3

The Death of a Boy at School

A STEADY, LAZY rain fell. An ambulance backed up to the spot. Its reverse-gear warning beeped several times; its lights twirled. Two white police BMWs, with sirens and orange stripes, blocked the entrance to Church Hill Road. The area had been taped off, and the coroner’s team was doing its job. One detective, a man, stood waiting: for the coroner’s team to finish, for his partner to get the statement from the witness. The witness was a teenager, so his partner, a woman, was doing the interview. He was one of these schoolkids, the ones in the straw hats who looked like they belonged in a different century. This one had long, shaggy black hair, and he was tall, too adult to be wearing those school clothes. He looked like he should be playing in AC/DC, the detective smiled to himself. The kid sat in the backseat of their car, his legs turned out the open door, facing the female detective, who stood on the pavement; the kid’s body language indicated shock. He fingered the hat he held in his hands, never raised his eyes, mumbled, shook his head. The detective saw his partner gesture back to where the body was found—she was trying to get a reaction, prodding the kid to give up more. The detective watched closely. The boy raised his eyes. They flicked back to the spot where the body was being zippered up, and the face recoiled, as if the boy were afraid the body might heave upright and begin walking like a zombie. Soon the partner gave it up and ambled back.

“Anything?” the detective asked his partner.

“Not really. The patrolman found him here, shouting for help.” She checked her notes. “Andrew Taylor. They were mates. Next-door neighbors in the little dormitories here. Houses, whatever they call them. Mr. Taylor came walking up here and found the body.”

“Anything about the victim? What was he doing back here? Drugs?”

“There was nothing on the body. This one’s American.” She nodded back at Andrew. “Arrived yesterday. First day at school.”

“Bad luck. Did he notice anything?”

“He said the body already seemed stiff. Saw the blood on the face.”

“Did he move him?”

“Checked for a pulse.” She hesitated, then turned back to look at Andrew.

“What?”

“He’s awfully jittery,” she said. “Like he saw something. Seems afraid.”

“He didn’t look too responsive from where I stood.”

“No,” she agreed. “Want to have a go?”

“Not really.”

“What else have you got to do? Get rained on?”

The detective ambled over to Andrew, still seated in the back of the detectives’ car, his legs resting on the pavement. The detective squatted and faced him.

“I’m Detective Bryant. I think you just met my partner.”

“Hi,” Andrew murmured.

“Rather a bad shock,” Detective Bryant offered, with a grimace of sympathy.

Andrew did not react.

Bryant decided to take a random shot. “You saw what happened, didn’t you?”

Andrew raised his eyes quickly.

Bryant felt a thrill. He took another shot. “Not what. Who. You saw who killed him. Am I right?”

Now the boy’s eyes went wide. Terrified.

“Who was it?” Bryant kept bluffing. “One of the locals? Someone from school?”

Andrew searched the detective’s face. For an instant Andrew thought the policeman knew something; knew, somehow, what he had seen; but no one familiar with the gaunt, white-haired figure could have assumed the detective’s flat, factual expression. The detective was groping in the dark. Andrew went back to staring at his hands.

“The other detective told me he died this morning,” said Andrew. “So how could I have seen it happen? I didn’t find him until noon.”

The detective silently cursed his partner.

“Then what?” Bryant demanded, a little too urgently, sensing his moment was passing. “You’re frightened, I can tell. What of? I won’t tell anyone,” he added in a flourish of disingenuousness.

But the boy’s eyes had focused on something else. The detective turned to follow his gaze. A heavyset woman in a black raincoat had arrived at the crime scene perimeter. She was breathlessly asking for help from the policeman standing guard there, then bickering with him as the answers he gave were evidently unsatisfactory. Eventually the policeman looked over at Andrew and pointed. Matron fastened her eyes on the boy and advanced.

“Last chance,” said Bryant.

“I didn’t see anybody,” said Andrew.

“Don’t lie to me,” snarled the detective.

Their eyes met in a standoff.

Moments later, Matron reached them. “There you are!” she panted. “No one would give me any information,” she scolded Detective Bryant. “Can someone tell me what is going on here?”

“Now you’re in trouble,” mumbled Andrew.

Bryant rose from his haunches, obliged to answer the woman’s many questions and to listen to her moans of sorrow. He was forced to watch in silence—cowed by her busy, blowsy manner—as she wrapped an arm around Andrew and marched him down the hill.

