those tablets without Mark knowing he was taking them.
In the end he’d been too tired to think anymore. He’d called the police and left a message, very urgent, on Brian Sheehy’s voice mail. Then he’d loosened his tie and sat down on the bed for what he’d thought would be a rest just long enough to get his shoes off. As the phone rang in his ear, it became obvious to him that he had never taken those shoes off. They were still on his feet, and they hurt. He rolled over onto his back and stared at the ceiling momentarily. The ceiling had molding on it, the way a lot of eighteenth-century ceilings did. It had cherubs and small bunches of grapes with leaves that looked broad enough to belong to marijuana plants. He reached for the phone and wondered, absently, why people had thought it so important to have bumpy representations of fruit on their ceilings at all.
