The Headmaster's Wife (30 page)

He found a seat at a table near the window and sat down. He looked at the menu—more fat letters curving around the front cover, these saying
WAR IS HARMFUL TO CHILDREN AND OTHER LIVING THINGS,
as if whoever had opened this place had found it impossible to escape from 1968. He found the section of the menu with “beverages” on it and paused. There were at least fifty different kinds of tea listed there, and two dozen kinds of coffee. The waitress came up, dressed in what looked like a burlap apron over a shirt made out of something similar that flowed to the floor, and he said, “Could I have some coffee to start? Just plain coffee, with a little milk in it.”

“We have Bana Tiryu coffee. It's grown and harvested by native peoples on their own cooperative in the Brazilian rain forest The Aubergine Harpsichord participates in the boycotts of Brazilian and Colombian corporate-harvested coffee and of all GM coffee wherever
it
is grown—”

What's GM coffee?”

“Genetically modified.”

“Ah,” Gregor said. He still had no idea what she was talking about. “Is this Bana—”

“Bana Tiryu.”

“Yes, is that regular coffee? Not flavored or noncaffeinated or—”

“lt's plain coffee, yes. But you don't have to worry about that kind of tiling here. We don't serve artificially flavored coffees or teas of any kind. If we offer vanilla coffee, it's because we've ground the vanilla beans and flavored it ourselves.”

The front door opened. Gregor looked up and was relieved to see Brian Sheehy, dressed in yet another badly fitting suit with nothing more than a down vest over it, in spite of the fact that it was still cold enough so that it hurt to breathe outside. The waitress saw him come in and backedaway from the table a step or two. Brian sat down on the other side of the table and said,

“Good morning, Alexandra. Give the man a cup of plain coffee, will you please, and not a nervous breakdown. Give me a cup of plain coffee while you're at it.”

“A little cream,” Gregor said.

“You should consider the facts of dairy farming before you decide to have cream,” Alexandra started; but Brian shot her a look, and she shrugged. “I'll leave some pamphlets,” she said, taking off.

“It's like being in a time warp,” Gregor said.

“Not really,” Brian told him. “I remember hippies, and these people are not hippies. Alexandra is taking a year off to work before she starts a master's degree program at Tufts in sociology. Nobody around here is going back to the land and giving up their possessions. They just all drive minicompacts and vote for Nader.”

“Right,” Gregor said.

Alexandra was back with the coffee, in two white ceramic mugs that looked a little uneven. “These are hand thrown by the Joy Hope Women's Cooperative in Lagos, Nigeria,” she said. “The Aubergine Harpsichord supports women's cooperative enterprises throughout the developing world.”

“You hungry?” Brian asked.

“A little,” Gregor said.

Brian handed Alexandra both the menus. “Give us a couple of western omelets.” He turned to Gregor. “They're vegetarian but not vegan, so no ham but a lot of cheese.” He looked back at Alexandra. “And no more lectures, sweetheart. Please.”

Alexandra rolled her eyes and wandered off, and Gregor noticed that she hadn't written down anything they'd said. Didn't waitresses carry order books anymore?

“Can you grow coffee in the Brazilian rain forest?” he asked Brian.

“How should I know?” Brian said. “If you really want ananswer, you should talk to Kitty, who owns this place. She actually knows what she's talking about. Alexandra is, well, Alexandra.”

“I see.” Gregor took a sip of his coffee. It tasted like coffee. He knew people who could tell the difference between coffees, and who treated drinking coffee like some people treated drinking wine, but he wasn't one of them.

“So,” Brian said, “you want to tell me what's going on exactly?”

Gregor nodded. “Mark DeAvecca, the boy I came up to see, was admitted to the hospital last night. I was there when he convulsed by the way. I'd gone to his dorm to see if I could ask him a few more questions, and when I got there he was throwing up everywhere and whipping around like he was being electrocuted.”

“Drug overdose?”

“No.” Gregor reached into his pocket, got out his wallet, and got the folded-up sheets of paper he had put in behind his credit cards the night before. They were bad notes, but at least they were notes. He flattened out the papers against the table. “At least as of three o'clock this morning,” he said, “every drug test done on Mark DeAvecca came back negative, except for one.”