“I’m still interviewing him,” he called after them, helplessly.

“He’s underage and the school’s responsibility,” Matron snapped over her shoulder.

The road stretched empty and slick for thirty yards. Andrew and Matron descended together, leaving the bustle of police activity behind them. Ahead they faced a throng that had gathered below, in silence, blockaded behind another police car: countless bluers growing dark in the rain. A sea of Harrow hats. The black robes of beaks. The police let Andrew and Matron pass. They were immediately pressed by the boys’ damp bodies and awed faces.

What happened?

Is it true someone died?

Is it someone from school?

Did you see anything?

Andrew pushed past them. They crowded him, asking, demanding, some grabbing. The rain intensified, pelted his face, trickled down his cheeks. A beak took his elbow, Let him through, please, boys. Come now, please, and ushered him, with Matron, through the crowd. The beak asked him if he was all right, what house was he in, and Andrew lied, Yes, and Matron answered The Lot. But Andrew did not see his fellow students or recognize any of their features; he perceived only the ashen face, the sunken eyes; the flaps of the frock coat and the echo of that horror-filled cough.

“NEVER BEFORE,” MATRON muttered, half grief, half grumble.

She removed his wet things with all the care of a farmer shucking an ear of corn. She told him to lie quiet. She put a blanket over him. She did all this while maintaining a stream of talk, mainly to herself.

“In fifteen years.” She shook her head. “And, oh, what will the poor parents say? Imagine getting that phone call. You’d wish you were dead. I hope they have other children. Oh, but they do—Theo had brothers and a sister. Won’t break their hearts any less but it’s good to have others.” Then, almost angry, already converting the fresh news to gossip and rumor: “God knows what happened to him. He was too young for a heart attack, or an aneurysm. Healthy boys just don’t up and die.”

Andrew sat up in bed. He wanted to explain to her, help her understand. “Matron, I saw . . .”

She met his gaze and waited for him to finish.

I saw a murder! He wanted to shout. I saw someone dressed in an outsize, costumelike overcoat suffocating Theo.

Yes . . . and then what?

This is the question he had been asking himself since he scrambled down the hill, shouting for help, and then returned to wait with the body. He had been alone there some five minutes before he realized that the attacker had disappeared. Not run away, with a fading footfall or a scramble down the path. He had simply vanished. With the high fence on either side, there would have been no means of escape. Andrew would have seen the gaunt figure run off. But Andrew had been so shocked—shocked? or was it something else: a kind of swoon, a surrender to an oppression that lingered on that spot?—that he had not even noticed the attacker’s disappearance. In such a gloom, it was almost natural that the snarling, uncanny figure had snapped out of existence so suddenly.

And then he disappeared, Matron.

Andrew’s mouth hung open.

If you say those words, he assured himself, she will think you are crazy. She will tell others. Then every kind of attention you don’t want, you will get. Think what St. John Tooley and Vaz would do with information like that. They’d rip you to shreds. Brand you a psycho, a freak.

Fortunately for Andrew, Matron took that moment to indulge a rare moment of sympathy, and leapt in to finish his thought.

“I know. Your friend, like that. Poor Theo. Of all people.” Then Matron’s eyes screwed down on Andrew—it was the nasty American she was talking to, she seemed to remember—and he understood quite clearly in that moment that Matron would have rather seen him a cadaver on the Church Hill path than sunny, charming Theo. “You’re in shock,” she announced, standing. “Lie back and rest. I can’t sit here with you all day. The housemaster and the head of house need to be told. And the head man. And the parents. But that’s not my job, thank goodness.”

Then, without a glance back, she rushed off to get Mr. Fawkes, leaving Andrew alone.

HE LEANED ON one elbow and peered out the window. The rain, ignorant of the tragedy now beginning to stir the school, patiently tapped each leaf of the plane tree outside his window as it fell.

Andrew flopped back onto the bed. He was at last warm, dry, and alone, but as though suffering a delayed reaction, he felt a shudder rack him from shoulders to toes. He pulled the blanket tighter. He began a kind of wandering debate with himself.

You’re sleep-deprived, he reasoned. You’re wigging because you’re starting a new school.

But the body had been real. He had felt it, cold and stiff and heavy. It had rolled a little when he had touched it.

It. Him.

Theo is really dead.

Andrew’s mind recalled the few images it had gathered of Theo over twenty-four hours. He felt sick to his stomach.

