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Leaning forward, Hawthorne saw him fall. LeBrun made no sound, twisting with his arms out to the side. His snow-covered hunting jacket glistened in the lights of the approaching Chevy Blazer as he flipped through the air. It seemed to Hawthorne that as LeBrun fell, the spikes on top of the fence were reaching toward him. Some were gold-tipped, some wore caps of snow. LeBrun hit the fence with a sudden clang and was impaled through his back. He screamed, a short, choked-off roar as three of the spikes pushed through his belly. In the headlights, Hawthorne saw LeBrun thrash and arch on the golden metal, then he was still. A gush of blood reddened the snow beneath him. The bell had stopped ringing and the silence felt thick and palpable. The flashing blue light on top of Moulton’s Blazer came on and swept across LeBrun’s body. A small group of people was assembled by the steps of Emerson.

Jessica was standing back by the ladder, holding on to it. She had seen LeBrun fall but she hadn’t seen him hit the fence. She pointed out across the snow-covered lawns where the Jeep’s taillights were just passing through the gates of the school.

“Tremblay’s getting away.” Her voice was at the very edge of hysteria. “He’ll kill my brother.”

Hawthorne put his arm around her shoulder. “Moulton will radio the troopers. He’s down below right now. They’ll get your brother out of the house before Tremblay even reaches Plymouth. He’ll be arrested.”

The girl put her arms around Hawthorne and held him. He could feel her body shaking even through the thickness of her jacket.

“I thought he was going to kill me. I just knew it.”

“It’s over now. Do you think you can climb back up the ladder?”

“I’ll try. I’m scared.”

“I’ll be right behind you.” Hawthorne went over to get LeBrun’s light. He couldn’t imagine who had rung the bell. He pointed the light up the ladder so Jessica could see the rungs. She took hold and stepped onto the first rung.

“Don’t let me fall,” she said.

“I won’t,” said Hawthorne.

“You saved my life.”

Hawthorne didn’t say anything to that. He realized that he couldn’t climb and hold the light at the same time. Then a light flicked on above them, not pointing down into their eyes but pointing to the side, letting them see the ladder and helping them climb. Hawthorne dropped LeBrun’s flashlight back onto the scaffolding.

“Keep going,” he said. “Whoever’s up there will help you over the top.”

It was Kate. He had to look a second time to make sure he wasn’t mistaken. She reached down and grabbed Jessica’s arm, steadying her. Then she helped Hawthorne. “You rang the bell,” he said.

Kate touched his cheek. “I saw the knife and then looked over the side. When I saw LeBrun stand up I thought he was going to hurt you. And the police were coming . . .”

Hawthorne embraced her, then held her tighter. In his mind he kept seeing LeBrun falling and hitting the fence, then twisting on the spikes. He pulled away.

“I have to get downstairs,” he said. “Help Jessica.”

Hawthorne dropped through the trapdoor and hurried down the circular staircase. He could hear Jessica and Kate coming behind him. The light from Kate’s flashlight bounced across the inner walls of the tower. Their boots rang on the metal steps.

At the bottom, Hawthorne felt his way uncertainly across the attic to the stairs, not waiting for Kate. Then he descended to the third floor. He could hear their footsteps falling farther behind. Now there were windows, and light coming through them. Hawthorne didn’t pause. His mind was full of LeBrun and the inexorable progression of events.

On the first floor of the rotunda Hawthorne found Hilda Skander sitting by the body of her husband. She didn’t look at Hawthorne, nor was she weeping. She had a handkerchief and was rubbing the bloody spots from Skander’s corpse. She looked very serious and her brow was furrowed with concentration. She spat into the handkerchief and rubbed it against Skander’s skin. Then she spat into the handkerchief again. Hawthorne hurried around her to the front door.

As he came out of Emerson, he saw Betty Sherman with her son and Bill Dolittle. A pair of cross-country skis was leaning against one of the columns. Betty came toward him.

“Where are Kate and Jessica?” she asked, frightened.

“They’re coming.”

“The police are here. LeBrun . . . ,” said Betty, then she couldn’t say any more.

Hawthorne looked over at the fence where LeBrun’s body was arched across the spikes; his arms hung past his head toward the snow. The Blazer was just drawing even with him. Its blue light swirled across the body. Bill Dolittle stood in front of Betty’s son so he wouldn’t see. A light appeared above them, then Kate and Jessica emerged through the door of Emerson. Hawthorne began to run toward LeBrun, stumbling in the snow and getting up again. He heard Betty say something to Kate. Jessica was crying.

