Текст книги "Boy in the Water"

Автор книги: Stephen Dobyns

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Текущая страница: 3 (всего у книги 29 страниц)

“ I still don’t see why you can’t give me the money. I want to buy a dog, a greyhound.” His stomach was hurting again

“Jesus, you’d be better throwing the money into the street. I’m doing you a favor.”

“By not giving me the money?” Sal stopping walking. They were both in the water.

Frank flicked his cigarette through the air. It made a red arc into the surf. “I fuckin’ told you. You fuckin’ stupid? I’m in a jam and got to move fast. And this other job, the big one, after I take care of it, then I’ll have to disappear. Get up to Quebec or someplace and live fat.”

“I could lend it to you.”

“You’re not going to be lending it to me, asshole, I’m going to be taking it.”

“What about me?” Sal thought about what Frank had told him about killing that guy Buddy something.

“You, nothing,” said Frank. “You don’t even exist. Jesus Christ, you’re dumb. Did I ever tell you how you brainwash an Italian?”

“Then keep the money.” Sal took a step deeper into the water. “I’m glad to do you the favor. We’re buddies, right? Keep the whole thing.”

“You didn’t say if I’d told you the joke.”

“An enema, goddamnit. That’s how you brainwash an Italian. You give him an enema!”

“Don’t talk to me like that, Sally. I always been polite to you.”

Sal stood up to his ankles in the water. His head felt full of yelling, and in the midst of the clamor he realized he was going to piss himself just like the kid in the liquor store.

“Bishop’s Hill,” said Frank. “Bishop’s Hill Academy. I love names like that. You can almost smell the money. Me, I never got past tenth grade. Thought of taking the G.E.D. at one point, but why bother? I don’t need a fuckin’ piece of paper saying I can count. But this cooking job at Bishop’s Hill, it’ll be like being in school again, except nobody’s going to be shouting at me or pushing me around or making fun of me. Shit, I’ll even get paid. Can you beat that?”

“Let me go, Frank.”

“No can do.”

“I’m a friend, right. I won’t say anything. You can even have my car. Let me go.”

“I already got a car.”

“I got the money from the other jobs at my place. I’ll give it to you. Just follow me back.”

Frank zipped up his backpack, then swung it onto his left shoulder. “I’m not dumb, Sally. Stupidity’s not my problem. It’s like an insult to think I’m dumb.”

Sal stepped deeper into the water. There was something in Frank’s hand but it wasn’t a gun. It was something small.

“You do a little business for a while,” said Frank, “then it comes to an end. It’s fall and I got to go to school. Did I tell you that joke about what elephants use for tampons?”

The ice pick in his hand was tilted so it wouldn’t catch the moonlight. Frank grinned and rested his arm on Sal’s shoulders, a friendly gesture. Sal tried to step away, but it was too late. Perhaps he felt the prick of the needle point at the base of his skull but most likely it happened too fast to feel even that. Frank shoved the ice pick upward into the softness, then gave it a little swirl, cutting a cone shape into “the gray stuff,” as he called it. Then he slipped it out. Sal’s whole body was twitching and jittering. He grabbed Sal’s shoulder with one hand and the seat of his pants with the other. He walked him deeper into the water. Sal himself wasn’t walking; he was dead weight.

“Sheep, asshole, that’s what elephants use for tampons.” He lowered Sal into the water so he wouldn’t splash. It was like those baptisms he’d seen on TV. He liked the idea of making Sal clean again. Frank pressed his foot down on Sal’s back to force the air out of his lungs—the bubbles burst around him like farts, like farting in the bathtub, and that made Frank chuckle.

“Think of it this way,” he told Sal, “I’m saving you from ever being sent to jail.”

Frank turned and walked back to shore with the water running off his clothes. He was going to school. He was almost excited.

Two

Because she was interested but still expected to be bored, the woman sat in the back row over by the window so if she wished she could turn her attention to the late-afternoon sun laying its orange light across the playing fields, where some half-dozen young men were kicking a soccer ball as if it represented the very acme of earthly endeavor. Her name was Kate Sandler and she had been teaching Italian and Spanish at Bishop’s Hill since January, when her predecessor, Mr. Mead, had given the school two days’ notice before relocating to the west coast of Mexico, “for his health,” he had said, “both mental and physical.” As a divorced mother with a seven-year-old son, Kate had felt lucky to get the job. Now, three weeks into the fall semester, her sympathies lay with the absent Mr. Mead. Kate was trim, athletic, and thirty-four with shoulder-length black hair that she wore in a ponytail at school. Reaching back from her left temple was a white streak about an inch wide that had made its appearance while she was still in college. At the time she had been sorry to turn prematurely gray but the white streak had been the extent of the change and now she valued it as something that made her memorable to clerks and garage mechanics.

