Goody 59484x

Goody

Kenneth Labich

Copyright © 2019 by Kenneth Labich.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019919453 ISBN: Hardcover 978-1-7960-7519-9 Softcover 978-1-7960-7518-2 eBook 978-1-7960-7517-5

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only. Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 12/03/2019

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CONTENTS

Chapter 1: Professor Moron

Chapter 2: #PsychoBitch

Chapter 3: Creepy Cal

Chapter 4: Everything Is God

Chapter 5: Well-Behaved Women

Chapter 6: Pulse Optional

Chapter 7: No Fun Intended

Chapter 8: Retroactive Abortion

Chapter 9: Degloved

Chapter 10: Machete Under My Bed

Chapter 11: Sophisticated Stupidity

Chapter 12: Brains Devolving

Chapter 13: A Pig’s Anus

CHAPTER 1

Professor Moron

A LTHOUGH HE DIDN’T know it at the time, Douglas Hatcher’s prospects began to brighten in August 2015, when a hip-hop musical very loosely based on the life of Alexander Hamilton opened on Broadway to great acclaim. Doug, a professor of American history, had a decade before published a biography of Hamilton. It was reasonably well reviewed in three academic journals, but sold less than 400 copies and was soon out of print; over the years, he had more or less forgotten about the entire painful experience. Then, on a dreary late-autumn afternoon a few months after Hamilton opened, his office phone rang and a man with a high-pitched voice announced that his name was Mark Bradley and he was an editor at Simon & Schuster Publishing Corp. in New York. He said he had just acquired the North American rights to Doug’s book from his previous publisher, the University of New Hampshire Press. In light of all the hoopla surrounding the Broadway production, they would be putting out a new edition, said Bradley, and an advance against royalties would be coming his way. Over the next two weeks, Doug wrote a new forward, highlighting the great surge of interest in Hamilton, and Simon & Schuster commissioned a handsome new cover, with an elegant watercolor portrait of the former Treasury Secretary. Just below the portrait were large red letters that read HAMILTON! THE BOOK THAT INSPIRED A BROADWAY MEGAHIT! This time, Doug’s biography was reviewed by a dozen national newspapers and magazines, sold 28,000 copies in the first two months, and inched onto the bottom rungs of The New York Times nonfiction best-seller list. He began getting calls from newspaper and TV reporters, looking for quotes from an expert on the Hamilton mania on Broadway, and a segment producer from 60 Minutes called to set up an interview. Whenever anyone questioned him about the show, he always tried not to dwell on the musical’s distorted portrayal of Hamilton as a champion of American democracy. The man Doug wrote about believed most fervently in the concentration of wealth among the few and the

ruthless application of military power when rich people’s interests were at risk. Doug shut up about all that; he received a check for $65,000 from Simon & Schuster. A month later, Doug was slumped over his desk one afternoon, grading a stack of grad-student essays on the Industrial Revolution, when the phone rang again. This time, an overly perky female voice informed him that, based on his “insightful study of one of the most important of America’s Founding Fathers”, he had been granted a MacArthur Foundation grant—a so-called genius award. He would receive a check for $125,OOO, free of all taxes, each January 1st for the next five years and, while most recipients engage in projects related to the work for which they were being honored, Doug could basically do whatever he wanted with the money. This double whammy of good fortune came at a crucial time for Doug. A few months before, his wife Heather had walked into their bedroom early on a Saturday morning and told him she was leaving him and taking with her their 14-year-old daughter Blaire, who was the sole unalloyed joy in his life. Heather said she had taken a job as chairman of the French department at Reed College in Oregon and would be leaving that very day. She said the U-Haul was packed and parked outside and she had been in touch with a divorce lawyer who would be calling him. “I don’t think we have to talk much about what’s happened,” she said. “We’re both the culprits in this mess.” “That’s probably right,” said Doug. “But culprit is such a weaselly word.” She stared at him for an eternal five seconds, and then she just left. Doug lay there in bed for an hour and tried to figure out how to think about it all. He decided he felt relieved—their arguments had become meaner and more frequent —and he also felt emptied-out somehow, alone. He was confused as well; though they seldom said a kind word to each other at the end, their sex life had become ever more robust. He didn’t want to think about how much he would miss his daughter. His college, a second-tier liberal arts operation, located in an old mill town in western Pennsylvania, shepherded 1600 or so students through an old-fashioned curriculum unsuited for the technological world, and it charged them more than $60,000 each year for the privilege. s did what they had to do to keep the school’s US News rankings high, the best path to prosperity for

American colleges; campus rumors swirled about deans fudging numbers in latenight sessions before submitting them to the magazine. In any event, the place continued to attract an overflow of mostly white suburban youths too dim or lazy or poorly connected to get into the Ivies or tonier schools like Kenyon or Middlebury. The nearest sizable town was an hour away, and there wasn’t much to do if you were faculty except drink and gossip about your fellow teachers and their spouses. So when Doug went to work on the Monday after Heather walked out on him, everyone he talked to already knew what had happened. Just one person, a woman who had shared an office with Heather, said she was sorry about it. For a few days, nobody told Doug that Heather had run off with a man, but then the philosophy department head sidled up in the men’s room and told him she had left with Geoffrey Sherman, an associate dean who had also found a job at Reed. He wore a goatee, was fond of turtleneck sweaters, and talked a lot about wine; Doug had always despised the guy, but never suspected he would be the one to barge into his life and break it up. Doug soon found out that everyone he talked to already knew about Heather and Sherman. When he got up in the morning and looked in the bathroom mirror, Doug felt in his bones that he was staring at a pathetic excuse for a man—Professor Moron. After a while, Heather’s departure became a sort of mental toothache, throbbing away somewhere in his cerebellum, and he thought every ten minutes about Blaire. She called him often, but he could feel her getting farther from him week by week.

Doug drank, always had. He grew up in Evanston, north of Chicago on Lake Michigan, and he and his friends got drunk every weekend all through high school. His father, a patent attorney who worked down in the Loop, drank too— Bombay martinis, straight up with three green olives on a toothpick. He had set up a lounge in the knotty-pine basement of their big old Victorian, and at least a dozen full bottles of assorted liquor filled the shelf behind the bar at all times. He didn’t keep close track of his inventory, and Doug and several friends got so sick on Chivas Regal on his 16th birthday that two of them were carted off to Evanston Hospital; they had vomited so much that dehydration had set in.

Doug drank a lot every weekend—three-day tequila binges—during undergraduate school at Duke. At graduate school at Penn, he stepped it up, becoming very drunk every other day, weekend or not. It was a six-year slog to a PhD. Doug met Heather at Penn. She drank too, and she did it badly, going through ups and downs of paranoia and rage. A doctor once told her that when she drank she went into a state of “rapidly cycling bipolar disorder.” She drank anyway, beer and Stoli shots, and she and Doug boozed their way through grad school. Then came Blaire, a quickie marriage ceremony in her mother’s backyard, and they both got jobs at the so-so school in Pennsylvania. Doug drank hard for ten days or so after Heather left him, starting every afternoon after his last class and continuing on into the night. The four bars in the drowsy college town all closed by 1 A.M., so he had to finish up at home, ing out on the couch in front of the TV. He drank mostly Irish whiskey, Jameson, on the rocks, splash of soda. The Irish made him sad, and on most days he wallowed in his travails. At some point, he fell in with a group of English department faculty who were often in one of the bars—a dozen or so flirty men and women in their 30s, a decade younger than Doug. Most of them were hard-core Neo-Socialists who talked politics more than literature, and all but a couple Hillary diehards were ing Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary. Several of them lived together in a big stucco house up in the hills above town, and everyone drank sangria and smoked a lot of weed at their parties, which broke out three or four times a week. Doug, who had pretty much stopped smoking the stuff in grad school, took it up again and found his way through at least two ts a day, along with the Irish. He had drunken sex four times with three different women in a one-week period, and he could not a time when he felt worse about himself. People on campus, friends, stopped him and asked after his health. “Gotta tell you,” said one of his grad students, a wise-ass kid from New Jersey, “you look really terrible, I mean in a physical way. None of my business, obviously, but you really need to get that shit checked out.” Doug lectured most days with a skull-splitter of a hangover, sipping on black coffee laced with crushed aspirin tablets and a shot of Irish. He had a light

semester, just two survey courses, a course on the economic aspects of the Revolutionary War, and a weekly graduate seminar on the Ten Worst U.S. Presidents, so he managed to stumble through his schedule and then spend the nights destroying brain cells. One night at the bar of the only Italian restaurant in town, an older man with a white beard on the next stool said he was going to stop drinking alcohol after fifty years of bad bar behavior. He tipped his half-full glass of amber liquid toward the bartender and drained it in two gulps. “I think just one more glass, Tommie, go out with a bang or whatever,” he said. The old guy inspired Doug to quit the Irish, drink red wine instead, and cut his weed ration to one t a day. That lasted four days, until Saturday, when he tumbled off the wagon hard and just kept going. The semester was ending, and Doug wasn’t scheduled to teach until an August seminar on George Washington. He had vaguely planned to spend the free time researching an article about the Battle of Ticonderoga for Smithsonian; he had tenure, though it never hurt to publish if you could manage. But his brain was so scattered by then that any kind of rational work seemed beyond him. He drank more and smoked more; he twice vomited blood. He scheduled an appointment to see a woman from the psychology department who counseled despondent colleagues. One night in bed with a red-haired woman who taught Elizabethan poetry, he cried for the first time in twenty years.

Then came the phone calls about the book and the grant, and he began to wander out of the Jameson fog. He didn’t go completely dry as he worked on the introduction, but he did cut back. He taught the fall semester and was prepared to take on a full load in the spring, but then he got a $96,000 royalty check and his first MacArthur check arrived. Doug started thinking about his options, and teaching the next semester didn’t seem like an attractive one. In the week before classes started, he scheduled a meeting with his department head, Dorothy Nagy, a frail, gnome-like Hungarian woman who wore a bright red wig and was a world-class Nazi scholar, and he asked her to get someone else to teach his spring courses. “I thought you would come to see me,” she said. “All these things have happened to you.”

Doug was slouched in the black leather chair in front of her desk. “Yeah,” he said. “Lots of stuff, good and bad.” “Well, of course, we will make this work,” said Nagy. “The trolls in the dean’s office are all excited about the publicity you’re generating, with the book and the MacArthur. It’s good PR for the school, they say. They’re going to do their best to keep you involved here.” “Great,” he said. “I don’t know what I’m gonna do, but it’s probably better to go somewhere else right now. You know, take a sabbatical” Nagy was smoking a clove cigarette and sipping at a cup of tea; the office smelled of lemon. “Have you thought about the research you might undertake, with all your money?” she said. Doug felt slightly ill and smelled of the previous night’s Irish; he spotted a splash of dried vomit on the cuff of his brown tweed jacket. “Uh, I have been looking into the Battle of Ticonderoga,” said Doug. “Benedict Arnold. Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys. First actual coordinated military action of the Revolution.” Nagy smiled at him, showed her yellowed teeth. “Ah, that would be something safe, something small” she said. “But you could do something bigger. The trolls would salivate.” That afternoon, after he walked out of Nagy’s office, Doug went in search of lunch at what ed for an Irish pub two blocks off campus. From his favorite stool at the end of the bar, he could look out over the town green, a bronze statue of a bewhiskered Union general in the center of it. He was working on a second drink and a bowl of lamb stew when his phone buzzed in his jacket pocket. Bradley, the man with the high-pitched voice, came on the line. “Two words,” he said. “Aaron Burr.”

The notion of writing about Burr had been drifting around Doug’s sodden brain for years. He had researched the former Vice President for a year for the Hamilton book, and he found him the more interesting of the two men—the military exploits, the wild term in Washington, the years whoring around New York as a top lawyer. The duel, of course. Bradley said he had a contract to send

him. He said Simon & Schuster would give him a $90,000 advance to do a Burr biography—“we’re thinking something, you know, popular, as non-academic as you can manage”. Doug couldn’t find a reason to say no, and he didn’t really want to; it was as if the phone call was destined to come at that moment, as he sat on a stool in the pseudo Irish pub, to let him know his next move. So he told Bradley he had a deal—“I’m gonna need some time, you know, try to get my act going.” “Of course,” said Bradley, “you should just know that this whole pop history thing is very hot right now. The longer we wait, the more likely Jon Meachem or Bill O’Reilly or some other asshole will put out some trash on Burr—Killing Hamilton or whatever.” “Pop history,” said Doug. “Think we could not say that anymore?” When he left the bar, he called the town’s lone real-estate office and offered up his old brick house as a one-year rental. Over the next week, he turned down several groups of students who were looking for a place to party hard. He eventually signed a one-year lease with a grad-school couple with a feral twoyear-old son, who seemed capable of pulverizing all the wood ing on the first floor. Doug threw a final party with his English-department friends, two days devoted to gin and mescal, and then he paid two students to help him pack up his furniture in a U-Haul and move it to the storage lot in the next town.

Doug decided to move to Fairfield, Connecticut, an old Colonial farm town on Long Island Sound that had turned into an affluent suburb of 60,000 souls. Burr spent much of his childhood in New Jersey, but most of his forebears lived in and around Fairfield in the 18th and 19th centuries, so it seemed like a good place to start his research. A restored Burr family mansion, first built in 1790, stood on a corner on the Old Post Road in the center of town, and a local foundation maintained a small library on the second floor that contained a trove of Burr material. New York City was just over an hour away on the train, so he could head into the Public Library’s Reading Room whenever he needed to. Fairfield looked like a reasonably sane place on the web sites he looked up, maybe a bit dull—a town green with a white wooden gazebo, a classic wooden town hall and a historical museum, a restored 17th century tavern, and lots of

healthy-looking white people—shopping, eating in restaurants, walking on the beach, riding bikes, mowing their lawns. After two days on his laptop and more than twenty phone calls to real estate agents, he rented a small house on a cul-de-sac two blocks from the beach, within walking distance of the history center and the Burr Homestead. It was a two-bedroom Cape painted dark gray, with white shutters and a red door, and it had a first-floor study and a quiet backyard, bordered by a stand of red oak trees. He moved in on the last Tuesday in January, piloting his trusty 2002 Volvo station wagon through a small snowstorm and two hours of traffic tieups on the Jersey Turnpike. The house came furnished with the basics—a couch, a coffee table, a Lazy Boy, a dining table and four chairs, beds and dressers upstairs. The first-floor study contained two empty bookshelves, a large walnut desk, and a high-backed brown leather chair. He found a local furniture website and ordered some extra chairs and a TV stand. He bought the Platinum phone/cable/Internet package and found a nerdish kid with thick glasses and acne behind the counter at Radio Shack to hook up both TVs and the sound system for $200; for another $300, the same kid sold him an ounce of weed. He found a bank, a grocery store and a 24-hour Greek diner, a dry cleaner and a Starbucks, a liquor store and a red-sauce pizza/pasta t. He walked the half-mile to the Homestead, presented his credentials to an elderly woman in a second-floor office and was granted access to the Burr papers.

