“I agree,” Kay said, “at least in this preliminary stage. Butif he didn’t take the tablets himself, then somebody must have given them to him, either at the same time as the arsenic or immediately before or after. The issue, you see, is why. What was the person or persons trying to accomplish? It’s all well and good to say that somebody wanted to kill this boy, but if that were the case, it would make as much sense to give him a whopping dose of arsenic the first time and get it over with. And it leaves in question the matter of the caffeine. You’ve got a very elaborate sequence of events here. What was the point? If the same person gave him both the arsenic and then caffeine, then it’s hard to see what that person was trying to accomplish with both that couldn’t be accomplished with one or the other. If two different people were giving him two different things—well. Now you’ve got a plot out of a fantasy novel. I would say it was damn near unheard of for two people to be running around trying to kill or injure the same person in an underhanded way as part of a plot to—well, you see what I mean.”
“I see what you mean,” Gregor said. It had been bothering him, too. But there was something else, something he thought more important, and he wanted to make sure he had that nailed to the wall. “Give me something in the way of a time frame,” he said. “When did he have to have been given the caffeine that resulted in the pieces of tablets pumped out of his stomach? And when did he have to have been given the arsenic?”
Kay pulled the papers to her again, took a pen out of her shirt pocket, and made a few calculations. “The caffeine tablets, within twenty minutes or less, or they would have dissolved. The arsenic, anytime within an hour. It would act faster than that, of course, but it wouldn’t necessarily kick in at full force all at once. There’s the tolerance to consider. Still, I’d guess much less than an hour. I’d be happier with that same twenty minutes.”
“So would I,” Gregor said. He drummed his fingers on the table. There was another possibility, one he didn’t like to consider, but he knew it would be brought up sooner or later. “There’s always one other possibility,” he said slowly. “There’s always the possibility that Mark did it all to himself.”
“Do you think that’s likely?” Kay asked. She looked genuinely curious. “It brings you back to the question of why. Why would anybody want to do something like this to himself? It must have been excruciatingly painful at times. It must have been miserable nearly all the time. What possible motive could he have had?”
“I don’t think he did do it to himself,” Gregor said, “but the possibility is there, and you know it’s going to be brought up. You and I might think the idea is insane, but it would be the best possible solution for the school.”
Kay shrugged. “I’ve given up trying to understand what those people think of as a best possible solution for the school. If the local public school dealt with its drug problems the way Windsor Academy deals with theirs, it would be raided by the DEA. They get away with it because they have connections. It’s a revelation, living next door to that place. You think you know how it works with connections, and then you find out you’ve vastly underestimated the whole process. But just because they might think that that’s the best possible solution from their point of view doesn’t mean it’s any kind of solution at all from ours. If you want my professional opinion, it’s not an impossible scenario because practically nothing is an impossible scenario, but it is so improbable as to make it legitimate that we not consider it—at least not seriously.”
“They could say,” Gregor said carefully, “that Mark was disturbed. That he was, is, mentally ill. He’s got a history of erratic behavior, at least during this school year. That this was some kind of bid for attention.”
Brian cocked his head. “You do sound like you think it’s plausible,” he said. “Is there something we don’t know about?”
“No,” Gregor said, “not at all. I’d bet my life Mark wasn’t doing a thing to himself. But it does seem to me to be the tack somebody would take if they were trying to defend the school. And it also seems to me to be the possible explanation for why somebody would do what they did to Mark, assuming that the same person who fed him the arsenic fed him the caffeine tablets.”
“And what reason is that?” Brian said.
“To discredit him,” Gregor said. “Look, the kid was drinking enough caffeine on his own to give himself serious problems. At the very least, he’d be jittery and unfocussed and highly anxious. The arsenic would have given him stomach problems, and after he’d had enough of it it would have given him short-term memory problems, too. Put it all together and what you get is a mess of a kid who can’t be relied on in any way at all. He looks like he has a drug problem, and even if that’s ruled out, he looks like he’s mentally ill.”