Текст книги "Boy in the Water"

Автор книги: Stephen Dobyns

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Текущая страница: 5 (всего у книги 29 страниц)

The fifteen or so men and women were skeptical but polite. Since most were hourly employees, they didn’t share the faculty’s complaints about spending extra time on campus.

Afterward at a reception, Hawthorne was introduced to each of the staff, including the new cook. The man told him a joke. What had it been? “Did you hear the story about two cannibals eating a clown? One says to the other, ‘This taste funny to you?’”

Hawthorne had been surprised but he had laughed and chatted with the cook, whose name was Frank, a man about thirty with a narrow face and his dark hair slicked back with gel. Frank had seemed especially energetic and Hawthorne heard him telling jokes to others as well. Hawthorne was glad of his vitality. He seemed the only one not made nervous by the new headmaster and he looked at the scar on Hawthorne’s wrist without embarrassment. Still, Hawthorne had found himself trying to draw a line between upbeat and hyper. But he also liked the man’s cousin, Larry Gaudette, the head cook, who seemed serious, responsible, and even slightly critical of his cousin’s joke telling.

Sliding off the railing, Hawthorne stood and stretched. It was nearly one in the morning and he had a few files left to read. He would spend the weekend going over student files, then start scanning them onto floppy disks. And he wanted to read the files of students who had transferred or dropped out. Some he would telephone. Even if he only got an earful of complaint, it might be useful to hear why they had left. If he worked all weekend, maybe he could keep his mind fully occupied. Skander had invited him to dinner on Saturday night and he looked forward to that. Hawthorne glanced up at the dark windows of Adams Hall. A sudden breeze sent the dried leaves of the ivy rattling and whispering. Strangely, he had a sense of being watched. He looked more closely at the windows.

Suddenly, Hawthorne had a shock. Somebody was standing at a third-floor window looking down at him. It was a man. There was something very odd about his clothes. With a feeling approaching horror, Hawthorne realized the man was dressed in a fashion that had gone out of style a hundred years earlier. The stern white face and thin beard, the somber clothing—the man stared down at Hawthorne with such anger that it was all Hawthorne could do not to turn away or cover his eyes. The figure was standing about a foot back from the glass, dimly illuminated by the security lights along the walkway. Hawthorne waited for him to make some sign but he stood at the window, forbidding and lifeless.

Forcing himself into action, Hawthorne ran across the terrace toward the French windows. Once inside he paused long enough to grab a flashlight from the hall table, then he hurried through the door separating his quarters from the rest of the building. He stopped to listen. The only noise was the wind moaning through a crack. Hawthorne ran for the stairs, taking them two at a time as he dashed toward the third floor. His shoes had rubber soles and made hardly any noise. He kept the flashlight off; there was enough light in the stairwell from the windows. When he reached the third-floor landing, he opened the fire door and listened again.

From farther up the hallway, he heard laughter, manic and inhuman. Hawthorne moved quietly through the door and down the hall. The laughter grew louder with breathless hysteria. Here the only light came dimly from the open doors of the classrooms. Touching the wall with one hand, Hawthorne moved forward, gripping the flashlight but not turning it on. The laughter seemed to be coming from a classroom halfway down the hall, which looked out over the playing fields. Hawthorne calculated that it was in this same area that the man had been standing. He paused at the doorway. His hands were sweating and he wiped them on his pants. The high tenor of the laughter, its tenacity without pause for breath, its noisy echo in the empty classroom—Hawthorne imagined it spewing forth from the dead mouth he had seen.

He flicked on the flashlight and stepped into the classroom, sweeping the beam across the desks and blackboard. There was no sign of the man he had seen at the window. Then, on the teacher’s bare desk at the front of the room, he saw a set of jittering white teeth jumping and turning in the circle of the flashlight’s beam. The awful laughter was coming from the teeth. Hawthorne gripped the doorjamb and watched the teeth hop about on the desk, approach the edge, then scuttle back to the center. He felt for the light switch and turned on the overhead fluorescent light. The white teeth and bright pink gums were a toy, a plastic toy. Laughing and twitching, they again skittered to the side of the desk, balanced briefly on the edge, then fell to the floor with a crash and were silent. Hawthorne kept by the door. It was the scientist in him, the clinical psychologist, who stared at his two hands and watched them shake, as if he had the D.T.’s or the palsy of the very old. The very peculiarity of it helped to calm him. In the silence there was only the hum of the fluorescent lights and the occasional low moan of the wind.

