The Headmaster's Wife(48)

“Searches?”

“They search your room,” Mark said. “They don’t tell you about it, and they never talk about it unless they find something, but they search it. They’re not that good at it either. It’s easy to tell. They put all my stuff back in the wrong places. Never assume that just because somebody’s a slob, he doesn’t remember where his stuff was.”

“When they searched your room, they were looking for Michael Feyre’s drugs?”

“Hell, no. They were looking for my drugs. They all think I’m using, too. Either that or they think I’m stupid.”

“I know. I called your mother.”

“I expected that. That’s okay She’ll come up, and I’ll talk to her. Anyway, Michael and I had this deal. I don’t know where he kept his stuff, but he was making anywhere from five hundred to a thousand dollars a week—”

“How much? How big is this school?”

“We’ve got maybe three hundred fifty kids. But we’ve got faculty, too, you know.”

“You think there were faculty members buying drugs from Michael Feyre?”

“Yeah,” Mark said. “But the big business was speed. Michael talked about it all the time. He didn’t like speed. He said it made him nervous. He couldn’t see why anybody bothered. I could. They do it for the same reason I drink coffee. There’s a lot of work here. People load themselves up with AP courses and honors courses—”

“AP?”

“Advanced placement. It’s essentially a college course you can take in high school, and then you take a test from the same people who do the SATs and if you get a good-enough grade you get credit from whatever college you go to. People use them to get rid of the distribution requirements the colleges all have so that they can take stuff they like instead of stuff they just have to take. Starting junior year, people take three or four of them at a time. They don’t have time to sleep. And then, you know, if you take speed, it keeps you up; so you need downers if you want to sleep at all. Michael was making a mint.”

Gregor considered this. “Did the police check that out? Drugs in his system? People he might have been connected to? Where did he get the drugs to sell?”

“I haven’t got a clue,” Mark said. “My best guess would be Boston, but he’s not from there, so maybe not. He’s from some place in Connecticut, but not a town I know.”

“What about the suicide?” Gregor said. Mark had abandoned his second sandwich only half-eaten, and that was nearly impossible because the sandwiches were only abouttwo inches long. “Did it make sense to you that Michael would commit suicide? Had he been depressed?”

“Not exactly. Maybe. It’s hard to explain.”

“Were you surprised?’

“Was I surprised to find his body hanging from the ceiling of our room?” Mark asked. “Hell, yes, I was surprised. You’d have been, too. I had no idea—they don’t show what it really looks like in movies. And they don’t show … he’d sh——God, I have no idea what the right word for it is. He’d shit himself. Sorry for my language.”

“That’s all right. I expect he’d pissed himself, too.”

“Right,” Mark said. “If I ever get to make movies, I’m going to show it the way it really is, and it’s ugly as hell. I went out in the hall and got sick, but all I’d had was coffee and so mostly I just dry heaved. I think I did it for hours.”

“I think that’s perfectly normal. I didn’t mean were you surprised to find the body; I mean were you surprised to hear that Michael Feyre had killed himself.”

“Oh,” Mark said. “I don’t know. He was … uh… he was having an affair with Alice Makepeace.”

The name sounded vaguely familiar but not familiar enough. “This was another student?”

“Alice is the headmaster’s wife,” Mark said. “She’s, well. I don’t know. Maybe you’ll get a chance to meet her. She’s something else.”

“Young?”

“In her forties, I’d think. Madonna is in her forties. That can be all right.”

“I’m sure it can. Did he tell you he was having this affair with the headmaster’s wife?”

“He didn’t have to,” Mark said. “Everybody on campus knew about it. And I do mean everybody. Peter Makepeace must have known about it, too. It was practically up on a billboard. Except nobody ever talked about it directly, if you know what I mean.”

“I think I do,” Gregor said. “Was there a reason for this? Was Alice Makepeace using drugs?”