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Flynn sucked on his cigar and looked out at the wet brown grass. It wasn’t much of a yard except for the picnic table. A seagull was flapping along above the rooflines. Flynn watched it for a moment and wondered what it was like to have no thoughts, no morality, no worries, just belly rumblings.

Flynn pushed himself to his feet. His head bumped the umbrella and a thin stream of water trickled down his neck, causing him to bite deeply into the cigar. Then he took it out of his mouth and spat into the dead grass.

“I’ll go talk to the girlfriend,” said Flynn. “Thanks for the smoke.”

“Not too many people to share it with anymore. The wife won’t even let me smoke in the car. I mean regular cigarettes. Filters, even. Makes me feel like a crook.”

Flynn walked around the side of the house. Pausing, he bent over to pick up a twig, wiped the twig on the sleeve of his raincoat, and popped off the smoldering tip of the cigar. There was almost enough left to last him down to Boston that afternoon. The department’s unmarked Dodge was parked in Porter’s driveway. Flynn unlocked the door, started it up, then drove across town.

The woman’s name was Letta Smothers and she worked afternoons at Shaw’s supermarket as a cashier. She was single with two kids, neither of whom were Ritchie’s. Irving had drawn him a map to where she lived, but still Flynn missed the apartment twice and had to double back. He kept thinking of what he knew about Frank the Ice Pick Man. Not a lot. On the other hand, everything he knew was in the computer and Flynn had no doubt that Frank’s full name would turn up in Manchester or Concord. Surely the guy had a record and when Flynn popped in one or two more pieces of information—even Frank’s shoe size, for crying out loud—then the whole story would fall into his lap. Chapter and verse.

Letta Smothers’s apartment house was one of those buildings that Flynn called pregentrified. The developers hadn’t got their hooks into it yet. It was a rectangular three-story building from the mid-nineteenth century, with flaking white paint. Rusted tricycles formed an obstacle course up the front steps. The door was unlocked and the buzzer system was broken. The woman’s apartment was on the third floor. A dump like this wouldn’t have an elevator and Leo Flynn wouldn’t have trusted it anyway. By the time he reached the third-floor landing, he was out of breath. The hall looked like it hadn’t been swept since Vietnam. Flynn found the woman’s door and knocked.

Letta Smothers was a big, blowsy woman with multicolored hair—blond streaks, auburn streaks, and gray roots. She wore blue jeans that were too small for her and a sweatshirt that was too big. A cigarette was stuck in the corner of her mouth.

“I don’t normally like cops,” she told Flynn, leaning in her doorway, “but seeing it’s about Ritchie, it’s okay.” She pronounced the name “Witchie.”

“I appreciate that,” said Leo Flynn. Over the woman’s shoulder, he could see some tattered furniture and two hefty preschoolers watching cartoons on television. As Flynn glanced at the TV, a black cartoon cat got blown to smithereens.

“Didn’t make any sense for Ritchie to be out in the bay anyway,” Letta said. “He hated water. I even had to tell him to wash regular. He said water was for plants and fish.”

“I’m more curious about this friend of his—Frank something.”

“They weren’t friends, not like real friends.” Letta dropped the cigarette on the floor of the hall and ground it out with her slipper, which was fluffy and orange. “Frank just showed up one day. I don’t think Ritchie knew him before. They had some business deal—I don’t know what it was unless it was car parts. You know, buying and selling. You want to come in and sit on the couch?”

Flynn again looked at the television. Now a hyenalike creature was getting blown up—turning into a mass of stars.

“That’s okay. It’s probably more private here in the hall,” said Flynn. “Can you tell me anything about Frank?”

“Not much. He looked kind of strange, with this thin face all squeezed together like it had gotten caught in a press. He had a lot of energy, always moving. More’n once I had to tell him to take a load off his feet just to keep him from walking back and forth in front of the TV. And he liked jokes, he knew lots of jokes. He couldn’t shut up with them.”

“You remember any?”

“You hear the one about the queer nail? Laid in the road and blew a tire.”

Flynn nodded. “Any others?”

“You know what you get when you cross a donkey with an onion? A piece of ass that makes your eyes water.”

“Any about Canucks?”

“You know what you call four Canucks in a Mercedes? Grand theft auto.”

“He must have been a lot of fun.”

