Free The Headmaster's Wife by Jane Haddam

students’ private lives. Mark DeAvecca’s private life positively frightened her.
Still,
she thought.
Still
He looks so cold.
There were traces of ice in his heavy dark eyebrows.
    â€œYou could come in if you like,” she said. “I’ve got a pot of tea. I’ve got hot chocolate if you’d rather have that.”
    â€œThank you,” Mark said. He wasn’t looking at her. He never looked at anybody directly. He turned in a complete circle and then faced her again. The muscles in his face were twitching. While she watched him, his whole body seemed to convulse, quickly and painlessly. It was over in a moment.
    â€œCome in,” she said. “You don’t look well. Have you been to the infirmary?”
    â€œThe infirmary isn’t open.”
    â€œI meant anytime in the near past.”
    â€œI go every once in a while,” Mark said. “There’s never anything wrong with me. I don’t have a temperature. They send me back to class.”
    â€œI didn’t say I thought you should miss class.”
    â€œI know. I know. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Maybe nothing’s wrong with me. Except, you know, it was never like this before.”
    â€œLike what?”
    Mark shook his head. Edith was beginning to feel the cold. She wondered why she hadn’t felt it long ago. There was something odd about this scene. It was as if they were both suspended in space, riding in a bubble without weather. There was a wind in the quad, though, the same wind that had blown Alice Makepeace’s cape around her legs. Edith thought it was going to take her an hour before she got herself warmed up again once she was back inside.
    â€œCome in,” she said. “Warm up. Have something to drink. You look awful, and I’m freezing.”
    â€œThanks anyway,” Mark said, “but I’ve got to get some sleep, I think. Sometimes it feels like I haven’t slept all year.”
    â€œYou look as if you’re sleeping now, right on your feet.”
    â€œSleepwalking,” Mark said solemnly. Then he turned away from her and looked across the quad, all the way to the other end, where Hayes House was. “I don’t remember leavingand coming out again. I don’t remember it. I remember deciding to do it, but I don’t remember doing it. I don’t remember anything until I got down to the pond, that was the second time at the pond, I think. I don’t remember. I don’t remember. That’s what this year has been like. I can’t ever remember anything.”
    Edith almost said something, too sharply, about the fact that he almost never remembered his homework, but she bit it back. Maybe it was drugs. Maybe he was stoned all the time. There was certainly something wrong with him. He was swaying on his feet. She thought he might pass out right in front of her, but it didn’t happen.
    â€œIf you’re not going to come in, go back to Hayes,” she said. “Go back right now. Go to your room and lie down. You shouldn’t be wandering around in the condition you’re in.”
    â€œThe question is, what condition
am
I in?” Mark said. “That’s it, you see. The infirmary says there’s nothing wrong with me. For a while I thought I had that thing, Huntington’s disease, Huntington’s chorea—”
    â€œDoes it run in your family? Did one of your parents have it?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œWell, then.”
    â€œI know,” Mark said, “but the thing is—”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œNothing,” Mark said. “I must have been hallucinating, and that’s a first. I’ve never hallucinated before.”
    â€œGo back to Hayes,” Edith said.
    Mark nodded slightly. Edith stood back a little, giving herself the partial shelter of the doorway, and watched him head off down the path in the direction of Hayes House. Had he really already been there once