“First Halloween, now this,” I said, with a shrug he didn’t see. “It’s like the lake’s turned on us. Like there’s some naiad down there that we’ve pissed off. Maybe Meredith was right and we should have gone skinny-dipping at the start of term.” I didn’t realize how stupid it sounded until it was out of my mouth.
“Like some kind of pagan ritual?” James asked, turning his head so I could just see the side of his face, the curve of his cheek. “Good Lord, Oliver. Sleep with her if you must, but don’t let her get inside your head.”
“I’m not sleeping with her.” I could see that he was about to protest and added, “Not, you know, figuratively.”
“Doesn’t really matter, does it?” he asked, and turned to face me—the movement deliberately casual, not convincing.
“What?”
“Whether it’s figurative.”
“I don’t understand.”
He raised his voice so it cut through the soft forest silence like a razor blade. “No, you must not, because I really don’t think you’re that sort of idiot.”
“James,” I said, too mystified to really be angry, “what are you talking about?”
He looked away. “You,” he said, staring off into the trees. “You and her.” He grimaced, as though saying the words together left a bad taste in his mouth. “Do you not understand how it looks, Oliver? It doesn’t matter if you are or are not actually sleeping with her—it looks bad.”
“What do you care how it looks?” I asked, forcing the show of indignation, more unnerved than anything else. His sarcasm was caustic, unfamiliar.
“I don’t,” he said. “I really don’t. I care about you, and what might happen if you carry on like this.”
“I don’t—”
“I know you don’t understand, you never do. Richard is dead.”
I glanced back toward the Hall again, the quadrate silhouette at the top of the hill. “It’s not like we killed him.”
“Don’t be na?ve, Oliver, for once in your life. He’s been dead two days and his girlfriend’s already in bed with you every night?” He shook his head, thoughts tumbling out in a reckless, implacable rush. “People won’t like it. They’ll talk. They’ll gossip, that’s what people do.” He cupped his hand around one ear and said, “Open your ears; for which of you will stop / The vent of hearing when loud Rumor speaks?”
My voice stuck in my throat, dry as chalk. “Why are you talking about this like we killed him?”
He grabbed the front of my jacket, like he wanted to throttle me. “Because it fucking looks like we might have. You think people won’t wonder whether someone might have pushed him? You keep sleeping with Meredith and they’ll think it was you.”
I stared at him, too surprised to move. His hand was the only solid thing, the brunt of his anger thrust against my chest in the shape of a fist. “James, the police—they’ve said, it was an accident. He hit his head,” I said. “He fell.”
He must have seen the fear in my face, because the hard lines around his eyes and mouth vanished, like someone had cut the right wire to defuse him before he went off. “Yes, of course he did.” He looked down, let go of my jacket, and brushed one hand across the front to smooth the wrinkles out. “I’m sorry, Oliver. Everything’s gone sideways.”
I offered an awkward shrug, still half trapped by my nervous paralysis. “It’s all right.”
“Forgive me?”
“Yeah,” I said, a split second too late. “Always.”
SCENE 6
The tiny fairy lights of a thousand candles flickered on the beach. Half the attendants held narrow white tapers in cardboard cups, and luminarias hovered at the end of each row like little spectral ushers. The fourth-year choral music students were gathered in a dense clump on the sand, singing softly, voices shimmering off the water, as if our capricious mermaids were in mourning. Beside them on the beach were an old wooden podium and a covered easel stand. White lilies bloomed at the base of each, their gossamer fragrance too delicate to disguise the earthy smell of the lake.
James and I filed down the center aisle through a thicket of whispers that parted reluctantly to let us through. Wren, Richard’s parents, Frederick, and Gwendolyn were seated on the first bench on the right—Meredith and Alexander on the left. I sat beside them, James sat beside me, and, when Filippa arrived, Alexander and I shifted farther apart to make room for her. Why, I wondered, had they put us at the front, where everyone could stare? The rows of benches felt like a courtroom gallery, hundreds of eyes burning on the back of my neck. (The sensation would eventually grow familiar. It is a unique kind of torture for an actor, to have an audience’s undivided attention and to turn your back on them for shame.)
I glanced across the aisle at the opposite bench. Wren sat beside her uncle, who so fiercely resembled Richard that I couldn’t help staring. The same black hair, the same black eyes, the same cruel mouth. But the familiar face was older, lined, and streaks of silver had crept into the sideburns. This, I had no doubt, was what Richard would have become in twenty years or so. No more chance of that.
He must have felt my gaze, the way I felt everyone else’s, because he turned suddenly in my direction. I looked away, but not fast enough—there was a moment of contact, a jolt of electricity that rattled me from the inside out. I breathed in at a gasp, the lights of the candles dancing in my peripheral vision. Why all these fires? I thought. Why all these gliding ghosts?
“Oliver?” Filippa whispered. “You all right?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Fine.” I didn’t believe me, and neither did she, but before she could say anything else the chorus fell silent and Dean Holinshed appeared on the beach. He was dressed in black except for a scarf (Dellecher blue with the Key and Quill embroidered on one end), which hung limply around his neck. Besides that ribbon of color he was a grim, imposing figure, his beaky nose casting an ugly shadow across his face.
“Good evening.” There was a wilted, weary quality to his voice.