On an Indian-summer Saturday morning ten days after he arrived in Fairfield, he was driving back to his house from the Home Depot when he ed by a restaurant—a one-story tan stucco building, with two dozen tattered buoys, three stuffed marlins and an oversized red rubber lobster hanging from its front wall. A large green sign over the front door read FAIRFIELD FISH CO. Three people, two women and one man, were standing in the small outdoor garden, drinking and smoking cigarettes in the winter sun. Before he realized he had made the decision, he was pulling into the parking lot. Inside, it was a smallish space, maybe sixteen tables and a twelve-stool L-shaped bar along the south wall. The dark wood walls were covered in more buoys and stuffed fish and pictures of people holding up their catches; at the front of the

dining room was a raw bar, with an array of shrimp and crab, clams and oysters splayed out over a bed of ice, and a lobster tank with three or four creatures waving their claws through the glass. That Saturday, about half the tables were full and five people were spread out along the bar. He found a stool and had just sat down when the blonde bartender turned around and put a glass of amber liquid in front of him. “Jameson, rocks, splash of soda,” she said. She stood back from him, wiping her hands on a damp bar rag. “So, the historian.” She was tall, five-ten, five-eleven, with a sheaf of ash-yellow hair to her shoulders and almond shaped green eyes. She wore a sleeveless white shirt, tight blue jeans, brown suede ankle boots. She was smiling at him, a flash of white, and he couldn’t find words to speak to her. He took a sip of the Irish. He noticed that she had a tattoo of a hummingbird on her left shoulder. She put down the rag and leaned over the bar toward him. “I am Sally Moses,” she said. “And I’m glad you made it here.” Doug still couldn’t talk, then the woman, Sally Moses, walked down the bar to draw a draft for another customer. Four or five minutes later, she came back toward him carrying a glass and a plate of food and set them down on the bar in front of him. “Lobster roll, onion rings, small salad,” she said. “And a fresh Irish. It’s what you would have ordered. I just saved us some time.” For about ten minutes, Doug worked on the lobster roll and the Irish and eavesdropped on two 30ish men across the bar. “How’s it going with that woman, that whatever, marketing analyst, with the ass?” said one of them, a bearded, red-faced man in a white cableknit sweater. The other guy—thinner, balder, glasses—took a pull on his beer. “Oh, that didn’t, you know, work out.” He seemed drunker than his friend. “The woman didn’t like chocolate, for Chrissake. You didn’t know what to do when you got in trouble with her. Flowers, she’d slam them into a jelly jar and give you the look like you just… do…not…get…it.”

Doug would always what happened next as a series of slow-motion images. Sally cleared his plate and then came back, leaned over the bar again and locked her eyes on him. Then, somehow, everything in the bar—the walls,

the ceiling, all the people—fell silent and slipped into deep shadows. Now it was just the two of them in a small arc of bright light, and everything else had disappeared but Sally and the small slab of bar between them. “You probably have some questions,” she said. “Just, you know, what the hell?” She hit him with those teeth again. “Okay,” she said, “I’m gonna use some words to explain things that aren’t really true, but they are the only way you will be able to understand.” Doug drained his second Irish and put the glass down on the bar. “Jesus,” he said. “Did you put something in my drink?” “No, of course not,” she said. “I know it’s confusing, but I need to tell you a few things. First, you are here for a particular reason that will become clear in time.” “How did you know who I am?” he said. “And how can you make this whole bar disappear, just like that?” “We’ll talk about that another time,” she said. She bent down under the bar and came up with a medium-sized manila envelope, sealed shut. She laid it on the bar. “You should go home now,” she said. “And sometime tonight, you read what’s inside. Then tomorrow you come back here and we’ll talk about it some more.” Then she waved her right hand, and the bar and all the people came back from wherever they had been.

Doug walked out of there in a kind of trance, still trying to process what had happened to him. Back at his house, he poured three fingers of Jameson into a water glass, drank it off, then poured another and sat down with the manila envelope. Inside were several sheets of vellum, high-quality parchment made from calfskin, rolled up and tied with a length of twine. The leather was dark brown and weathered, hundreds of years old. Doug had only handled vellum documents that old three or four times in graduate school, and he gently laid the roll onto the table. Also in the manila envelope was a short note, written

longhand on a single sheet of white typing paper:

Doug,

These pages are from a prison diary written by a woman named Goodwife Knapp, who was hung as a witch in Fairfield in 1653, on a town green about one-quarter mile from where you are now sitting. See you tomorrow.

Love, Sally

Doug lit a t, took a sip of the Irish, untied the twine, and laid the leather pages flat across the table. The letters were etched into the calfskin in deep black letters, still easily legible. On Page One was the title THE JOURNAL OF GOODWIFE KNAPP IN HER LAST DAYS Over the next hour, Doug read and re-read the pages. They came for me last night just as the last light left the sky, the text began. There were three stout men, all strangers not of our town, who came into our poor house and pushed my dear son aside. I fear now, rotting in this foul den, that I will never see him or his brother again. They allowed my husband Roger to come with me to this unholy place and he sat for a time outside my cell. For more than an hour, I could hear him crying for help from the Creator and then he fell silent or was taken away. Somewhere down the hallway, a woman began to scream out God’s name, over and over. Then she too fell silent. I tried to sleep on the filthy straw mat in the corner, but the smell was too strong too allow the escape into oblivion. I lay there all night with the stench.

Sometime later, an old woman opened the cell door and put a tin bowl and cup on the floor. “By God’s grace, you will break your fast with this,” she said. I drank the water in the cup and stared at the gray porridge in the bowl, a lump of pale pork fat nestled in a pool of grease on the top. An hour or so later, six men filed into my cell. I had never laid eyes on five of them, but the sixth I knew. It was the all-mighty Roger Ludlow, the founder of the town, the first selectman, my former employer. He is a deadeyed man with a face the color of cabbage. He held a handkerchief to his nose against the smell. The others looked to him to speak and he obliged. He said a woman named Goodwife Bassett, then on trial for witchcraft in the town of Stratford, had claimed that a woman in Fairfield was also a witch, who cast spells and consorted with devilish spirits. Ludlow said Goodwife Bassett wouldn’t reveal the woman’s name but said she “held her head high” when in public. Ludlow said a meeting of town elders had concluded that the woman could be me. I looked into his cold gray eyes. “I have not ever met this Goody Bassett,” I said. “And it is no sign of witchery that a poor person not hang her head and stare at the ground in the company of those of higher regard in this town.” All six of them just stared at me, and two more took out their handkerchiefs. After they had left, I lay on the straw and thought of all the times Roger Ludlow had thrust his filthy hand up my skirts when I cleaned his grand house on Post Road. He liked to sneak up quietly and thrust himself against me from behind, those hands all over me in the front, his mouth pressed against the back of my neck. I thought of the day he fired me, after I bit him on the wrist and pushed him down a short flight of stairs. He said that only God’s mercy prevented him from beating me. Next morning, the same unholy six came back. One of them, a short fat man who smelled of onions, bound my wrists with a leather strap and then they led me out of the cell and down the fetid corridor to a room lit brightly with tallow candles. A half-dozen women were in the room. I recognized some of them as mistresses of great Post Road houses I had cleaned—Elizabeth Brewster, Susan Lockwood, Lucy Pell. The men left and the women took me by my arms and laid me down on a scarred oaken table in the center of the room. I fought them as best I could as they tore at my clothes, looking for

extra teats in my lower parts, places where imps and demons were said to feed on the blood of witches.

CHAPTER 2

#PsychoBitch

B LAIRE HATCHER WOKE up at 3:23 AM to the sound of her mother and Geoffrey fighting in the living room. She couldn’t hear precisely the insults they were hurling at each other, but they kept their volume high for a half-hour or so until they began to wind down. Blaire lay in the dark for another hour, then got up, put on her underwear, a T-shirt and shorts, and plopped down on the beige shag rug in her bedroom and did her floor exercises—pushups, stomach crunches and leg lifts, a lot of stretching. When she was done, she could see the sun coming up over the towers of downtown Portland from her bedroom window. She sat down on the bed and rubbed linseed oil on her legs, from her knees to her feet, put on her socks, and a pair of aqua-colored Nike LunarGlide5s—her current favorites. She threw on a black hoodie as she walked toward the door, stopping first to look at an item on the cork bulletin board above her desk: a clipping from the first page of a newspaper feature story about Mary Cain, the runner from Bronxville, New York who owned the national high-school girls’ records for the 1500 and 5000 meters. Blaire knew the details well, she thought about them all the time—Cain ran the 1500 in 4:04.62 in Eagle Rock, California on 5/17/13, she ran the 5000 in 15:45.46 on 6/08/13 right there in Portland. The clipping had a black-and-white picture of Cain crossing a finish line—skinny arms raised up over her head, long dark hair streaming behind. Blaire stared at the picture for perhaps thirty seconds before she left. It was rainy again that morning, fine needles slapping at her face as she ran through the silent suburban streets toward the Williamette River. She ran every morning—“you brush your teeth when you get up every day, right?”—she told her mother, who had used the word “obsessive” about her road work. As usual, she had to dodge a horde of cyclists hurtling in every direction; cars were a lesser obstacle in the bike-mad city. She ran a two-mile loop along the river and then angled over to the Reed College campus and did another three miles on the

track, amping up her pace on the last four laps to test her finishing kick. When she got home, the clicking of a digital clock in the kitchen and Geoffrey’s snores in the first-floor bedroom were the only sounds she heard. When she came back down after her shower, her mother was sitting at the dining-room table, drinking a cup of coffee and staring at the far wall. She looked pale and puffy, and her blue terry-cloth robe was stained in three places. She broke off her gaze when Blaire sat down across from her. “I’m making breakfast,” said Blaire. “What I want is a Bloody Mary with three raw eggs whipped in,” said her mother. “But I’ve got a class at 10.” “I’m doing a smoothie, with yogurt and spinach, flax seed, some other stuff,” said Blaire. “I will just mainline coffee here for a while,” said her mother. “Try to get inspired to start the day.”

After almost two months, Blaire still hadn’t settled into living in Portland. The whole thing had come so quick—her mother marching into her bedroom to announce they were leaving for Oregon, a Saturday-morning U-Haul in front of their house a week later. The long drive west, four days of listening to Geoffrey and her mother, already sniping at each other. A week in a smelly motel room while they found a house to rent. The first bewildering days as a secondsemester sophomore at Grover Cleveland High School. Worst of all were her father’s phone calls—listening to his sad voice was like swallowing a stone. At home, she spent almost all her time in her room, trying not to hear Geoffrey and her mother call each other names each time they got drunk. She was also often overwhelmed by life in a major metropolis; Portland may be among the more laid-back of large American cities, but it often seemed a brusque and impersonal place to a 14-year-old girl who grew up in a tiny Pennsylvania town. Grover Cleveland, with more than 1500 students, was triple the size of her old school, and she felt lost in a semi-hostile sea of strange faces for the first month, trying to decipher a whole new set of social signals. There were a handful of non-white kids at her old school; here, almost one-third of the students were Latino, Asian or black. Back in Pennsylvania, the only boys who wore long hair tied up in a man-bun were the hardcore skateboarders; here in Portland, man-

buns were a trademark of Reedites, artsy sons of the college faculty who dominated the drama club and the music and dance programs. Most female Reedites wore their hair long, to their waists, and seemed to favor T-shirts with ironic slogans—AVERAGE HUMAN, NO SNICKERING Her grades and test scores qualified her for an honors program, so she booked AP courses in English, Western Civilization, Calculus, and second-year Biology. She ed the track team, which was just beginning workouts for the outdoor season. Two seniors had better times than hers in the 1500 and a junior, who was nationally ranked, had run a better 5000. The three of them took the lead when they ran team laps during workouts; Blaire laid back with the second pack, ten yards back, and she watched them— their strides, how they carried their hands, what sort of pace they liked most. Blaire had plans. She would break Mary Cain’s records by senior year, be awarded a full scholarship to Stanford, where she would study environmental science and lead the track team to successive NCAA titles. She would make the U.S. Olympic team in 2020 and contend for a medal in 2024.

Blaire made a friend after a few weeks, a girl named Aerial Teller who was the second-best sophomore sprinter on the track team. She was tall, five-eight or so, and skinny, with brown hair cropped short, a narrow face, prominent nose, and large hazel eyes. She was officially a Reedit, her parents both full professors in the Philosophy Department, but she mostly hung out with two other female jocks, a volleyball player named Donna and a swimmer named Dawn. Blaire ate lunch with the three of them every day at the same six-seat table in the far corner of the cafeteria; nobody ever tried to sit at the two empty chairs. Geoffrey and her mother seemed angry with each other almost all the time— glaring across the kitchen table, snapping out comments with a sandpaper edge, designed to hurt. They went out to bars with their faculty friends three or four nights a week and came home late and drunk, and that’s when the real fights would begin. Blaire tried some earplugs she bought at Walgreen’s, but the horrible sounds came through; she played electronic music over her earphones to drown them out and lay awake for hours. On most mornings, she would clean up the mess they made in the kitchen and living room before she went on her run.

Blaire’s father called one night while Geoffrey and her mother were still out. He’d met someone, he said, a woman, and things were going well with the Burr research. This town, Fairfield, is more interesting than he’d expected, he said. For the first time in weeks, he didn’t sound defeated.

