by Jane Haddam
“Jesus Christ,” Brian said. “This person has to be crazy. Either that or a megalomaniac. Why the hell would he—he or she, whatever—why would he bother to do that?”
“Because there’d been a mistake.”
“What kind of a mistake?”
“That’s what I meant when I said look to Mark,” Gregor said. “I think that sometime in the fall the perpetrator made the wrong withdrawal at the wrong time. Something happened. Mark was away for the weekend, maybe, or in the infirmary, or otherwise tied up so that he could not have made the withdrawal in question. And that’s the nightmare in this kind of scheme. That one day you’ll make a withdrawal, a relatively sizable withdrawal, under circumstances in which the victim not only knows but can prove that he didn’t make it himself. I say sizable because a ten-dollar mistake might be shrugged off as some kind of minor anomaly. Take fifty dollars, though, or a hundred, and once the mistake is discovered people will start to ask questions. I think that’s the kind of mistake that was in fact made. And when Mark began to question what was going on with his account, the perpetrator needed to take his mind off it. So Mark got fed either the arsenic itself, or something else likely to make him immediately and violently ill, and by the time he made it back to. The dorm from the infirmary, the perpetrator had already tampered with the multivitamins. It wouldn’t have been hard. In fact it would have been easier and easier as time went on, because the more arsenic Mark took, the more dysfunctional he would have become. In no time at all it would have been a case of nobody believing him if he did say something about the missing money.”
“And it got worse after Christmas because arsenic builds up in the system,” Brian said.
“That and the perpetrator decided to screw Mark up totally by playing around with the caffeine. Don’t forget there were caffeine tablets in his body as well as arsenic the night he collapsed.”
“That was because the perp was trying to kill him.”
“At first it was because the perpetrator was trying to make sure Mark didn’t know that Michael Feyre was engaged in this particular bit of blackmail. And that would have been very hard to keep secret when Michael was Mark’s roommate, and Michael was a hinter. Definitely a hinter. Let me ask you something. Did your people ask around about where on this campus somebody could find poison, specifically arsenic and cyanide?”
“Of course.”
“And what did they find out?”
“Both of them, up straight, so to speak, in the science materials closet. A couple of different insecticide powders with arsenic in them in the groundskeeper’s shed.”
“Exactly,” Gregor said. Then he looked up toward the library’s wing-side door and watched Alice Makepeace sailing out of it, her long, red hair bouncing and whipping in the wind. “She’s a remarkable woman, isn’t she? Never mind the downside. She really is a remarkable woman. One of those people who command attention. I don’t envy her. It’s like a drug. And drugs are kinder.”
A moment later it was Mark DeAvecca coming out of the door, his shoulders hunched, looking cold even though he’d just been inside. He saw Gregor and Brian Sheehy and came over to them.
“Hi,” he said. “I need my jacket. It’s really awful. I’m serious. I should have remembered. And it’s not like I’m forgetting things anymore.”
“I want to ask you something,” Gregor said. “Sometime this fall, did you get sick? Very sick? As sick as you’d ever been before?”
“Yeah, September thirtieth. At least that was the day I went to the infirmary. I think it was Monday. I got sick onthe weekend, but the infirmary isn’t open on weekends. I was throwing up all over the place.”
“Did you end up in the infirmary?” Gregor asked.
“For the day,” Mark said. “Not even overnight. They don’t like to keep you in the infirmary in this place. I don’t think it’s anything sinister though. That happens in a lot of schools at the beginning of the year. Everybody brings their bugs that they’re immune to already and gives them to those who aren’t.”
“What about before that weekend?” Gregor said. “Did you go home for a weekend before then? Or did you go away?”
“No, I couldn’t have. You’re not allowed to leave campus for the first month. You’re supposed to be getting acclimated.”
“You didn’t go anywhere at all?”
“Well, I went into Boston with some people. For the day, you know. We saw some movies and had lunch.”
