The Bone Key (15 page)

I tired rapidly. My clothes were heavy; I had already been near exhaustion from the blind, terrified run that had ended with me in this dark pool. And I was panicking, thrashing more and more frantically, going under and getting great mouthfuls of water in my open, screaming mouth.

And the boys on the side of the pool stood and watched. Once they laughed, and their laughter was as cruel and remote as their faces; it might have been the laughter of hyenas. Their laughter rang in my ears, even after they stopped. It was still echoing when I went under for the last time, felt mouth and throat and lungs and body fill with water, and sank slowly toward the bottom of the pool, still staring upwards at the dim, dusty light and the black wavering shapes of the boys.

I woke myself by the brutal expedient of falling out of bed, tangled in sheets and blanket and catching myself a tremendous crack on the hip as I hit the floor. I did not even notice for several minutes; hyperventilating, half-hysterical, I curled myself into an awkward knot, both hands clenched in my hair and my face pressed into my knees, every atom of control I possessed channeled into the fierce and frantic effort not to make a noise loud enough to be heard from the hall or the next room. I do not know how long I stayed that way; when I finally calmed enough to notice my throbbing hip, to raise my head, the sun was rising.

Slowly, grimly, one shattered piece at a time, I assembled my armor to face the day. More than ever, I wished I could simply leave, but now, entirely regardless of Dr. Starkweather, I could not. That scene in the pavilion had been real. I knew that as clearly as I knew my own name, as profoundly as I felt the throbbing pain in my hip. That boy Palmer had truly drowned, and his death had truly been watched by six of his so-called peers. I discovered that I remembered two names and paused, knowing the ephemerality of dreams, to write them in my pocket notebook: Grimes, Carleton.

I bathed, shaved, dressed. The bathroom mirror told me I was bloodlessly pale, and there was a jitter in my hands that I could not quell, but I did not expect anyone at Brockstone School would look at me too carefully. They never had before.

But on the way back to my room, for the second time in as many days, I came within an inch of colliding with Ratcliffe, and this time when he frowned up at me, he said, “You look dreadful. What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” I said and tried to sidestep, but he sidestepped with me.

“You look like you’ve been dragged through Hell’s own bramble bushes backwards. Is it the reunion? I know it’s a bit of a pain, but—”

“No, nothing like that. Please.”

I sidestepped again, and he sidestepped with me; for a moment I wavered perilously between laughter—even John Pelham Ratcliffe was not at his most formidable in a ratty old bathrobe, armed with a sponge bag and toiletries kit—and tears of pure frustration. Then he said, “Look. I came by car. Let me get washed up, and I’ll drive you into Bourne where we can get decent coffee, and you can tell me about it.”

“But we can’t,” I said. “The . . . the schedule . . . ”

“To hell with the schedule. What are they going to do? Expel us?”

This time I did laugh, although the noise was choked and strange.

“Will you wait?” Ratcliffe said.

“Yes. But . . . why?”

His mouth quirked sardonically. “In celebration of the fact that we are no longer fourteen.” And with that, he stepped neatly around me and headed for the bathrooms.

Ratcliffe knew, he said cheerfully, exactly where we ought to go. He guided his car—as sleek, stream-lined, and impressive as he was himself, if considerably larger—to Bourne’s only hotel, a rickety old monster called the St. James which had seen the temporary housing of the families of Brockstone scholars for three generations now. The St. James’s restaurant was open for breakfast, and the smell of coffee was entirely ambrosial, even to me. I do not normally drink coffee, but Ratcliffe said firmly that I needed it, and I was past the point of arguing with him.

I startled myself by being ravenously hungry, and Ratcliffe let me eat in peace, himself absently consuming a vast quantity of food while discoursing, freely, learnedly, and frequently scurrilously on his excavations in Asia Minor. But when we were both replete, he beckoned the waitress over to refill our coffee cups and said, “Now. Tell me why you were in the hall this morning at six a.m., fully dressed and looking like Banquo’s ghost after a hard night’s haunting.”

I had had the whole meal to work out my answer. “I am sorry to have disturbed you, but it was just a nightmare. I am prone to them.”

“Are you?” He gave me a strange look. “What was your nightmare about?”

