Marta sat down. She didn’t bother to take her plates off her tray. James hadn’t expected her to. “Gregor Demarkian,” she said, “is in town. Here. In Windsor. Earlier today, Edith heard that he was coming, and she told Philip, and then Philip saw him on Main Street near the Windsor Inn, which I suppose is where he must be staying.”
“Really?” James cocked an eyebrow. He’d taken great pains to learn to do that when he was younger, and now he did it all the time without thinking. “That’s surprising. From what I remember, Mr. Demarkian is a consultant to police departments, who call him in when they have homicide cases they’re having trouble with. I thought our local police had decided without doubt that Michael Feyre committed suicide.”
“Oh, they have,” Marta said. “At least, as far as I know they have. The police didn’t bring him here; Mark DeAvecca did.”
“Did he? How did he manage that?”
“Oh, Demarkian is a friend of the family or something. You know what it’s like in this place. The students. Their parents. It makes me sick sometimes, it really does. Don’t mind me. I’ve been in a mood for days. Before Michael Feyre died really. And now I just don’t know what to think. It bothers me, this Demarkian person being here.”
“I don’t see why,” James said. The vegetable omelet was inedible, but he’d expected that. The coffee was undrinkable, too, but he forced himself to drink it because the Windsor Academy coffee had one thing to be said in its favor. It was some of the strongest coffee he had ever had outside of Istanbul. “I don’t see what business it is of ours if Mark DeAvecca wants to ask a family friend to come here to visit, even if the family friend is Gregor Demarkian. Gregor Demarkian can’t change the fact that Michael Feyre committed suicide.”
“No, he can’t change it,” Marta said, “but there are other things, aren’t there? There’s all that stuff about Alice, for example.”
“Marta, ’all that stuff about Alice,’ as you put it, has been going on for a long time. It didn’t start with Michael Feyre, and I doubt if it will finish with him.”
“It will if it causes the school to fail,” Marta said. “This isn’t Exeter, you know. We don’t have that kind of an endowment. If that kind of thing gets out—”
“If it gets out, Peter will be fired and he and Alice will go off somewhere, and we’ll get a new headmaster whose wife is fifty-six and looks like a long-haul trucker. That’s all. You’ve got nothing to worry about on that score.”
“Well, there are other things, too,” Marta said. “There are the things about the drugs.”
“‘The things about the drugs’?”
“That he was selling drugs.”
“Marta, students sell drugs to each other in every school in the country. Schools don’t fail over incidents like that; they just expel the students.”
“But he wasn’t just selling drugs to students,” Marta said. “He was selling drugs to faculty. He was selling drugs to you.”
It was odd, James thought, but just a second ago he had considered this room far too warm. Now it seemed far too cold. His plates were still spread out on the table. The vegetable omelet still looked heavy and wet at the same time. The coffee still looked too dark to really be coffee. There was a lot of noise. It seemed to be coming from another room, through a wind tunnel, broadcast by a bad microphone.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.
“Oh, James, for God’s sake,” Marta said. “What do you think, that I want to turn you in? If I did, I’d have done it already. And it wouldn’t matter in this place anyway. You know what they’re like. You’ve been here a lot longer than I have.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” James saidagain. He picked up the plate with the omelet on it and put it back on the tray. It was very important to move slowly, and with seriousness, to not appear to be hurrying. He wanted to take the plate with the omelet on it and smash it over Marta Coelho’s head, but it was the kind of thing he would never do.
Marta had pushed her tray away from her into the middle of the table. “James, please, behave like a sane person. Somebody around here has to. You bought amphetamines from Michael Feyre. I saw you. In Ridenour Library not two weeks ago. My office—”
“Everybody’s office is in that wing,” James said. “You’re mistaken.”
“I’m not mistaken, and you know it.” Marta stopped. Her voice had risen. She’d become aware of it. Nobody else seemed to have noticed. “I’m not mistaken,” she said again. “I heard the whole conversation. Six something-or-the-others of crystal methamphetamine. I don’t remember the word he used. Two hundred dollars. And I couldn’t believe it, you know, so I went out into the hall so that I could hear better, and you were right there. You didn’t even have your office door closed. I suppose you must have thought the wing was empty—”