Mark felt better than he’d felt in months. He had no idea why, and he didn’t care. He just wanted to eat something and do it soon.
2
It was noon, and that meant it had now been at least two hours since some of the particulars of what had happened to Mark DeAvecca had begun to filter through the Windsor Academy campus. Philip Candor would never have accused Peter Makepeace’s secretary of listening at doors or, better yet, at intercoms, but he knew she did it, and so did everybody else. That was why the news was out within minutes of
Liz Toliver’s meeting at President’s House, that Mark’s drug tests had come back negative, not only the quick ones that had been done when he was first admitted, but the more accurate ones that had taken until this morning to be read and interpreted. Mark was not on marijuana. Mark was not on speed. Mark was not on heroin—not that Philip had ever suspected that one. Heroin made people calm, not wired and frantic. Of course, Mark was not on cocaine either, which was a much more interesting finding. Philip would have bet his life that that kid was pickled in cocaine, even if he didn’t snort it through his nose or leave dustings of powder on the hardwood surfaces of his dorm room.
The gossip had been somewhat more hazy about just what had been wrong with Mark when he’d vomited all over Sheldon’s ceiling and collapsed in convulsions on the bathroom floor, but the best guess was an overdose of caffeine tablets of the kind kids used to stay up to study for exams. There was no question that Mark had been found with the half-digested remnants of several of these tablets in his stomach when he was admitted to the hospital, and Philip supposed that it was not impossible that Mark had taken them. Drugged or not, the kid had been making no sense for most of the time he was on this campus. Unlike most of his colleagues in the cafeteria, however, Philip knew enough to be sure that caffeine pills weren’t likely to explain the projectile vomiting, never mind the myriad other symptoms they’d all been watching for months on end. There was something seriously wrong here, and it was likely to get even more wrong in the next few days. Jimmy Card had arrived. Liz Toliver had been around for twelve hours. The one thing Philip had spent most of his life avoiding had arrived, and he was uncomfortably aware of the fact that there was nothing he could do to escape it. His best chance lay in staying out of sight as much as possible and in making sure that he was prepared for any eventuality. That was why he was cleaning and loading his stainless steel Colt Anaconda. It was not a gun he liked very much. It had only a six-round chamber, and it was too heavy for most of the purposes for which people wantedhandguns. At the time he’d bought it, however, he hadn’t had much choice, and he hadn’t had the time to go shopping. He’d only been back in Idaho for the week.
He saw Alice coming up the walk before she knocked. He could have put the gun out of sight if he’d wanted to. He knew that no matter how easily he’d strong-armed the Windsor Academy administration over the matter of his smoking, he would not be able to strong-arm them on the matter of this gun. They would insist that he get rid of the gun or get himself out of faculty housing. He wanted to do neither.
Even so, he opened the door to Alice without putting the gun away. It was lying out in the open on the coffee table when she walked in. She took off her cape and stared at it, truly shocked. Philip thought it was the only time he had ever seen her shocked. Then he amended that. It was the only time he had ever seen her show a thoroughly genuine emotion. Alice was always on stage. She was like that remarkable hair of hers: overblown, overcolored, overwrought.
“Well,” she said, “you got paranoid very fast. I wouldn’t have expected that of you. What did you do, go into Boston last night and pass a man a hundred on a street corner?”
“No.” He sat down on his own couch and went back to loading the chamber. “I bought this gun in 1998.”
“And you’ve had it here ever since? In the dorm?”
“That I have.”
“The trustees will have a complete fit. They won’t let you keep it, you know. And I don’t understand why you have it in the first place. It’s not as if Windsor is a high-crime area.”
“No.” There was more crime in Windsor than she knew, but that was one of those things Philip had long since ceased trying to explain to the faculty of Windsor Academy. He finished loading the chambers and tried siting at his reflection in the wall mirror. Alice Makepeace shuddered.
“I’ll be happier when they make you get rid of it,” she said. “I don’t know why you want it here to begin with. Especially not now. God only knows what’s going to happen around here now that we’re in the middle of this mess. Don’tyou hate what it’s like around here? When the institution is threatened, I mean. Peter gets insane. You should see him.”