The Headmaster's Wife(159)

“Jesus Christ,” Brian said. “This person has to be crazy. Either that or a megalomaniac. Why the hell would he—he or she, whatever—why would he bother to do that?”

“Because there’d been a mistake.”

“What kind of a mistake?”

“That’s what I meant when I said look to Mark,” Gregor said. “I think that sometime in the fall the perpetrator made the wrong withdrawal at the wrong time. Something happened. Mark was away for the weekend, maybe, or in the infirmary, or otherwise tied up so that he could not have made the withdrawal in question. And that’s the nightmare in this kind of scheme. That one day you’ll make a withdrawal, a relatively sizable withdrawal, under circumstances in which the victim not only knows but can prove that he didn’t make it himself. I say sizable because a ten-dollar mistake might be shrugged off as some kind of minor anomaly. Take fifty dollars, though, or a hundred, and once the mistake is discovered people will start to ask questions. I think that’s the kind of mistake that was in fact made. And when Mark began to question what was going on with his account, the perpetrator needed to take his mind off it. So Mark got fed either the arsenic itself, or something else likely to make him immediately and violently ill, and by the time he made it back to. The dorm from the infirmary, the perpetrator had already tampered with the multivitamins. It wouldn’t have been hard. In fact it would have been easier and easier as time went on, because the more arsenic Mark took, the more dysfunctional he would have become. In no time at all it would have been a case of nobody believing him if he did say something about the missing money.”

“And it got worse after Christmas because arsenic builds up in the system,” Brian said.

“That and the perpetrator decided to screw Mark up totally by playing around with the caffeine. Don’t forget there were caffeine tablets in his body as well as arsenic the night he collapsed.”

“That was because the perp was trying to kill him.”

“At first it was because the perpetrator was trying to make sure Mark didn’t know that Michael Feyre was engaged in this particular bit of blackmail. And that would have been very hard to keep secret when Michael was Mark’s roommate, and Michael was a hinter. Definitely a hinter. Let me ask you something. Did your people ask around about where on this campus somebody could find poison, specifically arsenic and cyanide?”

“Of course.”

“And what did they find out?”

“Both of them, up straight, so to speak, in the science materials closet. A couple of different insecticide powders with arsenic in them in the groundskeeper’s shed.”

“Exactly,” Gregor said. Then he looked up toward the library’s wing-side door and watched Alice Makepeace sailing out of it, her long, red hair bouncing and whipping in the wind. “She’s a remarkable woman, isn’t she? Never mind the downside. She really is a remarkable woman. One of those people who command attention. I don’t envy her. It’s like a drug. And drugs are kinder.”

A moment later it was Mark DeAvecca coming out of the door, his shoulders hunched, looking cold even though he’d just been inside. He saw Gregor and Brian Sheehy and came over to them.

“Hi,” he said. “I need my jacket. It’s really awful. I’m serious. I should have remembered. And it’s not like I’m forgetting things anymore.”

“I want to ask you something,” Gregor said. “Sometime this fall, did you get sick? Very sick? As sick as you’d ever been before?”

“Yeah, September thirtieth. At least that was the day I went to the infirmary. I think it was Monday. I got sick onthe weekend, but the infirmary isn’t open on weekends. I was throwing up all over the place.”

“Did you end up in the infirmary?” Gregor asked.

“For the day,” Mark said. “Not even overnight. They don’t like to keep you in the infirmary in this place. I don’t think it’s anything sinister though. That happens in a lot of schools at the beginning of the year. Everybody brings their bugs that they’re immune to already and gives them to those who aren’t.”

“What about before that weekend?” Gregor said. “Did you go home for a weekend before then? Or did you go away?”

“No, I couldn’t have. You’re not allowed to leave campus for the first month. You’re supposed to be getting acclimated.”

“You didn’t go anywhere at all?”

“Well, I went into Boston with some people. For the day, you know. We saw some movies and had lunch.”