The Headmaster's Wife(130)

Gregor took a seat in a club chair without waiting to be asked. Philip Candor stayed standing.

“Would you like me to get you some coffee? I always seem to be offering coffee to people who come here.”

“Thank you, but no,” Gregor said. “Have some yourself, if you’d like, of course.”

“I would, if I liked,” Philip said. Then he came around and sat down on the couch, close enough so that his knees would have touched Gregor’s if he leaned only a little forward. He leaned back instead. “Mark’s all right from what I’ve heard. That’s a relief.”

“Yes, it is,” Gregor agreed. He took his coat off. He reached into his jacket and took out his notebook again. He knew what questions he needed to ask. He couldn’t get started because he couldn’t get past the increasingly intense conviction that he knew this man’s face. He looked at his notes again. He looked at the face again. Philip Candor was still smiling.

“Dear God,” Gregor said suddenly, “you’re Leland Beech.”

“Very good, Mr. Demarkian, but you’re slipping. I’ve been sitting here for days, expecting you to walk through my door and recognize me immediately.”

“It’s been a long time,” Gregor said. “It’s been, I don’t know—”

“Coming onto twenty-five years. If I’d stayed in jail, I’d have had another ten to go before I could be considered for parole. But of course I wouldn’t be considered for parole, not seriously, not in this climate.”

“I remember the escape,” Gregor said. “I didn’t realize you’d never been picked up again. But how did you get here? What are you doing here?”

“Teaching mathematics. I’ve been teaching mathematics here for more than a decade.”

“Do you know anything about mathematics?”

“Of course,” Philip said, “I’ve got a very good degree. Two of them, to be accurate. A bachelor’s from Williams. A master’s from Tufts. About a year after the escape, I took the GED in Massachusetts and passed with flying colors. My father may have been a lunatic, but he did make sure we were all literate. Then I took the SATs and did very well indeed. I applied to Williams and they took me. I didn’t really lie, you know, about anything but my name and my arrest record.”

“That’s a lot to lie about,” Gregor said.

Philip shrugged. “I told them the truth as far as it went. Growing up with a survivalist lunatic who’d gone sovereign before I was six years old. Growing up living off the land and learning to read from the Bible and those amazing books he had. I still remember those books. I even havethem. My own copies, of course. The originals were destroyed in the firebombing. Everything was destroyed in the firebombing. I wasn’t sorry to see it go.”

“You did your best to defend it at the time,” Gregor pointed out.

Philip dismissed this. “Look at it in context. Nobody ever does anymore, but you should. I was two days past my eighteenth birthday. I’d never seen more than four or five people who weren’t directly related to me since my father had taken us all out of town and set us up in that cabin. I’d been brought up to believe that the entire world was plotting against us, not against the United States or against the people of Idaho, but against us, the Beech family, we were the big prize the FBI and the CIA and the Vatican and everybody else you can think of meant to wipe off the face of the earth. And then what happened? The FBI showed up at our front door and started shooting at us.”

“That’s not the way it happened, and you know it,” Gregor said.

“But it is the way it happened,” Philip insisted. “At least, that’s what it looked like from the inside, and I was on the inside. You can show me all the evidence you want that my father was stockpiling weapons and doing God knows what else up there. I heard all the evidence about that at the trial. But that isn’t what it looked like from the inside. What it looked like was a bunch of guys with helicopters and machine guns ganging up on us. And even now, even after all this time and everything I know, it still looks like that to me. What difference did it make if he was stockpiling weapons? There were just the six of us. He was too much of a loner even to band together with other loners. We weren’t a threat to the security of the United States. We weren’t even a threat to the peace and safety of Dubran, Idaho. We were just up there doing our thing and not bothering anybody.”

“He bought three rifles and enough ammunition to take out the state of Illinois from a federal officer,” Gregor said.