Dedication
For my father, Joe
Contents
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
About the Author
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
1
NIGHT AIR EXPLODES past me. I hit the roof and roll, moving, brain thundering at shock pulse.
At the roof door, I brush tar from my soles. The door opens so quietly. Inside, the heavy smell of trapped air in the stairwell. Filling the lungs like fuel. Head swimming now. Racing down flights, the old frenzy filling me. Feel the banister. Spindles blur past my shoes, faster, faster, feet almost on fire. Thoughts burning up into my skull. Have waited so long for this . . . I want to scream—but clamp glove on my face.
On the floor now. Here I am. Fourth floor—smells like ammonia. Wombats have been here. Can hardly keep to the wall. Legs tingling as I run. Fingers grip the molding. Eyes glued to the plaster. Now STOP. A rush of air from my mouth. Am I here? The door. The pounding in my head rising on chords of sound, howling. A storm raging inside. Have to stop it . . . but no time. Now the sound is coming closer. Louder. Closer. In a fury now, white-hot, seething.
Turn the knob. See it turn. A flash of brilliant light. Enveloping me. But it can’t be, not here. A Day-Glo playroom. A child’s mad colors. Bright oranges, reds roaring, blues that cut. Colors that erupt, burst across walls, great swaths of color, splattered upward at sharp angles.
Try to focus . . . see the room as it really is. A great silence inhabits me. I see it now. No color. Drab. Dark wooden desk. Closet door ajar. Dust on the floor. Close my eyes . . . the playroom again—flashing back—cutting in, burning through my eyes.
Open the door wider.
A blade of light falls across a sleeping face.
Crawl to the edge of my bed. There I am, sleeping. Skin so white. Jet-black hair. Someone creeps into my room, brushes my hair. Hands so soft. So nice.
This won’t hurt.
2
WHEN THEY FOUND fifteen-year-old Eddie Crawford, he was tucked upside down in one of the garbage cans under the massive windows on the fourth floor of Ardsley Hall. Another freshman, Brad Schwerin, always the first in line at breakfast, was emptying his garbage on the way out when he discovered the body. He could only see the scuffed heels of Crawford’s shoes when he lifted the lid. Even before enduring his slimy oatmeal and powdered eggs, the boy thought he was seeing things and walked calmly back down the squeaky hallway with his garbage, only to stop in his tracks and start screaming.
Mr. Toby, one of the masters, looked out of his door and ran to where the boy’s pink, trembling hand pointed down at the shoes; he then called to one of the other masters, the German teacher, Mr. Carlson, to help him hoist the body.
By the time Crawford was lifted out of the can, the hall was full of boys milling around. They moved in closer, their eyes widening in disbelief. Crawford’s face was indigo. His neck was wrapped in the school tie with gold crests that all the new boys had to wear. When the body was turned upright, the thin piece of silk suddenly peeled away. Shrieks of fright echoed through the hallway. Crawford’s throat had been cut, and the blood that had poured over his features into the garbage can had left tracks racing up his face. On top of his head was a frozen clump of brown hair that had been swimming in a pool of his own blood.
Cary Ballard was there that morning, but stood away from the others as the screams went up into the rafters of Ardsley’s hallway. He remembered reaching suddenly for his own throat, as if someone were about to grasp it from behind. He wheeled around, but there was no one there. All he could say was that a fear gripped him. He turned toward the back stairs.
He was a large boy, already over six feet with broad shoulders and strong arms, yet something about him was frail, even delicate. He was also painfully shy and he hunched in a conscious way as if to apologize for his stature. At times, despite this, he rebelled against his own dispirited nature by losing his temper or talking back—bold actions for which he was usually reprimanded. He was fourteen, handsome in a boyish way, had clear skin and some freckles across the bridge of his nose. His eyes were green.
Cary slouched down the back stairway. The sight of the dead boy’s body had terrified him. He ran down the stairs until the dank smell of the hallway faded. On the steps between the second and third floors, his palm skimming the banister, he stopped suddenly on the stairs. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the familiar shadow, the tall, slightly pitched parody of that figure, that presence he remembered so well. It was coming up the stairs. He was sure his own footsteps had already been heard. All he could manage was to pin the back of his head against the wall, waiting, hoping the shadow would stop, retrace its steps and go down. It didn’t. He tried to contain his breathing, which came in short spurts that stalled in the back of his throat. He knew who it was. There was no question. Whatever fight he had left seemed to turn inward. As he watched the shadow on the landing below make the final turn to the third floor, he listened to the steps and for the first time was unsure. Now the shape of the image racing up the wall took flight in his mind. The shadow whipped across the surface of the cement. He saw a hand. He panicked, plunging down the stairwell. He ran right into Mr. Allington, a tall master who dropped down a step as the boy bumped into him.
