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Krueger attempted to laugh. “That’s rather drastic.”

“Well, we won one of our meets this fall and that’s a positive sign. Kate’s a good coach and I swam in college, so I know what you’re supposed to do. But if the school doesn’t close, I hope to hire someone to do this so I can go back to simple administration.”

“Simple administration,” said Krueger.

“It sounds almost restful.”

There was a crash as the outside door was flung open, followed by the sound of feet running in the hall. Hawthorne and Krueger turned toward the door. Almost immediately Scott McKinnon slid through it and stumbled to a stop. His wet red hair hung in strings across his forehead.

“Mr. Skander wants you. You better hurry. Someone ripped apart Mr. Evings’s office. I didn’t get a good look, but they say it’s a wreck.”

—

One whole wall of Clifford Evings’s small office had been a bookcase. Now the books were on the floor and many were torn—pages ripped out, covers pulled off. Hundreds of loose pages were scattered across the room, or cubby, as Evings liked to call it. One of the wing chairs by the fireplace was tipped over, and Evings was perched on its side with his head in his hands. He wore a green cardigan so threadbare at the elbows that the fabric of his white shirt was visible. The second chair was slashed and its stuffing had been pulled out. The desk lay on its side; the desk lamp was by the door with its glass shade smashed. The frame that had held the painting of Ambrose Stark had been partially pried from the wall. The painting itself was missing.

Bobby Newland stood behind Evings with his hand on Evings’s shoulder. “I’ve called the Brewster police and the state police.”

Krueger was again struck by how alike the two men looked: bald and gangling. He imagined that Newland had grown his mustache and goatee just to make a clear distinction between Evings and himself.

“Most assuredly everything will be done,” said Skander. He stood by the fireplace and looked around in dismay. “Of course, if the culprit is a student and a juvenile . . . but we’ll see, we’ll see. Unquestionably an expulsion would be called for. Nothing like this has ever taken place in all my time at Bishop’s Hill. And how dreadful for it to happen while a representative of the Department of Education is visiting us.”

Krueger remained with Hawthorne by the door, which was shut to prevent the students from peering in. Krueger found the room warm to the point of stifling. Was Skander saying that the vandalism was particularly awful because he, Krueger, was here to witness what had happened? It seemed an odd position. When Hawthorne told him that the empty frame had held the portrait of Ambrose Stark, Krueger found himself thinking that Stark had broken loose, as if the former headmaster himself had caused the wreckage.

“When did this happen?” asked Hawthorne.

“We don’t know,” said Bobby. “Possibly during lunch. Clifford and I came back about one-thirty and found it like this.”

“Of course it happened during lunch,” said Skander. “We’ll have to make a list of all the people who weren’t there. That would be a good start.”

Krueger couldn’t help staring at Skander’s necktie and its message, “What, me worry?” “And nobody saw anything?” he asked.

“Believe me,” said Bobby, “if I knew who did it, that person would be here
right
this instant.”

“Do you have any ideas, Clifford?” asked Hawthorne gently.

Evings shook his head but neither spoke nor removed his hands from his face.

“It
had
to be students,” said Bobby. “They’ve been making fun of Clifford all fall. Those damn discussion groups, talking about gayness and diversity and whatnot. Nobody ever cared that Clifford was gay until it became a matter of discussion.”

“Of course we don’t know for certain that students did this,” said Skander. “It could be an adult. Try to imagine a parent with a grudge against the school, someone who felt his child had been unduly punished.” He raised an index finger and looked at it thoughtfully.

“And I suppose you’re going to say that someone might have just happened to stroll by the school—some stranger who came in here and just on a
whim
—”

“Stop it, Bobby,” said Evings quietly.

“I think I’ll wait for the police outside,” said Skander. “And if I were you, Robert, I’d watch my tongue. We all understand that you’re angry, but that’s no reason to be unpleasant.”

Skander left. Krueger briefly got a glimpse of several students standing in the hall.

Hawthorne knelt down beside Evings, putting a hand on Evings’s knee. “I’m terribly sorry this happened, Clifford. We’ll find out who did it and make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

Evings shook his head but didn’t speak.

“There are many people,” said Bobby somewhat primly, “who don’t believe you’ve done this school any good at all.”

