“What’s going on?” he called. One of the boys, a newboy, stopped and located Thomas by the sound of his voice. Thomas could see the boy grin in the foggy light, and he realized how obvious it must look to everyone that he had been fooling around in the chapel. He felt embarrassed, but also a bit proud, and then he felt ashamed for feeling proud.
“Everybody’s going over to the gym,” said the newboy.
“What for?”
“Somebody’s dead,” said the boy.
“Who?” Thomas called. Hesta lifted the hood on her slicker.
“I heard it was Robert Staines,” said the boy, and then he ran ahead.
SCENE 33
At the sound of the sirens, Horace Somerville put down his magazine and stood up in the teachers’ lounge in Fleming Hall. He did not know why there were sirens on campus; he knew only that there must be trouble. He put on his raincoat with the furry lining and his floppy rain hat and gloves, and then he picked up his oversized golf umbrella in the Montpelier navy blue and white and departed the building in the direction of the noise. He felt faintly guilty for riding out his chaperone duty in the quiet of the teachers’ lounge, but he had excused himself by rationalizing the need for chaperones in the less public parts of the campus. Already in the course of the evening he had thwarted three couples looking for privacy. Still, he was relieved to note that the sirens had not stopped at Bradley Hall, where he was supposed to be, but had halted in the opposite direction. Helped by the occasional walkway lights on campus, Somerville joined small groups of people moving west. It took only a couple of dozen yards for him to see that the trouble was over by the gym, where all the lights were on.
Somerville could remember hearing his older brother Virgil talk about when this gym was built back in the mid-1920s. Virgil had been a third-form newboy and had owned a box camera with which he had taken photographs of the construction to show his family. Virgil had been thirty-one years old when it was Horace’s turn to enroll at Montpelier, but he had pulled out the photo album and had shown Horace all his pictures from his days at school. What had stood out most vividly was the memory of all the rubble associated with the building of the gym. A decade ago they had built the huge, bulbous field house out behind the old gym—new basketball courts, swimming pool, locker rooms—but for Horace the gym was always the old gym, the building that to his young mind had seemed as big as the Waldorf and as grand as Madison Square Garden.
A mob of students and adults milled around in the mist outside the building. It wasn’t a fire, then; they wouldn’t have been so close, and of course he would have smelled the smoke or seen the flames. There was the Boatwright boy talking pleadingly with the girl in wire-rimmed glasses and the yellow rain mac. What was her name? From the way the girl’s lips were set, it looked as though young Boatwright was losing his argument. The young people were always finding some way of breaking each other’s hearts. Somerville turned to look for some adults. He wondered if Kathleen had come out to check on all the commotion. Then he saw a clutch of his colleagues over by the main lobby door to the gym. One policeman stood in front of the door; several more moved around inside. He caught the flash of a camera from inside the building despite the glare of the fluorescent lights. Was it a robbery? He would not allow himself to consider any worse possibilities.
Somerville strolled over to the circle of adults huddling under umbrellas. He recognized Ben Warden and Dan Farnham, and the third was Carella, that young fellow teaching science.
“Gentlemen,” he said.
Warden and Carella greeted him by name.
“You haven’t seen Chuck Heilman or Sam Kaufman, have you?” asked Ben Warden.
“Neither since dinner.”
“Dr. Lane wants to find somebody who can address the students in chapel tomorrow. It might turn out to be you.”
“What’s the trouble here, Ben?” Somerville asked.
“It’s bad, Horace,” said Warden. “We’ve got another boy dead.”
“Who?”
“Robert Staines.”
“The fourth-former,” said Somerville. He tried to assimilate it. Had Staines been one of the boys he had chased away from the teachers’ lounge earlier? “Not another suicide?”
“No,” said Warden. “It’s looking as though the first one wasn’t suicide, either.”
Somerville nodded. “Tell me what happened,” he said.
Warden knew few details. “His girlfriend found him dead inside the gym,” said Warden. “She roused Pat McPhee out of his apartment with her screaming. He’s the one who raised the alarm.”
