The Headmaster's Wife(125)

Marta was sure Mr. Demarkian was about to tell her that complaining was perfectly natural, too, but she already knew that. She trained her attention on John Whoever, now set up and talking in front of Hayes House’s big front windows, looking appropriately solemn while reporting a story in which two people had died. The snow had been very bad overnight. It wasn’t only media vans that were blocking traffic on Main, it was snow dunes as well, created by a road clearance department that liked to make big piles of white stuff in what were supposed to be parking spaces.

Marta just wanted to go home—not to Barrett House, or even back to Yale, but home.

What worried her was that she didn’t think such a place had ever existed.





2


Mark DeAvecca was bored. He was screamingly bored. He was outrageously bored. He had the television on in his hospital room and was sitting up in the visitor’s chair with a tray of hospital food in front of him, and he felt fine, except, of course, that he was starving. It was impossible to get them to give you enough to eat around here, and he didn’t need another lecture about how badly he’d handled the McDonald’s Jimmy had brought for him the other day. Yesterday. It was only yesterday. His mother had brought him a copy of Don Quixote, which she said was one of his father’s favorite books. That was good, especially since he was able to read again, but it wasn’t enough to keep him from going crazy. Now there were all these news stories, and camera crews and television reporters standing right outside Hayes House, and he was stuck here staring at a little cup of tapioca pudding that the hospital nutritionist insisted on calling a “portion.” The woman was insane. A portion was half a gallon of ice cream, or one entire extra-large sausage and pepperoni pizza, or three or four of those Triple Play appetizer samplers you could get at Chili’s. Mark’s mother was not very fond of Chili’s, but Jimmy absolutely loved it; and when they were all home in Connecticut, Mark and Geoff could get Jimmy to take them out to the one in Waterbury. Mark thought there was nothing on the planet he wanted right now more than he wanted to go to Chili’s.

A reporter on CNN was saying, “Edith Braxner was born in 1948 in …”

Mark didn’t catch where she’d been born, only the date. She was even more ancient than he’d thought she was. He poked at the tapioca pudding with his finger. It was a very odd consistency. He’d never had tapioca pudding before. He’d decided to hate it without trying it.

There was a cough on the other side of the room. Mark looked up from the chair and saw Gregor Demarkian standing in the doorway.

“Oh, good,” he said. “I’m so bored, you wouldn’t believe it. Couldn’t you tell these idiots it’s okay for me to go? I feel fine. I really do. And it’s not like I’m going to go drinking any more caffeine. Even I can get the message of ’it was enough to kill me.’ I’m not stupid.”

Gregor came all the way into the room and sat down on the edge of Mark’s bed. They never had put Mark into a single room, they’d just failed to fill the other bed in this one. Mark thought Gregor looked tired.

“I am fine, you know,” he said. “There’s no reason to keep me cooped up here going stir-crazy while the only interesting thing that’s ever happened at Windsor is in full-tilt boogie. All I want to do is go back to my dorm.”

“And give the person who tried to kill you another shot?”

“I promise not to eat any of the food at school at all,” Mark said solemnly. “I won’t take so much as a LifeSaver from any person on campus. I’ll have everything I eat brought in on delivery. I’ll double-check the seal on every can of Sprite. How’s that?”

“I think you ought to consider the possibility that your mother isn’t going to let you go back to school at all, not even to finish the year,” Gregor said. “That’s been the general drift of the conversations I’ve heard.”

“Yeah, I know,” Mark said. “It’s stupid though. I mean, okay, under the circumstances, I can see my not coming back next year, if they’d even have me, which I don’t think they would. But does it make sense to make me repeat my sophomore year of high school because my mother wants to blow this place up?”

“She’s got good reason to want to blow this place up. And there might not be much of a year left for you to finish. I take it you’ve been watching the news.”

“Yeah. Somebody killed Dr. Braxner.”

“Poisoned her, yes. The usual result of this sort of thing is that parents take their children out, even once the murdereris caught and there is no more danger. It wouldn’t be surprising if the school was forced to close down.”