The Headmaster's Wife (48 page)

James turned away. “So maybe Michael did commit suicide,” he said sullenly. “Maybe she was poisoning Mark because he knew something about her sleeping with Michael.”

“Maybe,” Gregor said.

“You should see the way she's been behaving,” James said. “Going on and on. Making accusations where anybody could hear them. Making accusations in front of half the student body in the library last night, from what I've heard. What could possibly be the point of that except to deflect suspicion from herself?”

“I don't know,” Gregor said. “Some people like to gossip. What could possibly be the point of this display you've put on for me today except to deflect suspicion from yourself?”

James Hallwood froze. “I don't know what you mean,” he said. “I don't have the faintest idea what you're talking about.”

He really was an elegant man, Gregor thought. He could play the part of an Oxford don or a Nobel Prize winner in amovie aimed at the sort of people who thought of Indiana Jones as brainwashing. Gregor gathered up the papers—he would keep those; he wasn't an idiot—and stood himself.

“It has been suggested to me,” he said carefully, “that you bought drugs from Michael Feyre.”

James snorted. “Suggested by Marta, I suppose. That's what she's been going around saying. And not only about me.”

“I didn't hear it from Marta Coelho.”

“Then you heard it from somebody who heard it from Marta Coelho,” James said. “I don't buy drugs, Mr. Demarkian. And if I did, I wouldn't buy them from a student. I'm not a fool.”

“Maybe not, but the idea that you do buy drugs is current on this campus, and I have to wonder, if you don't buy them at all, why that's so. I also have to wonder about the possibility that Michael Feyre knew you bought them and threatened to expose you for it. He was a blackmailer.”

“He was a blackmailer for sex,” James said, “and he blackmailed women.”

“Maybe he blackmailed men for money.”

“He had more money than all the faculty combined. He had more money than the school's endowment, most likely. He didn't need money.”

“Psychopaths need things in ways much different than normal people do. He may not have needed money in the usual sense, but he might have needed to extort it.”

“If he did, he didn't extort it from me.”

James was glaring. Gregor didn't blame him. He'd come into this interview convinced he could make Gregor move in the direction he wanted him to go, and Gregor wasn't going there. James turned away and stared out the living room windows onto an expanse that ended in a large clapboard building Gregor thought might be the Student Center.

“If you've come here to trap me into saying something that you can use to arrest me, I won't have any part in it,” James said. “You might as well pack up and go.”  

“All right,” Gregor said.

“You mean you don't want to interrogate me any further?

You don't have a thousand clever questions that will prove I broke Michael's neck with my bare hands and strung him up like a sausage in his own bedroom? I'm disappointed in you.”

“I'd like to keep these papers, if I could.”

“Do what you want. I have copies.”

“All right.”

“She's going to get what she wants after all,” James said. “She's going to get to see one of us arrested, and she's going to stand by and gloat. And you're going to help her do it.”

Gregor didn't think he was helping anybody do anything, but he knew there was no point in arguing with somebody in the mood James Hallwood had sunk himself in. Gregor left James standing with his back to the rest of the living room and let himself out Martinson House's backdoor. He had to remind himself again that the school Houses did not face the quad. They backed onto it.

He didn't think that was significant, but it was the kind of detail that was much too easy to ignore until it tripped you up.

Cherie Wardrop had to admit it. It only made sense. It was a matter of practical reality. Windsor may have been the best place they had ever had, and the only school where they had stayed more than two years, but all good things must come to an end. Even without murders and publicity, they would have been on their way next year or the year after. It got boring to stay in one place for too long. It also got difficult. It got to the point where you knew everything about the place, and it knew everything about you. After that, things always got to be a little tense.

“I know the normal thing would be to stay 'til the end of the year,” Melissa said, “but I don't think there's going to be any school to stay at in a day or two. And what would we do here? Answer questions from the police. There's that. But we can answer questions anywhere. We don't have to be sitting here in an empty dormitory for five months while Gregor Demarkian figures out that he doesn't know what he's doing.”

“The dormitory isn't empty,” Cherie pointed out.

“It's not empty now,” Melissa said, “but give it a minute or two. We've already had, what, six calls today? The entire third floor is due to be picked up before evening. The only reason there will be anybody left on the second is that allthree of the Korean boys are there, and their parents don't have any place for them to go yet. At the most we have a week before this building will clear out. It will only be the middle of March. You really don't expect those students to come back for this school year, or ever?”

“If the police make an arrest,” Cherie said.

“If the police make an arrest in the next hour, the kids are going to go,” Melissa said. “Let's face it. Half these people wouldn't recognize their own children if they passed them in the street. And even if they would recognize them, they don't like them. But they all feel guilty about it, Cherie. Every last one of them. So when something like this happens, they panic. They feel they need to do something. And what they do is find the kid another school.”

“Well,” Cherie said lamely, “at least we can get Mark DeAvecca out of Sheldon's apartment.”

“Mark DeAvecca isn't going to be back either,” Melissa said. “What do you think his mother is doing up here? She
would
recognize him if she passed him on the street, and I think she may even like him; but one way or another, she's here, and he's going. And you know it.”

Cherie shook her head. “It feels wrong, somehow. That he'd just go, right from the hospital, and not come back to say good-bye. That they'd all just go. As if we didn't mean anything to them.”

“They don't mean anything to us, Cherie. Be sensible.”

Cherie was being sensible; she just didn't think what Melissa said was true. They did mean something to her. They always did, in every dorm she'd lived in, although she needed to get away from them as much as she needed to get away from their schools when the end came.