He thought of the gaunt figure. If it killed Theo, could it kill others? Andrew had locked eyes with it. Something had passed between them, a kind of recognition. Could the figure find him somehow? Would Andrew be the next victim?

He sat up. He must tell the police, let them know that the pale figure had strangled Theo. Whatever it was, it was dangerous.

No. They will think you’re insane. They will call your parents.

And his parents would pull him out of school. Then he really would be fucked.

With trembling hands he sought his cell phone in his desk drawer. Out of power. There was a charger somewhere. He found it and plugged it in. Pressed D. Saw names appear.

DAD

DANIEL

He let the cursor land on DAD. The 203 area code popped up. His thumb went to the green button. He ached to hear a familiar voice. Even his father’s. An American accent. He wanted to tell his father the whole story. Not pieces of it, not the parts he thought his father could handle, but everything, just to hear him out, just to hear somebody nod their heads, say Yeah, that’s pretty weird.

The thumb rose off the button. He knew his father could not do that.

Even if the thousand miles had not been separating them (he knew this put his father on edge, made him his most controlling), Andrew could never draw out the kind of reaction he wanted now from his father. He might have once. At the dawn of Andrew’s puberty, his father had bought a canoe and had begun taking Andrew out on the Housatonic. He pointed out birds in the marshes and told stories—of his days at Penn, or his generally paranoid theories about surviving the corporate life-struggle, and asked Andrew about the soap operas unfolding among his school friends. Sometimes they even forgot to paddle and just drifted, talking and listening to each other’s voices and watching the ospreys carry off their prey; not forced to face each other; pointed in the same direction. But the arguments waited for them, a year later, back at the house. At first about ordinary things like grades and curfews. Then they grew bitter. His father’s frustrations mounted (Andrew’s choice of friends, his haircuts, his getting caught smoking cigarettes at fourteen; with a bag of pot in his sock drawer at fifteen). His father’s own ingrained rage seeped into all their dealings (the unfairness of his treatment at American Express; his inferiority complex about his lineage—all those Taylors in daguerreotypes, and he, a middle manager in suburbia, still wanting but failing to live like a southern aristocrat, heaping debt upon himself to keep up the vacations in Aspen or Biarritz, then suffering brutally with the burden, the humiliating day a fat man with a lip full of tobacco arrived to repossess the Audi). And after the first nine or ten screaming fights—recriminations, slammed doors, false accusations, top-of-his-lungs frustrated screamed red-faced fuck-yous—all that remained between them was a sprawling lake of bile. One vacation Andrew came home and noticed that the canoe was gone from the garage. His mother told him casually that his father had sold it.

I’m pulling you out of there

He could hear his father’s voice say it.

Controlling. Angry. Taking away from him. Grabbing. His son made passive, brutalized by the storm of temper if he moved or rebelled.

Pulling you out? said a voice inside him. Isn’t that what you want? You’ll be safe from

The hands pressing on Theo’s face.

We’re through with you, his father had told him. You make this right or we’re through with you.

DAD

DANIEL

He lifted his thumb from the phone.

No, he could never tell his father. Because of the incident at FW. It had destroyed what little was left of their trust.

This was not Andrew’s first time in the acrid presence of death. It had brushed him once. He had peered into its fog and shuddered. That time it had been a disaster. That time it had ruined everything.

You cannot tell about the white-haired boy.

He drew up onto the bed. He curled into a ball. He stared at the blue wallpaper striped with brown.

HE IS IN another dormitory room in country Connecticut, where the roads spin and dip and each village boasts its own whitewashed Puritan church. Where Frederick Williams Academy keeps you safe with its black iron gates and attenuated brick dormitories and groomed grounds and acres of trees and playing fields. Andrew is sitting on the floor, his legs splayed. There is a small glassine bag beside him with a ridged top. The word FLATLINE is stenciled on it, a kind of perverse brand name. Across from him is Daniel Schwartz. Daniel sags. Andrew struggles with himself, trying to stir, wait, he is saying, wait, then shaking his friend, because this doesn’t look right, but his friend is no longer there, his friend is turning blue, his mind has been kidnapped, carried off on a gypsy adventure on sunlit hills while Andrew is fighting struggles of his own against the drug fuck how much did I do this must be lots more potent than the last bag we tried because Daniel seems to be left alone there on the ground while he, Andrew, rises aloft, he is standing in the giant wicker sun-warmed basket of a hot air balloon, and up here, God is talking to him in great silent lightning flashes, showing him he has wasted everything, showing him his life is an empty lunchbox. Andrew vomits, vomits from the self-disgust and the loss, from the dead serious fear Daniel looks really fucking BLUE and he takes his cell phone from his jeans pocket. Andrew punches the three numbers and then SEND and lies back gazing at Daniel and idly wondering what the paramedics will think when they see him with an overdosed teenager at his feet and vomit on his legs.

