The Headmaster's Wife (28 page)

This time there were footsteps, maybe because Edith's voice sounded as loud to Cherie and Melissa as it had sounded to Edith in the hall. It was odd what high ceilings and empty halls could do to acoustics. The footsteps on theother side of the door were quick and heavy. The door opened, and it was Melissa, not Cherie, standing there.

“Edith, listen,” Melissa said, “we know you're curious. We know everybody is curious, but we're very upset. And Peter's asked us to say nothing to anybody.”

“I rather doubt if it matters what Peter says now,” Edith said. “Can't you tell that it's all fallen apart already? You don't really expect him to be headmaster a month from now.”

“I think Cherie would like to have a job a month from now.”

Cherie came up behind Melissa. It was obvious to Edith that she'd been crying. Her eyes were as puffy as doughnuts. Her nose was red. She gentled Melissa out of the way and came to the door.

“Come on in,” Cherie said, stepping back to let Edith through. “I'm going crazy in here. We're not supposed to leave. Peter told us not to. He wants us 'instantly available at all times.' And I couldn't face the cafeteria. I really couldn't. I don't know what to do. Do you think the police will be called in? He looked like he had been poisoned.”

Edith went down the narrow front hall into the apartment proper. It had a big living room that had been left to go to mess much longer than Mark DeAvecca had been in the hospital. Edith leaned over and took a pile of magazines off a chair and sat down.

“First things first,” she said. “I take it that Mark is not dead.”

“Oh, no,” Cherie said, the blood draining out of her face. She sat down herself, abruptly, on the couch. The couch was as littered with magazines as the chair had been. “No, no, not at all. Peter said that he was quite fine really.”

“‘Out of danger,' is what Peter said,” Melissa said, “whatever that means. He isn't exactly being forthcoming.”

“He was forthcoming about one thing,” Cherie said. “Well no, not exactly forthcoming, but he said it. They did drug tests. Mark wasn't on drugs.”

“Ah,” Edith said.

“Well, it settles that,” Cherie said, sounding despairing. “I never believed that gossip. It was all wrong. It was—tooeasy. He was behaving oddly and it was the easiest way of explaining it. Sometimes I think we've got only two explanations we're willing to accept at this school, drugs or attention deficit disorder.”

“But he was behaving oddly,” Edith pointed out. “Did Peter have an explanation as to why?”

“No,” Cherie said.

“He really didn't say much of anything,” Melissa said, “except to tell us to keep our mouths shut. I don't know what he thinks we're going to say. We were out in Boston yesterday and when we got back, well, we'd been back a little while—”

“An hour or so,” Cherie said.

“An hour or so,” Melissa agreed, “well, there he was, having another fight with Sheldon. I'm telling you, Edith. You have no idea what it's been like since they moved that kid in with Sheldon. Sheldon resented the hell out of it. And he didn't like Mark.”

“Not many people like Mark,” Edith said.

“True,” Melissa said, “but this was really awful. And of course Mark is something of a slob. And Sheldon's anal retentive beyond belief. And it went on and on, day after day, so that Mark spent as little time in the House as possible because he didn't feel comfortable with Sheldon there looming over him. I wouldn't have either. God only knows where Mark was spending his time during the day”

“Does it matter where he was spending his time during the day?” Edith asked.

“It depends on what happened,” Cherie said. “That's why I asked about the police. He really did look as if somebody or something had poisoned him, Edith. You should have seen him. And if it wasn't drugs, then what was it?”

Edith thought about this. “It could have been something he ate. It could have been food poisoning.”

“The vomiting could have been food poisoning,” Cherie said. “But the convulsions couldn't have been. Is that all over campus already, that he had convulsions last night? Like a grand mal seizure, but worse, much worse, than anyof those I've ever heard about. It was like he was being electrocuted. I thought he was going to die.”

“But he didn't die,” Edith said.

“No, he didn't,” Cherie said, “and if you can believe Peter Makepeace, he isn't even much the worse for wear. No, that isn't right. That isn't what Peter said exactly. He was just so
relieved.”

“Peter was?” Edith asked.

“Peter was,” Cherie said. She looked cold. Edith did not think it was cold in this room, but she hadn't taken off her coat. Cherie rubbed her hands together. “Peter asked if I'd seen Mark drinking coffee.”

Edith stood up, unbuttoned her coat, and took it off. Hayes House was not her favorite dorm. The main living room was too small, and the windows were too small throughout. “Mark is always drinking coffee,” she said. “I don't think I've ever seen him without his coffee. He even brings coffee to class, and he isn't supposed to.”

“I know,” Cherie said. “And of course I did see him drinking coffee last night. I brought him a cup myself right before all that craziness started, and Sheldon was behaving like an idiot. The whole thing is so unbelievable. Maybe somebody did poison him. Maybe somebody put the poison in coffee, and they know that. That would make me a suspect.”

Edith shook her head. “That doesn't make sense,” she said. “Why would Peter sound relieved if Mark DeAvecca had been poisoned?”

“Oh,” Cherie said, looking a little less likely to start crying again.

“Attempted murder would be worse than successful suicide,” Edith said, pursuing the thought. “A successful suicide is the result of a psychological problem on the part of the person who commits suicide. It isn't usually an indication that there's a danger to anybody else. Except in the case of suicide pacts, of course, but I don't think there's any danger of Mark having made a suicide pact with Michael Feyre. They didn't like each other all that well. It must be something else. It must be something that gets Peter out of at least some of the trouble he's going to be in.”

“I don't see what could get him out of trouble after this,” Melissa said. “It may not have been attempted murder, and Mark may be alive, but his parents are in town. His mother got here last night. Peter said so over the phone—”

“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.”

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.