On Sunday, my head pounding after three hours of grading papers, I threw on my barn coat and headed out into the chill air for a walk. The windows of the Brickhouse were steamy from the students gathered inside for fries and Cokes, and a couple of new boys were halfheartedly throwing a Frisbee on the Lawn, but otherwise a kind of limp exhaustion had settled over the Hill, as if even the few leaves left on the trees were too tired to let go and sail to the grass below. Sundays were for doing laundry, catching up on homework, or watching an old movie for the fourth time in the A/V center. Students were bored and already mourning the weekend that was not yet over, watching with dread the hours tick by toward Sunday dinner, chapel, and study hall.
I didn’t want to just take a short stroll around the Lawn and head back to the dorm, so I walked past the chapel and Sam Hodges’s house, thinking I might stop by the infirmary and see if Porter was in. But the porch was empty and Betty Yowell’s kitchen window was dark, so I decided to wander down the drive to at least the start of the trees. It was brisk, a light wind cooling my breath. Low gray clouds hid the sun, although you knew it was there, like a lamp held up behind a shade. If it had been colder, I would have thought of snow, although we were a few weeks away from that at least. In that strange, soft light, I cast no shadow as I walked down off the Hill, the drive a ribbon of asphalt at my feet.
I reached the grove of hickory, oak, and poplar that were older than the trees by the lions at the other end of campus. Rather than a manicured green lawn, the ground underneath these trees was blanketed in dead leaves. This drive was used more as a service entrance, a back door that did not require the same attention to appearances that the lions’ entrance did. As a result, the woods here were more like an actual forest, wilder, more real. The light dimmed around me as I continued to walk down the drive that led to the bridge and the river, where Porter and I had spotted Terence’s body. Looking back over my shoulder, I saw the gentle slope that rose to Saint Matthew’s Chapel and the rest of the brick-and-columned Hill. Then I turned my back on it and walked on into the trees.
When I had been a student, this had been a favorite run of mine in the spring, when flowers bloomed in the undergrowth and the oak trees rose like gray columns wreathed at their crowns by golden-green leaves. Now in mid-November, the leaves scorched and the bushes bare, the branches were more skeletal and angular, like the naked limbs of an older woman stripped of her finery. Still, there was a melancholy beauty in the fading gold leaves and the stark branches, and the trees still held a sense of majesty, if less splendid than in early fall or spring.
Such thoughts on the relative beauty of the woods vanished when the bridge came into view. It lay across the river like something abandoned, a graceless span of metal and wood. Beyond it, around another curve, were the skeet range and a couple of faculty houses tucked away among the trees, and then the back entrance to Blackburne. I walked out onto the bridge. Leaning against the rail, I looked down at the flat rock a football field away where Porter and I had found Terence’s body. There was no visible mark left on the rock, no bloodstain or other sign that a boy had died there. Still, the place seemed marked, somehow, the air itself haunted by what had happened. But Terence Jarrar was not a ghost wandering the banks of the Shenandoah. His body was in the ground by now, far away. It was sad how little I knew of him. And now I wouldn’t have the chance to know him any more.
Sick with such thoughts, I almost missed the sound. It was low but distinct, the sound of a flat piece of wood striking another. It reverberated through the trees and then faded to nothing, all within a second or so. I looked around, puzzled. There was no one on the bridge, nor on the road in either direction. I glanced one more time downriver, seeing nothing on either bank, and then walked across to the other side of the bridge and looked upstream. That was when I saw, among a stand of poplars on the school side of the river, the heavy outline of the outing cabin. The cabin had a screened-in porch that looked out over the river, and I realized that what I had heard was the slam of a wooden screen door, as if someone had opened it and it had swung back on its spring, shutting with a bang. There was a breeze, but not enough to blow open a screen door. I kept my eyes on the cabin. There was a flicker of movement behind the screen door. Or had it been my imagination?
