Текст книги "Boy in the Water"

Автор книги: Stephen Dobyns

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Текущая страница: 12 (всего у книги 29 страниц)

“Could it be Chip Campbell?”

“I doubt it. I’m sure he hates me, but he’s got other things on his mind—his ex-wife is in the process of moving to Seattle and taking their two kids, and he’s doing substitute teaching in several schools. Believe me, when this began to get worse, he was the first person I thought of, but he just doesn’t have the time. I even drove over to his house, though I didn’t go in. I could see him through the picture window with a six-pack of beer, staring at the ceiling. I felt sorry for him.”

“Have you called the police?”

“I reported the theft and vandalism for insurance purposes. There’s a policeman in Brewster who’s come out several times, a sort of local character but very intelligent. He’s talked to the night watchman and some students, but he doesn’t have the time to mount a full investigation and the business is too small for the state troopers. As for the gossip, I don’t know who’s behind it. Maybe they’re friends of Chip, maybe it’s someone else.” Instead of going into the library, they kept walking along a path that circled Hamilton Hall.

“Let me show you where I live,” said Hawthorne. “I’ll give you a cup of coffee.”

Krueger could smell the wet wool of his overcoat. He turned up the collar. They hurried toward the terrace that extended out behind Adams Hall. Beyond the playing fields, only the first trees were visible. Past that, everything was gray.

“The trouble is,” said Hawthorne, “whenever I hear something unpleasant is going on, I think there must be even more to it. I hear Ruth Standish criticizing Alice Beech and I wonder, Who put that in her head? When you first meet a person, he or she’s mostly on their best behavior, kind, smart, well-meaning. But the longer you know the person, the more appearances get stripped away. You see the person get angry or act selfishly. Is someone saying something because that’s what he feels, or because he wants to present you with this particular deception for devious reasons of his own? At times in faculty meetings there’ll be so much double-talk I’ll think that Irony should be given a classification as a legitimate language. I should ask Kate to teach it: Irony 101, Irony 201. It lets a person talk without being held responsible for what’s being said.”

By now they had reached Hawthorne’s quarters. Krueger was the first to see a white plastic bag hanging from the doorknob of the French windows. In the unrelenting grayness, it seemed the focus of all available light. Then Hawthorne saw it and ran forward.

“Damn it to hell!” Hawthorne took the bag from the knob and unlocked the door.

“What is it?” asked Krueger, catching up to him.

“Someone keeps leaving me gifts of food.”

“And?”

“It’s rotten. Look at this.” Hawthorne opened the bag.

Krueger leaned forward. Even before he saw anything he caught the smell of spoiled milk. Then he saw moldy bread and some kind of moldy meat.

“Don’t you get it?” said Hawthorne, pushing open the door. “It’s a food offering but it’s dead. Just like Meg and Lily are dead. This is the third time it’s happened. The first time, there was a note: ‘Dead lunch.’ Funny, isn’t it?” He forced himself to speak more calmly. “I’m sorry. Fritz upset me. Asking everyone about their children. What about me? I think. I had a child too.”

He crossed the living room to the kitchen to put the plastic bag in the garbage.

Krueger followed him, removing his cap and hitting it against his leg. Then he took off his wet overcoat. “Actually, I couldn’t imagine why Skander brought up the subject.” The living room was shabby, with one brand-new oversized brown leather armchair.

Hawthorne busied himself in the kitchen, measuring coffee into a filter. “He’s dense, that’s all. What’s the saying? He’d mention rope in a house where a man had been hung. He’s fascinated with what happened at Wyndham. The fire, the reasons for the fire, why Meg and Lily couldn’t get out. I listen to him and I want to shout, Shut up! But I don’t. He’s a good man, he’s just tactless. After all, he didn’t spend a dozen years studying psychology. He’s a mathematician. Do you know that someone put news clippings from San Diego in all the faculty mailboxes? From the Trib—about four stories in all. They contained practically my entire history—that I played basketball, that I like jazz, that I read John le Carré. Then everybody had this skewed idea of what happened—the fire and the hearings afterward. God, I swear I almost went back to California.”

