He spoke specifically to Thomas. “Ask your advisor about it,” he said. “Mr. Warden used to live in that south apartment before Mr. Farnham moved in. Ask him about the old brickwork in the fireplace and the chimney.”
The sound of a siren interrupted him. Everybody jumped.
“It’s coming from next door,” said Mrs. Somerville. It was the fire alarm for the gym.
“We’d better see,” said Mr. Somerville. They all put down their teacups, some on the end tables, some on the Oriental rugs on the floor, and they ran to the front porch of the Homestead. At a school like Montpelier a fire was the most frightening prospect possible. You could lose a whole building as well as a bunch of lives.
From the porch they could see people from all over the campus rushing to find out what was wrong.
The gym was by far the largest building on the Quad, a huge box of brick and glass and white columns. Decorative white trim outlined the tall windows of the basketball court where Thomas had just been practicing. Below the middle windows was a squat cube of a lobby jutting like a wart from the rectangular face of the building. That was the old caretaker’s cottage Mr. Somerville was just telling them about, with its truncated chimney barely reaching over the roofline of the lobby. It looked odd, now that Thomas knew what it had been, like a Rubik’s Cube attached to a shoebox. The building was dark except for the lights on in the two faculty apartments at each end. Everyone speculated loudly over where the first flames would appear.
In a couple of minutes he heard the long, low hoot of a fire truck. The alarm system at Montpelier automatically notified the fire department and the sheriff’s office in town. Soon three fire trucks were lined up on the Quad in front of them.
But it was a false alarm. People came and went from the Homestead, Mr. and Mrs. Somerville included, and gradually the news drifted back to Thomas and Greg on the porch. Information at Montpelier spread almost instantaneously, as though all of them were psychic. Someone had pulled the alarm on the basement level, the locker room level. The doors had been shut and locked, Angus Farrier would swear to it.
Mr. McPhee’s front door on the north end of the gym was only twenty yards away, and they could see him on the threshold talking to some firemen. What had Mr. Somerville said about this end of the gym? It used to be the old kitchen for the Homestead.
“It’s weird to think of going outside to your kitchen,” said Thomas. Mr. McPhee’s chimney was a little more than a free-throw shot’s distance away from them. “Don’t you think the food would get cold when they brought it over?”
“It’s not that far,” said Greg. “I can believe in an outside kitchen easier than I can believe in a tunnel from here to Stringfellow.”
Directly across the Quad they could see the lights of Stringfellow Hall. It looked far away in the dark and the cold, a couple of football fields from them.
“There’s no way somebody could have dug a tunnel that far,” said Greg. “Look at it. The grass would all be dead, or the ground would be sunken. It would have collapsed somewhere.”
“Does that mean you’ve stopped looking?”
“As long as Delaney is offering extra credit,” said Greg, “I’m still in the tunnel business.”
It was 6:15. They just had time to get back for dinner at 6:30.
They walked together across the Quad to Stringfellow Hall. Greg pointed to the lights on in Farnham’s apartment. “That place is awfully small to have been the library,” he said. “They must not have had many books in the old days.”
Thomas was not listening.
“Hey,” said Greg. He poked Thomas in the arm. “Tune in to my station.”
“Sorry,” said Thomas. “What’d you say?”
“I said that looks like Richard on top of Farnham’s chimney,” said Greg. “He’s got a handful of dynamite.”
Thomas looked. There was nobody on Farnham’s chimney.
“That was a joke,” said Greg. “This is called Getting Your Friends to Relax.”
Thomas said he was too busy to relax.
“You want to talk about it?” said Greg.
Yes, he did. “I can’t,” said Thomas.
“How long are you going to keep this up?” said Greg. “It wasn’t too long ago when you were on my case for keeping too quiet.”
Thomas promised Greg it had nothing to do with him.
“I know,” said Greg. “It has to do with somebody huffing aerosol on the dorm.”
Thomas kept walking.
Greg said he was in the school store today when Robert Staines bought himself a new can of Right Guard deodorant.
Thomas was afraid to say anything.
“Seems to me old Robert runs through quite a load of that stuff,” said Greg. “What a coincidence.”
Thomas took a breath. “Are you sure you want to get involved in this?” he said.
“Bring it on.”
Thomas told Greg all about Staines and the deodorant spray and the question of honor and standing in Mr. Carella’s apartment and then leaving when he changed his mind.
“What do I do?” said Thomas.
“You know what to do,” said Greg.
“No, I don’t,” said Thomas. “I’ve been worrying about it for twenty-four hours.”
“You mean you’ve been talking yourself out of it,” said Greg. “You know what to do.”
Yes, he did.
“But can I do it?” said Thomas.
“Yes,” said Greg. “You’re going to do it right after dinner.”
Yes. It was a relief. He was going to turn himself in to the councilmen as soon as the meal was over.
SCENE 11
Warden felt cold in the car as he drove in the darkness to the hospital in Charlottesville. There was too much to think about. He did not want to ask Cynthia about her meeting with Dan Farnham, not when she was in the hospital. She was his wife, she loved him, it was not healthy for him to be so possessive. And yet the knowledge of that meeting nagged.
It was one of several competing
