Chapter 6

“Oh, hello,” I said, edging past. “Sorry.”

“Hey, ” she said.

I turned around.

“So you went home with Mona Beale last night?”

For a second I didn’t know what she meant. “What?”

“How was it?” she said bitchily. “Was she good?”

Taken aback, I shrugged and started down the hall.

To my annoyance she followed and caught me by the arm. “She’s got a boyfriend, do you know that? You better hope nobody tells him.”

“I don’t care.”

“Last term he beat up Bram Guernsey because he thought Bram was hitting on her.”

“She was the one who was hitting on me. ”

She gave me a catty, sideways look. “Well, I mean, she’s kind of a slut.”

Just before I woke up, I had a terrible dream.

I was in a large, old-fashioned bathroom, like something from a Zsa Zsa Gabor movie, with gold fixtures and mirrors and pink tile on the walls and floor. A bowl of goldfish stood on a spindly pedestal in the corner. I went over to look at them, my footsteps echoing on the tile, and then I became aware of a measured plink plink plink, coming from the faucet of the tub.

The tub was pink, too, and it was full of water, and Bunny, fully clad, was lying motionless at the bottom of it. His eyes were open and his glasses were askew and his pupils were different sizes—one large and black, the other scarcely a pinpoint. The water was clear, and very still. The tip of his necktie undulated near the surface.

Plink, plink, plink. I couldn’t move. Then, suddenly, I heard footsteps approaching, and voices. With a rush of terror I realized I had to hide the body somehow, where I didn’t know; I plunged my hands into the icy water and grasped him beneath the arms and tried to pull him out, but it was no good, no good; his head lolled back uselessly and his open mouth was filling with water.…

Struggling against his weight, reeling backward, I knocked the fishbowl from its pedestal and it crashed to the floor. Goldfish flopping all around my feet, amidst the shards of broken glass.

Someone banged on the door. In my terror I let go of the body and it fell back into the tub with a hideous slap and a spray of water and I woke up.

It was almost dark. There was a horrible, erratic thumping in my chest, as if a large bird were trapped inside my ribcage and beating itself to death. Gasping, I lay back on my bed.

When the worst of it was over I sat up. I was trembling all over and drenched in sweat. Long shadows, nightmare light. I could see some kids playing outside in the snow, silhouetted in black against the dreadful, salmon-colored sky. Their shouts and laughter had, at that distance, an insane quality. I dug the heels of my hands hard into my eyes. Milky spots, pinpoints of light. Oh, God, I thought.

Bare cheek on cold tile. The roar and rush of the toilet was so loud I thought it would swallow me. It was like all the times I’d ever been sick, all the drunken throw-ups I’d ever had in the bathrooms of gas stations and bars. Same old bird’s-eye view: those odd little knobs at the base of the toilet that you never notice at any other time; sweating porcelain, the hum of pipes, that long burble of water as it spirals down.

While I was washing my face, I began to cry. The tears mingled easily with the cold water, in the luminous, dripping crimson of my cupped fingers, and at first I wasn’t aware that I was crying at all.

The sobs were regular and emotionless, as mechanical as the dry heaves which had stopped only a moment earlier; there was no reason for them, they had nothing to do with me. I brought my head up and looked at my weeping reflection in the mirror with a kind of detached interest. What does this mean? I thought. I looked terrible.

Nobody else was falling apart; yet here I was, shaking all over and seeing bats like Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend.

A cold draft was blowing in the window. I felt shaky but oddly refreshed. I ran myself a hot bath, throwing in a good handful of Judy’s bath salts, and when I got out and put on my clothes I felt quite myself again.

Nihil sub sole novum, I thought as I walked back down the hall to my room. Any action, in the fullness of time, sinks to nothingness.

They were all there when I arrived at the twins’ for dinner that night, gathered around the radio and listening to the weather forecast as if to some wartime bulletin from the front. “For the long-range outlook,”

said an announcer’s spry voice, “expect cool weather on Thursday, with cloudy skies and a possibility of showers, leading into warmer weather for the—”

Henry snapped off the radio. “If we’re lucky,” he said, “the snow will be gone tomorrow night. Where were you this afternoon, Richard?”

“At home.”

“I’m glad you’re here. I want you to do a little favor for me, if you don’t mind.”

“What is it?”

“I want to drive you downtown after dinner so you can see those movies at the Orpheum and tell us what they’re about. Do you mind?”

“No.”

“I know this is an imposition on a school night, but I really don’t think it’s wise for any of the rest of us to go back again. Charles has offered to copy out your Greek for you if you like.”

