The Headmaster's Wife (46 page)

“Dear God,” Gregor said suddenly, “you're Leland Beech.”

“Very good, Mr. Demarkian, but you're slipping. I've been sitting here for days, expecting you to walk through my door and recognize me immediately.”

“It's been a long time,” Gregor said. “It's been, I don't know—”

“Coming onto twenty-five years. If I'd stayed in jail, I'd have had another ten to go before I could be considered for parole. But of course I wouldn't be considered for parole, not seriously, not in this climate.”

“I remember the escape,” Gregor said. “I didn't realize you'd never been picked up again. But how did you get here? What are you doing here?”

“Teaching mathematics. I've been teaching mathematics here for more than a decade.”

“Do you know anything about mathematics?”

“Of course,” Philip said, “I've got a very good degree. Two of them, to be accurate. A bachelor's from Williams. A master's from Tufts. About a year after the escape, I took the GED in Massachusetts and passed with flying colors. My father may have been a lunatic, but he did make sure we were all literate. Then I took the SATs and did very well indeed. I applied to Williams and they took me. I didn't really lie, you know, about anything but my name and my arrest record.”

“That's a lot to lie about,” Gregor said.

Philip shrugged. “I told them the truth as far as it went. Growing up with a survivalist lunatic who'd gone sovereign before I was six years old. Growing up living off the land and learning to read from the Bible and those amazing books he had. I still remember those books. I even havethem. My own copies, of course. The originals were destroyed in the firebombing. Everything was destroyed in the firebombing. I wasn't sorry to see it go.”

“You did your best to defend it at the time,” Gregor pointed out.

Philip dismissed this. “Look at it in context. Nobody ever does anymore, but you should. I was two days past my eighteenth birthday. I'd never seen more than four or five people who weren't directly related to me since my father had taken us all out of town and set us up in that cabin. I'd been brought up to believe that the entire world was plotting against us, not against the United States or against the people of Idaho, but against us, the Beech family, we were the big prize the FBI and the CIA and the Vatican and everybody else you can think of meant to wipe off the face of the earth. And then what happened? The FBI showed up at our front door and started shooting at us.”

“That's not the way it happened, and you know it,” Gregor said.

“But it is the way it happened,” Philip insisted. “At least, that's what it looked like from the inside, and I was on the inside. You can show me all the evidence you want that my father was stockpiling weapons and doing God knows what else up there. I heard all the evidence about that at the trial. But that isn't what it looked like from the inside. What it looked like was a bunch of guys with helicopters and machine guns ganging up on us. And even now, even after all this time and everything I know, it still looks like that to me. What difference did it make if he was stockpiling weapons? There were just the six of us. He was too much of a loner even to band together with other loners. We weren't a threat to the security of the United States. We weren't even a threat to the peace and safety of Dubran, Idaho. We were just up there doing our thing and not bothering anybody.”

“He bought three rifles and enough ammunition to take out the state of Illinois from a federal officer,” Gregor said.

“No better than entrapment,” Philip said. “I've been out in the real world for a long time now. I don't have any of myfather's peculiar ideas about politics or people. Hell, I'm probably a pretty standard-issue political liberal. But I've never understood what went on up there that day. I've never understood why it was necessary. Dubran. Ruby Ridge. Waco. What's the point, really? Why do people find it so hard just to let their neighbors be a little eccentric?”

“You shot and killed two federal officers,” Gregor said. “I was there. I saw you do it.”

“I shot at them because they were shooting at me,” Philip said. “I did not start shooting first. Neither did he. The whole incident was manufactured and, worse than that, it was manufactured for television. It's why I didn't major in sociology, did you know that?”

“How could I?”

“True enough. It
is
why I didn't major in sociology though. My sophomore year at Williams, I took an upper-level course called American Rebellions. It covered things like the antiwar movements in the sixties, but it also covered people like us. I barely made it through to the final exam. People on the outside really don't get it at all.”

