Breakheart Hill (36 page)

I came to my own picture, and studied it silently. In the photograph, I faced the camera squarely, an air of boldness in the lifted chin, certain that I know exactly who I am. But I’d been far emptier than the photograph could possibly have suggested. And far more ruthless in my emptiness.

I fixed my eyes on the picture, saw all the lies within it and heard my mind pronounce the awesome judgment I had fled from all my life:
There’s something missing in that boy
.

And I knew what I had to do.

I
T WAS NEARLY MIDNIGHT WHEN
I
REACHED THE NURSERY
. The building was dark, but Luke’s truck was parked outside, so I knew he was there. I walked through the high storm fence that surrounded the building, into a small forest of evergreen shrubs. They stood row on row, potted and neatly pruned, broad and flourishing, reviving the summer air.

Luke was near the back, dressed in gray flannels, his body bent over a box of seedlings. He straightened himself as I came toward him, smiled softly and wiped his forehead with his sleeve. “You’re out mighty late,” he said.

I nodded.

Luke’s smile seemed to dissolve into a gathering stillness. His face grew somber as he gazed on mine. “What is it, Ben?” he asked.

I worked to bring it all together, find the proper place for each detail.

Luke stepped toward me. “Why’d you come here this late?”

I saw Kelli sprawled in the vines, heard Mr. Bailey declare that only hate could do a thing like this, and knew that he’d been wrong.

Luke stared at me wonderingly. “What’s this about?”

“Love,” I said. And with that word began to tell the darkest story that I ever heard.

THOMAS H. COOK is the author of eighteen novels, including
The Chatham School Affair
, winner of the Edgar Award for Best Novel;
Instruments of Night; Breakheart Hill; Mortal Memory; Sacrificial Ground
and
Blood Innocents
, both Edgar Award nominees; and
Moon over Manhattan
, which he co-authored with Larry King. He has also written two works about true crimes,
Early Graves
and
Blood Echoes
, which was also nominated for an Edgar Award. He wrote the novelization of the SCI FI Channel television event,
Taken
, and has co-edited, with Otto Penzler, two anthologies of American crime writing.

He lives in New York City and Cape Cod.

Turn the page for an exciting preview of
Thomas H. Cook’s novel of suspense
,
THE CHATHAM SCHOOL AFFAIR

THE CHATHAM SCHOOL AFFAIR

by

Thomas H. Cook

Look for THE CHATHAM SCHOOL
AFFAIR in Bantam paperback
at your favorite bookstore!

M
y father had a favorite line. He’d taken it from Milton, and he loved to quote it to the boys of Chatham School. Standing before them on opening day, his hands thrust deep into his trouser pockets, he’d pause a moment, facing them sternly. “Be careful what you do,” he’d say, “for evil on itself doth back recoil.” In later years he could not have imagined how wrong he was, nor how profoundly I knew him to be so.

Sometimes, particularly on one of those bleak winter days so common to New England, wind tearing at the trees and shrubbery, rain battering the roofs and windows, I feel myself drift back to my father’s world, my own youth, the village he loved and in which I still live. I glance outside my office window and see the main street of Chatham as it once was—a scattering of small shops, a ghostly parade of antique cars with their lights mounted on sloping fenders. In my mind, the dead return to life, assume their earthly shapes. I see Mrs. Albertson delivering a basket of quahogs to Kessler’s Market; Mr. Lawrence lurching forward in his homemade snowmobile, skis on the front, a set of World War I tank tracks on the back, all
hooked to the battered chassis of an old roadster pickup. He waves as he goes by, a gloved hand in the timeless air.

Standing once again at the threshold of my past, I feel fifteen again, with a full head of hair and not a single liver spot, heaven far away, no thought of hell. I even sense a certain goodness at the core of life.

Then, from out of nowhere, I think of her again. Not as the young woman I’d known so long ago, but as a little girl, peering out over a glittering blue sea, her father standing beside her in a white linen suit, telling her what fathers have always told their children: that the future is open to them, a field of grass, harboring no dark wood. In my mind I see her as she stood in her cottage that day, hear her voice again, her words like distant bells, sounding the faith she briefly held in life.
Take what you want, Henry. There is plenty
.

It was my father who greeted her when she stepped from the bus that afternoon. He was headmaster of Chatham School, a man of medium height, but whose manner, so expansive and full of authority, made him seem larger than he was. In one of the many pictures I have of him from that time, this one printed in the Chatham School Annual for 1926, he is seated in his office, behind a massive oak desk, his hands resting on its polished surface, his eyes staring directly into the camera. It was the usual pose of a respectable and accomplished man in those days, one that made him appear quite stern, perhaps even a bit hard, though he was nothing of the kind. Indeed, when I remember him as he was in those days, it is usually as a cheerful, ebullient man with an energetic and kindly manner, slow to anger, quick to forgive, his feelings always visible in his eyes. “The heart is what matters, Henry,” he said to me not long before his death, a principle he’d often voiced through the years, but never for one moment truly lived by. For surely, of all the men I’ve ever known, he was the least enslaved by passion. Now an old
man too, it is hard for me to imagine how in my youth I could have despised him so.

