The Headmaster's Wife(25)
He reached the third-floor landing. His room was on the far end, but the hallway was dark and he could see that no light was coming from under the door. Michael was either out or asleep. He was most likely out. Michael had a varied and active social life. Mark wondered what it was like to have an affair with a woman like Alice Makepeace, the kind of affair that everybody would know about so that even the teachers looked at you and wondered. It had to be better than having the teachers looking at you and wondering if you were an idiot or a drug addict. Mark was sure of that, in spite of the fact that he didn’t much like Alice Makepeace. She was beautiful. He wasn’t so out of it that he couldn’t recognize that. He didn’t trust her. There was something—wrong—about the way she was, something off, that made all his defenses go up automatically.
He opened the door to the room he shared with Michael Feyre, and the first thing he noticed was that the window was open. The room was ice cold and there was a wind coming in, blasting in his face, making the hair on his arms go stiff. Michael had to be out. He wouldn’t have lasted ten minutes in the cold in this place. Mark snaked his hand around on the wall next to the door until he found the light switch. Always before, when he’d gotten a new room, it had taken him only a week or so to know instinctively where the light switches were on the walls. In this place, he had to learn over and over again, time after time.
He turned on the light. He looked into the cold room for a great long minute without reacting at all. Everything was a mess. The drawers had been pulled out of both the desks and both the dressers. There were books and papers and clothes everywhere. The laundry bags had been ripped apart. There was dirty underwear on the floor. Someone had smashed the big round alarm clock he and Michael called the Alarm Clock of Satan. Its hard, crystal face guard was shattered. Its hour hand had disappeared.
They’re going to have a fit about the mess in here, Mark thought, and then, only then, did he acknowledge what he had seen first, the most obvious thing in the room, the elephant in the middle of the floor.
Michael Feyre’s body was hanging from a rope thrown over one of the snaking pipes belonging to the sprinkler system. His neck was bent at an odd angle. His muscles were twitching. His eyes were bulging out. There was a bruise on his neck that looked as black as if somebody had tried to color in his skin with permanent marker.
They ‘re supposed to put a hood over your head when they hang you, Mark thought, and then, only then, could he make himself turn and run into the hall to get help.
Contents
Prologue
Part One
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Part Two
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Part Three
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Part Four
Chapter 1
Part One
There’s no way of knowing if the tree you plant will also turn out to he the tree you hang yourself from.
—Jose Saramago
Those who are kind to the cruel will he cruel to the kind.
—Talmud
It’s never easy to distinguish between a social visionary and an outright loon.
—Robert Fulford
Chapter One
1
It had been years since Gregor Demarkian spent much time thinking about his older brother, Stefan, and then it had only been a glancing thought occasioned by the fact that he was back on Cavanaugh Street and Cavanaugh Street was not what he’d expected. Now, standing at the window of his apartment and looking down at the construction crews beginning to arrive for their day at Holy Trinity Church—or what was left of it—it occurred to him that this was very odd. There had been a time, when he was very small and Stefan had just gone into the army, that he had thought about him every hour of every day, with an intensity of fear and hope that had blocked out every other emotion. Looking back on it, he found he couldn’t reason away the conviction that he had known, from the moment Stefan had put on his uniform and walked out the door, that he would never see his brother again. The whole idea of war had been a matter of confusion, and at that point he had never known anyone who had died except the very old people on the street who had never seemed alive to begin with. It wasn’t an understanding of life and death that had convinced him, any more than it was an understanding of war that had made him feel, at the time and forever afterward, that he didn’t approve of it. Stefan had seemed so tall standing at the door, holding his hatunder his arm while their mother draped herself over his chest and wept into the khaki buttons on his government-issue shirt. It was odd to think that he knew, now, that Stefan hadn’t been tall at all. He’d barely been five ten, and Gregor himself was now well over six feet.