by Jane Haddam
Gregor was convinced she hadn’t died from the fall. “I was going up to that catwalk because Mark DeAvecca told me that he had been there, in the nook, on the night Michael Feyre died. He had looked out of the window in that nook and seen something that disturbed him near something called Maverick Pond. Could Edith Braxner have been looking for the same thing?”
“I don’t see how,” Peter said. “You’re welcome to go up and look for yourself if the police will let you. There’s nothing to see. Oh, that catwalk’s better than the other one. The nook on the other one is crammed right against the faculty wing so that all you see is a building on one side and a little lawn right in front of you. But even the nook you saw Edith in doesn’t look out on much. There’s the pond, yes, and a small stand of evergreens, and some benches. It’s mostly deserted this time of year.”
“Do you know if anybody on this campus would have regular access to cyanide?” Gregor asked. “What about arsenic?”
“I don’t know what you mean by ’regular access,’ “ Peter Makepeace said.
“I mean access as a matter of course. Somebody who works with pesticides, for instance. Or chemicals. Somebody who would not have to do anything special to get his hands on poison.”
“Well, the groundskeepers work with pesticides, I’m sure,” Peter said. “We have a student protest or two every year over their use of them, but they do use them. In the end nothing else is practical in taking care of a property this size. And the Chemistry Department has chemicals. I’ll admit I don’t know which ones. I suppose some of them must be poisonous.”
“Is chemistry a separate department?” Gregor asked.
“No,” Peter said, “it’s part of the Sciences Department. We offer chemistry, biology, and physics. We’re very proud of the physics. It wasn’t offered when this was a girls’ school. Many girls’ schools didn’t in the old days. It was considered too mathematical and alienating for girls, especially since it was expected that most of them would marry as soon as they graduated from their colleges, if not before. Some of the girls’ schools that have remained girls’ schools don’t offer physics even now.”
“Who would have access to the chemicals in the Sciences Department?” Gregor asked. “Only the chemistry teachers, or all the science teachers? Or all the teachers? Or all the students? Are they locked up?”
“All the science teachers would be able to get to the science materials closet, which is where the things needed for lab courses are kept,” Peter said. “There’s a key, but I think all the science teachers would have to have it, because it’s not just chemicals for chemistry that are kept in there. I know the fetal pigs are—in glass jars. None of the other teachers are likely to have one of those keys, though, since they’d have no need to go into that closet. And none of the students would have them, unless they’d been sent by a teacher to get something from the closet. Then they’d have the key for however long the errand took and be required to hand it back when the errand was complete. We are carefulabout safety, Mr. Demarkian, no matter what it might seem like given the problems with the catwalks.”
“Was Edith Braxner particularly close to Mark DeAvecca?” Gregor asked.
“I wouldn’t think so,” Peter said. “Nobody was, really. Cherie Wardrop was fond of him, but the consensus of most of the teachers was that he either had no commitment to academic work, or he just wasn’t all that bright. He was one of our top picks last spring, too. We had doubts about some of the people we admitted, but we had no doubts about Mark. His record in his previous school was outstanding. It happens sometimes, no matter how careful you are.”
“What happens?” Gregor asked.
“That you bring in unsuitable people,” Peter said. “Students are a mystery. We screen until we’re blue in the face, but we always miss a few of the ones we should have screened out.”
“Was Michael Feyre one of the ones you should have screened out?” Gregor asked.
Peter Makepeace shrugged. “Michael Feyre was a concern from the beginning. We knew before we admitted him that he was a long shot. Sometimes you want to take long shots. In Michael’s case, we were sensitive to his mother’s position. His mother—”
“Won a lottery,” Gregor said. “We know.”
“She didn’t just win a lottery, she won the biggest lottery in history,” Peter said. “And she was very isolated because of it, and so were her children. We had the whole family up here when Michael applied. The younger children are adjusting well, and at least one of them is very bright. Michael wasn’t adjusting very well. There was some question that he might have a drug problem, although that was never proved. But I don’t see how you can say all this is connected. Michael committed suicide. He wasn’t poisoned.”
Brian and Danny looked away, keeping their faces expressionless. Gregor watched Peter Makepeace carefully. He was not being disingenuous. He had absorbed this pieceof information as thoroughly as if he were a Catholic submitting to dogma, and it had never occurred to him to question it.
“One more thing,” Danny said. “Who would be able to tell us what Edith Braxner was doing this evening before her fall? Did she eat dinner in her apartment or with the rest of you? Why had she come to the library? Why was she up on that catwalk? If there was nothing to be seen out that window but a pond and some evergreens and nothing else, why did anybody ever go up there?”
“Students go up there to study,” Peter said, “or some students do. And Mark DeAvecca, I think, went up there mostly to be alone. I often felt he was overwhelmed by boarding life. I suppose teachers might sometimes go up there to be alone as well.”
“But you’re not sure?” Danny said.