Krueger stood in the doorway of the kitchen wiping his face with a paper towel. He wished Hawthorne had given up Bishop’s Hill and gone someplace else.

Hawthorne talked about the school as he made the coffee. Everything positive that he had mentioned in the morning was being countered that afternoon by a negative. A few minutes later, they were sitting in the living room. Hawthorne insisted that Krueger take the leather chair, which he had bought several weeks before.

“I’m sure people believe I bought it with the money saved from my meatless Thursdays.”

“Why don’t you call the police about these pranks?”

“And say what, that someone’s leaving me bags of rotten food?” Hawthorne stood up and walked to the rain-streaked window. “I’m the prime example of someone ready to embrace every foolish conspiracy theory under the sun. I’ve even skulked around trying to catch whoever’s leaving the food, but the actual running of the school takes every moment. I can’t spend half the day hiding behind a tree and watching my back door.”

“It’s bound to get worse.”

“How much worse can it get?”

“I hate to think.”

They sat in silence for a while. Neither man drank his coffee.

“Come on,” said Hawthorne, “I want to show you where Kate and I coach swimming. Balboni Natatorium. I don’t know who Balboni was. Some gloomy fellow.”

They put their coats back on and went outside. Crossing the Common, they walked around to the gymnasium. There was no sign of the forest, just a foggy wall reaching past the playing fields. Hawthorne unlocked a set of green doors leading into a short, dark hall that smelled of chlorine and dampness. There was a door on either side, one labeled “Boys” and the other “Girls.”

“I won’t show you the locker rooms. They’re too depressing unless you like mildew.”

They continued down the hall to a door marked “Pool.”

“Let me get the lights,” said Hawthorne, unlocking the door and going inside. Krueger stood in the doorway. The air was warm and humid and reeked of chlorine. There was a sharp clank as twenty fluorescent panels began to flicker. A few came on directly; most blinked on and off.

Krueger took in the light green cinder-block walls, the sagging bleachers, the cracked tiles. There were no windows. Half the acoustic tiles were missing from the ceiling. The water in the five-lane twenty-five-yard pool was the color and opacity of pea soup, the painted lines at the bottom nearly invisible. Clumsily written in black letters on the far wall were the words “Bishop’s Hill, we aim to kill!”

“Nice,” said Krueger.

“I’m told there’s something wrong with the filtering system or perhaps the chlorine. The phys ed teacher keeps talking about the ‘pH.’ Don’t get me started on the pH.”

The fluorescent lights had turned their skin greenish yellow. At the deep end of the pool, two diving boards had been tilted up and leaned vertically against the far wall.

“This is my humble place of work,” said Hawthorne, “where Kate and I strive to make the Bishop’s Hill swim team a league competitor. Strauss’s school brochures claim that we have an Olympic-size pool, though prospective students never actually get to see it. I’ve often thought we could grow things in here, like mushrooms.”

Curlicues of mist rose from the water.

“When I get depressed, I start seeing the pool as a metaphor for Bishop’s Hill,” Hawthorne continued. “You ask yourself, How could one make it better? The only answer is to tear it down and start over.”

Krueger attempted to laugh. “That’s rather drastic.”

“Well, we won one of our meets this fall and that’s a positive sign. Kate’s a good coach and I swam in college, so I know what you’re supposed to do. But if the school doesn’t close, I hope to hire someone to do this so I can go back to simple administration.”

“Simple administration,” said Krueger.

“It sounds almost restful.”

There was a crash as the outside door was flung open, followed by the sound of feet running in the hall. Hawthorne and Krueger turned toward the door. Almost immediately Scott McKinnon slid through it and stumbled to a stop. His wet red hair hung in strings across his forehead.

“Mr. Skander wants you. You better hurry. Someone ripped apart Mr. Evings’s office. I didn’t get a good look, but they say it’s a wreck.”

