The Headmaster's Wife (42 page)

“Because it isn't common to find two poisoners operating totally independently and from unconnected motives in the same place at the same time,” Brian said. “In fact if that's what we have here, it will be the first case I've ever heard of. The detectives assigned to Mark's case are here. We don't need to talk to all of you this evening. It's enough that we get names and contact information for most of you. But we will talk to all of you eventually.”

“Don't bet on it,” Alice said. “As soon as this gets out, there's going to be a stampede. Families will be coming in from all over the country to get their little darlings out of here. There's a mad poisoner on the loose—or so you say.”

Danny Kelly came back in from the foyer. “Okay,” hesaid, “I've got a statement. I'm going to treat it as preliminary; she's a little upset.”

“She was hysterical,” Gregor said.

“Maybe we could find some place reasonably private and have a talk with Mr. Makepeace here,” Brian said. “There are a few things we need to know immediately.”

Alice Makepeace looked as if she wanted to protest yet again, but she didn't. She turned away from all of them and marched out the way she had marched in, with that inner sense of her own importance that could not have been shaken by the appearance on the scene of God Himself. Danny Kelly started to go after her, but Brian Sheehy stopped him.

“Don't bother,” he said, “we know where to find Alice Makepeace if we want her.”

Peter Makepeace looked relieved to have something to do. “There's a seminar room in the faculty wing,” he said. “It's just through the foyer and then through the side door. We can go there.”

“Fine,” Brian said.

Peter gave a last look at Edith Braxner's body—they were taking fingerprints now; somebody was using a sterile vacuum to suck up fibers from the carpet where she had fallen—and then led the way out of the main reading room, into the foyer, and around the side to the wing. Back in the main reading room, the police had begun to take the names and contact information of all the witnesses and then clear them out of the immediate area. They'd take short statements from each of them before allowing them to go home. Gregor thought that the statements wouldn't amount to much.

The seminar room wasn't very far along the corridor. Peter opened the third door on the left after they came through from the foyer, and then he ushered Gregor, Danny, and Brian inside. It was an elegant room, high-ceilinged and studiously Gothic, the very image of what education was supposed to be. Gregor wondered where so many Americans, who lived in a country that had been virtually uninhabitedwhen Gothic was the reigning style of architecture in Europe, came by that impression.

Peter motioned them all to chairs and, closing the door behind them, sat down in one himself. “This should do,” he said. “This should be comfortable.”

“It will be very comfortable,” Danny Kelly said.

Gregor made himself sit down next to Peter Makepeace. They all seemed to be having one of those moments when nobody was sure what the etiquette was; and although Gregor did not underestimate the importance of etiquette, it had to be secondary here.

“So,” Peter said, “what do you want to know? About all the things Marta said? I don't know where to start.”

“At the moment,” Danny Kelly said, “I think we'd like to know the more basic things. Who the victim was, for instance.”

“Oh.” Peter Makepeace looked as if he were radically adjusting expectations he hadn't realized he had. “Her name was Edith Braxner, Edith Delshort Braxner. She was married once, I think, when she was very young. She didn't talk about it. She taught languages, French and German. She was head of the Language Department.”

“Had she been here long?” Danny asked.

“Longer than I have,” Peter said. “She's one of our stalwarts, and one of the few to have lasted long after the school's mission changed. This used to be a girls' school, and a very traditional one in many ways. When the school decided to admit boys, they also decided to make some changes to the educational philosophy. Many of the teachers who had been here under
the
original ethos had a hard time adjusting. The headmistress at the time lasted less than a year.”

“And you replaced her?” Gregor asked.

“No,” Peter Makepeace said. “I've only been here eight years. This was back in the early 1980s. Edith must have been close to retirement age. I should know that, but for some reason I don't.”

“But you know she'd adjusted to the new, ah, mission,” Danny said.