“If I do it on that yellow paper you use,” said Charles, “with your fountain pen, he’ll never know the difference.”

“Thanks,” I said. Charles had a rather startling talent for forgery which, according to Camilla, dated from early childhood—expert report-card signatures by the fourth grade, entire excuse notes by the sixth. I was always getting him to sign Dr. Roland’s name to my time sheets.

“Really,” said Henry, “I hate to ask you to do this. I think they’re dreadful movies.”

They were pretty bad. The first was a road movie from the early seventies, about a man who leaves his wife to drive cross-country.

On the way he gets sidetracked into Canada and becomes involved with a bunch of draft dodgers; at the end he goes back to his wife and they renew their vows in a hippie ceremony. The worst thing was the soundtrack. All these acoustic guitar songs with the word

“freedom” in them.

The second film was more recent. It was about the Vietnam War and was called Fields of Shame—a big-budget movie with a lot of stars. The special effects were a bit realistic for my taste, though.

People getting their legs blown off and so forth.

When I got out, Henry’s car was parked down the street with the lights off. Upstairs at Charles and Camilla’s, everyone was sitting around the kitchen table with their sleeves rolled up, deep in Greek.

When we came in they began to stir, and Charles got up and made a pot of coffee while I read my notes. Both movies were rather plotless and I had a hard time communicating the gist of them.

“But these are terrible, ” said Francis. “I’m embarrassed that people will think we went to see such bad movies.”

“But wait,” said Camilla.

“I don’t get it, either,” Charles said. “Why did the sergeant bomb the village where the good people lived?”

“Yes,” Camilla said. “Why? And who was that kid with the puppy who just wandered up in the middle of it? How did he know Charlie

Sheen?”

Charles had done a beautiful job on my Greek, and I was looking it over before class the next day when Julian came in. He paused in the doorway, looked at the empty chair and laughed. “Goodness,” he said. “Not again. ”

“Looks like it,” said Francis.

“I must say, I hope our classes haven’t become as tedious as all that. Please tell Edmund that, should he choose to attend tomorrow, I shall make an effort to be especially engaging.”

By noon it was apparent that the weather forecast was in error. The temperature had dropped ten degrees, and more snow fell in the afternoon.

The five of us were to go out to dinner that night, and when the twins and I showed up at Henry’s apartment, we found him looking especially glum. “Guess who just phoned me,” he said.

“Who?”

“Marion.”

Charles sat down. “What did she want?”

“She wanted to know if I’d seen Bunny.”

“What’d you say?”

“Well, of course I said I hadn’t,” Henry said irritably. “They were supposed to meet on Sunday night and she hasn’t seen him since Saturday.”

“Is she worried?”

“Not particularly.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“Nothing.” He sighed. “I just hope the weather breaks tomorrow.”

But it didn’t. Wednesday dawned bright and cold and two more inches of snow had accumulated in the night.

“Of course,” said Julian, “I don’t mind if Edmund misses a class now and then. But three in a row. And you know what a hard time he has catching up.”

“We can’t go on like this much longer,” said Henry at the twins’

apartment that night, as we were smoking cigarettes over uneaten plates of bacon and eggs.

“What can we do?”

“I don’t know. Except he’s been missing now for seventy-two hours, and it’ll start to look funny if we don’t act worried pretty soon.”

“No one else is worried,” said Charles.

“No one else sees as much of him as we do. I wonder if Marion’s home,” he said, glancing at the clock.

“Why?”

“Because maybe I should give her a call.”

“For God’s sake,” said Francis. “Don’t drag her into it.”

“I have no intention of dragging her into anything. I just want to make it plain to her that none of us have seen Bunny for three days.”

“And what do you expect her to do about it?”

“I hope she’ll call the police.”

“Have you lost your mind?”

“Well, if she doesn’t, we’re going to have to,” said Henry impatiently. “The longer he’s gone, the worse it will look. I don’t want a big ruckus, people asking questions.”

“Then why call the police?”

“Because if we go to them soon enough, I doubt there’ll be any ruckus at all. Perhaps they’ll send one or two people out here to poke around, thinking it’s probably a false alarm—”

“If no one’s found him yet,” I said, “I don’t see what makes you think that a couple of traffic cops from Hampden will do any better.”

“No one’s found him because no one’s looking. He’s not half a mile away.”

It took whoever answered a long time to bring Marion to the telephone. Henry stood patiently, gazing down at the floor; gradually his eyes began to wander, and after about five minutes he made an

exasperated noise and looked up. “My goodness,” he said. “What’s taking them so long? Let me have a cigarette, would you, Francis?”

