Chapter 1
CHAPTER
Alexandria, Virginia
Before getting out, he paused to assess himself in the rearview mirror.
The balding dark brown wig flawlessly covered his naturally curly blond hair, which he’d cut short.
His mustache was darkened with brown wax and shaped into a droop that swallowed his upper lip.
Green-colored contacts, English-schoolboy glasses, and facial prosthetics he’d bought from a movie makeup artist completed a disguise that made him look at least ten years older.
Soneji smiled. His own dear wife, Missy, would not have recognized him.
His real name was Gary Murphy. But he had taken on a new identity—Gary Soneji—who so far lived only in his mind.
He stepped out of the Saab, opened the back door, and retrieved a faded blue blazer. He put it on over his blue button-down dress shirt and adjusted the knot of his blue and red rep tie to make himself look even more disheveled.
He slung his canvas messenger bag over one shoulder and checked his watch. Seven forty. Classes did not start at the Charles School until eight.
Twenty minutes. A chance to practice.
Soneji scanned the faculty parking lot. Two teachers were climbing the stone staircase to the verdant main campus. He spotted a tan Dodge sedan, empty, with a vacant spot next to it.
He walked in a loop until the Dodge was three rows in front of him, took another look around, saw the teachers were gone, and prepared his final stalk. Soneji imagined himself at night and studied the driver’s-side mirror until he had calculated how to come at it through a blind spot.
Then he crouched, hurried forward to the next row, and peered through the back window of the tan sedan to the rearview mirror, making certain he would not be seen. When he was sure, he checked all around once more.
Convinced he was unseen, Soneji moved quickly to the left rear corner of the empty parking space. He walked to within five feet of the sedan, raised his hand like a pistol, aimed it where a driver would be, and said, slowly and deliberately, “Bang. Bang.”
Not bad, he thought as he turned and headed toward the staircase to campus. He’d practice again later. And then he’d repeat it until he was sure.
A white Jeep Grand Wagoneer pulled into a space by the stairs.
Headmistress Jenny Wolcott.
Soneji cursed his luck. He didn’t like Wolcott. She was—well, nosy.
He pasted a plastic smile on his lips as he passed the Jeep and started to climb the stairs, hoping she’d have some rearranging to do before getting out. But her door opened behind him.
“Is that you again, Mr. Murphy, on this fine October day?” Jenny Wolcott called.
Soneji tried not to stiffen as he stopped on the stairs and looked back, smiling and thinking how very much he would like to throttle her. He said, “Me again, Headmistress. It seems Ms. Porter has a world-class flu.”
A tiny dynamo of a woman in her late forties, Wolcott had taught English before turning to administration. “What does she have you covering today?”
“‘The Lagoon,’” he said.
“Ah, Joseph Conrad. I know you went to Penn, but your degree is in computer science. You feel up to this?”
He managed a smile and said, “I reread it last night. At first the tale seems incoherent, like a dream, but then you start seeing what the author does with light and darkness when the white guy goes up the canal into the jungle lagoon, and then it becomes a nightmare when the one Malay boy abandons his brother to the raja’s men hunting them. ”
“To save his dying girlfriend,” the headmistress said. “It’s a moral-quandary story that suggests many of the themes later amplified in Heart of Darkness.”
“That’s how I plan to teach it,” Soneji replied. “A sketch for them to consider before Heart of Darkness.”
“Let me know how it goes,” Wolcott said as they reached the top of the stairs. She headed toward the administration offices.
“I will,” Soneji said, and he turned toward Fowler Hall on the quadrangle, thinking once again how deeply satisfying it would be to snuff out her sanctimonious life.
The halls of Fowler were bustling with teenagers in school uniforms, clutching books, heading toward their first-period classes. Ms. Porter’s classroom was on the second floor.
Soneji loved taking on a substitute-teaching role from time to time.
It was a break from his boring real job, selling heating oil.
A chance to be someone else, someone who by necessity was surrounded by youth.
And here at the Charles School, they were the youth of privilege, though not of super-wealth or super-power.
Still, these were elite youth, and they interested Soneji very much. So much promise to be toyed with. So much potential to—
He reached the second floor and spotted seventeen-year-old Abby Howard leaning back against the wall, laughing with Conrad Talbot, who wore his Charles School lacrosse captain jacket and stood very close to her.
Soneji had met Abby in class two days ago, and she reminded him of Joyce Adams, a freshman at Princeton who’d mysteriously vanished years ago.
He had fond memories of Joyce, how long and lean she’d been, the first to sate a particular craving in him.
But now, years later, the hunger was coming again.
Every time he glanced at Abby, he thought of Joyce and how wonderful it would be to repeat that sweet episode.
A knot of students came down the hall, causing Soneji to take a few steps to his right. He stopped with his back almost to Conrad and Abby, close enough to overhear them.
“C’mon, Abs,” the boy said. “I’ve got my brother’s Bronco for the week.”
“You know my mom doesn’t let me go out on school nights.”
“Tomorrow morning everyone’s doing SAT prep, but we don’t need to retake them, so we don’t have to be here until noon.”
“I did score well already,” Abby said.
“You scored through the roof, and so did I. C’mon, Abs, we’ll get something to eat in Georgetown and then go to this place my brother told me about on Bear Island, off the canal bicycle path.”
“On our bikes?” she asked skeptically.
“No, in the Bronco,” he said.
“Is that, like, legal?”
“Nah. But it’s okay if you go late enough that no one’s there and you drive with just your running lights across the bridge and down the wide dirt path there.
My brother’s done it a bunch of times. Bet we don’t even need the lights tonight.
There’s a full moon and there’s this cutoff to a maintenance road that goes right above the river.
You can see Little Falls from there. We’ll look at the falls and the moon. ”
“No, we won’t,” Abby said playfully. “At least I hope not.”
“No moon-gazing, then,” Conrad said and laughed.
Soneji wanted to linger, longed to hear more. But he had a class to teach.
He moved on, thinking about the young lovers, thinking about Joyce Adams, and wondering how the genius he’d been studying might handle the situation.