The Headmaster's Wife (31 page)

The light from the windows was blinding. All the Venetian blinds had been pulled uncompromisingly to the top of their frames. Mark decided that he must be in a hospital of some kind, although that made less than good sense since the last thing he remembered was his mother bending over him and running her hands through his hair, which he thought must have meant he was at home. His throat was dry and scratchy. He needed to use the bathroom. He wanted to sit up. He tried to move around a little in bed, and both Jimmy and the woman in white nearly jumped out of their skins.

The Woman in White
was a novel by Wilkie Collins. Ithad been one of Mark's father's favorites, and Mark himself had read it half a dozen times. He was now making no sense at all.

Jimmy and the woman in white came to the edge of the bed. The woman peered into Mark's open eyes and said, “He seems to be awake.”

“I want to go to the bathroom,” Mark said. It was not the first thing he'd thought of to say. He was a very polite boy, trained that way by a mother who did not put up with rudeness in her own children. The problem was, his throat was more than scratchy, it was downright sore. It hurt him to talk.

“The bathroom,” the
woman
in white said, as if she'd never heard of such a thing.

Mark almost panicked. Maybe this was a dream, and in this dream there would be no bathrooms, and the result would be waking up to find he'd wet himself. That was all he would need. Sheldon would throw him out in the snow, or worse, and the story would get around campus in no time at all. He struggled to sit up. It wasn't easy to do when you were lying flat on your back. Jimmy came over and held out an arm. Mark grabbed it and pulled himself forward.

“Water,” he said, and then, with enormous effort, “please?”

There was water in a pitcher with ice in it on a little side table, and a glass beside it. Jimmy filled the glass and handed it over. Mark took it. His hands were shaking. His arms were shaking. It took a conscious resolve of will to get the glass to his mouth without spilling any water, but he did it, and as soon as he did his throat felt better.

“Thank you,” he said again. It wasn't so difficult this time. “I've got a sore throat.”

“You've got strep,” Jimmy said. “You had an IV full of antibiotics when I came in, but it's gone now.”

“Bathroom,” Mark said again. He threw his legs off the side of the bed and almost fell over. The woman in white offered her arm and Jimmy offered his. Mark took both of them and allowed himself to be steered into what he saw with relief was a bath private to this room. The bed thatshould have belonged to his roommate was empty. He shook off his helpers at the bathroom door—he really wasn't ready to have his own stepfather wipe his behind for him—and went in on his own. The bathroom was like the room it served. There was too much in the way of tile.

Mark did what he needed to do and then, deliberately, spent a long time at the sink washing up. He washed both his face and his neck. He washed his hands twice. He was in a hospital gown and a pair of boxers, which didn't bother him, since he tended to hang around the dorm in boxers and a T-shirt. That was something else that got him into trouble with Sheldon and the Dean of Student Life, who was a fat, pompous giant of a man whose social development seemed to have been arrested at the age of twelve. Washing his face felt good. He did it again. He looked at himself in the mirror and decided that he looked dead. The odd thing was, he didn't feel dead. He felt creaky. He felt ridiculously tired. His muscles ached. His head itched. Even so, he felt better than he had even when he'd been talking to Gregor Demarkian yesterday, and that was the best he'd felt in—

Gregor Demarkian,
Mark thought.
Michael Feyre.
The body hanging from the sprinkler system pipe in the middle of his dorm room, swinging slightly in the breeze Mark had made when he'd opened the door.

Mark opened the bathroom door and went back into the hospital room proper. Jimmy and the woman in white were still standing more or less where he'd left them.

“I'm in Windsor,” he said. “I couldn't remember where I was.”

“You're in the hospital,” Jimmy said.

“Why?”

“You don't remember?” the woman in white asked.

Mark wished he could figure out if the woman in white was a nurse or a nurse's aide or what. He hated not knowing, even though he wasn't sure it would do him any good if he knew. He walked back over to the bed and sat down on the side of it. He didn't want to lie down. He would have usedthe chair if it hadn't meant that Jimmy would have no place to sit himself.

“I'm starving to death,” he said. “Can I have some breakfast? Can I have some coffee?”

“No,” the woman in white said.

“What?” Mark said.

