From an earlier, legitimate visit, Fred knew the walls were hung with photographs of Armitage from another day: early hockey teams; classes from 1912, when only twenty boys a year graduated, all of them bound for colleges even the best students would kill now to get into, a berth secured merely with a letter from the headmaster, in brutal contrast to the heavy dossiers of achievement required now. Even so, maybe those old guys deserved their spots at Princeton and Yale. Their faces were full of stern dedication to duty, boys who would serve in the great wars. Most long dead. But Harvey Fuller could probably name the raw-faced teenagers in those faded pictures and also list the four or so students who had chosen military service as their career since Korea. Although he wasn’t technically the archivist—that job belonged to an ancient local alumnus named Samuel Briggs—everyone leaned on Harvey to pluck out the most telling details of the school’s past. When people spoke about institutional memory, they usually meant something rather abstract. In Harvey, this idea had condensed in an actual person, like a toxic nugget of musk.
It was not useful to have his mind wander toward Harvey at the moment. A memory of the man’s face—he’d been Fred’s teacher—triggered guilt, and he felt enough at odds with himself as it was. He wasn’t sure where he should start looking, though he knew the papers he was after wouldn’t be in the actual files for the 1950s; nothing was officially on record about the incident on which he wanted information. He wasn’t even entirely certain that the papers of former heads were kept here. But he’d confirmed that they weren’t in the library, and without exciting the suspicions of Mary Manchester, no small feat. Mary had doggedly guarded the card catalog in the basement out of some dragonlike loyalty to the old ways, though the heavy drawers took up space Porter wanted to use for new computers. She’d recently lost the battle to have them saved indefinitely, but Fred had found and pocketed the card he needed before the movers could come. The manila rectangle had merely said, “Papers of a personal nature, correspondence 1954–1955, archives,” and had no Dewey number attached. The handwriting was like no other he had seen in the catalog, delicate but firm, and that fragile, human trace was what he was looking for now.
Though the room was compact, Fred realized it contained an enormous amount of material. Bound volumes lined one wall, file cabinets another, and low shelves the two others. He felt a twinge of despair. It could take months to sort through it all, and he didn’t want to spend months on this dubious project. He flashed his light around the room and saw with a start that he’d briefly illuminated a picture of his grandfather Llewellan Naylor. He edged closer to the photo, taken, its typewritten caption said, in 1953. In it, Llewellan looked exhilarated. He had his arm around the shoulder of a student and was smiling into the lens, looking straight at the camera, his strong teeth a blinding slash of white, his hair dark and curly, the very image of confidence, intelligence, good humor. A person worthy of trust.
Fred thought about his grandfather, who had died last year, and knew with a flush of shame that Llewellan would have been enraged that Fred was rooting around in these old papers, searching for the details of a story that might well turn out to be wholly false. But that was wishful thinking. Fred’s intuition was uncomfortably certain that something deeply unpleasant could indeed emerge about his grandfather. Llewellan had been a dominant force in his life, the presiding male. Fred had acquired the deepest, fiercest lessons from him, and to search seriously for flaws in a powerful mentor was to invite betrayal.
Fred started with the file cabinets, opening the bottom drawer, his hands slipping with sweat, his teeth clenched on the penlight. The headings on the cardboard files were handwritten, in curling penmanship, in what was probably India ink. “Admissions,” “Assembly programs, 1941.” The wrong years, the wrong writing.
As he flicked through the contents, Fred thought about the man named Malcolm Smith, whose visit this April had prompted his descent into the archives. Not finding what he was looking for, Fred shut the drawer for the 1940s a little more sharply than he’d intended. Smith had had squirrel-bright eyes, rounded shoulders, tweedy clothes, very much like most of the graduates who wandered back to stroll the campus and engage in diluted versions of the competitions that had stirred their lives as young men. Smith had sought Fred out, claiming to want to observe an art class and the work of current students. “He’s an artist,” said Sarah Talmadge, the assistant head and an admired colleague. “Sorry, Fred. Would you mind? I know it’s a bit of a drag, but he’s an alum.” Fred and Sarah, old-school Armitage, knew better than to offend any former student. Big gifts could come from unexpected sources, and it was always wise to court them.
