The Headmaster's Wife(163)

“I know that Michael Feyre did not have sex with men and that any other woman would have been both suspect and noticeable if she appeared on the third floor of this house,” Gregor said. “I know that nobody else could have tampered with Mark’s vitamins consistently, and nobody else had access to cyanide—”

“I thought you said arsenic,” Cherie said.

“Arsenic, too. Arsenic for Mark. Cyanide for Edith Braxner because you wanted that to be quick. I don’t know what you put that in, but the police will find out. They always do. Edith Braxner snooped into people’s accounts. My guess is that she knew something was wrong with yours, but I think she still thought it was mostly sloppiness. Given the police presence, though, and me here, you couldn’t risk it, so you didn’t.”

“This is ridiculous,” Melissa said. “We don’t have to listen to this.”

“You killed Michael because he got hold of your walletwith the student IDs inside. That’s how you were stealing what you were stealing here. You’d get the IDs and the students would think they’d lost them. You’d put in for new IDs that were supposed to be changed in some way in case the old ones had been stolen, but if we check we’ll find that they weren’t changed at all. You just didn’t bother to ask for the change in the first place. So you had the IDs, and you could use the accounts. As I said we found them, ten of them together, all boys, and I’d venture to say all residents of this house. We found something else, too.”

“What?” Cherie said. “A smoking gun.”

“In a way,” Gregor said gently. “We found a bank card from the First National City Bank of Sheboygan, Wisconsin, in the name of M. C. Medwar. Melissa Medford. Cherie Wardrop. It’s really just that simple. All we have to do is talk to the tellers, go to the bank, and look at the records. It won’t be hard to trace the account to the two of you. And then there’s that timing I talked about. Nobody else could possibly have killed Michael Feyre, and nobody else could possibly have poisoned Mark DeAvecca, and that means nobody else could or would have wanted to kill Edith Braxner. A prosecutor will be able to stack this evidence up in court and hang you both.”

“They don’t have the death penalty in Massachusetts,” Cherie said absently, but she had sat down abruptly on the floor and she was in tears.





Part Four



Violence is the last resort of the incompetent.

—Isaac Asimov





1


Bennis Hannaford was not on Cavanaugh Street when Gregor Demarkian got home. He climbed the stairs past old George Tekemanian’s first-floor apartment and Tibor in Bennis’s second-floor apartment and walked through his own front door, hoping to find her sitting in front of the computer she had installed in the living room, but she was nowhere to be found. It was a cold first Friday in March, and he thought that the least he should have been able to expect was that she would sit still to fight. That, he had finally realized, was what had so disturbed him about the last week. It wasn’t that Bennis was mad at him. Bennis got mad at him. There were times when he thought she practically made a hobby of it. The real shock was that Bennis didn’t want to talk, not even to yell at him. It wasn’t like her. What was worse, it was ominous as hell. A nontalking Bennis was a violation of the natural law, like a river that flowed upstream.

He got out of his traveling things and left his clothes on the floor of the bedroom when he took them off—if she was anywhere in the vicinity, that would get her yelling at him—and took a shower. When he got out of the shower, he looked around again, but she was still gone. He changed into “casual clothes,” which these days meant he wore a sweater instead of a jacket but still wore a tie. He stared at the clothes on the floor and then picked them up. It wasn’t only Bennis who yelled at him when he did that. His wife had yelled at him, too. He’d come to think of it as the definitive mark of having a woman in his life: as long as she was with him, clothes could be in closets, or in hampers, or even over the backs of chairs, but they couldn’t be on the floor. He was just about to go back out into the living room when he saw the white envelope lying on his pillow, his own first name written across the front of it in Bennis’s strong, sloping hand.

His first instinct was not to open it. If she had left him—but why would she leave him? What was all this about?—there was some advantage in not reading her letter. When she got back in touch with him again, he could say that he’d never found it. She would have to get back in touch with him again because her clothes were still here. He’d seen them in the closet. He got up and went through the drawers. Yes, most of them were still here. Even her underwear was still there. He sat down on the edge of the bed, on her side of the bed, and opened the envelope. It was one of her Main Line envelopes, the thick, cream stationery she had monogrammed every year at some place in the city of Philadelphia.