“Aha,” Gregor said. “And when you got back and looked at your student account, it was short more than it should have been.”
Mark looked surprised. “Yeah, it was. A hundred dollars. I looked in the book and it said I’d withdrawn it at ten o’clock, but I hadn’t. I’d been in Boston at the time. I hadn’t taken any money out for that trip because Mom had been up a few days before and she’d taken me out to lunch, and when she does that she always ends up slipping me more cash than I know what to do with. I’d forgotten all about that.”
“Exactly,” Gregor said.
Brian Sheehy cleared his throat. “I thought you wanted to go over to Hayes and look at the death scene,” he said. “I don’t know what you think you’re going to find, but if you want to do it, we probably ought to do it now. This place looks like it’s about to become a ghost town.”
They all looked out over the campus, at the Student Center in front of them to their left, at the beginnings of the quad to their right. The campus was not deserted. It was full of students and their parents. They were all leaving.
2
Hayes House was full, too. The last time Gregor had been there, he had been aware of the sound of students moving just out of sight on the upper floors and in the common rooms. This time, he could see them everywhere. The front door was propped open with a clay pot filled with dirt, making it easier for students to come and go with boxes in their hands. A middle-aged woman in a long, formal coat and good gray flannel dress pants was standing near the front staircase directing a tall young man who looked buried beneath suitcases. How much stuff could these kids cram into their rooms? Gregor decided not to ask. The man he remembered as Sheldon had come out onto the front porch, livid.
“It’s freezing in here, don’t they understand that?” he demanded. “We have to keep this door closed. This is intolerable.”
“The door will remain open,” the woman in the gray flannel pants said, “until Max has his room cleared of his things. I have no intention of being held up. And if you try to stop me, I’ll sue you. You personally. Don’t think I won’t do it.”
Sheldon shrank a little and retreated inside, muttering to himself. If he had noticed Mark, or Gregor Demarkian, or Brian Sheehy, he gave no indication of it.
“We can start with Sheldon,” Gregor said. “What’s his last name anyway?”
“LeRouve,” Mark said. “Do you mind if I just stay out of sight? He’s only going to yell at me again. I can’t take it. I’m recuperating.”
“Relax,” Gregor said. “I just want to check one thing.”
They went through past the milling students and knocked on Sheldon LeRouve’s door. He opened up, looked at the three of them, and practically spat.
“I’ve said as much as I’m going to to any policeman. I’mnot saying any more. If you want to talk to me, talk to my lawyer.”
“I don’t think that’s really necessary,” Gregor said. “I just want to know one thing. On the night that Michael Feyre died, did you go to the upper floors of this house at any time?”
“I don’t have to answer your questions,” Sheldon said. “Get out of here.”
“Then I will assume that you did go to the upper floors during the evening,” Gregor said.
Sheldon reared back. “Don’t be ridiculous. I don’t go upstairs. I don’t even do bed checks anymore. What do you take me for? It’s enough that I’m stuck with these idiots day after day, I don’t have to go climbing two flights of stairs five times a night to check on what kind of stupidity they’re up
to next. Especially that one,” he cocked his head toward Mark. “That one is a real mess. A bigger one than his roommate was.”
“Then you weren’t upstairs that night?”
“No.”
“And you would say that it is so seldom your custom to go upstairs that if you had gone, somebody would have noticed it as odd?”
“How the hell would I know what somebody would notice as odd?” Sheldon said. “They’re all so drugged out most of the time, they’d probably think pink elephants were perfectly normal.”
“But it would have been odd,” Gregor insisted.
Sheldon looked them all over again and slammed the door in their faces.
“Well,” Brian said, “that was helpful.”
“It was helpful,” Gregor said, “but I needed to be sure. It’s the kind of man he is, though, don’t you think? Everything, no matter what, would be too much trouble. Even the smallest obligation will be chucked onto somebody else if at all possible. I take it he’s got seniority as a houseparent.”
“Seniority?” Mark said.
“That he’s been here longer than Cherie Wardrop.”
