Waking Hours (35 page)

The sky was dark gray, and it was raining again, a steady autumn rain that soaked the countryside under a mat of soggy leaves, when they arrived at All-Fit to pick up Tommy. He was wearing a green Barbour raincoat, Timberland boots, and a black baseball cap.

Dani had always hated the movies or TV shows where the females seemed helpless and in need of male protection or rescue, and she’d always thought of herself as someone who could take care of herself. But at the same time, she couldn’t think of two men whose company could make her feel safer.

They turned at the sign for St. Adrian’s Academy for Boys. The school property was enclosed by a high stone wall that made it feel more like a prison than a place of learning, a fortification, Dani had always thought, modeled after the walled colleges of Oxford and Cambridge.

At the gates, Detective Casey showed his badge to the video camera, and the wrought iron gates swung open. The camera swiveled to follow them as they drove through, and then the gates closed behind them. The school grounds were immaculately groomed. The drive wound up the hill to the Grand Commons, an imposing slate-roofed, ivy-covered brick mansion that was grand in every sense of the word, with leaded windows, a central bell tower, and towers at the end of either wing. The dormitories and academic buildings were similarly imposing, redbrick and ivy and slate except for the athletic facilities and the science building, which were modern and state of the art.

“It’s a nice campus, but I’m glad I decided not to go here,” Tommy said.

“You could have?” Dani asked, surprised.

“It’s part of the original charter,” Tommy said. “Every year they give full scholarships to two kids from town, and in exchange they don’t have to pay taxes.”

“They wanted you to play football?” Phil asked.

Tommy nodded.

“Why didn’t you?” Dani said. “This school has probably the best academic reputation in the country. If not the world.”

“I didn’t because when they gave me a tour, everybody I met was a jerk,” he said. “It was kind of weird. Not one person I wanted to spend any time with.”

When they reached a circular at the end of the drive, Phil dropped Dani and Tommy off beneath the covered front portico, out of the light rain. He parked the car in a space just beyond the portico and joined them.

The porter asked their names, then ushered them into the foyer, which opened into a larger hall lit from above by a massive domed skylight that reminded Dani, she told him, of the pictures she’d seen of the Crystal Palace from the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893.

The porter smiled in condescension. “The glass is indeed from the Crystal Palace,” he said. “Erected in 1851 in Hyde Park, London, during the Great Exhibition. Designed by Joseph Paxton, who had been a student here. I’ll tell the headmaster you’ve arrived.”

The walls of the great hall were decorated with murals depicting the history of mankind, which, Dani noted, had been reduced to a series of battles and wars, kings and thinkers, all male, with an occasional mechanical invention thrown into the mix, a railroad locomotive or a biplane. Closer to the floor, the walls were painted white, and paintings were hung every ten feet and lit with spotlights. She saw a Breughel and a Matisse and a sketch by Leonardo da Vinci. Above an arched door, carved into a marble shield, was a saying from Confucius:
The most beautiful sight in the world is a little child going confidently down the road after you have shown him the way
.

From an office off the hall, Dani heard someone tapping on a keyboard. Three students shuffled past, their footsteps barely making a sound. At the double door to the east wing, a workman on a stepladder was mounting a bracket to the molding.

“I have one just like that. I love my stepladder,” Tommy told Dani. “But it makes me sad to think I never knew my real ladder.”

The headmaster, Dr. John Adams Wharton, approached from the door where they’d heard someone typing. He looked like what Dani thought a headmaster should look like, distinguished and wise and well-mannered and pretty much the last person you’d want to have dinner with. His smile was perfunctory and curt, and he gave the air of someone who was both relaxed and enormously busy at all times. He looked about sixty, with thinning white hair, tortoise-shell reading glasses on a chain around his neck, and a double-breasted gray suit with black buttons. His tie was striped in the school colors, red and purple.

Phil made the introductions.

“You’ll be meeting with Amos and Dr. Ghieri in Dr. Ghieri’s office. Dr. Ghieri is the head guidance counselor, but he’s also a practicing clinical psychologist, which I say to alert you to the fact that the things that he and Amos have exchanged in their private sessions are protected by doctor-patient privilege. But he’ll tell you what’s off-limits and what is not,” Wharton said. “Can I arrange for any refreshments before you begin?”

“We’re good,” Tommy said.

They were led by a secretary down a corridor past two sets of double doors that opened into a massive library. They turned down a hall where a sign marked Guidance Counseling and an arrow brought them to the counseling office. The secretary showed them to an oak-paneled waiting room. The carpet was Persian, Dani noted. The window was Tiffany glass and not an imitation, as far as she could tell. The grandfather clock was German. One of the doors off the waiting room had a brass nameplate that read Dr. Adolf Ghieri. There was no receptionist.

“You don’t meet a lot of guys named Adolf anymore,” Phil commented.

They waited less than a minute before a man opened the door. He was heavyset and bald, with a goatee that covered the better part of a double chin. He wore a blue shirt with the sleeves rolled up over his elbows, black shoes, black pants, and a school necktie, loosened at the collar. He looked, Dani thought, more like an aggravated supermarket manager than a psychologist. He introduced himself and invited them to come in. Dani saw a desk with two chairs on one side, one for the doctor and one for the boy, and two chairs opposite. Ghieri looked at Tommy, then at Detective Casey.

