“Why not?” said Grayson.
“Because,” said Somerville, “I’m worried that the killer is somebody on the faculty.”
Lane said that was ridiculous.
Grayson did not appear rattled by the suggestion.
“Why on the faculty?” he asked.
“Because we are isolated and rural and do not have strangers wandering around our campus at night. We notice them.”
Grayson said that strangers were on the campus all the time.
“They don’t congregate at the gymnasium,” said Somerville.
“Why not a student?” asked Grayson.
“Exactly,” said Lane. “Why not somebody on the staff? Why not a friend of the school from town? Say it’s not a suicide. That’s some leap in logic to assume automatically that he was killed by a member of the faculty.”
Somerville said he was going on instinct and hoped he was wrong.
“But who? Who on the faculty could it possibly be?” said Lane.
It was Grayson who answered. “McPhee.”
“Why McPhee?” said Lane.
“He found the boy. Pretty convenient for him just to stumble onto a body at the side of the gym at midnight.”
“Pat McPhee was the day master,” said Lane. “He went looking for Russell Phillips when the boy was reported missing from his dormitory.”
Grayson continued. “Plus an ex-professional athlete? You know he’s in good shape. And he lives in the gym. Easy access.”
“What a miracle that Carol Scott didn’t arrest him on the spot,” said Lane. “Why are you so eager to convict McPhee? Where were you last night when the boy died?”
“I’m not accusing,” said Grayson, “just playing along. I heard McPhee went chasing off to Boston over the holidays and came back without his wife or her son. I imagine that must have rattled him some.”
“So he starts killing our students?” said Lane.
“They were married just last summer,” said Grayson. “I bet he’s still got his honeymoon hormones.”
“Don’t waste my time, Felix,” said Lane. “Are you seriously suggesting that Patrick McPhee is capable of murder?”
“No,” said Grayson. He turned serious. “I think Horace, here, is cuckoo.”
“Is there anyone on this faculty who is capable of murder?”
“No,” said Grayson.
“I agree,” said Lane. “Let’s not complicate matters with rumors and innuendoes.”
“If you think it’s so silly,” said Horace Somerville, “why did you ask our advice? Why take any precautions whatsoever?”
This time Eldridge Lane said nothing. He knew of at least two members of the faculty who had been in New York on Sunday.
SCENE 2
By the end of second period, everyone on campus knew that one of the newboys had taken his own life.
Thomas Boatwright learned about it between classes from Richard Blackburn.
“They said he broke the lock on the rooftop door with a hammer and dived off the roof,” said Richard. “I heard it was because he couldn’t make weight for the wrestling team and was depressed.”
Thomas said he couldn’t believe it. “I sure as hell wouldn’t kill myself if I got cut from the basketball team.”
“That’s because you don’t understand the mind of your basic wrestler,” said Richard. “They’re all crazy. They’re obsessed with themselves. They’re narcissistic and anorexic all at the same time.”
“Did he leave a note?”
“Hell, no,” said Richard. “Wrestlers can’t write. I’ve got to go.”
They were standing in the brightly lighted cinder block and tile hallway of Reid Hall, the science building. It was 9:30, third period, time for biology. Montpelier’s weekly schedule was pretty neat except for the part about going to classes on Saturdays. Your classes were always rotating around, so that you didn’t have the same class at the same time of day every day. English, for example, met Monday at 8:00 but didn’t meet Tuesday until 2:15, after lunch, and it didn’t meet at all on Thursday. Biology, on the other hand, didn’t meet on Monday, and Spanish didn’t meet on Saturday. Nobody had classes at all on Friday or Saturday afternoons, so that all the athletic teams could play games without missing classes. It worked pretty well, so you didn’t get stuck in a rut with the boring classes like English and religion as your first thing to look forward to every day of the week, and the fun classes like biology and Spanish sort of got sprinkled throughout your schedule like candy.
Science was usually Thomas’s worst subject. He just couldn’t keep all those terms straight.
“Where’s the carotid artery?” Richard would ask him.
“In the thigh,” he’d say.
“No.”
“The lungs.”
“No way.”
“Where, then?”
The carotid artery was in the neck. Richard would laugh at him for always forgetting, but Thomas couldn’t see what difference it made where the damn carotid artery was.
But Mr. Carella made biology class lively and fun. He was Italian and from the North and talked really fast and always cut jokes in class and on dorm, where the worst thing he ever did was to ask you to turn down your stereo. He’d played football and wrestled on the varsity teams at Union College, and he was also excellent in basketball, tennis, and lacrosse. On weekends he took groups kayaking and rappelling.
Thomas always looked forward to biology class the most, but today he was dreading it.
Carella helped coach the JV wrestling team. Russell Phillips had been one of his wrestlers.
Instead of being depressed, however, Mr. Carella was his usual upbeat self.
“Boatwright, Boatwright, can’t even float right,” said Mr. Carella as Thomas entered the biology lab. He was sitting on a gray metal lab stool behind the long black lab table at the front of the room, and the biggest surprise for Thomas was that he was so dressed up, in blue slacks, a white button down shirt, and a tie. Carella didn’t wear ties most days; instead he wore open-necked shirts, jeans, and sneakers. One day he even wore a Redskins T-shirt, but Dean Kaufman saw it and made him go back and change.
“Boatwright doesn’t even have to come to class today,” said Mr. Carella. “He knows all about sex already.”
Then Thomas noticed the two big plastic models on the black-topped table in front of Mr. Carella. One was a big limp penis with scrotum, all made of ribbed beige plastic and hinged so that