After making sure there was no one hiding in any of the rooms, Hawthorne hurried back down the stairs. At the bottom he paused, but there was no sound. He hurried through his quarters, out to the terrace, and down to the lawn, hoping to see someone running away, but there was nothing. He walked quickly across the grass. He had turned off the light but still held it in his hand. His heart was beating rapidly and he felt that if he relaxed even a little his panic would overwhelm him. About a hundred yards from Adams Hall he entered a grove of trees and stopped. He became aware of a peculiar but somewhat familiar odor. Almost without knowing it, he found himself thinking of France, where he had gone with his wife shortly after their marriage.

Hawthorne squinted. Seated under a tree and faintly illuminated by a light at the corner of Adams Hall was a boy in a sweater smoking a cigarette. The boy held it very precisely between his thumb and index finger, inserted it slowly into his pursed lips, and inhaled deeply. Then he slowly exhaled one, two, three smoke rings.

“Is that a Gauloise?” Hawthorne called out.

The boy leapt to his feet, sprinted away several yards, and then stopped. “Yes, it is,” he said.

“I thought I recognized the smell. I used to smoke them in Paris, even though the first several made me dizzy.”

“Would you like one?” asked the boy, turning. He appeared about thirteen, slight and with long red hair. He was trying to keep his voice calm but it squeaked nonetheless.

“No, thanks. I quit when my daughter was born.” Hawthorne’s voice faltered.

“You going to report me?”

“Not tonight. It’s too late for reporting. Have you seen anyone else out here?”

The boy leaned against a tree and smoked his cigarette. “No, nobody. Why?”

“I thought I saw someone leaving Adams Hall. You’re positive?”

“Absolutely . . .” The boy paused. “You’re the new boss.”

“Headmaster, yes.”

“I heard you speak this morning.”

“Oh? How did I seem?”

“Okay, I guess. I wasn’t sure if you were serious. You know how it is—you hear a guy’s scam, then you just wait and see. You going to let students smoke?”

“That’s not in my hands. There are laws against it, insurance regulations.”

“So I’m going to keep getting caught.”

“I expect so. Do you really need to smoke?”

“I’m an addict,” said the boy with some pride. He stood with his hands on his hips and the cigarette stuck in the corner of his mouth. His hair fell across his forehead in a wave.

“If you get desperate for a cigarette and you can’t have one without getting caught, then come to me. We’ll go for a drive and you can smoke. I like the smell of Gauloises.”

“I don’t always smoke Gauloises. I just got lucky.”

“Well, whatever you’re smoking. If I’m not too busy, we’ll go for a spin.”

“I bet you won’t.”

“Try me,” said Hawthorne. “How come you’re out so late?”

“I don’t sleep much and I like to see what’s going on. I don’t mean I’m a Peeping Tom but I hate just lying there staring at the ceiling.”

“What about the night watchman?”

“He’s usually drunk and asleep. You’d have to step on him to get him up.”

“What’s your name?”

The boy hesitated, then said, “Scott.”

“I’m Jim Hawthorne.”

“I figured that.”

“What do you see when you wander around?”

“All kinds of stuff. Tonight I found a dead cat. D’you want to see it?”

“A dead cat?”

“Yeah, it’s been hung. It’s Mrs. Grayson’s cat, the housekeeper. It’s always poking around. Not anymore, I guess. You see that pile of firewood? It’s past that, over by those trees.”

Hawthorne followed the boy across the grass toward a clump of pines. Scott was small for his age, barely over five feet tall. As he led the way, he lit another Gauloise and the strong smell drifted back to Hawthorne, who had an immediate recollection of sitting with Meg in Les Deux Magots and spending a great deal of money for a small cup of coffee.

The cat was fat, gray, and very furry. It had been hung from a low branch with a piece of yellow twine. Its pink tongue protruded from between its gray lips. Hawthorne touched it. The cat was stiff and must have been dead for quite a while. It swung slowly in a circle.

“Pretty fucked up to hang a cat,” said Scott.

Hawthorne didn’t disagree. He took out his Swiss Army knife to cut it down. “You have any idea who did it?”

“Nope, but I bet I’ll find out.”

