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

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

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

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

“Is that a Gauloise?” Hawthorne called out.

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

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

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

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

“You going to report me?”

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

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

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

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

“Headmaster, yes.”

“I heard you speak this morning.”

“Oh? How did I seem?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I bet you won’t.”

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

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

“What about the night watchman?”

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

“What’s your name?”

The boy hesitated, then said, “Scott.”

“I’m Jim Hawthorne.”

“I figured that.”

“What do you see when you wander around?”

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

“A dead cat?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Nope, but I bet I’ll find out.”

Three

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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