“Let’s get back over to Hayes,” Melissa said. “I don’t believe anybody has spy cameras, but I wouldn’t put it past them to be listening at windows.”
Melissa went around the side of the car to the walk, and Cherie followed. It wasn’t a long walk from here. Hayes was just down the pathway in the middle of the Main Street side of the quad. When they came into the quad proper, Cherie saw that most of the dorms were lit up almost as spectacularly as President’s House was. Maybe everybody needed more light than usual to get through the evenings these days.
They pushed out onto the walk, past President’s House, past any conceivable danger.
“Anyway,” Cherie said. “The police have finally gone and aren’t coming back, as far as I know. I hated all that questioning, and everybody keeping their mouths shut about Alice. Everybody. I was really impressed. I thought somebody would have to go at it, if only out of spite. And nobody said a word.”
“Maybe they thought it would shut the place down, just like you, and they didn’t want to risk it.”
“There are people who wouldn’t have cared. Marta Coelho. God, I know we’re supposed to show solidarity with all women, but that one really blows my corks. Oh, it’s just too, too tragic. There she is, with her fine mind and her doctorate from Yale, stuck in this wretched, tenth-rate place.”
“You’re exaggerating.”
“Not by much. She wouldn’t care if this place was shut down. She wouldn’t care about getting Alice in trouble either. She can’t stand her.”
“You can’t stand her.”
“It’s not in the same way,” Cherie said. “Marta—resents her. Do you know what I mean? It matters like hell to Marta, all that East Coast crap, the old families and the everybody knows everybody and all that bullshit. She’d stab Alice in the back if she could. I can’t believe she didn’t say anything when the police were here.”
“Did the police even interview her? I thought it was just those of us in Hayes and Michael’s teachers. Is she one of Michael’s teachers?”
“I don’t know. But even if she isn’t, she could have asked to talk to them, gotten one of them aside on one of those days when they were crawling all over campus. It’s the kind of thing she would do, don’t you think?”
“I haven’t spent that much time thinking about Marta Coelho,” Melissa said. “I just thank God every once in a while that she isn’t gay. Are we intending to go home? Because if we are, we ought to turn in here.”
Cherie looked around. She’d missed the turnoff in the path for Hayes House. She backtracked and began going up the walk to the backdoor. It bothered her no end that the Houses were arranged like this, with their backdoors facing the quads. Yes, the front doors faced roads that cars could travel on, but the quad was the true face of the campus, and Cherie thought the front doors should face that. Besides, the front of the library faced the quad.
If you stay at a boarding school long enough, you’ll start thinking in trivialities, she thought. She got out her key and opened up, letting herself into the long back hall. The lights were on here, too, although they rarely were unless someone was passing through directly. She wondered if people were forgetting to turn them off or if they had left them on deliberately to drive out the dark. She took out the key to their apartment and began fiddling with it—it stuck, as usual—as Sheldon came around from the front and saw them there.
“Oh, good,” he said. “We’ve been looking all over for you two. Have you seen Mark?”
“Mark DeAvecca?”
“He’s the only Mark we’ve got in this house.”
The key caught. Cherie pushed the door open. “We’vebeen in Boston all day. We haven’t seen anybody. Why? Has he gone missing?”
“He didn’t sign the book this afternoon. And it’s nearly five.”
Cherie put the key back into her bag. “People fail to sign the book all the time,” she said. “You know what afternoons are like around this place. He’s probably over in the library or the Student Center. He’s probably just trying to stay out of your hair.”
“I’m all in favor of him staying out of my hair, but Peter’s adamant. Everybody has to sign the book. It’s the police and all that. He doesn’t want us to look lax.”
“Not having a fit when a sixteen-year-old boy doesn’t check in at home some afternoon isn’t looking lax. It’s not looking hysterical.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Sheldon said. “I don’t give a damn one way or the other. That kid is the single most irresponsible student I’ve ever seen, never mind the obvious, which is that he’s far too screwed up most of the time to function. I wish they’d throw him out of here, although I don’t suppose there’s any chance of that now. The school would look like God knows what if they threw him out in the wake of this.”