The Headmaster's Wife (29 page)

She was just coming out of the quad-side front door when she saw the woman coming in from what must have been East Gate and start across the long, diagonal path in the direction of what Marta was sure would eventually be President's House. She put aside her annoyance at the name—why call something “East Gate” when there was no fence for it to be a gate of?—and stopped to stare. There was really no way to mistake this woman, in spite of the fact that she wasn't dressed in heels or covered with makeup the way she was on CNN. This was Elizabeth Toliver,
Mark
DeAvecca's mother. She was walking very quickly. Marta had the impression that if she could have, she would have run.

Marta had no idea what got into her. She wasn't a celebrity hound. Elizabeth Toliver wasn't even somebody whose work she respected much. Marta felt propelled by forces beyond her control down the porch steps, into the quad, along the path most likely to intersect with Ms. Toliver on her way to whatever she was going to do at Peter Makepeace's house. They collided at the quad's center, the place where the center paths all came together. Ms. Toliver hadn't been paying attention. She looked startled to see anybody else in the quad.

“Excuse me,” she said.

“Excuse me.” Marta thought she sounded lame. “I'm sorry, I don't mean to bother you. You're Ms. Toliver, aren't you?”

“Yes,” Liz Toliver said. “I'm sorry I can't stop to talk, but I have an appointment.”

“Oh, I didn't mean to bother you,” Marta said. “I'm Marta Coelho; I'm Mark's history teacher.”

Liz Toliver stopped looking as if she were about to take flight. “Oh,” she said, “yes. Mark's told me about you.”

It was a noncommittal line. Marta had the uncomfortable feeling that what Mark had told his mother was not good, but how could it be otherwise? She was getting used to thefact that when students didn't do well, they blamed their failures on their teachers and not on their own lack of commitment to academic work.

Marta shifted to the other foot. “Well,” she said, “I didn't mean to keep you. I just meant to say that I hope Mark is recovering from, well, whatever it was. They haven't really told us much of anything, you see, except that it wasn't a drug overdose. Food poisoning, somebody said in the cafeteria this morning.”

“Mark's fine,” Liz Toliver said, “I just came from his room. He's had a very quiet night. There doesn't seem to be any chance of permanent damage from the incident last night.”

“Well, good,” Marta said. “I mean, he's been so sick so often this term, hasn't he? Much sicker than most students are, even in a bad winter. And that thing with the shakes, you know, and the tremors—”

“What?” Liz asked.

Marta blinked. “The shakes,” she said. “I told the infirmary about it. I thought they must have told you. He'd come to class and he'd have the shakes, and there would be sweat coming off his forehead in waves really. We do have a number of first-year students who have hygiene problems, but Mark was the worst I've ever seen. Although of course I've only been here this one year—”

“Why is having the shakes a hygiene problem?” Liz Toliver asked.

“What?” Marta asked.

“Never mind,” Liz Toliver said. “Do you think you were the only one who noticed it? Was it just in your class?”

“Oh, no,” Marta said, “it wasn't in class at all necessarily. He had them the night, the night—yes. Well, the night his roommate committed suicide. I don't know if you know about that, if Mark told you—”

“I even got a formal notice from the school. Yes, I heard about that. He had them the night the boy killed himself? Why did you see him at night?”

“It was in the library,” Marta said. “I've got an office in the faculty wing in the library. He came through.”

Liz Toliver turned around until she was looking at Ridenour. “That's the library?” she asked.

“Yes,” Marta said. “Yes, of course. But there's no reason to be upset, Ms. Toliver. It's just another indication, you see, of why Mark isn't really suited to be here. We've all discussed it this year. He just doesn't fit. And the hygiene problems, and the getting sick, well, they're symptoms. I don't mean last night was a symptom. That sounds like it was a terrible accident. We warn them about keeping food in their rooms when it could go bad, but they never listen of course. But the other things—”

“I have an appointment,” Liz Toliver said again, moving in the direction of President's House. “Mark is going to be quite well. I'll convey your good wishes.”

“You should take him out before we're forced to ask him to leave,” Marta pushed on. “You must see it would be better. What good is it going to do to insist on keeping him here when he's not really suited for this level of academic work? There's no shame in admitting that he's just not bright enough to compete on this level. It's—”

But she was gone. Marta had no idea how long she had been gone. She was more than halfway to President's House, but she moved very quickly. Maybe it had been no time at all. Marta's mouth felt dry. Her lips felt chapped. She was sure she had said things she should not have said. She'd only told the truth though. She was sure of that.