“Of course I’m not sure. I’m not clairvoyant. I don’t know what Edith was thinking. Isn’t that the kind of thing an investigation is supposed to find out? Besides, I think it would be more important to find out where Edith had been before she went up to the catwalk, don’t you? Unless you think somebody was up there feeding her cyanide in full view of the entire main reading room. And even then you’d have to figure out how they got down without Marta and Mr. Demarkian here running right into them.”
3
Outside, the air was cold and crisp, and the snow was definitely something serious, coming down in hard-driving streams that were almost as violent as a bad rain. The body was gone and so was the ambulance. It had been parked, with the police cars, in the East Gate lot. Gregor stopped on the steps of the library to look over the quad one more time, and Brian Sheehy stopped with him.
“It’s a beautiful place,” Brian said. “I think part of thereason we hate it so much is that we envy it. The local high school is not, exactly, this well equipped.”
“I’m sure it’s not,” Gregor said.
Danny Kelly had met up with his partner, and they were walking together toward the parking lot, their heads bent toward each other as they talked through the distraction of the snow. All the lights in all the windows that faced the quad were on.
“What do you think?” Brian said. “That woman who had hysterics, were they real hysterics or put on? I don’t trust people who have hysterics. I tend to think they’re guilty.”
“She was making enough accusations,” Gregor said. “Who is this Philip she was talking about, the one she said was hiding something?”
“I don’t know,” Brian said. “We get to know a few of the people at the school, especially if they’ve been around long enough, but that’s not one I’ve run into.”
“And members of the faculty buying drugs from Michael Feyre, do you think that’s plausible?”
“Hell, yes,” Brian said, “and not the ones you’d necessarily think either. A lot of the leftover hippies have gone organic in their old age.”
“It might be a motive,” Gregor said. “Get rid of Michael Feyre because he could expose you as a customer. Get rid of Mark because he’d heard about it from Michael Feyre. Get rid of Edith because she knew something that pointed to you as the killer of Michael Feyr
e or as Mark’s poisoner. You do realize that she couldn’t possibly have taken that cyanide before she went up to the catwalk? It would have worked too fast.”
“Yeah, I know,” Brian said. “She must have taken it on her own up there. I’ve already told Danny to be on the lookout for something she was carrying. Candy is traditional, isn’t it?”
“It is. But it could have been in anything. A sandwich. One of those sandwich cookies with the creme filling. She could have carried it around for days before she ate it. Which I suspect was the idea.”
“You’ve got to wonder if the same wasn’t done to Mark DeAvecca.”
Gregor shook his head. “Couldn’t have been. The killer couldn’t have been sure that Mark would eat whatever he gave him. Mark wasn’t eating much. And besides, that poisoning had been going on for weeks.”
“You’ve got a look on your face that says you know what’s going on here.”
Gregor looked up into the darkness. The snow came down at him in swirls and curtains, melting as soon as it touched his skin. If this went on for another few hours, the town would be snowed in. He wondered how often that happened.
“No,” he said, “I don’t have it all figured out. I know what must be true, but I’ll be damned if I know how it makes any sense.”
Chapter Two
1
Marta Coelho knew that she was not behaving rationally. She had spent too much of her life holding herself in not to realize when her self-control had vanished or to understand how hard it would be to get it back. It had started last night, long before Edith had fallen to the library floor, dead and horrible looking. It had begun when she had not been able to sit in her office for one more minute. That was when she had stood up to walk around, to visit whoever else had come in to work, only to realize that she couldn’t. In the last few days, she had alienated every other faculty member she had established any friendly acquaintance with. She hadn’t even been aware that she was doing it. James Hallwood would barely say hello to her in passing. Philip Candor was staying out of sight, and the last time she had gone to his apartment he had made it clear that she was invading his privacy. Even Cherie seemed to be avoiding her. Marta couldn’t remember what she’d said to Cherie. All of a sudden her time at Windsor seemed like a long, black tunnel where all the sights and sounds of ordinary life were blacked out. She had never reconciled herself to a year teaching in this place. She had hated it from the start, at first because of what it said about her—not good enough, the words kept ringing in her mind, not good enough for a real job—and in the end because of what it was. She hadn’t wanted to stay in the world in which she had grown up. That was true enough. She couldn’t have stayed there, if only because her interest in books and ideas and scholarship was natural. It was not something she had taken on in order to escape the pointlessness of the existence she had seen in the lives of all the people around here. But there was pointlessness here, too, and it was a hundred times worse. The people she had grown up among did necessary work. They built things and fixed things and cleaned things. It all had to be done if the world was going to function. The people here did nothing that anybody would miss if they stopped doing it. Even the “education” they provided was a hothouse flower that had very little to do with the real world in which most people had to live, in which they themselves had to live. It was an education in attitude, not in ideas, and like all educations in attitude it produced people proud of what they were instead of what they did.
