Free The Headmaster's Wife by Jane Haddam Page A

tonight and then come out again for a … hallucination? What were the drugs that caused hallucinations? She’d never paid much attention to the drug information that floated around campus like confetti in Times Square on New Year’s Eve. She wasn’t interested in her students’ drug lives any more than she was interested in their sex lives. Mark was bobbing and weavingas if his bones had half melted under his skin. Edith stepped all the way back into the hall and closed the door in front of her. Lytton House was very quiet tonight, as quiet as she usually liked it to be. Now it felt oppressive and stale.
    She went back into her apartment and closed that door, too. She sat down in her big club chair and looked at her cup of tea. They all just assumed the boy was on drugs. It was the most obvious explanation for the way he was behaving.
    It had suddenly occurred to her just how much trouble that boy’s parents could make for this school if it turned out they were all wrong and something was really the matter with Mark.
8
    Alice Makepeace knew that her husband had a surveillance camera in their bedroom, and she knew what it was he used it for. Every once in a while, when he was safely out of state at a conference of independent school heads—the euphemism drove her crazy; when had they decided to hide the elitism of it all under cover of that bourgeois word “independent”?—she went into his study with her spare key and looked through the photographs in the desk. They were terrible photographs more often than not, grainy and unreal, nothing at all like what she had really experienced in bed. She was not afraid of the photographs any more than she was afraid of Peter. It would hurt him far more than it would hurt her if anybody ever knew what was in them, just as it would hurt him more than it would hurt her if anybody ever found out about the boys. She was no Mary Kay Letourneau. She wasn’t conducting a grand passion or working out the demons from a tackily wretched childhood spent feeling guilty and ugly on the streets of some subdivision in flyover country. She had had a wonderful childhood, thank you very much, and an even more wonderful young adulthood. She had been to Paris four times before she was eight. She had spent every one of her winter vacations on the Riviera rightup until the year she married Peter, when they had had no winter vacation because he was taking seminars at Harvard and attempting to beef up his résumé. She should have realized, then, that this was what it would be like—the unutterable boredom, the endless sameness of it all, day after day, week after week, year after year, with nothing to look forward to but the malice in the eyes of the old ladies on the board, the ones who hated her for merely existing.
    Boredom was the key. In the end everything came down to that. Most of the time Alice lived in a positive fog of boredom, and she knew herself too well to think that she could do what most women in her position did to make the time pass. It was a tradition in “independent” schools that the headmaster’s wife had a teaching job at the school or a place on the support staff. Husbands and wives worked together almost always because that meant two paychecks and a more viable household income from jobs that—except on Peter’s level—didn’t really pay much at all. Alice could not see herself as a counselor. She could not see herself teaching English. She could not see herself at faculty meetings. She could barely see herself making her way across the quad every morning to have dinner in the cafeteria, although she did it, the way she did everything that was required of her.
    She was not bored tonight, although she was oddly lightheaded. It confused her because she didn’t often get dizzy. She’d come into the headmaster’s house by the side door. She was standing in the little mudroom with its built-in