The Headmaster's Wife(18)

Alice disappeared, going off on a side path somewhere. She was not a straightforward woman. Edith did not find it odd that she would not be able to take a straightforward path home. She was about to go back to her chair and her book when she saw somebody else, and the somebody else gave her pause. Mark DeAvecca. Practically everybody in school thought Mark DeAvecca was taking drugs, handfuls of them. They were trying to ease him out of the school without actually confronting him about it because—Edith had heard this from one of the secretaries in the dean of Student Life’s office—they had done a secret search of his room and not been able to find a single thing. Even his roommate hadn’t had anything, and that was Michael Feyre, who came from one of the less savory neighborhoods of Boston and had connections. There was obviously something wrong with Mark. He sat through classes and didn’t hear a word that was said. He handed in homework that was only half-done, or didn’t hand it in at all, or did it and then left it on the study desk he’d been using in the library so that it was lost, never to be found again. She would have thought he was stupid beyond belief except that she remembered him from the first two weeks of classes, when he had been very different.

It probably is drugs, she thought, watching him move unsteadily down the path toward her window. She wondered where he had been. He seemed to be coming from the direction of Maverick Pond, but that made no sense. There was nothing out at Maverick Pond this time of year, and the cold was bad enough to give you frostbite if you decided to go out there and contemplate nature. Mark DeAvecca did not seem to be the kind of person who would want to contemplate nature under any circumstances. She had a lot of sympathy for that.

He had stopped on the path and turned to look behind him. Edith bit her lip and made up her mind. She stepped out of her apartment into the hall. She stepped out of the hall onto the back stoop. She hated being outside on the campus on weekend nights. It was always too deserted.

“Mark?” she called to him.

He looked up. “Ms. Braxner?”

Edith did not correct him. The culture of the school didn’t matter to her at all. She preferred to be addressed formally, and all the students addressed her formally. Even Alice Makepeace addressed her formally on occasion, but that was a story with a different moral and not one she wanted to think about now.

“You look frozen,” she said. “Worse than frozen, really. Where have you been?”

Mark looked around. “Out to the pond. And around. I was talking to Philip for a while.”

“Philip Candor?”

“Yes.”

“About what?”

Mark looked around again. “I went back to Hayes and I was going to go to bed, but it was still bothering me, so I sort of turned around and came back out; and then I went down there to see, and it wasn’t there. Of course it wasn’t there. I imagined it, I guess.”

“Imagined what?”

“Nothing,” Mark said. “This is where? What house is this?”

“Lytton.”

“Oh, right. There was somebody named Bulwer-Lytton, am I right? They didn’t name the house after Bulwer-Lytton though, did they?”

“No. He was an English writer from the nineteenth century. Famously bad.”

“Okay.”

Edith hesitated. She did not usually fraternize with students. She did not like this pretense of equality that Windsor Academy was so desperate to foster. She didn’t like to know too much about her students’ private lives. Mark DeAvecca’s private life positively frightened her. Still, she thought. Still He looks so cold. There were traces of ice in his heavy dark eyebrows.

“You could come in if you like,” she said. “I’ve got a pot of tea. I’ve got hot chocolate if you’d rather have that.”

“Thank you,” Mark said. He wasn’t looking at her. He never looked at anybody directly. He turned in a complete circle and then faced her again. The muscles in his face were twitching. While she watched him, his whole body seemed to convulse, quickly and painlessly. It was over in a moment.

“Come in,” she said. “You don’t look well. Have you been to the infirmary?”

“The infirmary isn’t open.”

“I meant anytime in the near past.”

“I go every once in a while,” Mark said. “There’s never anything wrong with me. I don’t have a temperature. They send me back to class.”

“I didn’t say I thought you should miss class.”

“I know. I know. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Maybe nothing’s wrong with me. Except, you know, it was never like this before.”