On a dank, rainy Tuesday, Blaire and her three friends were eating post-practice soy burgers and drinking Cokes at Mom’s Eats, the second-best fast-food place near the high school. (The best fast-food place near the school, Rose City Burgers, was usually full of elite seniors—Reedites, football players, cheerleaders—and interlopers risked verbal abuse and general harassment.) In a booth behind the four girls, three boys from their school, two sophomores and a junior, were making a lot of noise and flipping French fries at each other. Aerial said she thought one of the boys played lacrosse. After a while, two of the boys got into a wrestling match in the aisle and the manager came over and said they would have to leave if they didn’t settle down. As soon as the guy left, the boys started lobbing fries onto the girls’ table. Donna and Dawn started lobbing them back, and then two of the boys—a tall, skinny black-haired kid with big white teeth and a chubby fair-haired kid with a round red face—got up, came over to the girls’ table, and squeezed into the booth. The third boy— skinny, glasses, Jewish Afro—stayed in the booth; he seemed to be asleep, head slumped onto the table. “What exactly is wrong with your friend?” said Blaire. The tall kid was swiping pickle slices from Dawn’s plate. “Jerry’s fried,” he said. “We are too. How about you ladies? Wanna get high?” None of the four girls said a word for thirty seconds, until Blaire told him they would take a . “Not a good time for us,” she said. The boys lingered for another six or seven minutes, then stood up to leave. The round-faced kid dropped a white envelope on their table. “Warehouse party this weekend,” he said. “Address is on the tickets. Twenty bucks at the door, kegs, other stuff, music. Gonna be epic.”

The four of them talked about the party non-stop for the rest of the week. On Wednesday, only Donna wanted to go, but news of the affair began to bounce around the hallways of the school. The tickets had all been handed out, and

possession of one conferred coolness. On Thursday, Aerial and Dawn said they wanted to go too. “I mean it’s high school,” said Aerial. Blaire held out until Friday morning, suggesting at one point that they sell their tickets. After all, they had received them without cost, other than enduring a quarter-hour of stupidity with the boys. Anything they got for them would be pure profit. When none of the other three signed on to that idea, Blaire succumbed and said she’d come along too, if only to see which absurd stuff their classmates were up to. “I’m only going because I’m gonna treat this like an anthropology class, checking out the indigenous people in their native environment.” The party was scheduled to start and end late—it said on the tickets FROM 11 P.M. UNTIL SOMEONE CALLS THE COPS—so they came up with the usual set of lies. Dawn would tell her parents that she was staying on Donna’s house; if Dawn’s mother called, Donna’s sister, who sounded exactly like her, would answer and tell her Dawn was in the shower. Blaire would also tell her mom she was staying at Donna’s house; her mom and Geoffrey would no doubt be drunk by dusk on Saturday and they would have effectively forgotten that there was a daughter out there somewhere. On Saturday, they met at Mom’s Eats and spent the next hour eating chicken nuggets and looking at YouTube videos on their phones. Just after ten-thirty, they walked six blocks to Jones Street and waved down a cab to take them to the riverfront warehouse district. The party site was in a block-long gray stone building, with one end half-demolished and broken windows all along the whole second floor. The space inside was the size of six high-school gyms, with a thirty-foot ceiling and a second-floor iron balcony rimming the room. It was dark, a dozen strobes in the corners providing the only light, but you could make out small groups of people moving around the balcony. A series of tapestries hung from wire frames, dividing the space into dozens of small rooms, most of them filled with lawn furniture or battered couches. As the girls walked by, they could see people in half the little rooms—drinking from Red Solo cups, standing up and ing ts. One couple was making out on one of the couches and another seemed to be having some kind of actual sex. In the center of the room was a small stage. An all-girl band was playing; the lead guitar player, a plump woman with long blue hair, was in the middle of an overly long solo. Thirty or forty people were shuffling around the dance floor, not really reacting to the music. The girls stood along the side of the dance floor, behind two tall boys

with man buns, obvious Reedites. “What the fuck is going on with this band,” said one. “They go to the college,” said the other. “Call themselves SASSY, play sort of punkish stuff.” “Well, they suck,” said the first guy. “Supposed to be better sounds later—that’s what Paul told me anyway,” said the second one. An older guy, maybe twenty, asked Aerial to dance and then Donna went off to find a bathroom, Blaire and Dawn went over to a row of kegs and each bought a $2.50 Solo cup full of warm beer. A new band, three guys wearing faded flannel shirts, came out and played some fast hard rock that got the crowd going. Blaire and Dawn danced with each other for a while, then some boys drifted into their range, then another girl, then maybe twelve people were all dancing together. Donna came back from the bathroom. “They’re doing pot everywhere,” she said, “and other stuff too.” She started dancing with the rest of them. After a while, a slim boy with dark-blonde hair, stubbled cheeks, and very good teeth, danced with Blaire for four songs and then grabbed her hand when the flannel-shirt band took a break. Blaire let herself be led off the dance floor and over to the keg stand. The boy bought them each a beer. He said his name was Ron, he was a senior at the high school, and he’d noticed her in the cafeteria. “I love redheads,” he said. Ron handed her a beer and steered her off to one of the small dark rooms off the dance floor. They each took a sip of their beers, and then he pushed her down on what appeared to be a musty blue futon. Ron kissed her twice, using more tongue than he needed to, and then he reached around her and tried to unhook her bra. She used a left knee to his crotch to get him off her. They sipped on their warm beers for a while, then Ron pulled out a small brass pipe and a plastic bag half-full of weed and fired up. He took two big hits and handed the pipe to Blaire. She put up her right hand. “No, thanks,” she said. “I don’t smoke anything.” “You know, this is a party, right?” said Ron. “They don’t rock the herb where you come from?” “Pennsylvania,” she said. “I don’t like to put anything in my lungs. I run track.”

“Big deal,” he said. “I am co-captain of the swim team, finished third in the state last year in the IM.” “It’s just what I do,” said Blaire. Ron took another hit on the pipe and put it down on the floor. Then he stood up, undid his belt, pulled down his jeans and his black Calvin Klein boxer-shorts, and laid down on top of her again, pinning her arms with his. He tried to kiss her, and she bit his lower lip. When he reached down to undo her jeans, she took her free hand and grabbed his left testicle. “Get off,” she said. “I mean it.” “Doesn’t smoke, doesn’t fuck,” he said. “Why are you here?” “I would tell you,” she said, “but I don’t think you’d like it. Then he put his hand on her left breast and she squeezed his testicle until he made a squeaky sound and climbed off her. He pulled up his pants and buckled his belt, then sat down beside her on the futon. “So,” said Blaire, “you’re a senior.” That simple statement set off Ron on a ten-minute monologue about his life and times, as Blaire knew it would; her mother had told her that the male animal liked to brag on himself more than just about anything else, except sex and using the bathroom. Ron Underwood was the son of a big-time corporate lawyer downtown. He would graduate from Grover Cleveland with honors in May, had been accepted at Dartmouth, Brown, and Michigan and was still deciding. “My dad says there are more opportunities to meet the right sort of people out East, but, you know, you get all that action at a Big Ten school—the Greek life at U of M is awesome, you’ve got the big football weekends in the fall, March Madness in basketball. The swim team is nationally ranked.” He took a hit on the pipe. “Who are the right sort of people?” she said. Ron looked confused. “You know, people who can do you some good later in life,” he said. “I think I should go find my friends,” she said. They both stood up and he tried to kiss her again. She let him gnaw on her briefly, then backed away and headed past the tapestry.

Blaire tracked down Aerial at the far end of the dance floor. She was standing in a group of maybe twenty kids, boys and girls, who were practicing posing frozen for a Mannequin Challenge. A guy with some kind of movie camera was standing on a box, telling people to bend over further, turn their heads this way and that. Aerial posed for two challenges and then came over to Blaire. “They’ve been doing this all night, with different costumes and stuff,” she said. “Must have done like thirty videos.” “Is it fun?” said Blaire. “Not really,” said Aeiral Aerial said that Dawn and Donna had called an Uber car and had gone home. “Sounds wise,” said Blaire. On the way out, they ed Ron Underwood, standing in a group of a halfdozen boys. Four of the boys, including Ron, took pictures of them with their phones.

Aerial sent Blaire a text early the next Monday morning: SOMETHING BAD HAPPENED. THAT GUY RON TWEETED OUT SOME NASTY STUFF ABOUT YOU. Blaire replied: WHAT YOU TALKING ABOUT? She waited a full minute for an answer, then punched Aerial’s button on her phone. She answered on the second ring. “Ron, that guy you were with at the party,” she said. “He’s really popular. He’s got like 1200 followers on Twitter.” “And he said something bad about me?” said Blaire. “Yeah, should I send it to you?” “Yeah, I guess. The tweet arrived thirty seconds later: EPIC WAREHOUSE PARTY ON SATURDAY. ONLY BUMMER WAS RUNNING INTO A WACKO SOPHOMORE TRANSFER NAMED BLAIRE HATCHER. MESSED-UP LESBO. #PSYCHOBITCH.

Blaire went for a run, on a warm, clear morning for a change—four easy miles along the river, then a hard two on the college track. She picked up her phone off the bed when she got home—eleven new calls on her phone, seven from people she didn’t know. She stared at the names and numbers for a moment, then erased them all. When she got to school, the first weird sign came when she got to her locker. Someone had taped a full-color picture of a vagina on the door, someone had also used a can of red spray paint to write the words PSYCHO BITCH on the nearby wall. Before she went off the class, she tore down the picture and stuffed it into her backpack. Between French and Calculus classes, she noticed that several kids were staring at their phones and then looking up to laugh at her as she walked down the hallway. When she got to the cafeteria for lunch, Donna and Dawn were already there, looking funereal. “That asshole has put up all sorts of things on Facebook now— he’s got people taking pictures of you,” said Donna as Blaire sat down. “I’ve decided I don’t want to know about it,” she said. “I’m just gonna pretend it isn’t happening.” “That will probably piss him off more,” said Dawn. On Wednesday, Aerial told Blaire that Ron had posted a series of overhead pictures of her on the toilet in the girl’s locker room, panties and shorts down around her ankles; someone had held a phone over the side of the stall. On Friday, Aerial told her that Ron had posted a picture of her coming out of the shower after track practice. The caption read #PaychoBitch—RED BUSH, TINY TITTIES. On Saturday, at a dual meet with Portland East, almost all the spectators broke out laughing when they called her name for the 1500; she ran a personal best and finished second to a teammate, the tall, skinny senior with the great kick. The crowd laughed again when they announced the results.

Her mother and Geoffrey fought all the time now—each of them spewing out their grievances in a drunken rage on into the night. Geoffrey went away for a day or two every week, and he almost never slept in the bedroom. Every morning, Blaire would tip-toe past him as he lay there on the couch, snoring away, stinking of gin. One night, about a week after Blaire’s Internet torment had begun, Geoffrey and

her mom were still fighting well past dawn. Blaire had slept fitfully, her earphones barely drowning out the awful noises from the living room, and she had dreamt of hiding in small dark places while various people in her life— teachers, students, teammates, the waitresses at Mom’s, Geoffrey, her mother, Ron Underwood—chased after her. She had cramps from her period and some sort of low-grade fever, and she thought about trying for another hour of sleep. But she got up, put on her robe, and walked out into the living room. Geoffrey was standing at the kitchen counter, dressed only in striped boxer shorts, his pale white torso jiggling as he wrestled with a corkscrew, trying to open a bottle of red wine. Her mother was lying flat on the couch, picking at the hem of her black silk nightgown. She seemed to be humming a song to herself, possibly (Can’t Get No) Satisfaction. The two of them seemed to have worn themselves out and were taking a break from their warfare. Her mother would later say what happened next was the first time Blaire “had completely lost all composure” since she was a toddler. Blaire first grabbed a lamp off the side table next to the couch, ripped the chord out of the wall socket, and tossed it against the wall. “You. People. Have. Got. To. Stop. It.”, she said in a voice not her own. Geoffrey stopped fiddling with the wine bottle and stared at her. She couldn’t decide if he looked guilty or amused. Her mother came over to her, took her in her arms. She smelled of whiskey and pot and Pantene shampoo, with a trace of stale sweat. “Oh, baby, I’m so sorry,” she said. “I know you’ve been having a rough time lately.” Blaire held on to her. “You guys just seem to hate each other so much,” she said. “And there’s a whole thing going on at school.” Her mother let her go, took her hand, and led her over to the couch. She turned her head toward the kitchen. “Do you think you can manage to get that Cabernet open?” she said. “And pour a glass of orange juice for my girl.” Geoffrey made a growling sound, deep in his throat. “Consider it done, dearest,” he said. Blaire and her mother sat down. “What is this thing going on at school?” said her mother. “Just stuff that happens at a place like that,” said Blaire. “A place like what?”

“It’s big and everybody’s trying to figure out where they fit into this complicated system. And everybody’s putting every moment of their life out there on their phones.” “I’m not sure I understand what you’re talking about, baby,” said her mother. “Yeah, I know,” said Blaire. Geoffrey went to bed and Blaire and her mother made breakfast—scrambled eggs and toast for her mother, egg-white omelet with spinach and avocado slices for Blaire. Her mother switched from wine to coffee. At some point, she said she would change. “We’re going to work on keeping it lighter around here,” she said. “We’ve all got to just lighten up.”