Three

Detective Leo Flynn had a cold. He had woken up with it that Monday morning and when his wife, Junie, had heard him snuffling she had been unsympathetic. “How many times do I have to tell you that you’ve got to quit the smoking.” As if smoking caused colds, and not the hanging around with the lowlifes he came across working for the Boston homicide unit. Still, September was not yet over and this was his second cold of the month. He’d also had a cold in August, and in July he’d had two colds, though one was a holdover from June. He figured if he retired next year like Junie wanted, then he could make his money doing ads for Kleenex, because when Leo Flynn blew his nose there was nothing secret about it. The walls shook.

Despite the cold, Flynn was feeling more optimistic than usual—darkly optimistic. The sort of optimism that in a normal person would lead to severe depression. At the moment he was driving up to Revere, which he saw as a door leading out of a nightmare case he had been assigned to a week earlier, one of those jobs that could drag on and on and stay open in the files for years. He was hardly over the Tobin Bridge and already he had a small mountain of wet tissues on the seat beside him. It was hard to blow his nose while driving and hard to smoke while blowing his nose. Even worse, the cold made his cigarettes taste like garbage. Like, it had become work just to smoke them. Flynn had a heavy, meal-sack figure and was bald except for some tufts of reddish hair on the sides and back of his head. Back in the early fifties, while still in his teens, he’d been a lightweight Golden Gloves champion in Boston for two years running, but now at sixty-three he was more than twice the size, though he still had that bantam rooster way about him, quick and cocky. His ears looked like a baby’s closed fists—tin ears, he called them—and they were the last remaining evidence of his years in the ring.

Flynn’s professional problems had begun when his team had been given a new homicide, and he’d known when they got it that it would bust his balls. A guy had been ice-picked outside a dance club, the Avalon on Lansdowne, and it had happened so fast that the lady he was with had thought he was bending over to whoop his cookies. Then he kept bending and tumbled flat on his belly. And he hadn’t gotten up again no matter how much the lady yelled.

All Flynn knew at first was that the corpse had a little bead of blood at the base of his skull. But Flynn had expected the worst. Maybe his twenty-five years in homicide had given him that kind of thinking. The autopsy had showed the damage—entry through the foramen magnum of the occipital bone, then the cone-shaped depredation in the brain, a quick swath through the gray porridge. And that’s what had upset him—not that Buddy Roussel was dead, which was only bad fortune for his friends and family, but that he had been iced so well.

Flynn and the three other members of his team had been at the Avalon until four o’clock Sunday morning, then he and Kosta had taken Buddy Roussel’s girlfriend downtown. Her name was Bridget Bonnelli and she couldn’t stop crying. Flynn felt bad for her but he had a job to do so he gave her the Kleenex. Flynn always had a few boxes lying around his desk. Bridget and Roussel had been in the club about two and a half hours. They had danced, talked with friends, and seen about twenty people they knew. Flynn got their names, though some were only first names and some were nicknames. Like Dick-nose, how do you look for a guy named Dick-nose?

Roussel had neither quarreled with nor bad-mouthed anybody. He and Bridget went to the Avalon about twice a month and the bouncers never had a complaint against him. He’d been happy the whole evening and when he’d left the club around twelve-thirty he was relatively sober. That’s when he’d gotten ice-picked, just outside the club, walking beneath the trees with his arm around Bridget’s shoulders on the way to his car.

Roussel was from Manchester, New Hampshire, but he’d worked for a restaurant-supply company in Boston for several years. He had a thousand friends. Bridget Bonnelli couldn’t think why anyone would want to kill him. Just the thought of it made her start weeping again. She knew most of those friends. They were all friends together.

And had there been anyone that she hadn’t known? She thought about this. After all, they’d seen many people that night. But maybe there was this one guy Buddy used to know and was surprised to see. He’d just come and gone. You know how it is standing at the bar—someone comes up and you say a couple of words. Buddy hadn’t introduced her. He’d joked with the guy but it had only been for a few seconds. She couldn’t remember what he looked like—just a young guy, regular-looking. Buddy had known him in Manchester. Did he have a name? Maybe it had been Fred, maybe it had been Frank. Had she seen this Fred or Frank outside? No. She didn’t remember anything outside. For that matter, she wasn’t even sure his name had been Fred or Frank.

Neither name had any special meaning for Flynn. Fred or Frank was just a name among twenty others. It would have meant nothing if it hadn’t been for the break, the piece of news that made Flynn feel optimistic. All week he and his team had been talking to Roussel’s buddies: four detectives knocking on doors and nobody could come up with a reason why Roussel had got himself iced. He was a good guy, worked hard, and his girlfriend loved him. No drugs, no debts, no bad habits. Buddy Roussel was an upstanding young man and now he was dead. It was a shame, and two hundred people had attended his funeral on Friday.