“But you're not on the inside any longer,” Gregor pointed out. “You didn't go back to Idaho. You didn't, what did you call it?”

“Go sovereign.”

“That.”

“No, I didn't,” Philip said. “At first I didn't because I knew that's what the authorities expected me to do. It's what people like me do when they escape from the federal penitentiary. So I came East instead and moved into an apartment in Boston and went to work doing day labor and did all the other things I told you about. Took the GED. Applied to Williams. They would never have thought to look for me at a place like Williams. Of course, Williams would never have accepted me if they knew I was Leland Beech.”

“But it wasn't just for convenience,” Gregor insisted, “or even as a smart way to stay away from the law. You never went sovereign. You built an entirely different life. And my guess is, you couldn't go back to what you were now even ifit was the only way to save yourself from going back to prison.”

“Don't bet on it, Mr. Demarkian. I have no intention of going back to prison.”

“That may not be up to you.”

Philip smiled again. It was one of the eeriest smiles Gregor had ever seen. “You came to ask me about the night Michael Feyre died. Why don't you ask me?”

Gregor was aware that something was wrong here. Philip Candor—he had to think of this man as Philip Candor; he was too unlike the boy Leland Beech had been to share the same name—was hiding something. Gregor wondered if he'd taken that name, Candor, on purpose. He probably had.

“All right,” Gregor said. “The night Michael Feyre died, Mark DeAvecca was in the library, in the catwalk nook we found Edith Braxner in last night just before she fell to her death. He says that he looked out the window there and saw somebody lying under a small stand of evergreens, somebody wearing black from head to foot. He came out of the library and went down to see who it was because, he said, he thought the person might have been drinking and passed out, and it was cold—”

“It was freezing,” Philip said. “It was under nine below.”

“Quite. Mark got to the evergreens and found nothing there. He then came back through the faculty wing of the library and stopped for a moment to talk to Marta Coelho. Then he came on out the front and started to cross the quad and ran into you. He said he told you all about it.”

“He did.”

“And did you believe him?”

“No,” Philip said. “He wasn't in good shape. We've heard all about the caffeine and arsenic poisoning now, but at the time I simply assumed he was wasted. And hallucinating. But just in case, after I sent him back to Hayes House, I went out to check.”

“Did you? Did you find anything?”

“No,” Philip said. “There was nobody at or under the evergreens when I looked, and there was no sign that anybody had been there. No footprints in the snow. Nothing like that, at least that I could see. Of course, even if somebody had been there when Mark looked out from the library, there might not have been any traces left behind. The ground was solid with ice. We'd had a couple of bad storms right before.”

“So you thought, what? That Mark was hallucinating?”

“I thought he was behaving fairly normally for a habitual druggie. He may have been hallucinating. He may just have seen something and misinterpreted it. My only concern was in case there really was someone passed out there because in that weather they could easily have frozen to death if they'd slept there overnight. So I checked, and there was nothing.”

“What about the description Mark gave? Somebody all in black, from head to foot.”

“It sounds like Alice, doesn't it?” Philip said. “You must have seen her by now, last night if not before. She's always wandering around in that cape and black leather pants as if she thinks she's about to be cast in a movie with the young Marlon Brando. But it needn't have been Alice. Black is very fashionable around here. People think it distinguishes them from the rah-rah cheerleader types they came here to escape. They think it's intellectual.”

Philip Candor would not be susceptible to that kind of symbolism, Gregor thought. He switched directions. “According to Mark, Michael Feyre had a habit of blackmailing people, specifically women, by threatening to expose the fact that they'd bought drugs from him and taking payment for the blackmail in sexual favors.”

Now Philip looked very,
very
amused. “You mean in blow jobs? Yes, Mr. Demarkian, I'd heard all about that. But it wasn't just blackmail about the drugs, and it wasn't just women, and it wasn't just sex. Michael was an out-and-out psychopath, the proverbial bad seed. He had no conscience at all, and he had a limitless appetite for sadism.”