Her mother’s good intentions lasted three days. On the fourth, a Friday, she and Geoffrey were half-drunk and sniping at each other by the time Blaire got home from track practice. They were both dressed-up, Geoffrey in his best dark suit and her mother in a navy sheath dress and four-inch heels. Her mother said they were going to a “dreary faculty dinner” and there was money for a vegetarian pizza on the kitchen counter. “Or go out,” she said, “We’ll be home early.” Blaire called Aerial, who called Donna and Dawn, and the four of them decided to go to Ling Ho’s Kitchen, the Chinese restaurant near the Reed campus for dinner. When she walked into the place, kids at two of the tables laughed at her. At one of the tables, three boys began to fake-cough “PsychoBitch” over and over. The prices were low at Ling Ho’s and the four of them ordered ten dishes off the menu and finished most of them. The conversation petered out after a while and soon Aerial, Donna, and Dawn were texting on their phones while Blaire stared at the painting on the back wall, three white cranes standing in a pond. Nobody was around when Blaire got home. She ate a frozen yogurt bar and watched the last half of a confusing Sean Penn movie about people arguing with each other on a sailboat. Just past eleven o’clock, she went to bed, fell deep asleep, and stayed that way until hours later—2:38 on the clock radio—when Geoffrey and her mother showed up and continued whatever argument they had begun earlier. Blaire put on her headphones and cranked up the volume on an Ed

Sheeran album, but she could still hear the hateful sounds. The music stopped just as a drunken shouting erupted over something someone said to someone else. Her mother was calling Geoffrey “Suck-Up Boy”; he called her a “wretched cunt”. Then came the sound of breaking glass, followed by the slamming of the front door. Blaire took off her headphones and she could hear her mother, talking to herself and crying in the living room. Blaire took the headphones off and waited for sleep. Two days later, on that Sunday, Geoffrey came back and they all had dinner together, vegetable lasagna and endive salad. Geoffrey and her mother were playful with each other without any edge of meanness, as if they had somehow made up while Blaire was off for her run. Blaire went to her room to work on a paper for her Western Civilization class and went to bed at ten. She hadn’t heard any arguing that night, but Geoffrey hadn’t made it into her mother’s bed. He was stretched out on the couch when she got up in the morning. “Your mother tossed me out in the middle of the night,” he said. “She didn’t say why. His penis was sticking out of the front vent of his boxer shorts and he looked at Blaire with a strange sort of leer, like he knew he was pointing his thing at her. Two nights later, she woke up at 3:43 AM and could see Geoffrey in the corner of her room, naked and pulling at himself.

Blaire called her father when she got home from school that night. He answered on the second ring. “Hey, baby,” he said, “I was just thinking of you. It’s like sixty degrees. Totally strange for Connecticut at the end of February. Upside of global warming, I guess.” He sounded like he wanted to say more, but she cut into his monologue. “You sound a little weird,” she said. “That’s the sound of happy,” he said. “I want to tell you all about it.” “I hate it here,” said Blaire. “It hurts me to hear you say that,” said her father. “I want to come live with you,” she said.

He took ten seconds to answer. “Of course,” he finally said. “I thought I wouldn’t see you until the summer. Your mother’s lawyer is talking to my lawyer, but we haven’t pinned down custody yet.” “I just have to leave here,” she said. “Have you told her, your mother, about this?” “Not yet,” she said. “I wanted to make sure you wanted me first.” Her father had a catch in his voice. “Go tell your mother what you want and tell her to call me,” he said. Her mother was on the couch, sipping a glass of white wine and watching an episode of Judge Judy. Blaire sat down next to her. “I’m just gonna come out and say it,” she said. “I wanna go live with dad.” Her mother hit the mute button on the remote. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “That man can barely take care of himself.” “I hate it here,” she said. “I can’t live here anymore.” Her mother took a sip of wine. “I suppose your father got you all excited about this,” she said. “I just told him,” said Blaire. She punched in her father’s number on her phone and handed it to her mother. “He wants to talk to you,” she said. Her mother took the phone into her bedroom, still talking into it when she came out for a refill after a half-hour, then came out for good after another fifteen minutes. She was red-eyed and sniffling, like she’d been crying; she was about three-quarters drunk at that point. She sat down on the couch next to Blaire. The local news was just ending; the weather lady forecast rain all weekend. “I’ve got one question,” said Blaire’s mother. “Did something happen with Geoffrey?” “No,” said Blaire, surprised she could lie so easily, simply to avoid talking about it.

So that was essentially that. Geoffrey went off to stay somewhere until she was gone. She presumed he’d be back with her mother soon after her plane had left the ground. She told the women at the dean’s office she was leaving and secured copies of her transcripts. She had a teary half-hour farewell with the track coach. She packed most of her clothes into two big suitcases. There was a final dinner with her friends at Mom’s and all four girls cried on and off and promised to stay in touch forever. She and her mother had a solemn final breakfast, talking about everything but what was happening that day, and then her mother drove her to the airport to catch the red-eye to Hartford. Her father was there to greet her; he looked better—face fuller, eyes clearer. She fell asleep in the car, woke briefly when they got to a small, gray-shingled house, then climbed up a flight of stairs and fell asleep in her new room for four hours. She woke just past noon, took a shower, put on jeans and a white cableknit sweater, and found her father in the kitchen. He was wearing a black flannel shirt and tan corduroy jeans. Some old blues man, Howlin’ Wolf maybe, was wailing away on the speakers in the living room. “Ah, great, you’re up,” he said, walking toward her for a hug. He smelled of strong coffee and maple syrup. “We have an appointment with the heaster at the high school at four, but we have time to show you around a bit, maybe grab something to eat.” He drove them two blocks south to the beach and they walked one lap on the mile-long stretch of sand, then they cruised by the old colonial town hall and the Burr House, where her father was doing his research. “I’ll show you the inside this weekend, there’s some kind of flower show,” he said. They drove past a half-dozen old graveyards, a downtown row of restaurants, shops, and gas stations, block after block of neat suburban houses, a cluster of $20 million beachfront mansions. After an hour or so, he pulled into the parking lot of a squat tan stucco building with a large sign out front that said FAIRFIELD FISH CO. Inside, behind the horseshoe-shaped bar, was a tall, slender woman with shoulder-length blonde hair, wearing tight blue jeans and a patterned Mexican blouse. She came over to them as they sat down and put out her right hand. Blaire shook it. “I am Sally Moses,” said the woman. “You’re gonna be all right now.”

CHAPTER 3

Creepy Cal

I T WAS MONDAY morning and Calvin J. Pomeroy, heaster of Fairfield Ludlowe High School, was staring at his laptop screen. He was livid, as angry as he had been in a long time. He reran the video again—watching two slight figures, each encased in a dark hooded sweatshirt and wearing sunglasses, as they approached his office door and took two aerosol cans out of a backpack. He stopped the video, rolled it back and then forward again, trying to find some clue —a gesture, a tilt of the head—that would help him identify the two figures on the screen. He watched for the seventh or eighth time as the two of them spraypainted the words in large red letters on the wall outside his office: CREEPY CAL. According to the time-check on the surveillance video, the violation had taken place just before 3 A.M. that Saturday. Happily, one of the janitors had come in on Sunday to work on the furnace and spotted the graffiti. Otherwise, 876 students and 64 faculty and staff would have seen the words on Monday morning. After the janitor called him, Calvin called Michael Goldschmidt, deputy heaster for istration, the short, plump, obsequious young man whose entire job was to do whatever Calvin told him to, right away and without any extraneous conversation. In this instance, the task was to get a painter over to the school that afternoon and get his own fat ass over there too, just to be certain that all traces of this sorry affair were gone when the pimply troglodytes trooped back into the building in the morning. What bothered Calvin so much, what made the whole thing so infuriating, was that it had happened before. Once each semester for the previous three years, some miserable souls sprayed the wall outside his office with those words, that insult. He’d had the security camera installed behind an air vent the previous September, but the figures on the screen seemed to know about it—shrouded in their hoodies, faces averted.

Calvin ran the video again.

Just past eight o’clock, he heard Goldschmidt stumbling around in his office next door. He leaned over and hit the buzzer on the brown plastic intercom on his desk. Goldschmidt answered right away; he sounded winded, as if he’d been running through the hallways. “Yes, sir, I’m here,” he said. “The wall …” “Yes, yes,” said Calvin. “That’s done. When you can carve a moment out of your feverish schedule, could you come on by? Need to talk.” Goldschmidt’s portly figure showed up in his doorway within ten seconds. He was wearing khakis and a too-tight red sweater over a maroon shirt and red tie. He sat down on the brown leather chair in front of Calvin’s desk. He was sweating heavily, droplets slipping down his pudgy white cheeks, his curly black hair plastered to his forehead. “You look like an overripe tomato,” said Calvin. “You need someone to dress you. How does your wife let you out of the house looking like that?” “Like she’s got time to worry about how I dress,” said Goldschmidt. “And why exactly are you always out of breath?” said Calvin. “And sweaty. It can be sixty-two degrees in here and you’re a mess.” Goldschmidt pushed his glasses to eye level with his right index finger. “My mother always says I have a very active metabolism,” he said. “She says I burn hot.” “So, we need to do a full investigation into this incident on Saturday,” said Calvin. He waited ten seconds, then waved his hand at Goldschmidt. “So, go,” he said. “ the usual suspects and tell them all to bring me something fast.” Calvin knew Goldschmidt would require the rest of the morning to get in touch with the two-dozen faculty, students, and staff who quietly reported to the heaster what was going on at the school. He had recruited each of them personally, providing whatever they wanted from him—an office with a window for the senior phys ed teacher, a new golf cart for the head janitor, amnesty for the buck-toothed sophomore who kept getting caught smoking marijuana in the

parking lot. They would all be looking into this outrage for him, and he resolved that by the end of the week he would know the identity of the two loathsome cretins who had defiled his space.

Calvin ran the tape four more times over the next hour, until Goldschmidt stuck his head in the door and said the ten o’clock meeting was convening in the conference room. This was a bi-monthly Monday nightmare, two hours or more with department heads, trying to make sure the school wouldn’t run afoul of the vast library of state and Federal regulations that governed everything they did. That Monday was centered on the school’s treatment of 504 plan students, a proliferating category that covered all those with “special needs”— from sickly freshmen with myriad food allergies to dull-eyed seniors who had been deemed potential suicides. When Calvin had taken over as heaster eight years before, barely one percent of the student body qualified for the program; now, almost ten percent were included. What made the whole thing so time-consuming was that the regulations required that all students in the category must be presented with an IEP, an Individual Education Plan, that took into whatever demons they were confronting. The boy who was overly sensitive to violence could by the history class that dwelled on the World Wars, the girl who was an ardent lover of animals could be spared the biology class that required her to dissect a fetal pig, the obese and anorexic and physically timid skipped gym. After the department heads at the school crafted an IEB for a particular student, it had to be approved by the Fairfield education department downtown, then shipped to Hartford for state approval and on to the Department of Education in Washington. There seemed to be little or no actual oversight involved in the process; Calvin had never received notice from any bureaucrat on any level who objected to an individual IEP. The only offense that received official notice was the late filing of the paperwork. The meeting that Monday promised to be painful. A half-dozen new IEPs were on the agenda, and Calvin expected a full table in the conference room and much disagreeable conversation. Goldschmidt was standing outside the conference room when Calvin got there, shifting from foot to foot, an anxious look on his fat face. “I called for your lunch to be delivered and they said there was no poached salmon today,” he said

“But you know that I require poached salmon for my lunch on Mondays,” said Calvin. “Yessir,” said Goldschmidt. “With a side salad and a whole wheat roll.” “A simple meal, no?” Goldschmidt looked as if he might throw up. “Yessir,” he said. “And yet you seem incapable of furnishing it to me, precisely at noon. I must presume then that this is a task beyond your capability.” “I’ll find it,” said Goldschmidt. “On your desk at noon.” He turned and scurried down the corridor. Calvin counted twelve heads as he came in the room and walked around the conference table to his chair—department heads, a rep from the town Board of Education, a dour white-haired woman who had been hired by the state to monitor the meeting. The extra attention from Hartford came after two sets of parents had complained that their special-needs children had not been properly coddled at Ludlowe during the previous semester. A sophomore girl who had been sexually molested was asked to read a short story about rape in an American Literature class, a transgender freshman boy had been bullied. The first case was relatively straightforward. A freshman girl with muscular dystrophy needed a schedule that allowed her extra time to wheel her way between classes and a light load in the afternoons, when she tended to run out of energy. The second case also seemed simple at first. The bony, long-nosed woman who ran the math department had devised a schedule for a freshman boy who had been acting out in class—all senior teachers who ran no-nonsense classrooms, daily meetings with the school counselor, weekly appointments with an anger-management therapist. Calvin waa about to rubber-stamp the schedule when the woman from Hartford spoke up. “In the course of reviewing this case,” she said, “I looked through the records and found that this student has recently been diagnosed about midway on the autism spectrum.” This announcement stopped the meeting cold; Calvin choked down the bile in his throat. Because of the boy’s diagnosis, a whole new set of rules would apply. A new IEP would be required, another inch of paperwork would land on his desk.

“Fine,” said Calvin. “Back to the drawing board with that one. Can we move on?” The third IEP on the schedule was a mess. The parents of a junior girl who had transferred in from a private school in New Hampshire said she was suffering from various eating disorders, showed signs of manic depression, and may be suicidal. “Lovely,” said Calvin. “The joys of public education. I suppose we have to take her in. Her parents do live in the town, correct?” “Big place up on Greenfield Hill,” said the balding, sad-faced man who looked after the school’s finances. “He’s a lawyer and she works for one of the hedge funds in Greenwich. They sued the boarding school where the child was attending.” “This just gets better,” said Calvin. He swiveled around in his chair and faced the blank wall. “Big problem here is that the parents won’t give us any details about the kid’s problems,” said a woman’s voice from somewhere down the table. “They say everything about the girl’s history is confidential, sealed.” Calvin could feel a headache creeping around the corners of his skull. “I hereby declare we push this one back until next time,” he said. “Let’s get this going.”

They disposed of the next two cases quickly. The Syrian twin girls, just refuged from a war zone, would be sent to remedial English classes and reevaluated next semester. The sophomore boy with Tourette’s Syndrome would continue therapy three times a week; the school nurse would ensure that he took his anti-seizure medication each morning. The last case, involved a senior boy with a serious opioid addiction who had returned to school after a stint in rehab. The boy had been found that autumn, ed out in his car in the parking lot with a needle in his arm, and then went back into rehab. Now he was coming back again. Calvin’s mind began to wander and he lost control of the meeting, which devolved into a painful half-hour of semi-informed bromides about the current drug epidemic blossoming among the state’s youth. In the end, the woman from Hartford suggested they table the issue until the boy’s medical status could be determined. Sensing that he might manage to bring the endless blather to an end at that point, Calvin jumped in as soon as the woman ceased speaking. “Fine,” he said, “good.

