He made his way along the frozen paths to Doyle House’s front door and rang that bell. He’d barely put his finger to the button when the door was flung open and he found himself staring at a tall, thin, elegant man in impeccable tailoring, holding a sheaf of papers in one hand.
“Mr. Demarkian,” the man said. “Mr. Demarkian. I went over to the inn a little while ago looking for you, but you’d already gone out. I’m James Hallwood.”
This was almost too convenient to be believed, but Gregor didn’t think he ought to turn down good luck. He didn’t have that much of it. James Hallwood was standing back and motioning him inside. Gregor went, wondering what the papers were. James closed the door behind them both.
“It’s very difficult to know what the right thing to do might be,” James said. “You think and you think. And, of course, if I’d received this paper, Michael’s paper, at any other time, I would have brought it to the attention of the administration. Ever since Columbine, we’re all very careful to focus on any sign of impending violence. But then he was dead. You can see that, can’t you? There was no point making a fuss of it if he was dead. It would only have hurt his family to no good purpose.”
Gregor noticed that James Hallwood was not leading him into an apartment. He had opted instead to go to the large Doyle House living room, a gigantic empty space with more couches than Gregor would have thought any room needed. There was also a television set, tucked in between the shelves of a built-in bookcase. It was not a large television set, and it had dust on it. James motioned for him to sit down.
“Don’t worry,” he said, “they’re not anywhere around at this hour of the day. On days when class is in session, they’re not permitted in the Houses after breakfast until two thirty. That’s to make sure that none of them hide. There are no classes today, of course, but they’re all at an assembly at the moment. We’ll have the grief counselors in any minute now.”
“Other faculty members can be here, can’t they?” Gregor said. “Houses have more than one houseparent, as far as I can tell.”
“Yes, yes they do,” James said. “But you don’t have to worry about that either. Linda and Donald Corby are away for the day. They’ve gone to visit Linda’s mother. About to jump ship, if you ask me, although I don’t expect there’s going to be much of a ship to jump by the end of the week. The news is out now. It’s all over the place. This school will be on the verge of collapse by tomorrow morning. I wanted to show you these, both of them. The first one is Mark DeAvecca’s. The second one is Michael Feyre’s. They’re short stories they wrote for my English class a few weeks ago. Take a look.”
Gregor sat down on one of the big couches, took off his coat again—this was what he hated most about winter, getting in and out of all the extra clothes—and read the first few paragraphs of the story on the top.
That year the snow came down in thick white mats like lace doilies, shutting out the mountains, Martin Francis thought he had reached a place in life where only good things could happen to him, and the best of those things was Andrea Marl. It didn’t matter to him that Andrea Marl was twenty years older than he was, any more than it mattered to him that she was married. He cared only that she ask him into her bedroom every Wednesday afternoon during the study break, and that her husband always be away in Boston until very late on Wednesday evening.
“That’s remarkable,” Gregor said. “Mark wrote this?”
James Hallwood nodded impatiently. “Yes, yes. Whatever else we may all want to say about Mark DeAvecca, he writes like a professional. Better than his mother does, and she’s been at it and getting paid for it for longer than he’s been born. But that’s not the point. Look at the other one.”
Gregor ran through page after page—Mark had written a very long story—and finally came to the last few, badly typed and almost illegible under a cascade of Inkjet printer smear. The first few lines were impossible to read. The next few were not, but he wished they were.
… take an axe straight to her cunt smash it open and see it bleed and fuck the whole slimy garbage of entrails and pussy and …
Gregor put the papers down on his lap. “For God’s sake.”
“It’s hard to read, I know it is,” James Hallwood said. “It took me three tries before I managed to get through it. But I did get through it. And that’s when I realized.”
“Realized what?” Gregor said. “That Michael Feyre was apparently deeply mentally disturbed? I think everybody knew that already.”