“Why don’t you sit? Might make things easier.” He gestured to the chair waiting behind me. There was another one in front of Holinshed’s desk, facing me, empty.
I lowered myself into the chair, wondering if it would vanish before I got there and let me fall to the floor. In that moment, nothing seemed certain or solid—not even the furniture. Colborne sat across from me in the other chair and reached into his pocket. His hand emerged again with a small black tape recorder, which he placed behind him on the edge of Holinshed’s desk. It was already on, a little red light glaring at me.
“Do you mind if I record this?” Colborne asked, politely enough, but I knew I couldn’t refuse. “If I don’t have to write everything down I can pay closer attention to what you’re saying.”
I nodded and adjusted my blanket. Dignity was immaterial, and I didn’t know what else to do with my hands.
Colborne leaned forward and said, “So, Oliver. All right if I call you Oliver?”
“Sure.”
“And you’re a fourth-year theatre student.”
I didn’t know if I was expected to answer, so I said, a half second too late, “Yes.”
Colborne didn’t seem to notice, only offered another nonquestion. “Dean Holinshed tells me you’re from Ohio.”
“Yes,” I said again, again too late.
“You miss home at all?” he asked, and I was almost relieved.
“No.” I could have told him that as far as I was concerned, Dellecher was home, but I didn’t want to say any more than I had to.
Colborne: “How big is your hometown?”
Me: “Average, I guess. Bigger than Broadwater.”
Colborne: “Did you do theatre in high school?”
Me: “Yes.”
Colborne: “Did you like it? How was it?”
Me: “It was all right. Not like here.”
Colborne: “Because here is…?”
Me: “Better.”
Colborne: “Are you close? The six of you.”
It sounded alien. The six of us. We had always been seven.
“Like siblings,” I said, and immediately regretted it, uncertain how quickly the word “rivalry” would come to mind.
“You share a room with James Farrow,” Colborne said, more quietly. “Is that where you slept last night?”
I nodded, not quite trusting myself to speak. We’d decided that James would account for me. The fact that one drunk first-year saw me on the stairs with Meredith didn’t mean we had to admit to what had happened after.
“And what time did you go to bed?” Colborne said.
“Two? Two thirty? Something like that.”
“Okay. Talk me through what happened at the party, and be as specific as possible.”
My eyes flicked from Colborne to Frederick to Holinshed. Gwendolyn sat staring down at the top of the desk, her hair limp and tired-looking.
“There aren’t any wrong answers,” Colborne added. His voice had a soft scratch to it that made him sound older than he was.
“Right, yeah. I’m sorry.” I tightened my grip on the blanket, wishing my palms would stop sweating. “Well. James and Alexander and I walked down from the FAB a little after ten thirty, and we weren’t in a rush so we probably got to the Castle about eleven. We got drinks, and then we all got separated. I just, I don’t know, wandered around for a while. Someone told me Richard was upstairs, drinking by himself.”
“Any idea why he wasn’t socializing with everyone else?” Colborne asked.
“Not really,” I said. “Figured he’d come down when he was ready.”
He nodded. “Go on.”
I looked toward the window, to the long winding road that led away from Dellecher, disappearing into the gray. “I went outside. Talked to Wren. Talked to James. Then there was a—a bunch of noise, I guess, from inside. So we went in to see what was happening. It was just me and James by then. I don’t know where Wren went.”
“And you were in the yard, is that right?”
“Yes.”
“When you went inside, what happened?”
I shifted in my chair. Two different memories were fighting for dominance: the truth and the version of it we’d agreed to tell. “It was confusing,” I said, feeling some fleeting comfort in the honesty of those three words. “The music was loud and everyone was talking at the same time, but Richard had hit somebody—I don’t remember his name. Colin brought him up to the infirmary.”
“Allan Boyd,” Holinshed said. “We’ll be discussing this with him, too.”
Colborne didn’t acknowledge the interjection, his attention fixed on me. “And what then?”
“Meredick—I mean, Richard and Meredith—were arguing. I don’t know exactly what it was about.” More accurately, I wasn’t sure how much Meredith had told them.
“The others made it sound like Allan had been paying her a little more attention than Richard was comfortable with,” Colborne said.
“Maybe. I don’t know. Richard was drunk—I mean, beyond drunk. Belligerent. He said some pretty nasty things. Meredith was upset and she went upstairs, to get away from everybody. I went after her, just to make sure she was all right. We were talking in her room—” A few vivid moments of Meredith flashed in my brain—strands of auburn hair caught in her lipstick, black silk lines at the edges of her eyelids, the strap of her dress sliding down off her shoulder. “We were talking in her room and Richard came up and started pounding on the door,” I said, too quickly, hoping Colborne wouldn’t notice how warm my face and throat had gotten. “She didn’t want to talk to him and she told him as much—through the door, we were sort of afraid to open it—and eventually he went away.”
“What time was this?”
“God, I don’t remember. Late. One thirty, maybe?”
“When Richard left, do you know where he went?”
“No,” I said, exhaling a little more easily. Another scrap of truth. “We didn’t come out for a while.”