The House was quiet. If students were up and about, picking apart the death of Edith Braxner, they were not doing it in the Barrett House common rooms. Although Barrett fronted on Main Street, its front door didn’t open there, but to the side. Marta went out onto the side porch and looked around. There was a lot going on, much more than she had expected. The street seemed to be even more clogged with people than it was usually. She came around to the front and made her way onto Main Street proper, and then she sawwhat was going on. There were half a dozen large vans parked in the middle of the road down at Hayes House. They were blocking all traffic on Main; and although the police were out in force, trying to do something about the situation, they didn’t look ready to move. Marta saw two women holding microphones, and then, looking more closely, paying attention finally, a few men carrying cameras on their shoulders. Press, she thought. She should have realized there would be Press. You couldn’t have a murder at an expensive private school, where lots of famous people sent their children, without attracting attention from the media. The question was why they were at Hayes House instead of down here at the other end, at the library. Edith had died in the library.
Marta’s immediate thought was that somebody else had died, and nobody had come to tell her. If she had been a member of the media, she would have called Hayes House the “locus of evil” or something like that. Maybe “locus” was too esoteric a word for a mass audience. Still, Michael Feyre had died in Hayes House. Mark DeAvecca had been poisoned in Hayes House. Now, if there was another one, it would be like one of those serial killer/slasher movies that had been all the rage while she was growing up.
She moved a little closer and saw that, although there were plenty of cameras and men and women with microphones and media vans and people asking other people to speak into audiotapes, there was no sign of an ambulance or of the pile of police vehicles that had been at the library last night. It wasn’t likely that anything new had happened. She pressed even closer, trying to hear somebody saying something sensible, but nobody was. The media people were speaking in generalities and not even sensible generalities. There was a tall man in a long, formal coat right in front of her. She pressed against him, trying to get past.
He had turned around and was already holding out his hand to her before she realized who it was: Gregor Demarkian, the detective or consultant or whatever he was who had wanted to see the nook in the library where Mark DeAvecca used to go to read. Marta had no idea if she was happy to see him. He was there, just as he had been there in Ridenour. He did not make her feel intimidated, or frightened, or shy, which she often did with people she didn’t know well, and especially with men. She took his hand, feeling a little embarrassed for him because he was holding it out like that. He didn’t seem to be embarrassed for himself.
“It’s Marta Coelho,” he said, polite, not questioning.
She nodded. “It’s Portuguese,” she said. “My name, I mean. Coelho is a Portuguese name, and my family named me Marta instead of Martha because Marta is the Portuguese form.”
“Mine’s Armenian.”
“Yes,” Marta said. She thought they both sounded like idiots. “I came out to walk. I didn’t realize all this was going on. There hasn’t been another… another death, has there?”
“No,” Gregor Demarkian said, “the media has just caught up with us, that’s all. It had to happen eventually.”
“Everybody’s been saying that for days,” Marta said. “They even said that when Michael died, and then it didn’t happen. You never got what you wanted last night, did you? A view out that window. Although I still don’t see what you could have seen, even if you had looked. There’s nothing there.”
“So everybody keeps telling me,” Gregor said. “Edith Braxner wanted to look though, didn’t she?”
“Did she?” There was actually a CBS van in the street—not just the local CBS van, with the local CBS reporter, but a national one. She looked around and caught sight of John Whateverhisnamewas, the very pretty one who sat in for Dan Rather from time to time on the evening news. “Maybe Edith was just up there,” she said. “People did go up there every once in a while. Not a lot of people. The catwalk made people dizzy. But some people did. Maybe Edith just went up to read for a while.”
“Maybe,” Gregor agreed. “Do you know what she was doing before she went up there?”
“I don’t know,” Marta said. “I was in my office. Not that Iwas getting a lot of work done. I’ve been distracted beyond belief this week. But I was there for over an hour. She was at dinner though.”