A spotlight on the side of the Blazer came on and turned slowly until it was pointed directly at LeBrun’s body, casting the spider-shape of his shadow onto the wall of Emerson. LeBrun’s back was broken, and the spikes pushed up through his stomach. Blood ran down the iron posts, steaming in the cold. LeBrun was alive, but just barely. His eyes were open and he watched Hawthorne approach through the drifts.

“Frank,” said Hawthorne. He reached up to touch him, then stopped.

Very slowly LeBrun began to smile. He opened his mouth to speak. For a moment the smile hung on his lips, as delicate as smoke, then his face relaxed into meaninglessness.

Hawthorne felt that their conversation wasn’t finished. There was more he wanted to tell him. “Frank,” he said again. But LeBrun was dead; there were no words left. Hawthorne raised his arms, trying to push LeBrun up off the spikes, but he couldn’t move him. Hawthorne’s hands and coat were red with his blood.

“You’re not going to be able to do that,” said a voice behind him. “Too heavy.”

Hawthorne turned. An older man in a dark overcoat was climbing out of the Blazer. Hawthorne didn’t recognize him. Chief Moulton was getting out on the other side. Both men walked toward him. The man in the overcoat wasn’t wearing boots, but he waded toward LeBrun’s body without paying attention to the snow. He was heavyset, like a rolled-up mattress.

Looking back toward Kate, Hawthorne thought how dear to him she was. The spotlight on the Blazer reflected off the snow caught in the brick and dead vines of ivy, so that the building shone. Its very brightness made Hawthorne hopeful that the school would have a future, that he could keep it going. He saw Kate fall in the deep snow, then get to her feet and keep moving toward him.

The man in the overcoat joined Hawthorne at the fence. He stared up at LeBrun with his hands on his hips. “This is the guy who made bread?”

Hawthorne nodded. “He made good bread.”

When Kate reached him, Hawthorne took her hand, pulling her to him. Without gloves their hands were freezing, yet he could feel warmth in the closeness of their palms. He tried to concentrate on it.

The man looked at LeBrun for a moment, then he reached up and touched LeBrun’s head, smoothing his brown hair and brushing it back over his forehead. His touch was almost affectionate.

“And he liked jokes, right?” asked Leo Flynn.

Epilogue

L
eo Flynn sat in his kitchen with his feet in a dishpan of water hot enough that steam rose up around his bare knees. He had on an old plaid bathrobe, and a blue wool scarf was tied around his neck. His nose was several shades redder than the rest of his face—a strawberry in a field of pink. He took a Kleenex from the box on the Formica table and began to unfold it. Next to the box of Kleenex was a glass of orange juice and a bowl of chicken soup. Before Flynn had a chance to lift the tissue to his nose, he sneezed.

Junie stood in the doorway eyeing him critically. She wore a dark green dress and was just leaving for her women’s club, which met on Monday nights. Her “hen club,” Flynn called it, but only to himself. Although she was sixty, her dark red hair had only begun to turn gray in the past few years and she had kept her figure. Despite what he thought of as her carping, Flynn still loved her as strongly as when they had married over forty years earlier.

“And what about those snow chains?” Junie was saying. “They weren’t cheap.”

“I already told you I’ll get reimbursed. Coughlin said he’d send off the paperwork.” Reaching down, Flynn scratched the ears of his eighteen-year-old black cat. Rheumy-eyed and ragged-eared, the cat was named Curley after the former mayor.

“That’s what you said when you bought that expensive flashlight, and you never got your money back.”

“For crying out loud, I can only say what he promised. Without the chains I’d of been dead in a ditch. It snowed all the way back down this morning, leastways till Concord. The salt trucks had their hands full.”

Junie crossed her arms and assumed a stubborn expression. “I don’t see why you went there anyway. It was all over by the time you showed up.”

“That was the weather, not me. I did the best I could.” Flynn grabbed another Kleenex and blew his nose, making a sound like a motorboat. The walls of the kitchen were light yellow. On the wall above the table hung a photograph of Pope John Paul and another of President Kennedy. “Anyway,” continued Flynn, “I’d been looking for this guy all fall. When I found him, he was dead. Sometimes it happens like that. Hey, it saved the state a chunk of change. Two states.”

Flynn was just as glad to get away from the subject of snow chains.

