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“I’ve got four sisters and they all suck.”

Skander erupted in laughter. “Isn’t that typical? Nobody ever likes what he has.” He then proceeded to ask about Gene Strauss’s children.

Krueger found himself wondering if Skander knew that Hawthorne had lost his wife and daughter. But he must have known. Hawthorne seemed to be listening attentively to Strauss’s answer about a boy who’d just started as a freshman in Durham and a daughter at home. But again Krueger felt he detected some strain in Hawthorne’s face, an inner sadness that he tried to conceal.

After lunch, Hawthorne gave him a tour of the rest of the school. The rain had decreased to a drizzle that showed no sign of stopping. Krueger’s least-favorite period of the year was between the time the clocks were set back and December 21, when the days started to get longer again. Now, though it was only a little after one, it seemed closer to four o’clock. They walked along the driveway, past Krueger’s car, to the chapel in Stark Hall. The bricks were streaked with water, which made shadowy designs on the building.

Stark Chapel was a severe horseshoe-shaped room with dark pews raked so that those in the back were at least twenty feet above those in the front, as if the pews had been placed to make certain that all students could be seen at all times. There was an aisle down the middle and aisles on both sides. Three golden chandeliers, each with some twenty candlelike bulbs, hung from the arched wooden ceiling, which was painted white and resembled the hull of a schooner. On both sides of the chapel, stained-glass windows depicted biblical scenes. One showed Abraham holding a knife to Isaac’s throat before the angel interrupted the sacrifice. Krueger asked himself what sort of message that had been designed to send to the students of Bishop’s Hill.

“The organ’s quite good,” said Hawthorne. “Rosalind Langdon, the music teacher, plays it every Thursday evening. She doesn’t like to call them recitals but they feel like recitals. They’re really one of the nicest things that happen here. Mostly she does transcriptions of popular songs—you know, ‘Ruby Tuesday’ and ‘Eleanor Rigby,’ but once she did Bach. I try to make it every week, though sometimes I can’t. Too many people wanting to see me with a new complaint.”

The front of the chapel was very plain, with a wooden altar and wooden cross. On the right side were pews for the choir and on the left was a pulpit flanked by two large oak chairs. Above the pulpit hung a painting of a slender, dour man dressed in black. He had a thin white beard covering little more than his jawbone and colorless lips like twin sticks.

Hawthorne pointed to it. “That painting of Ambrose Stark is one of at least four. He was headmaster for forty years and clearly spent a lot of time getting his portrait painted. Given the prominence of his picture, you’d think he was the object of worship.”

“Not what I’d call a fun-loving man.” Approaching the painting, Krueger saw that the frame was bolted to the wall. The bolts looked new. “What’s this?” he asked.

“I had the paintings of Stark tied down, as it were. A few of the faculty see it as a serious eccentricity on my part, but they had a way of wandering. I saw one staring at me from a window.”

“Good Lord, are you serious?”

“After it happened a second time, I had the paintings bolted to the walls, which was probably a mistake. But I was angry. You have no idea how frightening it was.”

“I can imagine. Was this another practical joke?”

“Not a very funny one. I assume someone was holding it up for me to see. I couldn’t be sure it was a painting at first, but it had to be. Anyway, the Reverend Bennett fits in quite well here—everything serious and repentant.”

“You get calls from someone pretending to be Meg and pictures of this old geezer keep popping out at you—what’s going on?”

Hawthorne began to walk back up the steps of the aisle. “Most simply, it’s someone unhappy with the changes I’ve been making.”

Krueger hurried after him. “And what are you going to do about it?”

“Well, I bolted down the paintings and have taken to prowling around the buildings late at night. I’ve become so watchful that my eyes ache. Otherwise, I’m trying to wait it out. Maybe I’ll catch the person.”

Once outside, Hawthorne pointed to the two faculty apartments at the back of Stark Hall. “The Reverend Bennett and her husband live in the biggest one. That fellow you met earlier, Bill Dolittle, wants to move into the one above it.”

They walked around the drive in front of Emerson toward the library in Hamilton Hall, directly across from Stark. It began to rain harder.

“What do you mean, someone’s unhappy with the changes you’re making?” asked Krueger. “Is this one person or several?”

