The Headmaster's Wife (19 page)

“I'm not sure if that's good or bad,” Gregor said.

“Well, Walt's impressed, and that's not usual. Look, I'm just getting off, I'm starving, and I need a beer and I need a cigarette—” The young woman at the desk clucked, and Brian Sheehy ignored her. “There's a place about three blocks down and around the corner, if you wouldn't mind. And you don't mind a place where they allow smoking.”

“I don't mind,” Gregor said.

“It's not one of those places on Main Street,” Brian Sheehy said. “No sprouts. No spinach salads. You don't look like an organic vegetable guy to me.”

“I'm not,”

“I'm going up to Doheney's,” Brian told the young woman at the desk, “then I'm going home. I'm on my cell phone.”

“Okay,” she said.

Brian shooed Gregor toward the door. “Only thing is, I want to make one thing clear up front. There's a lot going on with this, but what isn't going on is a murder. Walter said you understood that, right? We checked into it every way we could, and there's nothing there that even makes a murder possible. You can see the reports if you want. This one is not a doubtful case.”

“I do understand that,” Gregor said, as he found himself outside on the front steps again. He kept forgetting how dark it got and how early in February in New England. “I haven't come to investigate a murder. I haven't come to investigate anything. I came because Mark DeAvecca asked me to.”

“Yeah, the roommate,” Brian said.

“What do you think about the roommate?”

“Serious stoner,” Brian said automatically. “Whacked to the gills practically all the time. Someday he's going to start convulsing, and then it's just going to be a matter of whether they get him to the hospital on time.”

They were out on the street again. There was snow on the ground, but even in the darkness it didn't look soft. “The thing is,” Gregor said, “I know the kid.”

“Don't you ever think that,” Brian said. “I've heard it a million times. Even the ones you know get caught, more often than you'd think.”

“I know that,” Gregor said, “but I've also just spent the last hour and a half talking to him. He knows everybody thinks he's using. He offered to take a drug test.”

“When he offers where he's likely to get taken up on it, get back to me.”

“I will. It may be soon. I called his mother. When she gets here, she may insist.”

“I don't get this boarding school thing,” Brian said. “It's bad enough when they're eighteen and want to go away to college. Why would you want your kid to go away when he was only fourteen?”

“In this case I think it was the kid who wanted to go away,” Gregor said. “Get out. Be independent. He's that kind of kid. But the thing is, I did talk to him for over an hour. And the way he is, the way he behaves—yes, I can see the presumption that he's using. But the more I watched him, the less that seemed like what was going on. I hate to tell you what did seem to be going on.”

“What?”

“Alzheimer's disease.”

“In a fourteen-year-old kid?”

“He's sixteen,” Gregor said. “He turned sixteen in January. But yes, I understand. I don't really mean I think he has Alzheimer's disease. I meant that if you spend enough time with him, that's the way he comes off. Not like somebody who's drugged. He goes in and out of focus, for one thing. He'll be just fine, and then ten minutes later his mind willstart to wander and his speech will get thick. Then ten minutes later he'll be fine again. Unless you know of a drug that works on a time-release basis, that doesn't sound like substance abuse.”

They were suddenly outside a small building close to the street with a plain, plate-glass storefront. If Gregor had had to make a bet on it, he would have said nothing that looked like this remained in the town limits of Windsor. There was gilt stencil lettering across the plate glass:
DOHENEY'S RESTAURANT.
It looked less like a restaurant than a bar.

“Here we are,” Brian said, opening the glass door to let Gregor go in ahead of him. Doheney's Restaurant was as dark inside as the street was outside and maybe darker. The few lights were low and concealed behind amber globes. Brian went to the back and slid into a wooden booth.

“I'm impressed,” Gregor said, sliding in on the other side. “I would never have guessed you could find a place like this in this town.”

“There're still a few of us here from the old days,” Brian said, waving at a waitress. “Those of us who go to Our Lady of Grace instead of the First Unitarian Church. I don't get Unitarians any more than I get boarding schools. Here's Sheila. You want a beer?”