“Whoa, young man!” he said. “What’s the hurry?”
“Oh, sir, sorry—I thought it was someone else—I’m not feeling well, I—I—”
“What is it?” A warm hand fell on his shoulder.
“Nothing, sir—it was just the smell up there—I couldn’t . . .”
As assistant headmaster, Elliot Allington had been present in Ballard’s initial interview. The boy always remembered him as the only person behind that long reef of a table in the Admissions Office who had smiled.
Allington looked down at Cary, concerned. The boy sensed the master staring at his shirt.
“What were the screams on the fourth about?”
The boy could not respond at first, but looked right through the man toward the end of his fear. “I . . . don’t know what . . .
happened, sir. There was no air. I couldn’t breathe—had to go.”
The master’s eyes began to tighten. “Cary, just sit down and relax, all right?” Climbing the stairs two at a time, he disappeared.
The boy felt as though he was in shock and didn’t remember how he got to the hill overlooking the town, but felt he could not get his breath until he was away from the muffled gloom that floated through that stairwell. He was numb. He looked down at himself just to make sure his body was still there. His tie was gone. That’s what the master had been looking at. He had lost it, no doubt, between the fourth floor and the hill outside. Then he began to question whether he had ever put it on.
As the wind began to whip yellow leaves around him, his mind tried to retrace the steps he had taken. It was all a blur. He would have to go back upstairs to get another tie before class.
As he stared down at the front lawn of the school, the way it rumbled into town, something occurred to him. He turned back to look at the stone arch that joined Ardsley and Booth halls. For an instant he imagined he saw the murdered boy, Ed Crawford. There under the vaulting gray stones, he remembered, was the last time he had seen Crawford alive. It was the day he had first thought of leaving Ravenhill School. Recalling the incident kept the fear at bay. He thought back, devouring the memory.
At lunch that day, Crawford had attacked him in front of the others at the dining table. He told Cary that he was worthless for having declined to fight him after history class. The class had met in the dank basement of Booth Hall, near the labs.
Crawford, a light-skinned boy whose fiery pupils seemed to glow in the dark, and another boy, Gluckner, a big football player, had been sitting sullenly on either side of the locked door to the history classroom like Japanese guard dogs.
When Ballard walked down the basement stairs, he spoke to them but they didn’t answer. They just looked at each other during a kind of tense silence. Ballard set his books down on the floor. Suddenly Crawford spit on Ballard’s books, then stood up, smiling. When Ballard pushed Crawford against the windowpane in the oak door, the old glass echoed down the hallway. Crawford’s eyes became oddly distended as if filling with chaos. He slapped Ballard hard in the face and told him he’d better show up after class to fight. Ballard said yes but he didn’t show.
Instead he slipped into the dining room for lunch. Then he realized Crawford was nudging him from behind, kicking his heels to unnerve him. Crawford didn’t have to say much. He just sat at the same table, right across from Ballard, and stared at him. He leaned the patched elbows of his sports jacket on the white tablecloth and hissed across at him. “You’re a wimp.” He rolled the word around in his mouth and spit it out, much the way he had spit on Cary’s books in the first place. “You know what you are, don’t you, wimp?”
Cary looked down at Crawford’s elbow patches and got the idea that the sports jacket must have belonged to someone’s father. His own father had died so long ago he couldn’t remember what he looked like. Cary heard the other students snickering. When the main course came, they refused to pass him any food and he sat, unable to look at any of them, staring out the window.
Then he saw it. The same hand he had seen so many times. It reached slowly out of the same black cuff and moved across the outside of the window. The hand rested against the window glass, as if waiting. No one else saw it. The boys were lulled by the din of voices, of forks scraping plates, the crisp rubbing of linen jackets as the scholarship students pitched stainless steel bins of food onto the table. No one seemed to care that someone’s arm, draped in black, was poised in the window near their table. Ballard knew whose hand it was. He wondered why so many years had passed since he’d seen the stranger—and why now?
He thought back to the first times he had ever noticed it. The figure would appear at a distance, just standing there in a black cloak and hat, staring. Ballard often thought it must be hot in those clothes. A black scarf was always wrapped across the bottom of the face.
When he was a child he remembered seeing the figure one time standing on the grass outside his bedroom window. It was a bright summer day. The hill sloped down to a cement wall where his father was busy tending a thin bed of petunias. Ballard had opened his window, noticed his father squatting over the flowers and, on the hill above, seen the stranger standing there, staring. The way the eyes above the scarf burned, the boy imagined it was smiling. This sent shivers up his spine, but he kept looking at the stranger until it went away.
At the table Ballard’s eyes followed the black sleeve as it moved slowly across the pane, bringing with it a shoulder, and finally, the wrapped face. The same smiling eyes. The figure was wearing the dark hat and filled the entire window, looking down at Crawford in a very careful, attentive way. Again, Ballard stared up at the stranger until it went away.