He had it in his mouth and Francis was lighting it for him when Marion came on the line. “Oh, hello, Marion,” he said, exhaling a cloud of smoke and turning his back to us. “I’m glad I caught you. Is Bunny there?”

A slight pause. “Well,” said Henry, reaching for the ashtray, “do you know where he is, then?”

“Well, frankly,” he said at last, “I was going to ask you the same thing. He hasn’t been in class for two or three days.”

Another long silence. Henry listened, his face pleasantly blank.

Then, all of a sudden, his eyes widened. “What?” he said, a little too sharply.

All of us were jarred awake. Henry wasn’t looking at any of us but at the wall above our heads, his blue eyes round and glassy.

“I see,” he said finally.

More talk on the other end.

“Well, if he happens to stop by, I’d appreciate it if you would ask him to call me. Let me give you my number.”

When he hung up he had a strange look on his face. We all stared at him.

“Henry?” said Camilla. “What is it?”

“She’s angry. Not worried a bit. Expecting him to walk in the door any moment. I don’t know,” he said, staring at the floor. “This is very peculiar, but she said that a friend of hers—a girl named Rika Thalheim—saw Bunny standing around outside the First Vermont Bank this afternoon.”

We were too stunned to say anything. Francis laughed, a short, incredulous laugh.

“My God,” said Charles. “That’s impossible.”

“It certainly is,” Henry said dryly.

“Why would somebody just make that up?”

“I can’t imagine. People think they see all kinds of things, I suppose. Well, of course, she didn’t see him,” he added testily to Charles, who looked rather troubled. “But I don’t know what we should do now.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, we can’t very well call and report him missing when somebody saw him six hours ago.”

“So what are we going to do? Wait?”

“No,” said Henry, biting his lower lip. “I’ll have to think of something else.”

“Where on earth is Edmund?” said Julian on Thursday morning. “I don’t know how long he plans on being absent, but it is very thoughtless of him not to have got in touch with me.”

No one answered him. He looked up from his book, amused at our silence.

“What’s wrong?” he said teasingly. “All these shameful faces.

Perhaps,” he said more coolly, “some of you are ashamed at how insufficiently you were prepared for yesterday’s lesson.”

I saw Charles and Camilla exchange a look. For some reason, this week of all weeks, Julian had loaded us down with work. We’d all managed, somehow or other, to bring in the written assignments; but no one had kept up with the reading, and in class the day before there had been several excruciating silences which not even Henry had been able to break.

Julian glanced down at his book. “Perhaps, before we begin,” he said, “one of you should go call Edmund on the telephone and ask him to join us if he’s at all able. I don’t mind if he hasn’t read his lesson, but this is an important class and he ought not to miss it.”

Henry stood up. But then Camilla said, quite unexpectedly, “I don’t think he’s at home.”

“Then where is he? Out of town?”

“I’m not sure.”

Julian lowered his reading glasses and looked at her over the tops of them. “What do you mean?”

“We haven’t seen him for a couple of days.”

Julian’s eyes widened with childish, theatrical surprise; not for the first time, I thought how much he was like Henry, that same strange

mixture of chill and warmth. “Indeed,” he said. “Most peculiar. And you have no idea where he might be?”

The mischievous, open-ended note in his voice made me nervous.

I stared at the aqueous, rippling circles of light that the crystal vase cast over the tabletop.

“No,” said Henry. “We’re a bit puzzled.”

“I should think so.” His eyes met Henry’s, for a long, strange moment.

He knows, I thought, with a rush of panic. He knows we’re lying.

He just doesn’t know what we’re lying about.

After lunch, after my French class, I sat on the top floor of the library with my books spread across the table in front of me. It was a strange, bright, dreamlike day. The snowy lawn—peppered with the toylike figures of distant people—was as smooth as sugar frosting on a birthday cake; a tiny dog ran, barking, after a ball; real smoke threaded from the dollhouse chimneys.

This time, I thought, a year ago. What had I been doing? Driving a friend’s car up to San Francisco, standing around in the poetry sections of bookstores worrying about my application to Hampden.

And now here I was, sitting in a cold room in strange clothes and wondering if I might go to prison.

Nihil sub sole novum. A pencil sharpener complained loudly somewhere. I put my head down on my books—whispers, quiet footsteps, the smell of old paper in my nostrils. Several weeks earlier, Henry had become angry when the twins were voicing moral objections at the idea of killing Bunny. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he snapped.

