Hawthorne tried to persuade Bobby not to feel guilty and repeated Hamilton Burke’s assurances that Evings had understood about the leave of absence, even that he was looking forward to it.

“And you believe him?”

Hawthorne was surprised. “Why should he lie?”

Then Bobby said, “You might find out more about Gail Jensen.”

At first Hawthorne couldn’t place the name.

“She was the student who died several years ago. They said it was appendicitis.”

“And wasn’t it?” asked Hawthorne.

“I’m not sure.”

“Then what was it?”

Bobby smiled humorlessly. “That’s what you need to find out.” He pushed himself away from the locker. “I appreciate your having a memorial service for Clifford. I look forward to it.”

A few minutes later, Hawthorne was on his way to the infirmary in Douglas Hall. Dinner was at six and he still had forty-five minutes. Although he could have avoided going outside, Hawthorne wanted a breath of fresh air. The faculty meeting had shaken the last of his composure—the attacks on his credibility, the reluctance of the faculty to engage with the subject, the gossip. It made him miss the residential treatment centers he’d worked in. Six weeks ago it had struck Hawthorne as ridiculous that some teachers would prefer to see Bishop’s Hill shut down than change. Now he saw that point of view as one of his greatest obstacles.

Jessica Weaver was still in the infirmary with her kitten. Hawthorne had learned that Jessica’s roommate would be happy to have the kitten in the room.

“You’ll have to take care of it,” said Hawthorne, “make sure the kitten eats properly and that it has a cat box and the litter’s changed regularly. And if you’re going to keep it, I expect you to fulfill your obligations as a student at Bishop’s Hill. No drinking, no smoking, no cutting classes, and you have to go to meals.”

There was more of this. Hawthorne felt foolish saying things that struck him as obvious, but they had to be said. The girl wore an oversized sweatshirt but Hawthorne kept remembering how she had looked that night. He couldn’t erase the image from his mind. He asked himself if there was truth to the accusations, if he wanted to have sex with her, but he only had to raise the question to see its absurdity. Jessica was a child. Even if he had seen the girl dancing in that Boston club, he wouldn’t have been attracted. He was sure of it.

The girl sat cross-legged on the floor, teasing the kitten with a long strand of her hair as she listened to Hawthorne.

“So it’s agreed?” asked Hawthorne at last.

Jessica gathered up the kitten in her arms. “I guess so.”

“And you’ll take care of it?”

“Sure. I mean, I love it.”

“And are you going to tell me where you got the tequila the other night?”

“I can’t.” She raised her chin defiantly.

He was tempted to blackmail her. If she didn’t tell about the tequila, she couldn’t keep the kitten. The idea made him dislike himself. “Then you better get to dinner,” he said.

Hawthorne stayed a few more minutes to talk to Alice Beech.

“Certainly I remember Gail Jensen,” said Alice. “But I wasn’t here when she was taken to the hospital. It was just three years ago at Thanksgiving break. I’d gone to Boston to see some friends. The girl had stayed at school. She went into the hospital on the Friday after Thanksgiving. When I got back on Sunday night, I heard she’d died.” They were sitting in Alice’s office. On the walls were photographs of Alice kayaking with a number of friends, all women.

“And it was appendicitis?”

“That’s what I was told. I had no reason to doubt it.”

“Had the girl been sick?”

“No. It was very sudden.”

“What was she like?”

“The girl? Very quiet, a little plain, not a particularly good student.”

“Did she have friends?”

“Not many, maybe none at all. She had a job in the office helping Mrs. Hayes—photocopying and answering the phone. That was really the only time I saw her.”

Hawthorne thanked Alice again for taking care of Jessica, yet even as he spoke he recalled Skander’s absurd suggestion that Alice had a sexual interest. The thought made him feel even more isolated. He considered the good or bad construction that could be put on any action and asked himself why the faculty at Bishop’s Hill seemed so relentlessly determined to imagine the bad.

After dinner Hawthorne went down to the Dugout to spend an hour or so with the students. Many were upset about Evings’s death and he wanted to give them the chance to vent their feelings. He found about twenty at tables scattered around the room, talking, listening to the jukebox, and playing video games. Often during the fall he had joined a table of students, and they had come to see nothing out of the ordinary about his presence. Now they seemed more distant and he suspected it was because of the rumors about him and Jessica.

Still, half a dozen settled around him to talk about Evings, although they tried to mask their shock behind an affected composure.

“What I don’t sec,” said a sophomore named Riley, “is why he couldn’t of split. I mean, go to California.”

His girlfriend disagreed. “He was too old to go to California.” She combed her fingers through her long black hair.

“Hey, he had a big problem,” said Tank Donoso. Tank wore a T-shirt that showed off his muscular bulk. “And who could he talk to? Like, who’s the psychologist for the psychologist? It’s a problem—”

A thin blond girl by the name of Ashley interrupted him. “He could have talked to Dr. Hawthorne.”

“Yo,” said Tank, “Dr. Hawthorne’s his boss. You don’t go to the boss and say how you’re fucking up, even if the boss is a shrink.”

And Rudy Schmidt, with whom Hawthorne still sometimes shot baskets, asked the question that the others may not have had the nerve to ask. “You think the school’s going to make it to the end of the year?”

“Why shouldn’t it?” said Hawthorne, feigning more surprise than he felt.

“Well, you know, money and stuff.”

“I just want to make sure I’ll graduate,” said Tank.

“I promise that you’ll both graduate,” said Hawthorne, “as long as your grades don’t take a nosedive.”

The small joke hardly raised a smile.

“What about next year?” asked the girl with the long black hair. Hawthorne thought her name was Sara.

“I’m doing everything I can to make sure we’ll be here in the fall.” Hawthorne realized, not for the first time, that no matter how much the students complained about Bishop’s Hill and fantasized about an ideal home, the school was still a place of security, even of comfort; for some of them, it was the only real home they had.

“That doesn’t mean you’ll make it,” said Riley.

“We’ll make it,” Hawthorne told him, trying to put absolute certainty into his voice.

After the others drifted away, Hawthorne told Tank that he wanted to talk to him. He had the idea of asking Tank to help him catch whoever had been leaving the bags of food.

“Homeboy,” said Tank, straddling a chair and folding his beefy hands on the table.

“How’ve you been?” asked Hawthorne. The dark wooden surface of the table was scarred with students’ names and initials and dates going back as far as the fifties.

Tank shrugged. Then he said, “Hey, I got something I got to show you.” He raised his hands, putting one on his forehead and the other on the back of his head against his short blond hair. He tilted his head toward Hawthorne and pushed both hands upward, squeezing his scalp and creating a number of furrows across the top that looked like rumble strips. Tank relaxed his hands, squeezed, then relaxed his hands again so the rumble strips came and went. “Cool, huh?” asked Tank.

“Cool,” said Hawthorne, and he considered the incredible desperation he must be feeling in order to imagine that Tank might make a suitable accomplice.