“I don’t buy that a kid did that,” Briggs said. “Got drugs into your desk and apartment. They’d need access to keys, for one thing.”
“Blackburne’s got an honor code,” I pointed out. “People are trusting. Makes it pretty easy to lie and steal things.” Briggs raised his eyebrows. “Well, it does,” I said stubbornly.
“It’d still be easier for an adult,” he insisted.
“Like Ren Middleton.”
“I get that you want it to be him. Guy throws you out on your ass, you’d like him to get what’s coming to him. But all he had to do was just wait another month or two, tell you he wasn’t going to offer you a contract, and send you on your way.”
“Maybe he feels threatened. He tried to get me to lie about Paul Simmons and the drugs.”
“He’s not threatened by you in any way that firing you doesn’t take care of. What about Travis Simmons? He’d be pissed about his son—maybe he blames you.”
“And he gets me by planting drugs?” I shrugged. “I don’t see it, but it’s possible. Maybe he’d see it as ironically fitting. Which brings us to Paul.”
“Who’s ‘out in Utah,’ according to you.”
“His friends at Blackburne, then. He gets them to set me up out of revenge. If Paul Simmons knew how to get that shotgun out of that locked cabinet, he could get into my apartment and classroom without a problem.”
“His father’s the headmaster, for Christ’s sake.”
“Exactly. His son could get access to anything at Blackburne if he wanted to.”
“Which comes back to my problem with a kid doing this. I mean, the oxy they could steal from a parent or relative, but where’d they get that much pot? Most kids would smoke it instead of holding on to it.”
“Okay,” I said, rubbing my eyes, “let’s go over it again.”
“You’d make a decent cop,” Briggs said, using the back of his hand to stifle a yawn.
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“You know,” Briggs said, “what about Terence? Maybe he has friends who were pissed about what happened to him. Or they’re pissed that you could mess things up for them with your half-assed drug investigation. Who did Terence hang out with?”
I shrugged. “Ben Sipple, although I don’t see him doing this. We . . . have a history, but we worked it out.” When Briggs gave me a significant look, I added, “Trust me,” thinking about Ben in Saint Matthew’s, where he had ripped off the altar sheet and then sobbed against my shoulder. “Paul Simmons, obviously. Other than that, I don’t know. Terence was kind of a loner.” I thought about Terence’s journals, the odd, fragmented poems. His mother’s face rose out of my memory, beautiful and sad. Lost in thought, I stared out the window, my eyes wandering over Briggs’s truck. It had oversized wheels. Wheels . . .
The steel wheels
Turn and turn and turn
In the night
Shining with light
As if they burn . . .
burning wheels light up the bricks
as fate rolls down the path toward me
“Son of a bitch,” I said aloud.
“Excuse me?”
I turned to Briggs. “I need to get to Blackburne. Tonight.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Briggs dropped me off by the lions at a quarter past ten. It was dark, a heavy shield of clouds raised against the moon and stars. The road was deserted, patches of snow scattered over the fields on one side, the woods looming on the other. There wasn’t a sound, not a car or an owl or even the low keen of the wind. Briggs and I could have been the only two people left on Earth.
“You sure about this?” Briggs asked for the tenth time.
“Positive,” I said, making sure my iPhone was in my outside coat pocket.
“Trespassing is a serious crime, Matthias.”
“They won’t let me back on campus.” Saying it aloud, hearing the words in my mouth, stoked my anger. “I can’t just walk back up there in the open. They’d call Sheriff Townsend in a second.”
“And if they see you tonight, they’ll do the same thing,” Briggs said. “You could end up back in jail. You willing to risk that?”
I pulled on my gloves. “Yes,” I said. I wasn’t being cocky or brave—it was simply a statement of fact. “Just stick to the plan and I’ll be fine.”
Briggs’s face was in shadow, but I was pretty sure he was frowning. “All right,” he said finally. “But don’t be stupid. Just get what you need and come back.”
I opened the car door and went out into the night. It was like stepping into icy water. I shut the door, and Briggs drove away slowly, past the entrance. He would pull off the road about a hundred yards away or so. I checked my boots to make sure they were laced, more out of nervousness than anything else, pulled my wool hat a bit lower on my head, and set off up the drive. I passed the stone lions without a glance. Inside the gate, I left the pavement and moved about five yards into the trees on the left-hand side, in case there was a bus returning late.
It was slow going. I didn’t want to risk using a flashlight because of the guard at the security booth just beyond the tree line, so I made my way through the dark carefully, not wanting to run into a tree trunk or poke my eye out with a branch. It occurred to me that I was making the reverse journey that Fritz had made all those years ago—he had escaped Blackburne, while I was sneaking in. My earlier anger about being banned from campus still burned in my gut. It was as if I had been expelled, only worse—this was karma for cheating all those years ago. Was I a victim, or an offender finally getting my due?
Eventually I reached the edge of the playing fields, the trees a wall at my back. The Hill and its lights lay ahead of me, a beacon in the dark. Much closer, about thirty yards away, stood the security booth, soft yellow light illuminating its window and revealing a single person, one of the Slater brothers, seated inside. He looked like he was reading a magazine. Even if the light would ruin whatever night vision he might have, I needed to be careful. Snow glimmered on the ground, but otherwise the fields were covered in shadow. I gingerly stepped out from the trees and began walking slowly but steadily across the fields.
By this time, I was breathing somewhat heavily, the air rasping in my throat. My legs were heavy, and the Hill had never seemed so far away. I crossed a soccer field and glanced back—no one had stirred in the security booth—and then started up a sloping fairway that led straight to the base of Farquhar Gym.