“But how,” said Charles, who was close to tears, “how can you possibly justify cold-blooded murder?”

Henry lit a cigarette. “I prefer to think of it,” he had said, “as redistribution of matter.”

I woke, with a start, to find Henry and Francis standing over me.

“What is it?” I said, rubbing my eyes and looking up at them.

“Nothing,” said Henry. “Will you come with us to the car?”

Sleepily I followed them downstairs, where the car was parked in front of the bookstore.

“What’s the matter?” I said after we had got in.

“Do you know where Camilla is?”

“Isn’t she at home?”

“No. Julian hasn’t seen her, either.”

“What do you want with her?”

Henry sighed. It was cold inside the car, and his breath came out white. “Something’s up,” he said. “Francis and I saw Marion at the guard booth with Cloke Rayburn. They were talking to some people from Security.”

“When?”

“About an hour ago.”

“You don’t think they’ve done anything, do you?”

“We shouldn’t jump to conclusions,” said Henry. He was looking out at the roof of the bookstore, which was sheeted in ice and glittered in the sun. “What we want is for Camilla to drop in on Cloke and see if she can find out what’s going on. I’d go myself, except I hardly know him.”

“And he hates me,” said Francis.

“I know him a little.”

“Not well enough. He and Charles are on fairly good terms, but we can’t find him, either.”

I unwrapped a Rolaids tablet from a roll in my pocket and began to chew on it.

“What’s that you’re eating?” said Francis.

“Rolaids.”

“I’ll have one of those, if you don’t mind,” Henry said. “I guess we should drive by the house again.”

This time Camilla came to the door, opening it only a crack and looking out warily. Henry started to say something, but she gave him a sharp warning glance. “Hello,” she said. “Come in.”

We followed her inside without a word, down the dark hall into the living room. There, with Charles, was Cloke Rayburn.

Charles stood up nervously; Cloke stayed where he was and looked at us with sleepy, inscrutable eyes. He had a sunburn and he needed a shave. Charles raised his eyebrows at us and mouthed the word “stoned.”

“Hello,” said Henry after a pause. “How are you?”

Cloke coughed—a deep, nasty-sounding rasp—and shook a Marlboro from a pack on the table before him. “Not bad,” he said.

“You?”

“Fine.”

He stuck the cigarette in the corner of his mouth, lit it, coughed again. “Hey,” he said to me. “How’s it going.”

“Pretty good.”

“You were at that party at Durbinstall on Sunday.”

“Yes.”

“Seen Mona?” he said without any inflection whatever.

“No,” I said brusquely, and was suddenly aware that everyone was looking at me.

“Mona?” said Charles, after a puzzled silence.

“This girl,” Cloke said. “Sophomore. Lives in Bunny’s house.”

“Speaking of whom,” said Henry.

Cloke leaned back in his chair and fixed Henry with a bloodshot, heavy-lidded gaze. “Yeah,” he said. “We were just talking about Bun.

You haven’t seen him the last couple days, have you?”

“No. Have you?”

Cloke didn’t say anything for a moment. Then he shook his head.

“No,” he said hoarsely, reaching for an ashtray. “I can’t figure out where the hell he is. Last time I saw him was Saturday night, not that I thought about it or anything until today.”

“I talked to Marion last night,” Henry said.

“I know,” said Cloke. “She’s kind of worried. I saw her in Commons this morning and she told me he hasn’t been in his room for like five days. She thought maybe he was at home or something, but she called his brother Patrick. Who says he ain’t in Connecticut. And she talked to Hugh, too, and he says he’s not in New York, either.”

“Did she speak to his parents?”

“Well, shit, she wasn’t trying to get him in trouble.”

Henry was silent for a moment. Then he said: “Where do you think he is?”

Cloke looked away, shrugged uneasily.

“You’ve known him longer than I have. He’s got a brother at Yale, doesn’t he?”

“Yeah. Brady. Business school. But Patrick said he’d just talked to Brady, you know?”

“Patrick lives at home, right?”

“Yeah. He’s got some kind of business thing he’s working on, a sporting goods store or something, trying to get it off the ground.”

“And Hugh’s the lawyer.”

“Yes. He’s the oldest. He’s at Milbank Tweed in New York.”

“What about the other brother—the married one?”

“Hugh’s the married one.”

“But isn’t there another one who’s married, too?”

“Oh. Teddy. I know he’s not there.”

“Why?”

“The T-man lives with his in-laws. I don’t think they get along too well.”

There was a long silence.

