The Headmaster's Wife (43 page)

“It's a beautiful place,” Brian said. “I think part of thereason we hate it so much is that we envy it. The local high school is not, exactly, this well equipped.”

“I'm sure it's not,” Gregor said.

Danny Kelly had met up with his partner, and they were walking together toward the parking lot, their heads bent toward each other as they talked through the distraction of the snow. All the lights in all the windows that faced the quad were on.

“What do you think?” Brian said. “That woman who had hysterics, were they real hysterics or put on? I don't trust people who have hysterics. I tend to think they're guilty.”

“She was making enough accusations,” Gregor said. “Who is this Philip she was talking about, the one she said was hiding something?”

“I don't know,” Brian said. “We get to know a few of the people at the school, especially if they've been around long enough, but that's not one I've run into.”

“And members of the faculty buying drugs from Michael Feyre, do you think that's plausible?”

“Hell, yes,” Brian said, “and not the ones you'd necessarily think either. A lot of the leftover hippies have gone organic in their old age.”

“It might be a motive,” Gregor said. “Get rid of Michael Feyre because he could expose you as a customer. Get rid of Mark because he'd heard about it from Michael Feyre. Get rid of Edith because she knew something that pointed to you as the killer of Michael Feyre or as Mark's poisoner. You do realize that she couldn't possibly have taken that cyanide before she went up to the catwalk? It would have worked too fast.”

“Yeah, I know,” Brian said. “She must have taken it on her own up there. I've already told Danny to be on the lookout for something she was carrying. Candy is traditional, isn't it?”

“It is. But it could have been in anything. A sandwich. One of those sandwich cookies with the creme filling. She could have carried it around for days before she ate it. Which I suspect was the idea.”

“You've got to wonder if the same wasn't done to Mark DeAvecca.”

Gregor shook his head. “Couldn't have been. The killer couldn't have been sure that Mark would eat whatever he gave him. Mark wasn't eating much. And besides, that poisoning had been going on for weeks.”

“You've got a look on your face that says you know what's going on here.”

Gregor looked up into the darkness. The snow came down at him in swirls and curtains, melting as soon as it touched his skin. If this went on for another few hours, the town would be snowed in. He wondered how often that happened.

“No,” he said, “I don't have it all figured out. I know what
must
be true, but I'll be damned if I know how it makes any sense.”

Marta Coelho knew that she was not behaving rationally. She had spent too much of her life holding herself in not to realize when her self-control had vanished or to understand how hard it would be to get it back. It had started last night, long before Edith had fallen to the library floor, dead and horrible looking. It had begun when she had not been able to sit in her office for one more minute. That was when she had stood up to walk around, to visit whoever else had come in to work, only to realize that she couldn't. In the last few days, she had alienated every other faculty member she had established any friendly acquaintance with. She hadn't even been aware that she was doing it. James Hallwood would barely say hello to her in passing. Philip Candor was staying out of sight, and the last time she had gone to his apartment he had made it clear that she was invading his privacy. Even Cherie seemed to be avoiding her. Marta couldn't remember what she'd said to Cherie. All of a sudden her time at Windsor seemed like a long, black tunnel where all the sights and sounds of ordinary life were blacked out. She had never reconciled herself to a year teaching in this place. She had hated it from the start, at first because of what it said about
her—not good enough,
the words kept ringing in her mind,
not good enough for a real job
—and in the end because of what it was. She hadn't wanted to stay in the world in which she had grown up. That was true enough. She couldn't have stayed there, if only because her interest in books and ideas and scholarship was natural. It was not something she had taken on in order to escape the pointlessness of the existence she had seen in the lives of all the people around here. But there was pointlessness here, too, and it was a hundred times worse. The people she had grown up among did necessary work. They built things and fixed things and cleaned things. It all had to be done if the world was going to function. The people here did nothing that anybody would miss if they stopped doing it. Even the “education” they provided was a hothouse flower that had very little to do with the real world in which most people had to live, in which they themselves had to live. It was an education in attitude, not in ideas, and like all educations in attitude it produced people proud of what they were instead of what they did.

The last straw, however, had been Edith; and now that it was daylight again and Marta could look out over the quad at the snow, still coming down in thick curtains, and the Houses and the trees, she had to admit that what scared her the most was that she thought she was about to die. She'd read a few mystery novels in her time. Wasn't she the perfect candidate for the next dead body? She knew too much about everybody, and she'd been running around like an addled chicken for days, letting everybody know just how much she knew. She knew more than she'd said, too, and just how much more had been on full display in the library last night when she'd blurted out her protest to Alice Makepeace like a character in a bad movie, a parody movie, not even one intended to be serious. If this
had
been a movie, she would be lying dead on her own kitchen floor right this minute, her head smashed in by the edge of her microwave oven. Except, Marta thought, that this murderer did not use household objects. This murderer used poison. The only question was how he had used poison on Michael Feyre.

It was eight o'clock, and Marta couldn't stand the idea of staying in her apartment one more minute. The cafeteria hadbeen running on weekend hours all week. That meant there was a buffet set out every morning from eight to ten, to allow both students and faculty time to sleep in. Theoretically, they were all “engaging” each other over the “events” of the last few days. Originally, they were supposed to be “engaging” each other over the emotions unleashed by the suicide of Michael Feyre. Marta wondered what the students were saying now, when so many of them had witnessed Edith's fall, and the police, and all the rest of it. She couldn't stand the idea of walking into that and having to eat breakfast on her own, as if she were still in high school and the town pariah, too odd and studious to fit into any of the existing social groups.