Hawthorne stopped by the steps of the library. Raindrops glistened in his hair. “I told you that Mrs. Hayes resigned. Half the faculty thinks I fired her, just as I fired Chip. Even though a lot’s been done, the school’s barely hanging together. There’s endless gossip, and the rumor that I was writing a book didn’t help. One group is certain I’m fucking the language teacher, another thinks I’m messing around with the nurse, though she was purportedly a lesbian before I came. There’s probably a third group that believes I’m fucking them both, and a fourth is sure I’m having an affair with someone else entirely. Nearly forty people work here: faculty, staff, housekeepers, kitchen help. Half can’t stand me. They’re angry that I’ve taken away their perks, they’re angry I’ve given them more work, they’re angry I’m trying to get them to do what they’ve been hired to do.”

Hawthorne paused to wipe the rain off his face with the back of his hand. Splotches of water dotted the front of his white shirt.

“At least a dozen people think I’m getting rich on the place. Never in my life have I been so distrusted. I don’t really believe there’s a conspiracy against me, but at times it seems that way. As I say, there are people here I trust but then they become the focus of gossip. Beyond that, things turn up missing. A snow blower disappeared. Someone stole one of the new computers. Several telephones have been vandalized. Supplies vanish. Some of it can probably be blamed on students, but the rest, the vicious part, seems too sophisticated for students. Those telephone calls—I can’t believe a student would do such a thing.”

“Could it be Chip Campbell?”

“I doubt it. I’m sure he hates me, but he’s got other things on his mind—his ex-wife is in the process of moving to Seattle and taking their two kids, and he’s doing substitute teaching in several schools. Believe me, when this began to get worse, he was the first person I thought of, but he just doesn’t have the time. I even drove over to his house, though I didn’t go in. I could see him through the picture window with a six-pack of beer, staring at the ceiling. I felt sorry for him.”

“Have you called the police?”

“I reported the theft and vandalism for insurance purposes. There’s a policeman in Brewster who’s come out several times, a sort of local character but very intelligent. He’s talked to the night watchman and some students, but he doesn’t have the time to mount a full investigation and the business is too small for the state troopers. As for the gossip, I don’t know who’s behind it. Maybe they’re friends of Chip, maybe it’s someone else.” Instead of going into the library, they kept walking along a path that circled Hamilton Hall.

“Let me show you where I live,” said Hawthorne. “I’ll give you a cup of coffee.”

Krueger could smell the wet wool of his overcoat. He turned up the collar. They hurried toward the terrace that extended out behind Adams Hall. Beyond the playing fields, only the first trees were visible. Past that, everything was gray.

“The trouble is,” said Hawthorne, “whenever I hear something unpleasant is going on, I think there must be even more to it. I hear Ruth Standish criticizing Alice Beech and I wonder, Who put that in her head? When you first meet a person, he or she’s mostly on their best behavior, kind, smart, well-meaning. But the longer you know the person, the more appearances get stripped away. You see the person get angry or act selfishly. Is someone saying something because that’s what he feels, or because he wants to present you with this particular deception for devious reasons of his own? At times in faculty meetings there’ll be so much double-talk I’ll think that Irony should be given a classification as a legitimate language. I should ask Kate to teach it: Irony 101, Irony 201. It lets a person talk without being held responsible for what’s being said.”

By now they had reached Hawthorne’s quarters. Krueger was the first to see a white plastic bag hanging from the doorknob of the French windows. In the unrelenting grayness, it seemed the focus of all available light. Then Hawthorne saw it and ran forward.

“Damn it to hell!” Hawthorne took the bag from the knob and unlocked the door.

“What is it?” asked Krueger, catching up to him.

“Someone keeps leaving me gifts of food.”

“And?”

“It’s rotten. Look at this.” Hawthorne opened the bag.

Krueger leaned forward. Even before he saw anything he caught the smell of spoiled milk. Then he saw moldy bread and some kind of moldy meat.

“Don’t you get it?” said Hawthorne, pushing open the door. “It’s a food offering but it’s dead. Just like Meg and Lily are dead. This is the third time it’s happened. The first time, there was a note: ‘Dead lunch.’ Funny, isn’t it?” He forced himself to speak more calmly. “I’m sorry. Fritz upset me. Asking everyone about their children. What about me? I think. I had a child too.”

