Steven Portel stood, fist in mid-air. When he saw Colin he dropped his arm and wrapped his arms tight around his concave chest, mouth stretched wide, no sound coming out. Only his eyes moved, darting in all directions, while his body stayed rigid.
Had he been molested? He was the kind of kid somebody might pick out as a victim. But surely he hadn’t left campus . . .
He tried again to speak, slapped the side of his head in frustration and ran down the stairs. Colin followed. Snow tipped into his slippers and slid down the fleece lining, freezing his bare feet. Drawing loud, guttural breaths, Steven ran into the dorm and up to the second floor.
It wasn’t the exertion, Colin realised. The boy was hyperventilating. Outside Philip Grant’s room he huddled against the opposite wall, body half turned, and pointed without looking.
Philip’s door was ajar.
Colin pushed it open and stood there, taking it in a piece at time, his mind racing to make sense of what he was seeing. The room was shadowy, outlined by dozens of creamy white votive candles in rows along the desk, dresser and window sill. In their flicker he saw Philip lying naked on the bed, his body long and narrow and pale, the sheet a swirl around his feet. Flat on his back, he’d stretched his arms out straight, and they extended off the mattress, making a cross of his body. He was staring at the ceiling with his mouth slightly open, as though in wonder.
Colin glanced back at the hallway to make sure Steven was gone, then shut the door and switched on the overhead light. Under its fluorescent bulbs the flickering receded, and the boy’s skin took on a sickly bluish-grey cast.
“Philip? What in God’s name are you doing?”
The boy didn’t stir. The candles’ oversweet vanilla hung in the air, and tribal drumming pulsed from the computer speakers, hands slapping and beating in a complicated, continuous rhythm.
Colin’s legs went weak, but he forced himself to the bedside. A watery pink smear streaked from Philip’s mouth. Lipstick, Colin told himself, already knowing it wasn’t. Making a quick sign of the cross, he placed his index and middle fingers at the boy’s throat. The only movement was the tremble of his fingers against cold, waxy skin.
He fought a rising panic. What were all these candles doing in here anyway? They were a fire hazard. He should blow them out right away.
He sucked in enough air, bent toward the first votive, and let the air out in a sob. Philip was his favourite, he could admit it now. Blind with tears, he saw − God, was it just yesterday? − Philip wearing a dashiki to protest police violence in Ferguson. Philip, a week earlier, protesting the frequency of ‘All-Purpose Fritters’ in the dining hall. Philip taunting Colin about the bishop’s visit.
Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. The prayer found a groove and spun again and again, not so much words as a stream of reassuring sound. He went into the hall and, shutting the door behind him, leaned against it and punched 911, hand shaking so hard his finger bounced on the keys. Somehow he managed to spell the name of the school and repeat the street address.
Even from the hall he could hear the low throb of drums − the only life in the room. He paced a few yards, turned back, paced again. The quick reverses made him dizzy, but he couldn’t let himself get too far from that door and what lay behind it. Fumbling for his phone again, he called Connie, then Jimmy. He could come and get the rest of the boys off this floor and take them. Where? The dining hall. Tea for shock.
Colin was leaving a message when Luke’s door opened. “Father Mac? What’s going on?”
“We’ve got a medical crisis with one of the boys.” Learning the truth in stages might be easier. “The ambulance is on its way. Will you do me a favour and go down the hall, knock on every door, and tell the boys to go down to the dining hall? We need to clear this floor. To make it easier for the paramedics.”
“Sure. Who’s sick, Father?”
“It’s Philip Grant.”
There was a rumble of noise on the first floor, and firefighters started stomping up the stairs. Why firefighters? He thought again, wildly, of the candles.
“Hurry up,” he told Luke. “Get the boys off the floor.”
More men and women in bulky black jackets with neon-yellow stripes filed into Philip’s room, one hauling an oxygen tank. Paramedics, then, or EMTs. Colin heard the thunk of equipment hitting the floor and voices giving short, urgent commands. They’d swung the door halfway shut, but he could see them crowded around the bed, and he fought an odd impulse to yell, “Stand back! Give him air!”
