“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.
2
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.