Boy in the Water

Book by Dobyns Stephen

Prologue

Like a black island on a turquoise sea, the dark shape floated on the surface of the water, lit from beneath by a string of underwater spotlights evenly spaced along the twenty-five yards of the swimming pool. They gave off the only light apart from the glow of a red exit sign above the door. The shape at first looked like a barrel or log. It took a moment to realize that it was a body: a boy, naked except for a pair of white Jockey shorts. He was small for his age and quite slender. Perhaps he was thirteen—an eighth grader. Only the boy’s torso and the back of his head rose above the surface; his arms and legs hung down toward the black lines that ran the length of the pool’s bottom. His elbows were bent and his fingers were curved and relaxed, as if he had been holding something but had just let it go. The underwater lights made the air shimmer above the water and formed rippling shadows on the green cinder-block walls and tile ceiling.

Something small with pointed ears and a bedraggled tail stepped gingerly across the boy’s back, tentatively lifting and shaking one paw after another as it moved along the boy’s shoulder blades. It mewed and the sound echoed throughout the pool area. When the creature turned and its full silhouette became visible against the turquoise, one could see it was a kitten stranded on this dark island, stepping lightly from one part of the boy’s back to another, seeking the highest spot, while its movement caused the body to bob and turn very slightly. As a trickle of water ran across the boy’s skin, the kitten reared up like a miniature horse to keep its paws from getting wet.

One side of the boy’s body was white as parchment, lit up by the row of underwater lights. The other side was dark. His long red hair floated on the water in a ragged fringe. The kitten continued to mew and pace across the body as the turquoise light flickered and the boy’s shadow drifted like a dark swimmer across the left-hand wall. The kitten’s fur was orange-colored, and the orange of its fur and the red of the boy’s hair seemed significant, as if there were a family connection. It was warm and humid in the large room and the air smelled of chlorine and mold.

Two men stood at the shallow end, watching. Their backs were to the door and together they formed two black silhouettes.

“When did you find him?” asked the one in an Irish fisherman’s hat.

“Half an hour ago.”

“And we’re the only ones who know?”

“Except for whoever put him there.”

The kitten paused and arched its back, and its damp fur bristled. Then it began to mew frantically.

“Do we call the police?” asked the bareheaded one.

“Let someone else do it.”

“You’re taking a chance.”

“I see no reason to think so.”

Both men wore heavy overcoats, giving off an odor of damp wool.

“And is this what you were expecting?”

“No, but it will do.”

Outside it was snowing, as it had been for the past ten hours. More than a foot had fallen and the snow spread its white, uninterrupted surface across the lawns and playing fields to the edge of the forest. A half-moon glowed dully behind the clouds so one could make out the school’s buildings: five two- and three-story structures built in the nineteenth century and laid out in the shape of the letter H. The bridge of the H was Emerson Hall, the administration and main classroom building, with its illuminated bell tower. Lights were spaced along the driveways and sidewalks, creating brilliant circles of white. Beyond the school buildings on a curving driveway stood a row of six dormitory cottages for students, and further along the driveway and scattered among the trees were five small houses where faculty lived. Lights burned in the windows of two of the cottages: Shepherd, where a dozen students and two teachers were eating popcorn and watching Die Hard 3, and Pierce. Here, in the faculty apartment on the top floor, a tall, thin man was hurriedly taking clothes from the bureau and closet and dumping them into the two suitcases that lay open on the bed. It was the Friday night after Thanksgiving and most of the students were gone.

Lights also burned in four of the five faculty houses. In one a woman was mending a tear in a blue denim skirt. Beside her was a bowl of red-and-white peppermints and every so often she would stop her sewing, unwrap the cellophane from a candy, and almost tenderly put it in her mouth. In another house, a boy and his mother were watching the last minutes of a college basketball game. In a third, a man and woman were making love on a blanket before the fireplace, in which three logs were burning. Their damp skin flickered orange in the firelight. In the fourth house, a bearded man was cleaning a double-barreled shotgun in the basement, gently pushing an oiled cotton swab down the length of one of the barrels. Upstairs, his wife watched television.