Letta Smothers scratched her hair, then looked at her fingernails. “I don’t know, it got a little tiresome. Even Ritchie got sick of it, and he liked jokes. Poor Ritchie. And I had to tell Frank to watch his mouth in front of the kids. Like he couldn’t shut up.”

“This guy have any good points?”

A dreamy expression came over Letta’s wide face. “Bread. He’d make this fantastic bread. Muffins, cookies, cakes. Bread with fruit in it. Bread with chocolate chips. He liked doing it. Sometimes I thought he didn’t come over here to see Ritchie and me. He came to use the oven. He’d done baking in a vocational school someplace. It was a real gift.”

—

Jim Hawthorne got the call at six-thirty Tuesday morning. Clifford Evings was dead. Hawthorne had been shaving, and as he listened to the nurse’s voice he got shaving cream on the telephone’s black receiver. Alice spoke calmly but with a slight tremor. A breeze from the open bedroom window blew across Hawthorne’s bare skin as he stood in the living room dressed only in his pajama pants.

“The body’s cool. He must have died in the night.”

“Who else have you called?”

“The doctor, the Brewster police, the state police.”

“Why the police?”

“There’s an empty bottle of pills on the night table.”

“I’ll be right over.”

Hanging up, Hawthorne returned to the bathroom. The tile floor was cold on his bare feet. A faint gray light came in through the window. He finished shaving, then looked at his face in the mirror—his tired eyes, his drawn expression, his wet and uncombed hair. He took no comfort in what he saw, and in the lines on his forehead and at the corners of his eyes he felt he was witnessing the effect of his horror from the week before. His face looked tighter, bonier. Even as he stared at his reflection it seemed he could hear the notes of “Satin Doll.” Then he went to get dressed.

Clifford Evings was dead. Hawthorne would hear his nasal whine no more. Evings’s thinness and great height, his bald head and ragged cardigan sweater would never again be seen making their way through the halls of Bishop’s Hill. Hawthorne felt a thickness inside him. Wasn’t there more he could have done? He remembered the red scratches that Evings had sometimes left on his scalp as if they were symbols of the greatest fragility. He regretted that he hadn’t liked him more. Yet everything had been set for Evings to take a leave. The board had agreed. Money had been provided. Hamilton Burke himself had driven up to the school the previous day to assure Evings that all was well. He didn’t have to be back until classes resumed in January, almost two months. Instead, he had killed himself.

There was frost on the grass when Hawthorne let himself out the French windows onto the terrace behind Adams Hall. The sun had yet to crest the eastern mountains and Hawthorne couldn’t tell if the day would be cloudy or clear. The sky and ground had an equal grayness; the distant trees formed a leaden curtain. Crows were calling. Hawthorne hurried toward the row of dormitory cottages. Shepherd, where Evings had his studio apartment, was the third, and all the lights were burning. Half a dozen kids in puffy down jackets stood on the grass looking up at Evings’s windows. Scott McKinnon was one of them. He took a few steps toward Hawthorne. “Old Evings scragged himself,” he said. He looked both pleased and horrified. His blue baseball cap was turned around so the bill pointed down his back.

Hawthorne couldn’t bring himself to answer. Five boys and two girls looked at him with an excitement that seemed devoid of grief. Yet there was distress nonetheless. Hawthorne hurried past them up the front steps and opened the door. To the right of the hallway was the student lounge, where about twelve junior and senior boys were talking quietly. They looked at Hawthorne as if he might do something—erase their sadness or return Evings to life. Two were weeping.

Hawthorne greeted them, then used the house phone to call the kitchen. Breakfast wouldn’t be served for another forty-five minutes, but he didn’t want the boys to remain in the dorm. Gaudette answered and Hawthorne explained what had happened.

“I want to send about a dozen kids over to the dining hall. Give them some hot chocolate and juice or something, maybe get them to help you set up. Don’t let Frank tell them any jokes.”

“That’s fine. I got some muffins.”

Hawthorne told the boys to get their coats and go over to the kitchen. He tried to think what else he could do, but only the impossible came to mind—like removing those parts of their memories that hurt them.