Gregor hadn't had a beer in ten years. “Sure,” he said, “whatever they've got on tap.”

“They've got rat piss on tap,” Brian said. “Sheila, get the man a Heineken. And get me a hot pastrami on a roll with Russian dressing. You want something like that, Mr. Demarkian?”

“Gregor,” Gregor said automatically. “How about a cheeseburger and fries?”

“Cheeseburgers come with fries,” Sheila said. Then she thought about it for a moment. “Everything comes with fries.”

“Right,” Gregor said.

Sheila waltzed off, and Brian began moving the sugar cannister around on the wooden table. It was an old-fashioned diner cannister, made of glass with a stainlesssteel top. “So what is it?” Brian said. “If he's not a stoner, what do you think is wrong with him?”

“I don't know,” Gregor said. “That's what I came up to find out really. I like the kid. He's not acting like himself. He worries me.”

“If I liked the kid, I'd worry about him, too,” Brian said, “but I'd worry about—”

“Drugs, I know. He did tell me some interesting things though before I came out this evening. He said that Michael Feyre was dealing drugs. Is that true?”

“Yeah,” Brian said. “We couldn't have proved it, but I'd bet anything. Not that we could have done anything about it.”

“Why not?”

Brian laughed. “Look, this place is backed by serious money, you understand? Rockefeller money. Vanderbilt money. Roosevelt money. Some of the Kennedy kids went there. When they want to hush things up, they don't bother to schmooze around with me; they schmooze around with the governor. Or better. We stay off that campus. We have to. And if we pick up one of the kids in town, we go by the book, keep the papers out of it, make sure he gets probation, and then they just send him home.”

The beers came. Sheila put them down next to two clean glasses and walked away again.

“But this Michael Feyre,” Gregor said. “He wasn't old money, was he? Walter Cray said that his mother—”

“Won the Powerball, yeah. Have you met her?”

“I've never even seen her,” Gregor said. “I'd never even heard of her until I talked to Walter Cray.”

“Well,” Brian said, “she's a gas, really. She's real young for having a fifteen-, sixteen-year-old kid. She must have been sixteen herself when she had him. And she looks like just what she was, except that her clothes are better. She looks like a high-school-drop-out single mother who works in a convenience store. And she's ignorant as hell in a lot of ways, but she's not stupid.”

“She sounds more interesting all the time.”

“Oh, she's interesting all right,” Brian said. “And what'sbetter is, she's here. She's been here for a couple of days. She has to arrange for her son's body to get back home for one thing, but I don't think that explains it. I think she's looking for something.”

“Looking for what?”

“I don't know exactly. Maybe an explanation. Maybe she doesn't believe he committed suicide. Although, let me say again—”

“I know, there's no question.”

“Right, there really isn't one. But she's his mother. Mothers aren't always rational about sons. If they were, they'd probably kill them at birth.”

“So she's here, and she's looking for something. And Mark DeAvecca is here, and he's looking for something too, he just doesn't know what. And he's acting very oddly. And Michael Feyre was dealing drugs, and nobody could catch him at it. And I'm here. What's wrong with this picture?”

“What's wrong is that the press isn't here,” Brian said. “They're good at covering things up over there, but this is a miracle. You know what the scary thing is? If they're careful, the press may never be here.”

“Are they careful?”

“Not particularly. It's a weird place over there. I don't like it. Almost nobody in town does. They talk a really good game about ‘diversity' and 'inclusion,' but it's money that talks at that place, and they don't ever let you forget it. If you've got the cash, you can be a drugged-out crack addict with a D average, and they'll do everything but change your underwear to help you to stay; but you come in on a scholarship, and they'll find a way to get rid of you if they have to, unless you're one of those ultimate scholastic stars that could have gotten into Harvard without bothering with high school at all. It used to be a girls' school, did you know that?”

“No.”

“I liked it better when it was a girls' school. It was still stuck-up as all hell, but it was a kind of stuck-up I could get.

It didn't tell you how wonderfully committed to fairness and social justice it was while stabbing you in the back.”