“Not exactly,” Peter said. “Edith was an odd woman out, in many ways, but she was an excellent teacher, and she made it possible for us to offer German in a very small school. Students didn't call her Edith though. They called her Dr. Braxner.”

“Doctor?” Gregor said.

“Yes. Yes, she had a doctorate in comparative literature from Harvard. She got it in the days when women found it very difficult to get faculty places at colleges and universities, except at the women's colleges. I don't know why she didn't try for one of those. Or perhaps she did and still met with prejudice. There was quite a bit. For whatever reason she came here. I can't believe I'm talking about her in the past tense.”

Gregor thought that there came a time when you had to talk about everybody in the past tense, except when you could no longer talk at all, and other people referred to you that way. He asked, “Was there any family? I take it she lived alone.”

“She lived alone and on campus,” Peter said. “As for family, I think there's a married sister somewhere. Edith used to visit her in the summers for a week before taking a group of students to Germany to study. A number of our teachers run these little summer sessions. It provides the students with enrichment they wouldn't be able to get otherwise, and it provides the teachers with a means of traveling, which they otherwise couldn't afford.”

“Do you know if she was having a dispute of any kind with anyone?” Danny Kelly asked. “Was she involved in litigation, or were there bad feelings between herself and any other faculty member?”

“Do you mean, did she have any enemies?” Peter smiled faintly. “That always sounds so unrealistic to me. Do people have enemies in that sense in this day and age?”

“Some of them do,” Danny said. “What we need to know is if Edith Braxner did.”

“Not that I know of,” Peter said. “I won't say there were never any frictions between members of the faculty, or between members of the faculty and students, because therewere. It's a matter of degree. I don't think a teacher would kill another teacher over a dispute about which textbook to adopt in a freshman course or whether to offer Art History as a lecture course or a seminar.”

“And were there disputes like that?” Danny asked. “Was Edith Braxner involved in them?”

“I don't know,” Peter Makepeace said.

Gregor tried another tack. “When I saw her for the first time,” he said, “she was standing in a little nook at the end of a catwalk that ran along one side above the main reading room of the library. There are apparently two catwalks and two nooks.”

“That's right,” Peter said. “They're not really completely safe. I knew that. They're narrow, for one thing, and the railings are too low. We've been warned by the insurance company more than once, and we did intend to do something about them. I hope she didn't die from that. I hope she didn't die from the fall.”

Gregor was convinced she hadn't died from the fall. “I was going up to that catwalk because Mark DeAvecca told me that he had been there, in the nook, on the night Michael Feyre died. He had looked out of the window in that nook and seen something that disturbed him near something called Maverick Pond. Could Edith Braxner have been looking for the same thing?”

“I don't see how,” Peter said. “You're welcome to go up and look for yourself if the police will let you. There's nothing to see. Oh, that catwalk's better than the other one. The nook on the other one is crammed right against the faculty wing so that all you see is a building on one side and a little lawn right in front of you. But even the nook you saw Edith in doesn't look out on much. There's the pond, yes, and a small stand of evergreens, and some benches. It's mostly deserted this time of year.”

“Do you know if anybody on this campus would have regular access to cyanide?” Gregor asked. “What about arsenic?”

“I don't know what you mean by 'regular access,' “ Peter Makepeace said.

“I mean access as a matter of course. Somebody who works with pesticides, for instance. Or chemicals. Somebody who would not have to do anything special to get his hands on poison.”

“Well, the groundskeepers work with pesticides, I'm sure,” Peter said. “We have a student protest or two every year over their use of them, but they do use them. In the end nothing else is practical in taking care of a property this size. And the Chemistry Department has chemicals. I'll admit I don't know which ones. I suppose some of them must be poisonous.”

“Is chemistry a separate department?” Gregor asked.

“No,” Peter said, “it's part of the Sciences Department. We offer chemistry, biology, and physics. We're very proud of the physics. It wasn't offered when this was a girls' school. Many girls' schools didn't in the old days. It was considered too mathematical and alienating for girls, especially since it was expected that most of them would marry as soon as they graduated from their colleges, if not before. Some of the girls' schools that have remained girls' schools don't offer physics even now.”