There was the faintest hint of a path from the bridge to the cabin. No one was nearby as far as I could see, no faculty member walking a dog, no student lurking behind a tree. I walked up the path to the cabin, which was roughly built but looked sound. It was at least sixty years old, with small dusty windows and a steep roof, a few tiles from which lay on the ground under the eaves. I took the steps up to the screen door, one board popping beneath my feet. The door was unlatched, the porch beyond in shadow. I opened the door, which made no sound whatsoever. Part of me was disappointed that it hadn’t made an eerie screech. I smiled at the thought and then froze in the act of stepping through the doorway. On the bare wooden floor of the porch, not two steps ahead of me, lay a thick brass disc. It looked for all the world like a miniature hockey puck. I might have stepped on it had I not happened to glance down. I knelt and picked it up. It was heavier than I would have thought. On the surface was the engraved inscription PLS. Someone’s initials? The disc had a hinge at one end, and I swung the lid open to see the round white face, elegant script letters, and hovering needle of a compass. The needle seemed to work, as far as I could tell. It wasn’t all that surprising to find a compass in a cabin used by the outing club, I reflected. Then again, this compass looked clean, without any dust or leaves covering it to indicate that it had been there for a long time. As if it had been dropped on the porch recently.
I looked across the porch at the door to the cabin. It was painted a shade of green that might have once been bright. About a foot above the doorknob were a steel hasp, firmly bolted into the door, and a staple on the door frame over which the hasp would fit. A padlock hung from the staple, but the hasp was not fitted over the staple—it swung freely from the door.
There were windows to either side of the door, both dark and cobwebby. I couldn’t see anything through either of them. The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end as I reached for the door. I grasped the knob and silently stood there, listening. I heard nothing. Yet I was sure someone was inside. It wasn’t just the unsecured hasp. It was almost a physical perception, like sound or sight, except it wasn’t either of those. I just knew. Knowing didn’t make me feel any more at ease as I opened the door.
It creaked as it swung inside, and I stepped into a large common room with crate furniture—a sofa and three blocky chairs with ancient foam cushions—and an old brick fireplace. The fireplace held a few ancient cigarette butts, but nothing that had been smoked in recent history. There was nowhere to hide in the main room, no space underneath the crate furniture. Two doors sat in the back wall, seeming to lead into separate rooms. The right-hand door was opened inward about a foot.
I stood in the center of the room, weighing the compass in my hand. Was there a door between these two rooms? Or was there a rear entrance? No sound came from behind either door.
“Hey!” I shouted, suddenly, hoping for a reaction. The word rang off the walls. Then, when the sound had dissipated, it was as if the earlier silence had grown denser, withdrawing into itself. Nobody had yelped in panic or stumbled, revealing his hiding place. “I’ve got your compass,” I said. “I just want to talk.” Now I felt like a cop in a bad movie, trying to negotiate with a fugitive. Next I would demand that someone come out with his hands up. A steady silence was my only answer. Swearing, I strode toward the open door on the right, pushed it open, and stepped into the room. Two sets of heavy bunk beds, a window through which milky light hovered, and dust. There was also another door that connected the two back rooms, a fact I became aware of only after someone on the other side of that door shoved it open, hard.
I turned toward the noise, and the door caught me like a well-timed punch to the face. Lights sparked in my vision. I fell backward, grabbing at the door, which seemed impossibly tall. Then something smashed against the back of my head, and the world shut down around me like an electrical cord yanked out of a socket—a brief flicker and then nothing.
I OPENED MY EYES and immediately winced. Pain shot through my left cheek. I sat up on a dusty wooden floor. I was in the room with the bunk beds. The back of my head throbbed where it had hit something. Dazed, I looked at the window. The milky light was still there. I looked at my watch and figured I’d been out for only a couple of minutes, max.
The door. Someone had opened it into my face—on purpose. I got to one knee, ignoring the flares of pain in my head, and then stood, my hand on a bunk bed frame. My cheek stung, and when I touched it, my fingers came away with a drop of blood. Whoever had pole-axed me with the door was gone—I could see through the open doorway that the third room held more bunk beds, no hiding places. It did, however, have a back door. I hurried to it and tried to push it open, but the door stayed firmly closed. My guess was it had its own padlock, this one properly locked on the other side.
The front door. I turned and hurried back to the front common room. If whoever had been in here had secured the hasp on the front door, I could be locked in. Panic began tickling my throat, but when I reached the front door, it opened under the pressure of both my hands so that I almost stumbled outside onto the porch. A crow, startled, cawed at me from a nearby bush and beat its way into the sky.
