Passion Play

by W. Edward Blain

  “I want to get back to work,” she said. “I think of the poor English department, all those vocabulary quizzes you’re having to photocopy by yourself, those grades that need recording, those book orders.”

  “They can all wait.”

  “And the mixer this Saturday. I should tell Sam Kaufman he needs to get somebody else to be in charge. I’ve taken on too much.” Cynthia was also director of weekend activities at Montpelier.

  Warden said she suffered an excess desire to take part in the daily workings of the school. “This mixer can take care of itself.”

  “It certainly cannot,” she said. “I have to be there. I have to check on the bands and make sure that all the chaperones are there and check in the buses from the girls’ schools.”

  Warden told her that he would help.

  “I should still call Sam,” she said. “Only Sam Kaufman is the biggest gossip on campus.”

  “So we won’t tell him,” said Warden. “How do we explain your absence?”

  “I’m going to be back before they notice,” she said. “I’m going to be back by tomorrow.”

  He continued to read to her until the telephone rang and pulled them both back to their bedroom. Eerily, it was Samuel Kaufman, the dean of students, and for a moment Warden wondered whether Kaufman was calling to confirm the rumors he’d heard about Cynthia’s illness.

  “Is Cynthia available to do some substitute teaching?” asked Kaufman.

  Warden said she was not.

  “Then you’re going to have to find somebody to cover Patrick McPhee’s classes this morning. He can’t make it. We’ve got this . . .”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “He found a boy dead last night. We’ve had a suicide.”

  “Who?” It was the only word Warden could manage.

  “A newboy third-former. Russell Phillips. Apparently he jumped off the roof of the gym.”

  “Sam,” said Warden. He started again. “This is horrible news.”

  “It was awful,” said Kaufman. “Pat McPhee found him around midnight. In the fall his neck had been twisted all the way around so that his face was looking backwards.”

  Warden said nothing.

  “I have some other calls to make,” said Kaufman. “So you’ll be on your way to Fleming now?”

  “Yes. Sure.”

  He hung up and told Cynthia the news.

  “Who is Russell Phillips?” she said.

  Warden said he had met the boy only yesterday. “A newboy,” he said. “Didn’t like cold weather.”

  “Was he depressed?”

  Warden shrugged and began to dial the telephone. Be home, Kathleen, he thought. On the third ring she answered.

  He asked if she could drive Cynthia to the hospital. “Yes,” said Kathleen. Her voice was broken, as though she were choking.

  “Have you heard the news about the boy?” asked Warden.

  “Oh, yes,” said Kathleen. “He was one of our advisees. Horace and I are both sick about it.” She said she would come for Cynthia in half an hour.

  He hung up. Cynthia asked him why the boy would jump off the roof of the gym.

  “It’s the highest building on campus,” said Warden. “Next to Stringfellow. And Stringfellow would be too crowded.”

  Cynthia exhaled impatiently. “That’s not what I mean,” she said. “Why would he want to kill himself?”

  Warden was pulling his navy blue blazer out of the closet. “I don’t know,” he said. “Only it bothers me that we’ve been talking about death all morning and we now have a real death. There’s been too much talk about death.”

  She could not relinquish the subject. “What would he be doing at the gym at night, anyway?”

  Warden explained that the boy was on the wrestling team. The wrestlers held extra training sessions in the evenings after study hall.

  Cynthia twisted onto her side and lay with her head on the pillow. “I can see two of you,” she said, “like on a bad television picture. I wish one of you could stay here with me while the other goes off to work.”

  “I’ll stay,” he said.

  “No,” she said. “It was only a silly thing to say, not a real wish. I don’t want to waste a real wish on having some company for the morning.” She held up one arm. He bent down to kiss her quickly and then stood up.

  “The school will be in complete turmoil,” he said. “We’ll probably have a special schedule for the day.”

  “I’ll be all right,” she said. “In a minute I’m going to get up and get dressed.”

  “Do you want some help?”

