The Headmaster's Wife (55 page)

“Two hundred dollars a week?”

“That's what he said. We could check it out. My guess is that most of the kids in a place like this get more. I'd say many get more than Mark.”

“But two hundred dollars a week,” Brian said. “That's almost as much as you'd make on the minimum wage, before taxes.”

“You knew they were rich. What did you expect?”

“I don't know,” Brian said. “Fifty a week? Seventy-five? Sanity?”

“These are people who spend thirty thousand dollars a year to send their kids to high school,” Gregor said, “andthey probably feel guilty about the boarding part of it. I know Liz Toliver does, and it wasn't even her idea for Mark to go away to school.”

“Jeez,” Brian said. “When I was a kid, okay, not really a kid, you know, in high school, there was the thing with Jackie Kennedy. All the stories in the papers. And I remember it said that at this boarding school she went to, the girls were only allowed to have five dollars a week. That was a rule. So they didn't get too stuck up about being rich, and the really rich ones couldn't make the poorer ones feel bad.”

“John F. Kennedy died almost forty years ago,” Gregor said. “His children grew up. He'd be a grandfather if he were alive today. A lot has happened in the meantime.”

“Inflation hasn't gotten that bad,” Brian said.

“No, it hasn't,” Gregor said, “but attitudes have changed. People throw money around more now than they used to. If you've got it, flaunt it.”

“I thought that was the sixties.”

“It's a part of the sixties that hasn't gone away,” Gregor said. “But seriously, think about it. There are, what, about three hundred and fifty students in this school? Some of them will be on scholarship—”

“They must be miserable if all their classmates have two hundred dollars a week.”

“Yes. Well. Some of them will be on scholarship, but most of them won't be. Let's say that two hundred students have allowances of two hundred dollars a week or more. If you skimmed off ten dollars a week from every account, that would be two thousand dollars a week, week after week, throughout the school year.”

“The school year is nine months, which is about thirty-six weeks,” Brian said. “That would be, let's see, seventy-two thousand a year—”

“And not just this year,” Gregor said. “I think we'll find, when we look into it, that this has been going on for close to a decade. Students come and go, after all. And if your perpetrator was careful, he'd come and go, too. He wouldn't always do the same thing at the same time in the same way. Heor she, I should say. The British police give their murderer a name when they start their investigations, or they do if you can believe P. D. James. She's the only detective novelist I read anymore. Maybe because it's the British police forces she's dealing with, and I don't know enough about those to know when she's wrong. With the American mysteries, I'm always fighting with the writer about procedure.”

“So this has been going on for years,” Brian said. “We could pull the records and demonstrate that?”

“I don't know,” Gregor said. “It won't look like anything different than ordinary student withdrawals. Our perpetrator must be intelligent enough to make the filching look like ordinary transactions. If not, he or she would have been caught years ago. I wouldn't bet on the records by themselves; I'd bet on Mark DeAvecca.”

Brian raised his eyebrows. “What, Mark DeAvecca has some secret knowledge about the theft as well as about the death of Michael Feyre? I mean, okay, Gregor. He's a bright kid when nobody's poisoning him. I had him wrong. I apologize. But you're turning him into a regular James Bond.”

“I'll bet he'd like that,” Gregor said. “But no, it's not that he's a James Bond. It's not what he knows about the perpetrator or about the death of Michael Feyre. It's what he knows about himself.”

“And that's supposed to mean what?”

“I've been thinking about it. The symptoms increased in severity after Mark came back to school after Christmas vacation, but they existed before then. They were just milder. Both Liz and Jimmy have said that Mark was being very peculiar when he came home for Christmas break. Now, that could just be the caffeine. He was drinking so much it could account for a whole lot of peculiarity. I wish they had videotapes of the way he was when he came home. Because the possibility exists that he was being poisoned long before Christmas, going back well into the fall.”

