Текст книги "Boy in the Water"

Автор книги: Stephen Dobyns

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Текущая страница: 17 (всего у книги 29 страниц)

“So it’s agreed?” asked Hawthorne at last.

Jessica gathered up the kitten in her arms. “I guess so.”

“And you’ll take care of it?”

“Sure. I mean, I love it.”

“And are you going to tell me where you got the tequila the other night?”

“I can’t.” She raised her chin defiantly.

He was tempted to blackmail her. If she didn’t tell about the tequila, she couldn’t keep the kitten. The idea made him dislike himself. “Then you better get to dinner,” he said.

Hawthorne stayed a few more minutes to talk to Alice Beech.

“Certainly I remember Gail Jensen,” said Alice. “But I wasn’t here when she was taken to the hospital. It was just three years ago at Thanksgiving break. I’d gone to Boston to see some friends. The girl had stayed at school. She went into the hospital on the Friday after Thanksgiving. When I got back on Sunday night, I heard she’d died.” They were sitting in Alice’s office. On the walls were photographs of Alice kayaking with a number of friends, all women.

“And it was appendicitis?”

“That’s what I was told. I had no reason to doubt it.”

“Had the girl been sick?”

“No. It was very sudden.”

“What was she like?”

“The girl? Very quiet, a little plain, not a particularly good student.”

“Did she have friends?”

“Not many, maybe none at all. She had a job in the office helping Mrs. Hayes—photocopying and answering the phone. That was really the only time I saw her.”

Hawthorne thanked Alice again for taking care of Jessica, yet even as he spoke he recalled Skander’s absurd suggestion that Alice had a sexual interest. The thought made him feel even more isolated. He considered the good or bad construction that could be put on any action and asked himself why the faculty at Bishop’s Hill seemed so relentlessly determined to imagine the bad.

After dinner Hawthorne went down to the Dugout to spend an hour or so with the students. Many were upset about Evings’s death and he wanted to give them the chance to vent their feelings. He found about twenty at tables scattered around the room, talking, listening to the jukebox, and playing video games. Often during the fall he had joined a table of students, and they had come to see nothing out of the ordinary about his presence. Now they seemed more distant and he suspected it was because of the rumors about him and Jessica.

Still, half a dozen settled around him to talk about Evings, although they tried to mask their shock behind an affected composure.

“What I don’t sec,” said a sophomore named Riley, “is why he couldn’t of split. I mean, go to California.”

His girlfriend disagreed. “He was too old to go to California.” She combed her fingers through her long black hair.

“Hey, he had a big problem,” said Tank Donoso. Tank wore a T-shirt that showed off his muscular bulk. “And who could he talk to? Like, who’s the psychologist for the psychologist? It’s a problem—”

A thin blond girl by the name of Ashley interrupted him. “He could have talked to Dr. Hawthorne.”

“Yo,” said Tank, “Dr. Hawthorne’s his boss. You don’t go to the boss and say how you’re fucking up, even if the boss is a shrink.”

And Rudy Schmidt, with whom Hawthorne still sometimes shot baskets, asked the question that the others may not have had the nerve to ask. “You think the school’s going to make it to the end of the year?”

“Why shouldn’t it?” said Hawthorne, feigning more surprise than he felt.

“Well, you know, money and stuff.”

“I just want to make sure I’ll graduate,” said Tank.

“I promise that you’ll both graduate,” said Hawthorne, “as long as your grades don’t take a nosedive.”

The small joke hardly raised a smile.

“What about next year?” asked the girl with the long black hair. Hawthorne thought her name was Sara.

“I’m doing everything I can to make sure we’ll be here in the fall.” Hawthorne realized, not for the first time, that no matter how much the students complained about Bishop’s Hill and fantasized about an ideal home, the school was still a place of security, even of comfort; for some of them, it was the only real home they had.

“That doesn’t mean you’ll make it,” said Riley.

“We’ll make it,” Hawthorne told him, trying to put absolute certainty into his voice.

After the others drifted away, Hawthorne told Tank that he wanted to talk to him. He had the idea of asking Tank to help him catch whoever had been leaving the bags of food.

“Homeboy,” said Tank, straddling a chair and folding his beefy hands on the table.

“How’ve you been?” asked Hawthorne. The dark wooden surface of the table was scarred with students’ names and initials and dates going back as far as the fifties.

