The Headmaster's Wife(154)

Joseph Baldwin, he reminded himself now.

The other car was parked in a garage in Boston, the space paid for by the month on Joseph Baldwin’s account. He stopped in during the summers to take it out, a man who lived in Colorado and came to Boston to see his parents during the vacations when he didn’t have to teach school. The men who worked in the garage were mostly transients. They saw hundreds of people a day, dozens who had long-term parking deals. They wouldn’t remember him from one day to the next, if any of them bothered to look at him at all. He went up to the top floor, where the long-terms were kept, and got into a silver gray Volkswagen Golf. The trick was never to buy a memorable car or one in a memorable color. Philip Candor’s car back at Windsor, however, was memorable. It was a bright yellow Jeep Wrangler, as noticeable on Main Street as a circus elephant would have been, if Windsor had allowed circuses. It didn’t. It considered circuses to be hotbeds of animal abuse.

He eased the car out of its space and down the ramps. He turned on the news and listened for any sound of his name. There was none. There was a lot on the investigation at Windsor Academy, but either the feds were slow on the uptake—not an unusual occurrence in his experience—or Demarkian hadn’t called them yet. Since he couldn’t believe the second, he had to assume the first. That gave him a little tune. If he was careful, if he never drove any faster than the speed limit, if he did not do what they would expect him to do, he ought to be out of their line of sight long before they realized he was gone.

He was going to miss it though. He knew that. He liked the life he had built for himself. He liked teaching, and he liked mathematics. He had quite a bit of money put aside, but not enough so that he would never have to work again. Teachers didn’t make that kind of cash, and although his stabs at the stock market had been lucrative, he was nobody’s Warren Buffett. He would have to find something to do, and inevitably it would be less pleasant work than what he had become used to.

He could always fake credentials, but he knew he wouldn’t. That was far too risky, and it was far too easy to get caught. Besides, he could never fake credentials as good as the ones he had earned honestly, and he was very proud of those.

He was just making his way onto 1-95 north when it hit him: he was his father’s son after all. He might not restrict his reading to the Bible and The Turner Diaries. He might not live out in the middle of nowhere convinced that the mailman was an agent of the One World Government bent on destroying him by any means necessary. He was still living a life of subterfuge and deception. If his father could see him now, he’d be proud as hell of him. He’d managed to trick them at their own game. He wasn’t so much as a blip on their radar.

Of course his father couldn’t see him now. His father was dead, shot in the back by a federal agent wielding a rifle he only half understood how to use. His brothers were living

God only knew where, doing God only knew what, except that Philip didn’t believe in God and had never understood how anybody could. He had left all that behind in Idaho, too.

He wondered if it mattered that his paranoia was justified, while his father’s had not been, and then he saw the entrance to the interstate and slowed down to make his way onto the ramp.

Paranoia was paranoia. It didn’t matter if it was justified or not. You had to go where it took you.





3


Back on the hill, Mark DeAvecca had finally gotten cold. He let Gregor and the police chief mess around with the wallet he had found for them and whatever else it was they were looking for under those evergreens and retreated to the library, where there was a possibility that he might get warm. He was, he’d realized, actually himself again. His head was not fuzzed. He didn’t feel anxious and panicked. He could think and think clearly. What he was thinking was that it was tune for him to get out of this place once and for all. His mother had a point. There was something wrong here, or at least something wrong for him. He had heard the talk today about how the school was about to close. Parents were showing up at the gates ready to take the boarding students home, and the day students weren’t here at all, since they were still on the hiatus that had been declared when Michael died. It didn’t matter. He didn’t want to be here anymore. Even if it meant having to repeat the tenth grade—well, okay, that rankled. That made him completely nuts—but even so, it was time to get out of here and do something sane. Maybe he could convince his mother that, given the ordeal he had been put through, he deserved to do something more interesting between now and the end of the school year besides vegetating in Connecticut while Geoff finished third grade.