“But look at him now,” Brian protested. “He's been away from the poison for a day and a half, and he's a completely different person. Shouldn't that have happened over Christmas break? If he was being poisoned up here, and he went home, then after a couple of days he should have started to feel much better.”

“Maybe he was still being poisoned when he went home.”

“His mother was poisoning him, too? What?”

Gregor brushed this away. “Edith Braxner is dead. She's dead because she ingested cyanide. Cyanide works very quickly, within seconds, within minutes at the most. That means she had to have ingested the cyanide in the catwalk nook only moments before we found her. With me so far?”

“Of course.”

“She was up on that catwalk alone. I know that because I was standing in the main reading room right near the circular staircase that is the only way on or off it. How did she get the cyanide?”

“Marta Coelho was right there,” Brian said. “She could have given it to her.”

“Oh, I agree,” Gregor said. “Marta Coelho definitely could have given it to Edith, but even if she did, she must have given it in some form that would delay the ingestion. The perpetrator did not want to be around when Edith died. So Edith must have been given something, brownies or doughnuts or candy or something, to eat
later.
Right?”

“We've been over this before,” Brian said.

“Apply it to Mark,” Gregor said. “Think about him taking something home over the vacation, a gift somebody gave him, cookies laced with arsenic. Something.”

“It would have been risky as hell,” Brian said. “He could have had a pig-out and gotten himself killed. He could have given the damned things to somebody else and killed them.”

“Maybe there was something Mark and only Mark would eat, and that he'd only eat one of a day. Can't you think of something like that?”

“No,” Brian said.

“I can,” Gregor said. “Prescription multivitamins.”

“What? Who gets prescription multivitamins?”

“Lots of people do,” Gregor said, “especially rich and relatively rich people who fret about their health and their children's health. And no, don't ask. Mark was taking prescription multivitamins. In capsules. He took his last one on the day I showed up here. He took it with water in my room at the inn.”

“Jesus Christ,” Brian said. “This person has to be crazy. Either that or a megalomaniac. Why the hell would he—he or she, whatever—why would he bother to do that?”

“Because there'd been a mistake.”

“What kind of a mistake?”

“That's what I meant when I said look to Mark,” Gregor said. “I think that sometime in the fall the perpetrator made the wrong withdrawal at the wrong time. Something happened. Mark was away for the weekend, maybe, or in the infirmary, or otherwise tied up so that he
could not
have made the withdrawal in question. And that's the nightmare in this kind of scheme. That one day you'll make a withdrawal, a relatively sizable withdrawal, under circumstances in which the victim not only knows but can prove that he didn't make it himself. I say sizable because a ten-dollar mistake might be shrugged off as some kind of minor anomaly. Take fifty dollars, though, or a hundred, and once the mistake is discovered people will start to ask questions. I think that's the kind of mistake that was in fact made. And when Mark began to question what was going on with his account, the perpetrator needed to take his mind off it. So Mark got fed either the arsenic itself, or something else likely to make him immediately and violently ill, and by the time he made it back to. The dorm from the infirmary, the perpetrator had already tampered with the multivitamins. It wouldn't have been hard. In fact it would have been easier and easier as time went on, because the more arsenic Mark took, the more dysfunctional he would have become. In no time at all it would have been a case of nobody believing him if he did say something about the missing money.”

“And it got worse after Christmas because arsenic builds up in the system,” Brian said.

“That and the perpetrator decided to screw Mark up totally by playing around with the caffeine. Don't forget there were caffeine tablets in his body as well as arsenic the night he collapsed.”

“That was because the perp was trying to kill him.”

“At first it was because the perpetrator was trying to make sure Mark didn't know that Michael Feyre was engaged in this particular bit of blackmail. And that would have been very hard to keep secret when Michael was Mark's roommate, and Michael was a hinter. Definitely a hinter. Let me ask you something. Did your people ask around about where on this campus somebody could find poison, specifically arsenic and cyanide?”

“Of course.”