Tank shrugged. Then he said, “Hey, I got something I got to show you.” He raised his hands, putting one on his forehead and the other on the back of his head against his short blond hair. He tilted his head toward Hawthorne and pushed both hands upward, squeezing his scalp and creating a number of furrows across the top that looked like rumble strips. Tank relaxed his hands, squeezed, then relaxed his hands again so the rumble strips came and went. “Cool, huh?” asked Tank.

“Cool,” said Hawthorne, and he considered the incredible desperation he must be feeling in order to imagine that Tank might make a suitable accomplice.

–

It was Hawthorne’s sense of his increasing isolation that led him to call Kate Sandler that evening.

“I wonder if I could come over,” he asked Kate around eight-thirty. He had spent a good half hour building up his nerve to call and he worried that his voice might show his nervousness. “I don’t have anything in particular to talk about. I’d just like the company.”

Kate hesitated and Hawthorne could imagine her thinking about her ex-husband and how her name had been linked with Hawthorne’s. He was sure she would say it was a bad idea.

“Come over anytime,” said Kate. “I’ll make some coffee.”

Kate lived in a small Cape Cod on a dirt road about three miles from the school. Hawthorne got there about nine. Her son, Todd, was just on his way to bed. He was a tall seven-year-old who shook hands with Hawthorne but looked at him a little distrustfully. Hawthorne remembered how the boy had been grilled by his father as to whether Kate had been seeing other men. And what would the boy say about Hawthorne?

The living room had a stone fireplace and gray plank paneling on one wall. A pile of books was heaped on the coffee table. Kate took Hawthorne into the kitchen. He sat at a round oak table and drank black coffee from a blue mug. At first he didn’t know what to say, then without making any conscious decision, he began telling her about the pictures of Ambrose Stark and the calls from the woman who purported to be Meg. He almost laughed at himself, so needy was he to tell another person about what had been happening. And he was afraid of Kate’s disbelief, that she would think he was crazy.

“But that’s terrible,” Kate kept saying. “I can’t believe you’ve been keeping this to yourself.”

He told her of the mutilated Stark painting that had stared down at him the night she had helped with Jessica. As he told her about the gifts of spoiled food, his coffee grew cold by his elbow. He found himself thinking of Kevin Krueger and what Krueger had said about the school’s malice and rancor.

“But who do you think’s doing it?” Kate sat across from him at the table, her dark hair framing her brow. She stared at his face as if she meant to draw it.

“For a while, I thought it was Chip Campbell. Then I thought it might be Roger Bennett or Herb Frankfurter. So many of them are angry at the changes. My friend Krueger says I should call the police. It’s so stupid—if I bring in the police, I’ll never get the school on my side. And why would the police believe me? That policeman from Brewster is still poking around because of the vandalism of Clifford’s office. Maybe I could talk to him. And certainly there’ll be an investigation into Clifford’s suicide. If I tell him, then this stuff about Ambrose Stark and the phone calls is bound to come out. People will think I’m nuts. I mean, I don’t have any witnesses. I’m the only one who’s seen that damn picture.”

“They want to force you to resign.”

“Yes.”

However, it was more than that. Hawthorne had wanted Bishop’s Hill to be his punishment—his great Sisyphean task—but he had wanted it to be a punishment under his control. He had meant to be prisoner and jailer both. Now he thought how ridiculous that had been. Not only was he being punished, he was worried that he would fail at keeping the school from going under. But of these thoughts he said nothing.

“You must tell the police,” Kate said. “Tell Chief Moulton. Surely, whoever is doing it is the same person who wrecked Clifford’s office.”

Kate urged him to tell some of the other faculty, those who seemed sympathetic—Alice Beech and Bill Dolittle, even Betty Sherman and Gene Strauss in admissions. And there were several more who were friendly, Kate was sure of it. Hawthorne listened but wasn’t convinced. Every time he heard a car pass he thought of his car in Kate’s driveway and how people would notice it.

It was past eleven when Hawthorne stood up to leave. Kate walked him to the door, then stood by as he put on his coat.

“I’m glad you told me,” she said. “That you trusted me that much.”

Glancing into her face, Hawthorne thought how pretty she looked. Her eyes seemed to shine as she watched him. Without thinking, he reached out and touched her cheek. She took his wrist, then turned his hand, kissing his palm. They stood like this for a moment. Gently, he pulled himself free.

“Let me,” she said, taking his hand again.

Once more Hawthorne gently pulled himself free. “When I touch your cheek, I feel my wife’s cheek,” he said. “When you kiss me, it’s Meg’s kiss that I feel.”

All at once Hawthorne turned and walked into the living room, standing with his back to Kate. She watched him without moving from the door.

