The Headmaster's Wife(85)

“The tentative answer to that is yes,” Gregor said, “at least according to the emergency room doctor I talked to. He thought that Mark had enough of a sensitivity to caffeine so that he had a violent reaction to what he ingested last night, which is what caused the projectile vomiting, which is whyhe lived. I do want to stress that. Both the emergency room doctor and the floor physician who came on afterward were adamant that, given what they managed to find in the vomit on his clothes and in his stomach, he should have died last night He got very lucky.”

“Still,” Brian said.

“I know,” Gregor said, “but hear me out here, all right? For months, apparently, everybody in Windsor, Massachusetts, has been assuming that Mark DeAvecca was on drugs and lying about it. You assumed that. Well, we now know that he wasn’t on drugs, and he wasn’t lying about it Yes, I do realize he might have taken some on and off sometime in the last however many weeks. But the behavior people saw and interpreted as drug use was not caused by drug use. If it had been, it would have showed up in the drug tests that were done last night. So far so good?”

“Yes,” Brian said. “All right. Fair enough. We owe the kid an apology.”

“The kid may be owed more than that,” Gregor said. “There obviously has been something wrong with him. Something seriously wrong with him. I saw it myself when I met him at the inn yesterday, hours before he convulsed. Now the doctors were saying last night that the possibility of permanent damage from caffeine poisoning is remote. The immediate problem is death, and he didn’t die. Even so, the fact is that he’s been physically a mess, and nobody up here did anything about it that I can tell. Did I tell you he also had strep?”

“No, you didn’t,” Brian said, “but you can’t tell me you think somebody gave him that on purpose.”

“No, I don’t, but it’s indicative of another part of the problem. According to the doctor I talked to, this was the floor phycisian, Mark not only has strep, he has bad strep. They put him on some ridiculously high level of antibiotics, something like four times the normal dose. That bad. The doctor said he thinks Mark may have been walking around with the strep for weeks.”

“So?”

“So,” Gregor said, “what’s going on over at that school? What’s wrong with those people? I can’t believe Mark’s never checked into the infirmary feeling bad. Didn’t they do a throat culture? Didn’t they even look down the kid’s throat? The floor physician told Liz Toliver that Mark’s throat was red and raw enough to be mistaken for meat in a butcher shop.”

“Even so,” Brian said, “you can’t give somebody strep in an attempt to kill them, not unless you’re a mad scientist type with access to all kinds of things, and I don’t think we’ve got mad scientist types at Windsor Academy. And strep doesn’t usually kill.”

“Granted,” Gregor said, “but the fact is, their system over there is so lax, and so cavalier, at least where Mark is concerned, that anybody could have been doing anything to him and nobody would have noticed. They just assumed he must be on drugs, and they just assumed that they weren’t going to do anything about it. Although why not—”

“I’ve told you why not,” Brian said. “They couldn’t prove it. And if they accuse without proof and they’re wrong, they’ve got lawsuits.”

“I know. But they should have done something when he started to look that bad. And you know it as well as I do. The first thing is, though, to ask him if he was taking caffeine tablets. And to believe him if he says no.”

“He could lie, you know,” Brian said.

“I know,” Gregor said. “But, as I’ve told you, I’ve met him before. He’s not a natural liar. And he’s in the situation he’s in at the moment because he did not lie, and everybody refused to believe he was telling the truth. This time we should assume he’s being straight with us.”

“All right. Also fair enough,” Brian said.

“The second thing we should do is proceed on the assumption that this was an attempted murder.”

Brian shook his head. Alexandra was back with the omelets. They were enormous, even if they didn’t have meat in them. Gregor was a little disappointed, but not surprised, to see that the cheese was a pale white and not the orange of what he considered “normal” cheddar. It was too much to ask that The Aubergine Harpsichord have artificially colored cheese.

Brian waited until Alexandra went away and then said, “You really can’t do that, you know. We don’t have evidence of an attempted murder hare. Peter Makepeace may be in a lot of trouble when the going gets tough, but he’s still got connections. The school still has connections.”