“I don’t believe it,” Alice said. “He hasn’t been sick. He’s been doped to the gills—”
“Not according to the lab tests.” “—and treating this place like it was a residential party. He’s all wrong for Windsor, Peter, and you know it. He’s not serious.”
“He may not be serious, Alice, but what has happened to him is; and there’s no way around it, at least not from what I’ve heard. He was found with arsenic in his body as well as enough caffeine to have killed him. There’s arsenic in his hair. A lot of it, apparently. Which means he was being poisoned for weeks at least—”
“Or poisoning himself,” Alice said quickly.
“What for? Alice, let’s leave the realm of the ridiculous here for a moment. Let’s leave the realm of that Hustler centerfold you like to turn yourself into when the occasion arises and look at what we have here. We were nearly out from under the problem caused by Michael Feyre’s suicide, a suicide you almost certainly had something to do with—”
“Don’t be an idiot.”
“I’m not. I’m being practical. If you weren’t the reason Michael committed suicide, you could be made to look like the reason. But that was all right. We were almost clear from that one. Now we have this. And we aren’t dealing with Dee Feyre anymore, somebody with a lot of money but without sophistication or education or connections, we’re dealing with Liz Toliver. And I’ve seen her, Alice. She’s on the warpath.”
“She can be on the warpath all she likes. She can’t do anything. You’ve said yourself that we’re not going to beasked to stay on after all this. What difference does it make what she does?”
“It makes a difference if she lands you in jail, Alice. I don’t think you’re going to like the women’s correctional facility in Concord.”
“She can’t land me in jail,” Alice said. “I haven’t done anything to get landed in jail.”
“You were sleeping with a minor and a student, that could land you in jail.”
“He was sixteen.”
“It doesn’t matter; he was under eighteen. That’s the law, whether you intend to recognize it or not.”
“Those laws were passed to prosecute male predators who abused female children,” Alice said. “They have nothing to do with teenaged sex, for God’s sake. Teenagers have sex with each other all the time; they don’t get prosecuted.”
“They don’t get prosecuted if they have sex with each other. But never mind. It doesn’t matter. What does matter is whether or not you’re going to find yourself arrested for attempted murder, and the possibility does exist. You were feeding Mark coffee last night. You were seen. In the cafeteria.”
“I wasn’t feeding him,” Alice said. “I just got him a cup. He asked for it.”
“Two cups.”
“Whatever. We were talking.”
“About what?”
“About Michael. Why shouldn’t we talk about Michael? For God’s sake, Peter, everybody has been talking about Michael since it happened. Until today, I mean. It’s only natural. It’s a small community.”
It was the word “community” that stopped him, that catchall word meant to impose order and cohesion on random collections of people. Windsor was a “community.” They said it all the time. He went back to the desk and swept up the photographs and the manila envelope. The photograph on the top was of Alice sitting astride some boy whose name Peter no longer remembered. It was a younger Alice.
Even in black and white, her hair looked thicker and more glossy; her breasts looked firmer. They had no children and because of it, and of the fact that they were small, Alice’s breasts had lasted much longer than women’s ordinarily do. Still, it was coming to her as it came to all women everywhere. That was the problem for a woman who had based her life on sex.
Peter walked across the room to the fireplace and threw the envelope and photographs inside. It was a gas fireplace, easy to turn on and just as hot as one that burned with wood. He flipped the switch and watched the flames leap, instantaneous and deadly.
“I’d have thought you would want to keep those,” Alice said.
Peter was watching it all bum. “I was thinking about Ralph Waldo Emerson, did I tell you that? This house is a replica of Emerson’s house in Concord.”
“That was in the material they gave us when you were applying for this job.”
“I know. I was thinking about it. And about Emerson himself and all those people—the New England transcendentalists. The original American ‘radicals’: Thoreau, Margaret Fuller. I was thinking that Windsor was just their kind of place. They would have liked it here.”