“There’s something else I need to tell you about San Diego,” he began. “That psychologist, my former student, I knew her better than I said. Her name was Claire Sunderlin. I’d seen her a few times in Boston. Nothing had ever happened between us but it could have. We liked each other. We’d flirt. In San Diego, we’d had a good time during dinner, talking about Boston and other places. Afterward, listening to this jazz quartet, we were flirting again—making what-if kinds of jokes and laughing. Then we left the club and I walked her to my car. She was staying at a downtown hotel; it was only a couple of blocks. But I told her I would drive her. The car was in a parking lot and it was dark. We got in the front seat. We were still joking, then we began touching each other. I kissed her. We didn’t stop. We’d had a few drinks but I can’t even say I was drunk. It was like there was nothing outside my car, nothing outside in the world. She unzipped my pants. She made love to me with her mouth. My hands were buried in her hair and I held her over me. That’s what I was doing when Stanley was setting the fire.”

Eight

The chapel was full and the three golden chandeliers were blazing with light. Most of the faculty and staff were sitting in the two front rows, but Roger Bennett and Bill Dolittle stayed in the back in order to watch the doors and keep an eye on the students who occupied the pews behind their teachers. Also standing in back was Chief Moulton, the Brewster policeman. As headmaster, Hawthorne sat to the right of the altar, facing the school. On the other side of the altar was Harriet Bennett in her ecclesiastical robes. It was eight-thirty Thursday morning. Through the stained-glass windows, the November sun sent multicolored rays across the faces of faculty and students alike. Rosalind Langdon had just finished playing a Bach fugue on the organ and Tank Donoso, who lived in Shepherd, was climbing into the pulpit and looking somewhat truculently out at the chapel. As president of the student body he had been chosen to speak for the other students in Shepherd about their feelings for Evings, feelings that had probably ranged from the critical to the indifferent until death had increased Evings’s importance. Tank wore a dark blue suit that seemed too tight and he must have run his electric clippers across his scalp that morning, because he was nearly bald. Hawthorne glanced away and saw the door in back open. Frank LeBrun entered. He hesitated, then remained by the exit.

The service had begun shortly after eight with the Reverend Bennett talking about “Clifford Evings the man,” as she had called him. Her eulogy had been a mixture of homily and reminiscence but so generalized that she could have been talking about anybody. Hawthorne wondered what she truly thought, since she had urged him to dismiss Evings or at least force him into early retirement just the previous week. Instead she had spoken about the luminescence of his soul and the weight of his mortal burden. She said the light of his presence had been dimmed in this world only. Hawthorne imagined accusing her of hypocrisy, which he would never do. But possibly, now that Evings was dead, she could feel charity and even remorse. Possibly the prayers with which she concluded her remarks had been heartfelt.

Others had spoken. Skander told how he and Evings had both come to Bishop’s Hill exactly twenty years earlier. He had little to say beyond that numerical fact except that Evings had become a “fixture” and “one of those quiet people upon whom I had come to depend.” Tom Hastings, stuttering only a little, had spoken of a weekly chess game that he and Clifford played for years. Bill Dolittle had spoken of Evings’s love of books. But in none of these descriptions did Hawthorne see the frightened and desperate man he had come to know in the past two months. There was no mention of someone’s trashing his office only a week earlier or of Evings’s having taken his own life. And Hawthorne asked himself what the students thought of such a veneer of praise or if these pieties were just something they had come to expect.

Tank cleared his throat. “I can’t say that I knew Mr. Evings very well,” he began. He stuck a finger under the collar of his white shirt and pulled. “But he was certainly Shepherd’s main man. Like, he was in charge and he was a pretty good guy and if any of us wanted something, Mr. Evings was usually there to help or he could tell us who to see. And he never got angry. If someone broke something or if there was too much noise, he would come downstairs in his slippers and say, ‘Gentlemen, if you please.’ Then he would go back upstairs. And once when I was wrestling around with Charlie Penrose, he came downstairs and asked us to cool it. Then he sat with us until we’d settled down and asked if we wanted a cup of tea. I don’t know, it’s pretty lousy that he’s dead.”