She'd only told the truth, and she thought somebody around here ought to start telling it, all the time, to everybody.

Gregor Demarkian was not a man who “slept in,” not ever, not even when he'd been up most of the night before. He could remember mornings in his early days at the FBI, when he'd been on kidnapping detail all night, when he'd insisted on showing up at the office on time to file his paperwork and only going home later for a short nap. He could remember mornings in that last sad year when his wife was dying of the uterine cancer they had caught far too late to do anything about. There would be a crisis, and he would go to her hospital room and sit, hour after hour in the darkness. Her small square of the room would be closed off by a white curtain. Behind the faux-Danish Modern chair he sat in would be a half wall of windows, looking out on the cemetery that every hospital seemed to be built beside. Her breathing would be labored but steady. The machines would wink and blink and let off small hiccoughy beeps at random intervals. Then the sun would come up, and the day nurse would check in to see how everything was going, and Gregor, reassured yet again that Elizabeth was not likely to die anytime in the next few hours, would go off to the coffee shop on the first floor to put enough coffee into himself to keep going. And he had kept going. That was the thing. It had never occurred to him in that year to reset the alarm clock for a later hour, eventhough he was on leave and had no office to go to. Productive people got up at five thirty or six and started the day. He had always been a productive person.

It was quarter after nine when Brian Sheehy's call came through to Gregor's room at the Windsor Inn, and Gregor was still fast asleep across his bed and still dressed in the clothes he'd worn the night before. It had been after three by the time he'd gotten in. Even Liz had left earlier, waiting only long enough for Mark to waken slightly so that she could tell him she was there. Mark hadn't woken for long. He'd barely opened a single eyelid, and he hadn't seemed to be surprised that his mother was next to him, running her hands through his hair. Gregor thought Mark didn't know where he was. He woke to find his mother beside him and assumed he was in his own home in his own bed. Gregor didn't blame him. Mark went back to sleep. Gregor went back to waiting for Dr. Niazi's replacement to give him some idea of where the tests that took longer to read were heading. At three, he'd finally given up. Not only was he annoying the hospital staff—although he tried to do as little of that as possible; he wasn't
nagging
—but the results that were coming back in dribs and drabs all said the same thing, and that was that there was no sign of anything in Mark's body but the caffeine.

“He does have strep throat,” the second-shift doctor told Gregor at one point, trying his best to be polite when he was far too busy to be discussing test results with the patient's mother's designated “representative.” “It's a very bad strep throat, too, and he's probably had it for weeks or even months. His throat's so sore, I'm surprised he was able to talk.”

Strep throat was not the kind of tiling Gregor was looking for. As far as he knew, it wasn't possible for one person to give another strep throat in an attempt to weaken or kill him. The longer he thought about the amount of caffeine in Mark's system, however, the more sure he was that Mark hadn't ingested it all by himself, not even accidentally. It wasn't impossible that a student of Mark's age and ambitionwould take caffeine tablets in an attempt to stay awake long enough to get extra work done or to study more thoroughly for a test. What seemed impossible to Gregor was that a student of Mark's intelligence wouldn't know that he risked injury or death by taking what appeared to have been a handful of the things. Gregor was sure that Mark had not been intent on committing suicide. There was nothing suicidal about the kid who had turned up to greet him at the Windsor Inn yesterday, no matter how much of a mess he was otherwise. There was nothing stupid about that kid either. The problem was that Gregor couldn't understand how somebody could have given Mark those tablets without Mark knowing he was taking them.

In the end he'd been too tired to think anymore. He'd called the police and left a message, very urgent, on Brian Sheehy's voice mail. Then he'd loosened his tie and sat down on the bed for what he'd thought would be a rest just long enough to get his shoes off. As the phone rang in his ear, it became obvious to him that he had never taken those shoes off. They were still on his feet, and they hurt. He rolled over onto his back and stared at the ceiling momentarily. The ceiling had molding on it, the way a lot of eighteenth-century ceilings did. It had cherubs and small bunches of grapes with leaves that looked broad enough to belong to marijuana plants. He reached for the phone and wondered, absently, why people had thought it so important to have bumpy representations of fruit on their ceilings at all.