  “Of course not.”

  “All I have to do is tell Sam Kaufman you’re sick. He’ll let me go with you.”

  “They need you here,” said Cynthia. “I’ll be all right with Kathleen.”

  “I’ll try to call at lunch,” he said.

  “Poor Russell Phillips,” she said. “From the roof of the gym.”

  “Yes,” said Warden.

  “I wonder if Dan Farnham heard anything last night,” she said. “He lives in the gym.”

  “I’m sure I’ll find out in a few minutes,” said Warden. He held a scarf and a stack of folded papers in one hand.

  “You didn’t notice anything unusual last night, did you? When you were out?”

  “Not at all,” said Warden. “I was in Fleming Hall. I wasn’t near the gym.” He started for the door and then paused. “Why do you ask?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “The gym roof. The neck twisted around. It sounds weird, like something supernatural.”

  “I’ll find out all I can,” said Warden. His heart was sprinting.

  SCENE 15

  It had been so easy with Russell Phillips. The wrestlers had been following their usual fanatical training schedule, working out after study hall at night, running up and down the stairs of the old gym, down to the basement and the locker rooms, up to the top floor and the rooms for wrestling and lifting weights. Russell had been bench-pressing some weights himself. And running. He was a little zealot, Russell, a bantamweight who wanted to get lighter.

  It was such a kick to watch them all running the stairs, sweating through their gray tee shirts, encouraging one another with breathlessly muttered monosyllables. There must have been twenty or so at first, but most of them had disappeared after the mandatory fifteen minutes. Russell Phillips had stayed.

  And so had he. It was perfectly natural for him to be there, after all. So when all the boys had left, save Russell Phillips, he had sat down on a bench in the weight room on the third floor of the gym to watch Russell finish his set. The kid had longish blond hair that was stringy with sweat and a red pimple on the back of his thick neck. The hair reminded him of that other hair. And when Russell had asked him for permission to stay just a bit past on-dorm time, he had granted it. Why not? It was within his authority to do so.

  “You’re dedicated, Russell,” he had said.

  “Yeah, well, it’s about all there is to do here,” Russell had said. A bit cocky, this boy.

  “Did you work out over the holidays?”

  “I worked out with my girlfriend,” he’d said. Sure of himself, almost disrespectful. “In fact, it was sort of in this position.”

  The words were outrageous, but he masked his reaction.

  Even as he spoke to Russell, though, even as he uttered the words that reassured the boy that staying off dorm a bit late would be all right, he felt the passion return, felt his heart lurch and then flare into pounding, as though it had jumpstarted itself on a steep hill. While the boy was running more stairs, he toured the building: all dark in the furnace room, which contained an old desk and a cot, and which everyone called, to his amusement, “Angus’s Lair”; all quiet in the basement, where a shiny concrete floor opened onto sets of locker rooms and a training room and coaches’ offices; all quiet on the main floor with the basketball court and the trophy-lined lobby; all quiet in both faculty apartments.

  Should he chec
k the tunnel? No, that was a secret. No one would be in there at this hour. The only noise was upstairs; when he returned, he found that Russell had finished in the weight room and was now next door in the wrestling room, head down on a mat and serving as pivot as the boy spun and writhed and worked himself through an imaginary contest. This was a comfortable room, this box about twenty yards square, covered with mats on the floor and the walls, extra rolls of mats stored vertically like tree trunks against one wall.

  “You scared me,” the boy had said upon his return. “What are you doing here, anyway?” And then, before any chance for a response, the boy had added, “Sorry. Stupid question.”

  He had felt the heat pump into his face and had heard his own pulse in his ears.

  “Let me show you a special move, Russell,” he had said, and the boy had let him. Why not? The boy had sat on the mat and had let him kneel down behind and take the boy’s head in his hands. Russell Phillips was strong, but he was tired, and he was not prepared anyway for a familiar adult to twist his neck suddenly and break it.

