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Hawthorne paused. In his many retellings he had always left out the part about Claire, so it was almost as if it had never taken place. He asked himself if he could forget it completely, erase that hour and the guilt that stayed with him—Claire’s face, her short dark hair, the scooped blue silk blouse showing the deep shadow between her breasts and the red stone hanging from a silver chain around her neck: all of it had become a fixed part of his interior landscape.

“That’s what I remember of this dinner,” continued Hawthorne, “I stayed an extra twenty minutes to hear this jazz quartet playing old standards. There was a young woman on the clarinet who was very good. When I got back to Wyndham, the main building was already burning. They were getting the kids out but the fire department hadn’t arrived. I didn’t see Meg or Lily. There was tremendous confusion.

“I ran inside and up the stairs. There was smoke in the second-floor hall but no fire. I reached our door. There was a chain across it. Someone had put a thick chain through the two rings and locked it with a padlock. The door couldn’t be opened. Meg and Lily were on the other side. Meg kept throwing herself against the door. There was a gap of about four inches and I could see part of her face. We could talk. I was afraid, but it seemed obvious they could still get out. Already we could hear the sirens of the fire trucks. Meg and I were able to clasp our hands through the narrow space. Lily kept asking me to open the door. I stroked her hair with one hand and held Meg’s hand with the other. As I say, the grates on the windows were locked and the keys were in my desk. Meg had opened the windows but couldn’t do anything about the grates.

“Downstairs, in the administration office, was a fire ax set into the wall in a little locked cabinet. I’d passed it a thousand times. Meg urged me to get it and to get the keys for the grates. I don’t know, I stayed too long holding her hand. But maybe it was only a minute. Not even that. Maybe it was ten seconds, no more. Then I ran down the hall. The smoke was thicker. I could hear sirens and men shouting. When I got to the office, the cabinet was empty. The glass was broken and the ax was gone. It was never determined whether Carpasso had taken it or if someone else had.

“My own office was on the other side of the administration office. I ran to my desk to get the keys to the grates. By now the electricity had gone out and the only light came from the window—emergency lights and the lights of the fire trucks. And it was smoky. I couldn’t find the keys right away. I ripped out the drawer and overturned it on the top of the desk. You know the junk you can accumulate—paper clips, pencils. All this took time. But the keys were there. I grabbed them and ran back to the stairs. The emergency lights up by the ceiling had come on but the smoke was worse. I ran back down the hall toward our door. If I could get the keys to Meg, she could open one of the grates and jump. What I didn’t know was that the fire was already inside the apartment.

“By now the hall ceiling was on fire and I could see flames through the smoke. I could hear Meg calling my name but it seemed very far away over all the noise. And I could hear Lily. Then the ceiling began to collapse, great segments of flaming acoustic tile were falling around me and the ceiling itself was sagging. I tried to keep running, jumping over stuff. Then I don’t know. Something hit me. I tried to keep moving. I could hear people shouting behind me as well. I knew I had to get her the keys. It was difficult to breathe. I don’t even remember being burned. I just remember Meg’s voice, how her calling changed to screaming. I only wanted to reach her, to grasp her hand. I don’t know if I thought we would all die. I’m sure I still thought I’d be successful. Then that was all. That’s all I remember. When I woke in the hospital and found they were dead, I felt I had been the most awful of traitors.”

Hawthorne stopped and looked around, almost surprised to find himself at Bishop’s Hill. Kate touched his shoulder, letting her hand rest there briefly before removing it. Hawthorne looked out across the front lawns toward the glistening water of the Baker River and beyond. He tried to focus on something but there was only the distance, the vastness. Again, he had left out part of the story.

“For weeks I could hear Meg calling my name. Other people spoke to me, of course, but her voice was loudest. And Lily too, I heard her voice. If I hadn’t waited so long. If I hadn’t stood holding her hand. If I hadn’t stayed to hear that jazz group. They played ‘Satin Doll,’ an Ellington-Strayhorn tune. Do you know it? It’s very sweet, and the woman on the clarinet played it beautifully. When I hear the song now, I feel horror. I’m amazed by its ugliness. After a while Meg’s and Lily’s voices became softer and my arm began to heal. I was almost angry that it was healing. I wanted it to stay raw and painful. But all that went away. At times I still hear their voices. I don’t mean that I remember them, I actually hear them. I hallucinate them. If I’m very tired or distraught or very sad. Or if something frightens me. But it’s softer, just a whisper. They were the only ones killed in the fire, which was Carpasso’s intention: to lock them up as he had been locked up. Most of the school was saved and I gather it’s been rebuilt or they’re working on it. I didn’t want to see it again.”