He picked up and said, “Yes?”

Brian Sheehy said, “I had four phone calls this morning, all about the same thing. I answered yours. You want to tell me what's going on?”

“Yes,” Gregor said. He sat up. His back ached. His neck ached, too. He'd been joking about getting old for so long, but now that the state seemed to be visited on him, he did not find it funny. “Meet me somewhere for breakfast. There's got to be somewhere for breakfast in this town that won't serve alfalfa sprouts with the toast.”

“Don't bet on it. I'm in the middle of a workday, youknow. Granted, there's not a lot of work to the day here at the moment, but I'm informed on the best possible evidence that there's about to be. It seems a certain Mr. Jimmy Card has been spotted checking into the Windsor Inn. It's going to be a circus.”

“I agree, but it isn't going to be one immediately, and I want to lay it all out the best I can,” Gregor said. “Meet me somewhere for breakfast. Pick a place and I'll find it.”

“The Aubergine Harpsichord on Main Street.”

“The what?”

“The Aubergine Harpsichord. Don't ask. You wanted breakfast. They do serve alfalfa sprouts with the toast, and some specialty herb teas that would make a dog puke, but they also make a decent omelet, so have that. I've got a couple of things to clear up. Meet me in twenty minutes. Go down to your lobby, turn right when you get out the door, it's just at the end of the block. You'll know it because it has one of those big wooden signs hanging out over the sidewalk with an eggplant on it. That's what an aubergine is; it's an eggplant.”

“Right,” Gregor said.

They hung up, and Gregor decided he had just enough time for a quick shower. He stripped, threw himself under the water, and stepped out again exactly seven minutes later, timing the operation by his travel alarm clock. He gave a fleeting thought to the fact that Bennis had given him this alarm clock, and then, in a hope that gave evidence of more desperation than he knew he felt, called down to the desk to see if he had any messages. He'd picked up his messages when he'd come in the night before, but he told himself that he'd been asleep for a few hours. The idea that Bennis would call him after three o'clock in the morning unless somebody had died was absurd, but he tried it anyway. There were no messages. Tibor had learned long ago not to call him in the early hours of the morning with news about the people on his Internet newsgroups.

Gregor threw himself into clean clothes, made sure he had his wallet and keys, and left the room. In the hallwayoutside, there was nothing but quiet and a few small stacks of dishes waiting by one of the other doors. He might not like to sleep in, but presumably most other people who came to stay at a place like the Windsor Inn preferred to.

The Aubergine Harpsichord was indeed at the end of Gregor's own short block, just past an art gallery selling what looked like children's drawings rendered in oils and earth tones and a store with no stated purpose at all but with a beautiful pewter teaset in the window. Gregor had no idea who bought teapots. Bennis owned a beautiful ceramic one but never used it. He thought she had received it as a gift. The Aubergine Harpsichord's front windows were made to look as if they were divided. Gregor could tell that they were, in fact, plate glass with cosmetic dividers pasted over them. He went in through the divided wooden door and saw that the restaurant itself was very nearly a political statement. There were posters on the walls, carefully framed, of the kind that particularly intellectual college students favored: Barishnikov in midleap, Alice in Wonderland, Che Guevara. There were two posters of the kind Gregor thought of as “fat letters, caught drunk.” They had mud brown backgrounds, and the letters themselves were black, plump, and sort of wandering all over in different sizes, the text swooping around the sides, nothing made straight or easy to read.
LIVE SIMPLY THAT OTHERS MAY SIMPLY LIVE,
One of them  said. The other said,
RACISM: RANDOM ACTS OF BLINDNESS.
Gregor had no idea why those posters irritated him so much. He didn't disagree with them. He thought people who piled up mountains of stuff and spent their money on things they wouldn't want in six months' time were stupid beyond belief, and he had never had any patience with racism at all, not even in his early days at the Bureau when it had still been considered both “natural” and “inevitable” that African Americans would never become full-fledged agents. Forsome reason the posters brought out the anarchist in him. He was sorry he wasn't able to drive up to the curb in a gigantic SUV, and that in spite of the fact that no sane person allowed him to drive anywhere where there might be traffic.