“Patrick McPhee again,” said Somerville. “He’s having a bad week.”
“What terrible luck,” said Warden.
“Very bad luck,” said Somerville. Warden looked like a man fighting off a collapse—understandable, perhaps, given the pressures he had been resisting recently. What would it take to make a good man go bad? Or to go under? Somerville felt a trickle of dread make its way down his neck, and he was aware of being very tired, as if he had stayed too long at a party and regretted not leaving an hour before. “Where’s Cynthia?” he asked.
“Inside,” said Warden. “They won’t let anyone else enter the building. I’ve tried.”
“He was my student,” said Carella. “This is the second one I’ve lost this week.” He had tears in his eyes.
“Mine, too,” said Warden. “This isn’t the way teaching usually is, Kemper.”
Carella wiped his eyes like a little boy on the sleeves of his blue Montpelier sweatshirt. He had the hood up, but little tufts of hair popped out from beneath the edges. He held an umbrella in one hand and shook.
“You need a proper coat there,” said Somerville.
“This is plenty warm,” said Carella. “It’s a wrestling warm-up. I’m not shivering from the cold.” His voice broke. Somerville observed with distaste Carella’s lack of self-control.
A policeman walked out to the group from the gymnasium. “Has anyone here seen a man named Angus Farrier?” he asked.
No one had. The policeman moved to another group.
“Why do they want Angus?” said Warden.
“Maybe he saw something. His car’s here,” said Carella. Somerville considered Farnham, who stood in an ordinary trench coat with both hands in the pockets and wore a short-billed cap that did little good against the rain. Farnham hadn’t said a word since Horace had arrived, but stared into the gym.
Not shivering from the cold, thought Somerville. Neither am I, my boy. Neither am I. What is happening in this place? What is happening to my school?
Somerville’s heart nearly broke as he accused himself of dereliction of duty. If he had been at the mixer, if he had been more attentive, perhaps this latest catastrophe could have been prevented. At least he could make sure that the rest of the students were safe. Where was Felix Grayson, the day master? Someone needed to take charge.
He roused Warden, Carella, and Farnham. “Let’s get these boys onto their dorms and out of the cold,” he said. They looked at him stupidly.
“Right now,” he said. “It’s not safe for them to be out here.”
The men started to direct pedestrian traffic—all but Daniel Farnham, who stood silently and stared at the gym.
SCENE 34
Inside the gym Katrina Olson fought off hysteria.
She had silky blond hair, the color of imported mustard. Her eyes were blue and just a fraction too close together, and her nose rose at a slope distinctively beautiful. She wore a gray Montpelier School sweatshirt over her white blouse and the top half of her navy blue skirt. Her legs were bare down to her wet lace-up moccasins.
She sat on the beige corduroy sofa in Patrick McPhee’s apartment. Cynthia Warden was next to her. McPhee himself sat in a wing chair to the left of the sofa. Felix Grayson sat in an easy chair to the right.
It was 10:15. Carol Scott, the police investigator, sat directly in front of Katrina Olson in a straight-backed chair borrowed from McP
hee’s dining room.
“We had come here to the gym to talk,” Katrina Olson said through tears. She held the handkerchief she had borrowed from Cynthia and wept into it like an actress.
“Take your time,” said Carol Scott. “How did you get into the building?”
“Around the back,” she said. “There was a door propped open with a little pebble. Robert said he’d arranged it all earlier in the day.”
“Why?”
Cynthia Warden thought the investigator in charge was too striking to be on the police force. This Carol Scott was clearly under thirty years old and under six feet tall, though barely in both cases. She wore her dark hair in a pageboy with a gold pin on one side, and she had on one thin bracelet, a gray woolen suit, black nylons, and low-heeled shoes. She had removed her plain blue cloth overcoat and her fake-fur Russian hat. Cynthia had seen her in town a few times at the dry cleaner’s, but she had not known the woman was a cop.