As the boys rumbled down the opposite stairwell the paramedics went into action, their movements so fast and sure he wondered if there might be a chance.
“DRT,” somebody said, and the room went quiet.
*
The first flakes were coating the street when Sarah and Simon came back from Forest Park, both of them panting. She scrolled up the shades, made a big pot of coffee, and watched the city’s grime soften into white origami. One week left, and she’d nearly finished the first draft. As she wrote, she was back in Milot, smelling that sick-sweet blend of rotting garbage, wood smoke, and marijuana. When the phone rang it took her a minute to shake free and answer it.
“Sarah?” Colin’s voice shook, and his breath came in ragged little gasps. “Philip’s dead.”
“Philip? How? What happened?” She waited, but that seemed to be all he could manage. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
Her duffel bag was still in the corner of her bedroom. Good thing she hadn’t lugged it down to the storage space yet. She opened her closet door and stared, trying to focus. Overnight? Days? Pulling her least-worn jeans out of the laundry bin, she smoothed and repacked them, added sweaters and underwear. From a garment bag she pulled a long-sleeved black dress.
The snow was coming down so hard she couldn’t see individual flakes anymore, just whiteness in motion. Digging through a box of woollen socks, she found ice cleats, shoved them into the bag’s outside compartment and, with a flash of guilt, added her Haiti manuscript. It felt selfish even to think about it, but she had to finish.
Simon’s lead, her purse, phone, car keys. She even remembered to scribble Mr. Dunbar a note about holding her mail. Colin’s words only sank in as she belted the dog into the Miata.
Philip dead? He’d seemed the Romantic type, Oscar Wilde sneering at the mundane. A rich kid testing authority with trickster wit.
More alive than most.
*
The Miata made it out to Aberdeen; but, even in first gear, Sarah couldn’t get enough traction to make it up the hill. She whipped off her gloves, gripped the wheel tighter and shifted into neutral. The car slid back a few feet. She eased into first, and the wheels spun again, a silvery, shimmering sound coming from deep inside the engine. She let the Miata slide onto the shoulder and cut the motor. “We’ll climb.”
Glad for the cleats, she slid them over her boots and locked her duffel bag in the car. Simon ran ahead, his back paws spraying her legs with snow. “Thanks,” she called, voice ringing in the silence. The cold, wet air scrubbed her face like a washcloth. She shoved his lead in her pocket and pulled up her parka’s hood.
Grabbing hold of a twiggy sapling for balance, she started up the hill sideways, holding her hood on with her other hand. Simon stood stock-still, a black silhouette yards ahead, and waited for her to catch up. As soon as she got close he ran up a little farther and stopped again. “Show off,” she muttered.
The next sapling was brittle − it snapped just below her fingers and sent her sliding. Bracing, she started up again, zigzagging to make the incline less steep. When she stopped to catch her breath and gauge her progress, she’d made it halfway. Her heart pounded in her ears, the air loud and echoey as it entered her lungs. She heard the swish of her parka’s nylon sleeves as her arms pumped, the crackle each time her boots hit the snow’s frozen crust. Around her, the world stood perfectly still.
As she reached the to
p of the hill, the blanket of silence lifted. Hearing a distant jangle of voices, doors slamming, radio static, she climbed the last little rise and pushed through the fringe of trees onto the icy asphalt drive. The cleats caught and held, and she stomped her way toward the dorm.
*
Colin searched on his phone. ‘DRT: Dead Right There. Used by EMTs/Paramedics to describe a dead person that no treatment will bring back.”
But what had killed him? Colin closed his eyes and forced himself to remember the body. It reminded him of his mother’s − both so thin and pale, like marble effigies. Her skin was as translucent as handmade paper, crumpled and smoothed again. Philip’s skin was thicker, opaque. But his bones rose to the surface the same way hers had.
There was no bullet hole, no knife wound. Both arms outstretched − nobody would take that position naturally. He was making a point. Crucifixion? Some kind of ecstasy? Maybe literally − could X kill you? Nobody used it much anymore, from what Colin could tell.