Evings raised his head and put a finger to his lips. “Hush, Bobby, let’s not talk about it. You know as well as I do that I haven’t done all I could.”

“Given the situation,” said Bobby, “how could you?” He kicked at some papers on the floor. “A disaster waiting to happen, that’s Bishop’s Hill in a nutshell.”

Krueger began to feel annoyed but kept his thoughts to himself. Newland and Evings had good reason to be upset and this wasn’t the time to engage in a discussion about Hawthorne’s merits. Yet what had happened was horrible. All day Krueger had felt that the school was about to burst apart, as if the display of decorum were the thinnest of veneers covering a mass of hostility, resentment, and fear.

“Is this a practical joke too?” he asked Hawthorne.

There was a knocking on the door.

It was Skander with a policeman from Brewster, a heavyset middle-aged man with a red face. When he saw the state of the office, he took off his cap and massaged his brow. “My, my, hasn’t someone been making a mess.” He introduced himself as Chief Moulton.

Hawthorne told him what had happened, though it was clear that Skander had already passed on the basic facts. Before he finished, a state police sergeant arrived from the barracks in Plymouth, so Hawthorne had to begin all over again. Not that there was a lot to tell. The incident had apparently happened during lunch and no one had seen anything. Krueger kept thinking of the missing painting and Stark’s harsh expression. Seven men were now in the office and whenever Krueger moved he either stepped on something or bumped into someone. He began to make his way toward the door. He had a two-hour drive ahead of him and felt he should leave the police to their work.

Hawthorne walked Krueger to the entrance of Emerson Hall. Classes were in session and the corridors were empty. Outside it had resumed raining hard. Krueger buttoned up his coat and drew on his gloves.

“Don’t worry,” Hawthorne kept saying, “I’ll be perfectly fine.”

“Do you really think students wrecked the office?”

“I don’t know.”

Krueger wanted to urge Hawthorne to leave Bishop’s Hill, to quit his job and walk away. He felt dismayed by his own inadequacy, that he couldn’t take Hawthorne’s arm and say how worried he was. He wanted to tell his friend that he was afraid for him, but he lacked the courage. Still, there was more he wanted to learn about the school and he believed he could do it best from his office in Concord. He took Hawthorne’s hand and his eyes scanned his friend’s face.

“I’ll be in touch,” he said.

—

Away from home Detective Leo Flynn didn’t have a natural smile, no matter how much he tried. He needed to be in his own chair in his own living room—preferably with Junie, to whom he had been married for forty-one years, or with one of the kids—before he could let himself go. Even when one of his colleagues in the homicide unit told a joke he liked, Flynn’s smile had a watchful, self-observed quality. Now, as he directed his smile at Jerry Sweeney, a bush-league miscreant with two larceny convictions and a half-dozen years in Walpole, Flynn could see Sweeney fight off a desire to hurry from the room.

“Of course,” said Leo Flynn, widening his smile, “we could discuss this downtown.”

They were sitting in Sweeney’s small apartment in Dorchester. It was Monday afternoon, November 9, and Flynn had happened upon Sweeney after several weeks of hanging around sleazy bars in Revere, Dorchester, and South Boston looking for friends of Sal Procopio. Sweeney was a freckled, florid Irishman of about forty, already thin on top, with hands like slabs of meat. From the kitchen came a banging and clattering, as if Sweeney’s wife were engaged in throwing pots and pans on the floor.

“I don’t want to get anybody in trouble,” said Sweeney virtuously.

“You mean you don’t want to get yourself in trouble.”

Jerry Sweeney cradled his jaw with a fleshy hand. “That too.”

Leo Flynn leaned back on the couch, stuck out his legs, and tried to look inoffensive. “What interests me is Sal Procopio’s murder and this guy Frank. The larceny and general thievery, that’s not my department.”

“Sal and Frank,” said Sweeney, lowering his voice and taking a quick glance toward the kitchen, “they’d been knocking off some liquor stores.”

“I already know that. Where can I find Frank?”

“He left town.”

“I know that as well. Where’d he go?”

“No place around here. Someplace out of state. He said he was going back to school, he made a joke about it.”

“Yeah? And what was he planning to study?”

Sweeney looked at Flynn with surprise. “Hey, that’s just what I asked him.”