But this morning Leo Flynn had had a piece of good news. The state troopers in Revere had found themselves a two-bit hood who’d gotten killed the same way—a silver nail up through the occipital bone. They’d almost blown it because at first they thought the guy, Sal Procopio, was a floater, since he’d been dragged from the water at Revere Beach early Tuesday morning by a good citizen who had been making out with his girlfriend and happened to see Sal bobbing around in the surf. Sal had been tagged as a floater and stayed in the morgue all week because there was trouble finding his next of kin: parents dead, brothers and sisters spread out across the country.

Then on Friday the medical examiner in Boston had been using Sal to show his students what to look for in drowning victims and, lo and behold, it seemed Sal Procopio hadn’t drowned after all. Further exploration turned up the mess in his brain—the cone-shaped slice an ice pick can make. They even found the hole at the base of the skull, nearly swollen shut by Sal’s time in the water. By then the troopers were left with egg on their face, which was why they had gotten more active with the Revere cops than usual, tracking down Procopio’s chums and bar pals. And this had led to the second detail that caught Flynn’s attention and had him driving up to Revere. Procopio had been spending time with a guy named Frank—last name unknown—a French Canadian from Manchester who’d disappeared. Leastways, nobody could find him. But for Flynn this wasn’t so terrible, because where there were two dead guys killed the same way, they’d probably find a third and maybe a fourth and already he’d had the M.O. sent throughout the East.

In the meantime, Leo Flynn wanted to talk to Procopio’s pals. He wanted to find out what Frank looked like. And he even looked forward to walking along the beach to see where Sal had gotten himself iced. It was a sunny day and Flynn thought he would buy himself a cigar as a way to cut down smoking. He’d walk along the sand and think of the times he’d come to Revere as a kid with his parents and big sister. The salt air would be good for his cold.

–

The girl sat on the chrome counter, kicking the heels of her bare feet against the wooden door of the cabinet beneath her, making an iambic drumlike sound that echoed against the kitchen’s metal surfaces. She was watching Frank LeBrun pummel a heap of bread dough about the size of a beer case, hitting it hard, then picking it up, spinning it around, and flinging it down on the countertop. He wore a white shirt, white apron, and a white cap. Afternoon light slanted through the kitchen windows from the southwest, a Technicolor brilliance from the vast lapis lazuli bowl that seemed to curve over the school. The light reflected from the hanging pots and pans, the aluminum doors of the three large refrigerators, and the chrome on the stoves so the whole kitchen flickered and gleamed. It was Wednesday of Jessica’s second week, and while she was getting used to Bishop’s Hill, she didn’t like it any better.

“I don’t see why you can’t call me Misty,” the girl said. Her peroxided hair was in two pigtails and her figure was hidden by an oversized University of New Hampshire sweatshirt.

The man laughed, keeping his back to her. “It’s not your name.”

“Maybe not legally, but it’s still mine. It’s the name of my soul.”

“That’s pretty dumb.”

“Haven’t you ever wanted to be called something other than Frank?”

“People call me all sorts of stuff. My grandmom called me François. My old lady called me Francis.” He hit the mound of dough with his fist, then he took a quick look at the girl over his shoulder. He was grinning. “But I’m Frank.”

“Well, I’m Misty.”

“You ever hear what they call a Canuck with an IQ of 167?”

The girl gave an artificial yawn. “A village?”

“For Pete’s sake.” LeBrun gave the mound of dough another punch. “You know why a woman’s got two holes so close together?”

“Why?”

“So you can carry ’em like a six-pack.”

“That’s disgusting.” Jessica glanced out the window toward the trees. Then she looked down at her toenails, which were painted bright green. “Call me Misty.”

“Your name’s Jessica.”

“That’s what the jerks call me. I don’t want you to call me that.”

“Don’t start that possessive shit. I don’t even know you.”

“Then why’d you talk to me the other day?”

“I talk to everybody, I’m a friendly guy.” LeBrun stopped kneading the bread and turned toward the girl, wiping his hands on his apron. “You know how to catch a Canuck?”

“How?”

“Slam down the toilet seat when he’s taking a drink.”

“What do you have against Canucks?”