Heroin could kill. Had Philip shot up? Cocaine and meth were too amped up − they wouldn’t match his deliberate indolence. But heroin made a sick sort of sense. Philip craved transcendence. Sex, religion, mysticism − anything that lifted him out of the mundane. At the end of the first semester, the faculty had compared notes and realised he’d written seven papers on Santeria, Rosicrucianism, and Salafism, bending them to match various subjects’ requirements.
Had he overdosed on purpose? All the candles, the mise-en-scene − he must have. But it didn’t ring true. Philip liked coming off cynical, amused by the quirks of human nature. But underneath all the campy drama, he was interested in the world. He had none of the spiritual deadness, the weighed-down passivity Colin had seen in boys suffering from depression.
Someone could have shot him up as a favour and injected too much. But that meant another student. Surely not Steven, who’d come undone just at finding him.
Jimmy came up the stairs, his face white. “I went for a run in the snow. What happened? I saw an ambulance . . .”
“Philip Grant is dead.” Colin barely recognised his own voice, drained of emotion, almost clinical. “I think it was a drug overdose.”
“I didn’t even know he used.”
“Me either.”
“Was anybody with him?”
“I’ve no idea. Can you go down to the dining hall and break the news to the boys? All I said was ‘medical crisis’. Help them deal with it. And make sure they don’t try to come back up here.”
Jimmy started to say something, then broke off. When he reached the stairs, he turned. “Colin? Don’t take this the wrong way, but . . . where’s Graham Dennison?”
*
“You can’t go in there, ma’am,” a stocky young officer said, planting his feet apart.
“I’m a friend of Father McAvoy’s. He called me.”
Another officer, older, came toward them. “You Sarah Markham?”
She nodded.
“Let her by. Put the dog in the van.”
She brushed snow from Simon’s black curls and crouched down to look him in the eye. “I’m sorry, sweetheart. You’ve got to go with them. I’ll come get you soon.”
He swiped at her knee with his paw, eyes pleading.
“Nope. You’ve got to go.” She handed over his lead. Trotting away with the cop, he gave a single, hopeful backward glance. She nodded, then stepped inside the building.
The hall was empty, but boys’ muted voices came from the dining room. Sarah banged snow off her boots, slipped off the cleats and stomped up the stairs, feet tingling as the feeling returned. Focus on that, she told herself, not your stomach flopping around like a hooked fish.
Colin was alone in the hall, leaning against the wall just outside a taped-off area. “Sorry it took so long,” she said, coming up behind him. “I had to scale the Himalayas to get here.”
He turned and reached for her, but kept the hug quick. He was shaking. “Thank you for coming. I shouldn’t have dragged you out in this. I just . . . it’s . . .” He choked, lost control for a second. “Steven Portel found him early this morning. He was already dead. I think he ODed.”
“Oh, Colin.” She started to hug him again, but the sudden harsh sound of ratcheting metal made them both jump back. There was a slither of sheets, then the loud, rude zip of the body bag and a soft thud as the boy’s body was transferred to a gurney.
A blond woman came out of the room and walked quickly toward the steps, her heels staccato. “That’s Aubrey Gradwohl,” Sarah said in a low voice. “County medical examiner. The death investigator must have called her; she doesn’t usually go to the scene.”
Colin guided Sarah to one side, making room for Gradwohl’s people to wheel out the stainless-steel gurney. The cloying vanilla had followed the stretcher into the hall and, with the door open, the drumbeat pulsed louder.
“Is that the music he was playing?” she whispered. “Can’t they turn it off?”
“Aye, I’m about ready to ask. It’s unsettling as hell.” He pressed his lips together and, when he spoke again, they stuck for a second, flossy threads of white at the corners of his mouth.
“Let me get you a Coke,” Sarah said. “Is there a vending machine in this building?”
“No.” His mouth twisted. “We were trying to keep the boys healthy.”
A youngish cop came out of Philip’s room. “Markham, what are you doing here already? Print beat TV?”
She stepped forward. “Has to happen sometimes. Who caught the case?”