“He could have a milkshake, I'll bet,” Jimmy said. “Mark's always liked milkshakes.”

“Of course he could have a milkshake,” the woman in white said.

“Great,” Mark said. “A chocolate milkshake. That would be—”

“No,” the woman in white said.

“Is this a joke?” Mark said. “Because my throat hurts, and I ache, and I don't know how I got here, and I'm in no mood.”

“Get him a vanilla milkshake,” Jimmy said. “He liked those the last time I talked to him.”

“One vanilla milkshake,” the woman in white said. “And I'll page Dr. Holloway and let him know Mark is up.”

The woman in white left the room, still clutching the small square piece of paper Jimmy had been signing for her when Mark first opened his eyes. Mark watched her go with relief. He had the feeling that she was more of a hindrance than a help to his finding out what was going on.

“So,” he said, “I'm in the hospital for strep throat? Is that usual?”

“To tell you the truth,” Jimmy said, “you probably could be here for strep throat. According to what the doctor told your mother last night, you've had it for weeks, untreated. Didn't you feel sick? How could you walk around for weeks with your throat looking, to quote your mother, like raw hamburger, and not get some help for yourself?”

“I went to the infirmary just last Tuesday,” Mark said. “They checked me out. They didn't find anything.”

“Did they look in your throat?”

“I don't remember.”

“Did they do one of those throat tests where they use the huge Q-tip and stick it down behind your tongue?”

“No, they didn't do that,” Mark said. “That I'd remember. They took my temperature, though. I remember that. If I'm not in the hospital for strep throat, what am I in the hospital for?”

Jimmy sat down in the plastic-upholstered chair near the window. “Well, I only got in about two and a half hours ago, and I've only heard all this secondhand from your mother, so take whatever I say with a certain amount of caution, okay? The best guess this morning seems to be caffeine poisoning.”

“Ah,” Mark said, “that's why no coffee.”

“Right. Also why no chocolate, which is apparently full of caffeine, too. No caffeine at all of any kind for at least thirty days.”

“So what happened? Did I pass out?”

“You started by vomiting on some guy's ceiling—”

“On his
ceiling?
What guy? Where?”

“At your dorm. Then you had convulsions. Then you passed out. Demarkian showed up in the middle of the convulsions and got them to call nine-one-one, which they were apparently not thinking of doing. Nine-one-one brought you here. Your mother got in about an hour or so later because she'd already started up because Gregor had called to say that you looked like you were dying—”

“He called from the inn while I was there,” Mark said dismissively. “I know. Wait. Mom's here, right? I saw her last night, but I was still out of it and I thought I was home.”

“She's got meetings over at the school.”

“Whoo boy. Is she suing everybody on the planet, or has she skipped that part and gone directly to homicide?”

“She's got a meeting this afternoon with the Boston contact firm for Shelby, Dredson and Cranch.”

“Right,” Mark said. “You've been in Hayes House, haven't you? The ceilings are twenty feet high. How did I vomit on the ceiling?”

“Don't ask me,” Jimmy said. “I told you; I've just wandered in. I wasn't even coming originally before you endedup here. Liz was going to come down, assess the situation, and decide if you needed to be pulled out of school and brought back home.”

“She decided that before she'd left, did she?”

“Pretty much,” Jimmy said.

“She's always hated this place,” Mark said. “Not this place. The Windsor Academy. Crap, I don't know. I asked Mr. Demarkian down here, did you know that?”

“Yes, he told Liz and Liz told me.”

“I don't think Michael was murdered or anything. It's not that. It's just that this place is so odd, and I wasn't thinking straight and I couldn't figure it out. Except that I am thinking straight today. I mean, I'm a little fuzzy, but mostly I'm okay. And I was mostly okay over at the inn last night with Gregor. Except I'm more all right now. I can't read anymore, did I tell you that?”

“No,” Jimmy said, “how can you not be able to read anymore?”