“Why do you care?” The next moment I was apologizing in a welter of mortification, but he waved me to silence much as he had waved the waitress over to refill our coffee cups.

“Call it guilt,” he said and then laughed at the expression on my face. “The fact that I would no more work for a Napoleonic egomaniac like Emerson Starkweather than I would paint my face bright green and propose marriage to a Bactrian camel is no reason to be rude to you. It’s just that, for a moment—” He spread his hands in a gesture of rueful helplessness. “For a moment, I was fourteen again. I want to make amends.”

“But, Dr. Ratcliffe—”

“Please. ‘Ratcliffe’ is fine. Or my friends call me Ratty, if you can bring yourself to it.”

“It was just a dream,” I said doggedly.

“Not by the expression on your face this morning. And I’ve never quite understood dismissing things as ‘just’ dreams. Why should that make them any less important?” He paused, then asked in a voice unexpectedly warm with sympathy, “Was it about the school?”

I found myself telling him the whole thing, with details and names and even, because he listened with such attention and concern, my belief that I had dreamed about something that had really happened. I did not mention my falling out of bed.

He was silent for a long time when I had finished, and I finally asked timidly, “You do . . . you do believe me, don’t you?”

“Oh, yes,” he said, as if the matter hardly warranted discussion. I must have looked startled, for he said, “Archaeology is a strange field, and Asia Minor an even stranger place. I have a colleague who has dreamed of the fall of Troy once a year for the past thirty years. Always on the same date and always the same dream. He doesn’t excavate in Troy—never has—and says there isn’t a power on Earth that could make him. He dreams, you see, that he is one of the women.”

We were silent for a moment, watching the bright play of sunlight on the tableware; then Ratcliffe said briskly, “So I don’t see any inherent implausibility in the idea that you dreamed about a real murder.”

“Murder?” I said, although that was how I characterized it to myself.

“They pushed him in, and they didn’t drag him out. Murder by omission is murder nonetheless. It was the swimming pool, for goodness sakes! It isn’t as if there’s an undertow.”

“Yes,” I said. “I mean, no.”

“You know,” said Ratcliffe, “there’s a master at the school named Carleton.”

“There is?”

“He wasn’t there in our time. But they needed a new Mathematics master a few years ago, and he took the position. My friends who are active in the Alumni Council tell me that Old Boys often do.”

“He was a student?”

“Forty years ago, yes. You didn’t know about him, did you?”

“No. I don’t . . . that is, I haven’t been . . . ”

“And that makes this a very interesting coincidence. I think we might proceed with forging our own agenda by calling to have a small chat with Mr. Carleton.”

I followed helplessly in Ratcliffe’s wake, like a sailboat caught by an ocean-liner—or perhaps, given the disparity in our heights, an ocean-liner caught by a sailboat. It was a little after nine when we returned to the school. Ratcliffe marched briskly and decisively through the grounds and the buildings and the carefully organized schedule, waving aside all efforts to intercept or deflect him, until he found the office of Mr. Frederick Carleton, M.A., Brockstone’s Master of Mathematics.

The odds were extremely good that Mr. Carleton, like Ratcliffe and I, was supposed to be out somewhere participating in the reunion festivities, but when Ratcliffe rapped smartly on the door, an irritable voice from within demanded, “What in the name of God is it now?”

Ratcliffe chose to interpret that as meaning “Come in,” and opened the door. “Mr. Carleton,” he said, “we were wondering if you could spare us a few minutes of your time.”

Frederick Carleton was a short, owl-like man, stocky body, round eyes, upstanding tufts of hair, and all. He was seated on the floor amid a jumbled confusion of file boxes, folders, textbooks, and papers; either he was genuinely in the middle of a massive organizational endeavor, or he had hit upon that as the most inarguable excuse he could provide for avoiding the reunion.

He looked from Ratcliffe to me, clearly trying to deduce a context in which we might both fit. He said, “If this is about the baseball game—”

Heroically, Ratcliffe turned a laugh into a cough. “No, nothing of the sort. We wanted to ask you about a boy named Palmer.”

“No Palmer in any of my classes. If you’re concerned about his progress, I suggest you go talk to—”

“Not one of your students,” Ratcliffe interrupted, mild but inexorable. “One of your classmates.”

