“Why is having the shakes a hygiene problem?” Liz Toliver asked.
“What?” Marta asked.
“Never mind,” Liz Toliver said. “Do you think you were the only one who noticed it? Was it just in your class?”
“Oh, no,” Marta said, “it wasn’t in class at all necessarily. He had them the night, the night—yes. Well, the night his roommate committed suicide. I don’t know if you know about that, if Mark told you—”
“I even got a formal notice from the school. Yes, I heard about that. He had them the night the boy killed himself? Why did you see him at night?”
“It was in the library,” Marta said. “I’ve got an office in the faculty wing in the library. He came through.”
Liz Toliver turned around until she was looking at Ridenour. “That’s the library?” she asked.
“Yes,” Marta said. “Yes, of course. But there’s no reason to be upset, Ms. Toliver. It’s just another indication, you see, of why Mark isn’t really suited to be here. We’ve all discussed it this year. He just doesn’t fit. And the hygiene problems, and the getting sick, well, they’re symptoms. I don’t mean last night was a symptom. That sounds like it was a terrible accident. We warn them about keeping food in their rooms when it could go bad, but they never listen of course. But the other things—”
“I have an appointment,” Liz Toliver said again, moving in the direction of President’s House. “Mark is going to be quite well. I’ll convey your good wishes.”
“You should take him out before we’re forced to ask him to leave,” Marta pushed on. “You must see it would be better. What good is it going to do to insist on keeping him here when he’s not really suited for this level of academic work? There’s no shame in admitting that he’s just not bright enough to compete on this level. It’s—”
But she was gone. Marta had no idea how long she had been gone. She was more than halfway to President’s House, but she moved very quickly. Maybe it had been no time at all. Marta’s mouth felt dry. Her lips felt chapped. She was sure she had said things she should not have said. She’d only told the truth though. She was sure of that.
She’d only told the truth, and she thought somebody around here ought to start telling it, all the time, to everybody.
Chapter Three
1
Gregor Demarkian was not a man who “slept in,” not ever, not even when he’d been up most of the night before. He could remember mornings in his early days at the FBI, when he’d been on kidnapping detail all night, when he’d insisted on showing up at the office on time to file his paperwork and only going home later for a short nap. He could remember mornings in that last sad year when his wife was dying of the uterine cancer they had caught far too late to do anything about. There would be a crisis, and he would go to her hospital room and sit, hour after hour in the darkness. Her small square of the room would be closed off by a white curtain. Behind the faux-Danish Modern chair he sat in would be a half wall of windows, looking out on the cemetery that every hospital seemed to be built beside. Her breathing would be labored but steady. The machines would wink and blink and let off small hiccoughy beeps at random intervals. Then the sun would come up, and the day nurse would check in to see how everything was going, and Gregor, reassured yet again that Elizabeth was not likely to die anytime in the next few hours, would go off to the coffee shop on the first floor to put enough coffee into himself to keep going. And he had kept going. That was the thing. It had never occurred to him in that year to reset the alarm clock for a later hour, eventhough he was on leave and had no office to go to. Productive people got up at five thirty or six and started the day. He had always been a productive person.
It was quarter after nine when Brian Sheehy’s call came through to Gregor’s room at the Windsor Inn, and Gregor was still fast asleep across his bed and still dressed in the clothes he’d worn the night before. It had been after three by the time he’d gotten in. Even Liz had left earlier, waiting only long enough for Mark to waken slightly so that she could tell him she was there. Mark hadn’t woken for long. He’d barely opened a single eyelid, and he hadn’t seemed to be surprised that his mother was next to him, running her hands through his hair. Gregor thought Mark didn’t know where he was. He woke to find his mother beside him and assumed he was in his own home in his own bed. Gregor didn’t blame him. Mark went back to sleep. Gregor went back to waiting for Dr. Niazi’s replacement to give him some idea of where the tests that took longer to read were heading. At three, he’d finally given up. Not only was he annoying the hospital staff—although he tried to do as little of that as possible; he wasn’t nagging—but the results that were coming back in dribs and drabs all said the same thing, and that was that there was no sign of anything in Mark’s body but the caffeine.