The Headmaster's Wife (24 page)

He walked through on the path, between two large white houses and out to the other side. The path continued to his left until it reached a large building with several articulated wings. To his right there was open space that went down to a midsized pond. The building with articulated wings was relatively new, but it had been designed to “blend” with all that authentic Colonial. The pond was frozen over and obscured by thick stands of evergreens. He looked but didn't see any sign of sports facilities. There were no cages for batters to stand in for baseball. There were no goalposts for football. There was nothing that looked like it could have held a basketball court.

He walked a little ways toward the building with articulated wings and then stopped. He could see no point in going there. He didn't know what it was; and although it was lit up, it seemed to be deserted. He went back into the quad and paid more attention to the Gothic building. It said
RIDENOUR LIBRARY
on the front. He knew the name Ridenour from somewhere; he wasn't sure where. The library looked as deserted as the newer buildings. Only the Houses looked inhabited, and he assumed they were all dorms.

I wish I knew what I was doing here,
he thought. Then he remembered something Mark had told him and tried to figure out which of the houses was the one Mark lived in. It was one of the ones that fronted on Main Street, he remembered that. It was the one next to the one next to West Gate. He remembered that, too. West Gate defined the western end of campus, so the last house on the other side would be that one, and the next one closer to him would be Hayes, where Mark lived. Gregor went down the path in that direction.

When he came to the house he thought was Hayes, he hesitated. It wasn't late, that was true, but he wasn't sure that students were allowed to receive visitors on school nights or at all if the visitors hadn't been cleared in advance. If he was running a boarding school for teenagers, that was the kind of rule he'd put in force. On the other hand, if he was running a boarding school for teenagers, he wouldn't leave the campus open to the town the way this one was. It surprised him thatthey hadn't had a murder here yet or a kidnapping. A serial killer could waltz in at will and snatch anybody he wanted to. There would be no way to stop him.

He mounted the two shallow steps to the backdoor and stopped. He could hear noise inside, shouting, anger. For a split second, he was having that flashback to the old Cavanaugh Street all over again. Someone was furious and not doing anything to hide it. Nothing seemed to be breaking though. No furniture seemed to be flying. He went right up to the door and found the bell and rang it. The shouting was much closer now. Whoever was angry was angry on the ground floor, not upstairs in one of the rooms.

He was just about to ring again, sure that nobody had heard him the first time because of the noise, when the door was yanked open by a small man with thinning hair.

“Who the hell are you?” he asked. “What the hell are you doing here at this time of night?”

“I'm Gregor Demarkian,” Gregor said. “I'm looking for Mark DeAvecca, if it isn't too late to talk to him.”

“You're looking for Mark DeAvecca,” the small man said. “What the fucking hell.”

An even smaller woman came running out from somewhere toward the back of the house. “Sheldon, for God's sake. You've got to do something.”

“I
will
do something,” Sheldon said. “I'm going to kick that little asshole's ass from here to New York.”

“Sheldon, pleased.”

“I've come at a bad time,” Gregor said. “I'm looking for Mark DeAvecca. I was just wondering—”

The small woman looked at him, her eyes wide. “You're Gregor Demarkian,” she said. “Edith and I were just discussing you. Edith Braxner. I'm sorry. I know I'm not making any sense. Come in. Please come in.”

“You can't let some idiot off the street into the house because you talked about him with Edith,” Sheldon said.

“Shut up,” the woman said. “Oh, God. I don't know what we're going to do, Mr. Demarkian. I'm Cherie Wardrop. I'm Mark's biology teacher. Mark is—”

“Mark is throwing up all the hell over my bathroom and you know as well as I do that he's not going to clean up after himself,” Sheldon said. “Gregor Demarkian isn't going to clean up after him either. There is vomit all over my bathroom. There's vomit on the goddamned ceiling in my bathroom—”

“Projectile vomiting?” Gregor asked. “Bad enough to reach a, what, twenty-foot ceiling?”

