Schulz and the man I assumed was a paramedic approached the body. They bent over it, murmured back and forth, then Schulz walked raggedly back and reached for the cellular phone. His voice crackled through the cold air, although I couldn’t make out any of the words. The other men stationed themselves near the corpse, sentrylike, ignoring us. Julian and I stood, mute and miserable, our arms clasping our bodies against the deep cold.
Schulz walked over. He stopped and pulled me in for a mountain-man hug. He murmured, “You all right?” When I nodded into his shoulder, he said, “You want to tell me what happened?”
I pulled back to look at him, the man who had invaded my life a year earlier and stubbornly would not leave. Golden lantern light illuminated the large, unpretentiously handsome face that was now somber and grim. His serious mouth, his narrowed eyes with their tentlike bushy brown eyebrows-these showed willed control in the midst of chaos. His faded jeans, white frayed-collar shirt, and sweater the color of cornflowers indicated he’d been relaxing at something before the call came in. Now Schulz pulled himself up, his stance of command. “What happened here, Goldy?” he repeated crisply. I’m in charge here now.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I saw the sled when I was loading the van, and then I saw the coat, so I went over… Schulz’s sigh sent a cloud of steam between us. Behind us, three more police and fire vehicles drove up. He reached out and pulled the fur collar snugly around my throat.
“Let’s go in. That’s quite a getup. The two of you. I swear. Come on, big J.,” Schulz said to Julian as he put one arm around him. Behind us, strobe flashes went off like lightning. “Be lucky if pneumonia doesn’t take you both. Honestly.” Another deputy silently joined us. Schulz and the other policeman walked with Julian up the narrow path that skirted the pines and led to the big stone house. I followed, clumsily trying to step in their footsteps.
The headmaster was tripping down the carpeted front stairs when we pushed through to the house’s elegant entryway. The upturned collar of Alfred Perkins’ black trench coat framed his horrified eyes behind round hornrimmed glasses. Above his high forehead, the cottony mass of white hair was wildly askew. His boot buckles clickety-clacked as he marched across the foyer toward us. When Schulz identified himself, the headmaster demanded: “Is there any way we can keep this out of the papers?”
Schulz raised both eyebrows and ignored the question. Instead, he said, “I need some information about next of kin so we can get back to the coroner. Can you help me out?” The headmaster gave the names of Keith’s parents, who were apparently in Europe. The deputy wrote the names on a pad, then disappeared. Schulz started his characteristic swagger down the hallway, poking his head through each doorway. When he found a room he liked, he beckoned with a thumb to Perkins.
“Headmaster, sir,” he said with a deference that fooled nobody, “would you wait in here; until I have a chance to talk to you?” When the headmaster nodded numbly, Schulz added, “And don’t talk to anyone, please, sir. Press or otherwise.”
The headmaster clomped to his assigned spot. Schulz closed the heavy door behind him, then turned and asked who else was around. Julian called to Macguire, who trundled in and was assigned to another room. Perkins’ son looked deeply stunned. In a kinder tone Schulz asked Julian to sit in the living room until he’d finished talking to me. “And try not to disturb anything,” he added. “But get yourself a blanket to warm up.”
Julian’s face had a lost look that tugged at my heart. He obeyed Schulz in silence. But as we headed down to the kitchen, I heard him choke on exhaled breath.
I said, “Let me ? “
“No, not yet. I’ll take you back in just a couple of minutes. We need to talk before the investigative team is all over this place.” Schulz paused, then gestured for me to sit on one of the old-fashioned wooden stools. I obeyed. After looking around the kitchen, he sat on another stool and pulled out a notebook. He tapped his mouth with a mechanical pencil. “Start with when you had me paged and work backward.”
I did. Keith’s body. Before that, the cleanup, the after-dinner talks, the dinner itself. The blackout.
Schulz raised one thick eyebrow. “You’re sure it was a fuse?” I said I’d just assumed so. “Who fixed it, do you know?”