Besides, Fred honestly didn’t mind. Unlike some of his colleagues, sensitive to the point of paranoia, Fred didn’t really care who observed him. He was confident in the classroom, a natural. As a teacher, he had nothing to hide. When it came time for his annual evaluations, he tended not to notice Porter or Sarah or whoever had been slated to write up his report sitting in the corner of the room. Malcolm Smith had produced a sharply different effect the moment he stepped in the studio. In spite of the old man’s silence, something in his presence was obtrusive. Fred could feel Smith’s eyes on him as he discussed two-point perspective with his ninth graders. He couldn’t shake the unease he felt when the old man took his hand and looked searchingly in his face. Searchingly, but not kindly. “You look like him,” Smith said firmly. “You look very much like your grandfather.”
It was something people who had known them both commented on frequently. Apart from their hair color—Fred was blond and Llewellan very dark—they shared not just similar bones but similar voices and even mannerisms. Bizarrely, Fred’s father seemed to have been passed over genetically, as if nature had known the son’s personality wasn’t quite worth replicating. “You knew my grandfather?” Fred asked, guessing Smith was the right age to have been at Armitage during Llewellan’s tenure.
“Oh yes, indeed,” said Smith. Students were inspecting their easels. In these beginning classes, Fred considered it his job to get the kids to like art. Not just looking at it but making it. To that end, they began most classes with a free-drawing assignment. He played a piece of music, Xeroxed a poem or a joke, gave them an image or a quote to work from. The students enjoyed the space he allowed them, this easing into the period, especially since the classes were often the first of the day. Today, the assignment was to think about their favorite place on campus and try to re-create it from memory, using perspective. They were working in charcoal, and Fred could hear the soft scratch of the sticks on the large pads of paper.
“Were you a student of his?” Fred asked Malcolm Smith, fumbling for more information. What did he want, this man?
“Not exactly, in that none of us was. As you know, he didn’t teach,” Smith answered. “But I was here when he was headmaster. He was quite a personality, your grandfather.”
“He was,” said Fred with more warmth than he intended. He could tell Smith had something harsh to add. Usually, when these old guys figured out who Fred was, they wanted to regale him with stories about his grandfather’s savvy handling of young boys. Scrapes they found themselves in that he helped get them out of. His swiftness on hockey skates the years the pond froze before it snowed and they could all sweep out across the black, bubbled ice. The worst thing former charges ever said about him concerned his radically off-key but enthusiastic singing and the battle that Higgins, the organist, had ineffectively waged to keep him silent during Christmas services. Apparently, Llewellan always answered that God would rather hear himself praised than not, even by someone with a tin ear. Well-worn, harmless anecdotes.
But this man clearly felt differently about Fred’s grandfather. What he had to say was not going to be wedged inside a cheerful anecdote. Just then, however, a student asked a question about how to achieve shadings in charcoal. Fred took his time explaining, hoping Smith would take the hint and leave.
He did not. The moment Fred had fin
ished with his student, the old man was back at his elbow, whispering savagely, “He wasn’t what he seemed, Llewellan Naylor. You might want to learn more about the events of the winter of 1955. You might, Mr. Naylor, need to revise your opinion of your grandfather.”
Fred’s first reaction had been rage. His memories of Llewellan were banked in clear, clean light: the man had taught him to fish, swim, pitch a tent, hike a mountain. He’d been a bearer of practical wisdom. Not kind. No one ever described Llewellan as warm. But present, firm, and above all, strong. Intelligent and strong. So much more effective than Fred’s father, Harrison, the son so weak he couldn’t even pass his looks on to his boys. It was for Llewellan that Fred had come to Armitage as a student and returned to it as a teacher.
“What do you want to say, Mr. Smith?” Fred asked, keeping his voice low. The students were busy working, and if they sensed tension, they’d immediately start staring.
