“Who?” It was the only word Warden could manage.
“A newboy third-former. Russell Phillips. Apparently he jumped off the roof of the gym.”
“Sam,” said Warden. He started again. “This is horrible news.”
“It was awful,” said Kaufman. “Pat McPhee found him around midnight. In the fall his neck had been twisted all the way around so that his face was looking backwards.”
Warden said nothing.
“I have some other calls to make,” said Kaufman. “So you’ll be on your way to Fleming now?”
“Yes. Sure.”
He hung up and told Cynthia the news.
“Who is Russell Phillips?” she said.
Warden said he had met the boy only yesterday. “A newboy,” he said. “Didn’t like cold weather.”
“Was he depressed?”
Warden shrugged and began to dial the telephone. Be home, Kathleen, he thought. On the third ring she answered.
He asked if she could drive Cynthia to the hospital. “Yes,” said Kathleen. Her voice was broken, as though she were choking.
“Have you heard the news about the boy?” asked Warden.
“Oh, yes,” said Kathleen. “He was one of our advisees. Horace and I are both sick about it.” She said she would come for Cynthia in half an hour.
He hung up. Cynthia asked him why the boy would jump off the roof of the gym.
“It’s the highest building on campus,” said Warden. “Next to Stringfellow. And Stringfellow would be too crowded.”
Cynthia exhaled impatiently. “That’s not what I mean,” she said. “Why would he want to kill himself?”
Warden was pulling his navy blue blazer out of the closet. “I don’t know,” he said. “Only it bothers me that we’ve been talking about death all morning and we now have a real death. There’s been too much talk about death.”
She could not relinquish the subject. “What would he be doing at the gym at night, anyway?”
Warden explained that the boy was on the wrestling team. The wrestlers held extra training sessions in the evenings after study hall.
Cynthia twisted onto her side and lay with her head on the pillow. “I can see two of you,” she said, “like on a bad television picture. I wish one of you could stay here with me while the other goes off to work.”
“I’ll stay,” he said.
“No,” she said. “It was only a silly thing to say, not a real wish. I don’t want to waste a real wish on having some company for the morning.” She held up one arm. He bent down to kiss her quickly and then stood up.
“The school will be in complete turmoil,” he said. “We’ll probably have a special schedule for the day.”
“I’ll be all right,” she said. “In a minute I’m going to get up and get dressed.”
“Do you want some help?”
“Of course not.”
“All I have to do is tell Sam Kaufman you’re sick. He’ll let me go with you.”
“They need you here,” said Cynthia. “I’ll be all right with Kathleen.”
“I’ll try to call at lunch,” he said.
“Poor Russell Phillips,” she said. “From the roof of the gym.”
“Yes,” said Warden.
“I wonder if Dan Farnham heard anything last night,” she said. “He lives in the gym.”
“I’m sure I’ll find out in a few minutes,” said Warden. He held a scarf and a stack of folded papers in one hand.
“You didn’t notice anything unusual last night, did you? When you were out?”
“Not at all,” said Warden. “I was in Fleming Hall. I wasn’t near the gym.” He started for the door and then paused. “Why do you ask?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “The gym roof. The neck twisted around. It sounds weird, like something supernatural.”
“I’ll find out all I can,” said Warden. His heart was sprinting.
SCENE 15
It had been so easy with Russell Phillips. The wrestlers had been following their usual fanatical training schedule, working out after study hall at night, running up and down the stairs of the old gym, down to the basement and the locker rooms, up to the top floor and the rooms for wrestling and lifting weights. Russell had been bench-pressing some weights himself. And running. He was a little zealot, Russell, a bantamweight who wanted to get lighter.
It was such a kick to watch them all running the stairs, sweating through their gray tee shirts, encouraging one another with breathlessly muttered monosyllables. There must have been twenty or so at first, but most of them had disappeared after the mandatory fifteen minutes. Russell Phillips had stayed.
And so had he. It was perfectly natural for him to be there, after all. So when all the boys had left, save Russell Phillips, he had sat down on a bench in the weight room on the third floor of the gym to watch Russell finish his set. The kid had longish blond hair that was stringy with sweat and a red pimple on the back of his thick neck. The hair reminded him of that other hair. And when Russell had asked him for permission to stay just a bit past on-dorm time, he had granted it. Why not? It was within his authority to do so.
“You’re dedicated, Russell,” he had said.
“Yeah, well, it’s about all there is to do here,” Russell had said. A bit cocky, this boy.
“Did you work out over the holidays?”
“I worked out with my girlfriend,” he’d said. Sure of himself, almost disrespectful. “In fact, it was sort of in this position.”
The words were outrageous, but he masked his reaction.
Even as he spoke to Russell, though, even as he uttered the words that reassured the boy that staying off dorm a bit late would be all right, he felt the passion return, felt his heart lurch and then flare into pounding, as though it had jumpstarted itself on a steep hill. While the boy was running more stairs, he toured the building: all dark in the furnace room, which contained an old desk and a cot, and which everyone called, to his amusement, “Angus’s Lair”; all quiet in the basement, where a shiny concrete floor opened onto sets of locker rooms and a training room and coaches’ offices; all quiet on the main