“Oh, yeah,” Mark said, “a lot longer. He’s sort of like the school Grinch. I don’t know why they don’t fire him. They’re so big on the ethos of the school. Maybe he’s got money though. They’ll put up with a lot of things in this place if you’ve got money.”
“Let’s go see the upstairs,” Gregor said.
A few moments later, Gregor was almost sorry he’d insisted. There were not only two flights of stairs, but two long and steep flights of stairs. He was breathless by the time they reached the second floor and only too happy to have a chance to stop and look around. The hallway and landing were narrow. The stairs climbed along one wall. There were at least a dozen doors, most of them now open, with students packing inside them.
“Hey, Mark,” people called.
Mark called “Hey” back. Gregor was happy that he didn’t seem inclined to stop and give his dorm mates a play-byplay of his last few days.
They went up the next flight, which was thankfully the final one. It was the same scene here as it had been below, with the exception of the door just opposite the top of the stairs, which was not only closed, but sealed by yellow police tape.
“That was your room?” Gregor asked.
“Yes,” Mark said.
“We can go in it if you want,” Brian said. “I’ve told the Detective Division that you might want to break the seal.”
“It isn’t necessary,” Gregor said. “It’s the way the door is situated that I wanted to see. Mark, tell me something. When students are in their rooms, do they usually leave their doors open or closed?”
“Open,” Mark said, “unless they’re sleeping. Or, you know.”
“No,” Gregor said. “What?”
Brian cleared his throat again. “Unless they’re engaged in self-abuse,” he said helpfully.
“Michael used to keep the door closed most of the time,” Mark said, “when I wasn’t there. When I was, you know, I’dget to feeling hemmed in. But he didn’t talk to people around here if he could help it.”
“But the other doors would have been open, is that right?” Gregor said. “And would people have been home?”
“It was a Friday night,” Mark said, “so most of them wouldn’t have been. But some of them might have been. Kim Jun, for one. He’s from Korea. He studies more than most people breathe.”
“Good,” Gregor said. “Exactly what I needed to hear. Timing is everything.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Brian said.
“Just what I said. Timing is everything. Let’s go downstairs. There’s one last thing to do. And then I’m going somewhere and getting something serious to eat. I’ve spent this whole trip living on crackers, soup, and a vegetarian omelet.”
“It’s not a bad omelet,” Brian said.
Gregor ignored him, and they all trooped downstairs again. The trip down was a lot easier than the trip up, although it, too, required them to dodge students with boxes. The whole place was humming like bees on the wires in summer; and in spite of what was happening and why, everybody seemed to be almost unnaturally cheerful. He would not want to listen in to teenagers of his acquaintance if he ever came to a sticky end himself. He wouldn’t want to hear some nice young person he’d known for years saying, “He was decapitated? Cool!”
They got to the ground floor and Gregor led them toward the backdoor again and the narrow corridors leading to the faculty apartments. He was still having a hard time keeping straight in his mind what part of the House was the front and what was the back. Mark said hello to seven or eight more people and stopped to talk to two, but he didn’t linger. Gregor thought Mark must actually be interested in what the grown-ups were going to do. If somebody had tried to kill him, Gregor thought, he’d be interested, but he no longer understood much about people Mark’s age. Except for notwanting to miss out on the action, Mark seemed to be taking the whole thing as a matter of course.
They got to Cherie and Melissa’s apartment and knocked. They didn’t have to wait long before the door was open and Cherie poked her head out.
“Oh, Mr. Demarkian,” she said, “I thought it was one of the parents. I should leave the door open, I know I should. They do need to talk to me some of the time, or to talk to a houseparent at any rate, and Sheldon is, well, he’s busy—”
“He’s a son of a bitch,” Melissa called from inside the apartment.
Cherie flushed. “Sorry. She’s right, of course.”
“Do you mind if we come in?” Gregor asked.