Then let’s wrap this up, and everyone who needs to write up a report, please send them promptly to Goldschmidt, who will probably lose half of them.”

Calvin’s lunch was waiting for him in his office—salmon, salad, roll, a glass of club soda with ice and a lime wedge. Goldschmidt appeared in the doorway just as he was about to begin to eat. “I convinced them to poach a piece of salmon,” he said. “They only had the grilled.” “I am not interested in your process,” said Calvin. “Close the door behind you.” He was just finishing the meal when the intercom buzzed him. When he flicked it on, the dim-witted temporary secretary who sat outside his door informed him that the people he was scheduled to meet at 1:30 were there, ten minutes early. He waited fifteen minutes before buzzing the girl to let them in. Calvin was looking forward to the meeting. He was conducting an interview with a new transfer student, a sophomore girl, and her father, a history professor at a Pennsylvania college who had written a book about Hamilton and won one of those ludicrous genius awards. The Fairfield Citizen-News had run a frontpage picture of him when he arrived in town. He was shown shaking hands with the elderly woman who ran the Burr Homestead library; Calvin was struck by just how smug the man looked. So Calvin felt energized, prepared to wipe the smirk from the man’s face. In person, he seemed smaller than pictured—narrow shoulders, slightly stooped back. He had a weak chin, somewhat oily complexion, a thinning crop of brown hair with speckles of gray at the temples. The girl was tall and thin, all legs, with a mass of red-blonde hair gathered up in a sloppy bun. He was wearing khakis, a fashionably faded denim shirt under a gray tweed jacket, brown loafers. The girl wore a royal blue tracksuit and aqua-colored sneakers. “Ah, the local celebrity,” said Calvin. “What an honor.” The father, Douglas Hatcher, shifted around in his chair, as if he were trying to find a safe perch. “Ah, yeah, sure,” he said. “The honor is ours.” Calvin leaned back in his high-backed leather chair. “I gather from the local press reports that you have fetched up in our little town to do some research on the Burr family,” he said.

“Yes,” said Hatcher, “first three or four generations were here, then Aaron’s branch moved off to New Jersey.” “How fascinating,” said Calvin. “You are aware of course that the Burrs were hardly among the town leaders in the early days, mostly bar keeps and onion farmers—despite that monstrosity of a house on Old Post Road.” The girl sneezed. “Sorry,” she said, rubbng her nose with the sleeve of her sweatshirt. “Really?” said Hatcher. “Monstrosity?” Calvin felt the bile in his throat again. “Yes, you see, that building didn’t go up until 1790, 150 years after the town was founded,” he said. “And now, it sits there as some sort of historic touchstone.” “Well …,” said Hatcher. Calvin cut him off. “You see, my family, the Pomeroys, were in residence here in the 1650s. Several of the men were selectmen and other leaders of the town. My wife’s people, the Sturgeses came even earlier.” “Yes,” said Hatcher, “I’ve started the research and those names have come up.” Calvin opened the manila folder on his desk. “Yes, I’m sure they have,” he said. “Tell me, Mr. Hatcher, your name is—what? English?” “I’m Scots-Irish,” said Hatcher. “My old man’s people came over in the 1920s, ran a moving business in Philadelphia.” “I see,” said Calvin. He looked up from the paperwork on his desk and took off his black-framed glasses. “Well, our Blaire here seems to have done quite well at her previous school, just about all A’s.” The girl was staring at him, outsized green eyes, as he spoke. “And something of an athletic prodigy as well, I gather. The coach out in Portland put a special note about your prowess in your record.” The girl kept those eyes on him, unnerving him. “She was really great,” she said. “I am afraid we are a smaller institution than Grover Cleveland and we have a more modest selection of AP courses, but I believe we can keep you busy,” said Calvin. He gave Hatcher a pamphlet about the school and got a weak handshake in return, then he hustled them out of there. He found it irritating when, standing

next to the girl, he realized she was taller than him by at least an inch.

After they left, Calvin buzzed Goldschmidt and told him he was not to be disturbed unless it was a call from his mother or wife. Over the next two hours, he read an article in the current issue of The New Yorker that questioned whether the new U.S. President was a fascist or a plutocrat, watched a porn video starring young Asian women dressed as Japanese schoolgirls, masturbated twice, and ate a bagful of chocolate-covered raisins. About 4 p.m., he buzzed Goldschmidt and told him he’d be leaving early that day due to a mild headache. He slid his laptop into his briefcase, gathered his hat and coat, and walked out the back door of his office, down a staircase and out onto the parking lot. The schools around town were all largely emptied out by that point, so the drive home was quicker than usual—fifteen minutes under a gray winter sky, lights just coming on inside the rows of tidy houses he ed on the way. The silver Lincoln that Emma, his wife, drove was parked in the driveway. He pulled his Audi up alongside it. Emma was in the dining room, setting the table for dinner, and his mother could be heard in the sunroom at the back of the house. She seemed to be shouting herself hoarse at the television. “The old lady sounds particularly insane today,” said Calvin. Emma put down the last plate. “Nothing unusual,” she said. “You’re home a bit earlier than normal. She doesn’t really get wound up until she’s on her second Scotch Presbyterian.” “What got her started?” he said. “Same story,” she said, “the sorry state of the Republican Party.” Calvin went over to hang up his coat in the hall closet. “So she listens to the cable shows and screams at the talking heads all day.” “Look, I’m out of here before she’s up in the morning and I don’t get back until mid-afternoon, so I don’t really know what she does all day,” said Emma. “Pearl tells ms they drive around town in the Buick, your mother in the back. They go shopping, hang out at the DAR office, stop for lunch downtown or over in

Westport. She starts drinking then.” “How is Pearl? Better than that nice Dominican woman?” “Rose. Well, Pearl’s a lot tougher. Doesn’t take any nonsense from her highness.” Calvin went into the kitchen, pulled down a bottle of Boodles from the cabinet over the sink, and poured a double shot over a single ice cube. He walked back to the sunroom and set on the couch next to his mother. She was watching Fox News—one of the blondes was breathlessly describing the perfidy of Democrats on Capitol Hill. “Just makes you want to give up,” she said, voice craggy with the alcohol. “This country has no institutions with any credibility any more.” “There’s the DAR,” said Calvin. “I gather you still hang out with that crowd.” His mother switched the channel to CNN, where a man with a large head and white trimmed beard was describing the perfidy of Republicans on Capitol Hill. “Even a great organization like the Daughters is no longer what it was,” she said. “In what way?” Calvin said. “For one thing, the hip committee has simply abdicated its responsibilities. They’re letting in the most hideous climbers. These are people who have outgrown the Junior League and now we’re supposed to accept them, people whose ancestors were living in mud huts somewhere when this town was founded. She took a long hit on her Scotch and flicked her remote back to Fox.

Dinner was some sort of croquette of leftovers—potatoes, onions, Sunday’s roast beef chopped into tiny cubes—and a pile of limp green beans. Pearl’s husband, Alex, who cooked and looked after the outside of the place, the house and outbuildings, the two-acre lawn and garden, had been told to economize. “I believe he steals,” said Calvin’s mother. “And everything he cooks tastes of perspiration.” That night, his mother pushed around the sad mound of food on her plate for a while, then took one tiny bite, dropped her fork, and demanded some soft scrambled eggs. After the rice pudding, Pearl cleared the table and Emma and Calvin’s mother

left for the sunroom to binge-watch Downton Abbey. Calvin walked down the long central hallway to his study. He sat down at his desk and flipped open his laptop. He jumped around on a half-dozen of his favorite porn sites—all of them featuring young girls performing various acts on each other. Since it was Monday, one of Emma’s sex nights—every Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday night when she was not in menses—he refrained from masturbating again. Later, he punched on his office television and watched two episodes of Antiques Roadshow and the last half of a Julia Roberts movie, in which she overacted the part of a cop whose daughter was killed. The sex that night was unremarkable. Emma was a broad, fleshy woman with big pillowy breasts and a thick brown thatch down below. Calvin often felt repelled when she disrobed, but what she lacked in visual appeal she made up for with an enthusiastic approach toward the sex act. She writhed about the bed and wrapped her legs around him, drawing him deep into her and raking his back with her fingernails. Her orgasms came in waves, as she arched her body and shouted unintelligible words. Calvin watched her face grimace and the sweat speckle her forehead, withholding his own climax as long as he could, watching the spectacle of her. They never kissed before, during, or after coitus.

The next morning at school, Calvin’s cadre of informants began to filter into his office—the substitute teacher who overheard three junior boys joking about some “awesome rat-fuck” that took place over the weekend, the senior girl who heard two junior girls talking about a prank pulled off by some of their friends. An obese young woman who worked in the nurse’s office told him some names she had heard attached to the event. When she had left, Calvin called up the files on four of the names on his laptop. Each of the four was a scion of a wealthy Greenfield Hill family; the parents were all prominent citizens, active in charitable causes around town. One of the fathers was the president of a large Stamford-based bank, another had long headed up the Republican Town Committee. One of the mothers had been an assistant U.S. Attorney and had recently announced she planned to run for the state senate the following autumn. The miserable little scum who painted his wall were basically untouchable; he snapped his laptop shut. Calvin was restless, in a foul mood, for the rest of the morning, and he finally took half an Ambien and napped on his couch for an hour. After lunch, just as he

was considering a quick look at some porn sites, Goldschmidt waddled into his office and told him a woman from town hall was there to talk about next year’s preliminary budget. It was a hideous annual ordeal, working through an annual budget with the superintendent, the Board of Education, the Finance Committee, the Representative Town Meeting, the First Selectman. Calvin had been ducking the woman from town hall, a fat shrew with bad breath, for three weeks. But now she had actually come to his office—he could see her in the waiting room over Goldschmidt’s shoulder, glaring at him. He could see no possible escape, so sat there for two hours with the woman, babbling about leaky roofs and new paving for the parking lot, more teachers and a new floor for the gym. He listened to her talk and fantasized about the feel of his hands around her fat neck, forcing her to just shut up.

It was almost 4 P.M. by the time the woman left, and Calvin had less than fifteen minutes to prepare for the Bronson girl. He told the mutant intern in the outer office to go home early and told Goldschmidt he was not to be disturbed under any circumstances. He unlocked his side desk drawer and removed a yellow pharmaceutical vial of Percocets and a bottle of Martell cognac. He swallowed two pills with a half-snifter. He flipped open his lap top and cruised the sites until he found a short Korean film, 400 naked couples fornicating on mats in a huge auditorium. He masturbated. Precisely at 4 P.M. the girl knocked timidly on the back door. He barked at her to come in and she shuffled through the door—a short, narrow-faced girl with coalblack hair to her shoulders, eyes on the ground. “Go sit in the chair and tell me something evil you did today,” said Calvin. The girl sat down and he raised his phone toward her. She looked away from the camera and let her hair fall over half her face. “Straighten up,” said Calvin. “And shock me.” “I stole a necklace from a girl’s locker, a cameo thing,” she said. “More,” said Calvin. “I touched myself in the girl’s bathroom twice today,” she said. “All right,” said Calvin. “We should proceed. I have some things to attend to later this afternoon.” He put down his phone and rolled his desk chair around to her. She got down on her knees while he lowered his pants and underwear, then

she orally copulated him for a little over two minutes. He snapped open an amyl nitrate tab and sniffed as he climaxed. She knelt there, staring at him, while he cleaned himself up. He picked up the wastebasket from beside his desk and walked over her. “You can go ahead and spit it out,” he said. “Now clear out.” As the Bronson girl was leaving, he recalled with a tinge of anticipation that she would be graduating in four months. He would have to find a replacement among the freshmen or sophomore girls. He relished the process—the hunt for a new Special Girl, the months of training until she would do whatever he told her to do and tell him everything, every dark secret she had.

He scrolled through his e-mails for twenty minutes and then buzzed Goldschmidt and told him to order three quarts of clam chowder from the Fairfield Fish Co. restaurant. He would pick them up on his way home from school. “It will be the first course of a hideous dinner party my wife is throwing tonight,” he said. “Make sure it’s not the bottom of the pot. Gets too salty and my wife hates salty soup.”

When Calvin got to the restaurant, he squeezed into a single empty space at the bar, told the tall blonde barmaid about his takeout chowder, and ordered a straight-up Tanqueray martini. He was taking his first sip when he noticed that Douglas Hatcher and his daughter Blaire were seated across the bar, working their way through a large bowl of steamed clams. He caught the girl’s eye and she stared straight at him, insolent as ever. He sat there until the chowder came, imagining how much he might enjoy breaking her.

CHAPTER 4

Everything Is God

S EX WITH SALLY Moses changed Doug, coloring his world for days after each time they did it. His mind would wander back to the sight of her naked— pressing her long lithe body against his, all soft tanned flesh and vivid blue tattoos, those green eyes and that sheaf of straw-colored hair. He had trouble speaking in public, stuttering when he tried to talk to Blaire, stammering his order at Starbucks . He twice ran stop signs and he could barely work on the Burr book; he found himself staring for an hour or more at a page of text without understanding a word. Sally decided to cut back the sex to at most twice a week, just for the sake of his sanity. They did it the first time on a rainy evening in the bedroom of the little house she rented across the street from the restaurant. At one point, Doug thought he was dying and Sally attached her mouth to his and breathed life back into him. After, he lay on the bed for a full hour before he could move. One afternoon, as they lay in bed after a half-hour of strenuous action, Doug could no longer restrain his curiosity. “You did that thing at the bar, like made people disappear,” he said. “And there’s other stuff you do, like you know what people are thinking. Are you like an alien or something?” She was running her hand up and down his stomach. “Sure, I guess you could call it that,” she said. “But not like from some other planet, with lizard people or whatever.” He guided her hand downward. “Please tell me what you’re talking about,” he said. “Okay, I’m gonna use words you understand while I try to explain things,” she said. “But you have to know that it’s all actually much more complicated, and at the same time, more simple, than I can express just using language. Actually, it’s

probably easiest if you just ask me questions.” “Who … are … you?” “I am what you might call a completed soul. I have gone through multiple lives on various levels of physical organism, from amoebic creatures to full-grown whales. The last several lives were on the human level, and I completed the cycle successfully at one point and now have moved on to a different plane of existence. I guess that’s about as close as I can get to it with words.” “So, does this mean, you are … what? An angel?” “No such thing,” she said. “No devils either.” She smiled and sat up, then stretched her arms over her head. “God, that feels good,” she said. “God,” he said. “There’s a God?” “Everything is God,” she said. He sat up and dropped his legs over the side of the bed. “You are confusing me,” he said. “Tell me how you did that thing at the bar. That really freaked me out.” She stretched again. “Okay,” we’re using inadequate words here again,” she said. “It’s about time, stopping it or moving in and out of it.” “C’mon,” he said. “Think of time like a river that flows in a great infinite circle,” she said. “You climb out of the river whenever and wherever you want. Then you plunge back in whenever or wherever you want.” “Wanna go out for breakfast?” he said. “Maybe the diner with the corned-beef hash.”