WHEN HE HEARD months later, he was comparatively calm. He was in his room, at home, in Killingworth. There was a lawn mower buzzing nearby. And it was just a phone call. No one implicated him. He was just . . . informed. He was able to hang up the phone quite calmly, roll over in bed, and begin, in private, the long, slow process of feeling his own guts corrode.

“ARE YOU ALL right, man?”

Andrew turned his head. Roddy recoiled. He was standing in the doorway, holding a long black umbrella.

“You gave me the shivers. You look like a dead thing lying there. You coming?”

“Coming where?”

“To dinner! God, you don’t look well.” Roddy shook his head. “Come on. I’ll wait for you.”

ANDREW RECOVERED SUFFICIENTLY to pad behind Roddy to the dining hall and he stood in a half stupor in line. As he made his way through the tables, he caught the first wave of sidelong glances, the whispers behind hands. Boys’ faces lifted and stared. The younger ones openly curious; the middle forms furtive; the Sixth Formers awkward, as if Andrew were the bereaved. Andrew attached himself, with Roddy, to the least objectionable group, the house squares, Henry and Oliver and Rhys. Conversation stopped when he sat down at the table. Henry defensively admitted, “We were talking about Theo.” When dinner was over Andrew trailed behind them to the house, passive, listening with detachment as they tried, alternately, to process the death and distract themselves with their ordinary chatter.

FOR THE DAYS following, the rain continued, dull, pounding, remorseless as a headache. The Hill came to resemble not so much a proud crest, the highest point south of the Urals, but a set of shoulders hunched against the downpour and the winds. Black umbrellas appeared in profusion; skinny-legged boys clutched them earnestly while balancing books and trying to keep hats on their heads; laughter vanished from the High Street, replaced by coughing. Temperatures dropped; chills invaded. As if in sympathy with their dead friend, boys became sick, dry-coughed or wet-coughed through the night, sprouted fevers. Older boys grumbled as rugger practices were canceled. It’s like there’s nothing to do but sit and think of Theo, griped Roddy, voicing the sentiments of many: forced bloody mourning. On the day of the memorial service for Theo—presided over by Father Peter in the chapel, and thronged with Lottites—it was the blackest day of all, cloud cover like a steel ceiling and gushing, pouring rain, an absurdly tragic scene; alleviated, momentarily, by the bright rhetoric and charm of the many speakers, but ruined again by the wet sobs of the smaller boys, the vindictive downpour awaiting them outside, their need to puddle-hop, without dignity, to dining hall after. And in the Lot, even the boy with the plummiest accent, a Fifth Former named Clegg-Bowra (who, it was known, personally owned a share in a Formula One team and took nothing, not lessons, not sport, seriously), began holding court in the snooker room and gossiping like a charwoman. There’s a curse on the school, he drawled nasally. It’s never rained like this in the history of Harrow. At this rate it will still be raining by Speech Day, and we’ll all be here with our parents, sneezing. People are getting sick. Theo Ryder was just the first victim. I think they should close the school, personally, he continued. And where’s the communication? No one’s saying what killed Theo. For all we know it was a murder and some psychopath up in the church graveyard is lying in wait to throttle more Harrovians. They hate us, you know, the Kevins, he said, using the school lingo—an Irish slur—for local, townie. Due to the chill, the heat was turned on, unseasonally; the pipes clanked and hissed. No one could get the damp out of their shoes. The felt in the snooker tables buckled.