I have to get out of here,
she thought, and then she realized she didn't have to go out onto campus at all. Barrett faced Main Street. She just had to go out the front door and into town. Her hair was still wet from her shower. She didn't own a hair dryer because she hated the way they made newly cleaned hair feel instantly dirty again. She got a wool snow cap out of the pile of things on the bench near her door. She had to unearth it from under scarves and gloves. She didn't wear hats normally. Then she circled back to her bedroom and changed into jeans and a sweater. It was interesting how easily she could be transformed from Upper-Middle-Class Professional Intellectual Woman back to Marta from the Neighborhood. She felt like one of the mice that had been pulling Cinderella's carriage, for a few moments transformed into a magnificent horse, now transformed back again and never to be returned.

The House was quiet. If students were up and about, picking apart the death of Edith Braxner, they were not doing it in the Barrett House common rooms. Although Barrett fronted on Main Street, its front door didn't open there, but to the side. Marta went out onto the side porch and looked around. There was a lot going on, much more than she had expected. The street seemed to be even more clogged with people than it was usually. She came around to the front and made her way onto Main Street proper, and then she sawwhat was going on. There were half a dozen large vans parked in the middle of the road down at Hayes House. They were blocking all traffic on Main; and although the police were out in force, trying to do something about the situation, they didn't look ready to move. Marta saw two women holding microphones, and then, looking more closely, paying attention finally, a few men carrying cameras on their shoulders.
Press,
she thought. She should have realized there would be Press. You couldn't have a murder at an expensive private school, where lots of famous people sent their children, without attracting attention from the media. The question was why they were at Hayes House instead of down here at the other end, at the library. Edith had died in the library.

Marta's immediate thought was that somebody else had died, and nobody had come to tell her. If she had been a member of the media, she would have called Hayes House the “locus of evil” or something like that. Maybe “locus” was too esoteric a word for a mass audience. Still, Michael Feyre had died in Hayes House. Mark DeAvecca had been poisoned in Hayes House. Now, if there was another one, it would be like one of those serial killer/slasher movies that had been all the rage while she was growing up.

She moved a little closer and saw that, although there were plenty of cameras and men and women with microphones and media vans and people asking other people to speak into audiotapes, there was no sign of an ambulance or of the pile of police vehicles that had been at the library last night. It wasn't likely that anything new had happened. She pressed even closer, trying to hear somebody saying something sensible, but nobody was. The media people were speaking in generalities and not even sensible generalities. There was a tall man in a long, formal coat right in front of her. She pressed against him, trying to get past.

He had turned around and was already holding out his hand to her before she realized who it was: Gregor Demarkian, the detective or consultant or whatever he was who had wanted to see the nook in the library where Mark DeAvecca used to go to read. Marta had no idea if she was happy to see him. He was there, just as he had been there in Ridenour. He did not make her feel intimidated, or frightened, or shy, which she often did with people she didn't know well, and especially with men. She took his hand, feeling a little embarrassed for him because he was holding it out like that. He didn't seem to be embarrassed for himself.

“It's Marta Coelho,” he said, polite, not questioning.

She nodded. “It's Portuguese,” she said. “My name, I mean. Coelho is a Portuguese name, and my family named me Marta instead of Martha because Marta is the Portuguese form.”

“Mine's Armenian.”

“Yes,” Marta said. She thought they both sounded like idiots. “I came out to walk. I didn't realize all this was going on. There hasn't been another… another death, has there?”

“No,” Gregor Demarkian said, “the media has just caught up with us, that's all. It had to happen eventually.”

“Everybody's been saying that for days,” Marta said. “They even said that when Michael died, and then it didn't happen. You never got what you wanted last night, did you? A view out that window. Although I still don't see what you could have seen, even if you had looked. There's nothing there.”

“So everybody keeps telling me,” Gregor said. “Edith Braxner wanted to look though, didn't she?”

“Did she?” There was actually a CBS van in the street—not just the local CBS van, with the local CBS reporter, but a national one. She looked around and caught sight of John Whateverhisnamewas, the very pretty one who sat in for Dan Rather from time to time on the evening news. “Maybe Edith was just up there,” she said. “People did go up there every once in a while. Not a lot of people. The catwalk made people dizzy. But some people did. Maybe Edith just went up to read for a while.”

“Maybe,” Gregor agreed. “Do you know what she was doing before she went up there?”

“I don't know,” Marta said. “I was in my office. Not that Iwas getting a lot of work done. I've been distracted beyond belief this week. But I was there for over an hour. She was at dinner though.”

“Oh? Did you eat dinner with her?”

“No,” Marta said. There was no reason to tell him that Edith had barely been speaking to her, or that not much of anybody else had been either. “She was sitting with Cherie Wardrop and Melissa, Cherie's partner. We're very tolerant at Windsor Academy. When Cherie and Melissa came, they got their pictures in the school magazine and a whole story about how they met.”

“That's not a bad thing, surely?”

“Oh no,” Marta said. “No, it's not a bad tiling at all. It's just one of the things that surprised me when I first came here. I went to an ordinary public high school, you know. I didn't know much about schools like this. I thought they were much more conservative.”

“Did you know if Edith looked odd in any way during dinner? Did you pay that much attention to her?”

“She looked normal enough,” Marta said. “But then Edith always looked very stern in a way. Very disapproving. She wasn't like that, really, but that was how she looked. Anyway, she had dinner with Cherie and Melissa, and then when she was leaving James Hallwood was coming in, and she had a talk with him at the door, and then, of course, there was Alice.”

“Of course?”

“Well, Alice is everywhere. It's as if she can clone herself. She came into dinner late and she didn't look happy, so I was hoping she wouldn't notice me for once and she didn't. They had words, Alice and Edith did. I didn't hear what they were.”