“Ah,” Brian said.

“And that one was for caffeine.”

Brian Sheehy blinked. “You did say caffeine.”

“Yes, I did, and it's not as trivial as it sounds. I wrote down all the numbers, but the bottom line is that he had enough caffeine in him to kill him. The only reason it didn't kill him was because he vomited out a lot of it. In chunks. In the form of pieces of caffeine tablets, the kind of tiling kids take to stay up during exam week.”

“Jesus Christ. What did he think he was doing?”

“Well,” Gregor said, “what he wasn't doing was getting high. I need to find out exactly what sort of symptoms caffeine can cause, but I've been wondering, ever since I heard this, if caffeine could explain everything people have been saying about Mark up here. The high anxiety levels, for instance, and the sweating. And the memory losses. And the blackouts.”

“I've never heard of anybody having blackouts from too much caffeine,” Brian said.

“Neither have I, but we're both thinking of people who have been drinking lots of coffee, not people who've been ingesting these tablets. Maybe wholesale. We're talking about a level of caffeine use here that exceeds even the worst coffee habit by a factor of ten.”

“But what did he think he was doing?” Brian asked again. “Did he decide he never wanted to have to sleep at all? What?”

“I think we should consider the possibility that he didn't take them on purpose,” Gregor said.

“You mean he took some and forgot about it and then took more?”

“Maybe,” Gregor said, “but I'm thinking more along the lines of somebody giving them to him without his knowing it or without his knowing what they were.”

Brian took a deep breath. “Is that what he says happened?”

“No,” Gregor said. “At the time I left, he still hadn't said anything except hello to his mother and then only for a split second. I'm speculating here.”

“It doesn't make much sense,” Brian said. “I'm going to have to look up the particulars on caffeine poisoning, if there is such a thing, but the simple fact is that people drink coffee by the gallonsful without dying from it, or having convulsions, or having any of those other symptoms you were talking about. Except for the anxiety maybe. The coffee jitters.”

“I know.”

“Did he have some kind of allergy to the stuff?” Brian asked.

“The tentative answer to that is yes,” Gregor said, “at least according to the emergency room doctor I talked to. He thought that Mark had enough of a sensitivity to caffeine so that he had a violent reaction to what he ingested last night, which is what caused the projectile vomiting, which is whyhe lived. I do want to stress that. Both the emergency room doctor and the floor physician who came on afterward were adamant that, given what they managed to find in the vomit on his clothes and in his stomach, he should have died last night He got very lucky.”

“Still,” Brian said.

“I know,” Gregor said, “but hear me out here, all right?
For
months, apparently, everybody in Windsor, Massachusetts, has been assuming that Mark DeAvecca was on drugs and lying about it. You assumed that. Well, we now know that he wasn't on drugs, and he wasn't lying about it Yes, I do realize he might have taken some on and off sometime in the last however many weeks. But the behavior people saw and interpreted as drug use was not caused by drug use. If it had been, it would have showed up in the drug tests that were done last night. So far so good?”

“Yes,” Brian said. “All right. Fair enough. We owe the kid an apology.”

“The kid may be owed more than that,” Gregor said. “There obviously has been something wrong with him. Something seriously wrong with him. I saw it myself when I met him at the inn yesterday, hours before he convulsed. Now the doctors were saying last night that the possibility of permanent damage from caffeine poisoning is remote. The immediate problem is death, and he didn't die. Even so, the fact is that he's been physically a mess, and nobody up here did anything about it that I can tell. Did I tell you he also had strep?”

“No, you didn't,” Brian said, “but you can't tell me you think somebody gave him that on purpose.”

“No, I don't, but it's indicative of another part of the problem. According to the doctor I talked to, this was the floor phycisian, Mark not only has strep, he has
bad
strep. They put him on some ridiculously high level of antibiotics, something like four times the normal dose. That bad. The doctor said he thinks Mark may have been walking around with the strep for weeks.”

“So?”