“I was told there would only be two of you,” Dr. Ghieri said, not as in,
Our mistake—let me get you a chair
.

“This is my assistant,” Dani said, gesturing to Tommy.

The doctor only waited.

“I’ll wait out here,” Tommy said, backing away and apologizing to Dani with a glance. “Not a problem.”

Dani chided herself for not calling ahead for permission. Another rookie mistake. She’d have to make the best of it.

29
.

Tommy was checking messages on his phone in the waiting room outside Dr. Ghieri’s office when a boy entered, a book bag slung over his shoulder. Must be Amos. He wore the school uniform, khaki pants, blue shirt and school tie, black shoes. He had fair hair, short on the sides and longer on top, parted on the left and neatly combed. His eyes were set widely apart, separated by an aquiline nose and thin lips. He looked like he probably didn’t need to shave more than once every two weeks. His complexion was pale, his cheeks lightly freckled. He had big hands.

The boy did a double take when he saw Tommy. Tommy pretended he was still checking his e-mail and turned on the camcorder in his phone, pointing the camera at the boy surreptitiously, then smiled.

“Yup. I’m that football guy,” Tommy confirmed. “You a fan?”

“Yeah,” the boy said. “What are you doing here?”

“Waiting for friends,” he said. “You ever go to any NFL games?”

“My dad took me to a Giants game last year,” the boy said.

Tommy ordinarily minimized his celebrity status. Today it was a card he could play.

“Gotta love the Giants,” he agreed. “I hated their old stadium though. The visitors’ locker room smelled like fish. Our equipment guy had to spray it with air freshener before we could use it. And that didn’t help much.”

Amos smiled, but in a way that seemed to Tommy more self-conscious than natural, the way a robot might listen to a joke and process the appropriate programmed response:
If humorous, then go to: laughter/moderate; duration/ volume level two
.

“Are you in trouble?” Tommy asked. “That why you’re here? Dr. Ghieri call you in?”

Amos nodded. “Are you?” he asked.

“Am I what?” Tommy said.

“In trouble,” the boy said. “For killing that guy.”

“No,” Tommy answered.

In the three years since the Dwight Sykes incident, most people had known better than to ask such a direct question.

“Did that make you feel bad when it happened?” the boy asked.

Tommy might ordinarily have presumed a degree of innocence behind the question. Kids Amos’s age often had a fascination with death. Tommy tried but had difficulty finding the innocence behind Amos’s question.

“What do you think?” Tommy said.

Amos shrugged. “It was just an accident,” he said.

“It was,” Tommy agreed. “But even if you kill somebody in a car accident that isn’t your fault, you still feel bad.”

“I wouldn’t know,” Amos said. “I’ve never had a car accident.”

“You like cars?” Tommy asked.

“I like Mustangs,” Amos said.

Tommy tried to conceal how startled he felt.

“Have you ever watched the video of the play where you killed the receiver? It’s on YouTube.”

“I haven’t seen it,” Tommy said. “Have you?”

Amos nodded. “It’s pretty cool,” he said.

Tommy felt something rising in him, a feeling he’d once cultivated, the strong desire to hit someone just to see them fall. Carl Thorstein had taught him how to forgive himself for it.

“We’re aggressors by nature, because we need to protect ourselves and our families,”
Carl had said.
“You were one of the smallest middle linebackers in football—if you hadn’t trained yourself to be more aggressive than everybody else, you would have died. The instinct is good.”

“I’m supposed to meet with Dr. Ghieri,” Amos said. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Sure,” Tommy said.

“When you hit that guy,” he said, “just for a split second, wasn’t there a part of you that felt glad?”

Tommy felt his heart race. Amos had zeroed in on the worst of it, the way he’d crowed and strutted after the hit, filled with the glory of himself, suffused with the joy of combat, while another man was dying. That was something Tommy could never live down.

“No,” Tommy said. “That’s not what I felt.”

The door to Dr. Ghieri’s office opened. The doctor nodded to Amos to come in.

Tommy made a V with two fingers.

“Mir,”
he said to Amos, using the Russian word for peace—a word he knew only because it was also the name of the orbiting international space station, a collaboration between the United States and Russian space programs.

Amos made a similar gesture.

“Igun
,” he said.

Rather than wait outside Dr. Ghieri’s office while Phil and Dani questioned the boy, Tommy decided to go for a walk, partly to clear his head but mainly because he knew there was absolutely nothing he could learn about anything sitting in the waiting room.

He found a back door that opened out onto a green expanse, with a path leading around the edge of a pond. In the distance he saw the science building and the athletic facilities opposite it. He walked toward the pond, where he saw a poem by Robert Frost, “The Road Not Taken,” on a brass plaque mounted at eye level on the trunk of a large oak tree. He decided, if he understood the poem correctly, that the plaque gave him permission to stroll down to the edge of the pond to have a look.

It was a lovely body of water, with an island in the middle where a variety of marigolds still bloomed. Then he noticed, in the shallow water where the pond met the grass, a small frog, green with dark brown spots and stripes.

He bent low and approached with as much stealth as he could manage, reaching his hand out until it hovered just above the frog. He’d caught more frogs than he could remember as a boy, playing around the vernal pools with his buddies. The trick was to get as close as you could, then make a sudden lunge.

This frog allowed him to get closer than any ever had before.

Odd.

He held out a finger and laid it lightly on the frog’s back.