“We don't even have a place to go next year,” Cherie said. “We weren't expecting this, and we should have been. When Michael—well, when Michael. We should have started looking for a new place then. And we didn't.”

“It's only March. We'll find something.”

“Not as good.”

“Maybe not,” Melissa said, “or maybe we'll find something better. We should check out some of the places in California. The weather would be nicer. And in the meantime, we should take a vacation. It's been a long time since we had one of those.”

“We should just be sure not to leave anything behind,” Cherie said.

They were standing in the living room of the apartment, putting things into boxes. Or rather, Melissa was putting things into boxes. Cherie had woken up to find her with the boxes out and a checklist on a clipboard, as if they had decided on their next move, when they hadn't even talked about it. It was true, things were definitely different now that Edith was dead. Even the air was different. Up until now they had all been able to pretend that nothing really awful had happened. Michael had committed suicide. Mark was, well, Mark: a perpetual screwup and slacker, a druggie, one of those people who should never have been admitted in the first place. People thought that of him even now that they knew it wasn't true, or might not be. Once you got a reputation in a boarding school, it was nearly impossible to change it. Edith was the best teacher the school had and the most conscientious houseparent.

“Do you think it's true?” Cherie said. “What Sheldon was saying last night. Do you think that anybody who was willing to kill Edith would be willing to kill anybody?”

“I don't know,” Melissa said. “What do you think?”

“I think I need some air.”

James Hallwood knew, even while he was doing it, that he had approached his interview with Gregor Demarkian in exactly the way he shouldn't have. He had heard his own voice, and the petulance and pettiness had been unmistakable. So had the panic. It was a terrifying prospect. Here was the truth about teachers in schools like this one. They came in only three types. First and best were the natural teacherswith too much respect for the traditions of Western culture to be willing to put up with public school bureaucracies that, except in the very best places, seemed to be concerned with everything and anything but academics. Next were the young ones on their way up and out. They were taking a year to teach while they made up their minds between doing doctoral work in Slavic literature or going into publishing. Finally, there were the men and women who had failed at everything else, not because they were inadequate as a matter of constitution, but because they lacked the courage or the ambition to try. That last group made up the smallest percentage of faculty at a good school, but they were very visible and very easy to spot. Sheldon LeRouve was one, scratching for his security in any way possible, angry at his colleagues and his students and the boarders in his house, angry especially at boys like Mark DeAvecca, who seemed to be so worthless and yet had no need to worry about the future.
Oh, that family money,
James thought. He hadn't had it either, and he could remember himself in college, envying the hell out of the boys who did. He didn't think he was like Sheldon, not yet. He was not angry most of the time, and he was not bitter. He could get that way. That was what his interview with Gregor Demarkian had made him understand.

Left to himself, he put in a call to David and was surprised to find him in. He realized with a pang that, in spite of all the years they had been together, he did not have David's weekday schedule imprinted on his brain. He didn't even have it memorized in outline. He thought about the night Michael Feyre had died, the way he had sat in this living room and told himself that his relationship with David was about to come to an end. The truth was, it had never really had a beginning. He had been with David as he had been with his work, here at Windsor and everyplace else he had ever been. It had seemed to him not only easier but more sensible not to allow himself to get too involved, not to allow too much to matter to him. It wasn't that he was cold. It wasn't even that he was afraid of commitment, although David would probably say he was, and had said so, more often than James liked to remember. The real issue was this: once you got involved, once you made a commitment, then all other options were closed off. You had chosen your road, and all other roads were barred to you.

When James thought of making decisions, it was closed doors he t   hought of, a whole corridor full of open doors crashing eternally shut. Even now, even when he knew better, even when he could hear the sound of his voice rising into panic, and see Gregor Demarkian's startled look of surprise, the idea of getting himself settled made him feel suddenly claustrophobic, irrevocably out of air. He had to force himself to dial David's number, and when David's voice came on the line he had to force himself to respond to it. For a moment he experienced a brand-new panic. David hadn't called this morning when the news had hit about the murder of Edith Braxner. Maybe James had left it too long. Maybe David had given up.

“I was wondering,” James said, when David had made all the right noises about the mess at Windsor, “if you'd mind coming to stay here with me tonight.”

“Stay there? At school? What's the matter, is the place about to close down so that you no longer have to worry about your reputation?”

He deserved the flippancy, James thought. He had been flippant often enough himself. “It probably will close down,” he said, “but that's not why I want you here. I think it's cowardice. The place doesn't feel safe.”

David stopped joking. “It isn't safe, if you ask me. You could come here to stay instead. That way neither one of us would have to worry about being poisoned at dinner.”

“I don't think we do have to worry. I don't think it has anything to do with us. But I don't know if I could leave tonight. The school is falling apart. Parents are showing up to take their children home. You can hardly blame them. I've got an … obligation … not to make things worse than they are. And I feel sorry for Peter Makepeace.”

“That's new,” David said. “Both feeling sorry for Peter Makepeace and a sense of obligation. Are you sure you're feeling all right?”

“No, of course not. I'm feeling awful. I'm even feeling awful about poor Edith, and she and I were hardly the best of friends. It's a nasty way to go, cyanide. I looked it up.”

“Come stay here,” David said again.

“No,” James said, “come here for the night. Maybe for the next few days. When this is over, if you're still interested, I'll move in full-time. Maybe I'll even go looking for a college job in Boston, if there's a college willing to take me after all this time in secondary schools and at my age.”

“They'd take you adjunct,” David said. “And you don't have to work full-time. I work full-time.”