As Cary stood now in front of the school, lost in these images, he understood why Crawford had died in such a grisly way. A police siren could be heard whining in the distance; it turned the corner at the light in town, followed by an ambulance, and complained as it climbed the hill to the school.
Ballard turned now and saw a horde of students and faculty members spilling out from under the arch as the vehicles came to a halt. In the crowd, he picked out the red face and blond hair of Mr. Carlson. He saw Mr. Toby talking excitedly to one of the officers and he saw Schwerin standing in the doorway crying.
The ambulance team walked into Ardsley. Ballard saw the edges of their white jackets as they climbed past the windows in the stairwell. Soon they would reach the fourth floor, he thought. They would bring Crawford’s covered body down on a stretcher, slide him in the ambulance, and drive back down the hill. People would wonder for years who could have done such a thing. As he took a deep breath, Ballard didn’t need to wonder. He thought he knew.
3
NICK FOWLER HAD been a cop in Buffalo for ten years, a sergeant for the last four, and had just made lieutenant. He had been trying to get a transfer to Ravenstown for years because the fishing was great and he was tired of the city. With the breakup of his marriage, he was spending more and more time out of town. When the call came that same morning, he was on vacation, eating breakfast at an angler’s lodge twenty miles upriver from Ravenhill School.
A half hour later he was in a squad car, still wearing his waders, speeding along the blacktop. His old precinct approved his transfer by policefax, and the local force hired him on his way to the scene. He guessed it was his strong background in assaults, evidence gathering, and maybe a little luck. Besides, he was in the neighborhood. His first case as a lieutenant too.
He pulled off his waders in the backseat of the car. The driver, a sergeant, said he would stash them for him in a locker down at the station house, handed him his gun and temporary badge, then peeled away leaving him standing under a stone arch. It was only then that he realized he was wearing a plaid shirt, frayed jeans, and a pair of hightops.
When Nick Fowler ambled onto the scene, an hour and a half after the body was taken downtown, he met Sergeant Robby Cole. Cole had gotten the call initially and was now coordinating technical services. Nick nodded to the sergeant. He skimmed Cole’s typed report and looked around the hallway, trying to yank himself out of a vague feeling that he was out of place. He was still surprised at how fast all this had happened; he was even a little sleepy. He couldn’t seem to focus.
Then he saw the blood.
It was on the floor, on the walls, everywhere. Something took a hold of Fowler inside. He looked down at the victim’s name and address on the report, his chest knocking, his own blood beginning to throb. He felt a little dizzy. He steadied himself, closed his eyes and stood quite still for a moment, as if his thoughts were suspended. He had seen bodies before. He had read the names of murder victims before on plain white pieces of paper, the forms recopied so many times they had to be committed to memory. He saw the face of a man appear in the back of his mind. It floated there like an apparition, then faded.
&nb
sp; Fowler opened his eyes. He scanned the hallway and couldn’t help but notice that nearly all the cops were looking at him.
He started to move anxiously around the room. By that time, more and more policemen were arriving to take a look—most were standing around drinking coffee from Styrofoam cups. The first thing Fowler did was raise his voice. The cops turned around with blank stares to hear this new guy, however politely, ask every man not involved in the investigation—including a lieutenant from the county—to leave. That didn’t win him any friends. He even walked up to his new boss, Captain Allen Weathers.
“I’d like to ask you to leave too, Captain. No offense,” he explained with a reluctant smile, “I need to seal the scene. Make sure no evidence is destroyed.”
“Who’s stopping you?” Weathers shot back, bristling as he stared up at the tall blond man, eyeing the prominent cleft nose, the wide jaw, the blue eyes. He had gone out on a limb to bring this guy in.
“Sorry, sir,” he said, unable to contain a frown, “if you’ll just step over here, the bloodstains under your feet might get to the lab.” The captain suddenly rose up on tiptoes and hotfooted it toward the wall. Fowler kept a straight face.
He set up a temporary office in an empty room on the floor, ordered his team to block off the corridor, asking the prefects to require their students to use the back stairwell. He then installed a police line of yellow tape bordering the scene. He also requested a barricade downstairs on the third floor, which blocked off the old wooden staircase.
He asked to be briefed on exactly what trace evidence had been found. He requested the immediate presence of the master who had found the body. When he was told that Mr. Toby was teaching, Fowler had him called out of his class.
Only one gloved technician had arrived. Nick fidgeted and watched as the man worked carefully around the place where the body had been found. Having read the initial report, Fowler knew the throat wound had been inflicted with a sharp, thin blade, possibly a fillet knife. Before he supervised a second thorough search of the scene, Fowler set up a schedule of interviews with faculty.
Kiss Them Goodbye Page 1