The Headmaster's Wife(131)

“No better than entrapment,” Philip said. “I’ve been out in the real world for a long time now. I don’t have any of myfather’s peculiar ideas about politics or people. Hell, I’m probably a pretty standard-issue political liberal. But I’ve never understood what went on up there that day. I’ve never understood why it was necessary. Dubran. Ruby Ridge. Waco. What’s the point, really? Why do people find it so hard just to let their neighbors be a little eccentric?”

“You shot and killed two federal officers,” Gregor said. “I was there. I saw you do it.”

“I shot at them because they were shooting at me,” Philip said. “I did not start shooting first. Neither did he. The whole incident was manufactured and, worse than that, it was manufactured for television. It’s why I didn’t major in sociology, did you know that?”

“How could I?”

“True enough. It is why I didn’t major in sociology though. My sophomore year at Williams, I took an upper-level course called American Rebellions. It covered things like the antiwar movements in the sixties, but it also covered people like us. I barely made it through to the final exam. People on the outside really don’t get it at all.”

“But you’re not on the inside any longer,” Gregor pointed out. “You didn’t go back to Idaho. You didn’t, what did you call it?”

“Go sovereign.”

“That.”

“No, I didn’t,” Philip said. “At first I didn’t because I knew that’s what the authorities expected me to do. It’s what people like me do when they escape from the federal penitentiary. So I came East instead and moved into an apartment in Boston and went to work doing day labor and did all the other things I told you about. Took the GED. Applied to Williams. They would never have thought to look for me at a place like Williams. Of course, Williams would never have accepted me if they knew I was Leland Beech.”

“But it wasn’t just for convenience,” Gregor insisted, “or even as a smart way to stay away from the law. You never went sovereign. You built an entirely different life. And my guess is, you couldn’t go back to what you were now even ifit was the only way to save yourself from going back to prison.”

“Don’t bet on it, Mr. Demarkian. I have no intention of going back to prison.”

“That may not be up to you.”

Philip smiled again. It was one of the eeriest smiles Gregor had ever seen. “You came to ask me about the night Michael Feyre died. Why don’t you ask me?”

Gregor was aware that something was wrong here. Philip Candor—he had to think of this man as Philip Candor; he was too unlike the boy Leland Beech had been to share the same name—was hiding something. Gregor wondered if he’d taken that name, Candor, on purpose. He probably had.

“All right,” Gregor said. “The night Michael Feyre died, Mark DeAvecca was in the library, in the catwalk nook we found Edith Braxner in last night just before she fell to her death. He says that he looked out the window there and saw somebody lying under a small stand of evergreens, somebody wearing black from head to foot. He came out of the library and went down to see who it was because, he said, he thought the person might have been drinking and passed out, and it was cold—”

“It was freezing,” Philip said. “It was under nine below.”

“Quite. Mark got to the evergreens and found nothing there. He then came back through the faculty wing of the library and stopped for a moment to talk to Marta Coelho. Then he came on out the front and started to cross the quad and ran into you. He said he told you all about it.”

“He did.”

“And did you believe him?”

“No,” Philip said. “He wasn’t in good shape. We’ve heard all about the caffeine and arsenic poisoning now, but at the time I simply assumed he was wasted. And hallucinating. But just in case, after I sent him back to Hayes House, I went out to check.”

“Did you? Did you find anything?”

“No,” Philip said. “There was nobody at or under the evergreens when I looked, and there was no sign that anybody had been there. No footprints in the snow. Nothing like that, at least that I could see. Of course, even if somebody had been there when Mark looked out from the library, there might not have been any traces left behind. The ground was solid with ice. We’d had a couple of bad storms right before.”

“So you thought, what? That Mark was hallucinating?”

“I thought he was behaving fairly normally for a habitual druggie. He may have been hallucinating. He may just have seen something and misinterpreted it. My only concern was in case there really was someone passed out there because in that weather they could easily have frozen to death if they’d slept there overnight. So I checked, and there was nothing.”