I looked around through the trees and then back toward the drive. Someone was running up the drive, more than a hundred yards away, back toward school. He was wearing a dark jacket, maybe a fleece, and jeans, and a dark skullcap. I took all three of the porch steps in a single leap, nearly stumbling again when I landed, and then started running through the woods toward the drive. My feet thudded on the ground as I ran, my breath rasping in my ears. Pain flickered in my head like a dying lightbulb, threatening one final blaze before burning out. I stepped on a fallen branch, causing it to snap with a loud crack as if I’d broken it over my knee. Ahead, the runner turned his head to look back—a pale face but nothing else I could make out—and then he ran faster.
It seemed to take me several long minutes to finally reach the drive, and when I finally ran out of the woods and onto the asphalt, the runner was gone. I continued running up the drive, pumping my arms, drawing breath through my nose, and blowing out my mouth. No matter how fast I sprinted, I wouldn’t catch him before the trees ended, but if he was heading back to the Hill, I just needed to be able to see where he went. I settled into a steady, loping run. Why I thought he was heading for the Hill, I’m not sure—probably because I assumed he was a student and would want to get to his dorm and hide in anonymity as soon as possible. But if the letters on the compass I had found were his initials, they would point to his name. At that thought, I realized I was no longer holding the compass. My heart sank. He must have taken it after bashing me in the face with the door. There was an S, I remembered, but the other two letters blurred in my memory. The cold air burned my bruised cheek, and my legs began to protest. I ran harder.
By the time I reached the edge of the trees, I had a stitch in my side and was beginning to breathe more rapidly through my open mouth, still shy of gasping for air but well on my way. Up ahead, more than halfway up the Hill, someone in a black fleece was running past the infirmary. I ignored the stitch in my side and kept going.
At the top of the drive, by Saint Matthew’s, I had to stop and bend over, palms on my knees. Ten years ago I’d been able to run two miles without breaking into a heavy sweat. Now I was wheezing like an asthmatic smoker, sweat dripping off my nose, my legs burning and threatening to cramp. Still bent over, I raised my head to scan the Hill. Empty. No one moved under the trees or on the walkways. The Frisbee throwers from earlier were gone. I tried to slow my breathing, letting the stitch in my side work its way out. He could have run across the Lawn to the gym, or ducked into the library or Huber Hall or maybe even into one of the dorms. I’d lost him. “Dumbass,” I said aloud in between breaths.
On the far side of Saint Matthew’s, to the left across the Lawn, someone walked into view, heading down the road away from me toward Stilwell Hall. He wasn’t wearing a skullcap, but he had on a black fleece. I stood up. “Hey!” I managed to shout. The person turned and then began running. From that brief glance, I could tell he was young, with dark hair, but he was still too far away for me to get a good look. I lurched after him. He sprinted down the road that circled the Hill, passing the gym and some of the other dormitory buildings—Raleigh Hall, Rhoads Hall. I cut across the Lawn, trying to keep him in sight. If he got to Stilwell, he’d lose me easily in that massive building with all its twisting corridors and stairwells.
I ran harder, my heart pounding at my ribs. Then I saw the runner turn suddenly and dash inside Vinton Hall, the senior dorm. Ten seconds behind him, I ran up the steps and through the front entrance, nearly colliding with someone just inside the door. “Hey —” the person shouted, and I almost grabbed him by the arm, thinking I’d caught the boy I’d been chasing. Then I realized this boy was wearing gray sweats and was much darker in skin tone. It was Jamal Bullock.
“Mr. Glass?” he asked, puzzled. “You all right, sir?”
“Somebody ran in here . . . a second ago,” I said, in between catching my breath.
Bull nodded. “Yeah. Ran upstairs.”
“Who was it?”
He shook his head. “When I came out of my room, he was already halfway up the stairs.” He leaned forward to get a better look at me, and his eyes widened. “What happened to your face?”
I ran past Bull. “Get the faculty resident,” I called to him, and then took the stairs two at a time.
