by M. L. Rio
“Okay.”
“Why don’t you sit? Might make things easier.” He gestured to the chair waiting behind me. There was another one in front of Holinshed’s desk, facing me, empty.
I lowered myself into the chair, wondering if it would vanish before I got there and let me fall to the floor. In that moment, nothing seemed certain or solid—not even the furniture. Colborne sat across from me in the other chair and reached into his pocket. His hand emerged again with a small black tape recorder, which he placed behind him on the edge of Holinshed’s desk. It was already on, a little red light glaring at me.
“Do you mind if I record this?” Colborne asked, politely enough, but I knew I couldn’t refuse. “If I don’t have to write everything down I can pay closer attention to what you’re saying.”
I nodded and adjusted my blanket. Dignity was immaterial, and I didn’t know what else to do with my hands.
Colborne leaned forward and said, “So, Oliver. All right if I call you Oliver?”
“Sure.”
“And you’re a fourth-year theatre student.”
I didn’t know if I was expected to answer, so I said, a half second too late, “Yes.”
Colborne didn’t seem to notice, only offered another nonquestion. “Dean Holinshed tells me you’re from Ohio.”
“Yes,” I said again, again too late.
“You miss home at all?” he asked, and I was almost relieved.
“No.” I could have told him that as far as I was concerned, Dellecher was home, but I didn’t want to say any more than I had to.
Colborne: “How big is your hometown?”
Me: “Average, I guess. Bigger than Broadwater.”
Colborne: “Did you do theatre in high school?”
Me: “Yes.”
Colborne: “Did you like it? How was it?”
Me: “It was all right. Not like here.”
Colborne: “Because here is…?”
Me: “Better.”
Colborne: “Are you close? The six of you.”
It sounded alien. The six of us. We had always been seven.
“Like siblings,” I said, and immediately regretted it, uncertain how quickly the word “rivalry” would come to mind.
“You share a room with James Farrow,” Colborne said, more quietly. “Is that where you slept last night?”
I nodded, not quite trusting myself to speak. We’d decided that James would account for me. The fact that one drunk first-year saw me on the stairs with Meredith didn’t mean we had to admit to what had happened after.
“And what time did you go to bed?” Colborne said.
“Two? Two thirty? Something like that.”
“Okay. Talk me through what happened at the party, and be as specific as possible.”
My eyes flicked from Colborne to Frederick to Holinshed. Gwendolyn sat staring down at the top of the desk, her hair limp and tired-looking.
“There aren’t any wrong answers,” Colborne added. His voice had a soft scratch to it that made him sound older than he was.
“Right, yeah. I’m sorry.” I tightened my grip on the blanket, wishing my palms would stop sweating. “Well. James and Alexander and I walked down from the FAB a little after ten thirty, and we weren’t in a rush so we probably got to the Castle about eleven. We got drinks, and then we all got separated. I just, I don’t know, wandered around for a while. Someone told me Richard was upstairs, drinking by himself.”
“Any idea why he wasn’t socializing with everyone else?” Colborne asked.
“Not really,” I said. “Figured he’d come down when he was ready.”
He nodded. “Go on.”
I looked toward the window, to the long winding road that led away from Dellecher, disappearing into the gray. “I went outside. Talked to Wren. Talked to James. Then there was a—a bunch of noise, I guess, from inside. So we went in to see what was happening. It was just me and James by then. I don’t know where Wren went.”
“And you were in the yard, is that right?”
“Yes.”
“When you went inside, what happened?”
I shifted in my chair. Two different memories were fighting for dominance: the truth and the version of it we’d agreed to tell. “It was confusing,” I said, feeling some fleeting comfort in the honesty of those three words. “The music was loud and everyone was talking at the same time, but Richard had hit somebody—I don’t remember his name. Colin brought him up to the infirmary.”
“Allan Boyd,” Holinshed said. “We’ll be discussing this with him, too.”
Colborne didn’t acknowledge the interjection, his attention fixed on me. “And what then?”