  The boy had not died right away, and that part was bad, the eyes accusing him and the voice trying to speak but only choking. He had removed the boy’s shoes and socks from the motionless feet and then had replaced the shoes, retying them patiently, all the while listening to that increasingly labored breathing. Once done, he had gone next door for a barbell and had climbed the stairs and broken the lock on the door to the roof. Then he had dragged the limp boy up the stairs, still coughing and choking and gasping at first, but then finally quiet, and had thrown him off the roof.

  Now that it was over, he was all cool reason again. And yet he nearly vomited when he remembered the boy in the theater in New York. That had been only yesterday, though it seemed so much longer ago. He was going to have to control himself. It was wrong, giving in to this passion this way. He would be strong. He would resist. He would try.

  The Third Act

  SCENE 1

  Eldridge Lane, Ph.D. (economics, Rice University), for fifteen years headmaster of the Montpelier School for Boys, was furious.

  “No one connected with my school is a murderer,” he said. “No one. The very idea is preposterous.”

  Carol Scott said nothing. She looked like a bank officer calling to sell him a loan, with her gray wool suit, light makeup, short black hair pulled back with a gold barrette. She even carried a leather briefcase, which now rested on the patterned carpet at her feet. But Carol Scott was not a bank officer; she was an investigator with the county sheriff’s office, and she was willing to wait for Lane to finish his tantrum. She cut her eyes over to Horace Somerville, the only other person in Lane’s office. Horace Somerville was a vestryman at the Episcopal church in town where Carol Scott’s children went to Sunday school and where she and her husband sang in the choir. She had greeted Horace a few minutes ago by noting that his tie had its knot uncharacteristically lopsided. He had surprised her by straightening it quietly instead of excoriating her.

  Carol Scott sat beside Horace Somerville in front of Eldridge Lane’s desk wishing she had not drawn this assignment. She knew Lane well and didn’t care for him at all. He complained too frequently about the way she did her job, particularly when it meant adverse publicity for Montpelier School. It was a great school, sure, with a national reputation, but that didn’t mean that the boys didn’t try to buy beer with fake IDs from time to time, or that an ounce of coke didn’t end up in somebody’s dorm room on occasion. Lane treated every one of her visits as an intrusion. Maybe she intimidated him. She was 5’10”, the same height as he. She guessed that he had probably parted that silvery hair of his on the same line for every one of his fifty-nine years, and she could not imagine him wearing anything but the traditional attire he had on today: charcoal gray suit, white shirt, striped tie, black tasseled loafers. She figured him as the type who didn’t like changes, including changes in the gender of the workplace.

  It was clear that nothing had changed since the last time she had been in this office, which was what? Five or six years ago? Six years, she remembered. It was a hazy June day when she had arrested Lane’s youngest daughter, then seventeen, for possession of marijuana. Carol Scott had only been twenty-two then; it must have been one of her first arrests. She had made a special trip out to tell Lane in person that she thought the girl was probably dealing it, though she didn’t have any hard evidence. Back then Lane had sat behind the same expansive desk, had swiveled in the same green leather chair, had adjusted the position of the same brass desk lamp, had ranted just as vehemently. He’d been livid that they had actually arrested his child without telephoning him first. In the end, his daughter had managed to get by with a fine and probation. The experience had seemed to straighten her out, for Carol Scott had seen her picture in the paper last summer, the bride of some lawyer in Chapel Hill.

  “This school exists because of the trust that parents place in us,” said Lane. “A false rumor could do serious damage to our admissions program, not to mention our fund raising.”

  It was 9:00 in the morning, Tuesday, November 30, and Carol Scott was tired. She’d been called out here late last night to check on a corpse and had settled for five hours of sleep.

  “We plan to operate with discretion,” she said.

  Behind her she heard a knock on the door. She turned to see Felix Grayson bearing down on her.

