The Headmaster's Wife (40 page)

He had just about decided that he must have made a mistake, the
real
library was somewhere else, complete with the standard academic collection, when he felt a tug on his sleeve and looked down to see a smallish woman in the Windsor Main Street Uniform trying to get his attention. The Windsor Main Street Uniform consisted of a print skirt and a standard twinset. Gregor thought he was about to be ushered politely back into the quad, and that at any moment he would need to pull out those credentials he hadn't wanted to show anyone just yet.

The small woman saw she had his attention and smiled, anxiously. “It's Gregor Demarkian, isn't it? I've seen your picture in magazines. Everybody's been wondering when we'd see you on campus.”

“I was looking for something called the catwalk,” Gregor said. He wasn't about to apologize for his presence before he had to.

The small woman looked around. “It's up there,” she said, pointing above their heads. “You take the spiral staircase up to get there. But I don't know what you'd want that for. Nothing has happened there.”

“There's supposed to be a window at the end of it,” Gregor said. “I wanted to look out that window.”

“Ah, I see,” the small woman said. “Of course, that's one of the places Mark likes to go to be alone. He's supposed to have supervised study hall every night because his grades are awful. He's very irresponsible. But he ducks out of it and goes up there where nobody can see him. He probably plays video games.”

“Are there facilities up there to play video games?”

“Of course not,” the small woman said. “We don't approve of video games at Windsor. There's not a lot we can do to eradicate them, but we do try to keep them out of the library. But Mark probably brought his Game Boy or something like that. It's the kind of thing he would do. He had no dedication to work. I never did understand how he'd managed to get admitted to this place. He wasn't serious.”

In Gregor's memory Mark was one of the most seriously dedicated teenagers he'd ever met, but he let it go for the moment. He looked around again. “Where are the books?” he asked. “Is there another room, more stacks somewhere, something?”

The small woman bristled. “We have a perfectly adequate collection,” she said. “We don't spend the kind of money some schools do on volumes, it's true, but there's a public library right across Main Street, one of the best in the state, and the students are welcome to use that one whenever they need to. That leaves us with the budget to invest in truly innovative teaching tools, interactive learning, that kind of thing. It's all very state-of-the-art.”

Gregor suppressed his immediate need to tell this woman that the state of the art for schools was and always would be books, and said instead, “You know my name, but I don't know yours. You are—?”

“Marta Coelho,” the small woman said. “I teach history. I teach history to Mark DeAvecca, to tell you the truth. And it's only my first year here, but I find it very easy to understand what the problem has been—with Mark. I realize that we were wrong, you know, to think that he was taking drugs. There's been talk all day about how they found out in the hospital that that wasn't true, but you can see how we thought so.”

“Of course,” Gregor said. “I thought so at first.”

“There then,” Marta said. “I don't see what anybody expected us to do about it. And arsenic. I heard that somebody had given him arsenic. Somebody had tried to poison him.”

This was interesting, Gregor thought. He wondered how the news had gotten around so fast—and then he didn't wonder. Peter Makepeace would have been informed. Unless he'd kept his mouth completely shut, telling neither his secretary nor his wife, the news was likely to be all over the school in no time at all.

“He had quite a bit of arsenic in his system, yes,” Gregor said. “We don't really know how it got there at the moment.”

Marta Coelho looked away. She was, Gregor thought, almost painfully uncomfortable here. He couldn't tell if she was uncomfortable because she was talking to him or uncomfortable at the school. Her defense of the library had been elaborate but delivered without conviction. Her eyes kept darting around as if she expected to be attacked at any moment. Maybe there was a directive out that faculty and students should not be talking to him, or to the police, without a lawyer present.

Gregor looked around the main reading room one more time. “I'd like to get up to that catwalk if I could. Could you show me?”

Marta bit her lip. “I don't see it as sensible,” she said, “that somebody would try to poison Mark. Why would they bother? It was different with Michael. Michael Feyre, you know. He was an evil kid. We aren't supposed to say that sort of thing. They don't like talk about evil around here, but it was true. He was an evil kid. Mark is just—well, Mark. He's a loser, but he's mostly harmless.”

Did everybody at this school believe that Mark DeAvecca was a fairly stupid, fairly harmless, slacking-off loser? Gregor thought of the Mark he had seen at the Windsor Inn yesterday and decided that the judgment wasn't entirely surprising, even if it was far from reality when you knew all the circumstances. Even so, he thought that Liz had a good reason to get Mark out of here that had nothing to do with arsenic poisoning. He didn't like Marta Coelho. She was far too rigid, and far too angry, for his taste.

“The catwalk,” he said again.

“It's right along here,” Marta said, moving him toward the east wall of the reading room. “There are two, really. You get to them by spiral staircases, but they're not connected to each other. And the other one is off-limits at the moment because there's something wrong with it and it's being repaired.”

“Has it been off-limits long?”

“Since Thanksgiving. Somebody dropped something off it and broke part of the railing. But Mark always liked this one. There's a little study nook at the end of it. Well, that's true of both of them. But this study nook looks out over Maverick Pond. It's the closest we have in Windsor to real outdoors nature.”

Gregor didn't remember that Mark was fond of nature, but he might have been. He followed Marta through the bare and meager stacks to the far edge of the room. There was a narrow break in the wall. Through it he could see the start of the circular staircase.

“It's silly, really,” Marta said. “The woman who gave us the money for a library was angry because her brothers had been able to go to Andover or Exeter or wherever, and girls weren't allowed at the time. Her parents sent her here instead, and she inherited everything eventually. I don't know what happened to the brothers, but she left Windsor the money to build this. We wouldn't have a library as a separate building otherwise. If it wasn't for the terms of the bequest, we'd probably turn this building into a performing arts space. We've talked about it at every faculty meeting I've been to since I got here. But there's the legal aspect. The will won't let us.”