The stairs came out in the middle of the upstairs hallway, which ran from the front of the dorm to the back, with rooms on either side. By instinct I turned left, toward the back. There were fire escapes on the rear wall of Vinton. But the window at the end of the hall was closed, the windowsill crusted with old paint and dust, a dead fly on its back by the latch. No one had gone out this way. Which meant that he was still on the second floor somewhere. Two rooms I barged into had no one in them, while in a third, a blond-haired boy, lying on his bed and listening to his iPod, glared at me. Realizing I was a teacher, he began to apologize as I let the door swing shut. In the bathroom, I startled a senior in the shower but saw no one else, either in the shower or the stalls. Back out in the hallway, I heard a strange scraping sound, wood rasping against wood, coming from behind another door. When I opened it, I saw someone across the room in the act of stepping through an open window and onto a gabled roof below, one leg and arm still inside. He got his other leg through the window, but I grabbed his arm before he could withdraw it, too. He put up a mighty struggle, trying to yank his arm out of my grasp, but I dug my fingers in, nearly wrenching the boy’s arm out of his shoulder as I yelled for Bull. “No!” he started yelping as I braced a foot against the wall and began pulling him back through the window. “I didn’t do it! I swear! I didn’t do it! No! I swear I didn’t do it!” By the time Bull came running down the hall with the faculty resident, I had managed to pull the boy back through the window and into the room, where he lay sobbing in a heap on the floor. He covered his head with his arms, but not before I recognized him.
“What the hell is going on?” demanded the faculty resident, a young, sandy-haired teacher named Matt McGuire.
“Mr. McGuire,” I said far more calmly than I felt, “would you please call Mr. Middleton and ask him to meet us in his office?”
McGuire looked at me, opened his mouth, seemed to think better of it, and then nodded before heading off to call Ren Middleton. Bull stayed in the room, his wide shoulders blocking the doorway so that other students, drawn out of their rooms by the commotion, had to peek around him to see Paul Simmons, the headmaster’s son, lying on the floor and crying as if his heart were breaking right before our eyes.
MCGUIRE CAME BACK A little later, sent the gawking students away, and said Ren Middleton would meet us in fifteen minutes. He said this a bit accusingly, as if I’d dragged him into trouble, but he also looked interested despite himself. I told him that I’d found Paul in the outing cabin, which was strictly off-limits to students. This was enough to satisfy McGuire, although he kept glancing at my face. I knew my eye and cheek had swollen, could feel the skin tightening, but I said nothing about it and McGuire didn’t ask. We walked downstairs, and I asked McGuire to escort Paul, who was now limp and silent, to Ren’s office while I stopped by my apartment. McGuire hesitated, but then walked off with Paul as I cut across the Lawn to Lawson-Parker.
On my dorm, students were stirring to life. A few were in the showers, while others were folding laundry or blaring music in their rooms, a final defiant act against the ending of the weekend. I shut my apartment door on all of it and went up to my bedroom, opened the top drawer of my dresser, and retrieved the plastic bag of marijuana, which I stuffed into the outside pocket of my coat. Then I thought about why I’d been able to catch up with Paul on the Hill, why he hadn’t run to any of a half-dozen other places. He’d walked out from behind Saint Matthew’s, trying to look casual. He’d also ditched his skullcap. After deliberating for a moment, I shut the dresser drawer and headed for Saint Matthew’s, figuring that Ren Middleton could wait for five more minutes.
REN WASN’T HAPPY. HE sat behind his desk, in a dark blue suit and white shirt but no tie, as though I had disturbed him in the act of getting dressed for Sunday dinner, and glowered at me as if I were the one being hauled in for questioning. Paul Simmons sat in front of Ren’s desk, looking at no one, slumped in his chair. An uncomfortable-looking Matt McGuire sat next to Paul.
“Mr. Glass,” Ren said. “Thank you for finally coming. Mr. McGuire tells me you chased Mr. Simmons here through Vinton Hall and dragged him back through a second-story window.” He made it sound as if I’d been vandalizing the dormitory. “Can you tell me why, precisely?”
I sat without waiting to be asked to do so—in the same chair that Terence Jarrar’s mother had sat in, just over a week ago—and told him about walking down to the river, seeing someone in the outing cabin, going inside to investigate and being clobbered by the door, and then chasing Paul, without yet knowing who he was, up the Hill and into Vinton. I could sense McGuire alternating between rapt attention and disappointment, as if Paul’s injuring me with a door in the face were somehow unsatisfactory. Paul continued to stare at the floor, picking absently at his thumbnail, and said nothing. At the conclusion of my story, Ren nodded once and then turned his attention to Paul. “Mr. Simmons,” he said, “why were you in the outing cabin?”
