LeBrun raised his hands, as if in surrender, though he still held the knife. As he frowned, his dark eyebrows drew together. “You kidding? Why should I do a dumb thing like that?”

“Please, Frank, don’t hurt my cat. I love it. I saved it and I want to take it away.”

“You mean it’s alive?” LeBrun shook his head in surprise.

“Dr. Hawthorne rescued it.”

“For shit’s sake, one life down, eight more to go.”

“You did throw it in the water, didn’t you?”

“What’d I just say?” LeBrun tapped the knife against his pant leg. They stood by two of the large refrigerators with stainless steel doors. Jessica’s red jacket was reflected as a pink smudge on the bright metal.

“I want to take it with us when we get Jason.”

LeBrun took a step closer, lowering his voice. “I sure as hell am not going to have a cat in the truck when we’re driving down to Exeter, I can tell you that for damn straight.”

“Please, Frank, I want to take Lucky.”

“No way. The cat stays here. If you take the cat, I’ll throw it out the window. I can’t drive with a cat in the truck. Get serious.”

Now Jessica felt like crying, even though she hadn’t cried about Scott, but she wasn’t going to cry and have LeBrun make fun of her. She swallowed and looked up at him crossly. “Why aren’t we going tomorrow like we planned?”

“I got too much work. Larry took off, I don’t know if you heard, and I’m in charge of the kitchen. If we go tomorrow, who’ll make dinner? If we go later in the week, I’ll get the chance to cook something ahead of time that can just be warmed up. I don’t want to make trouble for Hawthorne. I’ll be getting some more help in a day or so. And who knows, maybe Larry’ll come back.” LeBrun laughed abruptly, then stopped.

Jessica didn’t like it but it made a kind of sense. The best plan would be for LeBrun to drive her to Exeter, help rescue Jason, then drive them to Boston, drop them off, and return to Bishop’s Hill. That was a lot of driving, maybe seven hours all told. But LeBrun could come back in the night and nobody would know he’d been gone. But if he took off tomorrow and missed dinner, then everybody would know and they’d see she was gone as well. They probably wouldn’t even get as far as Exeter before the police were called.

“Okay,” said Jessica, “but don’t do anything to Lucky. Promise me.”

LeBrun reached out with the kitchen knife and slowly drew it a few inches down the red fabric of Jessica’s parka. The fabric separated and white feathers pushed through the opening. “Don’t tell me what to do. You hear what I’m saying? You don’t want to make me upset.”

—

Most of the students began coming back to Bishop’s Hill from Thanksgiving break on Sunday afternoon, arriving by car with their parents or taking buses to Plymouth and getting picked up. A few flew into the small airport in Lebanon, then were driven to the school in a hired van. The snow made everyone late, though by evening most of the roads had been plowed. When the students arrived, they heard that Scott McKinnon had been found drowned in the pool on Saturday. A dozen or so had been friends with Scott, many liked him, all had known him. Coming so close after Evings’s suicide, his death was especially upsetting and there was the question whether Scott hadn’t committed suicide as well. Many theories went around and the students were agitated and disturbed. The homework that had been put off to the last minute didn’t get done and students stayed up late talking. Those who had remained at school over the break couldn’t remember exactly when they had seen Scott last, maybe Wednesday or maybe Thursday morning, but he had cut his math and English classes on Tuesday and he hadn’t trailed anyone around trying to bum a cigarette.

At an assembly in the chapel during first period on Monday, Hawthorne talked about what had happened. He didn’t talk about how Scott was found and he said nothing about the kitten. He spoke about grief and how it was a painful but necessary emotion. He said they all had every reason to be upset and the best thing they could do for Scott was to grieve for him, but they should also remember him and celebrate him and recall all that was good about him. The Reverend Bennett said several prayers. Many students wept and even several of the teachers wiped their eyes. Then Hawthorne canceled classes for the rest of the day and the students broke into groups to discuss their feelings. Many said how they were still upset about Mr. Evings, that he had been so unhappy that he had to kill himself, and they spoke about Bobby Newland’s accusations and how distressing those had been. Then the students began to realize that Mr. Newland wasn’t at the school. He had been there for Thanksgiving dinner but had left either on Friday or on Saturday. According to the boys living in his dormitory cottage, the door to his small apartment was open and his clothes were gone.

As for Hawthorne, he was kept too busy to think about his conversation with Kevin Krueger. On Saturday he had begun trying to call Scott’s parents, although he hadn’t been able to reach the father in California until Sunday. And then he had to explain that he didn’t know exactly what had happened or why Scott had been in the pool. He said the police were investigating. The father was angry and asked Hawthorne why they hadn’t kept the damn place locked. And he said he meant to call his lawyer. The mother told Hawthorne that she would take care of the funeral arrangements. She wanted to get the body right away and she was upset when Hawthorne told her there had to be an autopsy. She said she didn’t want her boy cut up, and Hawthorne could do nothing but give her Chief Moulton’s phone number. And she, too, talked about lawyers and how she’d thought she could trust the school, when obviously it turned out that she couldn’t. Hawthorne knew their anger masked their guilt—why, after all, had Scott had no place to go on Thanksgiving?—and he tried to be gentle with them and let them express their resentment and outrage.

Hawthorne’s discovery that Bobby Newland had packed his clothes and disappeared was especially disappointing and made everyone’s task more difficult, since Hawthorne needed him to talk to students. Bobby had the knack of making students feel at ease and express their emotions without constraint. He would have been useful that Monday when the students were saying how they felt about what had happened. All day Hawthorne went from one group to another, listening, for the most part, but also assuring them that their grief was necessary and natural. But it was more than grief. They all sensed that death was coming too close. First Evings, now Scott. Who would be next? A tenth-grade boy by the name of Skoyles asked if the locks shouldn’t be changed and a twelfth grader, Sara Bryant, recalled that Gail Jensen had died at just this time three years earlier.

The notices that Hawthorne had written advertising for a new psychologist had begun to appear in the journals in November and already a few letters and resumes had arrived, despite the low salary. Hawthorne recognized several names and one man had been a student of his in Boston. He realized that some applicants were responding to his own reputation, and he wasn’t sure how he felt about that.

Fritz Skander also talked to students but he wasn’t good at it and appeared stiff. The crying upset him and he told several students that they had to be brave, till Hawthorne explained to him that it was better to let them be emotional. It was Skander’s idea that Scott had broken into the pool in order to swim and had accidentally drowned. His death was the grievous effect of a reckless cause. “It should remind us all,” he told one group, “that we need to act like grown-ups.” To another group he said, “A person who breaks into a cage of tigers must face the consequences.”

A few faculty were helpful. Kate, of course, and Alice Beech. But also Betty Sherman, Gene Strauss, and Ted Wrigley. Bill Dolittle organized a reading of poems and other texts on grief and loss. The nurse went from dorm to dorm, just saying a few words; Kate came over to Jessica’s dorm and talked to the girls in the living room, and she went to other cottages as well. But at least half the faculty stayed out of the way, though they, too, were shocked. Herb Frankfurter, for example, used the time to go hunting. Roger Bennett was also absent. Throughout Monday, Hawthorne hoped that Larry Gaudette would return and take some of the burden off his cousin, but there was no sign of him.