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LeBrun pulled Bennett toward him, until their faces were almost touching.

“I’m not the only one who knows about this,” continued Bennett. “You’ve been paid and you need to keep quiet. Do you actually care whether Evings is alive or dead?”

LeBrun let go of Bennett’s coat. “I didn’t mean for him to off himself.”

“A little late for that, isn’t it?”

“You know, Bennett, you don’t smile anymore. You used to smile all the time when there was stuff you wanted me to do. How come you quit smiling? Is it because you think you’ve got me in your pocket?”

For the first time Bennett looked uneasy. “Perhaps I see nothing to smile about.”

“Hey, there’s always jokes. You hear about the Canuck who stole the Thanksgiving turkey?”

Instead of answering, Bennett turned abruptly and hurried up the driveway to his apartment behind the chapel.

LeBrun angrily kicked the metal fence. Then he sat down on the ground and massaged his bruised toes. In the beginning it had seemed easy: a little money for this, a little money for that. As for that stuff with the girl, it was a joke. But now Bennett had something on him. And so did others.

For a moment, LeBrun considered running, going out to California, where he had lived before. His sister was in Riverside and he hadn’t seen her for years. But he was almost broke. He had to stay at Bishop’s Hill until he got his money, which would be a bundle, a double bundle. After that he’d have all the freedom he could want. But to get the money he had to finish the job he’d been sent to do. No more fucking around. No more indecision. That fat policeman had come sniffing around the kitchen. LeBrun had talked to lots of cops in his lifetime. They never got shit. But LeBrun hated to see him hanging around the school. And the state trooper had come back as well.

LeBrun got up off the ground. His butt was cold and his foot hurt. Maybe he’d busted a toe, like he’d once busted a finger when he punched a wall. He had to talk to the girl and get the dates straight. Fucking Misty. When he was younger, girls like that wouldn’t give him the time of day. You had to get a hold on a person, otherwise you were nothing. And wasn’t that what Bennett had? A hold? LeBrun hated them all. But he didn’t hate Hawthorne, not yet. On the other hand, he didn’t doubt that if Hawthorne knew more about him, then he’d become an enemy, too. Hawthorne liked him now, but that was because he didn’t know anything. The more a person knew, the sooner they’d turn against you. It had always been like that. Even when he’d been a kid, even before he’d actually done anything. It was a fact of life.

LeBrun walked around the outside of Emerson, rubbing his arms and deep in conversation with himself. He wanted to talk to the girl. It was past four-thirty and she was probably in her room. He’d never been there but he knew it was on the second floor of Smithfield. LeBrun always made a point of finding out where things were. There was no telling when it might come in useful. And keys, he always liked to have a lot of keys.

He rounded Emerson by Stark Hall, into which Bennett had disappeared, then he continued toward the row of dormitory cottages. LeBrun liked how the days were getting shorter. He could never see why people complained about the decreasing daylight. He liked the dark. Maybe he should live in Alaska, where there was lots of night. Or he could go to Quebec and live with the rest of the Canucks. He’d picked up a little French from his grandmom, maybe twenty or thirty words. It would be a start.

There was a back door to Smithfield and LeBrun unlocked it. He stepped inside and listened. He could hear girls’ voices and laughter from the living room. And there was music. LeBrun didn’t like music, not even rock and roll. It made him jittery. He couldn’t imagine listening to music to relax. There was lots of stuff he didn’t like. LeBrun paused on the back stairs and thought about it. He didn’t like people fucking with his space, and to tell the truth, a whole lot of people fucked with his space.

LeBrun paused again at the second-floor landing. A girl was walking down the hall from the bathroom with a towel wrapped around her and he waited for her to get out of the way. Jessica’s door was the second one down on the left. He would surprise her. It would help to make her think he was invincible. But he wouldn’t touch her. On the whole, he didn’t like to touch anyone, except for business purposes.

LeBrun made his move, counting the seconds off to himself. Five steps to her door, two seconds to get the key in the lock and he was inside. The girl was on the lower bunk fussing with something. The only light came from a lamp on the desk, and the room was dim. LeBrun looked again. It was a fucking cat.

“Hey,” said Jessica.

“Get rid of that cat.” LeBrun stayed by the door.

