The Headmaster's Wife by Jane Haddam

Makepeace was never alone, and when she was it was because she was coming or going to an assignation. He couldn’t imagine what kind of assignation she could be having at Maverick Pond in the middle of a cold February night, when even the squirrels weren’t interested in making love in the out-of-doors.
    He put the teaspoons down on the tray. He watched Alice Makepeace reach the top of the hill near the west door of the library and then begin to move along the path toward the quad. She was wearing that floor-length black wool cape she’d affected since the day he’d first met her. She looked like she was auditioning for a part in an all-female remake of
Zorro.
The way things were these days, somebody probablywould make a female
Zorro,
and then all the girls in the English Department would write essays full of torturously complicated language for the
Publication of the Modern Language Association
saying, basically, that it was a Very Good Thing to show women in nontraditional roles, and that the movie would probably result in the death of capitalism and the coming of a Utopia built on nurturing, cooperation, and classically female values.
    Alice Makepeace had disappeared out of sight in the quad. James picked up the tray and began to carry it into the kitchen, thinking that he ought to put something sensible on the CD player before the night got too quiet for either his comfort or David’s. He didn’t know when that had started—the uncomfortable feeling they both had when there was too much silence between them—but it
had
started, and James had been through enough of these things to know that it meant the relationship was winding to a close. It was too bad really. He didn’t love David. He didn’t have much use for all this new talk of love and relationships and permanency that characterized this phase of the “gay” movement. He refused even to call himself “gay.” Still, it was too bad. He and David were companionable. They had been together a long time.
    David was sitting in the wing chair with his feet up on the ottoman going through the illustrated catalogue for the Turner show at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was an old show, years in the past. James couldn’t believe David was really interested.
    James put the tray down on the coffee table and sat in front of it on the couch. You
could
see out the window here to the quad, but there was no sign of Alice Makepeace trudging her way to the headmaster’s house. He wondered where she had gone.
    David put down the catalogue and reached for his coffee. “Where have you been? You’re not usually any more than a couple of minutes in the kitchen.”
    â€œI was watching someone out the window, a mystery.”
    â€œOh?”
    James shrugged. “Not really. An anomaly, really, that there’s probably some stupidly simple explanation for. I saw Alice Makepeace coming up from Maverick Pond.”
    â€œAlice Makepeace is who—the headmaster’s wife?”
    â€œExactly.”
    â€œAnd what’s at this Maverick Pond?”
    â€œNothing, really,” James said, “that’s the mystery. It’s just a water hole in the middle of a field. Everybody pretends to admire it because it’s part of nature, and there’s a demonstration out there every spring when the administration decides it has to spray to get rid of the mosquitoes. But there isn’t anything … there.”
    â€œSo what was she doing there?”
    â€œI haven’t the slightest idea. She has affairs with students. If the weather was somewhat warmer…” James shrugged.
    David had picked up his coffee cup. Now he put it down again, interested. He taught at a university in Boston. James knew he looked on Windsor Academy as a kind of exercise in surrealism. He was always asking James why James didn’t just move to some place like Emerson, or even Tufts. James had his