“My grandmom used to say they were New Hampshire’s colored problem. So why’d she marry a guy named LaBrecque, I’d ask? What was she, Irish? Nah, her name was Gateau—a fucking Canuck as well. She was nuts, is all. She didn’t know what the fuck she was. I’d visit her in the nursing home and I’d say, ‘Hey, Grandmom, why’d Canucks wear hats?’ And she’d say, ‘So they don’t flap themselves to death with their big ears.’ And we’d laugh till the nurses complained. The lousy bitches, they fuckin’ robbed her blind.”

“You think I could hire you to do something?”

“You couldn’t afford me.” LeBrun turned back to the pile of bread dough.

“Maybe I could. There’s something I need you to do.”

LeBrun turned to face her. “Are we talking about real money?”

“Two thousand dollars.”

LeBrun’s face had become still as he watched Jessica. Then he said, “Aren’t you going to be late to class?”

The girl glanced around at the clock on the wall behind her. She pursed her lips and jumped down from the counter. The bell must have rung without her hearing it. She scooped up her backpack from the floor. “Maybe we can talk after dinner,” she said. Her bare feet made a faint slapping noise against the tiles.

LeBrun shrugged. “I won’t hold my breath.” As the door swung shut, he returned to his bread dough, right jab, left jab. He opened a drawer and removed a bag of chocolate chips. Taking one bit of chocolate, he inserted it deep into the bread dough. Then he reached in the drawer again and took out a silver-colored tack, which he buried as well.

He patted the dough. “Something nice, something nasty.” LeBrun liked that. It made him laugh.

As Jessica hurried across the dining room, she looked at her watch. She had thirty seconds to get to her two o’clock Spanish class on the third floor and the other side of the building. Reaching the corridor, she broke into a trot. A few kids were still in the hall but most were in class. Above the wooden paneling of the walls hung rows of photographs dating back into the nineteenth century, showing formally posed groups of Bishop’s Hill boys—graduating classes, baseball teams, chess club, debating club. All wore coats and ties, except for the athletes. She happened to notice the graduating class of 1950, the same year her father had been born. He was born in March in Portsmouth in the midst of a snowstorm; this graduating-class picture was probably taken in May or June. She didn’t have time to study it, but she found herself calculating how old those boys probably were today—somewhere in their midsixties—and how they were probably alive while her father was dead.

Jessica began to run and her feet slapped the floor. The faces in the photographs became a blur as she ran past, as if they had been turned into a movie; but they weren’t moving, she was moving, and she smiled at this. But then someone grabbed her arm, pulling her to a stop and wrenching her shoulder so it hurt.

“Why the hell are you running? You know there’s no running.”

A man’s angry boiled-ham face rose above her. Jessica recognized him as one of the teachers, but she didn’t know his name. She pulled herself free and swung her hand at him, meaning to push him away. The man blocked her arm and gave her a push so she fell back against the wall.

“You’re not even wearing shoes. Jesus, you’re in trouble—”

“Fuck you,” said the girl. “Fuck you, fuck you!”

The man took a step toward her. His face looked swollen.

“Chip!” came a voice.

Both Jessica and the man looked up the hall and saw the new headmaster walking toward them. Behind him was Miss Sandler, her Spanish teacher. With some relief Jessica thought that, no matter what other trouble she was in, at least she wasn’t late.

“He hurt me, he hurt my arm.” Jessica held her shoulder. It didn’t occur to her not to exaggerate. It seemed perfectly reasonable to get Chip in as much trouble as she could.

Chip became increasingly angry. “She was running. You heard what she said to me. She doesn’t even have any shoes, for crying out loud.”

By now the headmaster and Miss Sandler had joined them. Farther up the hall several students were watching and a teacher leaned out her open door to look in their direction.

“I should get a fuckin’ lawyer and bust his ass,” said Jessica. “What right’s he got to touch me?” She continued rubbing her arm and wincing.

The headmaster turned to Miss Sandler. “Take care of her, will you?”

Kate put her arm lightly around Jessica’s shoulder. “Come on, let’s go to class.”

“I don’t feel like fuckin’ Spanish anymore. He hurt me.”

Kate smiled. “You know you were going to be late. Now we can walk together.”

“And what about him?” said Jessica, jabbing her thumb toward Chip.

Kate began leading her away. “You’re both upset. Let Dr. Hawthorne deal with it. We have a long hour ahead on the verb to be.”

They walked slowly down the hall. Jessica glanced back with a sort of sneer, then put her arm around Kate’s waist. “What a jerk,” she said.

“You know,” said Kate, “I happened to notice you right away the first day because we both wear ankle bracelets.” She extended her foot so Jessica could see it.