“Meredick—I mean, Richard and Meredith—were arguing. I don’t know exactly what it was about.” More accurately, I wasn’t sure how much Meredith had told them.
“The others made it sound like Allan had been paying her a little more attention than Richard was comfortable with,” Colborne said.
“Maybe. I don’t know. Richard was drunk—I mean, beyond drunk. Belligerent. He said some pretty nasty things. Meredith was upset and she went upstairs, to get away from everybody. I went after her, just to make sure she was all right. We were talking in her room—” A few vivid moments of Meredith flashed in my brain—strands of auburn hair caught in her lipstick, black silk lines at the edges of her eyelids, the strap of her dress sliding down off her shoulder. “We were talking in her room and Richard came up and started pounding on the door,” I said, too quickly, hoping Colborne wouldn’t notice how warm my face and throat had gotten. “She didn’t want to talk to him and she told him as much—through the door, we were sort of afraid to open it—and eventually he went away.”
“What time was this?”
“God, I don’t remember. Late. One thirty, maybe?”
“When Richard left, do you know where he went?”
“No,” I said, exhaling a little more easily. Another scrap of truth. “We didn’t come out for a while.”
“And when you did?”
“Everyone was gone, really. I went up to bed. James was already there, but not quite asleep.” I tried to picture him rolling over on his side to whisper to me across the room. But all I could see was the dim yellow light of the bathroom, steam and hot water warping his features in the mirror. “He told me Richard had gone off into the woods with a bottle of Scotch.”
“And that was the last you heard of him?”
“Until Alexander found him?” The prismatic memories of the previous night fell away, and the cold of the morning crept through me. I could feel the water on my skin, in my hair, under my fingernails. “Yes.”
“All right,” Colborne said. He spoke gently, the way you talk to spooked horses and crazy people. “Now, I’m sorry to ask this, but I need you to tell me what you saw this morning.”
I could still see it. Richard suspended on the surface of life, bloodied, gasping—and the rest of us simply watching, waiting for the curtain to drop. Revenge tragedy, I wanted to say. Shakespeare himself couldn’t have done it better.
“I saw Richard,” I told him. Not a proper dead man, not really floating. “Just sort of hanging there. But broken and crushed, like everything was bent the wrong way.”
“And you—” He cleared his throat. “You got in the water.” It was the first time he hesitated.
“Yes.” I pulled the blanket closer, as if it could somehow thaw me, shield me from the feeling of cold water closing in around me. I knew, sitting there in the dry warmth of Holinshed’s office, that I’d never forget it—how my lungs shrank so suddenly I thought they would shatter, gasping more in shock than for oxygen. Richard’s face, much too close, white as bone. The sour iron smell of blood. That insane urge to laugh was back, as strong as the urge to vomit, and for one harrowing moment I thought I would be sick all over the carpet at Colborne’s feet. I swallowed again, choked everything down. He mistook my wave of nausea for emotion and respectfully waited for me to compose myself.<
br />
Eventually I managed to say, “Someone had to.”
“And he was dead?”
I could have told him how it felt, to reach for Richard’s throat and find the flesh cold, that vein that had once bulged and throbbed in anger flat and finally still. Instead all I said was “Yes.”
He stared at me, with a brittle sort of look, deliberately blank, like a bad poker face. Before I could guess what he didn’t want me to see he blinked, leaned back. “Well, that can’t have been easy. I’m sorry.”
I nodded, unsure of whether I was supposed to thank him or if condolences were in his job description.
“Just one more question, if you’re up for it.”
“Whatever you need.”
“Tell me about the last few weeks,” he said, loosely, as if it were only a matter of course. “You’ve all been under a lot of pressure, Richard maybe most of all. Was he behaving strangely?”
Another mosaic of memories took shape like a stained-glass window, shards of color and light. The white glow of the moon on the water at Halloween, the blue bruises on James’s arms, the bright ripe red of blood creeping out of Meredith’s silk sleeve. My stomach, knotted and clenched a moment before, unexpectedly unwound. My pulse slowed.