“And what did they find out?”

“Both of them, up straight, so to speak, in the science materials closet. A couple of different insecticide powders with arsenic in them in the groundskeeper's shed.”

“Exactly,” Gregor said. Then he looked up toward the library's wing-side door and watched Alice Makepeace sailing out of it, her long, red hair bouncing and whipping in the wind. “She's a remarkable woman, isn't she? Never mind the downside. She really is a remarkable woman. One of those people who command attention. I don't envy her. It's like a drug. And drugs are kinder.”

A moment later it was Mark DeAvecca coming out of the door, his shoulders hunched, looking cold even though he'd just been inside. He saw Gregor and Brian Sheehy and came over to them.

“Hi,” he said. “I need my jacket. It's really awful. I'm serious. I should have remembered. And it's not like I'm forgetting things anymore.”

“I want to ask you something,” Gregor said. “Sometime this fall, did you get sick? Very sick? As sick as you'd ever been before?”

“Yeah, September thirtieth. At least that was the day I went to the infirmary. I think it was Monday. I got sick onthe weekend, but the infirmary isn't open on weekends. I was throwing up all over the place.”

“Did you end up in the infirmary?” Gregor asked.

“For the day,” Mark said. “Not even overnight. They don't like to keep you in the infirmary in this place. I don't think it's anything sinister though. That happens in a lot of schools at the beginning of the year. Everybody brings their bugs that they're immune to already and gives them to those who aren't.”

“What about before that weekend?” Gregor said. “Did you go home for a weekend before then? Or did you go away?”

“No, I couldn't have. You're not allowed to leave campus for the first month. You're supposed to be getting acclimated.”

“You didn't go anywhere at all?”

“Well, I went into Boston with some people. For the day, you know. We saw some movies and had lunch.”

“Aha,” Gregor said. “And when you got back and looked at your student account, it was short more than it should have been.”

Mark looked surprised. “Yeah, it was. A hundred dollars. I looked in the book and it said I'd withdrawn it at ten o'clock, but I hadn't. I'd been in Boston at the time. I hadn't taken any money out for that trip because Mom had been up a few days before and she'd taken me out to lunch, and when she does that she always ends up slipping me more cash than I know what to do with. I'd forgotten all about that.”

“Exactly,” Gregor said.

Brian Sheehy cleared his throat. “I thought you wanted to go over to Hayes and look at the death scene,” he said. “I don't know what you think you're going to find, but if you want to do it, we probably ought to do it now. This place looks like it's about to become a ghost town.”

They all looked out over the campus, at the Student Center in front of them to their left, at the beginnings of the quad to their right. The campus was not deserted. It was full of students and their parents. They were all leaving.

Hayes House was full, too. The last time Gregor had been there, he had been aware of the sound of students moving just out of sight on the upper floors and in the common rooms. This time, he could see them everywhere. The front door was propped open with a clay pot filled with dirt, making it easier for students to come and go with boxes in their hands. A middle-aged woman in a long, formal coat and good gray flannel dress pants was standing near the front staircase directing a tall young man who looked buried beneath suitcases. How much stuff could these kids cram into their rooms? Gregor decided not to ask. The man he remembered as Sheldon had come out onto the front porch, livid.

“It's freezing in here, don't they understand that?” he demanded. “We have to keep this door closed. This is intolerable.”

“The door
will
remain open,” the woman in the gray flannel pants said, “until Max has his room cleared of his things. I have no intention of being held up. And if you try to stop me, I'll sue you. You personally. Don't think I won't do it.”

Sheldon shrank a little and retreated inside, muttering to himself. If he had noticed Mark, or Gregor Demarkian, or Brian Sheehy, he gave no indication of it.

“We can start with Sheldon,” Gregor said. “What's his last name anyway?”

“LeRouve,” Mark said. “Do you mind if I just stay out of sight? He's only going to yell at me again. I can't take it. I'm recuperating.”