Chapter 69
Elgot accompanied Kaspar Filipowski to the ablution block, where he waited while the boy showered, dried himself, and changed into fresh underwear and trousers.
Elgot put the stained clothing in a bag and told Kaspar he’d take care of it.
He’d add it to his own laundry, which Elgot always did himself, and nobody would be any the wiser.
Elgot tried to press Kaspar on what he meant by “dead boys,” but Kaspar had clammed up.
Elgot decided it might be better to leave him be and broach the subject again the following day.
Once Kaspar was dressed and ready, Elgot walked him to the hall, where the film was playing, even though he’d asked Renders not to start it until the boy was located.
The others peered curiously at Kaspar, but nobody made any smart remarks, and a space was cleared for him at the end of the back row.
The students appeared to Elgot to be almost solicitous of Kaspar.
Even Leonard Levesque wasn’t sneering, and a sneer was his default expression.
Renders wasn’t around, and when Elgot asked where he was, Jamie Hanscomb, the oldest of the current intake, said that Mr. Renders had pressed play on the Blu-ray and left him in charge.
“Well, you’re still in charge,” Elgot told him. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
While it wasn’t unusual for a teacher to nominate one of the older boys to supervise, Elgot was irritated.
Why couldn’t Renders just have stayed where he was?
Elgot decided not to waste time finding him.
Better that he speak to Santopietro first. Elgot’s encounter with Kaspar Filipowski had unsettled him, coming so soon after the trouble with Anthony Marshall.
But the latter hadn’t said anything about dead boys, not that Elgot had heard, and Kaspar, unlike Anthony, hadn’t suffered any injuries.
Because he managed to hide in time.
Hide from whom, though? Elgot wasn’t a superstitious man and immediately dismissed a literal interpretation of what Kaspar had said.
However, he was prepared to accept that one or more of the older boys might have found a way to terrorize some of the younger ones.
Half the city kids, marooned far from home in an alien environment, were already scared of the dark.
It wouldn’t take much more than some ghost stories and a couple of Halloween masks to tip them over the edge.
Again, Elgot would have nominated Leonard Levesque as a prime suspect, but unless Levesque had added bilocation to his skill set, he wasn’t the one who’d made Kaspar hide in a closet and wet himself from fear.
As he neared the closed door of Santopietro’s office, Elgot heard voices inside: Santopietro and Renders.
Elgot was about to knock, then paused. He heard just one word clearly, the one his mother used to refer to as the “c-word,” and another that might have been a name but was more muffled.
Elgot experienced a similar sensation to when, as a child, he heard his parents giggling behind their bedroom door, followed by sounds that might have been expressions of pain, pleasure, or some adult combination of both.
The two incidents, distant and recent, coalesced as he heard Renders laugh filthily.
Elgot started to walk away, but he was only halfway along the hall when Santopietro’s office door opened behind him.
Elgot had the presence of mind to turn on his heel, so that when Renders emerged, Elgot appeared to be walking toward the office, not away from it.
“Everything okay?” Renders asked, as Santopietro poked his head around the frame.
“Not especially,” said Elgot. “I found Kaspar Filipowski in a closet over in Ford, scared half to death.”
“Did one of the boys do something to him?” Santopietro asked.
Elgot wasn’t sure how to reply. Eventually he settled for: “The rest of them were in the hall, waiting for the movie to start. But something frightened Kaspar enough to make him want to hide.”
Elgot watched a shadow pass over Renders’s face, but it was Santopietro who spoke.
“Like what?”
“Intruders, maybe?” Elgot suggested. “Local kids with too much time on their hands?”
“Is that what Kaspar said? Did he tell you it was boys who had scared him?”
Elgot decided to tell the truth, if not the whole truth.
“He did.”
The shadow, Elgot saw, had now settled on Renders. The man was unnerved.
“I accept that the rest of the students might have been in the hall when Kaspar was discovered,” said Santopietro, “but we don’t know how long he spent in hiding before then. It’s possible that some of the others were picking on him before movie time was called.”
Elgot didn’t bother arguing. He didn’t believe it, and from the look on his face, he didn’t think Renders believed it either.
“I’d better be getting back,” said Elgot.
“I’ll make a general address to the school in the morning,” said Santopietro. “We can’t have any escalation, not after all that’s happened.”
Elgot nodded. Renders seemed about to follow him when Santopietro held him back.
“A minute, Mr Renders.”
Renders returned to the office with Santopietro, closing the door behind him.
“Could this be Levesque acting up again?”
Renders replied that he didn’t think so. Since the incident in the ablution block, the staff had been keeping tabs on Leonard Levesque, Renders more than most.
“And what Elgot said about intruders?” Santopietro persisted. “I saw your face. Is there something you haven’t told me?”
Renders shifted uneasily.
“A few nights ago,” he said, “I thought I heard noises outside my room, in the yard. It sounded like voices whispering—boys’ voices—but when I went outside, there was no one.”
He didn’t mention the separate occurrence, on the night Anthony Marshall was attacked, when he’d watched from beside his bed as someone tried to open his locked door, someone who had managed to evade a motion-activated light so sensitive that a big moth could set it off.
Nor did he speak of a darkness that was too dark, and a conviction that whatever waited in it wanted Renders’s curiosity to get the better of him, wanted him to come closer, close enough for it to be able to take hold of him and draw him to itself.
“What time was this?”
“It was after one,” said Renders. “I remember looking at the clock.”
Santopietro was dubious.
“We haven’t experienced that kind of intrusion in a while, not since the Shackfords moved away.”
The Shackfords had been what passed for bad news in The Plains, their property resembling a junkyard, the extended family scattered over two or three decaying cabins and subsisting on welfare and minor criminality.
Some of the younger Shackfords had taken to taunting Spero’s students, even dealing out a cursory beating when they caught any of them outnumbered, or better still, alone.
Then, six months earlier, someone had burned the Shackfords out, the fire spreading so fast, thanks to a northerly wind, that it was a miracle no one died.
The Shackfords weren’t short of enemies and had no friends at all, so few tears were shed outside the immediate clan, and its members subsequently scattered.
An investigation by the Somerset County Sheriff’s Office and the Maine State Fire Marshal concluded that gasoline was the accelerant, but no obvious suspects presented themselves; in fact, there were so many potential candidates that it was less time-consuming to identify the innocent.
Santopietro assisted with the sheriff’s inquiries as best he could, and attested to the noninvolvement of the students under his care.
He decided not to bring up the beating Leonard Levesque had taken from Emile Shackford and two of his cousins a week or so before the fire. After all, boys would be boys.
“I might have been mistaken about the voices,” said Renders. “I’d had a long day.”
But he didn’t think he was.
“And Kaspar Filipowski?”
“He might have been mistaken too.”
“He does have a nervous disposition,” said Santopietro. “The kindest thing we can do is strengthen him. In the meantime, talk to Levesque, see if he can shed any light on the situation.”
Renders examined his fingernails.
“The boy really is more trouble than he’s worth,” he said.
“He is,” said Santopietro. “Someday soon it may be the death of him.”