But I did despise him. Silently. Sullenly. Giving him no hint of my low regard, so that I must have seemed a perfectly obedient son, given to moodiness, perhaps, but otherwise quite normal, rocked by nothing darker than the usual winds of adolescence. Remembering him, as I often do, I marvel at how much he knew of Cicero and Thucydides, and how little of the boy who lived in the room upstairs.

Earlier that morning he’d found me lounging in the swing on the front porch, given me a disapproving look, and said, “What, nothing to do, Henry?”

I shrugged.

“Well, come with me, then,” he said, then bounded down the front steps and out to our car, a bulky old Ford whose headlights stuck out like stubby horns.

I rose, followed my father down the stairs, got into the car, and sat silently as he pulled out of the driveway, my face showing a faint sourness, the only form of rebellion I was allowed.

In those days, Chatham was little more than a single street of shops. There was Mayflower’s, a sort of general store, and Thompson’s Haberdashery, along with a pharmacy run by Mr. Benchley, in which the gentlemen of the town could go to a back room and enjoy a glass of illegal spirits, though never to the point of drunkenness. Mrs. Jessup had a boardinghouse at the far end of Main Street, and Miss Hilliard a little school for “dance, drama, and piano,” which practically no one ever attended, so that her main source of income came from selling cakes and pies, along with keeping house for several of the rich families that summered in spacious, sun-drenched homes on the bay. From a great height Chatham had to have looked idyllic, and yet to me it was a prison, its buildings like high, looming walls, its yards and gardens strewn around me like fields of concertina wire.

My father felt nothing of the kind, of course. No man
was ever more suited to small-town life than he was. Sometimes, for no reason whatever, he would set out from our house and walk down to the center of the village, chatting with whoever crossed his path, usually about the weather or his garden, anything to keep the flow of words going, as if these inconsequential conversations were the very lubricant of life, the
numa
, as the Romans called it, that which unites and sustains us.

That August afternoon my father seemed almost jaunty as he drove through the village, then up the road that led to the white facade of the Congregationalist Church. Because of that, I knew that something was up. For he always appeared most happy when he was in the midst of doing some good deed.

“Do you remember that teacher I mentioned?” he asked as we swept past Warren’s Sundries. “The one who’s coming from Africa.”

I nodded dully, faintly recalling the brief mention of such a person at dinner one night.

“Well, she’s arriving this morning. Coming in on the Boston bus. I want you to give her a nice welcome.”

We got to the bus stop a few minutes later. My father took up his place by the white pillar while I wandered over to the steps of the church, slumped down on its bottom stair, and pulled the book I’d been reading from the back pocket of my trousers.

I was reading it a half hour later, by then lost in the swirling dusts of Thermopylae, when the bus at last arrived. I remained in place, grudgingly aware that my father would have preferred that I rush down to greet the new teacher. Of course, I was determined to do nothing of the kind.

And so I don’t know how he reacted when he first saw Miss Channing emerge from the bus, for I couldn’t see his face. I do know how beautiful she was, however, how immaculately white her throat looked against the wine-red collar of her dress. I have always believed that as she
stepped from the gray interior of the bus, her face suddenly captured in a bright summer light, her eyes settling upon my father with the mysterious richness I was to see in them as well, that at that moment, in that silence, he surely caught his breath.

I
nevitably, when I recall that first meeting, the way Miss Channing looked as she arrived in Chatham, so young and full of hope, I want to put up my hand and do what all our reading and experience tells us we can never do. I want to say “Stop, please. Stop, Time.”

It’s not that I want to freeze her there for all eternity, of course, a young woman arriving in a quaint New England town, but that I merely wish to break the pace long enough to point out the simple truth life unquestionably teaches anyone who lives into old age: that since our passions do not last forever, our true task is to survive them. And one thing more, perhaps: I want to remind her how thin it is, and weaving, the tightrope we walk through life, how the smallest misstep can become a fatal plunge.

Then I think,
No, things must be as they became
. And with that thought, time rolls onward again, and I see her take my father’s hand, shake it briefly, then let it go, her face turning slightly to the left so that she must have seen me as I finally roused myself from the church steps and headed toward her from across its carefully tended lawn.

“This is my son, Henry,” my father said when I reached them.

“Hi,” I said, offering my hand.

Miss Channing took it. “Hello, Henry,” she said.

I can clearly recall how she looked at that first meeting, her hair gathered primly beneath her hat, her skin a perfect white, her features beautiful in the way certain female portraits are beautiful, not so much sensuous as very finely wrought. But more than anything, I remember her eyes, pale blue and slightly oval, with a striking sense of alertness.

“Henry’s going to be a sophomore this year,” my father added. “He’ll be one of your students.”

Before Miss Channing could respond to that, the bus driver came bustling around the back of the bus with two leather valises. He dropped them to the ground, then scurried back into the bus.

My father nodded for me to pick up Miss Channing’s luggage. Which I did, then stood, a third wheel, as he immediately returned the full force of his attention to Miss Channing.

“You’ll have an early dinner with us,” he told her. “After that we’ll take you to your new home.” With that, he stepped back slightly, turned, and headed for the car, Miss Channing walking along beside him, I trudging behind, the two leather valises hanging heavily from my hands.