“But not end of problem,” Tibor said, “or you wouldn’t be telling me this.”
“Right,” Gregor said. “Mark was still disturbed about the death of his roommate, and he was disturbed about what he’d seen out the library window, and he called me. But he didn’t think Michael had been murdered. He thought Michael had killed himself over Alice Makepeace.”
“Alice Makepeace?”
“The headmaster’s wife.”
Tibor brightened. “The one with the red hair who was on the news this morning? She’s a compelling woman, Krekor. Very odd when she talks, but very compelling. This Michael Feyre had an unrequited love for her, and Mark thought he had killed himself for love of her?”
“Not unrequited, no,” Gregor said. “Alice Makepeace made a habit of sleeping with students. Michael was the flavor of the month, and everybody knew it. And Alice is Alice. She is a very compelling person, the person everybody pays attention to. So everybody, Mark included, thought that whatever had happened to Michael Feyre had happened because of Alice Makepeace, which suited Cherie and Melissa just fine. Then, Mark asked me up to school, and Cherie and Melissa knew that I was going to hear about the ’hallucination,’ the person under the evergreens near the pond, and they decided they just couldn’t risk him talking to me. So when he got back to the dorm on the night I arrived, Cherieinvited him in for coffee, spiked the coffee with a lot more arsenic than he could handle, and gave him a prepackaged ice cream sundae with chocolate chips in it, which she’d doctored beforehand with chunks of caffeine tablets. That way, when Mark died throwing up all over creation, the hospital would find the chunks and assume caffeine poisoning. They wouldn’t need to look any further. It was sheer accident and Mark’s good luck that he started throwing up so soon he got most of it out of his system, and I showed up on the scene and made sure he got to the hospital on time. You wouldn’t believe how hard Cherie tried not to call nine-one-one. She told me she had to get permission from President’s House. She dithered. I thought she was a damned fool. She was just trying to make sure she got the job done, which she didn’t. There was so much luck in this, it makes me sick to think about it.”
“There was also another murder, yes? Edith. I have never known anyone named Edith. I have always thought it was a beautiful name.”
“Yes, well,” Gregor said, “Edith. The official explanation is that Edith knew there was something wrong with the Hayes House accounts, and that was why Cherie had to kill her. And I think that’s mostly true. She was notorious on campus for checking the accounts. Her own accounts were pristine. She wrote scolding little notes to people on the mess theirs were in. She undoubtedly noticed quite a lot. She seems to have been a noticing kind of woman. But I’ll bet anything that that wasn’t all of it. When she died, she was up on that catwalk in the library where Mark had looked out and seen Cherie trying to get those cards. I wonder if she’d seen the same tiling on the same night from another angle.”
“How will you find out?”
“I won’t find out,” Gregor said. “Some things will have to remain mysterious. There’s never a murder investigation where you know everything you wish you knew. I’ll be happy to find out what Cherie put the cyanide in, what Edith ingested up there on the catwalk that caused her to die. Cherie’s kept her mouth shut on that one, and I don’t blameher. Edith’s the death she’s most likely to get sent away for good for, if they can convict her for it. She must have been in a hurry, though. Cyanide is a lot quicker than arsenic and a lot surer, too.”
Linda Melajian came over and put their big entrée plates down in front of them. Then she picked up the salad plates in a stack. “Look at that,” she told Gregor. “Mom really went to town on the french fries. She says she doesn’t want Bennis to think you didn’t get enough cholesterol while she was away. Are you going to have dessert? I want to reserve enough hot fudge if you are, since you seem to be intent on killing yourself tonight.”
“I never eat hot fudge,” Gregor said.
“I do,” Tibor said. “You could reserve enough for me.”
“Some people just don’t know what’s good for them,” Linda Melajian said, walking off with the salad plates.
Gregor looked down at his steak and then across at Tibor’s yaprak sarma and decided he’d made the right choice. He needed red meat, and close to raw, and lots of it. Linda came back with their glasses of wine, and he drank half of his in a single gulp.