The Headmaster's Wife (54 page)

He could always fake credentials, but he knew he wouldn't. That was far too risky, and it was far too easy to get caught. Besides, he could never fake credentials as good as the ones he had earned honestly, and he was very proud of those.

He was just making his way onto 1-95 north when it hit him: he was his father's son after all. He might not restrict his reading to the Bible and
The Turner Diaries.
He might not live out in the middle of nowhere convinced that the mailman was an agent of the One World Government bent on destroying him by any means necessary. He was still living a life of subterfuge and deception. If his father could see him now, he'd be proud as hell of him. He'd managed to trick them at their own game. He wasn't so much as a blip on their radar.

Of course his father couldn't see him now. His father was dead, shot in the back by a federal agent wielding a rifle he only half understood how to use. His brothers were living

God only knew where, doing God only knew what, except that Philip didn't believe in God and had never understood how anybody could. He had left all that behind in Idaho, too.

He wondered if it mattered that his paranoia was justified, while his father's had not been, and then he saw the entrance to the interstate and slowed down to make his way onto the ramp.

Paranoia was paranoia. It didn't matter if it was justified or not. You had to go where it took you.

Back on the hill, Mark DeAvecca had finally gotten cold. He let Gregor and the police chief mess around with the wallet he had found for them and whatever else it was they were looking for under those evergreens and retreated to the library, where there was a possibility that he might get warm. He was, he'd realized, actually himself again. His head was not fuzzed. He didn't feel anxious and panicked. He could think and think clearly. What he was thinking was that it was tune for him to get out of this place once and for all. His mother had a point. There was something wrong here, or at least something wrong for him. He had heard the talk today about how the school was about to close. Parents were showing up at the gates ready to take the boarding students home, and the day students weren't here at all, since they were still on the hiatus that had been declared when Michael died. It didn't matter. He didn't want to be here anymore. Even if it meant having to repeat the tenth grade—well, okay, that rankled. That made him completely nuts—but even so, it was time to get out of here and do something sane. Maybe he could convince his mother that, given the ordeal he had been put through, he deserved to do something more interesting between now and the end of the school year besides vegetating in Connecticut while Geoff finished third grade.

He had just settled himself on the deep) ledge of the window in the air lock just inside the doors to the faculty wingof the library and begun contemplating the arguments he could use to convince his mother that he'd be just fine taking a practical filmmaking course nights at NYU and living on his own at Jimmy's place in the city, when the door from the inside of the wing slammed open and Alice Makepeace came in. For a moment he was simply surprised to see her. He had seen her going through in the other direction just a little while ago, and he had assumed that she was on her way back to President's House. Now she was here again, and he almost said, “I'm beginning to think you're following me around.”

He stopped himself just in time. The woman had no sense of humor. She'd think he meant it seriously. And although he might not be attracted to her in the way she wanted him to be, and he was sure she wanted him to be, he couldn't ignore the force of her personality. He sank back a little onto the window ledge. She looked him up and down as if he were some kind of garbage she'd found, inexplicably, on her bedroom floor.

“Jesus Christ,” she said, “I can't get away from any of you.”

“I was sitting here when you came in,” Mark said.

“I just had to duck out the backdoor of my own house to avoid my own husband,” she said. “It's intolerable what's going on here. It's entirely your fault.”

Mark thought of that evening in the cafeteria, the one that had ended with his nearly dying. He could still feel the pain in his stomach and the even worse pain in his esophagus and chest as everything came up in racking spasms. Coffee, ice cream, chicken soup from Gregor Demarkian's room service order: it had all come flying out of him. He might not remember it hitting the ceiling of Sheldon's apartment's bathroom, but he did remember what it felt like. He remembered being scared to death.

Suddenly, he was as angry at this woman as he had been at God when his father died, and that was in the days when he had believed, with perfect trust, that God not only could do everything but would do everything, if you asked Him. He didn't know where he'd gotten that idea. His parentswere not religious. He did know that it was lodged in his head as firmly as the knowledge that his name was Mark, and that when his father had died in spite of his prayers it had become dislodged and what had followed it was fury so cold and all-encompassing that he had come very close to killing the funeral director who had been responsible for cremating his father's body.

His anger at Alice was like that, but this time he didn't even want to stop it coming out.

“I thought they would have arrested you by now,” he said. “I'm surprised you haven't taken off in a Ford Bronco.”

“Don't be an ass.”

“You gave me the coffee,” Mark said, “twice. I was going to get it for myself, and you wouldn't let me. You went and got it by yourself. There was enough sugar in it to give me diabetes.”

“You asked for enough sugar in it to give you diabetes.”

“You did something to make Michael commit suicide,” Mark said. “You did it because he was going to screw you over, and you tried to kill me because you knew I knew it. He'd been talking about it for two weeks. He said you were old and you disgusted him. He said you fucked like an animal, and it was gross in a hag like you. He said you'd never dare do anything about it because he could screw you over for real if you tried.”

“Don't be ridiculous,” Alice said. “You don't know what you're talking about.”

“I do know what I'm talking about, and when I get finished telling them, they'll have everything they need.”

Alice looked him up and down like garbage yet again. Mark thought she had the most amazing ability to make people feel like garbage.

“Have you decided yet why I should kill an old fool like Edith Braxner?”

“Because she knew, too,” Mark said quickly. “Or she knew that you'd tried to poison me. She knew too much and you killed her.”

Alice smiled slightly, and when she did Mark realizedthat he hadn't gotten through to her before. She was a magnificent woman, but her magnificence resided in her egotism, and it was only by overcoming that that he could have had some kind of victory over her. He had no idea what victory he wanted. He only knew that he hadn't made a dent.