Smith gave a terse, smug smile. “I’ll let you discover the particulars for yourself, Mr. Naylor. You might want to find out what you can about a student named Edward Smith, my older brother. The Class of 1955. No longer a contributing alumnus. He died.” Then he turned, as quickly as it was possible for a man of sixty-nine to turn, and left the studio.
“Who was that guy, Mr. Naylor?” asked Quinn Foster at the end of class. “He gave me the creeps,” she said, and Fred silently agreed.
Worse than the creeps, he thought. He’d been malevolent. Some acid ball of memory had been roiling inside him, rotting his stomach until he’d needed to spit up the whole, vile mess. He had probably planned this moment for years, deciding finally that Fred was the person he was heading toward, waiting until he couldn’t stand it any longer. Fred shook his head, trying to clear it of such targeted hatred. But Smith’s ploy had worked; the man had gotten his attention.
For the first week after Smith’s visit, Fred had tried to forget about him and the story he brought. But as April wore on, he found himself increasingly distracted by the idea that Llewellan had been involved in something shameful. Slowly, and with deeply assumed casualness, he began to search for traces of Edward Smith. He first ran a quick Google search, but the name was so common that even with keywords like “Armitage” attached, nothing useful emerged, and Fred decided that he would start with sources closer to home. He looked then for Edward on the wooden plaques that listed the names of all the graduating seniors for each class, boards that ran down the walls of the dining hall and the many long corridors of the school: rosters of boys from distinguished families, many names crowned with Roman numerals. But Edward’s wasn’t there. Fred’s next attempt to locate him centered on the yearbook for 1955, but Edward barely appeared in that, either. He had no senior page; no announcement mourning his death had been published; and Fred found him only once, in a sea of white faces in a photo of the Glee Club, which must have been taken early in the fall. Yet in the book for 1954, to Fred’s concern, he discovered far more evidence of Edward’s existence: there he was, a short boy with a wide smile, a junior in Greaves, a member of the chorus and the theater club. He appeared as well in the books for 1952 and 1953, his only pursuits apparently music and theater. In 1952, he had played Ophelia, and on page 73, Fred found a picture of him in blond braids, arm thrown dramatically over his brow.
By the end of April, Fred had started looking in academy records, and his worry increased by small but measurable degrees. A thorough examination of admissions files had shown nothing. Every other student who had graduated from Armitage in 1955, and several who had made it only through their sophomore or junior years, had their records intact. But Edward’s papers were nowhere to be found.
Fred enlarged the scope of his search, fitting the project in with growing unease on weekends or late at night when not on duty. Malcolm was amply documented. A good student, top of his class, won the art prize. Went to Brown. From Providence, Rhode Island, living now in Little Compton. A painter of more than competent if rather boring landscapes if the pictures on the Web from his gallery were to be trusted. Married, though no children appeared to have attended Armitage. No record, even of his having come back for reunions or having given a cent, though the development people guarded their information zealously and Fred might be wrong on that front. The Smiths had money, but none of it appeared to have filtered down to the academy.
It had taken weeks of rather clandestine work to gather even that much. And still, news about Edward was hard to come by. Then Fred had unearthed the library card with the distinctive handwriting. The archives were what was left, apart from combing Google or Porter’s office, where Fred assumed some of the more sensitive material that heads had access to was still kept. And breaking into Porter’s office was something he couldn’t face. He felt a queasy parallel between himself and Malcolm Smith; he was beginning to understand what it might be like to live with a noxious obsession, and it had been only a couple of months. Opening the next drawer in the cabinet, marked merely “1950s,” Fred was visited with a brief panic that what he found out was going to change him in ways he would not find comfortable.
As an artist, he was supposed to savor difficulty: it was supposed to feed his work, keep him productively off balance. As a teacher with a safe, pleasant job, this prospect horrified him. He wondered for a moment what side of his personality would win out: the part that could spend ten-hour days in the studio week after week, painting with both wild focus and abandon, or the part that happily traded Sox gossip with Alice Grassley while nursing a cup of coffee. Knowing exactly how the year would progress in step by measured step. But that wasn’t true, he told himself. Look how this year was ending. Then, toward the back of the file, he found a folder marked with the same handwriting that graced the old catalog card. He was on the brink of grabbing it when he heard a sound.
