Fred opened the old file and pulled out two manila envelopes, each sealed with a disk of red cardboard and a short length of red string. The first held the entire record of Edward Smith’s life at Armitage Academy. With one hand on the flashlight, and the other sorting through the papers, Fred saw that someone had bothered to preserve all the material he had been looking for: it had indeed been confiscated and compiled somewhere else. Edward’s application for admission; a letter from his father saying how much he wanted his son to have the benefit of the best education available in America if not the world; a recommendation from an eighth-grade teacher of Edward’s who praised his “sensitive way with language and his innate politeness.” His reports from Third, Fourth, and Fifth Form. The letters from the head of his dormitory, Francis Clapham, telling his parents that Edward was a “model Armitage boy, except for a rather marked disinterest in athletics.”
But then, Fred saw, the tone changed, and he saw, too, the first instance of Llewellan’s involvement. In December 1954, there was a letter from the father, saying that Edward had returned for Christmas break senior year in an overwrought state that at first his parents attributed to too much work. “Our boy is delicate and takes things much to heart,” the words read. “But when we were able to settle him, he told us something very grave, Mr. Naylor, about certain masters at Armitage,” and he then named three men whom Fred had known as a child. Three men who had served Armitage collectively for more than one hundred years. Men for whom dorms were named. Men to whom the yearbook had been dedicated, often multiple times. Men who had formed the very image of what it was to be part of the academy. The letter went on: “Knowing that you would never allow what Edward was implying to occur at your school, may I request a meeting at your earliest convenience to discuss the situation?”
His pulse quickening, Fred suddenly knew what had happened. Without bidding, the image of Llewellan returned. Llewellan yanking his arm back to the exact position necessary for him to make a perfect cast. Llewellan throwing him in the waters of Rangeley Lake to teach him how to swim. Llewellan telling him over and over how important it was to be a man able to face the greatest challenges of life with courage. Llewellan, who wouldn’t stand for weakness even in his dogs and called unathletic men, without fail, nancy boys.
Llewellan’s reply was brisk. The carbon copy was blurred with age, but again, whoever had preserved these files had done a meticulous job of it, placing this letter between two gossamer-thin pieces of archival paper. Such a meeting was not possible, Llewellan had written. Mr. Smith was suggesting something that simply wouldn’t be tolerated at the academy. In addition, he, Llewellan, had taken steps to speak with the masters Edward had named and found that they were men of “impeccable, even stainless character and eminently suited to the teaching of young boys.” He went on to suggest that Edward see his doctor or improve his diet or “as he has so often been exhorted to do here at Armitage, involve himself in purposeful physical activity.”
As he read these words, Llewellan’s voice began to boom around Fred’s brain. Suddenly, his grandfather’s presence was everywhere. Fred could almost feel him staring at his back from the photograph that hung on the other side of the room. In spite of the stuffy heat, Fred began to feel a creeping chill. He forced himself to continue. But that folder was empty.
The next held mostly clippings from the Globe and other Boston newspapers. A boy had been found dead in a room in the Bay State Hotel. He had hanged himself. No identification was found with him, but he had apparently signed in with a false name. Police were investigating. The date was February 20, 1955. Subsequent articles said only that the boy’s name had been discovered but was being suppressed because he was a minor. Even an editorial on unsupervised youth that the case apparently sparked had been included. There was no further notice from Armitage, no claim made or connection stated. No program of a service that the school had held for its dead student. Nothing. Edward’s inconvenient existence and even more inconvenient assertions had been more or less erased. Except that they hadn’t. Someone, somewhere, had seen fit to hold on to this dark corner. Fred found two final notes. The first was from Edward’s father to Llewellan, and it said only “I will not forgive you for my son’s death and neither will the Lord. May you and your family suffer as I and my family have.” And then, finally, a tiny, handwritten note on Armitage notepaper that said, in the now-familiar writing, “I felt strongly that this incident should not go unremarked and have preserved and collected these documents against the express wishes of my employer, Mr. Llewellan Naylor. For that I may be blamed, although I hope the wider light of history will forgive me. Naomi Beardsley.”
Fred was shaking as he put the papers back into a semblance of order. He could barely tie the fraying black thread that held together the accordion file. A secretary. A woman who had worked in Llewellan’s office. She had seen what was happening and had had the courage to gather the evidence and in her own, private way preserve it.
And all of it accounted for Malcolm Smith’s rage. His desire to hang that rage like a heavy, spiked wreath around Fred’s neck and make him feel the shame of his grandfather’s neglect. For that is what it had been, Fred felt sure. Most likely, at least one of the men that Mr. Smith named had molested Edward or worse. For all Fred knew, all three could have been involved and their abuse had driven the boy to suicide. He stood and looked at the file. The flashlight, on its side on the table, cast a fragile cone of brightness over all of Armitage’s dusty, complicated history. He knew he could simply stash the file again and let someone else discover it years or decades from now. He knew, too, he could destroy it. But that wasn’t really an option. Naomi Beardsley, with her careful insistence on documenting what she felt to be an unbearable wrong, had changed that. She had been as brave as she could be in the circumstances, and she had done what she could to right an injustice. Who knew what she had been risking? She hadn’t been brave enough to go to the newspapers or the board. Nor had the family apparently taken any legal action to avenge their son. But maybe those were different times, and women and boys seen as weak would be told, as Llewellan had told the parents of Edward Smith, to buck up and get on with it. They wouldn’t be seen, heard, responded to. They would instead be told that what they were and what they’d been through simply wasn’t true.