Eighteen of Kate’s colleagues sat in front and to her left; the remaining three or four probably wouldn’t appear. Kate thought of them all as survivors—some she liked, some she didn’t, others she hardly knew. Now she felt herself to be a part of them. She, too, was a survivor. In the spring semester, she had been invited to several dinners, she had gone on one rather dreary date, and once, when her daffodils were in bloom and she was feeling optimistic, she had invited an older couple over to her small house for lasagna. Still, there was no one to whom she felt particularly close.

The meeting was scheduled for five and it was nearly that now. Her colleagues were beginning to look attentive, turning from their slouched positions and perfunctory conversations. Green shades were drawn down over the top half of the high windows, giving an aquatic tint to the ceiling. The dark oak woodwork had been recently polished and the air retained the faint aroma of Murphy’s Soap. Next to Kate, Chip Campbell, the history teacher and swimming coach, patted her knee and said, “Let’s vamos, buster!” But whether he meant that they should leave immediately or that he wanted the meeting to begin, Kate couldn’t decide. Chip had a round red face and the look of a former athlete who has gone to seed. His short sandy hair was brushed back in a ragged flattop. He had taught at Bishop’s Hill for twelve years. Before that he had taught in public schools in Connecticut until, as he said, he couldn’t stand the bullshit anymore.

Directly in front of Kate sat Alice Beech, the school nurse, in her white uniform. She glanced over her shoulder at Chip, then smiled at Kate before turning away. Chip directed a mocking smile at her back. He and a few others claimed that Alice was a lesbian, but Kate had no proof one way or the other. Nor did she care. Alice was an unattached single woman in her midthirties. Her short dark hair was perfectly straight and clung to her skull like a cap. The nurse had always been pleasant to Kate, and sometimes they sat together at lunch.

People grumbled about attending a meeting so late in the day but their annoyance was offset by curiosity about the new headmaster, Dr. Hawthorne, who’d been observed since his arrival three days earlier but not officially met. A number of faculty had asked Fritz Skander what they were in for. Skander only smiled and said, “I guess we’ll find out.” But Hawthorne had made his presence felt right from the start when he indicated that he wanted faculty cars parked in the lot behind Douglas Hall, not in the circle in front of Emerson. And there were other indications: the grounds crew had grown more active and a number of litter baskets had suddenly appeared. And Kate had seen him at lunch talking to students—a tall man in his thirties with a thin, angular face and light brown hair.

The heavy door at the front of the room opened and Fritz Skander entered, followed by Hawthorne, Mrs. Hayes—the school secretary—and a third man whom Kate recognized as one of the trustees, Hamilton Burke, a lawyer from Laconia. Burke was about fifty and portly in a three-piece blue suit. He looked as serious as if he were standing before the Supreme Court.

Skander seemed especially genial and winked at several of the faculty who caught his eye. He was perhaps forty-five, rectangular without being heavy, and with a full head of thick gray hair that crossed his brow in a straight line. He was a man with a lot of charm and fond of wearing humorous neckties. When Kate had met him in January she had thought they would become friends but she hadn’t learned much more about him than she did at that first meeting; and while Skander was affable, even effusive at times, Kate came to realize that was just his manner and didn’t necessarily reflect his interior self. Skander was several inches shorter than Hawthorne, who was also smiling, although his eyes were alert. Kate couldn’t blame him for being tense, if that was what it was.

Mrs. Hayes looked motherly and somewhat anxious—a stout woman in her early sixties in a flowered dress who was reputed to have a temper. Now she appeared particularly eager to help and, indeed, that was often the case. But her evident strain made Kate conscious of how she herself was looking at her new boss, and she realized she too had some skepticism, even suspicion, having to do with her sense of Bishop’s Hill as it had developed over the past eight months. Not that she could entirely fault the school. After all, there was so little money.

Fritz Skander went to the podium, joined his hands together palm to palm, and pressed them to his lips for silence, though by that time the room was mostly quiet.