Paul continued to stare at the floor.
“Mr. Simmons,” Ren said, his voice laced with threat, and despite himself, Paul looked up, his blank expression now tinged with fear, “why were you in the outing cabin?”
Paul opened his mouth, closed it, looked down at his lap, and let out a short, strangled sigh. “I was thinking about Terence,” he said in a low voice. He glanced up. Ren’s face was impassive. “I was . . . sad. About what—what happened to him.” He shivered as if cold. “I wanted to go down to the river, to where he . . . And I couldn’t, I couldn’t do it. I made it to the cabin. We’d gone there once, this fall. With the outing club. We’d had fun. And . . .” He fell silent and looked at his lap again.
Ren grunted. “What about injuring Mr. Glass, here?”
Paul shot a fearful look at me and then looked back at Ren. “I didn’t mean to do it, sir. I swear. I just—I was scared, I thought I would get caught and in trouble, and so I just shoved the door open to—”
“Why?” I asked, interrupting. Ren bristled, but Paul turned to me, a worried frown on his face. I spoke gently, without accusation. “Why did you think you’d get in trouble?”
“Because we’re not supposed to be there,” Paul said. He sounded confused.
“If you’d just told me what you were doing there—”
“Mr. Glass makes a good point,” Ren said, leaning forward and regaining control of the interrogation. “If you had simply spoken with him, you might be facing a detention. As it is, you made things much worse. Much worse.”
It was the wrong way to go. Underneath the apologetic exterior, Paul seemed deeply shaken. I recalled him on the floor in Vinton, crying and saying, “No, I didn’t do it! I swear!” over and over. He needed coaxing, not threats.
Paul shrank back into his chair under Ren’s words. “I didn’t mean to,” he mumbled.
Ren sighed, whether from weariness or annoyance, I couldn’t tell. “Mr. Simmons, would you please wait in the room next door. I need to speak with Mr. Glass for a moment.”
Paul began to get up, but my words stopped him. “Actually, Mr. Middleton, there’s something else. I . . .” I glanced at Matt McGuire. “I’d like to speak with both you and Paul, if I could.”
Paul sank back reluctantly into his chair. Ren looked at me for an uncomfortable three seconds and then said abruptly, “Mr. McGuire, thank you for your assistance.”
McGuire’s face fell, but he stood. “Thank you, sir.” He nodded at me and then, with a glance at Paul, he walked out of the office, closing the door behind him.
I reached into my coat pocket and pulled out the plastic bag I had found in Terence’s lava lamp and placed it on Ren’s desk. He looked at it and then at me. “Where did you get that?” he asked evenly.
“I found it in Terence Jarrar’s room.”
Ren’s eyes widened slightly, and he tilted his head to the left, as if it had been momentarily imbalanced by the news. “When?” he asked, his voice sharper.
“Last weekend, when I cleaned out his room.” So far Paul Simmons had done nothing but flick a glance at the bag of pot. His face showed no emotion other than a clear desire to be somewhere else.
Ren raised his chin and looked at me as if sighting down the barrel of a gun. “Last weekend,” he said softly. He was livid—his lips were pressed together, and his face was flushed, accentuating his round, staring eyes.
I turned to Paul. “Do you have anything you want to say, Paul?” I asked.
Startled, Paul looked at me. I could sense the calculations going on behind that blank stare. “I—what?” he asked.
“Do you have anything you want to say? About that?”
Paul looked at the bag of pot on the desk and then back at me, then at Ren and back to me, a roving searchlight looking for answers in the dark. “I don’t . . . I don’t know what you mean.”
I reached into the inside pocket of my coat and pulled out a skullcap, which I also placed on Ren’s desk. Inside the skullcap was another plastic bag. It, too, contained marijuana buds, two of them, along with a handful of white oval pills. I looked at Paul, who had gone very still.
“I found this outside of Saint Matthew’s,” I said, still looking at Paul. “In a planter off to the side of the entrance. Where you put it before I caught you in Vinton.” I had thought saying this, making a big J’accuse! statement, uncovering a truth, would give me a small rush of triumph. Instead, I felt resentful and a little sad.
Ren stared at Paul. “Is this true?” he asked.
Paul worried at his thumbnail for a moment and then said, “I want to talk to my father.”