He crossed the living room to the kitchen to put the plastic bag in the garbage.

Krueger followed him, removing his cap and hitting it against his leg. Then he took off his wet overcoat. “Actually, I couldn’t imagine why Skander brought up the subject.” The living room was shabby, with one brand-new oversized brown leather armchair.

Hawthorne busied himself in the kitchen, measuring coffee into a filter. “He’s dense, that’s all. What’s the saying? He’d mention rope in a house where a man had been hung. He’s fascinated with what happened at Wyndham. The fire, the reasons for the fire, why Meg and Lily couldn’t get out. I listen to him and I want to shout, Shut up! But I don’t. He’s a good man, he’s just tactless. After all, he didn’t spend a dozen years studying psychology. He’s a mathematician. Do you know that someone put news clippings from San Diego in all the faculty mailboxes? From the
Trib
—about four stories in all. They contained practically my entire history—that I played basketball, that I like jazz, that I read John le Carré. Then everybody had this skewed idea of what happened—the fire and the hearings afterward. God, I swear I almost went back to California.”

Krueger stood in the doorway of the kitchen wiping his face with a paper towel. He wished Hawthorne
had
given up Bishop’s Hill and gone someplace else.

Hawthorne talked about the school as he made the coffee. Everything positive that he had mentioned in the morning was being countered that afternoon by a negative. A few minutes later, they were sitting in the living room. Hawthorne insisted that Krueger take the leather chair, which he had bought several weeks before.

“I’m sure people believe I bought it with the money saved from my meatless Thursdays.”

“Why don’t you call the police about these pranks?”

“And say what, that someone’s leaving me bags of rotten food?” Hawthorne stood up and walked to the rain-streaked window. “I’m the prime example of someone ready to embrace every foolish conspiracy theory under the sun. I’ve even skulked around trying to catch whoever’s leaving the food, but the actual running of the school takes every moment. I can’t spend half the day hiding behind a tree and watching my back door.”

“It’s bound to get worse.”

“How much worse can it get?”

“I hate to think.”

They sat in silence for a while. Neither man drank his coffee.

“Come on,” said Hawthorne, “I want to show you where Kate and I coach swimming. Balboni Natatorium. I don’t know who Balboni was. Some gloomy fellow.”

They put their coats back on and went outside. Crossing the Common, they walked around to the gymnasium. There was no sign of the forest, just a foggy wall reaching past the playing fields. Hawthorne unlocked a set of green doors leading into a short, dark hall that smelled of chlorine and dampness. There was a door on either side, one labeled “Boys” and the other “Girls.”

“I won’t show you the locker rooms. They’re too depressing unless you like mildew.”

They continued down the hall to a door marked “Pool.”

“Let me get the lights,” said Hawthorne, unlocking the door and going inside. Krueger stood in the doorway. The air was warm and humid and reeked of chlorine. There was a sharp clank as twenty fluorescent panels began to flicker. A few came on directly; most blinked on and off.

Krueger took in the light green cinder-block walls, the sagging bleachers, the cracked tiles. There were no windows. Half the acoustic tiles were missing from the ceiling. The water in the five-lane twenty-five-yard pool was the color and opacity of pea soup, the painted lines at the bottom nearly invisible. Clumsily written in black letters on the far wall were the words “Bishop’s Hill, we aim to kill!”

“Nice,” said Krueger.

“I’m told there’s something wrong with the filtering system or perhaps the chlorine. The phys ed teacher keeps talking about the ‘pH.’ Don’t get me started on the pH.”

The fluorescent lights had turned their skin greenish yellow. At the deep end of the pool, two diving boards had been tilted up and leaned vertically against the far wall.

“This is my humble place of work,” said Hawthorne, “where Kate and I strive to make the Bishop’s Hill swim team a league competitor. Strauss’s school brochures claim that we have an Olympic-size pool, though prospective students never actually get to see it. I’ve often thought we could grow things in here, like mushrooms.”

Curlicues of mist rose from the water.

“When I get depressed, I start seeing the pool as a metaphor for Bishop’s Hill,” Hawthorne continued. “You ask yourself, How could one make it better? The only answer is to tear it down and start over.”