“Lieutenant Morganstern’s handling it. But don’t expect any statements yet. This one looks a little funny.”
*
“I don’t screw up your scene, you don’t touch my body!” Bernie DiSalvo, Gradwohl’s death investigator, was standing at the foot of the dormitory stairs yelling at some poor rookie cop. Outside, more vehicles had made it up the hill, and a knot of detectives stood in the shelter of a van, hands jammed in their pockets, waiting to claim the scene. Half the county homicide department must be there. For an overdose?
Just beyond them, a man in a grey suit stood apart, an overcoat draped over his arm. Sarah approached him with her crispest reporter’s voice, “Lieutenant Morganstern?”
He shook his head. “Northrup Grant.”
The boy’s father. He looked so detached, she’d never dreamed. “I’m so very sorry,” she blurted, leaving off the stock “for your loss.” Overuse had drained all kindness from the phrase. Besides, she’d always hated the way it cut the grieving person out of the herd. Your loss, not mine.
Grant’s eyes stayed fixed on the dormitory, but he gave a slight nod. Sarah started to edge away. This was not a man who would take comfort from gushing strangers. Then she heard Adriana’s panicked voice on the other side of the yellow crime-scene tape. A cop barked directions, and Adriana stepped over the tape and hurried toward them.
“My God,” she said. “Connie’s husband called.” She looked at Grant, her eyes filling with tears. “I’m so sorry!”
“Thank you, Miss Braxton,” he said, touching her shoulder.
“What happened? Bill wondered if it was a drug overdose, but Philip would never have . . .”
“I’m afraid he would,” Grant said, cutting her off. “I saw needle tracks on his arm this summer when I took him to London. He didn’t even bother to hide them. I − should have warned the school. But I thought he would be safe here. I thought . . .” − he looked up at the school’s limestone front, his mouth twisting − “the innocence of this place would stop him.” He put his overcoat on, blindly rooting for the armholes as though he’d just realised how cold he was. “In his own way, Philip hungered for holiness.”
No-one spoke. Grant looked down at his black oxfords, clumps of snow on top of the satiny leather. He lifted his right foot, moved it to fresh snow and watched it slowly sink. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m not making much sense.”
“You
are,” Sarah assured him. “That’s exactly what Colin wanted this place to be. Not an escape, but a refuge.” She paused, trying to word her next question as gently as possible. “Philip overdosed by accident then?”
“They don’t know.” His voice was bleak. “The medical examiner isn’t even sure it was drugs − she said he could have died from an aneurysm, or some kind of traumatic brain injury. She won’t know until she does an autopsy. But . . .” He exhaled a little gust of air. “They let me see him. The way he was lying, with his arms out − he looked like Christ himself.”
Turning to Adriana, he asked, almost begging, “Was he that unhappy? Could he have wanted to die?”
“He didn’t seem unhappy in the least,” she said, putting a reassuring hand on his sleeve. “Caustic, but not unhappy. Philip’s a born provocateur. He wanted everybody to be smarter, deeper, cooler than they were. He was full of his latest project − he kept going on about art’s ability to save people from their own lies. He was nowhere near wanting to die.”
“Maybe he got some romantic idea into his head about, I don’t know, redemptive suffering,” Grant ventured. “Maybe he didn’t realise this was forever. They say teenagers don’t realise their mortality. I read an article about it.” A little colour came back, and he spoke more firmly now that he was armed with facts. “Their brains aren’t neurologically mature yet, so they don’t understand consequences. Maybe he used more as a sort of experiment, not realising . . .” He broke off, looking over Sarah’s shoulder.
She didn’t bother turning; she could sense Colin’s height behind her.
“What’s happening, Father?” Grant asked.
“They’re wanting to interview all the boys.”
“The boys!” Adriana said. “How awful − how could I forget? Where are they?”
“We sent them down to the dining hall,” Colin said. “I’ve got to notify all their parents first − the police say we’re in loco parentis, but some of these parents are going to want lawyers present.”
“But it’s just an accident,” Adriana pointed out. “It’s not like he was murdered or something.”
A Circumstance of Blood Page 7