“Certainly.”
“I’d really like to have you.”
“You’re not enjoying Mr. McPhee?”
“He’s great,” said Boatwright. “Everybody just says you’re the best when it’s time for poetry.”
“We’ll see what happens,” said Warden. The boy left. There was something warming about genuine praise devoid of all sycophancy. The surge of joy Warden felt surprised him, like a warm current in a cold lake. And then he felt terribly guilty. He had forgiven himself for marrying Cynthia and bringing her to Montpelier, but he was not entitled to know happiness. How could he be happy with Cynthia dead? How could he dare be happy? What an insensitive, selfish lout he was.
He turned his attention back to the blank sheet of paper on his desktop and picked up his pen. Then, instead of writing, he drew a human face, a face blotched and disfigured down the left side, a face that was ugly and frightening and evil.
SCENE 2
At 4:00 on the afternoon of Wednesday, December 15, just a few hours after Thomas Boatwright had his conference with Benjamin Warden, Horace Somerville found Kevin Delaney in the art room in Bradley Hall cleaning paintbrushes at the sink.
“I tried the gym first,” said Somerville. “I thought you’d be having practice.”
“Yeah,” said Delaney. “With two cases of the flu, one separated shoulder, three sprained ankles, a knee with the ligaments twisted, and at least four people with a major history test tomorrow, I guess I could have had practice with the single available boy left on the team, but I decided to give him the day off. Yesterday’s game demolished us. I’m too old for this.”
Somerville had long ago decided Delaney was the kind of art teacher who would have been sculpted by Henry Moore: heavy and rounded everywhere, with a double chin and drooping eyelids, arms like a blacksmith’s, and a beach-balloon belly. He wore socks that rarely matched and occasionally even two different kinds of shoes. A man of his size belonged in the art room, which was the largest single classroom on campus, at least fifty feet square, with one half given over to blackboards and four large tables with chairs and the other half to easels, boards for working clay, and a pottery wheel. Shelves throughout held residue from the past decade of students: figurines of every medium from clay to alabaster, charcoal drawings, acrylics, oils, watercolors, misshapen pots with peculiar glazes, broken mobiles awaiting repairs, plaster models of bizarre buildings.
Somerville had a rolled tube of paper. He took off his topcoat and laid it, folded, on a nearby stool. He held on to the paper.
“Look at this place,” said Delaney. “I still can’t find my pastel crayons. I am never letting them hold a mixer in here again.”
“It looks neater than my classroom,” said Somerville. “Can you talk while you wash?”
He could.
“Tell me about this secret tunnel.”
Delaney laughed. “You’ve been here longer than I have,” he said. “You tell me.”
“There have always been legends around here,” said Somerville. “What exactly have you heard?” ·
Delaney said he’d heard stories about secret escape passages and hidden rooms and ghosts when he’d come to Montpelier twenty years before, and so he had decided to turn the rumors into an assignment.
“I told the kids to see if they could find a secret tunnel built by the Stringfellows from the Homestead to Stringfellow Hall.”
“Under the entire length of the Quad?”
“Sure.”
“But you knew all the time that there was no such tunnel.”
“I never told them exactly that there was a tunnel. I just encouraged them to find it,” said Delaney. He was shaking off the brushes.
“So the rumor of that particular passage started with you,” said Horace Somerville. “I thought so. I’d never heard of any tunnel from the Homestead to Stringfellow until you arrived here.”
“Okay,” said Delaney. “What’s the harm? It gets the boys looking at buildings, it gets them thinking about design. Who gets hurt?”
“I didn’t come here to file charges, Kevin.”
“I’m not the one who originated all the old tunnel lore, you know,” said Delaney. “I just embellished it a little.”
Horace Somerville admitted that the rumors about secret rooms and ghosts had preceded Delaney by decades.
“I’ve been thinking about those old stories recently,” he said. “A stray conversation I heard in the dining hall a week and a half ago started me off. Some boys were saying that there was an unpleasant odor in the basement of the gym. Kathleen and I have been having a terrible time with an odor in our own basement. I started to wonder whether the two odors could have the same source.”
Delaney said he didn’t follow.
“Have you ever considered there being a passage between the gym and the Homestead?” asked Somerville.
“Of course,” said Delaney. “That’s the one that makes the most sense, with part of the gym being your old kitchen for the Homestead. I’ve considered every permutation at one point or another. There’s a blueprint in the Archives Room of the library. Some kids have tampered with it, I think. It’s got some pencil marks showing a tunnel leading from the gym. But that particular tunnel seems to lead to Stringfellow.”
“This blueprint?” Somerville unrolled the tube in his hand. It was the diagram that Greg Lipscomb had come across on the night of the mixer.
“Yeah,” said Delaney. “How did you sneak that past Janie Shepherd?”
“She trusted me to return it.”
Delaney dried his hands on several paper towels at the sink. He held the blueprint down on a tabletop with his huge round fingers.
“See,” said Delaney. “Here’s the supposed tunnel coming out of this lower floor. It’s labeled GYMNASIUM on the reverse side, so I’m assuming it’s the old library. You match up this fireplace to any of the three fireplaces on the gym, and the only one that works is the one in Farnham’s old apartment. The other two point across the Quad or into the playing fields. Every couple of years a boy will find it and get excited about it, but there are no tunnels