Footsteps, unmistakably. Someone was walking down the tunnel. And not exactly stealthily. He had to move fast. He wouldn’t examine the folder tonight. And he couldn’t risk being discovered in this room. Slipping out of the archives, dousing the penlight, and pocketing the keys, Fred cocked his head for an instant and followed the sound of the retreating feet.
Trotting slightly to keep up, Fred rounded a bend and saw, without a huge amount of surprise, Scotty Johnston. “Scotty,” he called, “slow down.” He saw the boy’s back tense, the flicker of doubt run through his body as he decided whether to bolt or be caught. But Fred knew what he’d decide; he’d coached the boy since his freshman year, and he was more familiar with Scotty than he cared to be.
Scotty was the captain of the varsity soccer, squash, and crew teams. He was going to Harvard, as had his brothers, father, uncles, and grandfather, a thicket of relatives just as blond, tall, and self-assured. That he was also a major smoker of pot, probably a dealer, and almost universally disliked by the faculty hadn’t prevented his acceptance. His erg scores probably had something to do with that. He was a moderately good student but an absolutely brilliant athlete. Magically, the marijuana had yet to diminish his performance. Six foot three, broad at the shoulders, the owner of blue eyes and a tapered waist, Scotty Johnston was catnip to girls and rowing coaches. Easygoing when it came to judging character, Fred had found that, after four years of exposure to Scotty, he had come to loathe him. With a prickle of discomfort, he was looking forward to what could be referred to in only the most technical terms as busting Scotty’s ass.
But he wasn’t prepared for the grin on the boy’s face. “Hey, Mr. Naylor. Nice night for a little B and E. Find what you were looking for? Good move to score the keys from Jackson. Easiest mark in the crew.”
The only solution was to hit back as sharply as possible. A classic soccer move. Look up the midfield, then strike for the goal just when the goalie thought you were going to send the ball to a fullback. “Whose word carries more weight, Scott? Mine or yours? Ms. Phelan’s been looking into that midnight raid when you were caught running to Claire’s dorm. Anything to do with that situation? If I were you, I’d be carefu
l about leveling accusations right now.” Joyce had sent out an all-faculty e-mail late Monday night, letting teachers know that Scotty had been seen hightailing it back from Portland. Fred had also heard that Scotty had been questioned by police that afternoon, but not about the outcome of that interrogation. People were being tight-lipped about their conversations with the police, maintaining a level of discretion unusual for Armitage’s population, who traded gossip with the vigor and expertise of village women.
Fred would never have predicted what happened next. A look of pure panic ran across Scotty’s face, and he looked as nervous as any scrawny kid on the first day of school. He charged past Fred and back down the tunnel. Too surprised to follow, Fred heard Scotty’s quickly moving footsteps and then the slam of a door. Heading in the direction that the terrified boy had come from—it had been Claire’s name, Fred was sure of it, that had sparked the fear—he went looking for traces of what Scotty might have been up to. As soon as he got out of the tunnels, he’d call security, and all of it would most certainly mean more trouble for Scotty, both with the school and perhaps with the police. He’d have to come up with some excuse about why he himself had been down there, but there was nothing for that. Satisfying his curiosity about what Scotty had been doing here would take only a minute. Touching the handles of the doors that lined the tunnel, Fred found them uniformly cool until he reached one about a third of the way down: the knob was warm, as if recently palmed. Opening the lock with the skeleton key, Fred was surprised to find himself in a storeroom with a lot of old computer equipment. He was even more surprised to find that the plastic roof and screen of a monitor near the door was almost hot to the touch. Someone, probably Scotty, had taken some care to unplug it and try to hide the cords below some plastic sheeting, but Fred guessed that he had been using this outmoded Mac. Fred looked more closely in the beam of his penlight: yes, he wasn’t imagining it. The computer had been wired for dial-up. A few weekends before, he had gone to Connecticut to help his mother at last change hers over to a faster service. For some reason, Scotty Johnston had wanted to use the Internet without resorting to the school’s network.
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