“I know it’s frustrating to have to meet so late in the afternoon. You all have terribly busy schedules with far too many demands on your time.” Skander spoke in a sort of stage whisper that suggested intimacy, and Kate had to lean forward to hear. “We wanted to take this opportunity,” he continued, “to let you get just a little acquainted with Jim Hawthorne, our new headmaster. I think you’ll realize, as I have done, how lucky we are at Bishop’s Hill to have someone of his reputation and experience ready to take the helm.”

Mrs. Hayes had sat down to the left of the podium, next to Hamilton Burke. Hawthorne stood next to Skander with his hands behind his back. He looked cordial but serious and Kate thought his face reflected a sobriety that he brought with him, not a temporary nervousness or tension but a gravity in his nature, as if he wasn’t a man who laughed much. Behind them on the high wall were six marble panels with the names of young men from Bishop’s Hill who had fought in six wars from the Civil War to Vietnam. Small black crosses indicated the boys who had died, and whenever Kate was in this room, known as Memorial Hall, she wondered about them and what their hopes had been. The panels gave an indication of the school’s long history, all the more affecting, Kate thought, considering how close Bishop’s Hill had come in the past year to shutting its doors.

Skander’s voice remained at the level of a soothing purr as he spoke of Dr. Hawthorne’s years as director of a school in San Diego, his time at Ingram House in the Berkshires, his many articles, and his professorship in the Department of Psychology at Boston University. Hawthorne’s experience was in clinical psychology working with high-risk adolescents and Kate realized that his appointment signified a shift in the ambitions of the board of trustees. For although Bishop’s Hill promoted itself as catering to young men and women with special needs, that had, in the past, seemed more advertisement than actuality.

“I’m sure I’m not the only one,” said Skander a little louder, “who wishes that our relationship with Jim Hawthorne will last many years. Obviously in these three days I can’t say that I have gotten to know him. But already my wife and I see him as a friend as well as a colleague, and I look forward to that friendship deepening and becoming a sustaining timber not only of my professional life but of my private life too. Won’t you help me welcome him.” Skander stepped back, beaming and clapping his hands. His head was tilted to one side and his dark eyes crinkled at the edges, which gave a touch of whimsy to his enthusiasm. It made him seem inoffensive and endearing. As he clapped, his jacket opened and Kate saw a red necktie patterned with the white silhouettes of dogs.

The faculty and staff began applauding as well; two teachers, then two more stood up. Roger Bennett, the math teacher, whistled with an ironic cheer. His wife, the school chaplain, was absent from the meeting. Bennett was a tidy, small-boned man, and beneath his heather-green tweed jacket, he wore a bright red crewneck sweater. He glanced around at his colleagues, grinning and making quick lifting motions with his open hands, urging them to get to their feet.

It seemed to Kate that the sudden release of energy merely masked the staff’s anxiety. Hadn’t she heard them wondering what changes lay ahead? More than half taught at Bishop’s Hill because they couldn’t go elsewhere. They lacked the credentials to teach in public schools, and any private school, unless desperate, would examine them with care. Just the fact they taught at Bishop’s Hill was suspect. In some cases there were other shadows on their records—an affair with a student years before, possibly the striking of a student, perhaps a breakdown or time spent in a rehab center. Some were just too old. So if their positions were in jeopardy, for many it meant the end of the line as far as teaching was concerned. And still they clapped—thankfully and heartily—even though most would have preferred Skander as headmaster. Whatever his shortcomings, at least he was a known commodity.

On the playing fields, a wrestling match had developed among four of the soccer players. From this distance Kate couldn’t tell how serious it was. Hurrying toward the group rolling on the ground was a man in jeans and a white jacket. It looked like Larry Gaudette, the red-haired cook, who had come to Kate’s small house the previous spring to help her shovel snow off the roof. Gaudette dragged two boys away by their ankles. What at one moment had been a picture-perfect scene of boys kicking a ball across the playing fields had turned into something ugly. It reinforced Kate’s idea of Bishop’s Hill as a place where things went wrong. A number of the faculty and staff applauding Jim Hawthorne had assignments in the dormitory cottages and Kate wondered who was left to monitor the students, one hundred and twenty boarders ranging from the gloomy to the criminal. Then Kate stopped herself. She certainly had students who were intelligent, even students she thought of with great affection, but in every instance there was a reason why the student was at Bishop’s Hill and not someplace else. And none of those reasons pointed to a quality to be found here and not elsewhere. Indeed, many were at Bishop’s Hill simply because no place else would take them.

