Cherie flushed. “Sorry. She’s right, of course.”
“Do you mind if we come in?” Gregor asked.
Cherie backed up and let them come. The apartment was stripped bare and full of boxes. Even the curtains had been taken down. Gregor was sure that the school provided the furniture for these apartments. He would have expected the school to provide the curtains as well. Maybe he was wrong, or maybe the school had but Cherie and Melissa hadn’t liked them.
They all trooped into the living room, and Melissa looked up from the box she was taping. “Take a good long look,” she said. “You’re seeing history in the making. Windsor’s first lesbian couple houseparents, symbol of all things progressive at Windsor Academy, packing up and getting out. Not that that has anything to do with our being lesbians, of course, but if the school magazine wrote it up, that’s the way they’d put it. We’re this year’s poster children for the virtue of tolerance.”
“Well, you might be,” Gregor said, “but I’d be very surprised to find that you were actually lesbians. I suppose it’s possible, but from what I’ve seen it’s very unlikely. It was a good cover, though, given that this place is what it is.”
“What is this?” Melissa asked. “A new version of ‘don’t tell me you’re gay, you just need a good fuck’?”
Cherie winced at the language. “Melissa.”
“Do you mind if I sit down?” Gregor said. He didn’t waitfor an answer. He took off his coat, laid it over the back of the couch, and sat. Melissa was suddenly very wary. Cherie looked as helpful and clueless as always. Gregor sat.
“You know,” he said, “as soon as I knew that Mark had been poisoned with arsenic, I knew that there were only two people who could have possibly given it to him—three, if we count Melissa. But it had to be either Sheldon LeRouve, or you, Cherie. You were the only people who were with him in the right time period.”
“There were students here at the time,” Melissa said. “Don’t forget that.”
“Oh, I’m not forgetting it. But Mark didn’t go upstairs that night. He wasn’t sleeping in his dorm room. He was bunking in with Sheldon LeRouve. Any student who was going to poison him, not only with the arsenic but with the caffeine tablets, had to manage to do it in full view of the common rooms and in a very short time. But when Mark came home, he came to this apartment because Cherie invited him here.”
“I did invite him here,” Cherie said. “I felt sorry for him. Sheldon was being a bastard as usual, and Mark looked so sick.”
“He should have looked sick,” Gregor said. “He’d just come from my room at the Windsor Inn, where he’d taken his multivitamin right in front of me, and the multivitamin was full of arsenic.”
“What?” Mark said.
“I’ve already explained all that to Brian here once today, so I won’t do it again now,” Gregor said. “But Mark came here, and you invited him in, and you gave him a cup of coffee and a packaged ice cream sundae.”
“He asked for the coffee,” Cherie said, “and he said he was hungry. He’d missed dinner. It was the only thing I had.”
“The extra arsenic was in the coffee,” Gregor said. “The pieces of caffeine tablets were in the sundae. That means you’d been planning this for a while, at least for the day. Why? Because I was here?”
“You’re being ridiculous,” Melissa said.
“Unfortunately, I’m not being ridiculous at all,” Gregor told her. “It’s a matter of the timing. Nobody else could have poisoned Mark that night, and nobody else could have killed Michael Feyre.”
“Michael committed suicide.”
“Michael was murdered, and you murdered him because he had proof of the scam you’d been pulling; and once people started looking into that scam, they’d realize Windsor wasn’t the only place you’d pulled it. Find a school. Become a houseparent. Pull—something. Not always the same something you pulled here, but in every school there will be a way to make money if you know how to do it, and you did it. We’ll get Brian to pull the records on the last few schools you’ve been at. Now that he knows what to look for, it won’t be hard to find. Up until Windsor, you were always very careful. And my guess is that you always left quickly, long before anybody would get suspicious. It’s too bad you didn’t do that here.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Melissa said. “And you can’t prove any of it. You’re just speculating.”