“And you didn’t see anybody?” said Carol Scott.
Cynthia said she didn’t see anybody except Angus Farrier.
“He’s the janitor?”
“More than that, really. It’s hard to explain his status here. He runs the gym.”
Carol Scott nodded. She had interviewed him a couple of days ago. He had told her he had gone hunting alone over the Thanksgiving holidays. “You saw him upstairs in the wrestling room,” she said.
“I was rehearsing my part in the play,” Cynthia said, “saying my lines and working on my posture, and Angus surprised me.”
“What do you mean by ‘surprised’?” asked Carol Scott.
“I mean he startled me,” said Cynthia. “I didn’t hear him coming up the stairs, and all of a sudden he was in the room with me. He said he’d heard me rehearsing downstairs.”
“Does he live here?”
“No. Not officially. I think he does keep a cot down in his lair.”
“What is his lair?”
It was McPhee who explained about the boiler room on the lower floor that Angus claimed as his office. “He keeps an old desk in there, a hot plate, maybe even some clothes in the closet.”
Carol Scott listened and then spoke again to Cynthia. “Did you check there on your initial search of the gym?”
“No,” said Cynthia. “Just the main rooms. So Angus could have been there the whole time I was patrolling.”
“And then after he startled you?”
“Then I left.”
Carol Scott stopped taking notes and looked at her. Cynthia silently acknowledged that her own editing had been as obvious as Katrina Olson’s.
“Please don’t leave anything out,” said Carol Scott. “If you start boring me, I’ll tell you.”
“I went out the same way I came in,” said Cynthia. “Through Dan Farnham’s apartment. I didn’t know he was at home then, and I barged in on him while he was doing calisthenics in his living room. It was awkward.” She wanted to omit the details of finding him in only his underwear while he was performing those frantic push-ups on the carpet. They had both been embarrassed, Dan more than she.
Katrina Olson listened quietly with the others as Cynthia finished.
“He invited me to stay for a cup of tea, but I declined. I left immediately through his front door and went home to Stratford House.”
“So this building had people all over it,” said Carol Scott. “And nobody was aware of anybody else.”
“It’s a big building,” said Grayson.
Cynthia shivered.
“What time did you leave?” Carol Scott asked.
“A little after 9:00,” said Cynthia. “I went home for just a minute, and then I went back to the mixer. And then we got Pat’s phone call.”
Cynthia was worried about Ben. When she had left Farnham’s apartment at 9:15 and returned home, Ben had not been there. And he was not there now.
A uniformed policeman knocked at the inside door from the gym and entered without an invitation.
“Nobody else in the building, Carol,” he said.
“Where’s Farnham? The guy that lives in the other apartment?”
“He’s outside with some of the other teachers,” said the policeman. “We’ve got him waiting to talk to you.”
“And where’s Angus Farrier?”
“Who?”
“The old man who looks after the gym. Is he down in the boiler room?”
“No,” said the policeman. “I told you, there’s nobody else in the building.”
“Is he outside?”
Patrick McPhee knew Angus better than the others. “He might have left,” said McPhee. “He comes and goes as he pleases.”
“What kind of car does he drive?” asked Carol Scott.
McPhee could identify it. “A yellow Pinto. Three or four years old.”
“We have a vehicle of that description in the parking lot,” said the policeman.
“Check the license number,” said Carol Scott. “I want you to find me this Angus Farrier now.”
“Angus would never do anybody any harm,” said McPhee.
“No?” said Carol Scott. “Was he out here the night the Phillips boy died? And does he ever shop in the Montpelier School Store?”
No one could say.
SCENE 35
Thomas thought it had to be the worst Saturday night in the history of the Western Hemisphere. Everything that had seemed so sure and stable at 9:00 was in complete confusion by midnight. It was like a concentration camp, with all the girls from the mixer lined up and marched onto the buses, and the chaperones yelling at everybody whenever someone was missing. Meanwhile, the police grilled all the bus drivers, all the people who worked in the kitchen, all the people in the bands. Anybody could have driven onto the campus. And when they found out that Staines had used the Richard Blackburn method—the rock in the back door—to enter a locked building, then the police decided that anybody could have gotten into the damn gym, too.
Then Angus turned up missing. In two seconds every student on campus decreed that Angus had killed Russell Phillips and Robert Staines and was lurking around to kill more students. Angus! It was impossible.
While the girls were getting herded onto their buses, all the Montpelier boys had to go back to their dorm rooms. The councilmen and the faculty tried to take attendance and squelch rumors and generally keep everybody calm, and they did it by making everybody mad. If you dawdled around the girls’ buses or even took your time going back to the dorm, somebody was there yelling at you to get inside. It was like the penitentiary. The thing was, though, it was reassuring, too. You felt safe. It was scary to think about one of the guys on your dorm getting killed.
After about an hour or so of scouring the campus, the faculty members managed to account for everyone. Robert Staines had been the only casualty. Thomas felt as though Hesta were trying to kill by a different method. After the chaperones had started screaming for order, she had gone and sat on her bus with Susie Boardman. She hadn’t even looked at Thomas when he’d said goodbye.
Part of him said she was overreacting, that he hadn’t even gone all the way with her, that she was just playing the tease. He replayed how far he’d gone, farther than he’d ever been
