Praise for Boy in the Water
“Once again, Dobyns has offered readers a thriller that is swift and smart and very, very spooky.”
—The Washington Post Book World
“A shivery whodunit.”
—USA Today
“Dobyns creates a haunted, troubled realm.”
—The Providence Sunday Journal
“Nasty fun.”
—Daily News
“The author has thoroughly mixed several genres—horror, the fiction of personal crisis, suspense—into a weird and original concoction that is highly entertaining.”
—The Chicago Tribune
“An atmospheric thriller.”
—San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle
“Like the best thriller writers, Dobyns not only scares us with what is out there but also with what we find (or don’t find) within ourselves.”
—Booklist
“Mr. Dobyns is a masterly poet and shrewd mystery writer . . . moody and evocatively written.”
—Dallas Morning News
“If you take Boy in the Water to the beach, take lots of sunscreen; you may sit longer than you planned, following this thriller to its intense conclusion.”
—Schenectady Gazette
“[Dobyns’s] prose is fluent and the plot races along like clockwork.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Set in the New Hampshire mountains at remote Bishop’s Hill Academy, Dobyns’s new novel succeeds . . . Recommended for all mystery collections.”
—Library Journal
Also by Stephen Dobyns
POETRY
Winter’s Journey
Mystery, So Long
The Porcupine’s Kisses
Pallbearers Envying the One Who Rides
Common Carnage
Velocities: New and Selected Poems, 1966–1992
Body Traffic
Cemetery Nights
Black Dog, Red Dog
The Balthus Poems
Heat Death
Griffon
Concurring Beasts
NONFICTION
Next Word, Better Word: The Craft of Writing Poetry
Best Words, Best Order: Essays on Poetry
STORIES
Eating Naked
NOVELS
Is Fat Bob Dead Yet?
The Burn Palace
Saratoga Strongbox
The Church of Dead Girls
Saratoga Fleshpot
Saratoga Backtalk
The Wrestler’s Cruel Study
Saratoga Haunting
After Shocks/Near Escapes
Saratoga Hexameter
The House on Alexandrine
Saratoga Bestiary
The Two Deaths of Señora Puccini
A Boat off the Coast
Saratoga Snapper
Cold Dog Soup
Saratoga Headhunter
Dancer with One Leg
Saratoga Swimmer
Saratoga Longshot
A Man of Little Evils
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
375 Hudson Street
New York, New York 10014
First trade paperback edition 2001 by St. Martin’s Press
Originally published by Metropolitan Books copyright © 1999 by Stephen Dobyns
Copyright © 1999 by Stephen Dobyns
Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.
Blue Rider Press is a registered trademark and its colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dobyns, Stephen.
Boy in the water : a novel / Stephen Dobyns.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-101-99179-4
1. Preparatory schools—Fiction. 2. New Hampshire—Fiction. 3. Good and evil—Fiction. 4. Psychological fiction. I. Title.
PS3554.O2B69 2015 2015017236
813'.54—dc23
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Version_1
Contents
Praise for Boy in the Water
Also by Stephen Dobyns
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Prologue
PART ONE
One
Two
Three
Four
PART TWO
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
PART THREE
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Epilogue
About the Author
Everything that happens is as normal and expected as the spring rose or summer fruit; this is true of sickness, death, slander, intrigue, and all the other things that entertain or trouble imprudent men.
—MARCUS AURELIUS, MEDITATIONS
Prologue
Like a black island on a turquoise sea, the dark shape floated on the surface of the water, lit from beneath by a string of underwater spotlights evenly spaced along the twenty-five yards of the swimming pool. They gave off the only light apart from the glow of a red exit sign above the door. The shape at first looked like a barrel or log. It took a moment to realize that it was a body: a boy, naked except for a pair of white Jockey shorts. He was small for his age and quite slender. Perhaps he was thirteen—an eighth grader. Only the boy’s torso and the back of his head rose above the surface; his arms and legs hung down toward the black lines that ran the length of the pool’s bottom. His elbows were bent and his fingers were curved and relaxed, as if he had been holding something but had just let it go. The underwater lights made the air shimmer above the water and formed rippling shadows on the green cinder-block walls and tile ceiling.
Something small with pointed ears and a bedraggled tail stepped gingerly across the boy’s back, tentatively lifting and shaking one paw after another as it moved along the boy’s shoulder blades. It mewed and the sound echoed throughout the pool area. When the creature turned and its full silhouette became visible against the turquoise, one could see it was a kitten stranded on this dark island, stepping lightly from one part of the boy’s back to another, seeking the highest spot, while its movement caused the body to bob and turn very slightly. As a trickle of water ran across the boy’s skin, the kitten reared up like a miniature horse to keep its paws from getting wet.