Edith went through to the other hall and then around the side to Cherie’s apartment. She knocked softly and waited. She could hear sounds in there, Cherie and Melissa, music playing on a radio or a CD player. It was Pachelbel, she thought. Pachelbel was the school obsession this year. Every year there was a classical composer, or baroque, or medieval, whom very few people had heard of, who became the school’s icon of genius. Nobody ever bothered to play Beethoven in this place. Beethoven was far too obvious.
Nobody was coming to the door. Edith knocked again, a little more loudly this time. Still nobody came. The voices had ceased, but there was no sound of footsteps.
“Cherie,” Edith said, “it’s Edith Braxner. I need to talk to you.”
This time there were footsteps, maybe because Edith’s voice sounded as loud to Cherie and Melissa as it had sounded to Edith in the hall. It was odd what high ceilings and empty halls could do to acoustics. The footsteps on theother side of the door were quick and heavy. The door opened, and it was Melissa, not Cherie, standing there.
“Edith, listen,” Melissa said, “we know you’re curious. We know everybody is curious, but we’re very upset. And Peter’s asked us to say nothing to anybody.”
“I rather doubt if it matters what Peter says now,” Edith said. “Can’t you tell that it’s all fallen apart already? You don’t really expect him to be headmaster a month from now.”
“I think Cherie would like to have a job a month from now.”
Cherie came up behind Melissa. It was obvious to Edith that she’d been crying. Her eyes were as puffy as doughnuts. Her nose was red. She gentled Melissa out of the way and came to the door.
“Come on in,” Cherie said, stepping back to let Edith through. “I’m going crazy in here. We’re not supposed to leave. Peter told us not to. He wants us ’instantly available at all times.’ And I couldn’t face the cafeteria. I really couldn’t. I don’t know what to do. Do you think the police will be called in? He looked like he had been poisoned.”
Edith went down the narrow front hall into the apartment proper. It had a big living room that had been left to go to mess much longer than Mark DeAvecca had been in the hospital. Edith leaned over and took a pile of magazines off a chair and sat down.
“First things first,” she said. “I take it that Mark is not dead.”
“Oh, no,” Cherie said, the blood draining out of her face. She sat down herself, abruptly, on the couch. The couch was as littered with magazines as the chair had been. “No, no, not at all. Peter said that he was quite fine really.”
“‘Out of danger,’ is what Peter said,” Melissa said, “whatever that means. He isn’t exactly being forthcoming.”
“He was forthcoming about one thing,” Cherie said. “Well no, not exactly forthcoming, but he said it. They did drug tests. Mark wasn’t on drugs.”
“Ah,” Edith said.
“Well, it settles that,” Cherie said, sounding despairing. “I never believed that gossip. It was all wrong. It was—tooeasy. He was behaving oddly and it was the easiest way of explaining it. Sometimes I think we’ve got only two explanations we’re willing to accept at this school, drugs or attention deficit disorder.”
“But he was behaving oddly,” Edith pointed out. “Did Peter have an explanation as to why?”
“No,” Cherie said.
“He really didn’t say much of anything,” Melissa said, “except to tell us to keep our mouths shut. I don’t know what he thinks we’re going to say. We were out in Boston yesterday and when we got back, well, we’d been back a little while—”
“An hour or so,” Cherie said.
“An hour or so,” Melissa agreed, “well, there he was, having another fight with Sheldon. I’m telling you, Edith. You have no idea what it’s been like since they moved that kid in with Sheldon. Sheldon resented the hell out of it. And he didn’t like Mark.”
“Not many people like Mark,” Edith said.
“True,” Melissa said, “but this was really awful. And of course Mark is something of a slob. And Sheldon’s anal retentive beyond belief. And it went on and on, day after day, so that Mark spent as little time in the House as possible because he didn’t feel comfortable with Sheldon there looming over him. I wouldn’t have either. God only knows where Mark was spending his time during the day”
“Does it matter where he was spending his time during the day?” Edith asked.
“It depends on what happened,” Cherie said. “That’s why I asked about the police. He really did look as if somebody or something had poisoned him, Edith. You should have seen him. And if it wasn’t drugs, then what was it?”