The Monday after the mixer, I went to talk to Brian Schue, Terence’s old roommate who now roomed with Ben Sipple. It was on the pretext of morning inspection, which I did infrequently enough as the prefects usually handled this, and I asked Ben to leave the room and give us a minute. Brian sat down at his desk and looked a bit apprehensively at me as I considered what to say. He was a slight boy with dark eyes and wavy brown hair. In a couple of years, girls would probably find him a romantic loner. I liked him. “How are you doing, Brian?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Okay, I guess.”
“Any difficulty with . . . your new roommate?”
He shook his head. “No, Mr. Glass, he’s okay. I’m okay. Thank you.”
I nodded and picked up a plastic Blackburne cup from Ben’s dresser, put it down again. “Brian, I feel that I need to tell you about something. Something that I found in your old room.” I glanced at Brian, who was alert but out of curiosity, not fear. “In the lava lamp, actually,” I added.
Brian blinked. “The lava lamp? That was Terence’s. I thought you packed all that stuff up for his family.”
“When I was doing that, the bottom of the lava lamp fell to the floor.” I fixed Brian with a firm gaze. “Do you want to tell me anything, Brian? Because it would be better to tell me now than later.”
I thought I could detect fear in his eyes. He cleared his throat. “What . . . I mean, I don’t know of anything—” He looked around the room, as if he would find what I seemed to be looking for hidden in plain sight, on his bed or hanging on the wall. He was upset by what I was asking; that was clear. It seemed equally clear that he had no idea what I was talking about.
“Dip,” I said. If Ren Middleton would lie by omission to hide the truth, I would lie outright to try to uncover it. “I found dip inside the lava lamp.”
Brian frowned, his hair inching down so it almost fell over his eyes. “That’s weird,” he said. “Terence hated dip. He hated the smell and thought it looked stupid.”
I continued to look straight at him. “So it wasn’t yours?”
Brian shook his head. “No, sir. Honest. I just . . . It’s weird he would have it, you know?”
I nodded. “Sometimes it’s hard to know what people really think, or who they are.” I let this silly and rather ominous-sounding piece of wisdom sink in. Then I thanked him and stepped out into the hallway, nearly colliding with Ben, who had been listening by the door.
I’m not sure what I had hoped for as a result of that meeting, although I knew that with Ben listening in, the conversation might as well have been broadcast to the entire student body. Which was what I wanted to happen. An indirect message to whoever might have been involved with Terence and his stash: Somebody knows. Maybe someone would come talk to me, confess to selling pot to Terence, tell me where the Vicodin had come from. Maybe someone would try to figure out what else I knew, and thereby reveal who else was involved. Half-baked at best, I know. I wasn’t all that worried about Ren finding out—the students would hardly be likely to talk with him or any other faculty member.
Nobody came to my apartment door for a late-night confession. Two days after my talk with Brian, however, I walked past one of the large trash cans outside the dorm entrance and got a whiff of something violently pine scented. Looking in the bin, I could see three round cans of dip, Copenhagen Long Cut Wintergreen, half-covered by some wadded paper towels and an empty box of laundry detergent.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Forget what T. S. Eliot said about April—February is the cruelest month. Christmas vacation is long past, and spring break seems like a mirage in the distance. The weather is cold and sodden, snow melts in your shoes, your nose runs constantly, and every classroom and dormitory smells like wet dog. Students’ faces grow longer and grimmer with each passing week. The only good thing about February is that it’s also the shortest month, although this fact did not bring me much comfort in my first week of February as a teacher. My students were struggling through Macbeth, which I had loved as a fourth former, particularly the Roman Polanski film version. With cold winds and occasional sleet buffeting the windows of the classroom, I would circle up the class to read Shakespeare aloud, trying to instill in them a love of language and a sense of the passion and the evil in the play. In response, they ducked their heads and spoke into their books, as if mortified to hear their own voices.
Listening to Stephen Watterson attempt to read Lady Macbeth’s “unsex me here” speech aloud, I looked out the window at the gray morning sky and the snow on the ground and wondered how much longer I could continue being the responsible English teacher. I was much more interested in my newer role of detective.
Fate must have been listening, like a jaded old gambler who sees a fresh mark he can play, because he dealt me an early win. My laptop pinged quietly, and I turned away from the window and glanced at my screen. I had a new e-mail, two words from Trip Alexander: Call me.
TRIP WOULDN’T JUST TELL me over the phone what he’d learned but insisted that we meet in person. This aspect of detective work hadn’t occurred to me—I’d envisioned an exchange of information via e-mail or a phone call, not driving across northern Virginia to meet Trip in a hotel room off the highway. But I had asked for his help, so on my free Saturday that month, I drove for two hours through sleet and bad traffic to a hotel outside of Culpeper. It was not a cheerful trip. Grimy snow and slush lined the roadside. Houses sat back from the road with a closed, brooding look. Knots of trees stood bare against a freezing rain that fell from a sky the color of iron. At one point, I passed a tow truck, its amber lights revolving, as it labored to pull a crumpled car out of a ditch.
By the time I got to Culpeper, I was in a foul mood. My shoulders ached from the stress of being hunched over my steering wheel and peering at the road through the frozen rain. I wondered why Trip was being so cloak-and-dagger. I’d asked him to find out all he could about Fritz’s disappearance, but I thought it must be the second request I’d made of Trip—to find out what he could about the Davenports and NorthPoint—that was behind this clandestine rendezvous. I glanced at the small duffel I had tossed in the front seat. At the last minute, I had packed the bag, not wanting to get stuck overnight in bad weather without a change of clothes.
The Hancock Inn was a graceless stucco box. Dark stains ran down the walls by the downspouts. If possible, an overnight visit was now even less appealing. The parking lot was half-empty. I pulled into a space near the front entrance and called Trip on my cell. “I’m here,” I said when he picked up.
“Room two-twelve,” he said, and hung up.