Chapter Two
1
Marta Coelho knew that she was not behaving rationally. She had spent too much of her life holding herself in not to realize when her self-control had vanished or to understand how hard it would be to get it back. It had started last night, long before Edith had fallen to the library floor, dead and horrible looking. It had begun when she had not been able to sit in her office for one more minute. That was when she had stood up to walk around, to visit whoever else had come in to work, only to realize that she couldn’t. In the last few days, she had alienated every other faculty member she had established any friendly acquaintance with. She hadn’t even been aware that she was doing it. James Hallwood would barely say hello to her in passing. Philip Candor was staying out of sight, and the last time she had gone to his apartment he had made it clear that she was invading his privacy. Even Cherie seemed to be avoiding her. Marta couldn’t remember what she’d said to Cherie. All of a sudden her time at Windsor seemed like a long, black tunnel where all the sights and sounds of ordinary life were blacked out. She had never reconciled herself to a year teaching in this place. She had hated it from the start, at first because of what it said about her—not good enough, the words kept ringing in her mind, not good enough for a real job—and in the end because of what it was. She hadn’t wanted to stay in the world in which she had grown up. That was true enough. She couldn’t have stayed there, if only because her interest in books and ideas and scholarship was natural. It was not something she had taken on in order to escape the pointlessness of the existence she had seen in the lives of all the people around here. But there was pointlessness here, too, and it was a hundred times worse. The people she had grown up among did necessary work. They built things and fixed things and cleaned things. It all had to be done if the world was going to function. The people here did nothing that anybody would miss if they stopped doing it. Even the “education” they provided was a hothouse flower that had very little to do with the real world in which most people had to live, in which they themselves had to live. It was an education in attitude, not in ideas, and like all educations in attitude it produced people proud of what they were instead of what they did.
The last straw, however, had been Edith; and now that it was daylight again and Marta could look out over the quad at the snow, still coming down in thick curtains, and the Houses and the trees, she had to admit that what scared her the most was that she thought she was about to die. She’d read a few mystery novels in her time. Wasn’t she the perfect candidate for the next dead body? She knew too much about everybody, and she’d been running around like an addled chicken for days, letting everybody know just how much she knew. She knew more than she’d said, too, and just how much more had been on full display in the library last night when she’d blurted out her protest to Alice Makepeace like a character in a bad movie, a parody movie, not even one intended to be serious. If this had been a movie, she would be lying dead on her own kitchen floor right this minute, her head smashed in by the edge of her microwave oven. Except, Marta thought, that this murderer did not use household objects. This murderer used poison. The only question was how he had used poison on Michael Feyre.
It was eight o’clock, and Marta couldn’t stand the idea of staying in her apartment one more minute. The cafeteria hadbeen running on weekend hours all week. That meant there was a buffet set out every morning from eight to ten, to allow both students and faculty time to sleep in. Theoretically, they were all “engaging” each other over the “events” of the last few days. Originally, they were supposed to be “engaging” each other over the emotions unleashed by the suicide of Michael Feyre. Marta wondered what the students were saying now, when so many of them had witnessed Edith’s fall, and the police, and all the rest of it. She couldn’t stand the idea of walking into that and having to eat breakfast on her own, as if she were still in high school and the town pariah, too odd and studious to fit into any of the existing social groups.
I have to get out of here, she thought, and then she realized she didn’t have to go out onto campus at all. Barrett faced Main Street. She just had to go out the front door and into town. Her hair was still wet from her shower. She didn’t own a hair dryer because she hated the way they made newly cleaned hair feel instantly dirty again. She got a wool snow cap out of the pile of things on the bench near her door. She had to unearth it from under scarves and gloves. She didn’t wear hats normally. Then she circled back to her bedroom and changed into jeans and a sweater. It was interesting how easily she could be transformed from Upper-Middle-Class Professional Intellectual Woman back to Marta from the Neighborhood. She felt like one of the mice that had been pulling Cinderella’s carriage, for a few moments transformed into a magnificent horse, now transformed back again and never to be returned.