  “Hello, Carol,” said Felix Grayson. “Out here to discuss that Phillips boy, are you?” He was fifty years old, bespectacled with bifocals, and very large. He wore steel-toed work boots, khaki trousers, a plaid shirt, and a black knit tie. He stood 6’7” and carried 230 pounds of muscle. He eased into the one chair remaining in front of the desk, right ankle resting on left knee, hands clasped and resting on his stomach. Grayson was the school’s disciplinarian, and once in a while he had occasion to converse with the local police.

  “You explain,” said Lane to Carol Scott.

  “I was on my way out here this morning anyway,” she said, “just to look around one more time in the daylight. Then I got a call from a very nice man in New York.”

  She said that the New York police had found the receipt from a Montpelier School Store on the floor of a movie theater off Forty-Second Street. It had been lying one row away from the body of a young male prostitute whose neck had been snapped by brute force.

  None of the men spoke.

  “Now, it could be that this boy’s death last night was a suicide,” she said. “I think it’s unusual to have a suicide so quickly after a vacation, but it’s possible. What makes me uncomfortable is the way his neck, too, is twisted.”

  “Couldn’t that have happened when he fell?” said Lane.

  She admitted that it could.

  Grayson asked her what she wanted them to do.

  She said she wanted a yearbook with everyone’s picture in it to send to New York. The ticket salesperson at the movie theater might be able to make an identification. She also wanted a sample cash register receipt from the school store to send up for comparison.

  “This receipt was not in particularly good shape,” she said. “It had been stepped on and spilled on. The part with the items purchased and the date seem to be gone forever. But they could read the name Montpelier.”

  According to the police in New York, there were twenty-seven schools in the country called “Montpelier.” No one had learned yet how many of the schools had their own supply shops.

  “It couldn’t be ours,” said Lane. “And even if it were, we can’t assume that a member of our own community is responsible for these deaths. We get people through here all the time—tourists, salespeople. We send off mail orders all over the country.”

  “I agree that the possibility is remote,” said Carol Scott. “Still, I would like to get the names of everyone on your faculty and all of your students who visited New York over the Thanksgiving holidays. I would also ask that you take some precautions with security. Don’t let these boys walk around the ca
mpus by themselves.”

  “They have to walk around the campus by themselves,” said Lane. “We have 500 acres of land here. How can I control the behavior of 360 boys?”

  “You’ll think of something,” said Carol Scott. “Tell them that you’ve put in a new rule.”

  “How can I do that without arousing suspicion or starting a rumor?” said Lane.

  “It’s all right with me if you want to treat this death like a suicide,” said Carol Scott. “Tell the boys that they need to look out for one another. That they need to be ‘buddies.’ I don’t know. You know your students better than I do.”

  “How long will we have to go through with this charade?” said Lane.

  She said it would be at least until Montpelier School for Boys was clearly not tied to the death of the kid in New York.

  Then she picked up her briefcase and left.

  Horace Somerville waved her a silent goodbye. He liked Carol, knew Eldridge would, too, if he could make the effort to get acquainted. Somerville and Eldridge Lane had known each other since they were thirteen years old, when both of them had enrolled at Montpelier as third formers. Somerville had been on the search committee that had nominated Lane as headmaster sixteen years ago, when Horace was academic dean. But Somerville had stepped down from that job three years ago, when he’d noticed himself slowing down. It was better for somebody younger, like Sam Kaufman, to have the position, even if Kaufman was an idiot. He wondered if perhaps Eldridge should have made the same move two or three years ago. Eldridge was slipping, Somerville thought, worried more about appeasing the board of trustees and keeping up the image of the school than he was about keeping in touch with the actual community.

  Lane pulled a Hershey’s Kiss from his jacket pocket and pulled at the silvery foil wrapper. “So where do we go from here?” he said. “You two are here to counsel.”

  “It wouldn’t be out of line to send the boys home early for vacation,” said Somerville.

  “On what grounds?” said Lane. “If nothing got settled over the holidays, would they all then stay at home? Should we close down the school?”