There was a pause. Ren set his jaw. “In due time,” he said. “First, I want to know if what Mr. Glass said is true. Did you put this bag in the planter by Saint Matthew’s?”
Paul looked at him, malevolence now rolling off him like heat from pavement. “No,” he said. I thought this is what the police must feel like after interrogating someone they know is guilty and the suspect smiles, sits back, and says he wants a lawyer.
Ren looked at me. “Did you see him do it?”
I shook my head. “I didn’t. But he did get to the chapel before I did, and instead of running away and hiding somewhere before I came up the Hill, he made sure he’d gotten rid of it. Probably thought he could pick it up tonight after chapel. Be pretty easy to do in the dark.”
“I didn’t do it,” Paul muttered.
“You said that in Vinton,” I said. “Several times. ‘No! I didn’t do it! I swear!’ But you weren’t talking about that,” I said, pointing at the bag. “Or about opening a door into my face. You were talking about Terence, weren’t you?” Paul stared at the floor, picking incessantly at his thumbnail. “Did you go down to the river with him last weekend? Did you take the shotgun out of the locker?”
Paul shot me a look of such loathing, I almost stopped. Ren was sitting forward. “Mr. Glass—”
“Did you smoke with him down at the river?” I said hurriedly. “Is that what happened, Terence was stoned and the gun slipped—”
“That’s enough!” This time Ren’s voice was a whiplash. “Paul, go across the hall and sit outside your father’s office, next to Mrs. Robinson’s desk. Do not move from there, not an inch. Go.”
After a moment, Paul got to his feet and went to the door, not without another poisonous look at me. Then he was gone.
As soon as the door shut, Ren said, “I don’t know what the hell is going through your mind, but it will stop, right now.”
“Look, I’m sorry that I interrupted you —” I began.
“Interrupted me? Sweet Jesus, man, you all but accused Travis Simmons’s son of manslaughter.”
“I made an inference based on a gut feeling—”
“A gut feeling?” Ren looked incredulous. “You shouldn’t be listening to your gut. From where I sit, your judgment is seriously clouded. You find marijuana hidden in a student’s room, and you hold on to it for over a week, without telling me or anyone else. Then you make this baseless accusation—”
“It’s not baseless.”
“This baseless accusation about Paul Simmons somehow being involved in Terence Jarrar’s death.”
I took a breath. “That boy knows something about Terence’s death,” I said. “He was panicked when I grabbed him, Ren. Not angry, or scared of me. He was panicked.”
“You pulled him out of a window. I’m not surprised he was panicked.”
“I pulled him back in through a window because he was trying to climb out onto the roof! You can’t tell me he did that because he was scared of detention.”
Ren sat back in his chair and gave a disgusted sigh.
I continued. “I think he feels guilty over Terence’s death. He knows something, Ren. I think he and Terence got stoned, and Terence shot himself, accidentally or otherwise. The marijuana in that bag I found outside Saint Matthew’s looks an awful lot like the marijuana I found in Terence’s room. I’m no botanist or pot expert, but I know there are different kinds, like different brands of beer. Both of these look the same. That means they might have gotten it from the same place. And those pills? They’re Vicodin. Look, you can see it stamped into the pills.”
Ren looked at me through narrowed eyelids. “You still haven’t explained the marijuana you supposedly found in Terence’s room.”
Now it was my turn to be incredulous. “Supposedly found?”
“You didn’t bring it up until now. According to you, you’ve held on to it for a week.”
I shut my eyes briefly, trying to regain my equilibrium, and then opened them again to look evenly at Ren. “I tried to bring the bag to you when I brought that box of Terence’s stuff over to your office. I wanted to give it to you then, but his parents were here. I couldn’t tell you what I’d found in front of them.”
“And what kept you from telling me later?” His voice was withering. “Is your schedule so busy you couldn’t stop by my office once this entire week to let me know that you had found drugs on campus?”
I thought of meeting Deputy Briggs at the Fir Tree, listening to what he had to say about Fritz’s disappearance and his suspicions about the Davenports. If I offered this up as an excuse to Ren, he would think I was even crazier than he did now. “I just . . . Other things came up,” I said lamely. “I made a mistake, clearly. And I’m sorry.”