She gave him one last sweeping look of contempt and then headed back outside to the hill, her long curtain of red hair swaying like a perfect swathe of scarlet silk in the wind let in by the opening of the door.

If he ever married, Mark thought, he would marry somebody not beautiful but kind.

It had come to the part in every case that Gregor hated most: the part where there was nothing left to do but wait. Waiting left him with much too much time to think, and his thinking went off on tangents: Bennis, Mark, terrorism, Windsor, the fact that he had once again solved, not the case he had been hired to solve, but a different and connected one that nobody would ever be prosecuted for. It seemed to him to be a deep truth about himself that he could never look any problem directly in the face. He was carrying a Windsor municipal check for one dollar in his pocket, handed to him on the assumption that he would aid Brian Sheehy and his force in the investigation into the death of Edith Braxner. So far all he'd done that was directly connected to Edith Braxner was to let the forensics people know they were looking for something portable Edith might have eaten or drunk while she was in the library. Little or nothing had come out of that so far. Edith had been carrying a box of Vanilla Myntz in her bag, but there was no sign that any of them had been tainted, and Gregor didn't see how they could have been. Myntz were hard little things. There was a possibility that you could take one and paint it with liquid cyanide, but Gregor's hunch was that that would have taken much too much time and been too finicky an attention to detail than this murderer wasable to provide. If Edith was in the habit of sucking on Myntz throughout the day, there was no way the murderer could be sure she wouldn't pop the tainted one into her mouth then and there, voiding the advantage that would come if she died of the poison elsewhere, with the murderer not in evidence. If she wasn't in the habit, it might be days before she ate the tainted mint, or she might give it to somebody else. In either case she would have gone on being the threat she always was.

“We can only speculate about why it was suddenly necessary to kill her when it hadn't been before,” Gregor told Brian Sheehy as they walked back up the hill toward the quad. The police tape was still up and would be now for at least a day. Brian Sheehy wasn't going to take the chance that there was something else lying around that might connect the murderer to the crime. “I can't see that she could have known anything new about what was going on. Nothing's happened here in the days since Michael Feyre died. Everything's been on hold. Maybe she just realized the importance of something she had considered trivial before. Or maybe not. Maybe she was harping on some detail that she thought was unimportant, but that was instead very important, and our murderer didn't want her around talking when at any moment the things she said could make people think about all the wrong things.”

“It would be good if we had all that nailed down for the prosecutor,” Brian said. “He doesn't like fuzzy thinking much. Juries hate it.”

“Juries are supposed to,” Gregor said. “But this isn't as fuzzy as it seems. Edith stuck her nose into everybody else's accounts. She scolded people for handing in sloppy ones. That means she was at least looking at them. From the way people talk, she was looking at all of them. Wouldn't you say that?”

“We'll get Danny to ask the women in the financial office.”

“Maybe she had friends there,” Gregor said, “or maybe those things are left lying around where anybody could look at them, but nobody but Edith did. She's dead, though, because of the fact that she did And because of the fact that she complained to people about them, therefore letting them know that she did. Somehow I doubt that she realized what was actually going on. If she had, I think she would have gone either to Peter Makepeace or to the police.”

“How do you know that she didn't go to Peter Makepeace?” Brian said.

“Because he hasn't said anything yet to cover his ass on the issue,” Gregor said. “I don't mean I'd expect him to get all giggly and be unable to stop talking about it, but I think he would have said something, something out of the way and in passing, that would at least have lessened the chances that we'd take Edith's habit of snooping all that seriously. And he didn't. He never said a thing. Whether he was protecting himself or the institution, if Edith had come to him with a story about how the accounts were being tampered with, he'd have said something to try to distance himself from it and to exonerate the school.”

“He could have done it himself then,” Brian said. “That's an idea I like. Arrest the headmaster of Windsor Academy for bank fraud, grand theft, and murder.”

“At the moment you can't arrest anybody,” Gregor said. “Not for anything. And although I can promise you that you'll have the evidence to arrest somebody for bank fraud and grand theft, I can't promise that you're going to be able to arrest anybody for murder. I miss the FBI sometimes. In spite of all the nonsense you hear on television, what we did in the Bureau was mostly deal with idiots. You see all this stuff about careful investigators tracking clever killers. Clever my foot. These idiots would bash some old woman's head in and walk around for three days carrying her pocketbook in broad daylight. They'd walk into a convenience store in Kansas, blow everybody away with a shotgun, take the twelve dollars in the cash register, and then hijack the store truck that was painted lime green with a big logo on it and use that to try to make it over the border to Nebraska. It was mind-numbing. That's why I could never make myself watch that movie
Dumb and Dumber,
Stupidity isn't funny; stupidity is lethal.”

“Well, it's like that on the municipal level, too,” Brian said. “But it's a good thing, if you know what I mean. If criminals were too intelligent, we probably wouldn't catch them.”

“Maybe we don't,” Gregor said. “Maybe there are crimes happening day and night that we know nothing about because the perpetrators are too intelligent to let us know they've happened and too intelligent to let us catch them.”

“Do you think that's true?”

“No,” Gregor said. “I'm not saying there are no intelligent criminals. There must be. But by and large, it's like Isaac Asimov said, ‘Violence is the last resort of the incompetent.'”

“I like that,” Brian said. “Guy who wrote science fiction. I remember him. Is it really going to be grand theft? Because it sounds nuts to me, picking up the nickels and dimes from kids' allowances.”

Gregor gave Brian a look. “Do you have kids? Teenagers?”

“They're grown,” Brian said. “Out of college and on their own. Why?”

“Well, Mark told me, the day I arrived here, that the school recommended that parents give students two hundred dollars a week in allowance, but his mother gave him two fifty because she was convinced that if she didn't he was going to spend so much on books he wouldn't have anything left to eat.”