And then I remembered. The Virginia state police had interviewed several faculty and staff members in the days after Fritz’s disappearance. The rumor was that the state police suspected Fritz had disappeared of his own volition because of all the money he had taken out of the ATM the previous weekend, and that meant that he might have had help from a faculty or staff member. The police had grilled several Blackburne employees, including Pelham Greer. One of the cooks, a black man named Tofer, had grown upset, even belligerent during his interrogation. He’d had a legitimate alibi of some sort and felt the cops were questioning him because he was black and because he had a record, shoplifting or some other petty theft. Even though the police cleared him, he eventually quit, aggravated by the discreet glances and open stares that students and faculty alike had turned his way. Others, too, had resented the questioning, and for Pelham Greer, the memory still seemed to be fresh. I could imagine a proud ex-soldier resenting any implications that he could have been involved in Fritz’s disappearance.
Greer ran his hand back and forth over the top of his right-side wheel. He didn’t look upset, just preoccupied, as if he were considering how to get rid of me politely. I cleared my throat. “Look, Mr. Greer —”
“Pelham,” he said.
I smiled weakly. “Okay, Pelham. Thanks. I don’t mean to imply anything. I just . . .” I sighed. This was far harder than I had thought. “He was my best friend,” I said simply. The words hurt to say, as if they confirmed that I had failed as a friend. Which I had.
Greer’s jaw shifted. He drummed his fingers on the wheel, twice. “I wish I’d said something to him,” he said finally. “Something about him made me think he wasn’t okay.” At the look on my face, he added, “He didn’t look panicked or nothing. Just . . . bothered, like something was nagging at him. But I was busy trying to fix some landscape lights out in front of Stilwell, so I didn’t. Wish I had. Maybe—” He shook his head.
I realized my mouth was open, as if I were a kid at camp hearing a ghost story. In a strange kind of way, I thought, that wasn’t far from the truth. “What made him look like something was nagging him?”
Greer shrugged. “He was playing with that chain around his neck, that medal he wore,” he said. He looked almost bashful. “I don’t mean to sound like I spy on you all or anything, but . . . I notice things. And whenever I saw that boy when he looked upset or troubled about something, he was always messing with that medal. What was it?”
I couldn’t answer him. I was trying to reconcile what he’d said with what I knew to be true. Fritz had left his Saint Christopher medal under my pillow, where I’d found it later that night, just before Sam Hodges and Deputy Briggs had come in. I’d assumed Fritz had placed the medal under my pillow before he had left with his backpack, which was when I was in the dining hall in Stilwell, pushing my dinner around on my plate. Now Pelham Greer said Fritz had still been wearing it when he’d left Walker House. He had worn only the one medal. So when had the medal been placed under my pillow? And who had put it there?
It took me a few moments to realize Pelham Greer had asked me a question. He was looking up at me, head cocked to one side as if to get a better read on me. “Sorry,” I said. “It was a Saint Christopher medal.”
Greer nodded thoughtfully. “I read somewhere that Saint Christopher would protect people when they had to travel, ’cause he carried baby Jesus across a stream and all.” He glanced down at his injured hand, as if noticing it for the first time. Still looking at his hand, he said, “I hope for your roommate’s sake that the story’s true.”
I SAID MY GOOD-BYES and left Pelham Greer’s apartment, climbed back up the stairs, and headed outside to walk around the Hill for a while to let my thoughts settle. If what Greer said was true, Fritz had not left his medal under my pillow before leaving Walker House around six forty-five. That meant that Fritz had returned even later that evening, still unnoticed, and placed the medal under my pillow, or that someone else had put the medal there. Or that I did not have Fritz’s actual medal but a clever fake. I didn’t think this last theory could be right—Fritz had shown me the medal more than once, and on the back was stamped “1939,” the year Fritz’s grandfather received the medal from his own father. That someone could replicate the same medal with the same date on the back seemed ridiculous.
But what if Fritz had returned later, snuck into our dorm, put the medal under my pillow, and vanished into the night again? I had been in our room the entire evening, except when I had gone to the library to look for Fritz. I imagined Fritz crouching behind the boxwoods outside, watching me come out the front door and hurry toward the library, and then slipping inside to put the medal under my pillow.
I still didn’t know, after all these years, why he had left the medal for me. Maybe it was a gesture of farewell. Or a sign that he was giving up whatever nominal protection the medal could afford him. Or there was an implied message in the medal itself, something hidden in plain sight that I could not see. This seemed too Da Vinci Code, and I wasn’t a Harvard symbologist.
What’s strange is how little I had considered the question of why Fritz had disappeared. At first, everyone leaned toward the scenario of a pedophile in a serial killer van abducting Fritz and driving away. Then, when the police learned about the ATM withdrawal Fritz had apparently made, coupled with his lie about where he had been the night before, it looked more and more like he had arranged his own disappearance. I had even supplied everyone with a possible reason for his disappearance: stress over college. Unable to handle the idea of not living up to his own ridiculously high expectations, he had stepped off the grid and left it all behind. My own dark secret, that I had betrayed Fritz and possibly driven him away, was one I could never share. But—and how ghoulish it is to say this—the more typical response to such stress is to shuffle off this mortal coil and head into what Hamlet calls the undiscovered country of death. It was possible Fritz had committed suicide after leaving campus; perhaps he hadn’t wanted anyone on campus to find his body. But the fact that no one had found his body argued against this.
In the end, I didn’t know with certainty why Fritz had disappeared any more than I had a decade earlier. His disappearance was an immutable fact, a stark iron signpost planted deeply and firmly in the middle of my life, compelling me to detour this way and that. I had come to think of it the way I think of natural disasters. Why the hurricane struck your coastal town isn’t as significant as the fact that it did, resulting in a complete upheaval of your life.
Pelham Greer’s story reawakened a fierce desire to know what had happened to Fritz. Because now I had a clue that no one else had: Fritz had come back to the dorm. I couldn’t reveal this to anyone without revealing that I had the medal, that I’d had it all along and kept it secret. But this goad, this inconsistency, prodded me to explain it. I needed to find the narrative that made sense of the facts I had. And so, walking among the giant oak trees of the Lawn in the shadow of Stilwell Hall, I decided that I would do just that.
CHAPTER NINE