–

One whole wall of Clifford Evings’s small office had been a bookcase. Now the books were on the floor and many were torn—pages ripped out, covers pulled off. Hundreds of loose pages were scattered across the room, or cubby, as Evings liked to call it. One of the wing chairs by the fireplace was tipped over, and Evings was perched on its side with his head in his hands. He wore a green cardigan so threadbare at the elbows that the fabric of his white shirt was visible. The second chair was slashed and its stuffing had been pulled out. The desk lay on its side; the desk lamp was by the door with its glass shade smashed. The frame that had held the painting of Ambrose Stark had been partially pried from the wall. The painting itself was missing.

Bobby Newland stood behind Evings with his hand on Evings’s shoulder. “I’ve called the Brewster police and the state police.”

Krueger was again struck by how alike the two men looked: bald and gangling. He imagined that Newland had grown his mustache and goatee just to make a clear distinction between Evings and himself.

“Most assuredly everything will be done,” said Skander. He stood by the fireplace and looked around in dismay. “Of course, if the culprit is a student and a juvenile . . . but we’ll see, we’ll see. Unquestionably an expulsion would be called for. Nothing like this has ever taken place in all my time at Bishop’s Hill. And how dreadful for it to happen while a representative of the Department of Education is visiting us.”

Krueger remained with Hawthorne by the door, which was shut to prevent the students from peering in. Krueger found the room warm to the point of stifling. Was Skander saying that the vandalism was particularly awful because he, Krueger, was here to witness what had happened? It seemed an odd position. When Hawthorne told him that the empty frame had held the portrait of Ambrose Stark, Krueger found himself thinking that Stark had broken loose, as if the former headmaster himself had caused the wreckage.

“When did this happen?” asked Hawthorne.

“We don’t know,” said Bobby. “Possibly during lunch. Clifford and I came back about one-thirty and found it like this.”

“Of course it happened during lunch,” said Skander. “We’ll have to make a list of all the people who weren’t there. That would be a good start.”

Krueger couldn’t help staring at Skander’s necktie and its message, “What, me worry?” “And nobody saw anything?” he asked.

“Believe me,” said Bobby, “if I knew who did it, that person would be here right this instant.”

“Do you have any ideas, Clifford?” asked Hawthorne gently.

Evings shook his head but neither spoke nor removed his hands from his face.

“It had to be students,” said Bobby. “They’ve been making fun of Clifford all fall. Those damn discussion groups, talking about gayness and diversity and whatnot. Nobody ever cared that Clifford was gay until it became a matter of discussion.”

“Of course we don’t know for certain that students did this,” said Skander. “It could be an adult. Try to imagine a parent with a grudge against the school, someone who felt his child had been unduly punished.” He raised an index finger and looked at it thoughtfully.

“And I suppose you’re going to say that someone might have just happened to stroll by the school—some stranger who came in here and just on a whim—”

“Stop it, Bobby,” said Evings quietly.

“I think I’ll wait for the police outside,” said Skander. “And if I were you, Robert, I’d watch my tongue. We all understand that you’re angry, but that’s no reason to be unpleasant.”

Skander left. Krueger briefly got a glimpse of several students standing in the hall.

Hawthorne knelt down beside Evings, putting a hand on Evings’s knee. “I’m terribly sorry this happened, Clifford. We’ll find out who did it and make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

Evings shook his head but didn’t speak.

“There are many people,” said Bobby somewhat primly, “who don’t believe you’ve done this school any good at all.”

Evings raised his head and put a finger to his lips. “Hush, Bobby, let’s not talk about it. You know as well as I do that I haven’t done all I could.”

“Given the situation,” said Bobby, “how could you?” He kicked at some papers on the floor. “A disaster waiting to happen, that’s Bishop’s Hill in a nutshell.”

Krueger began to feel annoyed but kept his thoughts to himself. Newland and Evings had good reason to be upset and this wasn’t the time to engage in a discussion about Hawthorne’s merits. Yet what had happened was horrible. All day Krueger had felt that the school was about to burst apart, as if the display of decorum were the thinnest of veneers covering a mass of hostility, resentment, and fear.

