6

Carter Stewart threw his garment bag on the bed. Besides underwear and socks, it contained a couple of Armani jackets and several pairs of slacks. On impulse he decided to go to the first night party in the jeans and sweater he was wearing.

In school he'd been a scrawny, untidy kid, the child of a scrawny, untidy mother. When she did remember to throw clothes in the washer, as often as not she was out of detergent. Then she'd toss in bleach, ruining whatever garments were in the machine. Until he started hiding his clothes from her and then laundering them himself, he'd gone to school in slightly soiled or freakish-looking attire.

Being too dressed up when he first met his former classmates might bring on remarks about how he used to look. Now what would they see when they looked at him? Not the shrimp he'd been most of the high school years but now of average height with a disciplined body. Unlike some of the others he'd spotted in the lobby, he had no gray strands in his full head of well-barbered dark brown hair. His ID showed him with shaggy hair and his eyes almost shut. A columnist had recently referred to his "dark brown eyes that suddenly flicker with a hint of yellow flames when he is angry."

Impatiently he looked around the room. He'd worked in this hotel the summer of his junior year at Stonecroft. He'd probably been in this dumpy room any number of times, carrying room service trays to businessmen, to ladies on a tour of the Hudson Valley, or to parents visiting their kids at West Point-or, he thought, even to trysting couples who were sneaking away from their homes and families. I could always spot those, he thought. He used to smirk and ask those couples, "Would this be a honeymoon?" when he brought up their breakfasts. The guilty expression on their faces had been priceless.

He'd hated this place then and he hated it now, but since he was here, he might as well go downstairs and start the backslapping, "great-to-see-you" ritual.

Making sure he was carrying the piece of plastic that passed for a room key, he left the room and walked down the corridor to the elevator.

The Hudson Valley Suite where the opening cocktail party was being held was on the mezzanine floor. When he stepped off the elevator, he could hear the electronically enhanced music and the voices trying to yell above it. There looked to be about forty or fifty people already gathered there. Two waiters with trays holding glasses of wine were standing at the entrance. He took a glass of the red and sampled it. Lousy merlot. He might have guessed.

He started into the suite, then felt a tap on his shoulder. "Mr. Stewart, I'm Jake Perkins, and I'm covering the reunion for the Stonecroft Gazette. May I ask you a few questions?"

Sourly, Stewart turned and looked at the nervously eager redheaded kid standing inches away from him. The first thing you learn when you want something is not to get in the other guy's face, he thought irritably as he tried to step back and felt his shoulders brush against the wall. "I would suggest we step outside and find a quiet spot unless you can read lips, Jake."

"That's not my talent, I'm afraid, sir. Outside is a good idea. Just follow me."

After a split second's consideration, Stewart decided not to abandon the wine. Shrugging, he turned and followed the student down the corridor.

"Before we begin, Mr. Stewart, may I tell you how much I enjoy your plays. I want to be a writer myself. I mean, I guess I am a writer, but I want to be a successful one like you."

Oh, God, Stewart thought. "Everyone who interviews me says the same thing. Most, if not all of you, won't make it."

He waited for the expression of anger or embarrassment that usually followed that statement. Instead, to his disappointment, the baby-faced Jake Perkins smiled cheerfully. "But I will," he said. "I'm absolutely sure of that. Mr. Stewart, I've done a lot of research on you and the others who are being honored. You all have one thing in common. The three women were achievers when they were here, but not one of you four men created much of a stir at Stonecroft. I mean, in your own case, I couldn't find a single activity listed in your yearbook, and your marks were only mediocre. You didn't write for the school paper or-"

The nerve of this kid, Stewart thought. "In my day, the school paper was amateurish even for a school paper," he snapped, "as I'm sure it still is. I was never athletic, and my writing was restricted to a personal journal."

"Is that journal the basis for any of your plays?"

"Perhaps."

"They're all pretty dark."

"I have no illusions about life, nor did I have any when I was a student here."

"Then would you say that your years at Stonecroft were not happy?"

Carter Stewart took a sip of the merlot. "They were not happy," he said evenly.

"Then what brought you back to the reunion?"

Stewart smiled coldly. "The opportunity to be interviewed by you. Now if you'll excuse me, I see Laura Wilcox, the glamour queen of our class, getting out of the elevator. Let's see if she recognizes me."

He ignored the sheet of paper that Perkins was trying to hand him.

"If you'd just give me one minute more, Mr. Stewart. I have a list here that I think you'll find of great interest."

Perkins studied the back of Carter Stewart's lean frame as he walked with swift strides to catch up with the glamorous blonde now walking into the Hudson Valley Suite. Nasty to me, Perkins thought, jeans and sweater and sneakers to show his contempt for everyone here who's all duded-up for the night. He's not the kind to show up just to collect some crummy, meaningless medal. So what really brings him here anyhow?

It was the question he'd ask in the last sentence of his article. He'd already done plenty of research on Carter Stewart. He'd started writing in college, offbeat one-act plays that were performed by the drama department and that led to a postgraduate stint at Yale. That was when he dropped his first name, Howard-or Howie, as he'd been called at Stonecroft. He had his first Broadway hit before he was thirty. He was reputed to be a loner who escaped to one of his four homes around the country when he was working on a play. Withdrawn, unpleasant, perfectionist, genius-those were some of the words used to describe him in articles. I have a few others I could add, Jake Perkins thought grimly. And I will.

7

It took Mark Fleischman longer than he had expected to drive from Boston to Cornwall. He had hoped to have a couple of hours in which to walk around the town before having to face his former classmates. He wanted to have a chance to figure out the difference between his perception of himself as it had been when he was growing up there and the reality, as he understood it, of who he was now. Am I hoping to exorcise my own demons? he wondered.

As he drove with maddening slowness down the congested Connecticut Turnpike, he kept thinking of the statement he'd heard that morning from the father of one of his patients: "Doctor, you know as well as I do that kids are cruel. They were cruel in my day, and they haven't changed. They're like a pride of lions stalking the wounded prey. That's what they're doing to my kid now. That's what they did to me when I was his age. And you know what, Doctor? I'm a pretty successful guy, but when I go to an occasional reunion at my prep school, in ten seconds I'm not the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. I'm back to feeling like the clumsy nerd everyone else had fun picking on. Crazy, isn't it?"

As the car once again slowed to a crawl, Mark decided that, in hospital terminology, the Connecticut Turnpike was in a constant state of intensive care. There was always a huge construction project going on somewhere along the way, the kind of project that meant cramming three lanes into only one, causing inevitable traffic jams.