Chapter 47
In Spero’s office, Renders continued waiting for Santopietro to speak.
Even after what they’d done together, and what they’d shared, Santopietro remained his employer and Renders was content to defer to him.
Santopietro was easy to underrate; it was a function of his appearance, his mode of dress, his slightly hunched way of walking, and the soft sibilance of his speech.
But Renders, like Spero’s more perceptive students, had come to appreciate that Santopietro deliberately cultivated a self-effacing air, particularly on the rare occasions when he was away from the school.
Santopietro was a man who did not care to be noticed beyond Spero’s confines and had constructed a persona to suit that end.
So accomplished was he that no one even bothered to examine more closely this reserve, or conjecture what it might conceal.
Renders could only speculate on how uncomfortable it must have been for Santopietro when Leonard Levesque, of all people, touched on the answer.
Santopietro began filing away the papers on his desk. He did not like unresolved business.
“This is an awkward position in which we find ourselves,” he said.
“Levesque doesn’t know anything,” said Renders.
“But he suspects.”
It was Levesque who had told Santopietro about Scott Theriault and Mallory Norton, ratting out his schoolmate to avoid punishment for some infraction that Santopietro could no longer recall.
Were he to reveal this to another—say a loquacious classmate, or the police—Santopietro might be asked why he hadn’t shared this knowledge following Norton’s disappearance, especially after Theriault’s body later turned up in a tributary of the Kennebec River.
“The price of his silence,” Santopietro continued, “is to be allowed free run of the school, for now. The beating of Anthony Marshall was a way of testing the waters.”
“So let him be top dog,” said Renders. “Top dog in a pound of mongrels.”
“I said ‘for now.’ This is a form of blackmail, and blackmail escalates. An adult might grasp how far and hard one can push, but not an adolescent. Levesque will overstep the mark again—if he even knows what a mark looks like, which I doubt—and we’ll be forced to rein him in.
When we do, he’ll bring up Mallory Norton once more, and we’ll be right back where we started.
And if he were to inflict serious harm on a fellow student, harm requiring a formal investigation by police, he could use the girl as a bargaining chip. ”
“I always thought Levesque was surplus to humanity’s needs,” said Renders. “It would be a shame if nothing happened to him.”
“If something does, it can’t happen here.”
They’d just about gotten away with Scott Theriault.
Losing two students in as many months would bring serious and unwanted attention: from the law, the media, and the handful of parents who gave enough of a damn about their children not to want to leave them in the care of an institution that appeared unable to keep its charges alive.
“Could Levesque have been the one who put Theriault’s body in the water?” Santopietro asked.
It was certainly a possibility, thought Renders, if one he hadn’t considered until Levesque started dropping nasty hints.
Could the boy have been fucking with them from the off?
Levesque tells Santopietro about how Scott Theriault is seeing a Bingham girl who drives up to the school after dark, then waits to see how the principal reacts.
Maybe he’s watching when Santopietro and Renders find Mallory Norton, and when she doesn’t show up again, Levesque has a good idea why, so he starts tormenting Theriault by whispering in his ear that Santopietro and Renders may know more than they’re saying about the disappearance of his girlfriend.
Theriault reacts, forcing Renders to deal with him.
Finally, Levesque somehow discovers where Renders has buried Theriault, but instead of calling 911, anonymously or openly, he puts the body in a stream to see where it ends up, like a kid playing with a stick on the current.
But that was where it fell apart for Renders. He couldn’t figure out how Levesque might have known about Theriault, not without shadowing Renders into the wilderness. Yet somehow Scott Theriault’s body, buried in a hole by the bank and covered with dirt, had washed downstream to be discovered.
“No,” said Renders at last. “I’m still of the belief there must have been a collapse.
I buried him within sight of the stream so if the ground did fall in, the body could have tumbled down the slope to be taken by it.
I mean, Levesque aside, what other answer is there?
That someone else found Theriault and decided to give him a water funeral? ”
Santopietro didn’t reply. He only had Renders’s word that Theriault’s body had been disposed of properly. He didn’t want to doubt the man, but it might be that without proper supervision, Renders flirted with negligence.
“So what do we do?” Renders asked.
“We wait. We control Levesque as best we can for the time being, until we find an opportunity to get rid of him—away from the school.”
Renders didn’t look happy, and Santopietro couldn’t blame him.
What he was proposing was less a solution than the kicking of a can down the road, with all the attendant risks of dealing with a creature as unpredictable as Leonard Levesque, but the reasoning was sound.
The school couldn’t afford any more dead students.
“Do you regret Mallory Norton?” Santopietro asked quietly.
“Not at all,” said Renders. “I enjoyed it. I enjoyed her. I’d very much like for us to do something similar together again.”
Which brought them back to the Game, and Renders’s potential introduction as a player.
It would mean longer gaps between games for each player, but as Santopietro had explained to Edward Kenney, that might protect them all in the long run by further disrupting the pattern.
The option was to continue what he had started with Renders: a separate game for two, meaning that Santopietro would no longer have to endure a time-out one year in three.
But by taking Mallory Norton, he had broken one of the cardinal rules agreed with Kenney and Teal, and they would be entitled to feel aggrieved.
It might be better were they to remain ignorant.
“Let’s see what we can do about that,” said Santopietro.