The Headmaster's Wife(127)

“Not possible,” Mark said. “He couldn’t have gotten a girl up there. We have parietal hours on Saturday and Sunday afternoons from two to five. That’s it. Otherwise, no members of the other sex allowed in the Houses above the first-floor common rooms. And don’t tell me he could have sneaked her in there or that she could have sneaked out. Go look at Hayes. There’s one stairwell going up three floors, and there are doors opening on it all the way. Weekend nights, the place is full of people running back and forth. There aren’t even any fire escapes except for one at each of the sides, and you have to go through the bathrooms to access those. He couldn’t have gotten a girl up there without somebody seeing, and she couldn’t have gotten out again without somebody seeing.”

“Maybe it’s not a girl we’re looking for,” Gregor said.

“Wrong again,” Mark said. “Michael was not a decent human being. I mean, okay, I think we get a little too trite and silly with all the hymns to tolerance at Windsor, but once I’d known Michael for a while I could almost see the point. He hated homosexuals. He truly and sincerely hated them. It wasn’t homophobia and all that stuff people talk about. It was pure hostility. He might have raped some guy in the butt if he was feeling particularly vicious, but he wouldn’t let another guy do something to him; and he really wouldn’t have let some other guy get him tied up.”

“Sometimes, what people protest most—”

“Please, Mr. Demarkian. I’ve heard it all before. But I knew Michael Feyre.”

“All right,” Gregor said. “Let’s try a couple of nights ago, the night you ended up in here. You fell asleep on the bed in my room. You woke up. Then what?”

“I went back to campus,” Mark said, “and I went to the Student Center to get some coffee because I was tired and I didn’t want to go to sleep right away. Oh, wait. I ate the food in your room that room service left you.”

“I noticed that. That’s all right. What about when you went back to campus?”

“I went to get coffee,” Mark said, trying to think, “and I wasn’t moving too well. I was really tired. I don’t get tired like that anymore. Do you think that was the arsenic?”

“Maybe. It could have been the caffeine.”

“But caffeine is supposed to hype you up,” Mark said. “Okay, never mind. I ran into Alice Makepeace, and she got me a cup of coffee. A big one. Don’t go jumping to conclusions. I asked her to. A big one with sugar. And she sat down with me for a while and said, well—” Mark had no idea how he was supposed to put this. It was always difficult to tell what adults would take in stride and what would make them go ballistic. “She accused me of being jealous of her, uh, relationship with Michael. She said I brought you here to hurt the school and hurt her because I was jealous.”

“Were you?”

“Hell, no,” Mark said. “I mean, she’s gorgeous to look at, you know, I’m not dead; but she doesn’t do it for me at all. She makes my skin crawl. She’s one of those people who uses ‘inappropriate’ all the time. You know what I mean? She finds Johnny and Susie screwing on the dining room table right in the middle of lunchtime and she says it’s ’inappropriate.’ The word drives me nuts.”

“So you had coffee with her and listened to her lecture,” Gregor said.

“And that was it,” Mark said. “I got really upset. I mean, wouldn’t you be? So I got up to get myself another cup of coffee, and she got snide and said in the shape I was in I’d never make it, so she went and got me the second one, too, full of sugar. And then I left the cafeteria and took the coffee up to the lounge to drink it in peace because there isn’t ever anybody there at that time at night, and then when I was finished with it I threw the cup away and came back to Hayes House.”

“And?”

Mark got out of his chair. He was not only bored, he was restless. “And,” he said, “I was in trouble again. Welcome to my life at Windsor. You’re supposed to stop into the House before dinner and sign in, as a sort of check that they know you’re around somewhere. I forgot about it when I went to see you. Actually, I was with you longer than I expected to be and then I fell asleep and then I forgot about it when I woke up, but it didn’t make a damned bit of difference what had happened because Sheldon was after my hide on any excuse. So I came back in and there was a big fuss, and Cherie took me to her apartment to get me out of Sheldon’s way while she tried to calm Sheldon down, which wasn’t easy. And I was still hungry, you know, so she let me have one of these prepackaged ice cream sundae things she keeps in her freezer. And then I wanted another cup of coffee and she made me one because Sheldon never lets me use his kitchen. He won’t even let me use my electric kettle. He says it’s a fire hazard.”