Cherie backed up and let them come. The apartment was stripped bare and full of boxes. Even the curtains had been taken down. Gregor was sure that the school provided the furniture for these apartments. He would have expected the school to provide the curtains as well. Maybe he was wrong, or maybe the school had but Cherie and Melissa hadn’t liked them.
They all trooped into the living room, and Melissa looked up from the box she was taping. “Take a good long look,” she said. “You’re seeing history in the making. Windsor’s first lesbian couple houseparents, symbol of all things progressive at Windsor Academy, packing up and getting out. Not that that has anything to do with our being lesbians, of course, but if the school magazine wrote it up, that’s the way they’d put it. We’re this year’s poster children for the virtue of tolerance.”
“Well, you might be,” Gregor said, “but I’d be very surprised to find that you were actually lesbians. I suppose it’s possible, but from what I’ve seen it’s very unlikely. It was a good cover, though, given that this place is what it is.”
“What is this?” Melissa asked. “A new version of ‘don’t tell me you’re gay, you just need a good fuck’?”
Cherie winced at the language. “Melissa.”
“Do you mind if I sit down?” Gregor said. He didn’t waitfor an answer. He took off his coat, laid it over the back of the couch, and sat. Melissa was suddenly very wary. Cherie looked as helpful and clueless as always. Gregor sat.
“You know,” he said, “as soon as I knew that Mark had been poisoned with arsenic, I knew that there were only two people who could have possibly given it to him—three, if we count Melissa. But it had to be either Sheldon LeRouve, or you, Cherie. You were the only people who were with him in the right time period.”
“There were students here at the time,” Melissa said. “Don’t forget that.”
“Oh, I’m not forgetting it. But Mark didn’t go upstairs that night. He wasn’t sleeping in his dorm room. He was bunking in with Sheldon LeRouve. Any student who was going to poison him, not only with the arsenic but with the caffeine tablets, had to manage to do it in full view of the common rooms and in a very short time. But when Mark came home, he came to this apartment because Cherie invited him here.”
“I did invite him here,” Cherie said. “I felt sorry for him. Sheldon was being a bastard as usual, and Mark looke
d so sick.”
“He should have looked sick,” Gregor said. “He’d just come from my room at the Windsor Inn, where he’d taken his multivitamin right in front of me, and the multivitamin was full of arsenic.”
“What?” Mark said.
“I’ve already explained all that to Brian here once today, so I won’t do it again now,” Gregor said. “But Mark came here, and you invited him in, and you gave him a cup of coffee and a packaged ice cream sundae.”
“He asked for the coffee,” Cherie said, “and he said he was hungry. He’d missed dinner. It was the only thing I had.”
“The extra arsenic was in the coffee,” Gregor said. “The pieces of caffeine tablets were in the sundae. That means you’d been planning this for a while, at least for the day. Why? Because I was here?”
“You’re being ridiculous,” Melissa said.
“Unfortunately, I’m not being ridiculous at all,” Gregor told her. “It’s a matter of the timing. Nobody else could have poisoned Mark that night, and nobody else could have killed Michael Feyre.”
“Michael committed suicide.”
“Michael was murdered, and you murdered him because he had proof of the scam you’d been pulling; and once people started looking into that scam, they’d realize Windsor wasn’t the only place you’d pulled it. Find a school. Become a houseparent. Pull—something. Not always the same something you pulled here, but in every school there will be a way to make money if you know how to do it, and you did it. We’ll get Brian to pull the records on the last few schools you’ve been at. Now that he knows what to look for, it won’t be hard to find. Up until Windsor, you were always very careful. And my guess is that you always left quickly, long before anybody would get suspicious. It’s too bad you didn’t do that here.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Melissa said. “And you can’t prove any of it. You’re just speculating.”
“I know that Michael Feyre did not have sex with men and that any other woman would have been both suspect and noticeable if she appeared on the third floor of this house,” Gregor said. “I know that nobody else could have tampered with Mark’s vitamins consistently, and nobody else had access to cyanide—”