“Can you think of anyplace he might be?” said Henry.

Cloke leaned forward, his long, dark hair falling in his face, and knocked the ash off his cigarette. He had a troubled, secretive expression, and after a few moments he looked up. “Have you noticed,” he said, “that Bunny’s had an awful lot of cash around the last two or three weeks?”

“What do you mean?” said Henry, a trifle sharply.

“You know Bunny. He’s broke all the time. Lately, though, he’s had all this money. Like, a lot. Maybe his grandmother sent it to him or something, but you can be damn sure he didn’t get it from his parents.”

There was another long silence. Henry bit his lip. “What are you trying to get at,” he said.

“You have noticed it, then.”

“Now that you mention it, I have.”

Cloke shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “This is off the record, now,” he said.

With a sinking feeling in my chest, I sat down.

“What is it?” Henry said.

“I don’t know if I should even mention it.”

“If you think it important, by all means do,” Henry said curtly.

Cloke took a last draw on his cigarette and ground it out with a deliberate, corkscrewing movement. “You know,” he said, “that I deal a little coke now and then, don’t you? Not much,” he said hastily,

“just a few grams here and there. Just for me and my friends. But it’s easy work and I can make a little money at it, too.”

We all looked at each other. This was no news at all. Cloke was one of the biggest drug dealers on campus.

“So?” said Henry.

Cloke looked surprised. Then he shrugged. “So,” he said, “I know this Chinaman down on Mott Street in New York, kind of a scary guy, but he likes me and he’ll pretty much give me however much I can scrape up the cash for. Blow, mostly, sometimes a little pot as well but that’s kind of a headache. I’ve known him for years. We even did a little business when Bunny and I were at Saint Jerome’s.” He paused. “Well. You know how broke Bunny always is.”

“Yes.”

“Well, he’s always been real interested in the whole thing. Quick money, you know. If he’d ever had the cash I might’ve cut him in on it

—on the financial end, I mean—but he never did and besides, Bunny has no business being mixed up in a deal like this.” He lit another cigarette. “Anyway,” he said. “That’s why I’m worried.”

Henry frowned. “I’m afraid I don’t follow.”

“This was a bad mistake I guess but I let him ride down with me a couple weeks ago.”

We had already heard about this excursion to New York. Bunny had bragged about it incessantly. “And?” said Henry.

“I don’t know. I’m just kind of worried, is all. He knows where the guy lives—right?—and he’s got all this money, so when I was talking to Marion, I just—”

“You don’t think he went down there by himself?” said Charles.

“I don’t know. I sure hope not. He never actually met the guy or anything.”

“Would Bunny do something like that?” said Camilla.

“Frankly,” said Henry, unhooking his glasses and giving them a quick swipe with his handkerchief, “it strikes me as just the type of stupid thing that Bunny would do.”

Nobody said anything for a moment. Henry glanced up. His eyes without the glasses were blind, unwavering, strange. “Does Marion know about this?” he said.

“No,” said Cloke. “And I’d just as soon you didn’t tell her, okay?”

“Do you have any other reason for thinking this?”

“No. Except where else could he be? And Marion told you about Rika Thalheim seeing him at the bank on Wednesday?”

“Yes.”

“That’s kind of weird but not really, not if you think about it. Say he went down to New York with a couple hundred dollars, right? And talking like he had a lot more where that came from. These guys’ll chop you up and put you in a garbage bag for twenty bucks. I mean, I don’t know. Maybe they told him to go back home and close out his account and come back with all he had.”

“Bunny doesn’t even have a bank account.”

“That you know of,” Cloke pointed out.

“You’re perfectly right,” said Henry.

“Can’t you just call down there?” Charles said.

“Who’m I gonna call? The guy’s unlisted and he doesn’t hand out business cards, all right?”

“Then how do you get in touch with him?”

“I have to call a third guy.”

“Then call him,” said Henry calmly, putting the handkerchief back in his pocket and hooking the glasses back over his ears.

“They’re not going to tell me anything.”

“I thought they were such good chums of yours.”

“What do you think?” said Cloke. “You think these people are running some kind of a scout troop down there? Are you kidding?

These are real guys. Doing real shit. ”

For one horrible instant I thought that Francis was going to laugh aloud but somehow he managed to turn it into a theatrical battery of coughs, hiding his face behind his hand. With barely a glance Henry slapped him, hard, on the back.

“Then what do you suggest we do?” Camilla said.

“I don’t know. I’d like to get into his room, see if he took a suitcase or anything.”

“Isn’t it locked?” Henry said.