The last straw, however, had been Edith; and now that it was daylight again and Marta could look out over the quad at the snow, still coming down in thick curtains, and the Houses and the trees, she had to admit that what scared her the most was that she thought she was about to die. She’d read a few mystery novels in her time. Wasn’t she the perfect candidate for the next dead body? She knew too much about everybody, and she’d been running around like an addled chicken for days, letting everybody know just how much she knew. She knew more than she’d said, too, and just how much more had been on full display in the library last night when she’d blurted out her protest to Alice Makepeace like a character in a bad movie, a parody movie, not even one intended to be serious. If this had been a movie, she would be lying dead on her own kitchen floor right this minute, her head smashed in by the edge of her microwave oven. Except, Marta thought, that this murderer did not use household objects. This murderer used poison. The only question was how he had used poison on Michael Feyre.
It was eight o’clock, and Marta couldn’t stand the idea of staying in her apartment one more minute. The cafeteria hadbeen running on weekend hours all week. That meant there was a buffet set out every morning from eight to ten, to allow both students and faculty time to sleep in. Theoretically, they were all “engaging” each other over the “events” of the last few days. Originally, they were supposed to be “engaging” each other over the emotions unleashed by the suicide of Michael Feyre. Marta wondered what the students were saying now, when so many of them had witnessed Edith’s fall, and the police, and all the rest of it. She couldn’t stand the idea of walking into that and having to eat breakfast on her own, as if she were still in high school and the town pariah, too odd and studious to fit into any of the existing social groups.
I have to get out of here, she thought, and then she realized she didn’t have to go out onto campus at all. Barrett faced Main Street. She just had to go out the front door and into town. Her hair was still wet from her shower. She didn’t own a hair dryer because she hated the way they made newly cleaned hair feel instantly dirty again. She got a wool snow cap out of the pile of things on the bench near her door. She had to unearth it from under scarves and gloves. She didn’t wear hats normally. Then she circled back to her bedroom and changed into jeans and a sweater. It was interesting how easily she could be transformed from Upper-Middle-Class Professional Intellectual Woman back to Marta from the Neighborhood. She felt like one of the mice that had been pulling Cinderella’s carriage, for a few moments transformed into a magnificent horse, now transformed back again and never to be returned.
The House was quiet. If students were up and about, picking apart the death of Edith Braxner, they were not doing it in the Barrett House common rooms. Although Barrett fronted on Main Street, its front door didn’t open there, but to the side. Marta went out onto the side porch and looked around. There was a lot going on, much more than she had expected. The street seemed to be even more clogged with people than it was usually. She came around to the front and made her way onto Main Street proper, and then she sawwhat was going on. There were half a dozen large vans parked in the middle of the road down at Hayes House. They were blocking all traffic on Main; and although the police were out in force, trying to do something about the situation, they didn’t look ready to move. Marta saw two women holding microphones, and then, looking more closely, paying attention finally, a few men carrying cameras on their shoulders. Press, she thought. She should have realized there would be Press. You couldn’t have a murder at an expensive private school, where lots of famous people sent their children, without attracting attention from the media. The question was why they were at Hayes House instead of down here at the other end, at the library. Edith had died in the library.
Marta’s immediate thought was that somebody else had died, and nobody had come to tell her. If she had been a member of the media, she would have called Hayes House the “locus of evil” or something like that. Maybe “locus” was too esoteric a word for a mass audience. Still, Michael Feyre had died in Hayes House. Mark DeAvecca had been poisoned in Hayes House. Now, if there was another one, it would be like one of those serial killer/slasher movies that had been all the rage while she was growing up.
She moved a little closer and saw that, although there were plenty of cameras and men and women with microphones and media vans and people asking other people to speak into audiotapes, there was no sign of an ambulance or of the pile of police vehicles that had been at the library las
t night. It wasn’t likely that anything new had happened. She pressed even closer, trying to hear somebody saying something sensible, but nobody was. The media people were speaking in generalities and not even sensible generalities. There was a tall man in a long, formal coat right in front of her. She pressed against him, trying to get past.
He had turned around and was already holding out his hand to her before she realized who it was: Gregor Demarkian, the detective or consultant or whatever he was who had wanted to see the nook in the library where Mark DeAvecca used to go to read. Marta had no idea if she was happy to see him. He was there, just as he had been there in Ridenour. He did not make her feel intimidated, or frightened, or shy, which she often did with people she didn’t know well, and especially with men. She took his hand, feeling a little embarrassed for him because he was holding it out like that. He didn’t seem to be embarrassed for himself.
“It’s Marta Coelho,” he said, polite, not questioning.
She nodded. “It’s Portuguese,” she said. “My name, I mean. Coelho is a Portuguese name, and my family named me Marta instead of Martha because Marta is the Portuguese form.”
“Mine’s Armenian.”
“Yes,” Marta said. She thought they both sounded like idiots. “I came out to walk. I didn’t realize all this was going on. There hasn’t been another… another death, has there?”
“No,” Gregor Demarkian said, “the media has just caught up with us, that’s all. It had to happen eventually.”
“Everybody’s been saying that for days,” Marta said. “They even said that when Michael died, and then it didn’t happen. You never got what you wanted last night, did you? A view out that window. Although I still don’t see what you could have seen, even if you had looked. There’s nothing there.”
“So everybody keeps telling me,” Gregor said. “Edith Braxner wanted to look though, didn’t she?”