Hawthorne stretched out and touched the cold metal of the bell, let his hand slide down it to the rope. He had a sudden desire to ring it, swing it with all his strength so the clapper banged and banged. He was surprised by the violence of his emotion. Kate stepped away to the other side of the tower. She reached back and freed her hair from its ponytail, then shook her hair loose. From far away came the sound of a chain saw.

“Part of me was sorry that the whole place didn’t burn to the ground.”

“Is that why you didn’t want to work at a similar sort of place?” said Kate after a moment.

Tapping the bell with one knuckle, Hawthorne listened to its faint ringing. It was nearly as inaudible as the voices of Meg and Lily had become—nearly inaudible but not yet silent. Then he hit the bell harder, hurting his knuckle. Kate looked up at the sound.

“I failed at Wyndham School. I should have paid more attention to Carpasso, and maybe it was wrong to give the kids so much freedom, maybe they weren’t ready for it. I don’t know anymore. It’s as if I no longer have any credibility with myself. It’s as if I let my abstraction of the place—all my ideas and theories—take precedence over the physical reality. I came here to get back to that physical reality. Beyond that, there’s trouble in the whole field. Treatment centers are hugely expensive. Kids needing serious psychiatric care can be charged a thousand dollars a day—most of which comes from insurance companies, though they’re increasingly reluctant to cough up the money. More and more centers are being run privately, governed by the bottom line and the stockholders. For-profits, they’re called, as opposed to nonprofits. Some do good work, but a lot of the places exist only to milk the insurance companies. They talk about milieu therapy so everything that happens to the patient can be considered treatment and given a price. People do jobs they aren’t trained to do, and it’s far more profitable to hire two half-time or four quarter-time employees than one full-time. Dog groomers make more than child-care workers in this country. Emotionally disturbed children, retarded children, psychotic children—it’s a big business. There’s less public money and the funds available can only be used on the treatment itself. In Massachusetts, for instance, there’s no way to tell if a kid was helped or hurt by the treatment centers, no way to know what he’s doing a year after he’s left, five, ten, twenty years after. That’s considered research, and there’s no money for research. A large percentage end up in prison, but there’s no money to confirm the connection.

“I could get a job in a for-profit tomorrow and make four times what I’m making here. But it would mean betraying everything I believe in, at least everything I
thought
I believed in.”

“You sound angry.”

“I
was
angry. Maybe I’m still angry.”

“Why’d you come to Bishop’s Hill?”

“At best, I hoped I could do some good. At worst, I could hide and lick my wounds. It didn’t occur to me that I’d become public enemy number one.”

They continued to talk about the school: faculty who were difficult to work with, students who were troublesome. They walked from one side of the bell tower to the other, looking out across the playing fields or the Common or the front lawns. They could see sections of the Baker River, a glimmer of silver through the leafless trees. Now and then a car drove up to the school or another drove away. They saw students on their way to the gym or coming back. Several of the grounds crew were replacing a window in one of the dormitory cottages. Kate and Hawthorne were aware of the hundred and seventy or so students, teachers, and staff pursuing their various occupations far below, but they were separated from that. Perhaps they could have been seen from the ground or another building had someone looked carefully: one figure in a blue overcoat, one figure in a red mackinaw. They were careful not to get too close or touch each other.

Kate spoke about her ongoing difficulties with her ex-husband. George had called Hawthorne twice and accused him of sleeping with Kate. The second time he had been drunk and could hardly speak. Hawthorne had had a difficult day and was brusque. “One, I’m not having sex with her,” he said. “Two, if I did it’d be none of your business.” And the next morning, he asked Hamilton Burke to call George and remind him that his actions could have legal consequences. George hadn’t called again. As for who had sent George the anonymous note, that remained one of Bishop’s Hill’s little mysteries.