I shook my head. “Oh, and one of my coffeepots was in the front hall closet. I didn’t put it there.”
Schulz made a note. “You have a guest list?”
“The headmaster would. Thirty seniors, plus most of the parents. About eighty people altogether.
“You see anybody you know wasn’t invited, seemed out of place, whatever?” I didn’t know who had been invited and who hadn’t. No one seemed out of place, I told him, but the senior-year anxiety had been palpable. “Anything else palpable?” he wanted to know.
I stared at him. He was all business. Anything else you could touch? He gave me just the slightest flicker of a smile. John Richard Korman always said I expected him to read my mind; Tom Schulz actually could. I wished for the two of us to be somewhere else, doing anything but this.
Reading my thoughts again, Schulz said, “We’re almost done.” Then he tilted his head back and drummed the fingers of one hand on his chin. “Okay,” he went on, “anybody who was not here who should have been?”
I didn’t know that either, and said so.
He looked me straight in the eye. “Tell me why somebody would kill this boy.”
Blood jack-hammered in my ears. “I don’t know. He seemed innocuous enough, .really more like a nerd… .”
Silence fell around us In the old kItchen.
Schulz said, “Julian fit into this scenario at all? Or the headmaster’s son? Or the headmaster?”
Miserably, I looked at the big old aluminum canisters in the kitchen, the wooden cabinets painted a buttery yellow, before replying. “I don’t know much about what was going on in the senior class, or in the school as a whole, for that matter. Julian and Macguire went back out to check for a pulse when I was on the phone with the 911 operator. I don’t know if Julian, Macguire, Keith, anybody, were friends.”
“Know if they were enemies?”
“Well.” I involuntarily thought of Julian’s recitation of the class rank. He hadn’t talked about any nastiness to the competition. I refused to speculate. “I don’t know,” I said firmly.”
The deputy stalked into the kitchen. Snow clung to his boots and clothing. Ignoring me, he said to Schulz, “We got drag marks to the gatehouse, where whoever it was got the sled. They haven’t finished with the photos, but it’s going to be a couple hours. You got a kid having a hard time down the hall.”
Schulz nodded just perceptibly and the deputy withdrew.
“Goldy,” Schulz said, “I want to talk to Julian with you there. Then I’ll deal with Macguire Perkins. Tell me if this headmaster is as much of a moron as he looks.”
“More so.”
?Great.?
Julian was sitting in the front room. His eyes were closed, his head bent back against the sofa cushions. With his Adam’s apple pointed at the ceiling, he had a look of extraordinary vulnerability. When we entered, he coughed and rubbed his eyes. His face was still gray; his spiky blond hair gave him an unearthly look. He had found a knit throw that he had pulled tightly around his compact body. Schulz motioned for me to go on over by him.
I moved quietly to a chair beside the couch, then reached out to pat Julian’s arm. He turned and gave me a morose look.
“Tell me what happened,” Schulz began without preamble.
Wearily, Julian recounted how the dinner had ended. Everyone had been putting on their coats and talking. He had stayed afterward to see if a girl he knew, who sort of interested him, he said with lowered eyes, would like a ride home. She had airily replied that she was going home with Keith.
“I said, ‘Oh, moving up in the world, are we?’ but she wasn’t listening.” Julian’s nose wrinkled. “Ever since I told her I’d rather be a chef than a neurosurgeon, she’s acted like I’m a leper.”
Schulz asked mildly, “Keith was going to be a neurosurgeon?”
“Oh, no,” said Julian. “Did I say that? I must have been confused… .”
We waited while Julian coughed and shook his head quickly, like a dog shaking off water.
“Do you want to do this later, Julian?” asked Schulz. “Although it’d be helpful if you could reconstruct the events’ for me now.”
“No, that’s okay.” Julian’s voice was so low, I had to lean forward to hear it.
Schulz pulled out his notebook. “Let’s go back. Before the girl. We have a dinner party for eighty people and a kid ends up dead. Goldy said the party was about college or something. How’s that?”
