“Why do you say that?”

“If he drowned, then he’d sink down and some time later he’d come up again. The kitten couldn’t have been paddling all that time, leastways I don’t think so.”

Scott’s clothes were found behind the bleachers, where they had apparently fallen. There were no keys in his pockets to let him into the gymnasium. Hawthorne remembered the boy’s green parka and wondered where it was.

“Little cold to be wandering around without a coat,” said Moulton.

They stood just outside the pool office. Kate hadn’t said anything. She held the kitten in her arms, stroking it. “Scott called me Thursday evening. Thanksgiving.” She nodded toward Hawthorne. “He was looking for you. He sounded excited and scared. I told him you were down in Concord but would be back on Friday or Saturday. I asked if anything was wrong and he said nothing was wrong. But he was almost whispering over the phone and talking fast. I asked if he wanted to come over to my house and even offered to pick him up. But he said no, he could handle it himself, that it wasn’t important. Then I gave him your friend’s name. I told him I didn’t have the number but he could probably get it from information. I don’t know, I should have gone over to the school right away. It was past eight o’clock and Todd’s bedtime.” She turned away and didn’t say anymore. Alice Beech put her hand on Kate’s arm.

“He didn’t call,” said Hawthorne uncertainly. “What happened on Thanksgiving? Did Larry Gaudette come back?”

Gaudette had turned up missing on Tuesday. His car was gone and he seemed to have taken a small suitcase of clothes. LeBrun said he had no idea where his cousin had disappeared to. “Maybe he’s got family problems,” he had suggested. “That whole family’s messed up.”

LeBrun had declared that he could handle the cooking by himself. He seemed eager. It would be a challenge. Tuesday had been the last day of classes and many of the students had left for Thanksgiving, but twenty students had remained, including Scott and Jessica. LeBrun cooked four large turkeys, making a Thanksgiving dinner with the fixings, including fresh biscuits. Alice Beech had eaten with the students, as had some of the faculty members. She said the meal had been wonderful.

“Frank LeBrun was a real impresario,” she said. The Reverend Bennett had said grace and led them in a few Thanksgiving hymns, accompanied by Rosalind Langdon on an electric keyboard. LeBrun had sung as well, louder than anyone. Alice couldn’t remember if Scott had been there, but she thought he had. She just wasn’t sure.

Moulton asked a few questions about Gaudette, where he was from and how long he had been at the school. Then he made several phone calls from the office. The rescue squad arrived and a few minutes later Fritz Skander came hurrying into the natatorium. He had seen the flashing lights on the rescue truck and asked why no one had called him.

“What a pity, what a pity,” he kept saying. His dark overcoat was dusted with snow. About ten students had gathered outside and Purvis kept them from entering the building. Skander stood by the pool office and watched the men from the rescue squad lift Scott onto the stretcher. He kept wringing his hands as if they were wet. “Jim, could you have possibly left the pool open? After all, you’d been coaching the team—”

“Of course not. Everything was locked. Purvis had to unlock the door.”

“I don’t understand it,” said Skander. “What a tragedy.”

“Did you see Scott on Thursday or Friday? Did he talk to you?”

Skander seemed to consider this. “I don’t think I saw him since before Thanksgiving. We had a quiet turkey at home with a few friends. I don’t believe I came over to the school all day.”

The men from the rescue squad covered Scott with a red blanket. As they carried him past the group standing by the office, Kate began to weep. Hawthorne wished he could weep as well.

“This is awful, simply awful,” said Skander. “Jim, you’ll have to call the boy’s parents right away. Poor things. And goodness knows what the newspapers will make of this. What a pariah we’ll become.” His thick gray hair sparkled with melting snow. He ran his hands through his hair, wiped them on his overcoat, then studied them.

The rescue squad carried the boy out of the building and drove off, taking the body down to Plymouth. Moulton was waiting for someone from the state police. He went outside to talk to Purvis about when he had found the body, when he had last looked in on the pool, and whether he had seen Scott on the grounds either Thursday or Friday.

Skander decided to leave, saying that he felt obliged to tell the other staff and faculty members—those who hadn’t left for the Thanksgiving break. The students were bound to be terribly upset. “Ruth Standish has gone down to Boston and poor Clifford is dead. We’ve no counselors, no one who’s been properly trained, except you, of course.” He nodded toward Hawthorne. “I wouldn’t be surprised if we didn’t have to engage grief counselors. Who knows where the money will come from?” He buttoned his coat. “I’ll call Hamilton Burke; perhaps he can make a suggestion. And perhaps he can also deal with the press. Poor man, as if he didn’t have enough to do.”

As Skander walked toward the door, Jessica Weaver came hurrying in. She had tried to get in earlier but Purvis had kept her out. Now Purvis was engaged with Chief Moulton.

“Where’s Lucky?” she said anxiously. “They said outside my kitten was here.” She wore a red down jacket. It was speckled with snow and snow was caught in her hair. Seeing her kitten in Kate’s arms, she ran to it and took it gently. “Oh, I thought it was dead.” She hugged the kitten to her face, kissing it, and the kitten squeaked. “It must be starved.”

“How did it get out?” asked Hawthorne.

Jessica unzipped her jacket and slipped the kitten under it. “I don’t know. I went to Thanksgiving dinner and when I came back it was gone. I thought it was a trick. I mean, my door was locked. I’ve been looking everywhere. Scott once told me that someone would probably try to hang it and I was scared. I was even looking at tree branches. But now she’s safe, or he, I’m still not sure.”

“Did you see Scott at Thanksgiving dinner?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. Everything is so awful. Poor Scott.” The kitten’s orange head was sticking out from the crack in Jessica’s jacket. It kept mewing over and over. “You see how hungry it is? It wants me to feed it.”

Hawthorne told her to go back to her room and take care of the cat. Kate and Alice Beech were talking together, then Kate said, “Scott must have taken the kitten. He must have been going to play some trick.”

“Perhaps,” said Hawthorne.

“But he certainly wouldn’t hurt it,” said the nurse.

At every pause in the conversation, Hawthorne could once again feel the rubbery coldness of the boy’s skin. Early in the fall he had asked Scott if he wanted to join the swim team.

“I don’t like getting wet,” Scott had said.

But that didn’t answer the question of whether or not the boy could swim.

Shortly, Hawthorne left the gym and headed back to Emerson Hall, meaning to talk to Frank LeBrun. It was a little before six and he assumed Frank would be in the kitchen. It was dark and the snow fell heavily, a mass of white flakes caught in the security lights, swirling yellow and white, a vortex of shiny particles. Away from the light the snow became a shadow in the air between Hawthorne and the looming shapes of Adams and Emerson Halls, where most of the windows were dark. Hawthorne buried his hands in the pockets of his coat. He wore no hat. The snow from earlier in the week had been plowed from the paths, but now several more inches had fallen and it shifted and blew around his feet as he scuffed through it. At least a foot covered the ground. He wondered how much more could fall. He had heard that in some winters, the really bad ones, there had been three hundred inches, though surely that wasn’t all at once. But three feet of standing snow wasn’t unusual, and a few times each winter the school would be cut off for a day or two—no phone, no electricity—before the snowplows could get around to clearing the road. Once, two years earlier—so he’d been told—it had snowed so hard that not even Jeeps and cars with four-wheel drive could get through, although usually such conditions didn’t last long, no more than a day.