“Who would have access to the chemicals in the Sciences Department?” Gregor asked. “Only the chemistry teachers, or all the science teachers? Or all the teachers? Or all the students? Are they locked up?”

“All the science teachers would be able to get to the science materials closet, which is where the things needed for lab courses are kept,” Peter said. “There's a key, but I think all the science teachers would have to have it, because it's not just chemicals for chemistry that are kept in there. I know the fetal pigs are—in glass jars. None of the other teachers are likely to have one of those keys, though, since they'd have no need to go into that closet. And none of the students would have them, unless they'd been sent by a teacher to get something from the closet. Then they'd have the key for however long the errand took and be required to hand it back when the errand was complete. We
are
carefulabout safety, Mr. Demarkian, no matter what it might seem like given the problems with the catwalks.”

“Was Edith Braxner particularly close to Mark DeAvecca?” Gregor asked.

“I wouldn't think so,” Peter said. “Nobody was, really. Cherie Wardrop was fond of him, but the consensus of most of the teachers was that he either had no commitment to academic work, or he just wasn't all that bright. He was one of our top picks last spring, too. We had doubts about some of the people we admitted, but we had no doubts about Mark. His record in his previous school was outstanding. It happens sometimes, no matter how careful you are.”

“What happens?” Gregor asked.

“That you bring in unsuitable people,” Peter said. “Students are a mystery. We screen until we're blue in the face, but we always miss a few of the ones we should have screened out.”

“Was Michael Feyre one of the ones you should have screened out?” Gregor asked.

Peter Makepeace shrugged. “Michael Feyre was a concern from the beginning. We knew before we admitted him that he was a long shot. Sometimes you want to take long shots. In Michael's case, we were sensitive to his mother's position. His mother—”

“Won a lottery,” Gregor said. “We know.”

“She didn't just win a lottery, she won the biggest lottery in history,” Peter said. “And she was very isolated because of it, and so were her children. We had the whole family up here when Michael applied. The younger children are adjusting well, and at least one of them is very bright. Michael wasn't adjusting very well. There was some question that he might have a drug problem, although that was never proved. But I don't see how you can say all this is connected. Michael committed suicide. He wasn't poisoned.”

Brian and Danny looked away, keeping their faces expressionless. Gregor watched Peter Makepeace carefully. He was not being disingenuous. He had absorbed this pieceof information as thoroughly as if he were a Catholic submitting to dogma, and it had never occurred to him to question it.

“One more thing,” Danny said. “Who would be able to tell us what Edith Braxner was doing this evening before her fall? Did she eat dinner in her apartment or with the rest of you? Why had she come to the library? Why was she up on that catwalk? If there was nothing to be seen out that window but a pond and some evergreens and nothing else, why did anybody ever go up there?”

“Students go up there to study,” Peter said, “or some students do. And Mark DeAvecca, I think, went up there mostly to be alone. I often felt he was overwhelmed by boarding life. I suppose teachers might sometimes go up there to be alone as well.”

“But you're not sure?” Danny said.

“Of course I'm not sure. I'm not clairvoyant. I don't know what Edith was thinking. Isn't that the kind of thing an investigation is supposed to find out? Besides, I think it would be more important to find out where Edith had been before she went up to the catwalk, don't you? Unless you think somebody was up there feeding her cyanide in full view of the entire main reading room. And even then you'd have to figure out how they got down without Marta and Mr. Demarkian here running right into them.”

Outside, the air was cold and crisp, and the snow was definitely something serious, coming down in hard-driving streams that were almost as violent as a bad rain. The body was gone and so was the ambulance. It had been parked, with the police cars, in the East Gate lot. Gregor stopped on the steps of the library to look over the quad one more time, and Brian Sheehy stopped with him.