“Come with me,” Cherie said, grabbing him by his arm.

Gregor let himself be pushed along, down a narrow hall lined with coat hooks and littered with snow boots, to a small door that stood open at the end. By now he was aware that they had an audience. A little crowd of students was clutched together near the door where he'd come in, spilling out of a corridor that would probably lead to the main rooms of the house and the stairs to the bedrooms upstairs. Gregor paid very little attention to them.

Cherie pulled him through the door at the end and into Sheldon's apartment. Gregor noticed that it was small and meticulously neat, but not much else about it. If Sheldon had taste, it was not the sort of taste that leapt out at you.

Cherie pulled him into another narrow hall and then into a bathroom, and right from the beginning Gregor saw two things completely clearly. One was that Mark had indeed been vomiting, and there was indeed vomit everywhere, even on the ceiling. There was vomit all over Mark, too, down the front of the sweatshirt he had borrowed from Gregor, down his arms, on his hands, on his shoes. The bathroom was the kind of mess that couldn't be cleaned up without professional help.

The second thing Gregor noticed was that Mark was not vomiting any longer. He was convulsing. His eyes were bugging out of his head. His body was arched and snapping as if he were being electrocuted, over and over again.

“Call nine-one-one,” he told Cherie. “Do it now.”

He got to his knees and grabbed Mark in the middle of a snap. It was hard as hell to hold onto him. He was whipping around like a rag doll and stiff and dangerous at the sametime. Gregor grabbed his head and got it wedged between his arm and his side. He forced Mark's mouth open and grabbed the tongue, then held it down with his thumb.

“Jesus Christ,” he said, “what's wrong with you people?”

“I can't call nine-one-one,” Cherie said, “I have to clear it with President's House first. Those are the rules, and we can't—”

“Call nine-one-one or I'll do it for you, with one hand if I have to,” Gregor said. “Can't you see he's not sick to his stomach? He's having convulsions. He could die from them. He could be permanently brain damaged. How long has he been like this?”

“He was fine ten minutes ago,” Cherie said frantically. “He came in and he wanted a cup of coffee, but he didn't want to ask Sheldon because Sheldon, Sheldon—”

“Because Sheldon is a selfish prick who didn't want him to think that just because he was bunking in Sheldon's apartment he could have free rein with Sheldon's stuff,” Sheldon said, “and Sheldon was right as rain because this kid is a selfish asshole slacker who thinks the world owes him a living.”

“He was fine,” Cherie said, in tears. “He wanted some coffee, so I made him some, and he took it back here because he's been staying here since Michael died, and then the next thing I knew Sheldon was screaming and Mark was throwing up and everything was a mess and I don't know what to do. I don't know what to do.”

“Call nine-one-one,” Gregor said again.

Mark's body had stopped snapping. This wave of convulsions was over. That didn't mean another wave couldn't start in thirty seconds or less. Cherie stared down at Mark's inert body. Mark's chest was rising and falling, rhythmically and deeply. Gregor thought that was the best sign he'd had since he'd walked into this room. Cherie bit her lip.

“I've got to call President's House,” she said. “I have to. And I will. But I'll call nine-one-one first.”

The man named Sheldon said nothing. He had the kind of look on his face that people have when they think they're the victim of a con. Gregor realized that if Mark DeAvecca had shown every sign of collapsing with a heart attack, this man Sheldon would have thought it was just another ruse.

