Everyone at Windsor treated Michael Feyre as a cipher. He was the paradigmatic Poor Boy from a Miserable Background who needed only Love and Attention to bring out his better qualities. Those qualities would include sensitivity and tolerance and a zeal for social justice. James knew for a fact, from the very pages of this very short story, that this fairy tale had had nothing to do with the Michael Feyre who had really existed among them this school year. The real Michael Feyre had not been a misunderstood genius or a juvenile delinquent or even a street thug. The real Michael Feyre had been an out-and-out psychopath.
If James had read this paper before Michael committed suicide, he would have made copies of it and sent them to Peter Makepeace and every member of the Board of Trustees. No school could tolerate this kind of person for long and especially not a boarding school. James was surprised as hell that there hadn’t been some kind of incident. Michael wouldn’t have felt much compunction about grabbing one of the girls or threatening a teacher. Maybe the affair with Alice had kept all that at bay. Still, it was surprising there hadn’t been an incident with Alice, that Michael hadn’t beaten her to a pulp one afternoon while they were shacked up during study hall or risking exposure in a faculty bathroom during sports trials on a Saturday afternoon. James was fairly sure that Michael was no stranger to beating people into pulps. That was in this short story, too.
Of course, in the meantime, Michael had died. James had to wonder if psychopaths committed suicide. It seemed to him like a contradiction in terms. Psychopaths didn’t want to die; they thought they were the center of the universe. One way or another, though, Michael was dead, and James had responded to this paper only a few days ago by putting it at the bottom of the stack and deciding to forget about it. He hadn’t thrown it away because he had wanted to make sure Michael’s mother had it. For some reason it had seemed very important to him that Michael Feyre’s mother know the kind of human being he was.
That aside, though, there was now another consideration. From what he had heard so far on campus, somebody had tried to murder Mark DeAvecca, unless Mark DeAvecca had been administering arsenic to himself, which was not impossible but highly improbable. That made these two papers interesting in another way, one having nothing to do with their revelations about their writers’ personalities. The interesting thing was that these two stories were about the same series of events. They took as their starting point the same set of facts. Everybody on campus thought they knew what those facts were. People like Marta Coelho—who thought she knew everything—believed they knew as much about them as either of the principals.
Any quick reading through these two papers together, though, and it became clear that everybody had been deceived. Mark presented what “everybody” knew, but what Michael presented was a variation on the theme, not the theme itself, and that variation might matter. Nobody would kill Mark DeAvecca for fear that he’d tell the world that his roommate was sleeping with the headmaster’s wife. Everybody on campus knew that Michael was sleeping with Alice. Only Alice herself might be deluded enough to think otherwise. If you were going to kill everybody who knew, then you were going to have to turn Windsor into a graveyard. The same was true of Michael’s drug selling. Everybody knew, even though they hadn’t been able to catch him at it. You didn’t murder, or attempt to murder, somebody to hide something that was already generally known.
James ran his hand across the first page of Michael’s paper. He’d read the damned thing through twice and never realized that he was reading his own assumptions into it. Then he’d decided that his confusion was the result of Michael’s bad writing. Then he’d known better, but he hadn’t known what to do about it.
He picked up both papers now and put them into the pocket of his coat. Safety required not keeping secrets, and this was one secret he had every intention of putting into the hands of the first policeman he ran across.
Either that or he was going to give them to that Gregor Demarkian, who might have more than the minimum of sense.
Chapter Seven
1
Gregor Demarkian was sure he was not having a change of heart. He was not interested in going back to work. He was not interested in investigating a murder. He was interested in making sure Mark DeAvecca was all right and stayed that way; and although he admitted that that could be done just by convincing Liz to take him out of school immediately and keep him out, it was a matter of principle not to allow Mark’s tormentor to go free without so much as an inconvenience. Besides, there was always the old truth that someone who committed murder once was always at risk of committing another. It was the kind of “old truth” Gregor sometimes took exception to. Most people who committed murder didn’t so much commit it as fail to commit self-control. They got liquored up or got stuck in the house for days by a storm or shocked into some kind of knowledge they weren’t expecting—that ancient scenario, catching his wife in bed with another man—and just blew up. If there hadn’t been a gun or a knife or a great big rock available, if they’d been small men instead of large ones with well-developed muscles, they would have pitched a fit and the whole thing would be over in a heartbeat, with no other consequences but the fact that they’d have to look silly every time the outburst was mentioned for the rest of their lives.