They talked about Evings and speculated about who had wrecked his office. Chief Moulton from Brewster had returned to ask more questions but Hawthorne had no idea whether he had learned anything. Hawthorne said nothing about the phone calls, the bags of rotten food hung from his doorknob, the reappearing image of Ambrose Stark. He wasn’t sure why he didn’t tell Kate, but it seemed part of his sense of isolation. He had even thought it was meant to happen, that these calls and bags of food and practical jokes were an aspect of his punishment. He linked them to his failure with Stanley Carpasso and Wyndham School. They were a result of the time he had spent with Claire in Croce’s and after. Sometimes he even wished these taunts would get worse, like a noise turned higher and higher till it became a scream, just so he would know how much he could take. And sometimes he wished he could strip away his emotional self, that part that still heard the voices of Meg and Lily, the part that was human.

Still, after one of the phone calls from the woman calling herself Meg, Hawthorne had dialed *69. Once he had the number, he called his caller back. The phone had rung and rung. Then a man answered, a postman in West Brewster—the phone was a public telephone outside the Brewster post office. And three times Hawthorne had hidden within sight of his door leading out to the terrace just to see if he could catch someone leaving a bag of food. He had waited about ten minutes and each time had felt like a fool.

These events were taking a toll. Hawthorne’s nerves were suffering; he had become jumpy—phobic, was how he described it to himself. And he knew that Kevin Krueger had looked at him with concern. Staring out over the fields, Hawthorne thought of Krueger’s suggestion that these pranks were bound to get worse. But how bad could they get, and wouldn’t they stop after people saw that the school was actually improving?

After Hawthorne and Kate had been up in the bell tower for nearly an hour, he opened the trap door and they descended the spiral staircase to the fourth-floor attic, going around and around in the dim light that filtered through louvers on the tower windows. At the bottom was the door separating the staircase from the attic. It had two dead-bolt locks so students couldn’t go into the tower and “fool around,” as Skander said. Hawthorne had locked one of the bolts behind them before going up into the tower, he was certain of it, but now as he inserted the key he found the door was open.

“What’s wrong?” asked Kate.

“I thought I had locked this. I must have been mistaken.”

“Who has keys?”

“I thought I had the only set. Maybe there are others in the office.”

They ducked through the low door. Hawthorne locked it and they descended to the third floor, where they stood for a moment at the low wall of the rotunda, looking down. Hawthorne wondered again about the unlocked door and what it might mean. A student hurried across the open space with a backpack slung over his shoulder, carefully stepping around the blue-and-gold crest with the letters
B
and
H.
Then the bell rang, signaling the end of fifth period. Doors began opening and voices rose toward them. Hawthorne and Kate continued down to the first floor to resume the business of their day.

—

When Hawthorne got back to his office he found Hilda Skander standing at the door waiting for him. She put a finger to her lips and pointed toward his inner office. “Reverend Bennett would like a word with you,” she said. “I told her to go in. I hope you don’t mind.” Hilda wore a denim skirt and a green sweater. The air around her reeked of peppermint.

“Of course not.” Hawthorne took off his overcoat, which Hilda hung in the closet.

“She seems very businesslike,” said Hilda. “You know, on a mission.”

Entering his office, Hawthorne found the chaplain studying the photograph of Meg and Lily posed in front of the Christmas tree.

“They were very pretty,” she said somewhat stiffly, as if annoyed to be caught snooping. She put the photograph back on the desk.

“Yes,” said Hawthorne, “they were.” He couldn’t think of more to say beyond that. “You have something you want to talk to me about?”

The chaplain sat down in the chair by the desk. She wore a gray blouse with a clerical collar and a voluminous skirt of a darker gray. She took off her rimless glasses and polished them on a handkerchief as Hawthorne sat down at his desk.

“It’s this business about Clifford. The students are quite worked up about it. And that policeman from Brewster has been asking questions. I can’t help but think that Clifford brought this on himself.” She tucked her handkerchief back in her breast pocket, then fussed with it for a moment to make sure that the point stuck up in the exact center.