Footsteps reverberated in the opposite stairwell, and I backed away.
"Damn," Orson said. "I’ve got to meet with a student. How about lunch tomorrow?"
"Splendid."
A chair squeaked, and I ran down the hall. There was a men’s bathroom on my right that I’d unwittingly passed before, and I slipped inside as Orson stepped from Jack’s office into the hall. In the dark bathroom, a faucet dripped into the sink. Cracking the door, I glanced back into the hallway. Orson now stood in the threshold of his office, leaning against the door frame and speaking to a pudgy girl with walnut hair and a pale white face. She wore a backpack on the outside of her yellow rain jacket, and she smiled as Orson invited her into his office and shut the door.
I let the bathroom door close, immersing myself in darkness. Closing my eyes, I took steady breaths until the banging in my chest subsided.
Suddenly, I remembered — walking up the steps, I’d seen a red box with the word Fire on it.
I opened the door. Orson’s was still closed, so I ran from the hallway into the stairwell. The fire alarm was mounted on the wall, and I stopped and looked back down the hallway. Now the only light came from Jack’s office.
I pulled the white handle and the alarm screamed.
Back inside the bathroom, the darkness now riddled with blinking lights, I found my way into a stall and sat down on the toilet. The door opened, someone shouted, and then it closed again, the darkness assuring whoever had entered that the men’s room was vacant. After thirty seconds, I walked to the door.
The floor vacated, most of the doors were open now, brightening the hallway considerably. I ran toward 209 as the alarm rang. Empty. Rushing inside, I shut the door behind me and moved to the window. Outside, a crowd was gathering at the building’s entrance, people staring up in wonder, looking for the smoke. It was snowing hard now, sticking to the grass, melting on the brick. I wondered how long it’d take the fire department to arrive.
There were no filing cabinets. I opened the bottom right-hand drawer of the desk and found it stuffed with graded papers and tests. The drawer above it overflowed with supplies — pens, pencils, several legal pads. Two roll books and two packs of note cards filled the drawer in the center, and the left-hand drawers were both empty. No trophies. No photographs. But this did not surprise me. He was too careful to keep them here. I’d known it, but I had to check.
A monitor, processor, and keyboard stood separately on the floor — an old Tandy 1000 with the letters and numbers worn completely off the keys. There was a bookshelf on either side of the window. I glanced at the titles but found nothing peculiar. They were history texts, most on ancient Rome and Greece. A poster of Athens and a framed photograph of Orson standing in the Coliseum hung on the wall in front of his desk.
A stack of unopened envelopes lay on top of his desk, and I picked them up. Of the four, three had been addressed to his school office, the other to 617 Jennings Road, Woodside, Vermont. Yes. Grabbing a pen and a sheet of paper from the supply drawer, I copied down the address. Then I looked through the drawers once more to make sure I hadn’t disturbed anything. Orson would know.
The fire alarm stopped ringing. Stuffing his address in my pocket, I opened the door. Though still quiet in this hall, there were firemen on the floor below — I could hear their shouting and heavy footsteps. Rushing to the stairwell on the right, I looked down, then, seeing nothing, descended the steps. At the bottom, I saw two firemen in the first-floor hallway disappear into different rooms. There was an exit at the side of the building, and I bolted for the door and sprinted down stone steps into snowy grass. After fifty yards, I slowed to a walk, and glancing over my shoulder, saw the people still waiting in front of the building, Orson among them.
The snow had let up and was now falling in big downy flakes. Exhilarated, I walked through frosted grass back toward the town. Walter and I still had to dig Orson’s hole before dark.
23
WE waited until 6:30, when the cloudy sky darkened into slate. I drove the Cadillac onto 116, a lonely stretch of highway that shot through the wilderness between Woodside and Bristol. Little snow remained in the valley now. The temperature had hovered in the upper thirties throughout the evening, melting the half inch of wet snow that had fallen in the early afternoon.
Pines blitzed by on both sides of the road. I could smell them even from inside the car — a clean, bitter scent. We passed several picnic areas and a campground, all part of the Green Mountain National Forest. But I wanted land where people never walked. The campgrounds were empty now, and their trails offered easy access to the woods. But if the weather turned warm again, which undoubtedly it would do before the ground froze for the winter, people would flock to these trails, some with dogs. I didn’t have the time or energy to dig that deep a hole.
I’d been driving for ten minutes when the shoulder widened to two car lengths. Slowing down, I swerved off the road, and the tires slid to a stop in the muddy grass. I turned off the engine and the headlights and looked through the windshield and the rearview mirror. The highway stretched on, dark and empty.
"You think this spot is safe?" Walter asked.
"Safe as any," I said, pulling the keys from the ignition.
I opened the door and stepped down into the cold, wet grass. The sound of our doors slamming resounded through the woods. Opening the trunk, we each took a shovel and a pair of leather gloves to keep our hands from going numb.
I led us back into the trees. We didn’t go far, because it’d be difficult to find this place on a moonless night. We’d be carrying Orson, and stumbling through the woods with him would be hard enough. The white pines dripped snowmelt, and within moments, I was shivering and miserable, thinking of the fireplace at the Woodside Inn.
Forty yards in, I stopped. The trees grew so close to one another that the highway was now invisible. I drew an arrow in the pine needles, pointing toward the road. If we somehow became disoriented in the forest, we could wander out here all night looking for the highway.
"Let’s dig," I said, motioning to a level space between the trees.
I stabbed my shovel through the pine needles, and it cut into the moist earth below. The work was initially difficult because we were cold, but the exertion soon drew sweat. In no time, I could feel only the biting chill in my ruddy cheeks.
We traced the outline first. Then we began to dig, and with the two of us working, we’d soon gone two feet down. When I thought it was sufficiently deep, I lay in the hole and Walter measured how far an animal would have to dig to reach me: There’d be a foot of earth between Orson and the forest floor.
I climbed out and brushed the dirt from my jeans, now damp and mud-streaked. Walter leaned against the trunk of a red spruce and lit a cigarette. In the blue dusk, there was no detail in his face, but I could tell that he stared at me strangely, the tobacco cinder glowing and fading.
"What?" I asked, but he shook his head. "No, what is it?" I’d begun to shiver again.
"We’re actually going to kill a man."
"Not a man, Walter. The man who’s threatened to sic a psychopath on your family."
"You might not be scared, Andy, but I’m shitting my pants. I hardly slept last night. I can’t stop thinking that a million things could go wrong tomorrow. He could escape. Kill us. He might even know we’re here. You considered that? He’s a psychopath, and we’re fucking with him."
A twig snapped in the distance.
"Aren’t you doing this for your family?" I asked. "Think about them when you’re scared. What it’ll feel like to see the animal who threatened Jenna bleeding in that hole."