“Do you think that might have been the reason for Chip’s violence?” Kate took off her blue scarf, folded it, and put it in the pocket of her mackinaw.

“I really know nothing about him. There are many reasons for violence. This is just something that sometimes happen. We’d see it in treatment centers—the child who’d suffered something awful. Even in the best recovery there’d be a fear that everything would fall apart and they’d become victims again. And their final loyalty was to themselves. They couldn’t be forced. They preferred to wreck everything, preferred self-destruction to surrender.”

Kate and Hawthorne stood side by side, leaning against the wall of the bell tower. “Was this true of the boy who started the fire?” asked Kate.

“Stanley Carpasso? I’m not sure. I was too close to him and I’ve probably lost all objectivity. But he’d been sexually abused repeatedly—some boyfriend of his mother’s. And such a trauma could have created that frozen space. Stanley actually saw his way out of it. I was to be his savior. He could be very loving, very affectionate, stopping by my office to ask if there was anything he could do for me. Sometimes he brought me flowers. Then he began to save food at mealtimes—cookies and fruit and cake, a drumstick. He’d wrap it up and leave it for me in a bag hanging on my doorknob. It was both gruesome and touching.”

“I think they mentioned that in one of those articles.”

“He got a lot of attention—boy victim, boy aggressor. One article tried to show him as evil and another as innocent. It seemed impossible to believe that he was neither, that he was simply a damaged human being. As I told you, he wanted me to adopt him. The only trouble was that I already had a family.”

“So he started the fire . . .” Kate buried her hands in her coat pockets.

“It was more cunning than that.” Far to the south a plume of smoke rose up from the trees. The smoke rose straight upward, then the wind caught it and blew it eastward. At that moment Hawthorne realized he was going to tell Kate more of the story, part of what he had left out during their walk earlier in the woods.

“Our apartment at Wyndham was on the second floor, above the offices,” he began. “It had a heavy oak door. Presumably so nobody could easily break through it. And there were grates on the windows. I had meant to take them off but several people who’d been at Wyndham longer than I had urged me to keep them. Kids used to break in before the grates went up. The apartment was a temptation. Certainly other windows had grates as well. So I kept the grates and the keys were in my office.

“One day I came back to the apartment after work and found these heavy rings screwed to the doorjamb. I asked Meg about them but she had been out as well and knew nothing. I called a few people but no one could tell me anything. And of course it was the end of the day and people were scattered. I assumed the rings were there for a good reason. It was something I meant to find out about the next morning. I mean, it didn’t seem terribly important at the time. Lily was asking me to help her with her homework. I remember she had just begun to study fractions . . .”

Hawthorne paused. Beneath them half a dozen students ran down the steps of the library and along the driveway toward Emerson Hall, their excited voices drifting upward. Hawthorne leaned back against the wall, unbuttoning the top of his blue overcoat.

“That evening,” he continued, “I had to meet with a psychologist who had flown in from Boston to give a lecture at UCSD—a young woman I had known before moving to San Diego. She’d been a student in several of my graduate classes at BU. We were going to have dinner. Meg had meant to come, but she said she was getting a sore throat and decided to stay home. We went to a restaurant downtown run by Jim Croce’s widow that has a jazz bar. We had dinner and talked about Boston. She told me about her lecture, which I hadn’t been able to attend, then about nine o’clock we decided to stay for the first set.”

Hawthorne paused. In his many retellings he had always left out the part about Claire, so it was almost as if it had never taken place. He asked himself if he could forget it completely, erase that hour and the guilt that stayed with him—Claire’s face, her short dark hair, the scooped blue silk blouse showing the deep shadow between her breasts and the red stone hanging from a silver chain around her neck: all of it had become a fixed part of his interior landscape.

“That’s what I remember of this dinner,” continued Hawthorne, “I stayed an extra twenty minutes to hear this jazz quartet playing old standards. There was a young woman on the clarinet who was very good. When I got back to Wyndham, the main building was already burning. They were getting the kids out but the fire department hadn’t arrived. I didn’t see Meg or Lily. There was tremendous confusion.

“I ran inside and up the stairs. There was smoke in the second-floor hall but no fire. I reached our door. There was a chain across it. Someone had put a thick chain through the two rings and locked it with a padlock. The door couldn’t be opened. Meg and Lily were on the other side. Meg kept throwing herself against the door. There was a gap of about four inches and I could see part of her face. We could talk. I was afraid, but it seemed obvious they could still get out. Already we could hear the sirens of the fire trucks. Meg and I were able to clasp our hands through the narrow space. Lily kept asking me to open the door. I stroked her hair with one hand and held Meg’s hand with the other. As I say, the grates on the windows were locked and the keys were in my desk. Meg had opened the windows but couldn’t do anything about the grates.

“Downstairs, in the administration office, was a fire ax set into the wall in a little locked cabinet. I’d passed it a thousand times. Meg urged me to get it and to get the keys for the grates. I don’t know, I stayed too long holding her hand. But maybe it was only a minute. Not even that. Maybe it was ten seconds, no more. Then I ran down the hall. The smoke was thicker. I could hear sirens and men shouting. When I got to the office, the cabinet was empty. The glass was broken and the ax was gone. It was never determined whether Carpasso had taken it or if someone else had.

“My own office was on the other side of the administration office. I ran to my desk to get the keys to the grates. By now the electricity had gone out and the only light came from the window—emergency lights and the lights of the fire trucks. And it was smoky. I couldn’t find the keys right away. I ripped out the drawer and overturned it on the top of the desk. You know the junk you can accumulate—paper clips, pencils. All this took time. But the keys were there. I grabbed them and ran back to the stairs. The emergency lights up by the ceiling had come on but the smoke was worse. I ran back down the hall toward our door. If I could get the keys to Meg, she could open one of the grates and jump. What I didn’t know was that the fire was already inside the apartment.

“By now the hall ceiling was on fire and I could see flames through the smoke. I could hear Meg calling my name but it seemed very far away over all the noise. And I could hear Lily. Then the ceiling began to collapse, great segments of flaming acoustic tile were falling around me and the ceiling itself was sagging. I tried to keep running, jumping over stuff. Then I don’t know. Something hit me. I tried to keep moving. I could hear people shouting behind me as well. I knew I had to get her the keys. It was difficult to breathe. I don’t even remember being burned. I just remember Meg’s voice, how her calling changed to screaming. I only wanted to reach her, to grasp her hand. I don’t know if I thought we would all die. I’m sure I still thought I’d be successful. Then that was all. That’s all I remember. When I woke in the hospital and found they were dead, I felt I had been the most awful of traitors.”