Jim Hawthorne stood at the podium with his hands holding the edges as he waited for the clapping to subside. He adjusted his glasses and brushed back a lock of hair that had fallen across his forehead, a gesture that made him seem suddenly younger. Chip Campbell leaned over to Kate. “There’s a handsome guy for you.”

Without doubt Hawthorne was in good physical shape—he was even tan—but was he handsome? Perhaps more distinctive than handsome, thought Kate; there was something too serious to be considered in the category of conventional good looks. Kate saw that Alice Beech had turned and was looking at Chip. Since she was directly in front, Kate couldn’t see the nurse’s expression but she guessed it was disapproving. She was glad she had kept her mouth shut. She could have easily said something stupid just to be sociable. Alice turned back and her starched white uniform rustled. Chip raised his eyebrows at Kate and winked.

The teachers who had been standing took their seats. Out on the field, Kate saw Gaudette talking to one of the soccer players while the others trotted back to the gym.

“I want to tell you,” said Hawthorne, “how glad I am to be here and how glad I am that we’ll be working with one another. However, I don’t want there to be any doubt about the enormity of our task.” He paused and looked out at his audience. Kate felt his eyes move across her. There was a slight burr in his voice that Kate found attractive and a slight accent that she associated with Boston: the broad a and a mild reluctance to confront the letter r.

“The school’s increasing debt, the low salaries of everyone who works here, problems with the physical plant, decreasing enrollment—at the moment the only circumstance in our favor is your own willingness and the board’s decision to give the school one more chance, a chance that I’m afraid will be our last.”

Hawthorne went on to cite further problems—lack of money, vacancies among faculty and staff, electrical and heating problems, broken equipment, low test scores of students. Kate already knew much of this but together it formed a depressing catalog. Hawthorne, while not exaggerating, was making certain that nobody held out any false hopes. The list was being made dire because dire solutions would be called for.

“If the school doesn’t begin to turn around this semester,” Hawthorne continued, “we will lose our accreditation before the end of the year. If that happens, then we won’t open next fall. That’s one possible calamity among many.”

Kate glanced at her colleagues. A few looked as if they were being scolded. Chip was digging at his thumbnail with a toothpick. Did any look hopeful? Kate thought not. Most were keeping their faces purposefully blank. Some students ran down the hallway outside and Chip heaved himself to his feet and walked to the door, where he looked out threateningly, ready to catch someone doing what he shouldn’t.

If it hadn’t been for her ex-husband in Plymouth and the terms of her divorce, Kate would have returned to Durham to finish her Ph.D. in Romance languages. Her choices were teaching at Bishop’s Hill or finding a job in an office. Even if she had wanted to teach at Plymouth State, there were no jobs available except for tutoring. And Plymouth was a thirty-minute drive, while Bishop’s Hill was less than ten. Most days she could be home when Todd got back from second grade. Even today she had been home to fix him a snack. Then Shirley Hodges up the road had agreed to watch him until Kate returned around six-thirty or seven.

“Despite our history at Bishop’s Hill,” Hawthorne was saying, “we cannot pretend to be a traditional prep school. Over the past ten years our attention has been increasingly focused on what was once called ‘the problem child,’ and if Bishop’s Hill is going to continue, then it will have to be in the area of helping such children. But instead of using the phrase problem child, I’d rather talk about children at risk. Reading their files, I’ve been dismayed by the psychological and physical handicaps, the divorces, delinquency, academic failures, sexual and substance abuse—I’m convinced the only way to help them academically is to help the whole child. And because one of our first obligations is to strengthen deficient ego functions, we need to think of our work as a twenty-four-hour activity. The entire day at Bishop’s Hill is our milieu and this milieu is our primary teaching tool. Along with educating our youngsters, we are trying to teach them age-appropriate behavior, to offer a counterdelusional design to break down their defenses and enable them to become productive members of society.”

With surprise Kate realized that Hawthorne was sincere, and she saw that she had expected something specious about Bishop’s Hill’s new headmaster. She had thought he would be like the others, someone who couldn’t get a job elsewhere and for whom Bishop’s Hill was the last stop. At best, she’d seen his hiring as a cosmetic change: a good-looking professional man to handle the fund-raising. This insight made her more attentive, and her colleagues, she noticed, were more attentive as well, sitting straighter, and two or three of them were even taking notes, although their faces, if possible, were stonier.