Although Tank never described Evings as ineffectual, that was the idea that came across: Evings was a nice man who did as little as possible and let the students run Shepherd as they wished so long as they weren’t troublesome and there was no fuss. It seemed clear to Hawthorne and perhaps others that whatever discipline existed in Shepherd came from Tank Donoso and his dope slaps. Hawthorne noticed that several of the faculty were dozing, while a number of students were using the occasion to finish their homework. Scott McKinnon was staring up at the stained-glass image of Isaac and Abraham. Jessica Weaver seemed to be writing something. Then Hawthorne’s eyes came to rest on Kate just a few feet away in the front row. She wore a dark blue dress with a string of lapis lazuli beads around her neck. Her dark hair hung loose and the strip of white shone in the light of the morning sun. Her legs were crossed and as she watched Tank her right foot twitched nervously. Hawthorne thought how attractive she looked and of what he had told her on Tuesday night. His face burned at the memory. He hadn’t spoken to her since and he felt the awful vulnerability of someone who has at last revealed all his secrets. He felt certain she must despise him.

For another five minutes Tank ground on, trying to pick his words and avoid his dated rap-singer slang. He described how Evings had once helped him with an English paper, how he had introduced Evings to his parents. Hawthorne was touched by Tank’s efforts to achieve some level of decorum. A cloud briefly obscured the sun and the light shining through the windows faded, darkening the faces of the faculty and students. Then the light returned as Tank reached the end of his talk and hurried down the stairs out of the pulpit, obviously glad that his ordeal was over. Bobby Newland was waiting at the bottom. His round face expressed an eagerness that caught Hawthorne’s attention.

Bobby wore a dark suit and bright red tie. As soon as Tank was out of the way, he quickly climbed the steps. Then he stood with his hands gripping the lectern as he looked out at the audience with his head slightly tilted back so his goatee seemed aimed at the men and women in front of him. He didn’t speak. Hawthorne began to count the seconds. Slowly, he saw faculty and students alike stop what they were doing and look up. Frank LeBrun was sitting on the top step by the door with his elbows on his knees and his chin cupped in his hands.

After another minute Bobby began to speak, raising his voice and precisely articulating each word. “Clifford was my lover. We met nearly three years ago in Edgartown, where I was working in a restaurant. He brought me to Bishop’s Hill and had me hired as a psychological counselor. He was the kindest man I’ve ever known and you killed him.”

There was an immediate stirring. A few faculty members called out some words of protest. Hawthorne saw LeBrun get to his feet. The Reverend Bennett leaned forward and gasped.

“Whoever wrecked Clifford’s office as good as murdered him,” Bobby continued above the noise, “but that wasn’t the beginning. Ever since September people have been telling Clifford that he was about to be fired. These were men and women who pretended to be his friends. At first I thought it was true, that Dr. Hawthorne meant to get rid of Clifford as soon as possible. Isn’t that what you told me? You, Hastings and Bennett and Chip Campbell? And there were others. You know who you are. I even heard it from students. ‘Old Evings is about to be shit-canned,’ one boy told me. Why did you do it? He deserved better than to be stuck here at this shitheap, but this was the only place he had. You tormented him and terrified him till he couldn’t stand it anymore. Wrecking his office was the last straw. Can’t you see your crime? Can’t you see that you killed him?”

By now Bobby was weeping and Hawthorne was standing below the pulpit. In the back, Bennett was holding onto LeBrun’s arm, as if LeBrun meant to rush down to the altar. Students were on their feet. Chief Moulton seemed calm, leaning against the back wall with his arms crossed.

“G-get him out of there,” shouted Hastings from the front row.

The Reverend Bennett crossed in front of the altar to Hawthorne. “Make him stop.”

Hawthorne looked at Skander, who was bent over with one hand across his eyes.

“Bobby,” said Hawthorne, “come down from there.”

Bobby looked down at Hawthorne with surprise. He glanced quickly out into the chapel. “Damn you,” he shouted, “damn each one of you!” Then he hurried down the steps, half stumbling so Hawthorne had to catch his arm. They stood facing each other with Hawthorne still supporting the other man. Bobby’s face was wet with tears. A small door was positioned to the side of the altar under the painting of Ambrose Stark. Bobby pulled away from Hawthorne and left the chapel.

Hawthorne climbed the steps of the pulpit. Looking out, he noticed a range of emotions, from anger to grief, surprise to remorse. Somebody whistled and students banged the pews. Prayer books and hymnals fell to the floor. Several of the faculty were trying to speak; most of them were standing.

Hawthorne held up his hand for silence. He saw LeBrun talking angrily to Bennett. Slowly the noise lessened. “Please sit down,” said Hawthorne. Beneath him the chaplain moved back to her chair, her white robes billowing around her in the breeze from the small choir door that Bobby had left open.