“Robert told me he knew of a quiet place where we could be alone out of the rain,” said Katrina Olson. “Mixers are so noisy, you know?”
No one answered. Cynthia knew that what they were about to hear would be close to the truth but not the truth, that the truth would not emerge in this first telling of the story, and that if it emerged at all, they would hear it because they had first persuaded Katrina Olson to stop concealing whatever it was that she and Robert Staines were doing in the gym. Smoking pot, making love—whatever it was didn’t matter as much as finding out how Robert Staines ended up with his neck twisted so that he appeared to be looking backwards.
Katrina Olson coughed out more sobs, as though she were coming to the end of her supply. She did not want to tell them the next part of her narrative. She spread Cynthia’s handkerchief on her lap.
“Pretty monogram,” she said. “What does the middle C stand for?”
Cynthia said her maiden name was Cunningham. The girl was stalling.
“What happened next?” asked Carol Scott.
“He took me upstairs to the wrestling room,” she said. “It was dark, but you could still see once your eyes adjusted because of the light coming in through the windows. It was strange to be the only people in the whole building. At least I thought we were.” She was on the verge of breaking down again.
“What time was this?” asked Felix Grayson. He was still in his raincoat and floppy rain hat, even though it was warm in Patrick McPhee’s apartment.
“About 9:00, 9:15,” she said. “We went to the wrestling room for about half an hour. All we did was talk.”
All knew she was editing her story.
“I had to go to the bathroom,” she said. “I wanted Robert to go with me, you know, because it was so scary and dark, but he was tired and wanted to rest on the mats on the floor.”
It was sex then, thought Cynthia. Though it might have been drugs, too. She couldn’t smell any alcohol or smoke on Katrina Olson, but of course they could have been doing pills.
“He told me where the ladies’ room was in the lobby. I found it okay, and then when I came back up the stairs, I could see him sprawled out on the floor. I could tell there was something wrong just from the way he was lying, but then I turned on the light and saw the way his neck . . . I must have screamed a thousand times.”
Carol Scott took notes. She also had a small tape recorder, the size of a transistor radio, on the coffee table to her right.
“I heard her from in here,” said McPhee. “I was asleep in that easy chair and then I heard a girl screaming outside my door. I thought it was a nightmare.”
They had covered this part already. McPhee had rushed outside through one of his interior doors to the gym, had found Katrina Olson and Robert Staines, had determined that Staines was dead, and had brought the girl down to his apartment. He had called Grayson first, and then he had called the police. Grayson had just talked to the headmaster in Philadelphia.
Carol Scott turned to Cynthia. “You say you were here earlier,” she said.
“Yes. Around 8:45.”
“You patrolled the entire building?” said Carol Scott.
“I didn’t rattle every doorknob,” said Cynthia, “but I checked the place thoroughly.”
“Are you the one who unlocked the wrestling and the weight rooms?” asked Carol Scott.
Cynthia said the wrestling room was already unlocked. The weight room had been padlocked.
“You didn’t unlock the weight room next door to the wrestling room?” Carol Scott said again.
“No,” said Cynthia. “I didn’t have a key.”
Carol Scott said somebody did, because the weight room was unlocked when the police arrived.
“And you didn’t see anybody?” said Carol Scott.
Cynthia said she didn’t see anybody except Angus Farrier.
“He’s the janitor?”
“More than that, really. It’s hard to explain his status here. He runs the gym.”
Carol Scott nodded. She had interviewed him a couple of days ago. He had told her he had gone hunting alone over the Thanksgiving holidays. “You saw him upstairs in the wrestling room,” she said.
“I was rehearsing my part in the play,” Cynthia said, “saying my lines and working on my posture, and Angus surprised me.”
“What do you mean by ‘surprised’?” asked Carol Scott.
“I mean he startled me,” said Cynthia. “I didn’t hear him coming up the stairs, and all of a sudden he was in the room with me. He said he’d heard me rehearsing downstairs.”
“Does he live here?”
“No. Not officially. I think he does keep a cot down in his lair.”
