“They weren’t love affairs,” Cherie said, “not really. They weren’t that clean. I don’t believe they were even about sex.”
“Whatever,” Melissa said.
Edith shifted a little in her chair. “It must have been something that happened by accident,” she said, “or that he could make seem as if it had happened by accident or by Mark’s intention. It could be another suicide attempt. It would fit. Mark has been depressed for months.”
“Two suicides would be better than one? I thought you just said they wouldn’t be,” Cherie said.
“No, I said that attempted murder was worse than successful suicide,” Edith said, “but it’s hard to tell how the board will react in cases like this. And of course Peter hasn’t just to think of his job here. He has to think of where he’ll go in the long run, what the next place will be. There’s a difference between not being able to go on at Windsor and not being able to stay in the network at all.”
“Does Peter want to stay in the network?” Cherie asked. “I think it’s incredible the way we all are. We get into this place, and it’s as if we forget that there’s life outside it.”
Edith shrugged. “There aren’t all that many jobs that are congenial to do or that many where you can be with people you respect. Everybody can’t teach in one of the better universities. Have either of you seen Alice today at all?”
“We haven’t been out at all,” Melissa said.
“I thought you might have seen her through the window. She wasn’t at breakfast. It was the oddest breakfast. It was better attended than breakfasts usually are, probably because people wanted to find out any news they could, but the two of you weren’t there, and Sheldon wasn’t there, and Alice wasn’t there, and Peter wasn’t there either. I suppose Peter has some excuse. He must have been up until the early hours of the morning.”
“I think we had an excuse, too,” Melissa said.
Edith didn’t argue with her. Cherie’s apartment looked out onto the quad, and at just that moment Alice Makepeace had come out of President’s House, her enormous black cape wrapped around her body like a heavy wool blanket around a victim fished out of a river in winter, her red hair gleaming like rouged bronze even without the help of the sun. She dyed it, of course, Edith thought, but it worked nonetheless. It took people’s attention away from her face, and her words, and her attitude. Alice went around to the side of President’s House to where the parking lot was. Edith supposed she was going to her car.
“There’s Alice on her way out,” she said. “Maybe she’s gone to pay the obligatory call on the student in the hospital.”
“If she is,” Cherie said, “I hope Mark throws her out of his room.”
3
Diagonally across the quad, in Barrett House, Marta Coelho saw Alice Makepeace leave, too, although it took straining and leaning to follow her movements to the parking lot, and even then Marta only managed to be sure that she could see the bright red hair. Then she withdrew into the Barrett living room and counted to one hundred with potatoes, the way they used to count seconds when she was a child. The last thing she wanted this morning was to run into Alice in any capacity at all. In the last few days, Marta had been feeling more and more as if she had to leave this place, no matter what the consequences. Even going home would be better than staying here, even though she knew she would die at home. She could no more go back to living that life among those people than she could sprout wings and fly. The problem was she couldn’t stay here either, not without losing her mind. She thought she might have lost her mind already.
She also thought that it might all be a hat trick. She hadn’t had anything to eat this morning. She’d gone to the cafeteria first thing, but she’d no sooner gotten there than she hadheard the news about Mark DeAvecca, and the speculations about him, too, as if whatever had happened had been an episode on a soap opera. The ultimate reality TV, she had thought, and then realized that she’d never actually seen any reality TV. It seemed to fit anyway, and it made her feel a little sick. They were talking about how he had vomited on Sheldon’s ceiling and gone into convulsions that looked as if he were being electrocuted, and they were doing it in the tones they might use to discuss Martha Stewart’s problems with the SEC. Nobody was even talking about counselors, or the trauma the students were likely to feel, and those were usually the first two things anybody at Windsor thought of when anything untoward happened. It didn’t even have to be something untoward happening to one of their own.