No explanations were forthcoming about Theo’s death. Only a terse note, posted on the bulletin board in the Lot and signed by the assistant master, Macrae, requesting that everyone soldier on with their work while the coroner did his, and that anyone who desired to speak to a counselor should avail themselves of Mr. Macrae or Matron or Father Peter. Piers Fawkes was conspicuously missing from the list, and from sight; Matron suggested to some that he was busy with arrangements with the family, who were in South Africa, and with the police and coroner. Macrae seemed to be enjoying the spotlight, and Andrew suspected that the assistant master was using Fawkes’s absence as an opportunity to ingratiate himself with the boys, especially the older, more influential ones—St. John and Vaz and their fawning crew, with teas and bull sessions, visible through the window in Macrae’s kitchen, just to the side of the Lot in the assistant housemaster’s residence. Once Andrew passed under this window on his way to Mr. Montague’s lesson, and all the faces turned to him. Vaz, St. John, and Macrae in a tall-backed chair, with a smug but guilty look, like a duke caught trying out the king’s throne. There was a moment of mutual apprehension. Andrew suspected they were talking about him. He moved on, ducking his head against the rain.

Andrew avoided these gatherings; he avoided the common room, the dining hall; any place the whispers might arise, there’s the American, the one who found Theo, or the questions might resume did you see what killed him? was there any blood? He went straight to his room after lessons, even skipping meals, getting by on a handful of the biscuits Matron left for the boys in a wicker basket in the snooker room. He would sit cross-legged on his bed, spilling crumbs on the scratchy wool blanket. He knew that he should tell someone what he had seen, crazy as it was. Maybe information about a vanishing, skeletal, strangling figure could help the detectives. Or the family. Or someone. But he also knew the most likely outcome was that he would be branded mentally ill, or fatally damaged by the shock. So rather than speak out and add to the chaos and fear, he isolated himself. He did not call his parents. He did not check his email. He plunged into his lessons, abandoning TV and hallway chatter. His class on Roman Britain became, for him, an addictive serial; he wrote a five-sided essay on Camulodunum, Fortress of the War God. He read Chaucer for Mr. Montague and whiled away hours training himself to read the lilting, alliterative-inflected Middle English. From his window he watched the rain beat down on the Hill.

ONE NIGHT AT dinner he found himself sitting across from Vaz. The table seemed tensed, poised.

“Hello,” said Vaz pointedly.

“Hey,” he replied.

Forks clinked on plates, but all eyes were on Andrew. Flickering between him and Vaz. It seemed that the house had something to say to Andrew and had appointed Vaz its unofficial spokesman.

“Everything all right?” asked Vaz, almost chummy, a little too loud.

“Not really,” said Andrew.

“It’s a tragedy,” agreed Vaz.

“Yeah, it is. Theo was an awesome guy.”

“People are saying he died of drugs,” said Vaz. “That he got from you.”

Andrew’s stomach dropped. He forced himself to swallow. The table fell quiet. “Why would anyone say that?” he asked.

“You were caught with drugs at your old school. They wouldn’t let you into university in America, so you came here.”

“What?” objected Andrew, weakly.

Vaz’s eyes narrowed. “I know Theo would never take drugs.”

“Not in a million years,” piped in St. John.

“So either it’s a lie,” continued Vaz, “or you pushed them on him.”

The food in Andrew’s mouth turned to cardboard. He glanced around the table. All the faces—Oliver, Henry, Roddy, Rhys, Nick, Leland, names he had struggled to learn—turned to him, watching for his reaction.

“I don’t do drugs anymore,” he said. “I was never that into it. Just a couple of times. I don’t see how you know this anyway.”

Vaz regarded him coolly, confidently. He definitely knew something. Andrew recalled that tableau: Vaz. Macrae. The others. Macrae would probably know the background of how Andrew got to Harrow. Andrew grew angry.

“If it wasn’t drugs,” sneered Vaz, “then what happened up there, with Theo? Why isn’t anyone saying?”

“If he died from drugs he got from me, you think I would still be sitting here?” Andrew countered, finding his voice.

Vaz, undaunted, shrugged. “What is it, then? You were there.”

The boys leaned in, watching Andrew.

He opened his mouth. The image of the pale face rushed at him. That baying gurgle. Andrew blanched. He pushed away from the table, infuriated and humiliated by Vaz’s ignorant, implacable fat face, those black eyes that stayed locked on him—amused. Andrew stood. He walked away from the Sixth Form table, shaking.

Psycho he heard someone mutter.

Nothing like this happened till he came.

Don’t mind us we’ll clean up after you called Vaz, shoving aside Andrew’s plate in a gesture of disgust.

THE SIXTH FORM table at the Lot was not the only place where the absence of facts, and the ominous rain, led to speculation. It was a murder. A drug overdose. A murder by a drug gang. A mysterious illness.