“Is this a practical joke too?” he asked Hawthorne.

There was a knocking on the door.

It was Skander with a policeman from Brewster, a heavyset middle-aged man with a red face. When he saw the state of the office, he took off his cap and massaged his brow. “My, my, hasn’t someone been making a mess.” He introduced himself as Chief Moulton.

Hawthorne told him what had happened, though it was clear that Skander had already passed on the basic facts. Before he finished, a state police sergeant arrived from the barracks in Plymouth, so Hawthorne had to begin all over again. Not that there was a lot to tell. The incident had apparently happened during lunch and no one had seen anything. Krueger kept thinking of the missing painting and Stark’s harsh expression. Seven men were now in the office and whenever Krueger moved he either stepped on something or bumped into someone. He began to make his way toward the door. He had a two-hour drive ahead of him and felt he should leave the police to their work.

Hawthorne walked Krueger to the entrance of Emerson Hall. Classes were in session and the corridors were empty. Outside it had resumed raining hard. Krueger buttoned up his coat and drew on his gloves.

“Don’t worry,” Hawthorne kept saying, “I’ll be perfectly fine.”

“Do you really think students wrecked the office?”

“I don’t know.”

Krueger wanted to urge Hawthorne to leave Bishop’s Hill, to quit his job and walk away. He felt dismayed by his own inadequacy, that he couldn’t take Hawthorne’s arm and say how worried he was. He wanted to tell his friend that he was afraid for him, but he lacked the courage. Still, there was more he wanted to learn about the school and he believed he could do it best from his office in Concord. He took Hawthorne’s hand and his eyes scanned his friend’s face.

“I’ll be in touch,” he said.

–

Away from home Detective Leo Flynn didn’t have a natural smile, no matter how much he tried. He needed to be in his own chair in his own living room—preferably with Junie, to whom he had been married for forty-one years, or with one of the kids—before he could let himself go. Even when one of his colleagues in the homicide unit told a joke he liked, Flynn’s smile had a watchful, self-observed quality. Now, as he directed his smile at Jerry Sweeney, a bush-league miscreant with two larceny convictions and a half-dozen years in Walpole, Flynn could see Sweeney fight off a desire to hurry from the room.

“Of course,” said Leo Flynn, widening his smile, “we could discuss this downtown.”

They were sitting in Sweeney’s small apartment in Dorchester. It was Monday afternoon, November 9, and Flynn had happened upon Sweeney after several weeks of hanging around sleazy bars in Revere, Dorchester, and South Boston looking for friends of Sal Procopio. Sweeney was a freckled, florid Irishman of about forty, already thin on top, with hands like slabs of meat. From the kitchen came a banging and clattering, as if Sweeney’s wife were engaged in throwing pots and pans on the floor.

“I don’t want to get anybody in trouble,” said Sweeney virtuously.

“You mean you don’t want to get yourself in trouble.”

Jerry Sweeney cradled his jaw with a fleshy hand. “That too.”

Leo Flynn leaned back on the couch, stuck out his legs, and tried to look inoffensive. “What interests me is Sal Procopio’s murder and this guy Frank. The larceny and general thievery, that’s not my department.”

“Sal and Frank,” said Sweeney, lowering his voice and taking a quick glance toward the kitchen, “they’d been knocking off some liquor stores.”

“I already know that. Where can I find Frank?”

“He left town.”

“I know that as well. Where’d he go?”

“No place around here. Someplace out of state. He said he was going back to school, he made a joke about it.”

“Yeah? And what was he planning to study?”

Sweeney looked at Flynn with surprise. “Hey, that’s just what I asked him.”

“And?”

“He made it clear he was going to do a number, at least that’s what I took him to be saying. But it’d be different from the others. He said it’d be something new for him. Like that was what he was going to school to learn.”

“What’d he mean by that?”

“Beats me. I told you, he gave me the willies. He’d get mad and you couldn’t figure how it happened. Like one moment he’d be laughing and the next he’d be all over you.”

“So what do you think he might have meant?”

