The Headmaster's Wife (41 page)

“Oh, God,” she said, “I've been telling Peter for years that those catwalks aren't safe. I knew this had to happen sometime. Why isn't anybody giving her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation?”

“Because there's nothing to resuscitate,” Gregor said, “and because it wouldn't be safe. It's not very likely that there's enough cyanide left in her mouth to kill you, but it's not impossible.”

Alice Makepeace looked him up and down, very slowly. Gregor had the impression that this was a technique she had used before and to good effect on other people. It had no effect on him.

“Who are you?” she said. “You're not faculty, and you're not a student. If you're not a parent, you have no right to be on this campus.”

“I probably don't. My name is Gregor Demarkian. I was invited here by Mark DeAvecca. Does that count?”

“Of course it doesn't count. You ought to get out of here. Or maybe you shouldn't. Maybe we should call the police.”

“If Marta over there did what I asked her to, the police have already been called,” Gregor said.

Alice Makepeace whirled around, looking for Marta. Marta looked frightened and resentful. Gregor was sure this wasn't the first time Alice had tried to bully her. And bully Alice did. She was good at it.

“Marta, for God's sake, what were you thinking? You know you aren't supposed to call the police without permission from President's House. You're not supposed to call an ambulance without permission from President's House. I know you haven't been here very long, but most faculty do understand the rules of behavior in this school when they've been here far less long than you have—”

“I did call President's House,” Marta said. “I talked to you. That's why you're here. And don't tell me I shouldn't have called nine-one-one without permission. You gave that lecture to Cherie just this morning because of Mark DeAvecca, and look how that turned out. He could have ended up dead. Poor Edith
is
dead.”

“We don't know that,” Alice said.

“We do, in fact, know that,” Gregor said. Alice turned back to him. She had lost none of her arrogance. She was not afraid. That was important for him to remember. “I've checked the vital signs myself, Mrs. Makepeace. Ms. Braxner is dead.”

“Alice,” Alice said. “You may not realize it, but we don't use formal address at Windsor Academy. We find it distancing, and a bar to the spirit of collegiality we are trying to maintain. Learning is most effective when it is carried out among equals.”

“And you're all equals here, Mrs. Makepeace?”

“Of course.”

“Students and teachers both?”

“Of course.”

“Then I don't understand how you function,” Gregor said, politely, thinking how bizarre it was having this conversation over the body of a woman who was dead from cyanide or had at least had cyanide before she died. He could feel the groups of students staring at them, tense. “Either your teachers don't grade your students,” he said, “or they do, and your students grade their teachers in return.”

“They do,” Alice said quickly. “We're committed to student evaluations of teaching effectiveness.”

“But their positions still aren't equal,” Gregor said, “unless the grading has equal weight on both sides. Unless student grades can affect a teacher's future as much as a teacher's grades can affect a student's. Is that what you do here, Mrs. Makepeace?”

Alice threw back her shoulders. “I will have to inform you that your continued use of the patriarchal form of my name will be construed by most people here as a collaboration with the white male hegemonic oppression of women and people of color.”

There were no people of color in the library that Gregor could see. He said, “That's quite all right, Mrs. Makepeace. I'd much rather be convicted of committing white male hegemonic oppression than of dishonesty.”

Around the edge of the magic circle, somebody burst into laughter. It was tension released, but Gregor hoped it was also insight gained. It was extraordinary to listen to this flamboyant creature throw around words like “hegemony” and “oppression.” She used them as if they were incantations. When her beauty failed, this was her ritual of control.

The sounds of sirens were suddenly very close. Gregor realized that he'd been hearing them for a long time. The ambulance would have to come from the hospital, which was on the very edge of town, but he didn't understand why it had taken the police so long to arrive. Then he remembered that there were no roads on the campus itself, only walkways much too narrow to allow vehicles, even small cars, to pass. The police had to know that. Both the policeand the ambulance would have been called in when Michael Feyre died. The ambulance had been called again, for Mark, only last night. Then, though, they'd only had to go to Hayes House, which fronted Main Street. They hadn't had to maneuver the campus proper.