“Yes. Marion tried to get Security to open it for her and they wouldn’t do it.”

Henry bit his lower lip. “Well,” he said slowly, “it wouldn’t be so very hard to get in in spite of that, would it?”

Cloke put out his cigarette and looked at Henry with new interest.

“No,” he said. “It wouldn’t.”

“There’s the ground floor window. The storm windows have been taken off.”

“I know I could handle the screens.”

The two of them stared at each other.

“Maybe,” Cloke said, “I should go down and try it now.”

“We’ll go with you.”

“Man,” said Cloke, “we can’t all go.”

I saw Henry cut his eyes at Charles; Charles, behind Cloke’s back, acknowledged the glance. “I’ll go,” he said suddenly, in a voice that was too loud, and tossed off the rest of his drink.

“Cloke, how on earth did you get mixed up in something like this?”

Camilla said.

He laughed condescendingly. “It’s nothing,” he said. “You have to meet these guys on their own ground. I don’t let them give me shit or anything.”

Inconspicuously, Henry slipped behind Cloke’s chair to where Charles stood, and leaned over and whispered something in his ear.

I saw Charles nod tersely.

“Not that they don’t try to fuck with you,” said Cloke. “But I know how they think. Now Bunny, he doesn’t have a clue, he thinks it’s some kind of a game with hundred-dollar bills just lying on the

ground, waiting for some stupid kid to come along and pick them up.…”

By the time he stopped talking, Charles and Henry had completed whatever business they’d been discussing and Charles had gone to the closet for his overcoat. Cloke reached for his sunglasses and stood up. He had a faint, dry smell of herbs, an echo of the pothead smell that always lingered in the dusty corridors of Durbinstall: patchouli oil, clove cigarettes, incense.

Charles wound the scarf around his neck. His expression was at once casual and turbulent; his eyes were distant and his mouth was steady, but his nostrils flared slightly with his breathing.

“Be careful,” Camilla said.

She was talking to Charles, but Cloke turned and smiled. “Piece of cake,” he said.

She walked with them to the door. As soon as she shut it behind them she turned around.

Henry put a finger to his lips.

We listened to their footsteps going down the stairs, and were quiet until we heard Cloke’s car start. Henry went to the window and pulled aside a shabby lace curtain. “They’re gone,” he said.

“Henry, are you sure this is a good idea?” said Camilla.

He shrugged, still looking at the street below. “I don’t know,” he said. “I had to play that one by ear.”

“I wish you’d gone. Why didn’t you go with him?”

“I would have, but this is better.”

“What did you say to him?”

“Well, it should be pretty obvious even to Cloke that Bunny isn’t out of town. Everything he owns is in that room. Money, extra glasses, winter coat. Odds are that Cloke will want to leave, and not say anything, but I told Charles to insist that they at least call Marion over for a look. If she sees—well. She doesn’t know a thing about Cloke’s problems and wouldn’t care if she did. Unless I’m mistaken she’ll call the police, or Bunny’s parents at the very least, and I doubt Cloke will be able to stop her.”

“They won’t find him today,” said Francis. “It’ll be dark in a couple of hours.”

“Yes, but if we’re lucky they’ll start looking first thing tomorrow.”

“Do you think anyone will want to talk to us about it?”

“I don’t know,” said Henry abstractedly. “I don’t know how they go about such things.”

A thin ray of sun struck the prisms of a candelabrum on the mantelpiece, throwing brilliant, trembling shards of light that were distorted by the slant of the dormer walls. All of a sudden, images from every crime movie I’d ever seen began to pop into my mind—

the windowless room, the harsh lights and narrow hallways, images which did not seem so much theatrical or foreign as imbued with the indelible quality of memory, of experience lived. Don’t think, don’t think, I told myself, looking fixedly at a bright, cold pool of sunlight soaking into the rug near my feet.

Camilla tried to light a cigarette, but one match and then another went out. Henry took the box from her and struck one himself; it flared up high and strong and she leaned close to it, one hand cupped around the flame and the other resting upon his wrist.

The minutes crept by with a tortuous slowness. Camilla brought a bottle of whiskey into the kitchen and we sat around the table playing euchre, Francis and Henry against Camilla and me. Camilla played well—this was her game, her favorite—but I wasn’t a good partner and we lost trick after trick to the others.

The apartment was very still: clink of glasses, ruffle of cards.

