Ruth Standish nodded but Krueger could see that she didn’t agree; now she was irritated with Hawthorne as well, though she said nothing more.

“So you have a family, Mr. Krueger?” asked Skander as the plates were being cleared. He sat back in his chair and unbuttoned his blue blazer.

Krueger nodded. “We have a son and a daughter.”

This information appeared to make Skander very pleased. “Children are such a happy addition, I find. What are their ages?”

“The girl is six and the boy is four. Actually, the boy—” Krueger was about to say that the boy had been named after Hawthorne, but Skander interrupted him.

“My wife and I have a ten-year-old boy. He loves to play the guitar. As a matter of fact, we’d hoped for a large family, five or six youngsters around the table, but that just wasn’t to be. Not that we’re not delighted with what we’ve got.” He turned to the boy beside him. “Tell me, Scott, do you have siblings?”

“I’ve got four sisters and they all suck.”

Skander erupted in laughter. “Isn’t that typical? Nobody ever likes what he has.” He then proceeded to ask about Gene Strauss’s children.

Krueger found himself wondering if Skander knew that Hawthorne had lost his wife and daughter. But he must have known. Hawthorne seemed to be listening attentively to Strauss’s answer about a boy who’d just started as a freshman in Durham and a daughter at home. But again Krueger felt he detected some strain in Hawthorne’s face, an inner sadness that he tried to conceal.

After lunch, Hawthorne gave him a tour of the rest of the school. The rain had decreased to a drizzle that showed no sign of stopping. Krueger’s least-favorite period of the year was between the time the clocks were set back and December 21, when the days started to get longer again. Now, though it was only a little after one, it seemed closer to four o’clock. They walked along the driveway, past Krueger’s car, to the chapel in Stark Hall. The bricks were streaked with water, which made shadowy designs on the building.

Stark Chapel was a severe horseshoe-shaped room with dark pews raked so that those in the back were at least twenty feet above those in the front, as if the pews had been placed to make certain that all students could be seen at all times. There was an aisle down the middle and aisles on both sides. Three golden chandeliers, each with some twenty candlelike bulbs, hung from the arched wooden ceiling, which was painted white and resembled the hull of a schooner. On both sides of the chapel, stained-glass windows depicted biblical scenes. One showed Abraham holding a knife to Isaac’s throat before the angel interrupted the sacrifice. Krueger asked himself what sort of message that had been designed to send to the students of Bishop’s Hill.

“The organ’s quite good,” said Hawthorne. “Rosalind Langdon, the music teacher, plays it every Thursday evening. She doesn’t like to call them recitals but they feel like recitals. They’re really one of the nicest things that happen here. Mostly she does transcriptions of popular songs—you know, ‘Ruby Tuesday’ and ‘Eleanor Rigby,’ but once she did Bach. I try to make it every week, though sometimes I can’t. Too many people wanting to see me with a new complaint.”

The front of the chapel was very plain, with a wooden altar and wooden cross. On the right side were pews for the choir and on the left was a pulpit flanked by two large oak chairs. Above the pulpit hung a painting of a slender, dour man dressed in black. He had a thin white beard covering little more than his jawbone and colorless lips like twin sticks.

Hawthorne pointed to it. “That painting of Ambrose Stark is one of at least four. He was headmaster for forty years and clearly spent a lot of time getting his portrait painted. Given the prominence of his picture, you’d think he was the object of worship.”

“Not what I’d call a fun-loving man.” Approaching the painting, Krueger saw that the frame was bolted to the wall. The bolts looked new. “What’s this?” he asked.

“I had the paintings of Stark tied down, as it were. A few of the faculty see it as a serious eccentricity on my part, but they had a way of wandering. I saw one staring at me from a window.”

“Good Lord, are you serious?”

“After it happened a second time, I had the paintings bolted to the walls, which was probably a mistake. But I was angry. You have no idea how frightening it was.”

“I can imagine. Was this another practical joke?”

“Not a very funny one. I assume someone was holding it up for me to see. I couldn’t be sure it was a painting at first, but it had to be. Anyway, the Reverend Bennett fits in quite well here—everything serious and repentant.”

“You get calls from someone pretending to be Meg and pictures of this old geezer keep popping out at you—what’s going on?”

Hawthorne began to walk back up the steps of the aisle. “Most simply, it’s someone unhappy with the changes I’ve been making.”

Krueger hurried after him. “And what are you going to do about it?”

“Well, I bolted down the paintings and have taken to prowling around the buildings late at night. I’ve become so watchful that my eyes ache. Otherwise, I’m trying to wait it out. Maybe I’ll catch the person.”

Once outside, Hawthorne pointed to the two faculty apartments at the back of Stark Hall. “The Reverend Bennett and her husband live in the biggest one. That fellow you met earlier, Bill Dolittle, wants to move into the one above it.”

They walked around the drive in front of Emerson toward the library in Hamilton Hall, directly across from Stark. It began to rain harder.

“What do you mean, someone’s unhappy with the changes you’re making?” asked Krueger. “Is this one person or several?”

Hawthorne stopped by the steps of the library. Raindrops glistened in his hair. “I told you that Mrs. Hayes resigned. Half the faculty thinks I fired her, just as I fired Chip. Even though a lot’s been done, the school’s barely hanging together. There’s endless gossip, and the rumor that I was writing a book didn’t help. One group is certain I’m fucking the language teacher, another thinks I’m messing around with the nurse, though she was purportedly a lesbian before I came. There’s probably a third group that believes I’m fucking them both, and a fourth is sure I’m having an affair with someone else entirely. Nearly forty people work here: faculty, staff, housekeepers, kitchen help. Half can’t stand me. They’re angry that I’ve taken away their perks, they’re angry I’ve given them more work, they’re angry I’m trying to get them to do what they’ve been hired to do.”

Hawthorne paused to wipe the rain off his face with the back of his hand. Splotches of water dotted the front of his white shirt.

“At least a dozen people think I’m getting rich on the place. Never in my life have I been so distrusted. I don’t really believe there’s a conspiracy against me, but at times it seems that way. As I say, there are people here I trust but then they become the focus of gossip. Beyond that, things turn up missing. A snow blower disappeared. Someone stole one of the new computers. Several telephones have been vandalized. Supplies vanish. Some of it can probably be blamed on students, but the rest, the vicious part, seems too sophisticated for students. Those telephone calls—I can’t believe a student would do such a thing.”

“Could it be Chip Campbell?”

“I doubt it. I’m sure he hates me, but he’s got other things on his mind—his ex-wife is in the process of moving to Seattle and taking their two kids, and he’s doing substitute teaching in several schools. Believe me, when this began to get worse, he was the first person I thought of, but he just doesn’t have the time. I even drove over to his house, though I didn’t go in. I could see him through the picture window with a six-pack of beer, staring at the ceiling. I felt sorry for him.”