Hawthorne spoke about theories of alternative behavior, how that didn’t mean enforcing rules that led to punishment but called for the substitution of other responses that in turn meant increased interaction with every child. He wanted to dismantle the school’s system of merits and demerits. “We can’t punish behavior unless we’re willing to teach the child alternatives that he or she can substitute. A merit/demerit system is how you create a prison. We must be careful to be neither baby-sitters nor prison guards curbing our students’ actions till their sentences are up.”

It occurred to Kate to wonder why Hawthorne was there. Not why he had been hired but why he had decided to come to Bishop’s Hill. Unlike Fritz Skander, he had nothing casual about him, no trace of the easygoing administrator. He appeared thoroughly professional. Why should Hawthorne want to settle in rural New Hampshire, where people’s main links to the outside world were the satellite dishes attached to the sides of their dilapidated barns? And with that question Kate felt a rush of fear she couldn’t understand. After all, she held her job lightly no matter how much she cared for her students. Were she fired, she would find another. Even though she had no wish to work in an office or a store, such a situation would hardly be permanent. Then it seemed to her that fear was what she saw on the faces of her colleagues. Whatever the past had been, the future would be different and the angular man at the podium represented the moment of change. Even his angularity made Kate uncomfortable. It made her think of sticks shoved in a bag, chafing and poking at the insides.

“We’re here to help these children in their transition to the adult world,” Hawthorne was saying. “They have been injured and their sense of cause and effect is based on a distorted sense of survival. Even those of you who have been victims of their anger must realize that it is characteristic of damaged children to display anger when it would be more appropriate for them to be sad.”

The reference to anger made Kate think of her ex-husband, whom she hadn’t seen since July, when the divorce was finalized. She supposed even George’s anger existed because he lacked the courage to show his sadness, but after a point Kate no longer cared, especially when he had drunkenly tried to knock her down. Every Saturday morning Kate drove Todd in to the YMCA in Plymouth for his swimming lesson. George would pick him up. Then on Sunday evening he would drop Todd off at the library for Kate to pick up. She wouldn’t ask Todd about his time with his father. She knew that George would again have told Todd what a terrible mother she was and would have grilled him as to whether she had a boyfriend or whether any man had been sleeping at the house. He had even made Todd reveal her uninspiring date with Chip Campbell the previous spring, a dull dinner followed by a bad movie to which Chip brought a thermos of martinis. And at least once George had yelled at Todd and called him a liar. She had tried to ask Todd if there had been other kinds of abuse, but Todd was oddly protective of his father, as if George were a younger sibling who was especially clumsy or weak.

Kate shifted her legs and the afternoon light reflected on the gold ankle chain with the letter K around her left ankle. She had bought it the day her divorce had been finalized. At first she had intended to get a golden heart but that seemed sentimental. Even with a K, though, the chain represented her future, a new future. She had also wanted it to mean hope, but as her life continued without dramatic change, the chain came to mean no more than “on-goingness.” And what changes did she still hope for? If not romance, at least some form of male companionship. The very fact that George was jealous made her wish for something just so it wouldn’t seem that she was agreeing to his terms. And he wasn’t really jealous. He had for her neither love nor liking; rather, he hated the idea of another man’s fingerprints on what he still saw as his property: his hunting rifles, his Dodge four-by-four, his ex-wife. What appeared to be jealousy was the result of frustrated ownership, not affection. Surely that was why he was so insistent that Kate stay in the area and not because of Todd, whom he never called except to question him about his mother’s behavior and whose visits with his father were mostly spent in front of the television.

Kate smoothed her green cardigan down over her breasts. She found herself trying to determine the last time she had been held. Two summers ago she had taken a seminar for secondary school teachers in Romance languages at UNH and had gone out half a dozen times with a Spanish teacher from Portsmouth. Todd had been staying with her parents in Concord. Was that the last time she had been embraced—fourteen months ago? She had had no strong feelings for the man, whose last name she couldn’t recall, but now he stood as a high point in her romantic life. How pathetic, Kate thought. Here she was, still young, reasonably attractive, and in good physical condition and she could almost feel the skin decaying on her bones. Her sense of waste heightened the anger she felt toward her ex-husband. There were plenty of places where she could take courses next summer. Even California wouldn’t be too far. She would apply and take Todd with her. To hell with George. But the summer was nine months away. It was only September and she still had the winter to get through.