Ren reached forward and jabbed at a key on the laptop computer on his desk, bringing it out of sleep. “Let me tell you about the consequences of your mistake,” he said. “On Wednesday afternoon, I received an e-mail from Mrs. Jarrar. She was quite upset. She had been looking through her son’s things, including his composition notebook. A notebook he had for your English class.” Ren looked at his computer, seeming to search for something, and then turned the laptop around so I could see the screen. “Read this,” he said.
Reluctantly, I leaned forward. On the screen was an e-mail exchange between Mrs. Jarrar and Ren. Ren had scrolled down to the bottom of the screen so I could read the first e-mail, from Mrs. Jarrar.
From: Samah Jarrar <samah-jarrar@gmail.com>
Date: Friday, November 19, 2010, 8:52 p.m.
To: Ren Middleton <ren.middleton@blackburne.org>
Subject: Terence
Dear Mr. Middleton,
I needed to contact you regarding something I found in one of Terence’s notebooks. It was his composition notebook for English class, and apparently he had been writing in it as a sort of journal. Terence was fond of writing poetry, and it was in his poems that I discovered something disturbing. In two different entries, Terence makes references to smoking and one reference to “grass.” As you can imagine, this greatly upset my husband and me. We are trying to come to terms with our son’s death, and while we have no desire to disrupt the Blackburne community, which has been so gracious and supportive as we deal with our grief, we wish to understand as much as we can how this tragedy came to pass. Do you or anyone else at Blackburne have any idea if Terence could have been involved with smoking marijuana? Or how he could have had access to that shotgun? I apologize for being direct, but we must know the truth, or otherwise we shall be haunted by uncertainty. The police have conducted an autopsy, including a drug test, but the results will not be available for at least another week.
Of course, we wish for this to be investigated as discreetly as possible. These poems of Terence’s may simply have been creative exercises rather than evidence of any hidden truths, and we do not wish our son’s name to be blackened, nor do we want to do anything that could harm Blackburne’s reputation.
Any assistance you could give us would be most appreciated, as always. Thank you for your help, and I look forward to your response.
Sincerely,
Samah Jarrar
From: Ren Middleton
To: Samah Jarrar <samah-jarrar@gmail.com>
Date: Sunday, November 21, 2010, 12:38 p.m.
Subject: Re: Terence
Dear Mrs. Jarrar,
First, my deepest apologies for not responding earlier. I was away from campus and without Internet access for most of Saturday and did not return to Blackburne until a few minutes ago, when I read your e-mail.
I completely understand your need to know the circumstances, and the school and I shall do everything we can to assist you. I can tell you that, given the structure and amount of faculty supervision here, it is extremely unlikely that students could engage in such behavior. We have, as you know, a zero-tolerance policy for the possession of drugs or drug paraphernalia, which has been an effective deterrent for many years. I will speak with Terence’s English teacher, Mr. Matthias Glass, about the composition notebook, although I am sure that if Mr. Glass had had any concerns, he would have forwarded them on to me or his department chair. You are probably correct that the entries you read were of a creative nature. I will be back in touch with you by Monday afternoon at the latest.
Again, please accept my deepest sympathies. The entire school community stands ready to support you and your husband in any way we can.
Sincerely,
Ren Middleton
Associate Headmaster
The Blackburne School
I looked up at Ren, beginning to feel squeezed by a sense of dread. I tried to shake it off. “Seems like my theory isn’t so ridiculous.”
Ren ignored me. “This notebook,” he said. “Did you read it?”
I felt comforted for a moment, on familiar ground. “It’s a journal I ask them to write in occasionally—free writes, personal reflection, creative exercises, that sort of thing. I take them up every few weeks. I haven’t read them this month so far. I don’t recall reading anything like that in Terence’s notebook, or anyone else’s for that matter. Maybe if I could see the notebook again, I could—”
“No.” It was blunt as a hammer stroke. “You said yourself that students wrote creative exercises in these notebooks. We leave it at that.”
I blinked. “But—if he was stoned, and if Paul Simmons was with him, we ought to find out how they got the drugs in the first place so we don’t have another accident.”
“We won’t,” Ren said. “I learned today how they got the shotgun.”
“What?”
