The Headmaster's Wife(7)
“What do you think you saw?” Philip asked again.
Mark shrugged. “I thought I saw a body.”
“A what?”
“I told you you were going to think it was stupid.”
“A dead body?”
Mark shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess. I guess not. I mean, I hadn’t thought about dead. It was just lying there, and I could see it from the catwalk window. You know that window up over the main reading room?”
“Of course I know it.”
“I was sitting up there by myself, just sort of reading and things, and I was looking out the window and there it was.”
“The body?”
“Under the trees. I didn’t really think of it in terms of dead. I mean, it wasn’t moving, but I thought it was somebody who’d gotten drunk. You know. I watched it for a long time.”
“How long?”
“I don’t know. I lost my watch. I was sitting up there for a long time though. And I kept watching it. And it never moved. So I thought—”
“Male or female?”
“What?”
“This body Male or female?”
“I couldn’t really see, but I think it must have been male. It was—big. I don’t know. And it was odd big. I remember thinking that it wasn’t a student. Couldn’t be. Because it was big. Except some students are big. I don’t know. It was dark, you know, in the catwalk, and it was dark outside. There isn’t a light on that side of the pond.”
Philip hesitated. This was not a con. Mark DeAvecca was perfectly serious. It wasn’t even impossible to imagine. Students did get drunk on Friday nights. They usually hid in their dorm rooms to do it, but one of them could have wandered onto campus and passed out. The campus was open to the town. Somebody could have wandered in from one of the little restaurants on Main Street.
“Is the body still there?” Philip asked.
Mark shook his head. “I went to check, you know, because I thought it was dangerous. Whoever it was could freeze. It’s cold as hell tonight. So I thought I’d go down and see who it was and either get him to move or get some help to move him, but when I got there he was gone.”
“Just gone?”
“Yeah.”
Mark was looking at his shoes. Philip felt the impatience rising in him like bile. “Was there any sign that he’d been there?” he asked. “Were there footprints in the snow? An impression of a body under the tree? Anything?”
Mark blinked. “It’s not snow. It’s hard as slate, for God’s sake. Everything’s iced over.”
“All right,” Philip said. “You ought to go back to your dorm. Nobody’s there now at any rate. You don’t have to worry about somebody freezing to death.”
“No,” Mark said.
“Go directly back to your dorm,” Philip said. “Don’t wander around. It is cold tonight. You’re going to freeze without gloves in this weather.”
“I lost my gloves,” Mark said.
That figures, Philip thought, but it was one more thing he didn’t say. He stood and watched while Mark walked away from him up the path to Hayes House. The kid was completely zonked. He wasn’t even functioning. He had probably imagined the whole thing. It was a miracle he wasn’t seeing pink elephants and snakes in the shower as it was.
Still, there was always the chance. When Philip was sure Mark was on his way up the Hayes House back porch steps, he turned in the other direction and went down the path toward the library and the pond. The pond was actually quite a distance away. The school said it didn’t build closer because of worries about wetlands regulation and the environment, but the real reason was worries about what water damage could do to the foundations of buildings. He went down along the office wing of the library—there was Marta Coelho’s office light, still on—and then past the big Gothic hulk and onto the open campus. Mark was right. It wasn’t really snow anymore. It was all iced over and hard, like a shell on the land.
Philip skirted the edge of the pond, moving slowly, looking for any sign of a “body” or anything like a body; but he could see, long before he got to the stand of evergreens, that there wasn’t a body there. Philip went up close. There were no footprints, but he was leaving none himself. There was no impression of a body under the trees, but there probably wouldn’t have been, even if the body had been real.
Philip Candor did not, for a moment, think that the body had been real. He thought Mark DeAvecca had been hallucinating, which was only to be expected. Mark should have been hallucinating for months, considering just how messed up he was most of the time.