There was a commotion in the foyer and then the ambulance men came in, carrying a stretcher, in a hurry. They pushed the groups of students out of the way, and one of them knelt down next to the body. A moment later he stood up and motioned to one of the men behind him. The second man came forward with what Gregor knew was a defibrillator.

A moment later Brian Sheehy came through the crowd himself, along with a younger man in a suit as badly fitting as his own. He saw Gregor and then the body. He came over to watch.

“Think it's going to work?” he asked.

“No,” Gregor said. “I saw her fall. We were up there.” He pointed to the catwalk. Its railing sagged and twisted where Edith had crashed through it. “I saw her before she fell. I'd bet my life we're looking at cyanide. You could smell it.”

“Crap,” Brian said. He turned to the man next to him. “This is Danny Kelly. He's the detective in charge of Mark's case. I thought it would make sense to put him on this one.”

“I think so too,” Gregor said.

The ambulance men were running electricity through Edith Braxner's body. Every time they did, the body jumped into the air, hovered, shuddered, and fell again. It was a small body. Edith Braxner had been a small woman, but not as small as Marta Coelho. Now that Gregor thought of it, Cherie at Hayes House had been a small woman, too. The only tall woman he had seen so far at Windsor Academy was Alice Makepeace. Maybe that had been arranged deliberately. It surprised him to realize that he didn't think that speculation was entirely ridiculous.

“I've got a partner,” Danny Kelly said. “His name's Fitzhugh. He's getting names in the foyer.”

Edith Braxner's body jumped again. Gregor felt as if the process had been going on for hours. Surely they must realize the woman was dead, and that nothing could be done for her. He looked away and just caught the arrival of Peter Makepeace, without a coat or hat, hurrying. He looked no more confident on his own turf than he had the night before at the hospital.

Peter Makepeace came up to the magic circle and looked down at Edith Braxner's body. He did not look at his wife. “Somebody said she was dead,” he said.

“She probably is,” Gregor told him. “I would say definitely, but they're still trying. You can't bring back a victim of cyanide poisoning with a defibrillator.”

“He keeps saying somebody gave Edith cyanide,” Alice Makepeace said. “He's said it a couple of times. But he can't know. He's just guessing.”

“But he does know these things.” It was Marta Coelho, her voice high and thin, stretched tight with strain. “He's an expert on these things. That's why he's here. He's here because Mark DeAvecca knows something, and Michael Feyre didn't commit suicide.”

“Don't be ridiculous,” Alice Makepeace said, furious. “For God's sake, Marta, we've been over the death of Michael Feyre a dozen times. There's no question but that it was suicide.”

“If there's no question, then why did Mark bring
him
here?” Marta pointed at Gregor. Her voice was beyond stretched now. She was coming very close to hysteria. “Why did somebody poison Mark? Why did somebody poison Edith? Edith is dead, Alice, can't you get anything
sensible
into your head? And Michael's dead, too, and from what I've heard today, Mark nearly died. He was stuffed full of arsenic. You can't just walk around pretending it's all an exercise in deconstruction and that you don't know what's going on in this place.”

“Education
is going on in this place,” Alice Makepeace said, furious.

Marta pushed her way through the students toward the circle until she was right in front of Alice, close enough to touch the cape. “Edith was in the catwalk nook,” Marta said.

“She was in the same place Mark was on the night Michael died. There's something up there. There's something Mark saw and then Edith saw it and somebody tried to poison them both and now Edith is dead. And you know that because you were there.”

“I don't have the faintest idea what you're talking about,” Alice said.