“You, personally?”

The food had arrived. Gregor sat back a little to let Sheila put his cheeseburger in front of him. It was the size of the old Volkswagen bug and buried in a mountain of french fries that could have shown up on satellite pictures from space. Brian asked for another beer.

“Not me personally,” he said, studying his pastrami sandwich. “It was a nephew of mine. Bright kid. Lived down on the other side of Boston, too far to commute really. Got himself a scholarship to come up here, covered practically the whole thing. End of his first year, he's got a B minus average, and they decided that 'he has not shown the ability to succeed in a sophomore year at Windsor.' A B minus average. Can you believe that? What's wrong with a B minus average? So I checked into it a little. There were two dozen kids in his class with averages of B minus or less. Only three were asked to leave. Every one of them was on a scholarship. And nobody on a scholarship with a B minus or less was allowed to stay. But lots of people with less were allowed to stay, and all of them had money.”

“How did you get that information?”

Brian shrugged. “The secretaries live in town, don't they, and they didn't migrate here from Boston or New York. They're local. And most of them are Catholics.”

Gregor thought it was probably not an easy time to be a Catholic in the Greater Boston Metropolitan Area, but he let it go. Brian was ripping apart his pastrami as if he were a saber-toothed tiger going at raw meat.

“The thing is,” he said, while Gregor accepted the second round of beers from Sheila, “I've got to tell you the truth. I can't do anything about it because it would mean my job in the long run, but I'd love to see something happen that would make the shit hit the fan at that place. The sooner the better. There gets to be a point where I just don't feel like putting up with their bullshit anymore.”

There were very few things that James Hallwood didn't like about living at Windsor Academy, but there was one thing he truly hated, and that was the requirement that all teachers eat lunch and dinner in the common cafeteria with the students throughout the school term. His faculty apartment had a perfectly respectable kitchen. It was more than respectable. He'd had expensive apartments in Boston that had had fewer amenities and even more expensive flats in London where it had been impossible to cook at all. He objected to everything about the common cafeteria. The food was invariably bad. That went without saying. Institutional food was always bad. The public exposure was at the least annoying and often repressive. He found himself picking over wilted salads or overcooked cod, more aware than he wanted to be that people were staring at him. Students and faculty both stared. David said that was because he was “gay”—God, how he hated that word “gay;” he used it, but he hated it—but he knew it was because he was something else, something far worse in this place. Nobody at Windsor Academy cared whether he was gay or not. They cared that he was an elitist.

I am an elitist,
James told himself, as he packed himself into his coat and scarf to make the trek over to the Student Center. It was egregious. If they had to make them all eat together in the common cafeteria, the least they could have done was to put the common cafeteria somewhere convenient, on the quad, instead of out in back with all the classroom buildings. The other thing they could have done was to set dinner at a reasonable hour instead of at five thirty. He had no idea why the school—and not only this school; every school he had ever been involved with—felt the need to feed its students as if they were day laborers in Liverpool who couldn't wait for tea. He only wished that they could establish the kind of tradition here that they had at places like Exeter, where everyone ate at tables with tablecloths, and students took turns being waiters. That was probably elitism, too.

He let himself out the back door of Doyle House, then went down the path to the left and across the broad field to the Student Center. To his left, he could just see the top of Maverick Pond, down at the bottom of the slope that made it possible for the library to have an “above-grade lower level.” He made a face at the memory of all those recruiting brochures and alumni bulletins and bent his head against the wind coming up from the open expanse to his left. Of course it was only relatively open. On the other side of the pond there were about two hundred feet of open ground. Then there was a high fence, and on the other side of that fence was some town building James had never understood the function of. He only knew it wasn't Windsor-Wellman High School, the local public school, which was from all reports a godforsaken place without facilities or standards. On the one hand, it was odd that a town as rich as Windsor, Massachusetts, wouldn't spend what it had to to make its high school a first-rate place. On the other, the whole situation seemed entirely typical. James had never seen the point in public schools on any level but the most elementary, and that in spite of the fact that he had gone to one.