“If we see teaching as a twenty-four-hour activity,” Hawthorne was saying, “it will require a great deal of communication not simply among the faculty but among everyone at Bishop’s Hill. Our job is behavior management and behavior change—education is part of that but our primary instrument of change is Bishop’s Hill itself. We’ll need to have regular staff meetings, which won’t just be the usual, depressing rehashes of inappropriate behavior and who did what to whom. The point won’t be to discuss what’s been done but what might be done. And we’ll all need to pool staff resources to think up alternatives that might be of assistance.”

Kate perceived that whatever changes were initiated by the new headmaster she herself would be asked to give up more time. This thought was followed by resentment. She saw herself as a responsible teacher whose homeroom duties, six sections of languages, field hockey chores, and occasional mail room and dining hall duties kept her fully occupied. What right had Jim Hawthorne to demand more of her? By redefining their endeavor and calling it a milieu—Kate automatically suspected other people’s jargon—he was making her job something else. But along with irritation she felt sympathy for Hawthorne, who surely was arousing the resentment of her colleagues. They were used to their routines. It wasn’t necessarily that Hawthorne was asking them to do more work—he was meddling with their complacency.

Yet Hawthorne was right about the students. Many were disturbed and troublesome. They acted out and lost their tempers. They were unhappy and felt unloved by their families. Even the best seemed to be trying to accommodate themselves to what Kate thought of as a reform school mentality—following orders out of fear of punishment rather than to be successful. And she was reminded of the new girl who had appeared in Spanish I on Tuesday—Jessica, her name was. She had an ankle bracelet like Kate’s, though thicker and shinier. Her roommate, Helen Selkirk, also took Spanish. Helen had talked to Kate about the girl after class, saying that Jessica had made Helen switch to the top bunk, threatening to wet her bed if Helen didn’t move. But that hadn’t been the most disturbing thing. What had Jessica said? “Who do I have to fuck to get along here?” In class the next day—pretty and blond and fifteen—Jessica had seemed to exude the animated naiveté that passed for innocence among adolescent girls. Yet what was her history and what dreadfulness in her past had led to her question? And when Helen told Jessica that she didn’t have to fuck anyone, she hadn’t believed her. “Sooner or later you got to do it,” Jessica had told her, “that’s just how things are.”

Kate studied Hawthorne standing behind the podium—his dark gray jacket, his white shirt and tie. She saw he wore a wedding ring, though she’d heard nothing about a wife. She wondered how she felt about that and detected a trace of disappointment. It made her scold herself again. Perhaps Hawthorne’s wife was someone with whom she could be friends. God knows, she’d be glad to find someone to talk to. As Kate listened, she felt that Hawthorne knew what he was saying was unpopular and that he didn’t care. No, that wasn’t right. He cared but it wouldn’t make him change his approach. He meant to take Bishop’s Hill forward and those who didn’t follow would be cut loose.

Kate glanced out the window—the shadows were lengthening across the playing fields and the light was increasingly golden. A red-haired boy in a red sweater was walking toward the trees, presumably to have an illegal cigarette. She recognized him as an eighth grader, although she couldn’t think of his name. He kicked a stone and it glittered in the light as it flew through the air.

Sitting on the grass near the back of Adams Hall, Kate saw, was the girl she had been thinking about—Jessica. She wore jeans and a blue sweatshirt and she sat with her knees drawn up as she watched something hidden by the edge of the window. Kate pushed back her chair. A man was splitting wood. He had his shirt off although it wasn’t warm. He would position a log on the chopping block, then stand back and swing the ax lightly over his shoulder, letting it gather momentum as it plummeted downward. A second after the log split in half, Kate heard the noise, a faraway thud. At first she couldn’t identify the man—dark-haired and muscular with a narrow face—then she realized she had seen him before. He, too, had just come to Bishop’s Hill. He was Larry Gaudette’s cousin and he worked in the kitchen. Indeed, the previous day he had made bread and the wonderful smells coming from the oven had cheered everyone. Kate had noticed him in the dining room yesterday afternoon, but then he had his shirt on and was wearing a Red Sox cap.