“You’re not supposed to be in here.” Jessica sat up on the bed and put her bare feet on the floor. The kitten crawled behind her.

“I said, get rid of the cat.”

“It’s not a cat, it’s a kitten. Its name is Lucky.”

Now that LeBrun couldn’t see the cat, it wasn’t so bad, but just thinking about it made him disgusted. Even kittens were filthy with fleas and mites crawling over their skin and feeding on their blood. And they ate filthy things—mice and birds—and played with them as they died. That was as bad as the filthiness. If you had to kill something, you killed it quick. You didn’t fuck around. You only teased something if you hated it and wanted to punish it everlastingly, if its suffering excited you.

“How’d you get a key?” asked Jessica, more curious than frightened.

LeBrun ignored her question. “This business with your brother, I want to do it right away. We can do it this weekend.”

“Nothing’s ready yet. I don’t even know if they’ll be home. I have to tell Jason and the only way I can do that is by writing him.”

“What the fuck’s Jason need to know for? We can just go down and snatch him.”

“Then they’ll call the police. We need time to get away.”

LeBrun kept an eye on the bed behind Jessica to make sure the cat stayed put. If it came sneaking out, then he’d have to twist it. He’d hardly be able to help himself. And if he twisted it, all hell would break loose. Beyond that, he didn’t like being in the room. It smelled of girl things and girl perfumes. There was underwear on the chair—black panties and a little bra—and a box of Tampax on the desk right next to the computer. There were posters of young men stuck up on the wall—that kid who had been in
Titanic
with a swan curling over his naked shoulder and that singer who’d killed himself, offed himself for no reason that LeBrun could see. Killing yourself was what you did last, and LeBrun laughed because it was a joke and he hadn’t meant it as a joke.

“What’s so funny?” asked Jessica.

“Hey, Misty, what’s the last thing a Canuck does?”

“What?”

“He dies.”

“I don’t find that very funny.”

LeBrun thought about it for a moment. “I guess you had to be there.”

“I don’t like you being in my room. I’m already in trouble and if they see you in here, they’ll guess where I got the tequila.”

The girl had her hand behind her back and LeBrun understood that she was keeping the cat out of his sight, which meant she was touching it. “I want to know exactly when we’re going to get your brother. You’re just fucking with me, promising me that money.”

“No, really, we’ll do it. We have to do it.”

“Next week then.”

“That’s Thanksgiving. There’ll be too many people.”

“Then right after that. On Monday, that’s the thirtieth. We’ll do it on the thirtieth.”

“Won’t there be school that day?”

“You nuts? You plan to come back? You take him and you’ll be gone.”

“Okay, the thirtieth. We’ll do it on that Monday. I’ll write to Jason.” Jessica stuck out her hand. “You want to shake on it?”

“You fucking kidding? You been playing with that cat. I wouldn’t touch your hand unless you boiled it.”

LeBrun had been leaning against the door. Suddenly it pushed against him. He half stumbled forward as Helen Selkirk entered. Seeing him she stopped, leaving the door open.

“What’re you doing in here? You’re not supposed to be here.”

LeBrun felt himself getting angry. “I’m checking the pipes. You wouldn’t want the pipes to burst now, would you? They’d cause one unholy fucking mess.” Then he left, darting down the hall to the back stairs and making no sound.

—

The Saturday before Thanksgiving there was sleet. Despite the weather, Hawthorne drove in to Plymouth in the morning, telling himself that he had errands, but in fact he wanted to get away from Bishop’s Hill. He had bought a used Subaru station wagon early in the fall and he felt some self-satisfaction that he had had the foresight to buy a vehicle with four-wheel drive. He would have lunch by himself and wouldn’t think that people were talking about him and conspiring against him. He would rest his mind. His subjective and objective selves seemed hopelessly entangled and he wasn’t thinking clearly. His guilt about the fire at Wyndham School, the deaths of his wife and daughter, the phone calls, Evings’s suicide, and all the other business kept rattling through his brain.