These rumors led to calls home. Calls home produced parents’ calls to the school. These calls fed indignation—boys’ and masters’—about the unexplained situation, leading to talk of little else. In Ancient History: Sir, was it drugs? In Maths: Sir, is the school hiding something? In French: Sir, were Kevins—sorry, the local townspeople—involved? The masters bumbled. They hadn’t been briefed. The request to let the family grieve privately . . . to honor the dead by keeping up the mission of the school . . . just wasn’t working. Somebody must have told the headmaster it was getting absurd—nothing was getting done.

On the third day, a school meeting was called, in Speech Room.

SPEECH ROOM WERE words spoken with special emphasis at Harrow. They conveyed gravitas and pride. Speech Room, tucked into the hillside, was the heart of the school. The site of the main school plays, school meetings; in the summer it would be host to Speech Day, an annual event where Sixth Formers, about to matriculate, addressed students, parents, and important guests with prepared speeches, poetry, and soliloquies—a kind of valedictory-address-as-entertainment; a display of their maturity through oratory.

The day of the meeting, clumps of students pushed their way into Speech Room. Andrew entered alone. As he shuffled his way to a seat, he felt that silence descend again. Cold, inquisitive eyes bore into him. He wished he had waited for Roddy.

Speech Room was not a room, in fact, but an amphitheater, seating five hundred in tightly packed, high-backed chairs. Stairs climbed to the back walls and their stained-glass windows; slender columns rose to an ornate paneled ceiling. At the front rose a stage, and on it stood a podium. On this day, a day with a darkening sky, at eleven in the morning, the headmaster, Colin Jute, took the podium, draped in his black robes. Ramrod straight with a vigorous chin, light hair going grey swept in a side part, and a cauliflower ear (he’d been a rugby player, part of his personal legend). His jowls hung balefully. Next to him slumped Piers Fawkes, legs crossed, with several long nights written on his face. Next to Fawkes sat a thin man, just forty, with wavy brown hair and tortoiseshell glasses. He was the only person onstage not in beak’s robes, and the only one in the room not dressed in dark colors: he wore a seasonal light green sport coat and slacks. He held a thick folder. Not a detective. Too skinny and professional. A doctor? The man pivoted his head, birdlike, not masking his curiosity at the sight before him: several hundred boys, washed and unwashed, beefy, prepubescent, peach-skinned, brown, the full diversity of schoolboys despite their identical dress and narrow range of social class, fidgeting in unaccustomed silence. The great semicircular room—which usually bounced with joshing and chatter—sounded only with coughs and whispers and creaking chairs. The headmaster stepped forward to speak. The whispers faded instantly. Andrew sank into his seat. He felt sick. He closed his eyes and waited for the words. Theo Ryder was strangled on the morning of September 9th. . . . If only someone had spotted his assailant, we might be safe today, and his killer brought to justice. . . .

The headmaster lifted his chin and started confirming the key facts: that Theodore Ryder, a Sixth Former in the Lot, died on the morning of September 9. Ryder appeared to have been ill, and he appeared to have died of that illness. The inquest doctor (the headmaster gestured to the man in the sport coat) had graciously agreed to join the meeting; Dr. Sloane . . . (even in mourning, the five hundred boys could not resist a ripple of amusement: Oh, WELL, Dr. Sloane, Mrrrowww; Dr. Sloane peered at the crowd, puzzled and curious why his name would cause a stir, not realizing that to a pack of toffs, having a name shared with London’s tony Sloane Square, but not being of Sloane Square, was pretention itself) . . . Dr. Sloane would speak shortly and allow the boys to hear the details firsthand, to ask questions, and to satisfy themselves with the answers. This would be the first time and, the headmaster sincerely hoped, the last that he would be forced to report the death of a boy at school.

Theodore Ryder . . . the doctor was speaking now. He gazed from his glasses—thick ones—as if staring into blinding stage lights. He spoke nasally, clinically. A computer nerd of medicine.

Theodore Ryder died of a pulmonary sarcoidosis, a disease which, when left untreated, attacks the function of the lungs. What was at first puzzling to us was the apparent speed of the onset of the disease, pushing glasses up the nose, since according to the family Theodore exhibited none of the traditional symptoms associated with the onset of sarcoid, such as fatigue. Even up to the night before—here the doctor checked his notes—Theodore Ryder’s next-door neighbor reported him apparently in perfect health. Andrew reddened, flush with a combination of relief—it wasn’t drugs! it wasn’t a murder!—and mortification. He would have given anything not to be mentioned today. Just leave me out of it, he pleaded.