Hawthorne waited a moment, then began to speak. “I don’t know why Clifford Evings committed suicide,” he said. “He left no note. He was about to begin a two-month paid leave of absence. Instead, he chose to kill himself. It’s true he was frightened and his fear had become a sickness. And it’s also true that, intentionally or not, certain people had scared him, and the vandalizing of his office absolutely terrified him. I don’t know who did that, but the police are investigating and whoever is responsible will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.”

Hawthorne paused again. He could feel the attention of the students and faculty fixed upon him. “I didn’t know Clifford very well. He wasn’t particularly effective at his job and he felt guilt about taking the school’s money and giving little in return. Eventually, I would have urged him to retire, but I wouldn’t have fired him. Whatever his failings, the school had a certain responsibility. I don’t know why people told him he was about to be fired, except that it was one more example of the malice and gossip that I have seen since I arrived at Bishop’s Hill. Most assuredly, Clifford was its victim.

“But we are here now to say good-bye to him and to praise what we can praise. He was kind, he meant well, he had no meanness in him. How many can say that of themselves? He had the same mixture of qualities and failings found in all human beings. His greatest pleasures were in his friendships and in books, the novels that filled his spare moments. He was a gentle man, and in saying good-bye to him we should remember that and say good-bye with as much goodwill as we can muster. I want to close with two quotes that I came upon this fall in my history class. Both are from the emperor Marcus Aurelius. ‘An empty pageant; a stage play; flocks of sheep, herds of cattle; a brawl of spearmen; a bone flung among a pack of dogs; a crumb tossed into a pond of fish; ants, loaded and laboring; mice, scared and scampering; puppets, jerking on their strings—that is life. In the midst of it all you must take your stand, good-temperedly and without disdain.’”

As he paused, Hawthorne thought of yet another quote from Marcus Aurelius that had stayed with him over the weeks: “You may break your heart, but men will still go on as before.” He had first thought of it in relation to his wife and daughter, but now it had become one of his truths, as if Aurelius’s role were to fill the agnostic’s empty heaven. Aurelius offered consolation when there seemed none other to be had. Glancing up, he saw Kate watching him from the second row. He tried to smile and felt his awkwardness as a clumsy twisting of his lips.

“And here is the second quotation that gives me guidance and may be of help to you as well. ‘Be like the headland against which the waves break and break: it stands firm, until presently the watery tumult around it subsides once more to rest.’”

–

Leafing through an issue of Boston magazine, Detective Leo Flynn thought how it reflected a Boston he knew nothing about, or at least very little—the newly prosperous and yuppie Boston, the online Boston. The city was full of people without history, or whose histories were elsewhere. Was there anything in the magazine about Somerville, where Flynn had grown up and gone to school? Not likely—Somerville wasn’t upscale enough. Bean sprouts and exotic mushrooms were absent from its supermarkets. But even that was changing. The yuppie sprawl from Cambridge was making inroads. And soon there would be no one to remember Scollay Square and Mayor Curley or even Ted Williams. Flynn closed the magazine and tossed it back on the table.

It was Thursday morning and Flynn was in Concord waiting to see Otto Renfrew of the Division of Children, Youth, and Families of the New Hampshire Department of Social Services. Fourteen years earlier, Renfrew had been associate director of the Bass Vocational School for troubled boys in Derry. One of the boys had been Francis LaBrecque, who had trained as a baker. Flynn wanted to talk to LaBrecque but so far he had found no trace of him. But he knew that LaBrecque was who he was looking for. He knew LaBrecque was the Ice Pick Man.

The door to the inner office opened and a round bald head stuck itself through the widening crack. “We’ve got to make this as short as possible,” said Renfrew. “I have a lunch meeting.”

Leo Flynn smiled affably and pushed himself up out of his chair. The trouble with New Hampshire was that he had no clout. In Boston he could make Otto Renfrew come to police headquarters any time of the day or night. He could keep Renfrew waiting for an hour or two without even an old magazine to help pass the time.

“I’d be grateful for just a minute,” he said. “I’ll make it quick.”

But ten minutes later Flynn was still asking questions while Renfrew scratched his bald head and furtively looked at his watch.

“I wouldn’t say he was especially bad,” said Renfrew. “He was emotionally damaged and educationally handicapped. He was certainly angry but there was no evidence of bipolarity. Perhaps overactive would be a better word, at times even hyperactive.”

“So you wouldn’t say he was fucked up,” said Flynn, checking Renfrew’s reaction.