By the time Liz Toliver showed up to find out what was happening to her son, it was nearly midnight, Mark was “resting comfortably,” and Gregor Demarkian thought he was going to fall over from exhaustion. He should have gone back to the inn an hour ago. He could have taken a comfortable seat in the lobby and waited for Liz to arrive. It would have been at least as compassionate as what he had done and far more sensible. This way Liz had had to arrive at the inn's front desk to be given a note about Mark and how to find him, and the note would of necessity have been brief and uninformative. Gregor didn't know how uninformative, since he had had to phone it in from the hospital once Mark was out of danger and he could think about something besides what he would say if Mark died and he had to tell Liz about it. He had been careful to give the desk clerk at the inn a complete and exhaustive text to pass on, but he didn't trust it. The desk clerk was one of those people—he was running into more and more of them in Windsor—who seemed to run fueled by a barely concealed resentment of the school and all it stood for. There was no way to disguise the fact that he was “connected” to the school, even though it was only to the extent of being the friend of a family of a student. When he wasn't worrying about Mark, Gregor couldn't help noticing that itwas a nasty situation. The police and the firefighters would do their jobs because, by and large, they would be the kind of men for whom the job mattered more than the worthiness of the people receiving its benefits. There were other people to be considered though. The school couldn't survive without support services, and support services were delivered by dozens of men and women, the vast majority of whom seemed to be of the opinion that they'd be better off if the school and all its people vanished from the face of the earth. Gregor had seen it every place he went, on his two brief walks up and down Main Street. He had seen it here, in the hospital, in the way the nurses' faces got blank and the emergency room doctor's spine got stiff as soon as they all understood that Mark was a Windsor Academy student. The emergency room doctor was a solemn, intelligent, and very young man who had obviously come to America from India or Pakistan. His distaste for Windsor and all its works was palpable. There was something about him that made Gregor trust his professionalism, but that was all that made Gregor confident that Mark would be well served in this place.
No,
he thought now,
that's not fair.
Nurses and doctors, like policemen and firemen, usually valued the job more than the worthiness of the people receiving its benefits.

It didn't help the situation that Gregor had not been left to wait for Liz on his own. Peter Makepeace, Windsor's headmaster, had decided to wait with him. Gregor had no idea if this was what Peter Makepeace was expected to do as headmaster, or if he'd decided it was something he had to do as long as Gregor was there. In any event it made for difficulties Gregor wasn't prepared for. Left on his own, and given an hour or two, he could probably have managed to get the nurses to talk to him. He was good at that sort of thing. If he hadn't been, he would never have risen as far as he had in the FBI. The nurses would not talk in front of Peter Makepeace. They would barely stay in the small waiting room with its molded blue plastic seats screwed into stainless steel bars and anchored into the walls. When there was news, they came just as far in past the swinging fire doors as they hadto. Often, they held one of those doors open for the sake of quick escape. Then they would deliver whatever line they had been given to say and dart out again, unavailable for questions.

No nurse had come in for over an hour now. There really was nothing else to say this evening. Mark had had his stomach pumped. He was sleeping. They had done tests. The results would be available in the morning. Gregor guessed that the results would be available a lot earlier than that, but that it was going to be damned near impossible to get anybody to tell them what they were.

It was a typical hospital waiting room. Gregor had been in dozens of hospitals in his life, as a patient and a visitor, and the waiting rooms were always the same. The floor was some kind of linoleum or vinyl. No matter how often it was scrubbed clean, it looked stained. There were bits and pieces of paper garbage in the corners and up against the walls: candy wrappers, Popsicle sticks, stray cigarette butts. No smoking was allowed here, but people had been smoking nonetheless. The smell of it was in the air. The windows looked out on a part of Windsor Gregor would not have believed existed if he hadn't seen it. There was a women's prison, and a big brick building he thought might be the local high school. Neither building looked as if it belonged in a town as rich as this one.

Peter Makepeace looked as out of place in this room as a Japanese rice paper print would have looked on the walls of a Neanderthal's cave. He was, Gregor thought, almost unreal in his perfection of the stereotype he had been hired to represent. He was tall and lean and athletic; but more strikingly, he was elongated. Even his face was elongated. He was all angles and edges, as uncompromisingly aristocratic as a Plantagenet prince. It was there in his air of entitlement, too, which was more than just confidence. Gregor was confident that, once Liz got here, he could get the people he needed to talk to him to talk to him. Peter Makepeace gave the impression of believing that his access to information was a matter of right.