Somehow, before Doug even realized it, Sally had organized his life. He got up early, six-thirty or so, woke Blaire and made her breakfast, drank coffee until she got on the school bus. Then he used the rowing machine he had set up in the garage for an hour or so. Once or twice a week, he jogged the two miles to

Planet Fitness and pumped small amounts of iron alongside soccer moms and suburban muscleheads. After his shower, he walked or drove to the Burr Homestead and spent the morning plowing through town records and family diaries in the second-floor library. He went to Sally’s bar for lunch every day, drinking just two glasses or wine and eating whatever she put in front of him— usually some sort of protein on top of a salad or a pile of sautéed vegetables. In the evenings, he put together dinner for Blaire and read or watched old movies on TV while she did her homework. Perhaps twice a week, she had three or four of her track teammates over—Doug walking in on intense conversations among the girls that ended when he entered the room. He got on his phone, ordered pizzas and salads and sandwiches for them, then retreated to his office. On the weekends, when Blaire wasn’t at a meet or going off for a long run, he took her to lunch at one of two Asian restaurants in downtown Fairfield; she liked the sushi in one and the salmon teriyaki in the other. They often ended up at Sally’s bar for dinner; she often ordered grilled tofu and vegetables. As the days ed, Doug began to feel that he was more content in his life than he had been in a long time, maybe ever. All that changed on a blustery mid-March evening, with the rain coming down in icy sheets and the bare trees snapping in the wind. He was in his study, reading through the personal journal of Eunice Burr, wife of the town leader Thaddeus Burr. She wrote about the day in 1779, when Fairfield was attacked by the British. Some soldiers broke into her house, tore up her furniture, then stole her silver shoe buckles. Somewhere around 10 p.m., he heard the sound of Blaire through the floorboards, sobbing in her bedroom. His first instinct was to stay away, give her some privacy, but the crying got louder. He could hear her wailing and gasping for air as he climbed the stairs and got to her bedroom door. She was on her bed, still in her track clothes, half-buried in a tangle of sheets and blankets. She stopped crying when he walked into the room, but she wouldn’t look at him. “Oh, baby,” he said, “what is it?” She wiped her face with a corner of the sheet. “You know I told you that I had some problems with a guy in Portland,” she said. “It’s not important how it started, but he put a bunch of things on Facebook and Instagram and Snapchat and YouTube—all sorts of awful things about me, pictures too.”

“I knew you had some issue,” he said. “Yeah,” she said, “some issue. Anyway, some people at school here in Fairfield found some of the stuff and now people are talking about it.” She took a deep breath. “I try to ignore it, but it’s hard.” Doug left her alone then, and an hour later she came down and found him in his study. She had put on jeans and a sweater and her long red hair was still wet from the shower and tied up in a long ponytail. “I’m hungry,” she said. There were two seats at the back end of the bar when they got to Sally’s. She came over with their drinks—club soda and cranberry for Blaire, a glass of sauvignon blanc for Doug. “We’ve got some swordfish,” she said. She was wearing a dark blue shirt and black jeans, a silver seashell necklace and black boots with four-inch heels. The bar filled up over the next hour, as they ate their shrimp cocktails and grilled swordfish, and Sally was whirling around behind the bar taking orders and turning out drinks. Blaire was quiet, seemed less sad, but Doug could feel her holding herself together. They split a piece of cheesecake and he waved Sally over to get the check. “We’re gonna call it a night,” said Doug as he fumbled with his credit card. “Blaire has had a long day.” Sally wiped at a spot in front of Doug with the bar rag. “I could see my friend isn’t as happy as she might be,” she said. Blaire looked up at her. “It’s just some stuff at school,” she said. “I don’t want to talk about it. It’s about some stuff on the Internet.” “That’s all right,” said Sally. “I’ve got something for you that might help.” She looked over at Doug. “You too,” she said. She walked to the front of the bar and reached into a drawer to retrieve a small paper bag, then retraced her steps and stood in front of them again. “Here,” she said, pulling two old-fashioned flip phones from the bag. “One for each of you. I took out a two-year contract. You can call people and text people and that’s all it does. No Internet, no computer in your pocket.”

Blaire flipped her phone open and started pushing buttons. “So, we’re supposed to go retro here, using dumb phones,” she said. “I’m gonna point out two things about smart phones,” said Sally. “First, neurobiologists have determined through a series of examinations that the shape of certain lobes of the brain in people who spend a lot of time staring at a screen are changing their size and structure. When they took away smart phones from test subjects, parts of the brain that trigger feelings of anxiety are peaking every twelve to fifteen minutes. When the test subjects returned to their phones, those levels retreated to normal.” Blaire was staring at her now. “How did we end up talking about this stuff?” she said. Sally reached out and touched her lightly on her wrist. “It’s what you’ve been thinking about anyway, right?” said Sally. “Yes, but how did you know that?” said Blaire. “Did my dad tell you what’s been going on with me?” “Not important,” said Sally. “The second thing about smart phones is that people in California are right now working on new software that will allow anyone at any time to listen in to your calls, read your texts, record any Internet search, basically do a constant data-strip on you. I am told that the newest generation of this software will allow someone to listen in on all your daily interactions, whether or not the phone is turned on. I understand certain data-mining companies plan to offer the information to large national retailers—You’re in a bar and you mention to your friend that you were thinking about ordering a draft. A Budweiser ad pops up on your phone immediately.” “Capitalism can have its flaws,” said Doug. Blaire went off to the restroom. “That was the first time I saw you do one of your tricks with Blaire,” he said. Sally poured him a half-glass of pinot grigio. “For the road,” she said. “What do you mean?” “You made it pretty clear that you were reading her mind,” said Doug.

“It will be all right,” said Sally. “You say that a lot,” said Doug. When Blaire got back, Doug noticed that Sally always smiled when she looked at her. When they got home that night, they both put their smart phones in a kitchen drawer. Over the first few days, Doug found himself retrieving his device three times when he wanted to check messages without cranking up his laptop; Blaire never touched hers. After a few more days, he more or less forgot it was there.

Doug didn’t see Blaire cry again over the next two weeks, and when she did shed tears it was at the end of a 5000-meter race in Weston, when she beat her biggest state rival by ten yards, going away. After, Doug asked her if she was happy or sad. “Sort of both,” she said. Whatever her state, she seemed to be settling into her new home. On top of her success on the track, she scored straight As, with A+ in French and AP Biology on her quarterly report card. Her circle of friends had expanded to six or seven track teammates, a gangly, longhaired pack, chattering at each other and singing snatches of songs. On a cold, sunny day late March, Doug hit a dead spot in his work on the book. Pawing through some old boxes in an annex to the Homestead library, he had come upon the 1644 journal of a town elder that included several entries that mentioned the brothers John and Jehu Burr, the first of the family to arrive in Fairfield. It was the sort of moment that was supposed to thrill a historian, but as he sat at a scarred mahogany desk, carefully turning the fragile yellow pages, he began to question whether anyone in the world would see any purpose in the work he was doing—would anyone ever care about Jehu’s political career, about John’s years as a judge? It was almost lunchtime, and he took his woes to Sally’s bar. “I basically think I am sort of an academic fraud,” he said as she placed a glass of the pinot in front of him She was beautiful in the shaft of winter sunlight that angled into the bar. Somehow, in a month of March that had been mostly gray and gloomy, she had managed to touch up her tan. “You have to ask yourself why you became an

historian in the first place,” she said. “I’ll answer that for you. You were interested in how people behave, what they do, what they say. The problem is you’ve forgotten that and now you’re just looking at words on a page.” “Old dead words,” he said. “Okay,” she said, “You might ask yourself what a great woman like myself is doing in a t like this. Well, it’s because this is the sort of place where people still come and talk to each other—when you can keep them from their phones anyway. You want to why people’s lives are interesting, every person’s life in one way or another, then start listening to people around this bar.”

And so he did. That afternoon, a 40ish woman sat down next to Doug and ordered a straight-up Tito’s martini. “You know, I’ve finally figured out the real difference between living in the city and up here in never-never land,” she said. “In the city, it’s all about what you do. Here, it’s all about what you have.” Then a girl about Blaire’s age said to her companion that she had acquired a new cat. “He’s wonderful,” she said. “He’s perfect. He’s magical.” Then a round-faced man with a goatee arrived with an older woman wearing a bright yellow wig. They have two drinks, then she gets up and leaves. The moment she walks out the door, the round-faced man begins to castigate the woman to anyone at the bar who would listen—she’s a “malevolent old crone, the queen bitch of all times”. After a few minutes of this, a 60ish man wearing a black turtleneck interrupted the tirade. “Why, Harold,” he ssid. “I thought she was the hag to your fag.” Later, two 40ish men in suits began to compare the rigors of their business trips. “They put me on some little regional airline on that last leg from Pittsburgh,” said one of them. “Small plane, butt-ugly stewardess. I think they would have charged two bucks for a barf bag.” Later still, two 30ish women came in and sat directly across the bar from Doug. One of them, a slim blonde, began to describe a couple she worked with. “They both have spectacular OCD,” she said. “He tries to organize their spice shelf alphabetically. Then she comes along a rearranges by color of the labels, lightest

shades to darkest.” Then two 40ish men on the other side of the bar began to discuss their business quandary. At some point, it became clear that they were employees at a funeral parlor in Stratford. Apparently, a woman had come into their office to speak about her 85-year-old diabetic brother. She said he had had most of his left leg amputated recently and had just months more to live. He wanted the leg to be buried with him and his sister wanted to know what it would cost to store the limb until he died. Apparently, she wanted a hard price, and the two guys at the bar, who seemed perplexed by the notion, had no idea what to say to her. They eventually settled on ten dollars a month. Just before Doug was about to leave, two 25ish men at the bar wearing ACE LANDSCAPING T-shirts were staring at a lit-up smart phone, their faces green in the glow of the screen. Suddenly, they began to shout. “Oh, my god,” said one of them. “That is the ugliest goddamn thing I have ever seen. That little cat head and that great big body.” The other man clicked off the phone. “They call them ligers,” he said. “They can only be bred once. The second generation is always sterile.” The first man took a big hit on his Sam Adams. “That just tells you that lions and tigers should not be screwing each other.”

A few days later, in bed with Sally on a Friday afternoon, Doug told her that, whatever the reason, he had found himself getting back into the work. He told her what he’d read in the journals of Colonel John Burr, an Episcopalian and an early leader of the Stratfield section of town. He said he had found a gold mine in the papers of Peter Burr, son of Jehu, who dominated Fairfield politics for twenty years in the early eighteenth century. “If that’s what you feel you should be doing right now, then that’s good, right?” she said. She rolled over. “Scratch my back,” she said. He leaned over and began to work on her shoulders first. “I’ve just gotta ask you something about your tattoos,” he said. “I know you’ve got a hummingbird on your right shoulder, and it’s always there, but I could swear that the butterfly thing was on the other side of your back last time I looked.” She turned around and smiled at him, breaking his heart. “Neat, right?” she said. “You can control stuff like that.”

Later, after their shower, Sally put on an old vinyl Otis Redding record and they danced for a while. Then Sally had to go back to the bar for the dinner rush and he had to go pick up Blaire from school. “See you in like an hour or so,” he said as he gathered up his coat and briefcase. “Blaire said she wants to try the lobster roll.” “I’ll save some nice claw meat for her,” she said. “You care about her, don’t you?” he said. She ran her hands through her hair. “It’s more than that,” she said. “There are things you might call spirit streams, and all of us are in one of them. You share certain traits and affinities with the other souls in your stream.” “Traits and affinities,” he said. “You’re sort of like in the same tribe,” she said. “Is this like all Virgos are private and Leos talk too loud?” he ssaid. “No, it’s different, more essential,” she said, “but astrology is actually not complete bullshit.”

Blaire had scraped her shin at track practice, so they had to stop at the CVS for bandages and hydrogen peroxide. It was dark and the bar was full by the time they got to Sally’s restaurant. They lurked at a small table next to the bar until two stools opened up. Sally’s face lit up when she saw Blaire. She got Doug a glass of Bordeaux and Blaire a club soda, then she and Blaire began to chatter away about the angry weather, Blaire’s favorite biology class, Blaire’s scraped shin, the qualities of various brands of disinfectant. Doug, meanwhile, listened to the voices bouncing around the bar. A middle-aged man two stools down seemed to be semi-drunk. “So I heard about this guy on death row somewhere out in the Midwest, Indiana maybe,” he said to the middle-aged woman sitting next to him. “Anyway, this guy has a fierce shellfish allergy. So when it comes time to give him the needle, he orders up a huge lobster dinner for his last meal. He dies an hour later from the reaction. Just wanted to deny them the pleasure of killing him.”