“Suh?”

A hand shot up. Electric bolts shot up Andrew’s back. What would this boy ask? Would it be about him? The doctor looked around, disoriented.

The headmaster rose in a billow of gown. “The boys are encouraged to ask questions,” he reminded Dr. Sloane. “Thank you, Mr. Clegg-Bowra. Please.”

The boy rose. “Sir, what was Theo doing on Church Hill?”

Piers Fawkes stood quickly to explain the place-name in the doctor’s ear. The place where he was found. Up on the hill.

“I am a pathologist and not a psychiatrist,” replied Dr. Sloane with a smile, unctuously; “therefore I cannot explain any motivation Theodore Ryder would have had for walking to a certain spot. But from a medical perspective . . . perhaps we can find a motivation.

“Time of death I place between seven and nine in the morning. Let us assume therefore Theodore died while walking to breakfast. His lung volume would have been greatly reduced by the presence of granulomas and swollen lymph tissue. They would be hardened, unable to stretch. He would have experienced shortness of breath. Then difficulty breathing. He would have experienced acute distress. As this difficulty became urgent, then life-threatening, panic would have set in. If such an event transpired at the hospital, we would at this point take emergency measures such as inserting an endotracheal tube to force the patient to breathe . . . but of course Theodore was not in hospital. So he did, I would suspect, what is natural—again, conjecture,” another incongruous and wholly inappropriate smile, “—which is to seek high ground, associating an open environment with open air. More oxygen. Which he would have badly needed since he was, in effect, suffocating.”

Colin Jute had grown intensely uncomfortable throughout this long-winded and depressing answer. He had invited the doctor to provide clinical reassurance, not to frighten the boys and add his own colorful terms. Another hand shot up. Jute leapt to his feet and pointed, hoping the question was not a medical one.

“So there were no drugs involved?” barked a red-haired boy.

“We tested for drugs and found nothing,” responded the doctor nasally. “But that might be a question better answered by the police . . .”

The headmaster had had enough of the doctor. He took back the podium. The police, he thundered, had investigated thoroughly and found absolutely no sign of drugs, or crime of any kind. Theodore Ryder died of natural causes. He delivered these words in a scolding voice implying And just let me hear any more nonsense to the contrary. This was not turning out to be the outpouring of emotion he had planned, and he was willing to force the discourse back into line if necessary.

“More questions,” the headmaster commanded.

There were several. Was the infection contagious? The doctor redeemed himself here. Not in the slightest . . . sarcoidosis is actually a fairly mysterious disease whose causes and development are poorly understood by science; but one thing we do know is that it is not communicable . . . and so on. The headmaster sniffed. Not communicable was better: authoritative, reassuring. Something the boys could pass on to their parents.

Was the body to be buried on campus, in a special memorial?

No, the parents had arranged transport back to Johannesburg. . . .

Would any further school days be canceled?

Their goal was not to disrupt the boys’ lives any more than necessary. . . .

The headmaster relaxed. Much better. They were on the homestretch. He counted the minutes until he could wrap up. He pointed to boys’ raised hands with the aplomb of a talk-show host, almost enjoying himself. Until he pointed at the skinny fellow in the back.

“It sounds like tuberculosis,” the boy shouted.

It wasn’t a question; it was a hand grenade. The room froze. The headmaster puffed up like a bullfrog. It . . . you . . . he stammered.

Now it was the doctor’s turn to come to the headmaster’s aid. Tuberculosis, he drawled, had an extremely low rate of incidence in England. At Clementine Churchill Hospital, they see zero cases per year . . . virtually unknown. . . .

“But Theo was from Africa. There are millions of cases in Africa,” belted the boy. “I was there last summer. There were public warnings about spitting.”

A nervous rumble from the crowd. Theodore Ryder did not have tuberculosis. You just heard from the inquest doctor. Thank you, Mr. Ross-Collins, that is the end of that line of questioning, stormed the headmaster. He nearly hip-checked the doctor back to his seat. Shifted to housekeeping. The school would send the family a wreath and make a contribution to a charity in the boy’s name. Classes would resume tomorrow. Mr. Moreton would take a group tomorrow to Hairspray, playing on the West End; sign up in the Classics Schools. Thank you all. Dismissed.

