I wish I knew what I was doing here, he thought. Then he remembered something Mark had told him and tried to figure out which of the houses was the one Mark lived in. It was one of the ones that fronted on Main Street, he remembered that. It was the one next to the one next to West Gate. He remembered that, too. West Gate defined the western end of campus, so the last house on the other side would be that one, and the next one closer to him would be Hayes, where Mark lived. Gregor went down the path in that direction.
When he came to the house he thought was Hayes, he hesitated. It wasn’t late, that was true, but he wasn’t sure that students were allowed to receive visitors on school nights or at all if the visitors hadn’t been cleared in advance. If he was running a boarding school for teenagers, that was the kind of rule he’d put in force. On the other hand, if he was running a boarding school for teenagers, he wouldn’t leave the campus open to the town the way this one was. It surprised him thatthey hadn’t had a murder here yet or a kidnapping. A serial killer could waltz in at will and snatch anybody he wanted to. There would be no way to stop him.
He mounted the two shallow steps to the backdoor and stopped. He could hear noise inside, shouting, anger. For a split second, he was having that flashback to the old Cavanaugh Street all over again. Someone was furious and not doing anything to hide it. Nothing seemed to be breaking though. No furniture seemed to be flying. He went right up to the door and found the bell and rang it. The shouting was much closer now. Whoever was angry was angry on the ground floor, not upstairs in one of the rooms.
He was just about to ring again, sure that nobody had heard him the first time because of the noise, when the door was yanked open by a small man with thinning hair.
“Who the hell are you?” he asked. “What the hell are you doing here at this time of night?”
“I’m Gregor Demarkian,” Gregor said. “I’m looking for Mark DeAvecca, if it isn’t too late to talk to him.”
“You’re looking for Mark DeAvecca,” the small man said. “What the fucking hell.”
An even smaller woman came running out from somewhere toward the back of the house. “Sheldon, for God’s sake. You’ve got to do something.”
“I will do something,” Sheldon said. “I’m going to kick that little asshole’s ass from here to New York.”
“Sheldon, pleased.”
“I’ve come at a bad time,” Gregor said. “I’m looking for Mark DeAvecca. I was just wondering—”
The small woman looked at him, her eyes wide. “You’re Gregor Demarkian,” she said. “Edith and I were just discussing you. Edith Braxner. I’m sorry. I know I’m not making any sense. Come in. Please come in.”
“You can’t let some idiot off the street into the house because you talked about him with Edith,” Sheldon said.
“Shut up,” the woman said. “Oh, God. I don’t know what we’re going to do, Mr. Demarkian. I’m Cherie Wardrop. I’m Mark’s biology teacher. Mark is—”
“Mark is throwing up all the hell over my bathroom and you know as well as I do that he’s not going to clean up after himself,” Sheldon said. “Gregor Demarkian isn’t going to clean up after him either. There is vomit all over my bathroom. There’s vomit on the goddamned ceiling in my bathroom—”
“Projectile vomiting?” Gregor asked. “Bad enough to reach a, what, twenty-foot ceiling?”
“Come with me,” Cherie said, grabbing him by his arm.
Gregor let himself be pushed along, down a narrow hall lined with coat hooks and littered with snow boots, to a small door that stood open at the end. By now he was aware that they had an audience. A little crowd of students was clutched together near the door where he’d come in, spilling out of a corridor that would probably lead to the main rooms of the house and the stairs to the bedrooms upstairs. Gregor paid very little attention to them.
Cherie pulled him through the door at the end and into Sheldon’s apartment. Gregor noticed that it was small and meticulously neat, but not much else about it. If Sheldon had taste, it was not the sort of taste that leapt out at you.
Cherie pulled him into another narrow hall and then into a bathroom, and right from the beginning Gregor saw two things completely clearly. One was that Mark had indeed been vomiting, and there was indeed vomit everywhere, even on the ceiling. There was vomit all over Mark, too, down the front of the sweatshirt he had borrowed from Gregor, down his arms, on his hands, on his shoes. The bathroom was the kind of mess that couldn’t be cleaned up without professional help.