Henry’s sleeves were rolled above his elbows and the sun glinted metallic off Francis’s pince-nez. I did my best to concentrate on the game but again and again I found myself staring, through the open door, at the clock on the mantel in the next room. It was one of those bizarre pieces of Victorian bric-a-brac that the twins were so fond of

—a white china elephant with the clock balanced in a howdah, and a little black mahout in gilt turban and breeches to strike the hours.

There was something diabolical about the mahout, and every time I

looked up I found him grinning at me in an attitude of cheerful malice.

I lost count of the score, lost count of the games. The room grew dim.

Henry lay down his cards. “March,” he said.

“I’m sick of this,” said Francis. “Where is he?”

The clock ticked loudly, a jangling, arrhythmic tick. We sat in the fading light, the cards forgotten. Camilla took an apple from a bowl on the counter and sat in the windowsill, eating it morosely and looking down at the street below. A fiery outline of twilight shone around her silhouette, burned red-gold in her hair, grew diffuse in the fuzzy texture of the woolen skirt pulled carelessly about her knees.

“Maybe something went wrong,” Francis said.

“Don’t be ridiculous. What could go wrong?”

“A million things. Maybe Charles lost his head or something.”

Henry gave him a fishy look. “Calm down,” he said. “I don’t know where you get all these Dostoyevsky sorts of ideas.”

Francis was about to reply when Camilla jumped up. “He’s coming,” she said.

Henry stood up. “Where? Is he alone?”

“Yes,” said Camilla, running to the door.

She ran down to meet him on the landing and in a few moments the two of them were back.

Charles’s eyes were wild and his hair was disordered. He took off his coat, threw it on a chair, flung himself on the couch. “Somebody make me a drink,” he said.

“Is everything all right?”

“Yes.”

“What happened?”

“Where’s that drink?”

Impatiently, Henry splashed some whiskey in a dirty glass and shoved it at him. “Did it go well? Did the police come?”

Charles took a long swallow, winced and nodded.

“Where’s Cloke? At home?”

“I guess.”

“Tell us everything from the first.”

Charles finished the glass and set it down. His face was a damp, feverish red. “You were right about that room,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“It was eerie. Terrible. Bed unmade, dust everywhere, half an old Twinkie lying on his desk and ants crawling all over it. Cloke got scared and wanted to leave, but I called Marion before he could. She was there in a few minutes. Looked around, seemed kind of stunned, didn’t say much. Cloke was very agitated.”

“Did he tell her about the drug business?”

“No. He hinted at it, more than once, but she wasn’t paying much attention to him.” He looked up. “You know, Henry,” he said abruptly,

“I think we made a bad mistake by not going down there first. We should’ve gone through that room ourselves before either of them even saw it.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Look what I found.” He pulled a piece of paper from his pocket.

Henry took it from him quickly and looked it over. “How did you get this?”

He shrugged. “Luck. It was on top of his desk. I slipped it off the first chance I had.”

I looked over Henry’s shoulder. It was a Xerox of a page of the Hampden Examiner. Wedged between a column by the Home Extension Service and a chopped-off ad for garden hoes, there was a small but conspicuous headline.

MYSTERIOUS DEATH IN BATTENKILL COUNTY

Battenkill County Sheriff Department, along with Hampden police, are still investigating the brutal November 12 homicide of Harry Ray McRee. The mutilated corpse of Mr. McRee, a poultry farmer and former member of the Egg Producers Association of Vermont, was found upon his Mechanicsville farm. Robbery did not appear to be a motive, and though Mr. McRee was known to have several enemies, both in the chicken-and-egg business and in Battenkill county at large, none of these are suspects in the slaying.

Horrified, I leaned closer—the word mutilated had electrified me, it was the only thing I could see on the page—but Henry had turned the paper over and begun to study the other side. “Well,” he said, “at least this isn’t a photocopy of a clipping. Odds are he did this at the library, from the school’s copy.”

“I hope you’re right but that doesn’t mean it’s the only copy.”

Henry put the paper in the ashtray and struck the match. When he touched it to the edge a bright red seam crawled up the side, then licked suddenly over the whole thing; the words were illumined for a moment before they curled and darkened. “Well,” he said, “it’s too late now. At least you got this one. What happened next?”

“Well, Marion left. She went next door to Putnam House and came back with a friend.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know her. Uta or Ursula or something. One of those Swedish-looking girls who wears fishermen’s sweaters all the time.

Anyway, she had a look around, too, and Cloke was just sitting there on the bed smoking a cigarette and looking like his stomach hurt him, and finally she—this Uta or whatever—suggested we go upstairs and tell Bunny’s house chairperson.”