“You were there,” Marta shrieked. “I
saw
you. You passed my office the night Michael died and then you went out the wrong door. You said you were going to go back to President's House, but you went out the wrong door, the door to Maverick Pond. I
saw
you. And you were sleeping with Michael Feyre. I know that. Everybody knows that. You think you're being so damned cute, but everybody knows what you're up to. Everybody always knows. And everybody knows James bought drugs from that boy and that there's something wrong with Philip that he's trying to hide and all the rest of it. You're all trying to hide something here. You hide it behind a lot of academic jargon instead of in closets, that's all.”

“That's enough,” Peter Makepeace said, walking up to Marta and putting a hand on her shoulder. “Do you have any idea what you're doing? There are police here.”

“So what?” Marta sounded like a banshee. “Why can't anybody in this place just tell the truth for once?”

“It's not telling the truth to engage in irresponsible speculation about matters whose facts you don't know,” Peter said.

“I know the facts just fine,” Marta said, “and I'm not going to go on pretending any longer for the sake of the school. I don't give a damn what happens to the school. I hate it here. I've always hated it here. And any policeman who wants to ask me what I know, I'll tell him.”

“Police officer,” Alice said, automatically. “You'd think they'd have trained you out of all those sexist constructions at Yale.”

Gregor thought Marta was going to haul back her arm and slap Alice Makepeace across the face. It didn't happen. Marta shrugged Peter Makepeace's hand off her shoulderand said, “Get away from me.” Then she pushed past Alice and out toward the foyer, through the milling students and the small crowd of crime-scene personnel waiting to get a chance at Edith Braxner's body. Danny Kelly gave both Gregor and Brian Sheehy a look and took off after her.

The ambulance men were giving up. The one with the defibrillator had gotten to his feet. The other one was still kneeling by the body, but not in order to do anything to revive it. Edith Braxner looked broken, her back bent at an unnatural angle, her face not calm as much as frozen. Gregor had never understood the things people said about corpses, or the need so many people had not to accept that a corpse was indeed a corpse. It didn't matter if they were religious believers or not, people wanted to see nobility in the human body, even when that body was devoid of life. They wanted to see beauty, and meaning, and purpose.

When Gregor looked at a corpse, he thought only that death made the human condition all too clear. Whatever it was we were, electrical impulses or eternal spirit, our bodies were victorious in the end; and our bodies did not really want to live. Descartes had had it wrong. It wasn't, “I think, therefore I am.” It was, “I breathe, therefore I am,” and our bodies didn't want to breathe. It was too much work and too much trouble. Our bodies were always headed for the decay that was their only rest.

Peter Makepeace didn't want them to treat Edith Braxner's death as a homicide, at least not right away, but his protests were halfhearted. Gregor had thought he looked like a defeated man last night at the hospital. Now he admitted that he hadn't realized what real defeat would look like. Peter Makepeace seemed to be walking through ether. He was beyond dazed and beyond resigned. His face was white. His hands were still. He was so without emotion that it was a shock to remember that he was a very large man.

Alice Makepeace was not without emotion, and she was still not afraid or intimidated. If there had been any truth to the things Marta Coelho had said—and Gregor knew that there had been, with some of those things—Alice did not expect to be affected by them.

Alice moved first after Marta rushed out. “That little ass,” she said. “I can't stand people with no sense of self-control.”

Brian Sheehy moved away from the body just a bit. The crime-scene personnel were coming through to do their jobs, and from now on what would happen to Edith Braxner would be technical, mechanical, and cold.

“Mr. Makepeace, Mrs. Makepeace, we really do need to have a word if we could.”

“I don't want
him
there.” Alice pointed to Gregor. “He's not a police officer. I don't have to talk to him, and I don't intend to.”

“You don't have to talk to the police officers if you don't want to,” Brian said mildly. “I'm sure you've got enough lawyers to secure your constitutional rights. Mr. Demarkian, however, although he is not a police officer, is a consultant who has been hired by the town of Windsor to serve in an official capacity in the investigation into the poisoning of Mark DeAvecca, and since this case is being treated as part of that one—”

“Why should it be?” Alice demanded.