Two 25ish guys across the bar were working on draft beers and tequila shots. “Yeah, Janeway went into the fucking Air Force,” said one of them. “Said he just couldn’t figure out what to do with himself after that thing with Sharon.” The other guy took back his shot. “That was definitely heinous,” he said. “The Air Force won’t be that bad. I hear it’s like the Canada of armed forces.” The round-faced man with a goatee, a regular, was waving at Sally, holding up his empty cocktail glass. “Sometimes, being a Jew can be difficult,” he said to a younger man sitting next to him. “They were giving away free hams yesterday at the Stop ‘n’ Shop.” An older man with a white beard slipped onto the stool next to Doug and ordered a straight-up martini. “I’m celebrating,” he said. “My wife asked me to flip over the rocking chairs on the front porch to check for beehives. First time I’ve felt useful for a week.” A broad-faced, brown-haired woman asked Sally why there were no tilapia dishes on the menu. “Don’t ever eat those things,” said Sally. “They grow them in sewers in Bangkok.” Their food came—blackened salmon over a Caesar salad for Doug, the lobster roll for Blaire. About halfway through the meal, Blaire dropped a sweet potato fry onto the bar and began staring at someone across the bar. Doug could barely make him out in the crowd, but then he realized it was Calvin Pomeroy, the short, balding heaster at the high school who had interviewed them. He seemed to be working on an amber-colored cocktail and staring directly back at Blaire. “That’s your school principal over there, right?” he said. “Yes,” she said, in a strangled voice. “Why do you seem to be so freaked out?” he said. She waited a few beats before she answered. “Everybody calls him Creepy Cal,” she said. “Even some of the teachers.” Pomeroy left with a tan shopping bag full of takeouts after a while and Blaire calmed down. Doug drove her back to their house and then drove back to the restaurant to keep Sally company until she closed at eleven. Later, in bed at her house, they had sex for the first time in a week. Sometime after that, maybe hours, Doug woke from what seemed like a slight coma. He threw on the old

flannel robe he kept in Sally’s closet and walked downstairs to find her at the kitchen table. She was sitting straight up in her chair and seemed to be staring at the far blank wall. “Yo,” said Doug, “you with us?” She blinked twice, looked up at him, flashed that smile. “And you?” she said. “You were sort of ed out.” “I was,” he said. “Do you learn to do that stuff like over a bunch of lifetimes.” “It’s like everything else,” she said. “You try out things and then at some point you have figured out how to put them all together.” “What does that mean?” he said. “Like they say that everything happens for a reason?” She got up and walked over to the stove to refill her tea mug. “No, it’s not like that,” she said. “Things happen to you, good or bad, along the way of a life. It’s all about how you handle them.” Then she leaned over and took a folded package from the chair next to her. She handed it to him. “Next part of the Goody Knapp story,” she said. “You need to read it right away.” He ripped open the side of the package and took out the dark brown vellum pages, wrapped up again in pale yellow twine. “I’ve read all there is about Goodwife Knapp at the History Center and I’ve read the first pages you gave me maybe thirty times,” he said. “I’m probably not supposed to ask you this, but why is she so important?” “You know when I told you about those spirit streams, like the one that Blaire and I share?” “Yes.” “Goody’s one of us,” she said. Doug stayed up all night, reading and re-reading the pages:

DAY TWO

Only the devil could conjure the misery I felt after those unholy women had torn at my clothing and exposed my body to all who cared to see. After they had done and I had been led back to my grimy cell, I lay for hours on my straw bed and cried out to my God to let the tribulations cease. When the old woman came with a tin plate bearing a lump of foul porridge for my dinner, she hung her head and would not meet my eyes. “What is it?” I asked her. “Am I so hateful a creature that you will not look at me?” She put the plate down on the ground next to me, along with a wooden spoon and a cup of brackish water. “The women,” she said. “People are saying that they saw marks of the demons on you.” I choked down what I could of the foul mess on the plate and somehow fell asleep until the first gray of morning showed in the small window of my cell. My dreams were of imps ripping at my flesh while a gaggle of long-nosed women watched. An hour or so later, Lucy Pell came to my cell. She was one of the rich Post Road ladies, a short, fat women, wife of a doctor, and had turned me away when I came looking for a house to clean after I had left Roger Ludlow’s employ. With her was another woman, a narrow-eyed shrew who said her name was Hester Ward. I knew who she was. My husband Roger had once worked for her husband, Andrew Ward, clearing some land on his property. This Hester Ward had hectored him the whole time he worked there, complaining about every small thing he did. Both of the women held handkerchiefs soaked with sweet perfume up to their noses. I managed to break wind twice to make the smell of the place even less to their liking. After a while, the Pell woman made clear the purpose of their visit. She said the women who had examined my regions had seen devilish marks, certain signs of the demons suckling on me. “These signs are unmistakable,” she said. I looked them straight in their pitiless faces. “You know, both of you know, that none of what you are saying is the truth of this matter,” I said. They left quickly after that, handkerchiefs still pressed to their sensitive noses.

An hour later, as I was trying to find some rest on my straw mat, the grayfaced Roger Ludlow, came into the cell. He had a sheen of nervous sweat on his forehead and his cold dark eyes were shifting back and forth. I knew at that moment that this was the man behind all the horrors that had befallen me. Ludlow found a three-legged stool and sat down, facing me from a dozen feet away, far enough to avoid the ripe smells coming from my corner of the room. “Goodwife, I must officially report that your physical examination has revealed certain signs,” he said. “Marks of improper actions with dark forces.” The foul porridge came up then and I spat a mouthful of the vomitus at a spot halfway between us. Ludlow jumped back slightly, almost tipping over the stool. “You know, everyone knows, that you are lying where you sit,” I said. “And that is God’s truth.” “Deny all you wish, Goodwife,” he said. “That will not change the outcome of this situation.” “So it’s a situation,” I said. Ludlow stood up. “Listen to me,” he said. “There is much concern among many of the people of this town about the witchery that is taking place.” “I know of no such events,” I said. He began pacing across the back end of the room. “So you say,” he said. “We will discover exactly what you know. And I must tell you that you can help yourself and your family by talking freely about your activities.” “What activities?” I said. “I clean houses and my poor sick husband picks up work wherever he can. We try to make enough to put a small amount away to pay for a better house. You probably don’t know too many people who live where we do, out by the onion fields on low lands that flood often.” “Listen to me, Goodwife,” he said. “We need to know of others in town who were involved in the witchery. Some in town say that a woman named Mary Staples has shown signs of being influenced by the demons.”

“I know of her,” I said. “But that’s all.” He stared, those dark eyes boring into me. “Too bad,” he said. He left. An hour later, an old man in a black waistcoat came into my cell and said that I would need to be ready for another examination in the morning. I wanted to wail, to scream at God for what He’d allowed to happen to me. But I spent the night weeping silently and trying, to no avail, to find some peace of mind in sleep.

CHAPTER 5

Well-Behaved Women

A S THE OUTDOOR season approached, Blaire felt better than ever on the track. She had only lost twice in the indoors—a close 5000 to a Darien senior who held the New England record and a 1500 on a day she had her period and a bad cold. She had lowered her personal-best times by seven seconds in the 1500 and almost a minute in the 5000. She had trouble keeping her weight up and gorged on pasta three nights a week, she ran at least ten times a week, and she was sore all over most of the time. Her wins gave her a weird status on the team—just a sophomore, a transfer from some place out West, but clearly the best girl runner in the school. For the first month or so, the seniors had tried to box her in during practice runs, but she learned how to bust out on the inside and then blow them away with her kick. They cut it out after a while and she could work on her times without all the drama; she never lost a race, whether in practice or at a meet, if she could possibly win. Sometimes, she wondered if that made her some kind of freak. A tall senior with long dark hair named Ginger, a good sprinter and team cocaptain, invited her to dinner at her house after a meet against New Canaan. Seven or eight other girls from the team were there, and they all drank at least two beers apiece. At some point, as they all sat around on the low-slung couches in the basement rec room, Blaire told some stories about the college town she grew up in, then the mess in Portland with her drunk mother and the insane boy with a talent for humiliating people. A week later, a blonde girl named Emily, also a sprinter, invited her over for lunch after a Saturday practice. The same girls from the team were there and they ate burgers and big bowls of popcorn and watched Silver Linings Playbook. Three of the girls declared their undying love for Bradley Cooper. The next week, Blaire asked them all over to her house. Her father was cool about it, ordered pizzas and salads, and stayed out of their way.

Blaire shared an AP Biology class with Ginger and they hooked up as lab partners. Another girl from the team was also in the class—Carmen, a short, thick-bodied brunette who did the field events like discus, shotput and javelin. The three of them ate lunch together daily, worked out in the weight room together three or four times a week, and they began to refer to themselves as Las Tres Amigas. The classes were pretty much the same as those in Portland. Half of the boys were stoned on something or other and the other half played constantly with their phones and laptops. They seemed to spend a lot of time looking at pictures of expensive sneakers. Most of the girls sat up front and took lots of notes, but there were always a few who lingered in the back and talked quietly among themselves. They dressed in dark clothes and seemed to spend a lot of time using Google View to look at the houses of their fellow students. Blaire’s favorite class was AP American History, taught by a Ms. Cavanaugh, a tall, thin, 30ish woman with brown hair cut into straight bangs in the front. She wore a bulky pair of horned-rim glasses and spoke in a low-pitched conversational tone. On the first day Blaire was in the class, Ms. Cavanaugh began a section on the struggle for women’s suffrage by writing a quote on the blackboard from a writer called Lisa Ulrich: WELL-BEHAVED WOMEN SELDOM MAKE HISTORY. Blaire wrote it down in her notebook and later pinned the page onto the bulletin board above her desk at home, right next to the Mary Caine news clippings.

The chatter about her Internet troubles back in Portland began to die down after a while, when she refused to react to anything anyone said to her about it. Two football players, both musclebound seniors who wore their letter jackets at all times, still whispered “Here she comes—the Psycho Bitch” whenever they saw her, and a certain cluster of sophomore boys would snicker among themselves when she walked by in the lunchroom. But she stayed off the net on her laptop at home except for schoolwork, and she never regretted putting her smartphone in the drawer. She used the flip phone Sally had given her to call or text her friends or her father and that was that. Blaire and her father ate at least half of their meals at Sally’s restaurant, sometimes idling away two hours or more at the bar. Her father had taken an

interest in some of the patrons who came to the place—-“the real hard-core regulars”. He said he was conducting research into the mores of American suburbanites. “They’re sitting here, telling their life stories to anyone who wants to listen,” he said. “And the things they have to say will blow your mind.” He spent much of his time talking to the customers, shouting questions across the horseshoe bar. Blaire didn’t mind. She found the sounds of the barroom comforting—the sudden burst of laughter when someone told a joke, the jingle of the oldfashioned cash , the rattle of ice cubes in a cocktail shaker, Sally’s honey voice bantering with the customers. Sometimes, she would read a chapter or two of some textbook to the time. When Sally wasn’t too busy, Blaire talked with her about everything—the man in the White House, the writer Laurel Ulrich, her 1500 times, boys. They talked about her father, about her mother, about the town and the kids at school and just how hard it is to keep a happy face on all the time when you didn’t necessarily feel that way. “Yeah, it’s a chore, slapping the smile on,” said Sally. “But it keeps people from asking you what’s wrong constantly, which is worse.” Blaire’s father seemed happier, more centered, than she had ever seen him, and she had no doubt it was because Sally had taken charge of him. He stayed overnight at her house two or three times a week and always showed up the next morning with a silly grin on his face. With all the exercise she had convinced him to do, he had lost his small belly and was standing up straighter. His eyes were clear, his hands were steady. At least once a week, they would run together, on the beach or along country roads in the hills north of town, Blaire reverting to a slow jog to let him keep up with her. Blaire called her mother every Sunday evening. She was often half-drunk or allstoned, and she seemed impatient to end the call after no more than ten minutes or so. As Blaire had predicted to herself, Geoffrey had moved back in as soon as she left Portland. Her mother said they had gone into couples therapy and were getting along much better than in the past. “We have learned to give each other the proper amount of space,” she said. Inevitably, at the end of each call, her mother would say, unconvincingly, that she missed her terribly. “My heart aches to see you,” she said once, when she was drunker than usual. The heaster, Creepy Cal Pomeroy, seemed to show up a lot wherever she was—getting off the bus in the morning, going to lunch with Las Tres Amigas,

coming off the track after practice. When she walked past his office each afternoon on her way to Western Civilization, he was always standing in his doorway, watching her.

On the gloomy Tuesday morning after the Easter break, Cal had some freshman girl deliver a note to Blaire in the lunchroom. It was written in very small, very neat block letters: PLEASE ME IN MY OFFICE AT 3 PM TODAY FOR A LITTLE CHAT. I GATHER FROM YOUR SCHEDULE THAT THIS A FREE PERIOD FOR YOU. She zombied her way through her morning classes, unnerved by the prospect of the meeting. At lunch, both Ginger and Carmen suggested she fake being sick and go right home. She thought about it. Right after her biology lab, Blaire walked out onto the parking lot and punched out Sally’s number on her phone. Sally answered on the first ring. “How are you doing?” she said. “I’m just mopping up the last of the lunch crowd. These two gentlemen have been drinking for a while now and I’m just about to tell them they’re cut off unless they hand over their car keys. I see Uber drivers in their future.” “There’s this thing,” said Blaire. “You know that Mr. Pomeroy, who comes in here for takeout sometimes. Heaster at the high school.” “Yeah,” said Sally. “Apparently, his wife is a freak for the Rhode Island clam chowder.” “Anyway, he sent me a note says he want me to come to his office in like an hour,” said Blaire. “That’s the guy all the kids call some name.” “Creepy Cal.” “Whole thing sounds scary. You hanging in there?” “My friends say I should fake sick and go home.” Sally waited five seconds before she spoke. “You don’t really think that’s gonna stop this man, do you?” she said.