Francis started laughing. At Hampden, the house chairpeople were who you complained to if your storm windows didn’t work or someone was playing their stereo too loud.

“Well, it’s a good thing she did or we might still be standing there,”

said Charles. “It was that loud, red-haired girl who wears hiking boots all the time—what’s her name? Briony Dillard?”

“Yes,” I said. Besides being a house chairperson and a vigorous member of the student council, she was also the president of a leftist group off campus, and was always trying to mobilize the youth of Hampden in the face of crushing indifference.

“Well, she barged right in and got the show on the road,” said Charles. “Took our names. Asked a bunch of questions. Herded Bunny’s neighbors into the hall and asked them questions. Called Student Services, then Security. Security said they would send somebody over—” he lit a cigarette—“but it really wasn’t their jurisdiction, a student disappearance, and that she should call the

police. Will you get me another drink?” he said, turning abruptly to Camilla.

“And they came?”

Charles, cigarette balanced between his first and middle fingers, wiped the sweat from his forehead with the heel of his hand. “Yes,”

he said. “Two of them. And a couple of security guards as well.”

“What did they do?”

“The security guards didn’t do anything. But the policemen were actually kind of efficient. One of them looked around the room while the other herded everybody in the hall and started asking questions.”

“What kind of questions?”

“Who’d seen him last and where, how long he’d been gone, where he might be. It all sounds pretty obvious but that was the first time anyone had even asked.”

“Did Cloke say anything?”

“Not much. It was very confused, a lot of people around, most of them dying to tell what they knew, which was nothing. No one paid any attention to me at all. This lady who’d come down from Student Services kept trying to butt in, acting very officious and saying it wasn’t a police matter, that the school would handle it. Finally one of the policemen got mad. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘what’s the matter with you people? This boy’s been missing for a solid week and nobody’s even mentioned it till now. This is serious business and if you want my two cents, I think the school may be at fault.’ Well, that really got the lady from Student Services going and then, all of a sudden, the policeman in the room came out with Bunny’s wallet.

“Everything got very quiet. There was two hundred dollars in it, and all of Bunny’s ID. The policeman who’d found it said, ‘I think we’d better contact this boy’s family.’ Everyone started whispering.

The lady from Student Services got very white and said she’d go up to her office and get Bunny’s file immediately. The policeman went with her.

“By this time the hall was absolutely mobbed. They’d trickled in from outdoors and were hanging around to see what was going on.

The first policeman told them to go home and mind their own business, and Cloke slid away in the confusion. Before he left, he

pulled me aside and told me again not to mention that drug business.”

“I hope you waited until you were told you could leave.”

“I did. It wasn’t much longer. The policeman wanted to talk to Marion, and he told me and this Uta we could go home once he’d taken our names and stuff. That was about an hour ago.”

“Then why are you just getting back?”

“I’m coming to that. I didn’t want to run into anybody on the way home, so I cut across the back of campus, down behind the faculty offices. That was a big mistake. I hadn’t even got to the birch grove when that troublemaker from Student Services—the lady who started the fight—saw me from out the window of the Dean’s office and called for me to come in.”

“What was she doing in the Dean’s office?”

“Using the WATS line. They had Bunny’s father on the telephone

—he was yelling at everybody, threatening to sue. The Dean of Studies was trying to calm him down, but Mr. Corcoran kept asking to talk to someone he knew. They’d tried to get you on another line, Henry, but you weren’t home.”

“Had he asked to talk to me?”

“Apparently. They were about to send someone up to the Lyceum for Julian, but then this lady saw me out the window. There were about a million people there—the policeman, the Dean’s secretary, four or five people from down the hall, that nutty lady who works in Records. Next door, in the admissions office, somebody was trying to get hold of the President. There were some teachers hanging around, too. I guess the Dean of Studies was in the middle of a conference when the lady from Student Services came bursting in with the policeman. Your friend was there, Richard. Doctor Roland.

“Anyway. The crowd parted when I came in and the Dean of Studies handed me the telephone. Mr. Corcoran calmed down when he realized who I was. Got all confidential and asked me if this wasn’t some type of frat stunt.”

“Oh, God,” said Francis.

Charles looked at him out of the corner of his eye. “He asked about you. ‘Where’s the old Carrot-Top,’ he said.”

“What else did he say?”

“He was very nice. Asked about you all, really. Said to tell everybody that he said hi.”

There was a long, uncomfortable pause.

Henry bit his lower lip and went to the liquor cabinet to pour himself a drink. “Did anything,” he said, “come up about that bank business?”