“So,” Gregor said, “what's going on over at that school? What's wrong with those people? I can't believe Mark's never checked into the infirmary feeling bad. Didn't they do a throat culture? Didn't they even look down the kid's throat? The floor physician told Liz Toliver that Mark's throat was red and raw enough to be mistaken for meat in a butcher shop.”

“Even so,” Brian said, “you can't give somebody strep in an attempt to kill them, not unless you're a mad scientist type with access to all kinds of things, and I don't think we've got mad scientist types at Windsor Academy. And strep doesn't usually kill.”

“Granted,” Gregor said, “but the fact is, their system over there is so lax, and so cavalier, at least where Mark is concerned, that anybody could have been doing anything to him and nobody would have noticed. They just assumed he must be on drugs, and they just assumed that they weren't going to do anything about it. Although why not—”

“I've told you why not,” Brian said. “They couldn't prove it. And if they accuse without proof and they're wrong, they've got lawsuits.”

“I know. But they should have done something when he started to look that bad. And you know it as well as I do. The first thing is, though, to ask him if he was taking caffeine tablets. And to believe him if he says no.”

“He could lie, you know,” Brian said.

“I know,” Gregor said. “But, as I've told you, I've met him before. He's not a natural liar. And he's in the situation he's in at the moment because he did not lie, and everybody refused to believe he was telling the truth. This time we should assume he's being straight with us.”

“All right. Also fair enough,” Brian said.

“The second thing we should do is proceed on the assumption that this was an attempted murder.”

Brian shook his head. Alexandra was back with the omelets. They were enormous, even if they didn't have meat in them. Gregor was a little disappointed, but not surprised, to see that the cheese was a pale white and not the orange of what he considered “normal” cheddar. It was too much to ask that The Aubergine Harpsichord have artificially colored cheese.

Brian waited until Alexandra went away and then said, “You really can't do that, you know. We don't have evidence of an attempted murder hare. Peter Makepeace may be in a lot of trouble when the going gets tough, but he's still got connections. The school still has connections.”

“Liz Toliver and Jimmy Card have connections.”

“Not those kinds of connections,” Brian said. “And be reasonable. Even if this really is an attempted murder, it's going to be damned near impossible to prove. You'd have to hope for a real piece of stupidity, somebody charging half a dozen boxes of those tablets on a credit card or buying an armful in a store where they're known. And if Mark DeAvecca has ever bought a box of those things himself, if anybody even comes forward and says they saw him with a box of his own, it's all going to go to hell. The incident is going to be written off as accidental, and there's going to be nothing you can do about it.”

“I know,” Gregor said, “but there's something else.”

“What?”

“Well, I was sitting in that hospital last night watching Mark breathe, and even Liz had gone back to the inn to bed, and I got to thinking. I don't know what the symptoms of caffeine poisoning are, never mind chronic caffeine poisoning, if there is such a thing. But those symptoms sure as hell are familiar. The whole thing about the memory loss, and not blackouts, but 'coming to,' which is how he put it.”

“That's different than blackouts?”

“I think so, yes,” Gregor said. “I think it's more like being distracted to the point of thoughtlessness rather than literally blacking out. And, like I said, it's all very familiar. The loss of appetite. The trouble with his hands. The inability to write. The joint pain.”

“He had joint pain?”

“Something like that. He kept saying his hands didn't work right. You should get a look at his handwriting sometime. It looks, well, what came to mind was the way people's handwriting looks after strokes. And that's when it hit me, while I was sitting in the hospital. There's definitely something that can cause all those symptoms.”

“Lyme disease?” Brian asked helpfully.

“Maybe,” Gregor said, “I don't know much about Lyme disease. What I asked the doctor to test Mark for was arsenic.”

The first thing Mark DeAvecca saw when he woke up was his stepfather standing against a wall whose upper half was made entirely of windows, signing an autograph for a woman who appeared to be dressed in hospital whites. The woman towered over Jimmy Card. Mark found nothing strange in that. Most people towered over Jimmy Card, except for Mark's mother, who was only five four herself. Mark thought Jimmy might be five six. Even if the woman wasn't wearing heels—and she wouldn't be, would she, if she was in a nurse's uniform?—there was a good chance she could make Jimmy look like a midget.