“No,” I said. Filippa’s words echoed softly in my head. “Before last night, everything was fine.”
Colborne watched me with curious closeness. “I think that’s all for now,” he said, after what felt like too long a pause. “I’m going to give you my contact information. If you think of anything else, please don’t hesitate to tell me.”
“Of course,” I said. “I will.”
But, of course, I wouldn’t. Not until ten years later.
SCENE 3
Up on the fifth floor of Dellecher Hall was a secret cache of rooms reserved for the school’s more illustrious guests. This peculiar apartment had three bedrooms, one bathroom, and a large central drawing room that contained a fireplace, a collection of elegant Victorian furniture, and a baby grand piano. Hallsworth House (as it was called, after Leopold Dellecher’s wealthy in-laws) was where the faculty decided to hide the six remaining fourth-years while the south shore of the lake was crawling with police.
Dean Holinshed had called an emergency assembly in the music hall that evening, but he decided that we should not be present. He didn’t wish, he explained, to subject us or the other students to the temptation to gossip. So, as the rest of the school sat in dumbstruck silence four floors below, Wren, Filippa, James, Alexander, Meredith, and I were prisoners at the fireside in Hallsworth House. Frederick and Gwendolyn didn’t like the idea of leaving us entirely alone, so one of the nurses from the infirmary had been placed as a sentinel outside the door to the rest of the fifth floor, where she sat sniffling into a tissue as she halfheartedly filled in a crossword puzzle.
I strained my ears against the suffocating quiet, acutely aware of our schoolmates, all gathered together without us. Exile was intolerable. It felt somehow Damoclean, a period of suspended judgment, dreading condemnation by a jury of our peers. (O, my prophetic soul.) Our mercenary relief at having Richard gone was quickly turning sour. Already I’d found a thousand things to be afraid of. What if one of us let something slip? Talked in our sleep? Forgot how the story was supposed to go? Or perhaps we’d walk on tiptoes the rest of our lives, waiting for the thread to snap, the axe to fall.
Alexander must have been infected by the same anxiety. “Do you think they’re going to tell everyone we’re up here?” he asked, staring hard at the carpet as though he might suddenly develop X-ray vision and be able to see what was going on downstairs.
“I doubt it,” Filippa said. “They won’t want anyone sneaking up.” The lines on either side of her mouth were deep and dark, as if she had aged ten years in as many hours. The others were silent, listening uselessly for a sound from downstairs. James sat with his knees pinned tightly together, arms folded over his chest, like he was cold. Wren was listless, limp, her limbs bent into her chair at odd clumsy angles, like those of a dropped doll. Meredith sat on the couch beside her, cross-legged, fists clenched, tension making every elegant line of her body hard and angular.
“What do you think they’ll do about Caesar?” Alexander said, when he couldn’t stand the quiet anymore.
“They’ll call it off,” Filippa said. “It’d be tasteless to just replace him.”
“So much for ‘the show must go on.’”
I tried—for one abortive moment—to imagine someone, anyone, else assuming Richard’s role. The threat Gwendolyn had made to have me learn his lines and take his place echoed from my memory and I balked, recoiled from the idea. “Honestly,” I said, afraid I’d have to scream if I didn’t do something else with my voice, “do you really want to get back onstage without him?”
A few heads shook; nobody spoke. Then—
“Is it just me,” Alexander said, “or is this the longest day of everyone else’s life?”
“Well,” James said. “Certainly not Richard’s.”
Alexander gaped at him, eyes wide and glaring.
“James,” Meredith said. “What the fuck.”
Filippa breathed out in a hiss, rubbing her forehead. “We’re not doing this,” she said, then looked up, from one of them to each of the others. “We are not going to bicker and bitch at each other—not about this. Things without all remedy / Should be without regard: What’s done is done.”
