“I don’t care how close he is to the family. You never really know a person until you’ve lived with him, and we’ve lived with him. He hasn’t.”
“From the reports I’ve heard over the last few days,” James said, “we haven’t really been living with him either. He’s not been himself.”
“It’s a lot of nonsense,” Alice said. “It’s an excuse. People don’t change their personalities, even on drugs. They just become more like themselves. And caffeine is just a drug.”
“I suppose arsenic is also just a drug,” James said, “but its effects can be severe.”
“Peter is over at the business office. The police havepulled all the house accounts, including Edith’s. And the student accounts, too. Eloise in the business office says she thinks they’re looking for regular payouts because that would mean somebody was being blackmailed. It’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard of in my life. Michael didn’t care about money. He had a ton of it; but even if he hadn’t, he wouldn’t have cared. He was used to doing without it.”
James said nothing. When Alice got onto the subject of Michael, it was impossible to get a word in edgewise. He wanted a cup of coffee, but he didn’t want to make it because he didn’t want to offer Alice one. He didn’t want to give her an excuse to stay longer than she otherwise might have.
“Besides,” she was saying, “what do they think they’re going to find in Edith’s accounts? They were meticulous. Everybody knows that. She was legendary in the way she kept them. And those notes she used to write to people when theirs weren’t perfectly done. Like it was any of her business. And do they really think Edith would be paying somebody blackmail? For what? Maybe she read Harry Potter books in secret and or went to Vin Diesel movies. And then, of course, there are the students. What they think they’re going to find there is beyond me, too. I mean, of course they’re going to find regular withdrawals of money. Most of them withdraw cash every Friday afternoon like clockwork. For the weekend. And God only knows, if the students were going to pay blackmail, they’d have enough money to do it. Their parents give them enough cash to found small businesses.”
There was nothing for it. James had to have coffee. He started toward the kitchen and offered some to Alice. “Percolated, not instant,” he promised. “And not Starbucks.”
“What I really need is a shot of Scotch,” Alice said. “Yes, all right, thank you. Coffee would be good. Although I don’t see how anybody around here is ever going to drink coffee again with those rumors about Mark DeAvecca being poisoned by it. And Edith. For God’s sake. Who would want to kill Edith? If he wasn’t in the hospital, I’d have bet on Mark DeAvecca. She was going to give him a C minus in German.”
“And you think he’d kill her for that?”
“It would have gotten him thrown out of school,” Alice said. “You know what the policy is around here. Oh, I don’t know. I just want them to get out of here. And the media. They’re all over the place. We’ve managed to keep them off campus only by threatening a lawsuit, but that isn’t going to last long. Have they taken your fingerprints yet?”
“Not yet, no,” James said. “But it’s early yet, if they’ve just started. Maybe they just haven’t gotten around to me.”
“I think they started with the people who were in the library last night. Did you know I was there? Not when she fell. I didn’t see her fall. Afterward.”
James made noncommittal noises. He knew that Alice had had a run-in with Gregor Demarkian. Everybody knew.
“If you ask me, he made the whole thing up,” Alice said. “Right on the spot like that, saying it was cyanide. He couldn’t possibly have known. He was just trying to make this a bigger mess than it already was and to get himself hired as a consultant so that he could snoop around here all he wanted to. I can’t stand the mother either. The voice of reason on cable TV. You know what else he asked for? The lost-and-found reports.”
“This was Mr. Demarkian again?” James asked.
“Of course it’s Mr. Demarkian again. Oh, it’s all too much. It’s ridiculous. Nobody murdered Edith, and the only thing that’s wrong with Mark is that he’s a spoiled rich kid who just couldn’t cut it. We’re being ripped up and torn to shreds because Liz Toliver has no intention of letting her little darling get a rejection letter from Yale. Or wherever it is he wants to go.”