Standing, his legs shaky, Fred picked up the file and tucked it to his side. Malcolm Smith couldn’t have known about it. He probably had no idea who Naomi Beardsley was. But he had known enough of the original story to want Fred, Llewellan’s scion, to bear its burden. Why had he waited until this spring? Did he have a terminal illness and feel it was his last chance to speak out? More likely, it was something deeply personal that Fred would never be able to understand. But now Edward’s brother could see what had happened laid out before him. Fred would send the folder to him tomorrow, from the academy’s post office. He turned off the flashlight then, grateful for a moment for the room’s encompassing blackness.
He almost didn’t care about making noise anymore but was still sensible enough to be happy that he met no one once he’d risen from the tunnels. The file seemed light pressed against his ribs, though he had to set it down as he crossed the bridge over the stream leading to the Bluestone. He unhooked the skeleton key from his ring and tossed it into the flowing water, glad to be rid of it. The queer stillness in the air had continued. Not even Forrest and Milton were out now.
Back in his apartment, Fred saw that it was only ten o’clock. How astonishing that news that could change your life could unfold so quickly. He laid the file on his desk, and now, in a room filled with regular light, he saw how faded it actually was. More than fifty years had gone by since Naomi Beardsley had done her careful, secret work. And now Malcolm Smith was going to have his vengeance. Fred snapped on his computer and opened a new document form. “Dear Mr. Smith,” he wrote. “I do not know why you chose me or chose the moment you did to come and find me, but your visit worried me enough to look into wha
t had happened to your brother. What I found was this, gathered and saved by a woman who worked, I believe, as my grandfather’s secretary. I do not know if any of this information will make a difference to you or in any way console you. But these files rightfully belong to you and your family. Again, I know it can’t come as consolation for your loss, but for what my grandfather did, I am truly sorry.”
He was utterly drained. But he had one more letter to write: his resignation from Armitage. Not merely the request for the leave he had thought would serve as the compromise position between the year in Williamsburg and the safety of his job at the academy. Knowing what he did, he couldn’t stay and couldn’t return. When he was done, he went into the hall and found some cardboard boxes left in the recycling bin. He assembled them until he was too tired to move anymore and looked at their brown emptiness, waiting to be filled with what he would take from this part of his life.
CHAPTER 18
Matt woke before the sun was up and forced himself to go for a run. Cases like this were wretched on the body; no one let themselves rest, and everyone but Vernon drank far too much coffee. No wonder cops tended to look fifteen years older than they were, haggard and worn. It came from being hunched over emergencies all the time. His joints felt stiff and cramped, but it was a good idea to limber up before meeting Angell at nine at the station. Matt thought about how much had shifted in less than a week. He had slipped his cell phone in a pocket of his shorts and even stopped to answer it when it rang, despite the fact he was in the beech grove, the most beautiful part of the loop, and just at the moment when his muscles had finally released. He had not, he realized, as he leaned in to talk to Vernon, seen Madeline, though the woods were no longer off-limits. Nothing had turned up there, despite the dogs, the men, and all that tense and thorough searching.
“Nowhere to be found,” said Vernon by way of saying hello. He was referring to Tamsin, who had not returned to her bungalow the night before. Lucinda, when they’d returned to question her last night about the bag, had said that Tamsin brought it with her. Lucinda had no idea what had been in it. She’d been at the house working on something Porter had asked her to take care of. That late at night? “She’s always on duty, Tamsin Lovell,” Lucinda had answered spitefully.
And when asked if she and Miss Lovell had had a disagreement, Lucinda had responded, “Of course we did. I didn’t like her. I was always disagreeing with her.” And then her phone had rung, and she had slammed the door in their faces and gone off to pick it up. Fortunately, at the station, they’d found a young officer eager to be a part of something as real as a murder investigation who had asked if there were anything he could do. Which was how he found himself watching Tamsin’s house until Vernon went to relieve him at dawn.
Matt walked through the filtered light that came down through the canopy of rough-edged leaves, listening to Vernon. “She’s got lilac bushes that she trims, window boxes full of hyacinth. She’s like something out of Beatrix Potter, except I get the strong impression she’s an unpleasant character.”
“Vernon,” Matt asked, “did you go into her house?”
There was a pause. “No,” he finally admitted. “But it was close.” Matt was pouring with sweat and for the first time in a week felt like he had actually breathed. “And now,” said Vernon, “I’m going home to have some breakfast with the kids. I’ll see you down at the station.” The young cop had tried to offer him a jelly donut. “I nearly yielded,” Vernon confessed.
“But you didn’t,” said Matt. “Go home and have some bulgur. You’ll feel better.”
“Fuck off,” Vernon said, quite cheerfully.