Jessica looked down but didn’t pause. “Yours is half the size of mine. You got a cheap one. Mine’s worth a lot of money. My father gave it to me.”

“You’re a lucky girl,” said Kate.

“Fat lot you know,” said Jessica.

Hawthorne watched them walk down the corridor. He had to remind himself that the girl was fifteen. Dressed in her sweatshirt and jeans, she looked about twelve, slouching and scuffing her bare feet. Kate, on the other hand, was thin and erect.

Chip had turned away and was looking in the other direction. “You still need me?” The hall was now empty except for the two of them.

“Chip, these kids are used to abuse and to adults who push them around. We have to show them we’re not like that. It’s hard enough to teach them as it is. They shouldn’t have the slightest fear that we might hurt them.”

Chip turned slightly but he still wouldn’t look at Hawthorne. He wore khakis and a tan crewneck sweater that gave him a slightly military appearance. “You know the difference between a kid with a learning disability and a juvenile delinquent?”

“Is that a serious question?”

“The difference is forty thousand a year. These are spoiled rich kids who’ve been kicked out of every place else and are used to doing what they want. Nobody has ever told them the difference between right and wrong and it’s time somebody did.”

Hawthorne stepped in front of him so Chip was forced to meet his eye. He was startled by Chip’s anger, his dark red face, and he found himself thinking that Chip would be ripe for a stroke in about ten years. He tried to keep his voice calm. “Before that young woman came to Bishop’s Hill, she spent ten weeks working as a stripper in Boston. Who knows what she experienced, but I don’t expect it was anything nice. Our job is to convince her that Bishop’s Hill is a place where she can be safe. If I ever see or hear of you laying a hand on a student again, I’ll have to dismiss you. This is the only warning you’ll get.”

Chip’s pale eyes widened, then relaxed. He made an ironical salute. “Noted,” he said. Chip started to walk down the hall toward his classroom.

“One other matter,” said Hawthorne.

Chip paused and half turned.

“You missed the first of the meetings yesterday to discuss the students. I’d like you to try and be there tomorrow.”

“I’ve got a pretty busy schedule.”

“We all do.”

Hawthorne watched Chip continue along the hall. Had Chip’s breath smelled of alcohol or had he just not brushed his teeth? Hawthorne wondered if his duties included telling the faculty and staff to floss. One advantage of working in treatment centers was that staff members were highly conscious of their physical impact on their surroundings. They were aware of how the kids looked at them, and they went out of their way to appear benign and harmless. That was even a talk that Hawthorne had given to child-care workers every year: the psychological effects of their body language and appearance.

Hawthorne also had to ask himself if he would have responded so sharply if Chip hadn’t missed the meeting. In fact, half the faculty had failed to attend and the discussion had been desultory at best—more complaint than productive deliberation. He knew that they were testing his resolve, in which case they were making a mistake. But even in the best of circumstances, he would have spoken to Chip about his treatment of Jessica. There was no excuse for grabbing her like that. As for the girl, Hawthorne would talk to her when she calmed down. Although he would have preferred her to wear shoes, he expected that she would put them on soon enough as the weather got colder.

Hawthorne was on his way to see Clifford Evings, the school psychologist, whose office was near the dining hall. Although Evings had come to Tuesday’s meeting, he hadn’t spoken, and at one point Hawthorne had noticed that he was asleep. Then Evings had left before Hawthorne could speak with him, something that had also happened at the meeting the previous week when Hawthorne had been introduced to the staff. Indeed, he had begun to think that Evings was trying to avoid any serious conversation. A single man in his early sixties, Evings had an apartment in one of the dormitory cottages, where he was also expected to monitor the students. But the people who had described the arrangement to Hawthorne, including Fritz Skander, had made some slight gesture—a rolling of the eyes or tapping the nose—to indicate that only minimal monitoring went on. Evings was soft-spoken and his voice had an unfortunate nasal quality that reminded Hawthorne of a dentist’s drill heard from far away. In addition, he was bald and thin to the point of being cadaverous. Hawthorne couldn’t imagine how he was with the students. He had thought several times that, if Bishop’s Hill managed to get through the year, he would encourage Evings in the direction of early retirement. In the meantime Evings was the only psychologist they had, though Hawthorne still hoped to hire another within the next few months.

Evings’s office was an oversized closet with a single window, a wall of books, a desk, a file cabinet, and two wing chairs positioned on either side of a small coal-burning fireplace.