The Headmaster's Wife(149)

Gregor hadn’t expected it to be Michael Feyre’s wallet. He hadn’t expected it to have anything in the way of money or credit cards in it either. He took it from Mark and bent it back and forth in his hands. It was stiff with plastic cards, but none of them were in the cardholders.

Mark looked, curious. “Where are they? I could feel them, but they’re not there.”

Gregor felt along the inside edges at the crease between the cardholder pocket and the fold for paper money. He found the slit in the lining without too much trouble. He stuck his fingers in and came out with a thick stack of Windsor Academy student ID cards. There were ten of them, all of boys.

“Holy crap,” Mark said. “That’s my lost card. That’s Michael’s card.”

“I expected that would be here,” Gregor said. “Michael lost his card. Then he figured out who had it.” He shuffled through the cards quickly, and toward the middle he found the anomaly, the one he had been looking for. This was not a photo ID, and it was not a Windsor Academy card. It was a VISA debit card issued by something called the First National City Bank of Sheboygan, Wisconsin.

“What’s that?” It was Brian Sheehy, moving in from the hill. A lot of people were moving in, including Danny Kelly and several uniformed police officers. “That’s a bank card. Who’s M. C. Medwar? Do we have an M. C. Medwar in this case?”

“It all depends on how you look at it,” Gregor said. Then he handed the wallet, and its contents, to Brian Sheehy. “There it is, everything Michael Feyre needed to hang somebody with and what got him hanged himself. I knew there was only one person who could possibly have done all this. I just couldn’t figure out why.”





Chapter Six



1


Oddly, Peter Makepeace was calmer than he had ever been before in his life. He was calmer than he had been on the day he had interviewed for this job, in spite of the fact that he had known, at that interview, that there was virtually no chance that he would be turned away. It seemed to him now that he had spent his entire life afraid. As a boy, he had been afraid that he would not measure up to his father’s idea of what Makepeace boys were supposed to be. He would not be athletic enough, or socially graceful enough, or intellectually easeful enough. It was ease, not achievement, that mattered in the Makepeace boys when it came to education. It was not acceptable to fail, but it was also not acceptable to swot. Peter had had disturbing tendencies toward swotting that he had only put down with great difficulty. If he had been born into another kind of family, or aspired to another kind of life, he would have done graduate work in philosophy and written a book on aesthetics. He had tried to do just that a few years ago when being who and what he was had suddenly seemed not nearly enough, but it was too late. Whatever spark he might have had for it when he was first in college was gone now. He had been unable to think of anything to say that wasn’t a cliché.

He had no idea why he was thinking about aestheticsnow, but he was, and at the back of it was the greatest revelation he had ever had about himself as a human being. He was a coward. There was no other word for it. He had not only lived on fear, he had let it rule him, even when the smallest effort at thought would have revealed his fears to be mostly fantasies. Maybe the truth was that he had loved fear, but that didn’t feel quite right. It was more a lack of imagination. He had never been able to picture himself as other than what he was. When he had tried, he had felt as if he were sinking into an abyss. His father would have had no respect for him if he had become the greatest professor of philosophy in the Western world and written the greatest work of modern philosophy. In the end he would have had no respect for himself if he had done those things either. The problem was he had no respect for himself for having not done them or for having done what he had actually done.

My self-esteem is a cesspit, he thought, and almost laughed. He remembered, at the last minute, that he was still standing outside. He had only thought of going back to President’s House and making the calls he needed to make. He didn’t want Gregor Demarkian or that repulsive police chief to start staring at him as if he were a lunatic or, worse yet, think that he had murdered Edith Braxton and tried to poison Mark DeAvecca. They thought Alice had done both, Peter knew that. If he were completely honest with himself, he thought so, too. Alice was a profoundly foolish woman, foolish to the point of being dangerous, but she was not a coward.

He turned carefully away from the scene where Mark was standing in his cotton crewneck sweater—that kid was a mess; he couldn’t even remember to wear a coat in subzero temperatures—and began to make his way back up the hill to the library and then from the library to the quad. There were phone calls he needed to make, people he had to talk to, arrangements he had to finalize. He saw Alice on the other side of the hill, but he didn’t go to her. She didn’t need him. She never needed him. He didn’t want her. It was all going to be bad enough without hearing in her his father’s voice.