Over at the school garage, in his overheated office, the night watchman was sleeping with his head on the desk, his arms hanging down so his knuckles brushed the floor. He snorted as he breathed and a trickle of saliva had made a kidney-shaped stain on the green blotter beneath his mouth. Upstairs in a small studio apartment, the assistant cook lay on his single bed, studying the cracks in the ceiling. He was smoking a cigarette and the smoke spiraled upward, forming a nimbus around the bare bulb that hung from a black wire. Next to him on a small bedside table was a half-empty bottle of Budweiser and a saucer overflowing with cigarette butts. In the apartment behind Stark Chapel, the chaplain, a woman, was lying in bed reading an Ellery Queen mystery. Across from the chapel in the library, an overweight, balding man was sitting at a desk leafing through the week’s magazines, licking the index finger of his right hand as he turned the pages. The half dozen other faculty and staff who lived on the grounds were away for the holidays.

The snow swirled around the security lights along the sidewalks and driveways. It seemed to plunge through a hole in the sky above the floodlit bell tower. It accumulated on the scaffolding where workmen had been repairing the roof of Emerson Hall. It dusted the heads of the alligatorlike gargoyles protruding from the cornices of the buildings. It collected on the vines of dried ivy clinging to the brick walls. It drifted through the broken windows of an unused dormitory and mixed with the dust on the floor. It formed delicate caps on the gilded tips of the iron fence posts lining the driveway. It gathered on the soccer goals and bleachers in the playing fields. It gave white cloaks to the pines. It seemed to bring the trees closer—the White Mountain National Forest that surrounded the school on three sides, three-quarters of a million acres stretching across north-central New Hampshire, a vast expanse of wintry dark, spotted with ice-covered lakes. The silence was so profound that a person standing motionless in the middle of the playing fields might have supposed that he had been struck deaf. Then a dog barked out in the woods, or perhaps it was the high yelp of a coyote.

South of the school, a quarter mile beyond its front gate, ran the Baker River. Then Antelope Road, extending through the woods between the tiny villages of Brewster Center and West Brewster, where a few of the faculty lived. Beyond Brewster Center lay the road to the city of Plymouth, twenty miles away. Not much was moving except snowplows at this time of night—sometimes a tractor-trailer out on the interstate, heading up to St. Johnsbury or down to Boston, leaving a cloud of snow in its wake.

The two men made their way out of the gymnasium, the one in the hat tugging at the door with his gloved hand to make sure it was locked. They turned up their collars and the bareheaded man put on a blue ski cap. They buried their hands in their pockets and seemed to pull their necks down into their collars.

“Where’s Hawthorne?” asked the man in the ski cap.

“He went down to Concord to visit his friend Krueger.”

“What a shame he was gone just when something like this happened—a boy dead in the pool. What kind of headmaster is he, anyway?”

The other man laughed and began to move away from the building out into the snow. “One whose tenure at Bishop’s Hill will be blessedly brief.”

The men chuckled together as they made their way along the path, lifting their boots above the surface of the snow, like shore birds walking through water. The wind was beginning to pick up, blowing the snow in gusts across the playing fields, creating white billows that swirled and rose, as if the snow had a sort of life, enwrapping the men as they walked and smoothing out their footprints until, as the night progressed, there was no evidence that the two men had ever passed that way at all.

PART ONE

One

Burnt flesh newly whole, pink skin puckered on the back of the hand, a moonscape of scar tissue extending from the sleeve of a gray sport coat. In the correctness of dress, only the scars were out of place. As he reached out to shake the hand, Kevin Krueger tried not to hesitate. This was his friend, Jim Hawthorne, his former teacher, a man he loved, a man to whom he owed his career.

“Been a long time,” said Krueger, squeezing the hand. “It’s great to see you.”

Bright morning light cut a yellow wedge across the office floor, the northern light of a fall day under a blue New Hampshire sky. The gold dome of the state capitol seemed to blaze under its regard.

His visitor noticed Krueger glancing at the scars. He gripped Krueger’s hand firmly, as if to show he had entirely healed. “We talked on the phone.”

“But I haven’t seen you for nearly a year.”

“Since before the fire.” Hawthorne let go of Krueger’s hand and stepped back. He was tanned and muscular, as if he spent part of every day at the health club, which was probably true. After all, he had been recuperating. Or perhaps it was that California glow. His hair was lighter than Krueger remembered, nearly blond and finely textured. Then, with shock, Krueger realized that Hawthorne’s hair must have been burned off.