“Well, he’d been mandated to the school by the court, presumably because the public schools couldn’t control him—he had a ferocious temper—but I don’t remember any instances of criminal behavior. He was disorganized and sometimes violent, though not to the other boys. But he might break up furniture or smash windows. Once he saw that we’d take away his privileges, though, he tried harder to fit in. Many of the boys at Bass were there for sexual-behavior modification, but that wasn’t entirely true in LaBrecque’s case, although he’d been sexually abused. Basically, he seemed friendly, but his anger and then his secretiveness made him completely untrustworthy. I wasn’t sure we could do anything for him, apart from giving him meds, until he got caught up in baking.”

“Did he have friends?”

“Frank was very much a loner. He was always eager to help out and he did favors for the older boys, but if given the choice he preferred his own company. When I first met him, he did lots of little favors for me—helping me clean my office, wash my car. And I thought it would lead to a friendship of sorts but it never did. His sociability was just a way of keeping a close eye on what was going on. It existed to mask his fear.”

“Was he ever sexually abused at the school?”

Renfrew’s brow wrinkled. “There was an older boy who bullied him constantly, always giving him orders, making him run errands, knocking him around. Looking back on it, there probably was a sexual aspect. Once I caught him snapping LaBrecque with a wet towel in the showers, aiming for the genital area. I put a stop to it and reprimanded him. He accused LaBrecque of coming on to him, although LaBrecque denied it. LaBrecque was somewhat peculiar-looking, thin and with an extremely narrow face. He was teased a lot. In all likelihood that was one reason he tried to ingratiate himself with the other boys, just so he wouldn’t be picked on.”

“What happened to the boy who’d been bullying him?”

Renfrew moved his tongue across his upper teeth. His discomfort seemed to increase. “He was nearly killed.”

“By LaBrecque?”

“I don’t know, but I rather think so. The boy was attacked one night as he was leaving the gym. He was beaten with a two-by-four. He didn’t see who did it and lost consciousness. His shoulder and arm were broken. Some other boys came running up and the attacker fled. The police became involved and all the boys were questioned. But suspicion didn’t fall on LaBrecque. He denied any involvement, and there was nothing of the fighter about him. All his violence had been directed at inanimate objects. He even seemed to be improving—he was calmer and making an effort in his classes. I remember he came to my room to say what a shame it was that the boy had been attacked and offered to make him a cake. I saw no harm in it. LaBrecque had done so well in the kitchen that he had a few special privileges. The boy had been in the hospital but after a week he was brought back to the infirmary. So LaBrecque made his cake and delivered it to him. It had bright red frosting. Actually, I should have been more careful.”

“What about?”

“The cake was full of tacks. The boy got several in his mouth and got a scratch on his tongue. I went to find LaBrecque but he was gone. No one saw him leave. There was a fence around the property but it wasn’t high; we didn’t want the place to look like a jail. The police searched for him for weeks. Obviously, his disappearance suggested that he had attacked the boy. And the business with the tacks was disturbing. In any case, the police lost track of him. They found a man who’d given him a ride to Boston—but nothing after that.”

“What about his family?”

“They seemed pretty indifferent.”

“Didn’t they visit him?”

“Never, as far as I remember, and LaBrecque himself never spoke of them. His mother was dead. There was a younger sister he was close to, but she was hardly more than a child. And there was a brother but no one really took an interest. Actually, I have to take that back. There was a cousin who visited him a couple of times, quite a young man.”

“Do you remember his name?”

“No, except that it was French and it wasn’t LaBrecque. And he was a cook.”

Flynn figured he could get the name of the cousin when he talked to LaBrecque’s brother that afternoon. He still lived in Manchester. The father was dead.

“Do you think LaBrecque is capable of killing someone?”

Again Renfrew looked uncomfortable, seeming to study the fluorescent light fixture. “I don’t know,” he said, looking back at Flynn. “At first I was absolutely certain he hadn’t been responsible for the attack on the other boy. He seemed so shocked by it. He even wanted to help question the other students and he talked to me several times about what might lead a person to do something so awful. I was touched by his concern, especially since he’d often been this other boy’s victim. But let’s say he did it. Then the lies he told afterward are amazing, because he didn’t simply deny that he’d attacked the boy. He went to great lengths to act shocked and play the detective. And there was that business about the cake.” Renfrew shifted in his chair. “It suggested that he saw it all as an elaborate game. His ego has to be immense. Behind his apparent concern there must have been a complete lack of feeling, which makes me think he might easily be capable of taking another person’s life. He’d be able to explain it in a hundred ways, and his first justification would be that he himself had been a victim.”