Alexander laughed a thin, humorless laugh I didn’t like at all. “To bed, to bed, to bed!” he said. “God, I need a smoke. I wish they hadn’t stuck the nurse outside.” He clambered to his feet, turned on the spot, moving in the quick, restless way he did when he was upset. He wandered around the room in an aimless zigzag, struck a few random notes on the piano, then started opening cupboards and fumbling around on the bookshelves.
“What are you doing?” Meredith asked.
“Looking for booze,” he said. “There must be something hidden in here. The last guest they had was the guy who wrote the Nietzsche book and I bet my ass he’s an alcoholic.”
“How can you possibly want to drink right now?” I said. “My insides still feel like liquid from last night.”
“Hair of the dog. Aha.” He emerged from a cabinet in the back of the room with a bottle of something amber in one hand. “Anyone for brandy?”
“Go on,” Filippa said. “Maybe it’ll take the edge off.”
Glasses clinked together as he rummaged deeper in the cabinet. “Anyone else?”
Wren didn’t speak, but to my surprise James and Meredith both said, “Yes, please,” at precisely the same time.
Alexander returned with the bottle in one hand, four glasses stacked and tilting in the other. He poured himself enough brandy to burn the Hall down, then passed it to Filippa. “I don’t know how much you want,” he said. “Personally I plan to drink myself to sleep.”
“I’m not sure I’ll ever sleep again,” I said. Richard’s half-smashed face—garish as a carnival mask—leapt at me every time I closed my eyes.
James, staring into the fire, chewing a fingernail, said, “Methought I heard a voice cry, ‘Sleep no more!’”
“Where are we sleeping?” Meredith asked, ignoring him. “There’s only three rooms.”
“Well, Wren and I can share,” Filippa said, with a sidelong look at her. She didn’t acknowledge that she’d heard.
“Who wants to share with me?” Alexander said. He waited for a reply but didn’t get one. “Don’t everyone jump up at once.”
“I’ll stay out here,” I said. “I don’t mind.”
“What time is it?” Meredith said. She lifted her glass to her lips, with a pained expression, as if that simple motion were monumentally taxing.
Filippa squinted at the carriage clock on the table beside her. “Quarter after nine.”
“Is that all?” I said. “It feels like midnight.”
“It feels like Judgment Day.” Alexander threw back an enormous gulp o
f brandy, gritted his teeth as he swallowed, and reached for the bottle again. He filled his glass almost to the brim and stood clutching it tightly. “I’m going to bed,” he announced. “If someone decides they don’t want to crash in the living room, well, we all know I’m not picky about who I sleep with. Goodnight.”
He left the room, with a small stiff bow. I watched him go and propped my head on one hand, unsurprised by how heavy it felt. Exhaustion pumped sluggishly through my veins, dampening everything else. In the raw dark of the morning I’d felt relief rather than dismay at the spectacle of Richard’s death, and now that it was dark again—after all we’d done and said during the long hypnotic hours in between—I was too tired for sadness or pity. Perhaps it was absent because I didn’t quite believe it. I half expected Richard to burst through the door, wiping stage blood from his face, laughing cruelly at how he’d had us fooled.
Filippa finished her drink, and the sound of her glass touching down on the table made me look up. “I’m going to go to bed, too,” she said, pushing herself to her feet. “I want to just lie down for a while, even if I don’t sleep. Wren? Why don’t you come to bed?”
Wren was still for a moment, then reanimated, unfolded herself from the chair, eyes bleary, out of focus. She accepted Filippa’s proffered hand and followed her out, without protest.
“Are you sleeping here?” Meredith asked, when they’d gone. She spoke to me as if James wasn’t there. He didn’t react or respond, as if he hadn’t heard her.
I nodded. “You take the other bedroom.”
She straightened up—slowly, gingerly, like everything hurt.
“Going to sleep?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said. “I hope I never wake up.”
The first real pang of sadness stuck me like a needle, but it had nothing to do with Richard, not really. I wanted to say something but couldn’t find a single adequate word and so I sat silent and immobile on the couch as she, too, left the room, half her brandy undrunk. When the door closed behind her I deflated, slumped against the pillows behind me, dragged my hands across my face.