The Headmaster's Wife(147)

He turned to find Mark DeAvecca looming over him, made to seem much taller than he was by the fact that he was farther up the hillside.

“Don’t kill me,” Mark said. “I just couldn’t stand it anymore. I mean, there I was, sitting in that stupid hospital, watching my life go by on CNN. I just couldn’t take it anymore.”





3


Gregor Demarkian wasn’t in the mood to murder Mark DeAvecca at the moment, although he was in the mood to murder somebody and he thought he could probably be talked into taking a surrogate for Bennis if Mark wanted to push hard enough. He got it out of his mind by marveling at the impenetrability of a sixteen-year-old’s brain. They really did think they were immortal, all of them. They didn’t need to be psychopaths for that. He wondered where Mark had gotten the clothes he was wearing and decided that Liz must have brought them from the dorm yesterday when she’d gone to see Peter Makepeace. She obviously hadn’t brought him a jacket because he wasn’t wearing one. Gregor didn’t think even Mark would go wandering around in chinos, turtleneck, and a cotton crewneck sweater in this weather ifhe’d had the option of something shiny stuffed with down. Belatedly, Gregor realized just how much Mark’s clothes looked like the kind of thing Bennis would wear. Maybe it was a boarding school thing. Bennis had been to boarding school.

Mark cleared his throat. “Mr. Demarkian? I’d sort of appreciate it if you didn’t tell my mother that I’d come straight here, you know, from the hospital. I mean, she’s going to know I left and all, but it would probably be better if she thought I went back to the dorm.”

“She’s going to know you came here no matter what I say,” Gregor told him patiently. “Look around.”

“She’s here?”

“No, Mark. How did you know to come here?”

“Oh, I was watching this story about it on CNN, there’s this breaking news thing—oh. Ah. We’re being filmed.”

“Exactly. It’s a testimony to the professional competence of Brian Sheehy’s men that you managed to get all the way here without getting nailed by a reporter with a microphone. How did you get here, by the way? Everything is supposed to be blocked off.”

“I came in through Hayes House. You can’t really block off this campus. You’d need an army. Then I came through the library and out the faculty wing. They’ve got the main reading room closed, but you can get to the wing through the foyer.”

Gregor turned around. “There’s a guard by the wing door,” he said.

Mark shrugged. “I sort of went through Marta Coelho’s office and out the window.”

“Sort of?”

“Well, for God’s sake, Mr. Demarkian. I mean, the only reason you’re here to begin with, and the police aren’t just dicking around pretending like nothing’s wrong, is me. Right? I was the first one to get it. And I brought you here. I’m not going to sit in a room two miles away and watch everybody else get on TV.”

“I thought you didn’t want to be on TV because your mother would see you.”

“Nah, I don’t mind being on TV. And don’t tell me I should still be in the hospital. If we had an HMO like everybody else, I’d have been out yesterday. I’m fine. I feel like I’ve taken my life back. You have no idea what a relief it is.”

“For your information,” Gregor said, “Michael’s mother knew there was something wrong. She talked to me, too.”

“Before you got here?”

“No,” Gregor said, “since.”

“There,” Mark said, satisfied. “What are they doing down there anyway? That guy’s going to kill himself if he keeps that up.”

“They’re trying to get under that stand of evergreens to see if something’s been left there,” Gregor said. “We think—I think, might be more accurate—that the figure you thought was passed out in the snow, or dead, the night your roommate died was trying to get something your roommate had put there. Deliberately put there. Let me ask you something. Were you ever aware of Michael using the room you shared with him for, ah, assignations?”

“You mean for sex?” Mark looked amused. “Yeah, he did. Not much, you know, because he and Alice went to her place most of the time. Peter isn’t much in evidence in the middle of the day. But she came up to the room sometimes.”

“Did you ever walk in on them?”

“No. I can hear through the door, if I put my ear against it and listen. And they’d go up there during the time when the dorms are supposed to be locked and off-limits. She could get keys. But they went up there other times, too.”