Carleton stared at him blankly, as if Ratcliffe were some strange beast he had never before seen or imagined. “One of my
classmates
 . . . Here! What is this all about?” Truculently, he came to his feet.

Ratcliffe glanced at me; clearly his ingenuity had not extended to concocting a plausible reason for our query. And I saw unspoken in his face:
After all, it was
your
dream.

“Er,” I said. I could think of no convincing lie, and I could tell that the truth would not help us; I said, “You needn’t talk to us if you don’t want to.”

Ratcliffe’s glare became positively agonized, but Carleton, deprived of an adversary, deflated like a collapsing tent. “No, no,” he said, and now that he did not sound pugnacious, he sounded merely tired and much more like a man of nearly sixty. “There’s no reason not to tell you about Palmer, though I can’t imagine what good it will do you. Please, sit down.”

Despite the chaos of the floor, it took only a few moments to clear two chairs. Ratcliffe and I sat down. Carleton retreated behind his desk and became pedantic.

“I assume,” he said, “it is the safety of the swimming pool that concerns you?”

“Among other things,” Ratcliffe said.

“Well, on that score I can reassure you. Stuart Palmer drowned because he was violating school rules. The boys are strictly forbidden to enter the pavilion unless escorted by a master.”

Ratcliffe and I exchanged a look, both of us remembering how frequently—and how easily—that rule had been flouted in our school days, particularly by upperclassmen, and Ratcliffe said, “Suppose you simply tell us what happened.”

“I can only tell you the events as they were reconstructed at the inquest,” Carleton said stiffly.

“Of course,” Ratcliffe murmured, as smooth and gracious as any prosecuting attorney.

I startled myself by asking, “Was Palmer of your year?”

“No. A year ahead,” Carleton said with a slight resurgence of his customary glower. “You want the story or not? I have other things to do, you understand . . . ”

“We are listening,” Ratcliffe said.

“It was a Sunday,” said Carleton, bringing out a pipe and beginning the slow, ineffectual search for tobacco pouch and matches so characteristic of pipe smokers, particularly when they want to buy time. I winced—I hate pipe smoke—but held my tongue. I did not want to derail Carleton’s story, fiction though Ratcliffe and I both already suspected it was going to be.

“Then, as now,” Carleton continued, “the pavilion is closed on Sundays, so there were no witnesses to say how Palmer got in there in the first place.”

I remembered my dream: the pounding footsteps, the baying pursuers.

“Somehow or another he came to fall in. Probably skylarking about.” He paused and added heavily, “Palmer was a facetious child. And since there was no one within earshot and since Palmer could not swim, he drowned. I pray God it was quick.”

You know exactly how long it took, I thought. You stood there and watched. But still I did not speak.

“He was missed at the roll-call for dinner. It took some time to determine that he was not in the School, and longer still to find him. By then he had been dead several hours. That’s the story, gentlemen. A pointless, senseless, stupid tragedy. Boys are frequently thoughtless. It is only by God’s mercy that the consequences are generally less final.”

It was a chilling way to view the subject, even without my deep-seated conviction that Carleton was lying. But he had finally gotten his pipe to draw and was rapidly barricading himself behind a wall of smoke. It was clear we would get no more out of him. Ratcliffe thanked him for his time and we made our departure.

At the door, I paused and turned back. “Mr. Carleton, did you have a brother?”

“A brother?” He stared at me through his veiling pipe smoke, his owl-eyes round and blank. “I did have an elder brother, but he’s been dead for thirty years. Why do you ask?”

“No reason,” I said. “Thank you.” And I shut the door.

Ratcliffe all but pounced on me. “What did you think?”

“One of us must be lying. Or . . . or deranged.”

We started back the way we had come.

“Of course he was lying,” Ratcliffe said impatiently. “But do you think he was the boy who was in your dream?”

“I . . . I don’t think so. That is, I’m not sure. He
did
have an older brother, so—”

“Did he?” Ratcliffe said, and I imagined he got that same bright intentness in his eyes when he was fitting fragments into a reconstruction of a vase or an inscription. “Let’s go look for Carleton Major.”

I realized after a moment that I had stopped walking and had to trot to catch up with him. “Look for . . . what do you mean?”

He grinned at me, delighted with himself. “I’m willing to bet the pictures that adorned the library in our day are still there. Come on.”