Matt snapped the phone closed and walked the rest of the way out of the woods. It was only seven, but he was planning to go to see his father. His sister, Barbara, was in town; she had no Friday classes, and he hadn’t done more than exchange a hurried hello on the phone with her in days. Once a month, she drove over from the Connecticut college where she taught art history to keep an eye on them both, she said. Come for breakfast, she’d urged. I know you can’t stay long. Just a few minutes.
Besides, his father was good preparation for Angell. He started in the moment Matt walked through the door. “Barbara,” Joseph shouted, “the man of the law has arrived,” and continued to sit in his large armchair and fiddle with the plastic tubing that led from his oxygen tank to his nose. Barbara sailed out of the kitchen and gave her brother a hug. His sister, lean as a deer, dark-haired, dressed in something black and architectural that probably cost a fortune in Tokyo, had her hands wrapped around a dish towel that did not match the sharp lines of her dress. “Hi, baby,” she said. “How are you?”
“Good to see you. You cooking?” he asked a little cautiously.
She snorted. Barbara’s idea of a good meal was Diet Coke with a side of lemon. She was, however, an ace at cleaning up, and she’d been setting the table and putting away dishes from the night before. “I’ll leave the food to you. I’ve got coffee on. Go say hi to Pop.”
Joseph was still tinkering with the knob on the tank and didn’t look up at his son until he was finished. “So what’s going on up there? No arrests? No baby found?” Above everything, Joseph hated incompetence, inaccuracy, vagueness. Matt remembered last year’s Thanksgiving, the first without Ella, his mother, and how they’d limped through it with help from a very expensive Barolo and Matt’s cooking. The rich smell of dark meat had hung in the air, and Joseph had been unable to stop talking about the bad books kept by the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles until Matt had said to Barbara in the safety of the kitchen, “Can you hospitalize someone for obsession with irrelevant details?” And she had said, “We can try,” and they had cackled for a minute until they went into the dining room and saw Joseph staring out the window, his hand twisting a napkin to knots.
“Good to see you, Pop,” Matt said. “It’ll break today or tomorrow,” he added, surprising himself. Both he and Vernon had sensed that this was so; that something critical would happen, but he hadn’t realized just how confident he felt about it since he had no real idea of why Claire’s death had happened as it had.
“What about the baby?” Barbara asked, bringing coffee.
This at least was decent, and they all sat down near Joseph, who continued to fuss with the knobs on his tank. “Barb, this is the part that’s strange. Mostly in these cases, there’s a clear suspect. A boyfriend, an uncle, a babysitter. But no one and everyone is involved here. No overwhelming physical clues, no confessions, no leads that pan out.”
“And who thought it would happen in this backwater,” Joseph said, “and that you, Mr. Big City Cop, would be dealing with it?” It was a favorite theme. When Matt had told his father that he had taken a desk job in the Armitage-Greenville force, Joseph had said, “Sentimentality. Lack of ambition. What is this? Some Little House on the Prairie moment? Roots meets Massachusetts?” He’d waved his hand dismissively. “Matthew, I am old and worn-out, but I do not need you here. I have Fabiola”—his tyrannical visiting nurse—“my practice, a lot of old geezers just like me, and your meddling sister one state away.” Barbara, who’d been visiting, had said, “I heard that,” over the clamor of the vacuum that she’d been running in the next room. Everyone in their family had impossibly keen hearing. Matt sometimes thought that it was his most curious advantage as a cop.
“Oh yeah?” Joseph had called. “Then you’ll hear this, too. It would please me to see the two of you get on with your lives.” The vacuum stopped and Barbara came in the room. “Pop. We have lives. And we are using them to stay awake.”
Matt had smiled. He and Barbara had always been close. She had supported him when he’d left Armitage under a cloud; he had been her biggest ally when she’d gotten her Ph.D. in art history. When he had stayed in Philadelphia “to chase hooligans,” she’d been his staunchest advocate. And when she had finally admitted to her parents that the beautiful blond from Sweden with whom she shared a house was her girlfriend, he had been
in this living room, holding her hand.
“Bah!” said Joseph. He loved them both helplessly, they knew it, even if their choices mystified him. As he often said, “One kid a gunslinger, the other a professor teaching children to look at pictures of naked people.” Barbara’s most popular course, unsurprisingly, was The Nude Through the Ages. “If you come back here, don’t pretend it’s for me. It’s your own business what you’re here for.”
Joseph had been right, of course. His mind was admirably lucid, floating easily from his accounting practice (small but still percolating) to his garden, backgammon game, and book club. That his body was slowly refusing to accommodate his still flexible intelligence was a fact he tried to treat as a trifle, an inconvenience. The wicked gap that Ella’s death had left was something they steered around as if it might swallow them all. Thinking of his mother now made Matt bite back the sharp retort he felt ready to make.
Instead, he kissed his father’s head and went to make omelets. He didn’t stay more than half an hour, though he had been happy in the bright dining room, surrounded by what was left of his family. But Angell had called the meeting for nine and would probably start early. Barbara saw him out and gave her head a tilt in the familiar direction, up the hill, toward the school. “Bringing it all back?”
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