Marta went up the staircase first. Gregor followed her. It was claustrophobic in the small circular space, a lot like he remembered in one of the buildings at the Tower of London. He had no idea why he'd remembered that. He hadn't been to the tower in years, and then he'd gone with Bennis.

They came out on the catwalk itself. It was very high in the air. Gregor had a good head for heights, but his first reaction was to feel as if he were going to be sick. The railing looked unsubstantial and far too low for safety.

“You come along here,” Marta said. “I don't like being up here. Most people don't, but there are always a few students who love it. Mark loves it, did I tell you? He's up here all the time. I know you're supposed to be a friend of his family, and now he's been poisoned, or might have been, and somebody must be responsible; but I have to say that I never did like him. Mark, I mean. He wasn't a very likable kid. And I know he lies.”

“Mark?”

“Oh, yes,” Marta said. “I can't believe you've never noticed it. People don't like to admit they've noticed it, but they must have in this case. It couldn't have started here. He lies about everything. He lies about his work and why he hasn't done it. We put a lot of emphasis on trust in this school. He isn't trustworthy.”

“I see. I thought you said it was his roommate who was the ‘evil' kid.”

“Oh, I did. I didn't mean I thought Mark was evil. He isn't evil. It's not that. Michael was different. He was frightening, really, and violent. When we talked about the decimation of the Native Americans and that kind of thing, Michael liked to talk about torture. To
dwell
on it. He wasn't all that bright, but he had a very vivid imagination. He could make you just see it: the pain, the blood. And he loved it. It was terrible to see. I didn't mean Mark was anything like that. He really isn't.”

“I wouldn't have thought so.”

“But he isn't trustworthy,” Marta insisted. She had turned to face him. Now she turned again. The catwalk was verynarrow. Turning wasn't easy. Gregor wished he were out in front. He thought it would be easier, less frightening, if he could see the nook ahead of them and concentrate on that, instead of having his attention constantly pulled toward the empty space under his feet.

“Oh, dear,” Marta said. “That's Edith up ahead. I hope she doesn't start coming this way without checking the walk. It's awful when that happens. There isn't room for two people to pass, and there isn't supposed to be more than one person on the walk at a time. Those are the rules. More safety concerns, I think.”

They were apparently nearing the end of the catwalk and the nook. Marta suddenly moved a little to the side, and Gregor could see past her into a small, high-ceilinged space just big enough for one person to sit on the floor or stand to look out the window. The older woman who took up most of that space was standing, more or less. She had her hands against the stone sides of the arched window and was bent at the waist, breathing heavily.

Gregor knew something was wrong before Marta did. Marta put her hand on the other woman's shoulder and said, “Edith? It's Marta, and I've got Gregor—”

She never got farther than that. The older woman named Edith straightened only slightly, then wheeled around on the heels of her shoes. Marta's smile was prepared and stayed on her face, frozen, for many seconds after Edith had turned fully around and begun to lurch toward them both. Gregor assessed the signs immediately: the flushed face, the labored breathing that suddenly became much worse, frantic and out of control. Gregor knew that the most important thing at this moment was to keep this woman from getting past them onto the catwalk, and he put out his arm to stop her as she swayed. He was a second too late, and she was a hair too panicked.

“Edith?” Marta said again.

Gregor's arm was in the air. Edith knocked it away from her with a single wide sweep of her right arm. Before they knew it, she was past them and out onto the narrow ledge.

Gregor had no sooner turned to follow her than she went over the side, breaking the railing as she fell.

The catwalk was immediately over a set of low bookshelves. Edith hit the top of those face first, rolled sideways, and then plummeted the rest of the way to the floor.

Gregor Demarkian knew who she was as soon as she walked into the main reading room of Ridenour Library, even though he had never heard a physical description of her.
Somebody should have mentioned the red hair,
he thought. It was far and away the most notable thing about her, so notable that, after a split second spent admiring it, it grated on him. This was a woman who not only expected to occupy center stage, but expended a lot of energy securing her place in it. Everything about her was theatrical: the head-to-toe black of the leather trousers and cashmere sweater; the sweeping exaggeration of the hooded black cashmere cape; the hair, surely dyed at her time of life; the walk. She walked like a woman determined to command, not only attention, but obedience. And it worked. Gregor had always thought that human beings were essentially lazy. They took other people at their own word unless something significant happened to make them question it. Here they sensed her presence in the room as soon as she walked through the door and parted quickly to let her through.

Gregor was standing next to Edith Braxner's body. It was only a body now. He'd expected it to be nothing else. She was already more than half-dead when she started to fall. She was sprawled out on the floor, her back jammed into arow of chairs that were themselves jammed into the side of a reading table. Marta Coelho was standing just beyond the body, near the door to the foyer, looking sick. She had given Gregor “Edith's” last name, and then run off to call 911 when he'd asked her to. Everybody else who had been in the library at the time was still there, as far as Gregor knew. They were huddled in little groups around the reading room, staring. Most of them were students. Gregor had no idea what faculty did at this time of night, but they weren't in the library. Both of the librarians had come in and stopped uncertainly at the edge of the student groups. It was as if Edith Braxner's body had a magic circle drawn around it that no one could pass.

Alice Makepeace arrived on this scene as if it were any other scene, as if she were entering the cafeteria for lunch or dinner on a perfectly ordinary day, but a day on which she was not in a very good mood. The magic circle didn't hold her. She strode past the librarians and two little groups of students right up to the body itself. She threw the edges of her cape back over her shoulders. Gregor half expected her to take out a sword and slash an oversized Z into the library carpet.