Brian and Danny looked away, keeping their faces expressionless. Gregor watched Peter Makepeace carefully. He was not being disingenuous. He had absorbed this pieceof information as thoroughly as if he were a Catholic submitting to dogma, and it had never occurred to him to question it.
“One more thing,” Danny said. “Who would be able to tell us what Edith Braxner was doing this evening before her fall? Did she eat dinner in her apartment or with the rest of you? Why had she come to the library? Why was she up on that catwalk? If there was nothing to be seen out that window but a pond and some evergreens and nothing else, why did anybody ever go up there?”
“Students go up there to study,” Peter said, “or some students do. And Mark DeAvecca, I think, went up there mostly to be alone. I often felt he was overwhelmed by boarding life. I suppose teachers might sometimes go up there to be alone as well.”
“But you’re not sure?” Danny said.
“Of course I’m not sure. I’m not clairvoyant. I don’t know what Edith was thinking. Isn’t that the kind of thing an investigation is supposed to find out? Besides, I think it would be more important to find out where Edith had been before she went up to the catwalk, don’t you? Unless you think somebody was up there feeding her cyanide in full view of the entire main reading room. And even then you’d have to figure out how they got down without Marta and Mr. Demarkian here running right into them.”
3
Outside, the air was cold and crisp, and the snow was definitely something serious, coming down in hard-driving streams that were almost as violent as a bad rain. The body was gone and so was the ambulance. It had been parked, with the police cars, in the East Gate lot. Gregor stopped on the steps of the library to look over the quad one more time, and Brian Sheehy stopped with him.
“It’s a beautiful place,” Brian said. “I think part of thereason we hate it so much is that we envy it. The local high school is not, exactly, this well equipped.”
“I’m sure it’s not,” Gregor said.
Danny Kelly had met up with his partner, and they were walking together toward the parking lot, their heads bent toward each other as they talked through the distraction of the snow. All the lights in all the windows that faced the quad were on.
“What do you think?” Brian said. “That woman who had hysterics, were they real hysterics or put on? I don’t trust people who have hysterics. I tend to think they’re guilty.”
“She was making enough accusations,” Gregor said. “Who is this Philip she was talking about, the one she said was hiding something?”
“I don’t know,” Brian said. “We get to know a few of the people at the school, especially if they’ve been around long enough, but that’s not one I’ve run into.”
“And members of the faculty buying drugs from Michael Feyre, do you think that’s plausible?”
“Hell, yes,” Brian said, “and not the ones you’d necessarily think either. A lot of the leftover hippies have gone organic in their old age.”
“It might be a motive,” Gregor said. “Get rid of Michael Feyre because he could expose you as a customer. Get rid of Mark because he’d heard about it from Michael Feyre. Get rid of Edith because she knew something that pointed to you as the killer of Michael Feyre or as Mark’s poisoner. You do realize that she couldn’t possibly have taken that cyanide before she went up to the catwalk? It would have worked too fast.”
“Yeah, I know,” Brian said. “She must have taken it on her own up there. I’ve already told Danny to be on the lookout for something she was carrying. Candy is traditional, isn’t it?”
“It is. But it could have been in anything. A sandwich. One of those sandwich cookies with the creme filling. She could have carried it around for days before she ate it. Which I suspect was the idea.”
“You’ve got to wonder if the same wasn’t done to Mark DeAvecca.”
Gregor shook his head. “Couldn’t have been. The killer couldn’t have been sure that Mark would eat whatever he gave him. Mark wasn’t eating much. And besides, that poisoning had been going on for weeks.”
“You’ve got a look on your face that says you know what’s going on here.”
Gregor looked up into the darkness. The snow came down at him in swirls and curtains, melting as soon as it touched his skin. If this went on for another few hours, the town would be snowed in. He wondered how often that happened.
“No,” he said, “I don’t have it all figured out. I know what must be true, but I’ll be damned if I know how it makes any sense.”