Hawthorne now realized that he had accepted the phone calls and the rest as his due, as a criminal might accept lashes of a whip. No punishment, he had felt, would be too awful, if it could expunge those moments with Claire in his parked car. How many thousands of times had he begun the sentence “If that hadn’t happened . . .”? It seemed that before that evening with Claire his life had been utterly in his control. He was a success, he was loved, he could do no wrong. And so he had let her unzip his pants. And although he knew with all the logic at his command that the one event had not caused the other—Stanley Carpasso would have started the fire regardless—he did not believe it. Part of him was certain that the moment with Claire had made the fire inevitable. As a result, he deserved punishment, and if the world wouldn’t mete it out, then he would do so himself.

Now he was truly being punished but he wasn’t the one doing it. He wasn’t the one holding the whip, and the irony of this made him smile: How could he have ever thought that he would be able to choose the time and nature of punishment? Hawthorne’s attempts in that direction were nothing but hubris. The truth was that Hawthorne felt that he could do nothing but hold on and endure what he had to endure. But he worried that he didn’t have enough strength and in his worst moments he feared that he might collapse entirely, retreat to a corner and weep until an ambulance came to take him away. Maybe he’d be sent down to McLean’s, where he had friends on the staff and they would see how far he had fallen. Later in the week, on Thanksgiving, he would drive to Concord and tell Krueger all that he had gone through.

Clifford Evings’s suicide meant that the punishment was no longer Hawthorne’s alone. The stories that Evings had been told about being fired, and the trashing of his office—these had been part of Hawthorne’s burden, part of the gossip, the malice, the Sisyphean boulder of Bishop’s Hill. Hawthorne had tried to bear that burden, but he had done little to discover who was responsible for Evings’s torment, since surely he himself was the real target. And then Evings had died. As Hawthorne drove the gray, sleet-covered road to Plymouth, his hands clenched the wheel so tightly that the car swerved. Was he responsible for Evings’s death as well? He had allowed Evings to become a shareholder in his punishment. He had done nothing to stop it. And who would be next? Kate? Jessica Weaver? Skander? Alice Beech? He had to do more than foolishly peering around a tree at the door of his apartment. He had to involve others—and others more capable than Tank Donoso.

At first, he had been tempted to talk to Chief Moulton, but he was afraid of not being believed. In his years as a clinical psychologist he had heard dozens of delusional confessions, ranging from intimate acquaintance with space invaders to the boast that the speaker was Jesus of Nazareth. He remembered hearing these confessions and trying to keep his face immobile, to maintain a certain smoothness of tone as he rid his speech of all trace of emotion or doubt. How awful it would be to see these responses in Moulton, for of course he would see them. How awful to hear Moulton say, “How interesting,” and “Tell me more,” as his eyes glazed over. No, he couldn’t talk to Moulton, as least not yet.

What were his alternatives? Solicit help from the people who were on his side? Who were they? Kate? Bill Dolittle? Fritz Skander? Mrs. Sherman, Rosalind Langdon, and Alice Beech? Gene Strauss, Larry Gaudette, even Frank LeBrun? But what did he know about Strauss except that they had both rooted for the Yankees during the World Series and had watched two games together on Strauss’s mammoth TV? As for Dolittle, his loyalty depended on whether he got the apartment in Stark Hall. And what did Hawthorne know about Skander, the eternal backer of conservative measures who disliked rocking the boat? Though he was tactless and insensitive, Skander had worked with these people a long time. If not his friends, they were at least friendly. Skander hadn’t minded that they borrowed cars and lawn mowers and chain saws and took food from the kitchen.

Briefly Hawthorne considered hiring a private detective but the idea struck him as ridiculous. He imagined a Sherlock Holmes type creeping around Bishop’s Hill with a magnifying glass. Besides, good detectives were expensive and who would pay? Would the money come out of his pocket or would he ask Hamilton Burke? And what did he know about Burke? What exactly had he said to Evings the day before Evings died? Had he really told him that he could take a leave?

It seemed that the only person available to investigate these matters was himself, but that seemed as foolish as hiring a private detective. His job as headmaster took at least sixty hours a week, so when would he find the time? And what did he know about investigation? He was an academic and a clinical psychologist. All his investigations had occurred in the decorous environment of the conference room and the therapist’s office. Could he really snoop? Moreover, there was the likelihood of violence. Obviously the destruction of Evings’s office had been violent.