Ren leaned forward, putting his elbows on his desk. “Porter Deems came here today after lunch, to my office,” he said. “He confessed to being careless with his master key. He would let his advisees use it if they had to get back into the library for their backpacks or if they wanted extra toilet paper out of the supply closet. His advisees knew he kept it in his desk drawer. Two weeks ago, just before Porter took Terence and his other advisees to Charlottesville for a movie and dinner, Porter couldn’t find his key in his drawer. The next day, it reappeared in the drawer. He said he keeps nothing else in that drawer other than a legal pad and a few pens, so he’s positive the key had been missing. Porter now suspects that Terence took the key, had a copy made in Charlottesville, and then brought the original key back the next day when he stopped by Porter’s apartment with a question about his history homework.”
I sat back in my chair, floored. Porter? It seemed incredible. And yet he could be reckless in just this sort of way. “What’s going to happen?” I managed. “To Porter?”
Ren turned his laptop back around and shut the screen. “Porter resigned. Effective immediately.”
“That’s not . . . This isn’t all Porter’s fault.”
“He took responsibility for his actions. He is the one who suggested resigning.”
I shook my head, unwilling to let it go. “We have to talk to Paul. His father could get him to talk, maybe.”
“That will be between Paul and his father,” Ren said.
Then I remembered the shotgun cabinet. “What about the combination lock on the gun cabinet? Did Porter open that up for Terence, too?”
It was the only time I saw Ren look uncomfortable during that entire conversation. He blinked and glanced away from me for a moment before saying, “Terence must have found out the combination. Perhaps he watched Porter open it once and remembered the numbers.”
He was bullshitting. I knew it, and he did, too. Terence had gotten the combination from someone else. Maybe it was written down somewhere and he’d copied it. Or someone else knew it—someone like Paul Simmons, the headmaster’s son. “We need to talk to Paul,” I said.
“No.”
“Ren, I get that you want to protect the school. But—”
“I said no.”
“If you would just listen to me for—”
“I don’t need to listen to you!” Ren stood behind his desk, his outrage palpable. I found myself on my feet, as if ready to physically defend myself. A vein forked in his forehead, thick and dark under the skin. “You deceived me, Matthias,” he continued angrily. “You made me look like a fool. And we are not telling the Jarrars about any of this. A faculty member was negligent, and a boy stole his key, resulting in a tragic accident. That is what happened.”
So this was why the school would say nothing: aside from the threat of a potential lawsuit, this was about Ren’s anger over looking foolish to the Jarrars. If I hadn’t been horrified by the whole thing, I would have laughed at the absurdity of it. “So we just ignore it?” I said. “We don’t even look at the possibility that Paul Simmons has some sort of responsibility?”
“Travis Simmons will take care of his son,” Ren said. “I suspect he will withdraw and continue his education elsewhere.”
“It’s a lie.”
Ren didn’t blink. “It’s an omission.”
I couldn’t believe I was hearing this. Ren came around the side of his desk and stood a few feet from me, the fingertips of one hand balanced on the desktop. “Some truths are best left uncovered,” he said quietly. “All of us face that fact at some point.”
“Lying, omitting the truth, whatever you want to call it, it’s just wrong.”
Ren nodded slowly, in consideration. “And what about you, Matthias?” he asked. “What about that physics test your sixth form year?”
I stared at him, stunned. How in the hell did he know about that? After a moment, I said, in an utterly unconvincing voice, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“All of us keep things hidden,” Ren continued. “Not because we want to lie, but because it’s necessary in order to function in society. Otherwise we have messy stories to tell, uncomfortable truths about ourselves we would rather not share with others. Colleagues, for instance. Or future employers.”
I managed to find my voice. “Are you threatening me?”
Ren looked disappointed. “No, Matthias,” he said. “I’m simply pointing out that all of us do such things, so you can better understand why the school will do so as well. For the greater good.” Ren reached over and picked up the two bags of pot, opened a drawer in his desk, dropped the bags in, and shut the drawer. “Your contract, as you know, is for one year,” he said. “I can’t say if we’ll continue to have the same position available next year. But should you decide to seek employment elsewhere, I would write you an excellent letter of recommendation.” The look on his face was inscrutable, tight as a closed fist.
After a moment or two of silence, I realized I had been dismissed. Without protest, I walked out of the office and shut the door behind me. Going down the hall in a daze, I felt as if I had suddenly woken from a dream and found myself alone, in unfamiliar country, with no idea of how to get home.