Walton: “Who was that?”
Colborne: “Nobody really wanted to say, but someone suggested Oliver Marks. He’s another fourth-year. He admitted to going upstairs with her, but according to him they were just ‘talking.’”
Walton: “Seems unlikely.”
Colborne: “You haven’t seen this girl. You don’t understand how unlikely.”
Walton chuckled. “What did she have to say about it?”
“Well, her story matches his,” Colborne said. “She claims they went up to her room, where they talked until Richard came up and tried to break the door down. They didn’t let him in and eventually he stormed off. And this is where it gets fuzzy.”
“Fuzzy how?”
Colborne stopped, standing face-to-face with Walton, scowling, like his own confusion annoyed him. “At about this time—and nobody seems to be able to say for sure what time it was—pretty much everyone but the fourth-years is gone. Richard storms away from his girlfriend’s room, where maybe she’s hooking up with one of their mutual friends or maybe they’re just talking, grabs a bottle of Glenfiddich, and heads outside. He’s already drunk—he was a belligerent drunk, too, everyone agrees on that—and he stumbles out into the yard, where his cousin is talking with James Farrow.”
Walton: “Another fourth-year?”
Colborne: “Marks’s roommate. They live in the attic room upstairs.”
Walton: “All right, then what?”
“Wren—the cousin—tries to talk him down, but he ‘shakes her off.’ Farrow’s words. When I asked him what that meant he clammed up. Makes me wonder if it might have been a little violent, because neither one of them went after him. Anyway, Farrow stays with the cousin, and Richard disappears into the trees.” Colborne’s face darkened, his thick eyebrows sinking low over his eyes. “Nobody sees him again until the following morning when Alexander Vass—he’s the last of the fourth-years—goes down to the dock for a smoke and finds him in the water. So, we have about three hours where we don’t know where Richard was or what he was up to.”
They were both quiet for a moment, looking out the same narrow window. The day outside was awash with stark white sunlight that did nothing to soften the bitter cold.
“What did the ME have to say?” Walton asked.
“Well, there was a hard blow to the head, but she couldn’t say with what. Originally we assumed that was what killed him.”
Walton’s forehead wrinkled. “Wasn’t it?”
“No.” Colborne exhaled heavily, and his shoulders sank down an inch or two. “He was alive when he hit the water. Alive, but unconscious or too stunned to roll himself over. Whatever it was hit him right in the face, and the damage was bad, but it shouldn’t have been fatal.”
“How did he die, then?”
“He drowned,” Colborne said. “In a manner of speaking. Choked on his own blood.”
I turned away from the door, pressed my back flat against the wall. I felt light-headed, the thrum of my pulse faint and far away, and I wondered if that was what it felt like—the slow loss of air, life seeping out into the surrounding water, and your own blood, thick as an oil spill, creeping into every empty space until it reached your eyes and the whole world went red. Asphyxia. System failure. Fade to black.
Colborne’s voice came in sharp and clear from the next room: “It doesn’t add up. We’re missing something.”
“Did we find the Scotch bottle?”
“In the woods, about a quarter mile from the dock. We thought that’s what he might’ve been hit with, but it was intact. Empty, intact, no blood on it, and nobody’s fingerprints but his. So what the hell was he doing between three in the morning and six?”
“Was that the time of death?”
“As close as the ME could figure it.”
They were both silent for a while. I didn’t dare move in my hiding place.
“What are you thinking?” Walton asked, eventually.
Colborne made a soft, impatient sound. I eased forward slowly until I could see him again, shaking his head, tongue pinched between his teeth. “These kids,” he said. “The fourth-years. I don’t trust them.”
“Why not?”
“They’re a bunch of fucking actors,” Colborne said. “They could all be lying through their teeth, and how would we know?”
“Christ.” They were quiet again until Walton said, “What do we do?”
“We keep a close eye on them. Wait for one of them to snap.” He glanced around the empty dining room. “The six of them holed up out here, alone? It won’t take long.”
The floorboards groaned as they moved toward the kitchen.
“My money’s on the cousin,” Walton said.
“Maybe,” Colborne said. “We’ll see.”
“Where to?”
“I want to walk through the woods to where we found the bottle, see if I can sort out how Richard got down to the dock from there.”
“Okay, then what?”
“Don’t know. Depends if we find anything.”
Walton replied, but his voice had faded low enough that I couldn’t hear what he said. The door closed behind them with a scrape and a thud. I slid to the floor, my legs weak and boneless underneath me. Richard loomed enormous in my mind, and if I could have spoken, I would have said to him, Had you such leisure in the time of death / To gaze upon the secrets of the deep?
To which he in my fantasy replied, Methought I had; and often did I strive / To yield the ghost: but still the envious flood Kept in my soul, and would not let it forth To seek the empty, vast and wandering air.
Awaked you not with this sore agony? I asked.
At last he abandoned his Shakespeare and said only, No.