“Did he find out about your secret? Did he threaten to expose the fact that you are actually Leland Beech.”

“No,” Philip said. “I'm not a fool, Mr. Demarkian. I don't keep reminders of that part of my life lying around loose forpeople to find. There's nothing to connect me to Leland Beech here or anywhere else in the state of Massachusetts. To expose me, Michael would have had to be someone like you, someone with a connection to the case, or a true-crime buff who watched all the little documentaries on Court TV and A&E and the
Unsolved Mysteries
episodes. I've—well, we've, my family and myself—we've been the subject of one of those episodes and of an episode of
City Confidential.
I watched them both. More stupidity.”

“And Michael had not watched them?”

“Michael's tastes in entertainment ran mostly to the pornographic. He was not all that bright, Mr. Demarkian. And he had nothing at all in the way of cultural literacy. He didn't read newspapers. He would have looked on
City Confidential
as just another newspaper, even if it is a television show. And I'm way out of his league. A lot of people here weren't though.”

“Weren't out of his league?”

“Exactly.”

“Such as who? Who do you think Michael Feyre had information on?”

“James Hallwood, for one,” Philip said. “He was definitely pushing Hallwood on the drugs, if nothing else. There's no other way to explain the grade he got in English. Hallwood is not a pushover. He's never heard of grade inflation. Michael should have been flunking that course. He wasn't coming close.”

Gregor checked his notebook. “Hallwood is Mark's English teacher?”

“And Michael's, yes. He does most of the sophomore English classes.”

“Who else?”

“I don't really know, Mr. Demarkian. I only know who was nervous, and I probably don't know everybody who was nervous. Marta, for instance, was very nervous. But I can't see her buying drugs, and she doesn't strike me as the kind of person who has a deep, dark secret.”

“What about Alice Makepeace?”

Philip laughed. “Michael was already getting everything he wanted out of Alice, and probably more.”

“She was sleeping with a student. She would have been rightly afraid of having that exposed.”

“Maybe,” Philip said, “but I don't see why she'd suddenly be afraid of that with Michael when she was never afraid of it before. Michael wasn't the first one. There've been a string of them. It's what she does. I always thought she'd be happier than not to get thrown out of this place. I don't think her idea of a good time was growing old as a headmaster's wife.”

“What about the houseparents in Hayes? Cherie Wardrop and Sheldon—nobody has ever used any name for him but Sheldon.”

“Sheldon LeRouve. No, nobody does use any other name for him. A bitter, small-minded, spiteful man. The first time I ever had any sympathy for Mark DeAvecca was when he got stuck rooming with Sheldon. Cherie is gay and lives with her partner, Melissa.”

“I know that. I've been in their apartment.”

“So you must have been,” Philip said. “They seem nice enough. They're school hoppers, though, which never makes administrations happy.”

“What's a school hopper?”

“A faculty member who hops from school to school. Schools are like businesses. They like to keep a stable workforce as much as possible. And most teachers like to find a congenial place and stay in it. Some teachers get restless and move from school to school. They want different areas of the country or different educational philosophies or different people to talk to. It's a way of relieving boredom, mostly. With Cherie, I think Peter Makepeace thought that since she'd be able to share faculty housing with Melissa, which wasn't the case in most schools, she'd be more likely to stay here. It might be true. It also might be that it is Melissa who wants to move and not Cherie. Cherie's got a good degree in biology and a good teaching record. She could probably finda job anywhere except a religious school that wouldn't tolerate her sexual orientation.”

“And any other school would?”

“She may just not have mentioned it,” Philip said. “She'd have been living in faculty housing, and Melissa would have been living on her own. They could have kept it a secret if they wanted to. But they don't need to keep it secret here. So that couldn't be a reason for Michael Feyre to blackmail her.”