“I figured he’d been hired to ice someone but it was going to be different from his other jobs. Jesus, what do you expect me to say? Just different, that’s all. Maybe he’d iced a bunch a short people and now he was going to do a tall guy.”

Leo Flynn refitted his uncomfortable smile onto his thin lips. “That’s a joke, right?”

“I’m just telling you I don’t know.”

Flynn watched Sweeney’s round face, waiting to see if anything twitched. Sweeney was the fourth of Procopio’s friends that Flynn had managed to find. Of the others, only one had known about Frank and the liquor stores—a discovery that had led the friend, a cardplayer named Exley, to cut all connection with Procopio. But Exley had claimed to know nothing about Frank except that he was a Canuck. Flynn thought that if he had been blessed with friends like these, he’d prefer to buy a dog, which, if things turned sour, could only bite him.

“Who hired him?”

“No one around here. Least that was my impression.”

“Was it somebody from Portsmouth?” Flynn had learned that Frank LeBlanc or LeBon, whatever his name was, had been working as a short-order cook in Portsmouth prior to coming to Boston and, if all went well, Flynn meant to drive up there in a week or so.

“If it was, he didn’t share it with me.” Sweeney widened his eyes in mock innocence.

“We could still go downtown,” said Flynn conversationally. “But you know how it is, all that red tape. And you still on parole—no telling when you’d get home.”

A drop of perspiration appeared on Jerry Sweeney’s puffy brow and Flynn felt gratified to see it. “I tell you, I got no idea,” Sweeny insisted. “You didn’t ask him questions. If he said something, then you nodded and smiled and let it go. He was touchy.”

“Murderous.”

“Yeah, that too.” Sweeney wiped his face with the back of his hand.

“How well’d you know him?”

“I’d see him in the bar with Sal. Even Sal was scared of him.”

“You’re lying to me again.”

Another drop of sweat seemed to emerge from nowhere. “Okay, okay, he wanted me to drive for him. I didn’t like it. I said I was busy. He started to get pissed off and I told him about Sal. That Sal was a good bet.”

“So you introduced them and now Sal’s dead.”

“Yeah, well, at least it’s not me. But before that I’d see him in the bar. We shot pool a few times. Like we’d be partners. He bet the dogs; he even won some.”

“And he talked about doing a number now and then.”

“Not directly, but, yeah, it’d come up.”

“You never thought of giving us a call? An anonymous tip?”

“Hey,” said Sweeney, looking offended, “I got my reputation to consider.”

Flynn drew an old Kleenex from the side pocket of his jacket and blew his nose. The next time Sweeney was brought in for questioning, Flynn decided, he’d have a friendly word with the assistant prosecutor, maybe get Sweeney some extra time in Walpole. “So, tell me, what’s so special about this number that Frank’s planning to do?”

“Different, that’s all. Frank didn’t confide in me. But it worried him. I don’t mean it scared him, I don’t think anything scared him. It was just something he had trouble making jokes about. And it was connected to the school, like the thing that worried him was something he had to get over. You know, like a defect of character.”

–

Scott McKinnon had piled his textbooks on his desk and was using them as a pillow, but he was listening. He made sure of that because every so often Dr. Hawthorne would ask him a question to check and he always got the answer right. If Scott was asked why he didn’t sit up like the other students, he’d say he didn’t feel like it or he was tired or it wasn’t any of your business. But he liked Dr. Hawthorne and he saw himself as the headmaster’s special pet and so he did things like putting his head down on his desk just to show he could get away with it. Dr. Hawthorne treated him different. Like the two times they’d gone for a drive and Hawthorne had let him smoke. Scott felt good about that and he’d talked to him about the school and what the kids were like, although, of course, most of them were pretty dumb. It wasn’t like being a snitch. He was Dr. Hawthorne’s agent.

