The Headmaster's Wife(86)

“Liz Toliver and Jimmy Card have connections.”

“Not those kinds of connections,” Brian said. “And be reasonable. Even if this really is an attempted murder, it’s going to be damned near impossible to prove. You’d have to hope for a real piece of stupidity, somebody charging half a dozen boxes of those tablets on a credit card or buying an armful in a store where they’re known. And if Mark DeAvecca has ever bought a box of those things himself, if anybody even comes forward and says they saw him with a box of his own, it’s all going to go to hell. The incident is going to be written off as accidental, and there’s going to be nothing you can do about it.”

“I know,” Gregor said, “but there’s something else.”

“What?”

“Well, I was sitting in that hospital last night watching Mark breathe, and even Liz had gone back to the inn to bed, and I got to thinking. I don’t know what the symptoms of caffeine poisoning are, never mind chronic caffeine poisoning, if there is such a thing. But those symptoms sure as hell are familiar. The whole thing about the memory loss, and not blackouts, but ’coming to,’ which is how he put it.”

“That’s different than blackouts?”

“I think so, yes,” Gregor said. “I think it’s more like being distracted to the point of thoughtlessness rather than literally blacking out. And, like I said, it’s all very familiar. The loss of appetite. The trouble with his hands. The inability to write. The joint pain.”

“He had joint pain?”

“Something like that. He kept saying his hands didn’t work right. You should get a look at his handwriting sometime. It looks, well, what came to mind was the way people’s handwriting looks after strokes. And that’s when it hit me, while I was sitting in the hospital. There’s definitely something that can cause all those symptoms.”

“Lyme disease?” Brian asked helpfully.

“Maybe,” Gregor said, “I don’t know much about Lyme disease. What I asked the doctor to test Mark for was arsenic.”





Chapter Four



1


The first thing Mark DeAvecca saw when he woke up was his stepfather standing against a wall whose upper half was made entirely of windows, signing an autograph for a woman who appeared to be dressed in hospital whites. The woman towered over Jimmy Card. Mark found nothing strange in that. Most people towered over Jimmy Card, except for Mark’s mother, who was only five four herself. Mark thought Jimmy might be five six. Even if the woman wasn’t wearing heels—and she wouldn’t be, would she, if she was in a nurse’s uniform?—there was a good chance she could make Jimmy look like a midget.

The light from the windows was blinding. All the Venetian blinds had been pulled uncompromisingly to the top of their frames. Mark decided that he must be in a hospital of some kind, although that made less than good sense since the last thing he remembered was his mother bending over him and running her hands through his hair, which he thought must have meant he was at home. His throat was dry and scratchy. He needed to use the bathroom. He wanted to sit up. He tried to move around a little in bed, and both Jimmy and the woman in white nearly jumped out of their skins.

The Woman in White was a novel by Wilkie Collins. Ithad been one of Mark’s father’s favorites, and Mark himself had read it half a dozen times. He was now making no sense at all.

Jimmy and the woman in white came to the edge of the bed. The woman peered into Mark’s open eyes and said, “He seems to be awake.”

“I want to go to the bathroom,” Mark said. It was not the first thing he’d thought of to say. He was a very polite boy, trained that way by a mother who did not put up with rudeness in her own children. The problem was, his throat was more than scratchy, it was downright sore. It hurt him to talk.

“The bathroom,” the woman in white said, as if she’d never heard of such a thing.

Mark almost panicked. Maybe this was a dream, and in this dream there would be no bathrooms, and the result would be waking up to find he’d wet himself. That was all he would need. Sheldon would throw him out in the snow, or worse, and the story would get around campus in no time at all. He struggled to sit up. It wasn’t easy to do when you were lying flat on your back. Jimmy came over and held out an arm. Mark grabbed it and pulled himself forward.

“Water,” he said, and then, with enormous effort, “please?”

There was water in a pitcher with ice in it on a little side table, and a glass beside it. Jimmy filled the glass and handed it over. Mark took it. His hands were shaking. His arms were shaking. It took a conscious resolve of will to get the glass to his mouth without spilling any water, but he did it, and as soon as he did his throat felt better.