Upstairs he found Alice Beech and Bobby in Evings’s apartment, a long room with a sloping ceiling and two dormers under the roof. Piles of books lined the wall across from the windows. Evings lay on his back in his single bed, fully dressed but with his shoes off. A pair of polished black wing tips stood side by side on the floor by the foot of the bed. Evings wore threadbare black socks and Hawthorne could see his long toes through the fabric. He wore a dark suit, white shirt, and blue striped tie, as if he had already dressed himself for his funeral and meant to cause as little trouble as possible. His hands were folded across his stomach. His eyes were slightly open, as if he were furtively watching the people in the room. There was a faint gleam from his teeth. The air smelled sweet. Hawthorne thought the smell was coming from Evings, then he realized that Evings had been burning incense.

Both Alice Beech and Bobby were wearing bathrobes. Bobby’s eyes were red from weeping. He kept rubbing them. Alice and Bobby stood at the foot of the bed and watched Hawthorne.

“Who found him?” asked Hawthorne.

“His door was open and the light was on,” said Bobby. Mixed with his grief, Hawthorne also heard anger. “A student who was going to the john saw him. He tried to wake him to see if he was all right. That was a little after six.”

“I’m sure he’s been dead four or five hours,” said Alice.

As Hawthorne looked at the dead man, he grew aware of several students in the hall behind him. He turned and shut the door. But he felt sorry for them. Even if they hadn’t liked Evings, they had spent a substantial amount of time in his company. Evings had become a three-dimensional presence and surely they felt guilt, as if by acting differently they could have kept him alive.

Hawthorne was increasingly aware of Bobby’s anger. Alice took his arm, trying to calm him.

“I don’t care,” said Bobby, shrugging her off. “I don’t care what he thinks.”

“What are you talking about?” asked Hawthorne. It was hot in the room and he unbuttoned his overcoat.

“I’m talking about what you promised,” said Bobby. “You said everything would be all right, that he’d be safe. Is this what you meant, damn you? He’s dead. Is that what you call safe?”

“Bobby, stop it,” said the nurse. There were tears in her eyes as well.

Hawthorne put a hand out toward Bobby but the other man brushed it aside. “The leave had been approved,” said Hawthorne. “I don’t know what went wrong.”

Bobby pulled his blue terry cloth robe around himself tighter. “He called me last night, did you know that? He said everything was over. And I misunderstood. He sounded happy. Or relieved, he sounded relieved. I thought he was glad he’d be going. Instead he was glad he was going to die. I even asked if he wanted me to come over and he said no, no, he wanted some time by himself. He meant to kill himself even then. Damn it, what did you do to him?”

There was a rapping at the door, and Chief Moulton entered, breathing heavily from his climb up the stairs. The Brewster policeman was wearing khaki pants, with a dark green jacket and hunting boots. In one hand he held a cap and in the other a blue bandanna with which he wiped his forehead then shoved in his back pocket. His cracked leather holster flopped against his hip as he walked.

“What a shame,” he said, looking at Evings. “I passed the doctor on the road. He should be here any minute.” Moulton glanced around the room, then his eyes settled again on Evings. “Not much he can do, of course. Everything as you found it?” Moulton had a low, raspy voice and his northern accent turned his
a
s into diphthongs.

“That’s right,” said Bobby. “I’ve been here the whole time.”

Moulton walked to the bed and clumsily knelt down by Evings’s head. Hawthorne could hear the older man’s knees creak. He thought the policeman was going to touch the dead man but Moulton only stared at him. “Rescue squad will take him into Plymouth. An unhappy man,” said the policeman. “I’ll give them a call.”

There was the sound of hurried footsteps on the stairs and the doctor entered. He was a young man in a dark ski jacket. He paused at the threshold to take in the assembled group, walked to the bed, and put the backs of two fingers against the dead man’s neck. He straightened up and pushed a hand through his dark hair, then he pursed his lips.

“Sorry,” he said.

Hawthorne was aware that Bobby was still staring at him angrily. He looked back, not knowing what else to do.

“If you knew how much I hate you,” said Bobby. “I hope they destroy you here.”

“Bobby, stop it,” said Alice. “He didn’t do anything.”

“If it weren’t for him, Clifford wouldn’t be dead.”

“You’re wrong,” said Hawthorne.

Bobby took several steps toward Hawthorne, until he was almost touching him. His wispy goatee seemed to quiver with rage. “You promised him a leave of absence but you never meant it. You found something easier than firing him. You made him kill himself.”

The doctor looked embarrassed. Chief Moulton shut the door, which had been left open. Then he hitched his pants up over his belly. “I’d watch your tongue, young fellow. That kind of talk makes no sense, specially with kids listening on the stairs.”