There were eleven kids seated in a semicircle and Dr. Hawthorne was up at the blackboard, drawing several lines indicating the northern boundary of the Roman Empire in what was now Austria, Hungary, and Romania. He had gotten chalk on his jacket but he didn’t seem to care. He was talking about the Second Marcomannic War between AD 169 and 175, when Marcus Aurelius and his legions fought the German tribes—the Iazyges, the Marcomanni, the Quadi, the Sarmatians—defeating them and pushing them north into the Carpathian Mountains. For these victories a triumphal column was raised to Marcus Aurelius that still stood in Rome’s Piazza Colonna.

It was last period on Monday and getting dark. All afternoon Scott had been thinking about Mr. Evings’s office being wrecked. While not exactly exciting, it was more interesting than most of the stuff at Bishop’s Hill. Scott had caught a glimpse of the room before he got shooed away: a great pile of busted books. And Scott had seen the police arrive in two different cars. A little later Dr. Hawthorne had taken the cops into his office. Scott felt frustrated because he knew nothing about who might have done it, nor did he know who might be suspected. Usually he knew stuff, but today he hadn’t heard anything and nobody looked guilty. Scott looked forward to prowling around the dorms after dinner to see if he could learn anything. He was sure some kids had done it, or almost sure. On the other hand, if kids weren’t to blame, then Scott couldn’t figure it out, unless it was evil spirits. He liked the idea of evil spirits. Or maybe it had been gay bashers from off campus. Scott had never talked to Mr. Evings, though he knew Mr. Newland. When Scott had entered seventh grade some kids had told him to watch out for Evings, that he would try to grab your pecker, but Scott didn’t know if that was true or just a story. Anyway, he hadn’t tried to find out.

As for history, Scott enjoyed the battles best and Mr. Campbell had made them exciting. The Greek and Persian wars had been absolutely great. Dr. Hawthorne wasn’t as good at battles as Mr. Campbell. And Scott didn’t really get stuff like Stoicism. “Everything that happens, happens justly.” What kind of sense did that make? “For a thrown stone there is no more evil in falling than there is good in rising.” Not only did Scott not understand it, he didn’t care about the riddle it posed except to stay friendly with Dr. Hawthorne. “The business of the healthy eye is to see everything that is visible.” Now, that made sense, because Scott prided himself on trying to see everything there was to be seen. Secret agents had to be on the alert.

Dr. Hawthorne spoke of Marcus Aurelius in his tent by the River Gran writing his meditations at night while during the day he and his legions fought the German tribesmen, who, Marcus believed, would someday break through the frontier and conquer Rome. All Marcus was doing was giving his people a respite, a breathing space before they were beaten. When the class had studied the Celts, Scott had learned that they’d attacked the Romans naked, just ripping off their clothes and jumping up and down and shouting. He couldn’t imagine it, though in his history book there was a picture of the Dying Gaul and he was pretty naked as well. Scott had asked Dr. Hawthorne whether the German tribesman had fought naked. “Get your mind outta the gutter,” Jimmy Lucas had told him.

“‘As a spider is proud of catching a fly, so is one man of trapping a hare, or another of netting a herring, or a third of capturing boars or bears or Sarmatians. If you investigate the question of principles, are these anything but thieves one and all?’”

Dr. Hawthorne explained that the Sarmatians were one of the tribes along the Danube that Marcus was fighting. Then he asked what Marcus meant by saying that the spider capturing the fly was no better than a thief. What was he saying about human behavior? Scott had no idea, so he kept his head down. He wanted Dr. Hawthorne to get past Marcus Aurelius and talk about his son Commodus, who was a real butcher and once killed a hundred tigers with a hundred arrows. Surely that was more interesting. From the corner of his eye he watched Dr. Hawthorne walk back and forth at the front of the room.

“Maybe he likes flies better than spiders,” said Jimmy Lucas.

“All right, we’ll try another one,” said Dr. Hawthorne, walking over toward Scott.

“‘When men are inhuman, take care not to feel toward them as they do toward other humans.’ Can anyone tell me what that means?” Nobody answered. Dr. Hawthorne tapped Scott on the shoulder and he snorted, pretending to be asleep. “All right, Scott, we’ll start with you. And don’t mumble into your armpit, if you please.”