President’s House was, indeed, a perfect replica. There was the hipped roof, the twin brick chimneys, the squared-off entry portico with its thin, Greek Revival columns. Peterwouldn’t have been surprised to find that this house had been built to scale. The three women who had founded Windsor Academy had been fond of that kind of historical voyeurism. They had been less interested in what Emerson had had to say than they had been in celebrating a peculiarly American standard. It was a time when being American was more fashionable than it had become now.
He went up the front steps and let himself in the front door. He had seen Alice through the front windows, sitting at the desk in his study. He thought that if he got fired—which he almost surely would be—he would spend some time digging up the floor plans for the original Emerson house or even going down to Concord to visit it. He was pretty sure it was still standing. He’d be surprised if it wasn’t a shrine. Emerson had lived there for years, and Thoreau had taken over the place when Emerson went to Europe. Everybody from the Daughters of the American Revolution to hippies with an itch for civil disobedience ought to treat the place as if it were hallowed ground.
He went through the hall to the door of the study and stopped. The door was not locked. Alice would not hide what she considered to be something she deserved to do by right. He looked in on her seated at the desk, jimmying the lock on the long center drawer. Then he cleared his throat and waited until she looked up.
“You could always just ask me for the key,” he said. “It would be easier.”
“Would you give me the key?” Her red hair shone in the muted light from the desk lamp. It was such an improbable color, and yet Peter knew for certain that there had been a time when it was completely genuine.
He came forward with the key in his hand. “I won’t give it to you, but I’ll open the drawer,” he said. He half expected her to grab it out of his hand while he bent forward to slip it into the lock, but she didn’t. He opened it up and stepped back. “Go ahead. Take a look.”
She sat staring at him for a moment, emotionally blank. Then she pulled out the drawer, found the manila envelope, and pulled that out, too. She was, he thought, curiously without affect. She showed only those emotions she wanted to, meaning none of the ones she actually had. She dumped the contents of the manila envelope on the green felt desk blotter and spread them out under her hands.
“Well,” she said.
“You can keep them if you want to,” he told her. “For a long time I thought of them as insurance. I’d use them if I ever had the guts to divorce you, and you wanted to make trouble over it. But I’ve realized, these past few days, that I don’t want to divorce you.”
“Worried about your reputation in the field?” Alice said.
“No,” Peter told her. He thought he ought to sit down. It would have a better effect. He couldn’t make himself do it. “My reputation in the field is shot, and you know it. There isn’t going to be another headmaster’s job after this one. I’ll have to retire to New Hampshire and live on what’s left of my trust fund. You’ll have to do what you want.”
“I thought you said you didn’t want to divorce me.”
“I don’t. But I don’t intend to force you to stay with me either. You can do what you want to do. You can take those with you.”
“They’re a form of pornography, aren’t they?” Alice said. “Did you masturbate to them?”
Peter went over to the window and looked out onto the quad. The snow was beginning to come down very heavily. People were walking along the paths in the direction of the Student Center and the cafeteria. They both ought to be on their way over right now.
“I want to know the truth,” he said. “I want to know if you tried to kill Mark DeAvecca.”
“Are you crazy?”
“No, Alice, I’m not crazy. I’ve been cut out of the loop on the official end. His mother can’t stand me, which under the circumstances I think makes a good deal of sense. Even so, it’s not that easy to keep me from getting the information I want, and I do know what’s been going on at the hospital all this afternoon. Somebody poisoned Mark with arsenic. Nota single dose of arsenic, apparently, but several weeks’ worth of smaller doses—”
“You don’t necessarily die of arsenic.” “True enough,” Peter said. “That’s another of the possibilities they’re considering, that somebody was just trying to make Mark ill. If that was what they were looking for, I’d say they got it, wouldn’t you?”