“You look well,” said Krueger, hesitating whether to remain standing or sit down.

Hawthorne considered this estimate with amusement. “My doctor says I’ve been putting myself back together, but it feels like loafing. Now I want to return to work.”

Renovation was going on in one of the state offices down the hall and the sound of an electric saw shrilled through the air. The work had begun on September 2 and after nearly three weeks Krueger still hadn’t gotten used to the noise. He noticed Hawthorne’s jaw tense, then relax.

“But not in your field?” said Krueger, turning to shut the window behind him.

“It’s still school administration.”

“Another sort of school . . .” Krueger let the remark hang. He didn’t wish to bring up the fire, but that meant their talk stayed on a level of superficiality that he had never experienced with his friend. Was he afraid Hawthorne might cry? Or he himself would? After all, he had baby-sat for Lily at least half a dozen times in Boston. In his mind’s eye, he could see her sparkling blond curls.

Krueger had met Hawthorne seven years earlier at Boston University, when he had begun graduate study in clinical psychology. Jim Hawthorne had been his adviser as well as teacher. Hawthorne was now thirty-seven. His birthday was in February, the same month as the fire. Only six years separated them and the two men had made many trips to various agencies and residential treatment programs throughout the state, especially to Ingram House in the Berkshires, where Krueger had done the work that resulted in his thesis. And when Krueger had said he was interested in a job with the New Hampshire Department of Education, Hawthorne hadn’t protested but had made the necessary calls from San Diego, even though he would rather have seen Krueger working in mental health. Yet if Krueger had taken a position someplace else, Hawthorne wouldn’t have been here this morning and Krueger wouldn’t have had the opportunity now to assist him.

“I’ve been on the phone with members of the board,” said Hawthorne, “and they’ve sent me cartons of papers. Without actually visiting the place I don’t see how I could be any more prepared.”

“All this in six weeks?”

“They want someone in residence before the semester is much advanced. Classes began two weeks ago. And I was ready to make the change.” He looked uncertain for a moment. “You know, it’s time to make a fresh beginning.”

Krueger wondered what Hawthorne meant by being “ready.” His dark gray jacket, blue slacks, white shirt, even his tie looked new. But of course his other clothes had been destroyed. In fact, in terms of property, he’d probably lost everything. But what had he lost of the rest—of his essential self, what people outside their profession might call the soul?

“There’s no real town nearby, at least for twenty miles,” said Krueger.

“I like the country. Perhaps I’ll learn to ski.”

“You could get stuck after the snow begins. The roads can completely shut down.”

“You’re not very optimistic.”

“These places, they develop their own ways of doing things. They get terribly ingrown: cousins and high school chums working together for years . . .”

“That’s probably why the board insisted on an outside hiring.”

“Of course, of course.” Glancing at Hawthorne’s hand, Krueger saw how the scar tissue extended up the backs of his fingers, how the little finger had no nail but ended in a sort of pink fragility.

Hawthorne was thin and handsome and somewhat gaunt, with dark indentations beneath his cheekbones. He wore glasses with pewter frames that kept sliding down his nose which he pushed back up with his thumb. Krueger was a few inches shorter and stocky, with a receding hairline, bushy eyebrows and a thick mustache, as if these bristling growths were soft bumpers between him and the world. These were men of similar backgrounds who had gone to similar New England schools and universities. They read the same magazines and newspapers, the same books. They felt at home in the same fashionable sections of Boston or San Diego, New York or San Francisco. But one had suffered great tragedy and the other kept trying to imagine it. Krueger had felt inadequate to the task of helping his friend. He had written. They talked on the phone. Hawthorne’s life had taken a turn impossible to anticipate and Krueger had been struck with wonder and compassion.

“It’s hardly your sort of school,” he said.

Hawthorne suddenly grinned. “On the cutting edge of failure, much like myself.”

“You’re a clinical psychologist with a tremendous reputation.”

“The school claims to specialize in youngsters with special needs.”

“You know what that means. Highly structured environment, empathy development, special needs—it’s code. The school’s just a dumping ground.”

“It’s been around a long time.”

“In name only. Even ten years ago it was different. They started that business about special needs when enrollment began to fall. Their accreditation hangs by a thread.”

“You think I can’t save...