“UCLA, last I heard.”
“God, that figures. Not even someplace decent, like Berkeley. I can’t stand it. I really can’t stand it. The media isn’t here, but the police are. They’re all over the place, and now they’ve cordoned off the whole area around Maverick Pond—”
“Maverick Pond? Why? Nobody ever goes there this time of year.”
“Of course I know that,” Alice said. “And you know it. Every sensible person knows it. But Mark DeAvecca is saying he saw somebody there, passed out in the evergreenbushes, the night Michael Feyre died; and of course you know who he’s saying it is, don’t you? Me. That’s who he’s saying it is. As if I’ve ever passed out from anything in my life. As if two dozen people didn’t see me that night, not including my husband. Oh, God. And of course Peter is putting up with this. He’s putting up with everything. He’s a complete rag where the police are concerned.”
The coffee was finished. James poured two cups. He took his black, but he put not only the cups but the sugar bowl and creamer on the tray he was making ready. He brought the tray into the living room and put it down on the coffee table.
Alice was staring out the window at the quad. “I’ve got to go,” she said. “I just thought you ought to know what was going on. Is going on. They’re going to wreck this place. It’s happening already. Parents have been showing up all morning. Students are leaving right and left. I don’t care if Peter is fired. He’s been fired before. There’s life after Windsor. But I hate giving that awful little snot his victory.”
Alice pulled her cape more closely around her neck and marched to the door. Her coffee was waiting on the tray. She didn’t even look at it. She opened the door and went out, not bothering to say good-bye. James sat down in front of the two full cups of coffee and sighed. She hadn’t even told him why she’d come to talk to him. Maybe she hadn’t had a reason. Maybe he’d just been available. In any event he was now going to waste a perfectly good cup of expensive ground roast, and that summed up his relationship with Alice—and Alice’s relationships with everybody—perfectly.
It gave James a great deal of satisfaction to think that if David had been here, even if they were caught in a tornado, he’d have been polite about the coffee.
3
Out in the quad Alice Makepeace found herself suddenly at a peak of anger so high and so sharp that she was stopped in her tracks. She was too angry to move, unless she could havehit somebody, and there was nobody around to hit. There were times when she understood violence. She really did. There were times when even the death penalty felt like a viable option. At the moment there was no death penalty in Massachusetts, and she belonged to an organization dedicated to keeping it out. She belonged to too many organizations. She couldn’t remember what half of them did anymore.
She went around the side of Ridenour Library and stopped. The police were there, cordoning off Maverick Pond with yellow police tape, as if it were a crime scene. But it wasn’t a crime scene. If it had been, somebody would have told her There would be ambulances as well as police cars. She watched the men stringing the yellow tape on thin poles they were hammering into the ground, through the snow and ice. On television shows, they used sawhorses. She supposed they couldn’t use sawhorses here. They’d skid on the ice.
She truly hated this. She hated everything about it. She hated the fact that they had taken her fingerprints, as if she were living in a police state. Maybe she was living in a police state. What else explained the fact that they could manufacture a murder case out of whole cloth, get it on the media in hours, and then treat them all like criminals?
She scanned the little crowd around the pond for any sign of Gregor Demarkian but didn’t find him. The police were nothing but that man’s puppets, and that man was Mark DeAvecca’s puppet, and none of them were worth a tenth of what Michael Feyre might have been if he hadn’t capitulated to the culture of Windsor Academy and all the places like it. There was a way of blaming it all on white male patriarchal hegemony, she just couldn’t think what that way was yet.
The truth was, she couldn’t think at all. She turned around and walked back through the quad. There were more police, all of a sudden. She realized they were talking to students and parents on the steps of the Houses, writing things down in notebooks. She wanted to choke. She wanted to walk over to one of them, rip his notebook out of his hand, and demand that he leave her campus. She wanted to dosomething for once, instead of waiting around for something to be done to her, the way she had been since she’d first heard Michael was dead. She knew that he had died for love of her. He had committed suicide because she was about to break off their relationship, because she had found him wanting.