Gregor picked up the phone and called the Windsor Police Service, just to make sure they knew he was coming. Then he called the desk to ask that somebody call the room at seven-thirty to wake Mark. That school had to have a curfew of some kind, although Gregor was slowly beginning to accept the possibility that Windsor ran on very different assumptions than most of the rest of the world. He found an extra blanket in the closet and threw it over Mark’s body, thinking that the kid was built like a defensive linebacker. Even the underweight didn’t disguise that.
Gregor went downstairs, left his key at the desk, and then headed out the front door to Main Street. It was, if anything, worse than he’d thought when he’d first seen it. It was the epitome of the sort of place built by people who recoil in horror from “suburbs,” by which they mean places with housing subdivisions. There was a bookstore. Its windows displayed hardcover books in matte jackets with muted impressionistic paintings used as the backdrop to titles that made no sense: Electric Pumpkins, Love in Aspic, The Poetics of Dystopia. A sign near the door said: THE EXCELLENT BECOMES THE PERMANENT. A few doors down there was a candle store, and a few doors down from that was a clothing store for women showing models in the window wearing good tweed skirts and cashmere sweaters. Gregor thought that if he stopped a dozen people at random, one right afterthe other, he’d find out that all of them listened to National Public Radio and owned a copy of Chocolat.
He checked the note he’d written to himself with the directions to the police station, walked up four blocks, and stopped for a moment to look across the road. That was the Windsor Academy campus right there. No gates set it off from the town proper, and no security service seemed to be active to keep the locals out. With the exception of one large, college Gothic building off toward the left, the Windsor Academy buildings were all large and studiously “Colonial,” the kind of thing that might have served as a mansion in pre-Revolutionary Massachusetts, except that they were all larger. Some of them, though, were probably authentic. The ones on Main Street proper almost certainly were. The rest of the campus had been configured to blend in with them. No, Gregor thought, he really didn’t like exaggerated respect for history.
He checked his directions again, walked down another block and a half, and turned left into a street full of large, Colonial houses set back on wide lawns. If you really want to know if a house was built in Colonial America, Bennis had told him, check out how far it is from the road. Real Colonial houses have no front lawns. They sit right up against the thoroughfare. These houses, Gregor decided, were reproductions, or at best from the early nineteenth century, when lawns had come into fashion.
He went down three blocks, checked the street sign—Muldor—and turned left again. The police station was a small, brick building hidden tastefully behind a box hedge nearly tall enough to obscure the building completely. The only way to tell that a police station was behind that hedge was to read the sign at the end of the drive.
Gregor walked up the drive to the front door. It was a very modern brick building, but it had a steep, pitched roof, as if that would be enough to make it look like a residence. Here was another way to tell the difference between a suburb and a real small town. In a real small town, the police station would have been right out front on Main Street, next door tothe Town Hall and the public library. Well, the public library was on Main Street here; it was right across from Windsor Academy.
Gregor gave his name to the young woman at the desk, and she spoke quietly into a microphone, A moment later a large, beefy man in a badly fitting black suit came out of the corridor behind the desk and held out his hand.
“Mr. Demarkian? I’m very glad to meet you. I’m Brian Sheehy. Walter Cray can’t stop talking about you.”
“I’m not sure if that’s good or bad,” Gregor said.
“Well, Walt’s impressed, and that’s not usual. Look, I’m just getting off, I’m starving, and I need a beer and I need a cigarette—” The young woman at the desk clucked, and Brian Sheehy ignored her. “There’s a place about three blocks down and around the corner, if you wouldn’t mind. And you don’t mind a place where they allow smoking.”
“I don’t mind,” Gregor said.
“It’s not one of those places on Main Street,” Brian Sheehy said. “No sprouts. No spinach salads. You don’t look like an organic vegetable guy to me.”
“I’m not,”
“I’m going up to Doheney’s,” Brian told the young woman at the desk, “then I’m going home. I’m on my cell phone.”