“I don't know,” Mark said. “I try to read but nothing makes sense. So I just sort of make myself, but when I finish the page I don't understand what the hell I've read. It's been going on for months. It was going on at Christmas—”

“You were pretty damned strange at Christmas. Your mother and I thought you were—”

on drugs,” Mark said, “but I'm not. I'm—”

“Relax,” Jimmy said, “that much I know. They did tests. You're clean. Except for the caffeine. That's something I know about, too. I mean, for Christ's sake, Mark. Drink a little coffee to keep yourself awake, but those caffeine tablets are murder. I know, I used to do that to myself when I still thought I was going to get a college education, pop a couple of those and stay up all night trying to study, but the tiling is—”

“What are caffeine tablets?”

“NoDoz. Vivarin. That kind of thing. They've got generic ones. I've seen them in the drugstores. They're a stupid way to go. They've got as much caffeine in one of them as in a cup of strong black coffee, and everybody takes five or six. You apparently took about thirty.”

“I did not,” Mark said. “I've never taken a caffeine tablet in my life.”

“Well, there were pieces of the damned things in your stomach when they pumped it, kid. And in the vomit on your clothes. Your mother, speaking of homicide, is ready to kill you.”

“I've never taken a caffeine tablet in my life,” Mark repeated. “And if this gets to be like the drug thing, where nobody believes me, I'll scream. Or break something. I'm big enough to break something serious these days. I mean, for Christ's sake, Jimmy, what do you take me for? I know I've been behaving like an irresponsible jerk this year, but I'm not an idiot. I've been drinking a lot of coffee, yes, okay, maybe too much, maybe about ten cups a day. I shouldn't have done that, thinking about it sounds pretty stupid itself. But I don't pop pills. I won't even take Tylenol for a headache most of the time.”

The woman in white came back in, carrying a very large, tall glassful of milkshake. Mark thanked her and reached for it, but she insisted on putting it down on the table, taking the straw out of its paper wrapper, and putting the straw in the milkshake herself. She reminded Mark of a waiter in a very, very, very pretentious restaurant who had been trained to believe that diners were incapable of putting their own napkins in their own laps. Mark took a long drink of milkshake. The woman in white nodded appreciatively and walked back out of the room again.

Mark put the milkshake back on the side table. “Listen,” he said, “that's why I asked Gregor Demarkian up here. Because nobody would believe me. Nobody would believe me about anything. If it's going to get like that again, I don't know what I'm going to do. I didn't take any caffeine tablets, not one. If they found them in my stomach, then somebody slipped them to me when I wasn't looking. And if you can't take my word for it, then to hell with you.”

“If somebody slipped them to you when you weren't looking,” Jimmy said, “then that somebody was trying to killyou. Unless you're suggesting it was a joke. Do you really think somebody is trying to kill you?”

“No,” Mark said, “why would they? But I didn't take them, and that's final. And I told everybody I wasn't taking drugs, and they didn't believe that either, and now you've got the proof that I wasn't lying after all. God, I don't know what's happened to my life. I really don't. People didn't used to think I was lying practically anytime I opened my mouth. What's the deal here? Have I suddenly grown horns and a tail I can't see in the mirror?”

“Of course not,” Jimmy said. “Calm down. You're yelling at the wrong person. I'm an innocent bystander. Did you really get Gregor Demarkian all the way up here just because people wouldn't believe you when you said you weren't on drugs?”

“Of course not.” Mark had more milkshake. He'd drunk nearly the whole thing, and he wanted more. He couldn't remember the last time he'd been this hungry. He thought he might never have been this hungry. He was ready to eat the mud beige, wholly inadequate blanket that covered his bed. He pulled his legs up under him, crossed in a not-quite lotus position. “Hey, Jimmy,” he said, “you got your car up here? Driver and everything?”

“Of course I have the driver and everything. Why?”

“Because I'm starving,” Mark said, “and all the food in Windsor sucks dead rats, and you know the hospital food won't be any better. What I want is three crispy chicken sandwiches from McDonald's and a supersized fries and, I don't know. Another milkshake. Like that. The thing is, the only way you can get that that I know of is if you go out to exit 30 on 1-95 north in, I think it's Lexington. It may be Concord. But you have to get off exit 30 going north, because the McDonald's is on the exit. It's a weird sort of arrangement. It's not off the exit in town, it's on this long access ramp. Oh, and I want ketchup. That doesn't have caffeine in it, does it?”