“What is his lair?”
It was McPhee who explained about the boiler room on the lower floor that Angus claimed as his office. “He keeps an old desk in there, a hot plate, maybe even some clothes in the closet.”
Carol Scott listened and then spoke again to Cynthia. “Did you check there on your initial search of the gym?”
“No,” said Cynthia. “Just the main rooms. So Angus could have been there the whole time I was patrolling.”
“And then after he startled you?”
“Then I left.”
Carol Scott stopped taking notes and looked at her. Cynthia silently acknowledged that her own editing had been as obvious as Katrina Olson’s.
“Please don’t leave anything out,” said Carol Scott. “If you start boring me, I’ll tell you.”
“I went out the same way I came in,” said Cynthia. “Through Dan Farnham’s apartment. I didn’t know he was at home then, and I barged in on him while he was doing calisthenics in his living room. It was awkward.” She wanted to omit the details of finding him in only his underwear while he was performing those frantic push-ups on the carpet. They had both been embarrassed, Dan more than she.
Katrina Olson listened quietly with the others as Cynthia finished.
“He invited me to stay for a cup of tea, but I declined. I left immediately through his front door and went home to Stratford House.”
“So this building had people all over it,” said Carol Scott. “And nobody was aware of anybody else.”
“It’s a big building,” said Grayson.
Cynthia shivered.
“What time did you leave?” Carol Scott asked.
“A little after 9:00,” said Cynthia. “I went home for just a minute, and then I went back to the mixer. And then we got Pat’s phone call.”
Cynthia was worried about Ben. When she had left Farnham’s apartment at 9:15 and returned home, Ben had not been there. And he was not there now.
A uniformed policeman knocked at the inside door from the gym and entered without an invitation.
“Nobody else in the building, Carol,” he said.
“Where’s Farnham? The guy that lives in the other apartment?”
“He’s outside with some of the other teachers,” said the policeman. “We’ve got him waiting to talk to you.”
“And where’s An
gus Farrier?”
“Who?”
“The old man who looks after the gym. Is he down in the boiler room?”
“No,” said the policeman. “I told you, there’s nobody else in the building.”
“Is he outside?”
Patrick McPhee knew Angus better than the others. “He might have left,” said McPhee. “He comes and goes as he pleases.”
“What kind of car does he drive?” asked Carol Scott.
McPhee could identify it. “A yellow Pinto. Three or four years old.”
“We have a vehicle of that description in the parking lot,” said the policeman.
“Check the license number,” said Carol Scott. “I want you to find me this Angus Farrier now.”
“Angus would never do anybody any harm,” said McPhee.
“No?” said Carol Scott. “Was he out here the night the Phillips boy died? And does he ever shop in the Montpelier School Store?”
No one could say.
SCENE 35
Thomas thought it had to be the worst Saturday night in the history of the Western Hemisphere. Everything that had seemed so sure and stable at 9:00 was in complete confusion by midnight. It was like a concentration camp, with all the girls from the mixer lined up and marched onto the buses, and the chaperones yelling at everybody whenever someone was missing. Meanwhile, the police grilled all the bus drivers, all the people who worked in the kitchen, all the people in the bands. Anybody could have driven onto the campus. And when they found out that Staines had used the Richard Blackburn method—the rock in the back door—to enter a locked building, then the police decided that anybody could have gotten into the damn gym, too.
Then Angus turned up missing. In two seconds every student on campus decreed that Angus had killed Russell Phillips and Robert Staines and was lurking around to kill more students. Angus! It was impossible.
While the girls were getting herded onto their buses, all the Montpelier boys had to go back to their dorm rooms. The councilmen and the faculty tried to take attendance and squelch rumors and generally keep everybody calm, and they did it by making everybody mad. If you dawdled around the girls’ buses or even took your time going back to the dorm, somebody was there yelling at you to get inside. It was like the penitentiary. The thing was, though, it was reassuring, too. You felt safe. It was scary to think about one of the guys on your dorm getting killed.
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