“And?”

“He made it clear he was going to do a number, at least that’s what I took him to be saying. But it’d be different from the others. He said it’d be something new for him. Like that was what he was going to school to learn.”

“What’d he mean by that?”

“Beats me. I told you, he gave me the willies. He’d get mad and you couldn’t figure how it happened. Like one moment he’d be laughing and the next he’d be all over you.”

“So what do you
think
he might have meant?”

“I figured he’d been hired to ice someone but it was going to be different from his other jobs. Jesus, what do you expect me to say? Just different, that’s all. Maybe he’d iced a bunch a short people and now he was going to do a tall guy.”

Leo Flynn refitted his uncomfortable smile onto his thin lips. “That’s a joke, right?”

“I’m just telling you I don’t know.”

Flynn watched Sweeney’s round face, waiting to see if anything twitched. Sweeney was the fourth of Procopio’s friends that Flynn had managed to find. Of the others, only one had known about Frank and the liquor stores—a discovery that had led the friend, a cardplayer named Exley, to cut all connection with Procopio. But Exley had claimed to know nothing about Frank except that he was a Canuck. Flynn thought that if he had been blessed with friends like these, he’d prefer to buy a dog, which, if things turned sour, could only bite him.

“Who hired him?”

“No one around here. Least that was my impression.”

“Was it somebody from Portsmouth?” Flynn had learned that Frank LeBlanc or LeBon, whatever his name was, had been working as a short-order cook in Portsmouth prior to coming to Boston and, if all went well, Flynn meant to drive up there in a week or so.

“If it was, he didn’t share it with me.” Sweeney widened his eyes in mock innocence.

“We could still go downtown,” said Flynn conversationally. “But you know how it is, all that red tape. And you still on parole—no telling when you’d get home.”

A drop of perspiration appeared on Jerry Sweeney’s puffy brow and Flynn felt gratified to see it. “I tell you, I got no idea,” Sweeny insisted. “You didn’t ask him questions. If he said something, then you nodded and smiled and let it go. He was touchy.”

“Murderous.”

“Yeah, that too.” Sweeney wiped his face with the back of his hand.

“How well’d you know him?”

“I’d see him in the bar with Sal. Even Sal was scared of him.”

“You’re lying to me again.”

Another drop of sweat seemed to emerge from nowhere. “Okay, okay, he wanted me to drive for him. I didn’t like it. I said I was busy. He started to get pissed off and I told him about Sal. That Sal was a good bet.”

“So you introduced them and now Sal’s dead.”

“Yeah, well, at least it’s not me. But before that I’d see him in the bar. We shot pool a few times. Like we’d be partners. He bet the dogs; he even won some.”

“And he talked about doing a number now and then.”

“Not directly, but, yeah, it’d come up.”

“You never thought of giving us a call? An anonymous tip?”

“Hey,” said Sweeney, looking offended, “I got my reputation to consider.”

Flynn drew an old Kleenex from the side pocket of his jacket and blew his nose. The next time Sweeney was brought in for questioning, Flynn decided, he’d have a friendly word with the assistant prosecutor, maybe get Sweeney some extra time in Walpole. “So, tell me, what’s so special about this number that Frank’s planning to do?”

“Different, that’s all. Frank didn’t confide in me. But it worried him. I don’t mean it scared him, I don’t think anything scared him. It was just something he had trouble making jokes about. And it was connected to the school, like the thing that worried him was something he had to get over. You know, like a defect of character.”

—

Scott McKinnon had piled his textbooks on his desk and was using them as a pillow, but he was listening. He made sure of that because every so often Dr. Hawthorne would ask him a question to check and he always got the answer right. If Scott was asked why he didn’t sit up like the other students, he’d say he didn’t feel like it or he was tired or it wasn’t any of your business. But he liked Dr. Hawthorne and he saw himself as the headmaster’s special pet and so he did things like putting his head down on his desk just to show he could get away with it. Dr. Hawthorne treated him different. Like the two times they’d gone for a drive and Hawthorne had let him smoke. Scott felt good about that and he’d talked to him about the school and what the kids were like, although, of course, most of them were pretty dumb. It wasn’t like being a snitch. He was Dr. Hawthorne’s agent.