WHEN THEY EMERGED, the morning sky cast its first fat drops of the day like stones, whacking the boys’ hat brims as they spilled onto the Speech Room promenade. The throng buzzed about the strange meeting and the provocative final exchange. And before the first boys had walked fifty yards, the drops came fast and hard and heavy, drumming the Hill in all-out artillery fire. The boys scattered, holding their boaters and their notebooks over their heads and darting for their houses. Andrew hung back, taking refuge in a basement-level doorway. But the rain did not relent. It came down in sheets. At last he bolted out into it, alone, isolated in the spray and the torrent, and finally arrived at the Lot sopping wet. The Lot lobby was packed. Boys gathered in clusters, steaming in the warmth, vigorously debating the events of the school meeting. Voices rose and chattered; eyes cast around uncertainly, as if expecting someone to pop through the door with more news. Though they could not articulate it, they all felt it: No one, not even the top man, had seen the doctor’s explanation coming. Lung volume? Suffocating? They shivered and wiped the rain from their faces.

Seeing Andrew enter, Vaz fell silent, and the others around him took his cue. Andrew stopped, feeling the pierce of Vaz’s black eyes. Andrew should have felt triumph. See? I told you it wasn’t drugs! I told you it wasn’t me! But it didn’t matter, he now realized. In Vaz’s eyes he was a scumbag. A stooped, shifty drug dealer. Andrew’s past had come out, and it now defined him. He did not belong at Harrow, those eyes told him. He was an undesirable. An interloper.

Then Vaz’s glance shifted, leading the room’s with it. Something behind Andrew attracted their attention.

Andrew turned and saw what they saw: Piers Fawkes, in a raincoat, damp and unhappy-looking. He led two oversize adults into the foyer. A bearlike man with a creased, overtanned face in a black raincoat. A woman with sun-bleached hair, carefully curled but damped by the weather. Something in the woman’s face was hauntingly familiar. An avian nose and deep-set eyes. Theo’s eyes.

The two groups stared at one another for a moment. One by one, the students picked up the clues:

Both adults wore black—black raincoats, black suit, black dress.

The woman looked expensive but wore no jewelry.

Sorrow fogged over their faces. Their eyes were watery. Their frowns deep. Watching them, you had the sense that the funniest joke, the wildest adventure, could not rouse in them a speck of joy, not if you tried for weeks.

And there was something else. It pulsed from the two grown-ups as they stood staring at the boys.

Bitterness. Envy. Resentment at the living. They clearly had not expected to see such a crowd, and the sentiment just slipped out of them. Hot blood coursed through all these boys’ veins . . . while their son Theo lay refrigerating in some London funeral home.

The crowd of damp boys hung back. Fawkes motioned for the couple to move toward the stairwell. They were on their way to Theo’s room to retrieve his belongings. But the standoff continued. Mr. and Mrs. Ryder were transfixed by the vision of all these uniformed copies of their son.

Rhys Davies broke the spell. He strode across the foyer and extended his hand to Mr. Ryder, then to Mrs. Ryder.

“Theo was the best of us,” he said.

One by one, and then in small groups, all the boys, the Sixth Formers and the smallest Shell, followed Rhys, crossing to the grieving couple and shaking their hands. They expressed their condolences or just smiled briefly and sympathetically and moved on. Fawkes watched, surprised but gratified. The parents smiled to the extent that they could. They shook hands; they murmured politely and nodded. The father was a great sunburned ape, with feathery blond hair and heavy lips, and to their surprise it was he, not the mother, who began to blubber. He was too overwhelmed and too polite to pause and find a handkerchief, so he kept on shaking hands and nodding and thanking the boys while tears slicked his face.

MATRON OPENED ANDREW’S door some time later, huffing as usual.

“I’ve been looking for you,” she said. “This came for you. From Sir Alan Vine’s daughter.”

Her vinegary tone left no doubt that she questioned what business Andrew had communicating with Sir Alan Vine’s daughter. She held out a small purple envelope.

Andrew Taylor, the envelope announced in girlishly looping blue ink. Matron retreated. He ripped it open.

Andrew,

Pick me up at Headland after supper tomorrow and we’ll surprise Piers with his new Byron.

Persephone

PS If possible please learn to act before then.

PPS Sorry about your friend.

He smiled his lopsided smile in spite of himself. Just what he needed, he thought. More drama.