The front door. I turned and hurried back to the front common room. If whoever had been in here had secured the hasp on the front door, I could be locked in. Panic began tickling my throat, but when I reached the front door, it opened under the pressure of both my hands so that I almost stumbled outside onto the porch. A crow, startled, cawed at me from a nearby bush and beat its way into the sky.
I looked around through the trees and then back toward the drive. Someone was running up the drive, more than a hundred yards away, back toward school. He was wearing a dark jacket, maybe a fleece, and jeans, and a dark skullcap. I took all three of the porch steps in a single leap, nearly stumbling again when I landed, and then started running through the woods toward the drive. My feet thudded on the ground as I ran, my breath rasping in my ears. Pain flickered in my head like a dying lightbulb, threatening one final blaze before burning out. I stepped on a fallen branch, causing it to snap with a loud crack as if I’d broken it over my knee. Ahead, the runner turned his head to look back—a pale face but nothing else I could make out—and then he ran faster.
It seemed to take me several long minutes to finally reach the drive, and when I finally ran out of the woods and onto the asphalt, the runner was gone. I continued running up the drive, pumping my arms, drawing breath through my nose, and blowing out my mouth. No matter how fast I sprinted, I wouldn’t catch him before the trees ended, but if he was heading back to the Hill, I just needed to be able to see where he went. I settled into a steady, loping run. Why I thought he was heading for the Hill, I’m not sure—probably because I assumed he was a student and would want to get to his dorm and hide in anonymity as soon as possible. But if the letters on the compass I had found were his initials, they would point to his name. At that thought, I realized I was no longer holding the compass. My heart sank. He must have taken it after bashing me in the face with the door. There was an S, I remembered, but the other two letters blurred in my memory. The cold air burned my bruised cheek, and my legs began to protest. I ran harder.
By the time I reached the edge of the trees, I had a stitch in my side and was beginning to breathe more rapidly through my open mouth, still shy of gasping for air but well on my way. Up ahead, more than halfway up the Hill, someone in a black fleece was running past the infirmary. I ignored the stitch in my side and kept going.
At the top of the drive, by Saint Matthew’s, I had to stop and bend over, palms on my knees. Ten years ago I’d been able to run two miles without breaking into a heavy sweat. Now I was wheezing like an asthmatic smoker, sweat dripping off my nose, my legs burning and threatening to cramp. Still bent over, I raised my head to scan the Hill. Empty. No one moved under the trees or on the walkways. The Frisbee throwers from earlier were gone. I tried to slow my breathing, letting the stitch in my side work its way out. He could have run across the Lawn to the gym, or ducked into the library or Huber Hall or maybe even into one of the dorms. I’d lost him. “Dumbass,” I said aloud in between breaths.
On the far side of Saint Matthew’s, to the left across the Lawn, someone walked into view, heading down the road away from me toward Stilwell Hall. He wasn’t wearing a skullcap, but he had on a black fleece. I stood up. “Hey!” I managed to shout. The person turned and then began running. From that brief glance, I could tell he was young, with dark hair, but he was still too far away for me to get a good look. I lurched after him. He sprinted down the road that circled the Hill, passing the gym and some of the other dormitory buildings—Raleigh Hall, Rhoads Hall. I cut across the Lawn, trying to keep him in sight. If he got to Stilwell, he’d lose me easily in that massive building with all its twisting corridors and stairwells.
I ran harder, my heart pounding at my ribs. Then I saw the runner turn suddenly and dash inside Vinton Hall, the senior dorm. Ten seconds behind him, I ran up the steps and through the front entrance, nearly colliding with someone just inside the door. “Hey —” the person shouted, and I almost grabbed him by the arm, thinking I’d caught the boy I’d been chasing. Then I realized this boy was wearing gray sweats and was much darker in skin tone. It was Jamal Bullock.
“Mr. Glass?” he asked, puzzled. “You all right, sir?”
“Somebody ran in here . . . a second ago,” I said, in between catching my breath.
Bull nodded. “Yeah. Ran upstairs.”
“Who was it?”
He shook his head. “When I came out of my room, he was already halfway up the stairs.” He leaned forward to get a better look at me, and his eyes widened. “What happened to your face?”
I ran past Bull. “Get the faculty resident,” I called to him, and then took the stairs two at a time.
The stairs came out in the middle of the upstairs hallway, which ran from the front of the dorm to the back, with rooms on either side. By instinct I turned left, toward the back. There were fire escapes on the rear wall of Vinton. But the window at the end of the hall was closed, the windowsill crusted with old paint and dust, a dead fly on its back by the latch. No one had gone out this way. Which meant that he was still on the second floor somewhere. Two rooms I barged into had no one in them, while in a third, a blond-haired boy, lying on his bed and listening to his iPod, glared at me. Realizing I was a teacher, he began to apologize as I let the door swing shut. In the bathroom, I startled a senior in the shower but saw no one else, either in the shower or the stalls. Back out in the hallway, I heard a strange scraping sound, wood rasping against wood, coming from behind another door. When I opened it, I saw someone across the room in the act of stepping through an open window and onto a gabled roof below, one leg and arm still inside. He got his other leg through the window, but I grabbed his arm before he could withdraw it, too. He put up a mighty struggle, trying to yank his arm out of my grasp, but I dug my fingers in, nearly wrenching the boy’s arm out of his shoulder as I yelled for Bull. “No!” he started yelping as I braced a foot against the wall and began pulling him back through the window. “I didn’t do it! I swear! I didn’t do it! No! I swear I didn’t do it!” By the time Bull came running down the hall with the faculty resident, I had managed to pull the boy back through the window and into the room, where he lay sobbing in a heap on the floor. He covered his head with his arms, but not before I recognized him.
“What the hell is going on?” demanded the faculty resident, a young, sandy-haired teacher named Matt McGuire.
“Mr. McGuire,” I said far more calmly than I felt, “would you please call Mr. Middleton and ask him to meet us in his office?”