“And when you did?”
“Everyone was gone, really. I went up to bed. James was already there, but not quite asleep.” I tried to picture him rolling over on his side to whisper to me across the room. But all I could see was the dim yellow light of the bathroom, steam and hot water warping his features in the mirror. “He told me Richard had gone off into the woods with a bottle of Scotch.”
“And that was the last you heard of him?”
“Until Alexander found him?” The prismatic memories of the previous night fell away, and the cold of the morning crept through me. I could feel the water on my skin, in my hair, under my fingernails. “Yes.”
“All right,” Colborne said. He spoke gently, the way you talk to spooked horses and crazy people. “Now, I’m sorry to ask this, but I need you to tell me what you saw this morning.”
I could still see it. Richard suspended on the surface of life, bloodied, gasping—and the rest of us simply watching, waiting for the curtain to drop. Revenge tragedy, I wanted to say. Shakespeare himself couldn’t have done it better.
“I saw Richard,” I told him. Not a proper dead man, not really floating. “Just sort of hanging there. But broken and crushed, like everything was bent the wrong way.”
“And you—” He cleared his throat. “You got in the water.” It was the first time he hesitated.
“Yes.” I pulled the blanket closer, as if it could somehow thaw me, shield me from the feeling of cold water closing in around me. I knew, sitting there in the dry warmth of Holinshed’s office, that I’d never forget it—how my lungs shrank so suddenly I thought they would shatter, gasping more in shock than for oxygen. Richard’s face, much too close, white as bone. The sour iron smell of blood. That insane urge to laugh was back, as strong as the urge to vomit, and for one harrowing moment I thought I would be sick all over the carpet at Colborne’s feet. I swallowed again, choked everything down. He mistook my wave of nausea for emotion and respectfully waited for me to compose myself.
Eventually I managed to say, “Someone had to.”
“And he was dead?”
I could have told him how it felt, to reach for Richard’s throat and find the flesh cold, that vein that had once bulged and throbbed in anger flat and finally still. Instead all I said was “Yes.”
He stared at me, with a brittle sort of look, deliberately blank, like a bad poker face. Before I could guess what he didn’t want me to see he blinked, leaned back. “Well, that can’t have been easy. I’m sorry.”
I nodded, unsure of whether I was supposed to thank him or if condolences were in his job description.
“Just one more question, if you’re up for it.”
“Whatever you need.”
“Tell me about the last few weeks,” he said, loosely, as if it were only a matter of course. “You’ve all been under a lot of pressure, Richard maybe most of all. Was he behaving strangely?”
Another mosaic of memories took shape like a stained-glass window, shards of color and light. The white glow of the moon on the water at Halloween, the blue bruises on James’s arms, the bright ripe red of blood creeping out of Meredith’s silk sleeve. My stomach, knotted and clenched a moment before, unexpectedly unwound. My pulse slowed.
“No,” I said. Filippa’s words echoed softly in my head. “Before last night, everything was fine.”
Colborne watched me with curious closeness. “I think that’s all for now,” he said, after what felt like too long a pause. “I’m going to give you my contact information. If you think of anything else, please don’t hesitate to tell me.”
“Of course,” I said. “I will.”
But, of course, I wouldn’t. Not until ten years later.
SCENE 3
Up on the fifth floor of Dellecher Hall was a secret cache of rooms reserved for the school’s more illustrious guests. This peculiar apartment had three bedrooms, one bathroom, and a large central drawing room that contained a fireplace, a collection of elegant Victorian furniture, and a baby grand piano. Hallsworth House (as it was called, after Leopold Dellecher’s wealthy in-laws) was where the faculty decided to hide the six remaining fourth-years while the south shore of the lake was crawling with police.
Dean Holinshed had called an emergency assembly in the music hall that evening, but he decided that we should not be present. He didn’t wish, he explained, to subject us or the other students to the temptation to gossip. So, as the rest of the school sat in dumbstruck silence four floors below, Wren, Filippa, James, Alexander, Meredith, and I were prisoners at the fireside in Hallsworth House. Frederick and Gwendolyn didn’t like the idea of leaving us entirely alone, so one of the nurses from the infirmary had been placed as a sentinel outside the door to the rest of the fifth floor, where she sat sniffling into a tissue as she halfheartedly filled in a crossword puzzle.
I strained my ears against the suffocating quiet, acutely aware of our schoolmates, all gathered together without us. Exile was intolerable. It felt somehow Damoclean, a period of suspended judgment, dreading condemnation by a jury of our peers. (O, my prophetic soul.) Our mercenary relief at having Richard gone was quickly turning sour. Already I’d found a thousand things to be afraid of. What if one of us let something slip? Talked in our sleep? Forgot how the story was supposed to go? Or perhaps we’d walk on tiptoes the rest of our lives, waiting for the thread to snap, the axe to fall.