LeBrun made his move, counting the seconds off to himself. Five steps to her door, two seconds to get the key in the lock and he was inside. The girl was on the lower bunk fussing with something. The only light came from a lamp on the desk, and the room was dim. LeBrun looked again. It was a fucking cat.

“Hey,” said Jessica.

“Get rid of that cat.” LeBrun stayed by the door.

“You’re not supposed to be in here.” Jessica sat up on the bed and put her bare feet on the floor. The kitten crawled behind her.

“I said, get rid of the cat.”

“It’s not a cat, it’s a kitten. Its name is Lucky.”

Now that LeBrun couldn’t see the cat, it wasn’t so bad, but just thinking about it made him disgusted. Even kittens were filthy with fleas and mites crawling over their skin and feeding on their blood. And they ate filthy things—mice and birds—and played with them as they died. That was as bad as the filthiness. If you had to kill something, you killed it quick. You didn’t fuck around. You only teased something if you hated it and wanted to punish it everlastingly, if its suffering excited you.

“How’d you get a key?” asked Jessica, more curious than frightened.

LeBrun ignored her question. “This business with your brother, I want to do it right away. We can do it this weekend.”

“Nothing’s ready yet. I don’t even know if they’ll be home. I have to tell Jason and the only way I can do that is by writing him.”

“What the fuck’s Jason need to know for? We can just go down and snatch him.”

“Then they’ll call the police. We need time to get away.”

LeBrun kept an eye on the bed behind Jessica to make sure the cat stayed put. If it came sneaking out, then he’d have to twist it. He’d hardly be able to help himself. And if he twisted it, all hell would break loose. Beyond that, he didn’t like being in the room. It smelled of girl things and girl perfumes. There was underwear on the chair—black panties and a little bra—and a box of Tampax on the desk right next to the computer. There were posters of young men stuck up on the wall—that kid who had been in Titanic with a swan curling over his naked shoulder and that singer who’d killed himself, offed himself for no reason that LeBrun could see. Killing yourself was what you did last, and LeBrun laughed because it was a joke and he hadn’t meant it as a joke.

“What’s so funny?” asked Jessica.

“Hey, Misty, what’s the last thing a Canuck does?”

“What?”

“He dies.”

“I don’t find that very funny.”

LeBrun thought about it for a moment. “I guess you had to be there.”

“I don’t like you being in my room. I’m already in trouble and if they see you in here, they’ll guess where I got the tequila.”

The girl had her hand behind her back and LeBrun understood that she was keeping the cat out of his sight, which meant she was touching it. “I want to know exactly when we’re going to get your brother. You’re just fucking with me, promising me that money.”

“No, really, we’ll do it. We have to do it.”

“Next week then.”

“That’s Thanksgiving. There’ll be too many people.”

“Then right after that. On Monday, that’s the thirtieth. We’ll do it on the thirtieth.”

“Won’t there be school that day?”

“You nuts? You plan to come back? You take him and you’ll be gone.”

“Okay, the thirtieth. We’ll do it on that Monday. I’ll write to Jason.” Jessica stuck out her hand. “You want to shake on it?”

“You fucking kidding? You been playing with that cat. I wouldn’t touch your hand unless you boiled it.”

LeBrun had been leaning against the door. Suddenly it pushed against him. He half stumbled forward as Helen Selkirk entered. Seeing him she stopped, leaving the door open.

“What’re you doing in here? You’re not supposed to be here.”

LeBrun felt himself getting angry. “I’m checking the pipes. You wouldn’t want the pipes to burst now, would you? They’d cause one unholy fucking mess.” Then he left, darting down the hall to the back stairs and making no sound.

—

The Saturday before Thanksgiving there was sleet. Despite the weather, Hawthorne drove in to Plymouth in the morning, telling himself that he had errands, but in fact he wanted to get away from Bishop’s Hill. He had bought a used Subaru station wagon early in the fall and he felt some self-satisfaction that he had had the foresight to buy a vehicle with four-wheel drive. He would have lunch by himself and wouldn’t think that people were talking about him and conspiring against him. He would rest his mind. His subjective and objective selves seemed hopelessly entangled and he wasn’t thinking clearly. His guilt about the fire at Wyndham School, the deaths of his wife and daughter, the phone calls, Evings’s suicide, and all the other business kept rattling through his brain.

Hawthorne now realized that he had accepted the phone calls and the rest as his due, as a criminal might accept lashes of a whip. No punishment, he had felt, would be too awful, if it could expunge those moments with Claire in his parked car. How many thousands of times had he begun the sentence “If that hadn’t happened . . .”? It seemed that before that evening with Claire his life had been utterly in his control. He was a success, he was loved, he could do no wrong. And so he had let her unzip his pants. And although he knew with all the logic at his command that the one event had not caused the other—Stanley Carpasso would have started the fire regardless—he did not believe it. Part of him was certain that the moment with Claire had made the fire inevitable. As a result, he deserved punishment, and if the world wouldn’t mete it out, then he would do so himself.

Now he was truly being punished but he wasn’t the one doing it. He wasn’t the one holding the whip, and the irony of this made him smile: How could he have ever thought that he would be able to choose the time and nature of punishment? Hawthorne’s attempts in that direction were nothing but hubris. The truth was that Hawthorne felt that he could do nothing but hold on and endure what he had to endure. But he worried that he didn’t have enough strength and in his worst moments he feared that he might collapse entirely, retreat to a corner and weep until an ambulance came to take him away. Maybe he’d be sent down to McLean’s, where he had friends on the staff and they would see how far he had fallen. Later in the week, on Thanksgiving, he would drive to Concord and tell Krueger all that he had gone through.

Clifford Evings’s suicide meant that the punishment was no longer Hawthorne’s alone. The stories that Evings had been told about being fired, and the trashing of his office—these had been part of Hawthorne’s burden, part of the gossip, the malice, the Sisyphean boulder of Bishop’s Hill. Hawthorne had tried to bear that burden, but he had done little to discover who was responsible for Evings’s torment, since surely he himself was the real target. And then Evings had died. As Hawthorne drove the gray, sleet-covered road to Plymouth, his hands clenched the wheel so tightly that the car swerved. Was he responsible for Evings’s death as well? He had allowed Evings to become a shareholder in his punishment. He had done nothing to stop it. And who would be next? Kate? Jessica Weaver? Skander? Alice Beech? He had to do more than foolishly peering around a tree at the door of his apartment. He had to involve others—and others more capable than Tank Donoso.

At first, he had been tempted to talk to Chief Moulton, but he was afraid of not being believed. In his years as a clinical psychologist he had heard dozens of delusional confessions, ranging from intimate acquaintance with space invaders to the boast that the speaker was Jesus of Nazareth. He remembered hearing these confessions and trying to keep his face immobile, to maintain a certain smoothness of tone as he rid his speech of all trace of emotion or doubt. How awful it would be to see these responses in Moulton, for of course he would see them. How awful to hear Moulton say, “How interesting,” and “Tell me more,” as his eyes glazed over. No, he couldn’t talk to Moulton, as least not yet.