He had arrived home with his cold around three. He’d called in sick, then gone to bed and slept for several hours. When he woke, Junie had made the chicken soup and began preparing the pan of hot water for his feet while he told her about his journey through the snowstorm and what he had found at Bishop’s Hill.

“I never seen snow like that.” Flynn shook his head vigorously to give a sense of the drama. Curley stared up at him with his head tilted, as if trying to construct a rudimentary thought but not quite managing. “It wasn’t like snow down here. This was big-time weather. Snowplow didn’t show up till midnight, with the troopers and ambulance right behind. I ended up sleeping in a dorm—some kid’s room with rock and roll posters on the wall. Electricity never did come on.”

“So why didn’t you come home yesterday? Coughlin said you were supposed to work.” Junie took her coat from the back of a chair. Her club met punctually at eight and it was now past seven-thirty.

“I wanted to talk to this guy Hawthorne. Dr. Hawthorne, they call him. He told me about LaBrecque or LeBrun—I can’t keep the names straight. Like I had part of the story and I wanted the rest. I thought he’d be glad that LaBrecque was dead. But he was more upset about LaBrecque than about those two teachers that got killed. Hawthorne couldn’t stop talking about him. It made me suspicious, but this copper up there said Hawthorne was all right. A little eccentric, that’s all. They call this copper a police chief but he’s only got one guy under him. We had a couple of meals together. I like him. We might even go up there this summer. They got a lake.”

Junie looked skeptical. “I like to take our vacations on the Cape.” She began putting on her coat—dark brown with black buttons and a mink collar. “So everything’s over and done with?”

“As far as Massachusetts is concerned, but New Hampshire’s not off the hook. There’ll be a grand jury investigation and they’ll bring charges against three or four people—a couple of them lawyers. That’ll drag on for a while. Statutory rape, sexual abuse—the whole business. But then a lot of white-collar crime. That Hawthorne’s got his work cut out for him, I can tell you. Give me a good old working-class murder any day of the week. Nothing subtle or too complex. I mean, LaBrecque was a bad guy but he’d been a bad guy from the start. These teachers and lawyers, it’s like they chose to be bad. Like they could pick one or the other and they decided they wanted to be crooks.”

“They all sound the same to me.” Junie tied her scarf around her neck. “I’ll be back by eleven at the latest. Remember—no cigarettes, no beer, be in bed by nine, and keep the cat off the table.” She crossed the kitchen to kiss his cheek. Flynn patted her behind.

“You look nice,” he said.

Junie pursed her lips disapprovingly, then smiled. A moment later she was shutting the front door. Flynn waited about ten seconds, then removed his feet from the pan of water and padded over to the refrigerator, leaving wet footprints on the linoleum. Taking out a half gallon of milk and a bottle of Molson, he opened both, then got a saucer from the cupboard. He set it on the kitchen table and filled it with milk. “Like some milky?” he shouted. Curley had been deaf for years.

Flynn picked up the cat and set it in front of the milk. Then he returned to his chair and opened the window a few inches, letting in a gust of frigid air. Curley was staring at the milk as if he didn’t know if it was meant to be drunk. Flynn scratched the cat under the chin. Black hairs floated down to the table. He would have to clean them up before Junie got home. Taking a pack of Marlboros from the pocket of his bathrobe, Flynn shook one out and lit it with a kitchen match. He inhaled deeply and bent over to blow a cloud of smoke through the partly opened window.

How strange, he thought, still brooding about Bishop’s Hill. If going to prison or getting killed was how you ended up, why would a person choose to be bad?

He thought of LaBrecque’s death again and how upset Hawthorne had been. Why hadn’t he been relieved, getting rid of a guy like that? Hawthorne hadn’t wanted to let LaBrecque stay on the fence till the ambulance came. They had to move the body—first Moulton and himself and Hawthorne, trying to push LaBrecque off the spikes where he was wedged tight, pushing until Flynn thought he was going to bust a gasket. Then they had gotten the other teacher that was hanging around, then this pretty woman, Hawthorne’s girlfriend or something. The five of them pushing and shoving and grunting until LaBrecque had flopped over into the snow.

But there was Hawthorne, standing over the guy looking somber, practically in tears. He was mourning, for Pete’s sake. Who the hell was this LaBrecque to make such a fuss over? Like he had told Junie, LaBrecque had been a bad guy from the start. It was as if LaBrecque had become the person in charge, as if the dead man lying there in the snow was making the rules. But Leo Flynn wasn’t having any of that and so he had turned his back to the bunch of them and looked out at the night sky, where the snow was stopping and the moon was coming out.