“We plan to operate with discretion,” she said.
Behind her she heard a knock on the door. She turned to see Felix Grayson bearing down on her.
“Hello, Carol,” said Felix Grayson. “Out here to discuss that Phillips boy, are you?” He was fifty years old, bespectacled with bifocals, and very large. He wore steel-toed work boots, khaki trousers, a plaid shirt, and a black knit tie. He stood 6’7” and carried 230 pounds of muscle. He eased into the one chair remaining in front of the desk, right ankle resting on left knee, hands clasped and resting on his stomach. Grayson was the school’s disciplinarian, and once in a while he had occasion to converse with the local police.
“You explain,” said Lane to Carol Scott.
“I was on my way out here this morning anyway,” she said, “just to look around one more time in the daylight. Then I got a call from a very nice man in New York.”
She said that the New York police had found the receipt from a Montpelier School Store on the floor of a movie theater off Forty-Second Street. It had been lying one row away from the body of a young male prostitute whose neck had been snapped by brute force.
None of the men spoke.
“Now, it could be that this boy’s death last night was a suicide,” she said. “I think it’s unusual to have a suicide so quickly after a vacation, but it’s possible. What makes me uncomfortable is the way his neck, too, is twisted.”
“Couldn’t that have happened when he fell?” said Lane.
She admitted that it could.
Grayson asked her what she wanted them to do.
She said she wanted a yearbook with everyone’s picture in it to send to New York. The ticket salesperson at the movie theater might be able to make an identification. She also wanted a sample cash register receipt from the school store to send up for comparison.
“This receipt was not in particularly good shape,” she said. “It had been stepped on and spilled on. The part with the items purchased and the date seem to be gone forever. But they could read the name Montpelier.”
According to the police in New York, there were twenty-seven schools in the country called “Montpelier.” No one had learned yet how many of the schools had their own supply shops.
“It couldn’t be ours,” said Lane. “And even if it were, we can’t assume that a member of our own community is responsible for these deaths. We get people through here all the time—tourists, salespeople. We send off mail orders all over the country.”
“I agree that the possibility is remote,” said Carol Scott. “Still, I would like to get the names of everyone on your faculty and all of your students who visited New York over the Thanksgiving holidays. I would also ask that you take some precautions with security. Don’t let these boys walk around the campus by themselves.”
“They have to walk around the campus by themselves,” said Lane. “We have 500 acres of land here. How can I control the behavior of 360 boys?”
“You’ll think of something,” said Carol Scott. “Tell them that you’ve put in a new rule.”
“How can I do that without arousing suspicion or starting a rumor?” said Lane.
“It’s all right with me if you want to treat this death like a suicide,” said Carol Scott. “Tell the boys that they need to look out for one another. That they need to be ‘buddies.’ I don’t know. You know your students better than I do.”
“How long will we have to go through with this charade?” said Lane.
She said it would be at least until Montpelier School for Boys was clearly not tied to the death of the kid in New York.
Then she picked up her briefcase and left.
Horace Somerville waved her a silent goodbye. He liked Carol, knew Eldridge would, too, if he could make the effort to get acquainted. Somerville and Eldridge Lane had known each other since they were thirteen years old, when both of them had enrolled at Montpelier as third formers. Somerville had been on the search committee that had nominated Lane as headmaster sixteen years ago, when Horace was academic dean. But Somerville had stepped down from that job three years ago, when he’d noticed himself slowing down. It was better for somebody younger, like Sam Kaufman, to have the position, even if Kaufman was an idiot. He wondered if perhaps Eldridge should have made the same move two or three years ago. Eldridge was slipping, Somerville thought, worried more about appeasing the board of trustees and keeping up the image of the school than he was about keeping in touch with the actual community.
Lane pulled a Hershey’s Kiss from his jacket pocket and pulled at the silvery foil wrapper. “So where do we go from here?” he said. “You two are here to counsel.”
“It wouldn’t be out of line to send the boys home early for vacation,” said Somerville.
“On what grounds?” said Lane. “If nothing got settled over the holidays, would they all then stay at home? Should we close down the school?”
“I say we wait for the police to finish their investigation,” said Grayson. “They said they wanted to look at our yearbook and our cash register receipts. Let them.”
“I agree,” said Lane.
“Shouldn’t we call a faculty meeting?” said Grayson. “Tell everyone to be on guard? Inform them that the police think it might not have been a suicide at all?”
“I’m considering that,” said Lane.
“Why hesitate? We need the extra security. We could have fifty vigilant adults on campus with their eyes open.”
“Horace has already advised me otherwise,” said Lane. “Though I do not think his reasoning is sound.”
Horace Somerville spoke before Grayson had an opportunity. “I believe that Russell was murdered. He was my advisee and I knew him, and I don’t believe he was a candidate for suicide. But we can’t tell
