The Headmaster's Wife Read Online Free PDF Page A

iced over.”
    â€œAll right,” Philip said. “You ought to go back to your dorm. Nobody’s there now at any rate. You don’t have to worry about somebody freezing to death.”
    â€œNo,” Mark said.
    â€œGo directly back to your dorm,” Philip said. “Don’t wander around. It is cold tonight. You’re going to freeze without gloves in this weather.”
    â€œI lost my gloves,” Mark said.
    That figures,
Philip thought, but it was one more thing he didn’t say. He stood and watched while Mark walked away from him up the path to Hayes House. The kid was completely zonked. He wasn’t even functioning. He had probably imagined the whole thing. It was a miracle he wasn’t seeing pink elephants and snakes in the shower as it was.
    Still, there was always the chance. When Philip was sure Mark was on his way up the Hayes House back porch steps, he turned in the other direction and went down the path toward the library and the pond. The pond was actually quite a distance away. The school said it didn’t build closer because of worries about wetlands regulation and the environment, but the real reason was worries about what water damage could do to the foundations of buildings. He went down along the office wing of the library—there was Marta Coelho’s office light, still on—and then past the big Gothichulk and onto the open campus. Mark was right. It wasn’t really snow anymore. It was all iced over and hard, like a shell on the land.
    Philip skirted the edge of the pond, moving slowly, looking for any sign of a “body” or anything like a body; but he could see, long before he got to the stand of evergreens, that there wasn’t a body there. Philip went up close. There were no footprints, but he was leaving none himself. There was no impression of a body under the trees, but there probably wouldn’t have been, even if the body had been real.
    Philip Candor did not, for a moment, think that the body had been real. He thought Mark DeAvecca had been hallucinating, which was only to be expected. Mark should have been hallucinating for months, considering just how messed up he was most of the time.
    Philip looked around. He could see the catwalk window, still glowing from the light coming up from the main reading room. He could see the first corner that led to the office wing. He could not see the dorms. This was the most isolated edge of the pond, the place farthest away from people and buildings and cars. There was something about it he definitely didn’t like.
    Stupid kid,
he thought.
    He dug his hands ever deeper into his pockets and started back to Martinson House and his apartment.
4
    Peter Makepeace had been counting drops of water falling from the icicle on the porch, but if he was completely honest about it he would have to admit that he had started and stopped counting several times and had no idea how many drops of water had fallen.
I’m going to have to do something about the leak in the porch roof,
he thought, but it wasn’t his job to do anything about the leak in the porch roof, just as it wasn’t his job to be sitting in his own study on a Friday night thinking about his wife having an affair with a student. Thewords “having an affair” popped into his head unasked for. It wasn’t the way he put it to himself when he thought about it deliberately.
She’s fucking
a Student, that’s what he meant to say. More specifically, she was fucking a particular student, this year’s entry in Windsor Academy’s annual socioeconomic diversity sweepstakes. It was incredible just how cynical he had become in the few short years since he had taken this job. It was even more incredible to remember that Alice hadn’t wanted to come here or to any school. She had wanted to take a job in a factory or run away to Fiji or become an artist in Greenwich Village. It was either the wonderful, or the