Blaire could feel her face begun to flush. “What should I do?” she said. “Go see the guy, face him,” she said. “And let me know what happened right after.” At five minutes before three, Blaire knocked on Mr. Pomeroy’s door. After ten seconds or so, he came to the door, snapped open a lock, and opened it. He looked slightly sweaty, his thin crop of brown hair mussed in the front. “Just working on a report,” he said. “Come, come in.” As Blaire walked past him, she realized she was at least an inch taller than him. She sat down on the chair in front of the desk. Mr. Pomeroy went around and sat in his tall brown leather desk chair, leaning back and crossing his leg. Blaire could see a length of blue argyle sock above his brown suede loafers. A white porcelain teapot, two cups, and a small tray of assorted chocolate cookies were arrayed on the desk. He reached for the plate and extended it toward her. “Please, have some,” he said. “And some tea. It’s orange pekoe.” Blaire felt like she was going to throw up. She burrowed down into her chair. “No,” she said. “No thanks.” Mr. Pomeroy took a sip of his tea. “As you wish,” he said. “I just wanted to invite you here to congratulate you on your performance since coming to Roger Ludlowe. I have looked into your academic performance and see nothing but success. I gather as well that you have been a huge addition to our track squad.” He took another sip, then he spoke to her in a quieter voice. “And I must say that you are a very attractive girl. That hair, they used to call it strawberry blonde.” Blaire felt weak, like she would just faint right there in the chair. Mr. Pomeroy flipped open his laptop and began hammering the keyboard. She could only see a corner of the screen. “I also find it interesting that you have virtually no current presence on the social media,” he said. “Makes you sort of mysterious. Most of your classmates live their lives right there in public.” Blaire cleared her throat, sat up straighter. “Some things happened in Portland,” she said. “So I just stay off of all that stuff now.” He pounded some keys. “Yes, I know,” he said, and spun his laptop to show her the screen. On it was the Facebook picture Ron had posted—her, coming out of the shower in the locker room. “Well, you certainly are a beautiful young

woman, with nothing to hide,” he said. “That’s what freaks me out,” she said. “The guy just puts it out there and it’s out there forever.” “Yes, strange age we live in,” he said, then turned his eyes back to the screen, staring at her nakedness. “That’s all, sweetheart,” he said. “I want you to know you can come see me whenever you want.” She got up and went for the door. “I’ll be in touch,” he said as she closed it behind her. At the bar that evening, Blaire waited until her father had moved down a few stools to talk to an elderly couple and made eye with Sally, who came over and began cutting up some limes. Blaire told her about the way Mr. Pomeroy talked in his quiet voice, about the remark about her hair, the naked picture of her on his laptop. “How do you feel about all that?” said Sally when she had finished her story. Blaire thought about it for a few seconds. “Well, when it was going on I felt like I might out or throw up or something,” she said. “But now I’m just kind of angry about it all.” “That’s good,” said Sally. “Do you think I should tell my father about what happened?” said Blaire. Sally poured her a glass of lemonade. “Slice of pecan pie?” she said. “I think the sugar would be too much right now,” said Blaire. “So, my father?” “I think you should probably keep him out of it for now,” said Sally. “He might do something male that would confuse matters.” Blaire decided to have the pie after all, and she was just finishing it up when two older men across the bar from her began to argue, their voices getting louder with each exchange. The men were both in their early 60s, one quite thin with horned-rim glasses, the other a bulkier man with a pure white brush cut. From what Blaire could gather, their dispute centered on car engines—specifically, which car had the best fuel-injection system ever built. The thin man said that, as

a mechanical engineer for the past thirty years, he had concluded the 1962 Mercedes E-class coupe was the best ever. The bulky man said that, as a lifelong car buff and owner of a 2016 Tesla, the thin man’s opinion was not worth “a hill of shit.” The thin man stood up and leaned into the bulky man’s face. “You’re a hill of shit,” he said. He had an accent, East European maybe, and seemed very drunk. The bulky man stood up too, and the two of them faced each other from three feet apart. “Outside,” said the bulky man. They started walking toward the back door of the restaurant, muttering curses at each other. The bulky man shoved the thin man against the wall just outside the women’s rest room and the two of them began to wrestle. Blaire never saw Sally come around from behind the bar, but suddenly she was standing next to the two brawlers. She reached out with both hands and laid them on the shoulders of the two men. After an instant, they stopped fighting and walked slowly back to the bar. Sally poured them each a drink, and they began to talk about the weather and the Yankees. “That was weird,” said Blaire after the two men had left. Sally was clearing the empty glasses off the bar. “All you need to know is that was about a lot more than electronic fuel injection,” she said.

Blaire first noticed Wilson Barnes on the first day of spring track practice. The boys and girls teams huddled on opposite ends of the field, but they shared the high-jump and pole-vault pits in the center. He was a vaulter, six-four, maybe six-five, skinny, with a long narrow face and an unruly thatch of thick black hair. According to Ginger, he had transferred in from a boarding school in Massachusetts. There had been some sort of trouble, she said. Ginger said he was a pretty good vaulter, maybe second or third best in the league. Blaire didn’t share any classes with Wil, a second-semester junior, but she saw him most days in the lunchroom. He usually sat with the same two or three boys from the track team, and he didn’t seem to talk much, just listened to the others and put in an occasional comment. Once, as her father was driving them to Sally’s for dinner, she saw him riding a bike hard along the Black Rock Turnpike. He didn’t seem to be going anywhere in particular, just intent on getting there fast. Another time, she was going into a smoothie place in downtown Fairfield just as he was leaving. He smiled at her and held open the

door. She saw that his eyes were hazel. The first time she talked to Wil was at a St. Patrick’s Day party, thrown by a junior basketball player whose parents were out of town. Ginger drove Blaire and Carmen to the house, a big pile of a place covered in redwood shingles in the rich Greenfield Hill section of town. They parked down the road and worked their way around the house to the two-acre backyard. Someone had set up two kegs on beach chairs next to the pool. A senior with a shaved head and a large gold loop hanging from his left earlobe had set up a DJ stand and was playing Beyonce. There were already more than fifty kids there, and more were walking in steadily. Four or five couples were dancing, but most of the kids were lining up for the kegs or doing shots of whiskey. Small clouds of smoke were circling up into the dark night sky, and the yard and all the surrounding acreage smelled like pot. They filled their Solo cups with warm beer and stood around for a few minutes, then a senior boy, a basketball player, came over and asked Ginger to dance, then two other boys came over and asked Blaire and Carmen to dance. They met up again a half-hour or so later. By then, at least a hundred kids were in the backyard. The pool cover was littered with crushed red Solo cups, and some of the boys were so drunk they were falling down. Blaire was thinking about asking the other girls if it was a good time to leave when a great commotion erupted in the front driveway of the house. At least a half-dozen police cars had pulled up; their red and blue roof lights were pulsing their colors against the bare trees in the woods beyond the yard. A few of the kids began walking, then running toward the tree line, then just about all the kids who could walk made for the woods in a great stampede. Blaire got separated from her friends somehow, and she found herself crouched behind a tree in the dark, cold and miserable with no ride home. She walked through the woods for three or four hundred yards, hoping to stumble onto her friends. A few kids were lingering among the trees, smoking ts and finishing up whatever was left in their cups, but there was no sign of Ginger or Carmen. Wil showed up then. She didn’t see him until he was standing next to her, as if he had dropped in from the sky. “You look sort of lost,” he said. His voice was deeper than she had suspected, perhaps a bit sadder as well.

“I can’t find my friends, the girls I came with,” she said. “Yeah, this is sort of a mess,” he said. “You wanna see if we can get out of here?” “Sure,” she said, and it seemed natural when he took her hand and they began to walk toward the lights along the road. At least a dozen cops were standing amid the parked cars, stopping kids and taking down names, so they walked a quarter-mile further up the road before they emerged from the woods. “I’m gonna have to leave my old man’s car here overnight,” said Wil. “He’s gonna be pissed.” They walked for an hour along the quiet country roads, until they came to the commercial district along Black Rock Turnpike. A diner, Penny’s Diner, was still open and they got a booth beside the window and ordered some drinks, hot chocolate for her, ginger ale for him. A few of the other kids from the party were already in the place, more came in, and soon it was full of kids who had hiked down from Greenfield Hill. Two girls from Blaire’s homeroom showed up and piled into their booth, then two boys from the track team pulled up chairs. Everyone was amped-up about the cops showing up and their escape through the woods. “It’s about as exciting as this town gets,” said one of the track boys, a middle-distance runner. Wil didn’t say much, but Blaire could feel him glancing at her across the table now and then. When the diner closed, he took out his cell phone and asked for her number, then called her an Uber to get herself home. In bed, she thought about him, those hazel eyes, the way he loped along with long, bouncy strides when he walked, the small chip on his left front tooth.

He called her the next day, a cloudy Sunday. “They towed some of the cars,” he said. “I lucked out. Maybe they ran out of tow trucks. The old man is still pissed though.” “Yeah, my friend Ginger lucked out too,” she said. “She went back up there this morning and there were like thirty cars still parked along the road.” “You wanna go out sometime?” he said in a rush, like he had to get it out fast. “I

don’t know, like dinner or something.” “Sure,” said Blaire, and she felt a small bump in her stomach. They met up at Flipside Burger after practice on Wednesday, then went to see the new Avengers movie on Friday. On Saturday night, he took her to a small house party in Southport. He kissed her for the first time when he dropped her off at home that night. Wil and his friends ate lunch with Blaire and her friends most days, and at least twice a week they met after practice to take a walk on the beach or share a smoothie. She introduced him to her father and he introduced her to his parents, both tall, elegant people who seemed always in a hurry to be somewhere. She told him all her secrets and he told her many of his. They made out in the front seat of his car until she could barely breath, but he always stopped before she asked him to. She dreamt about him often.

About three weeks after she had linked up with Wil, on a late March day with a hint of spring in the air, Blaire was hustling off the school bus when Mr. Goldschmidt intercepted her. “The heaster wishes to see you,” he said. “Right away.” Blaire felt a rising panic, but choked it down. “Someone better tell my homeroom teacher where I am,” she said. “I don’t want to get marked absent.” Mr. Goldschmidt looked ill, like he was nursing a low-grade fever. “We’ll take care of it,” he said. “Just get to the heaster’s office. He’s not happy.” She threaded her way to Mr. Pomeroy’s office through the mass of kids heading for their homerooms. He was behind his desk when she walked in, staring at his open laptop. He waved her toward one of the guest chairs. After a very long three minutes or so, while he scrolled his computer screen and tapped an occasional key, he turned toward her. “Ah, Miss Hatcher, what a disappointment you have been,” he said. Blaire felt something new, a kind of rage, and she had to control her tone when she answered him. “I don’t know what you want from me,” she said. “I don’t know why you call me in to talk to me and show me pictures of myself on the computer. I don’t know what exactly you are up to.” He smiled, a quick grimace. “What I am up to, young lady, is looking out for

you,” he said. “And, first and foremast, I am concerned about some of the people you have been associating with,” he said. “Now, you seem to be tightly connected to two girls from the track team. Now, Ginger Sackett is a fine young woman, but the other girl, Carmen Floria is another matter entirely. She is a Bridgeport girl, here on a special program for inner-city youth, and she is from a tragically broken family.” “I don’t care,” said Blaire. “That doesn’t make Carmen anything less than the other people here.” “Quite,” said Mr. Pomeroy. “But you should know that there have been rumors about Miss Floria’s personal life. Rumors that she has been involved in same-sex relationships. God, the muscles on the girl! She’s virtually a freak.” “Carmen is not a freak,” said Blaire. “Whatever,” he said. “More important, I understand you have been out with the Barnes boy, Wilson. This is a very bad idea, Miss Hatcher, this is a boy who was thrown out of his last school for selling drugs. We wouldn’t have him in Rodger Ludlowe if we could prevent it.” “How do you know all these things?” said Blaire. “Do you have spies all around the school?” “I have friends among the students and staff, many of whom wish to keep me informed about what’s happening in the school,” he said. “I believe you can be one of those friends, perhaps a very special one.” “I’ve gotta get to my homeroom,” said Blaire. “I’m supposed to give a presentation.” “Go then,” said Mr. Pomeroy. “And please take heed of what I am saying to you. I will be talking to you again soon.”

Blaire made it through her morning classes in a daze, stunned and angry. At noon, she found Wil in the hallway outside the lunchroom. “Pomeroy took me out class and said all sorts of crazy things to me,” she said.

Wil leaned down and locked his eyes on her. “What kind of crazy things,” he said. “I’ve heard stuff about him.” “He has a naked picture of me on his computer,” she said. “He sat right there looking at it while he was talking to me.” “Yeah, somebody told me there’s some weird shit on Facebook about you,” he said. “I did not look at it.” Blaire grabbed his right wrist. “He also said you were some sort of drug dealer,” she said. “Got kicked out of your last school because of it.” “That’s true,” he said. “The school was out in Western Massachusetts, small town in the Berkshires. I was in this room with three other guys. Two of them were from Boston and brought all kinds of dope from home every other weekend. Our room was sort of drug central. I did my share, and I would sell kids what they wanted when they came by the room. There really wasn’t anything else to do.” “We all have our secrets I guess,” she said. She leaned into him, got a smell of him. “And right now none of that stuff seems very important.” “I want to see you after practice,” he said. “Pick me up in the parking lot,” she said. “We need to go to this restaurant for dinner. You can talk to my father and this other woman, who runs the place. I need to talk to her.”

When they got to Sally’s restaurant, Blaire’s father was on a stool at the corner of the bar, chatting up an elderly couple. When they left, he turned toward Blaire and Wil. “So, you’re the one,” he said to Wil. “The pole vaulter who has dazzled my daughter.” “I … I am pleased to see you again,” he said. “Dad, please,” said Blaire. Her father took a sip of wine. “That couple I was talking to were arguing about

their cat,” he said. “It seems like it needs $10,000 worth of chemo to cure its leukemia. It’s like ten years old. He wants to let it die. She wants to sell her engagement ring to pay for it.” “Well, it’s her ring, right?” said Wil. “That’s the right answer,” said her father. Sally walked up then. She looked at Wil. “So, you’re the one,” she said. “You look like you need some protein. I’ve got a nice salmon filet for you. And for you, my favorite girl, some pasta with shrimp and scallops, small salad for both of you.” While they ate, they overheard an exchange between a 50ish man with thick white hair, wearing a double-breasted blue blazer with gold buttons and some sort of Italian loafers with no socks, and the waitress on the floor of the restaurant that evening, a 25ish woman, tall and slender with short black hair and an abundance of mascara around her dark brown eyes. “If you put my kid and me up in a decent apartment, I can promise you three blowies a week, minimum,” said the waitress. “How rich are you?” “Really rich,” said the man. “We need to talk on my break,” said the waitress. Wil left after an hour or so, and Blaire’s father began playing billiards with a stout man with a long white beard. Blaire read a chapter from her American History textbook and lingered over a club soda until the bar emptied and Sally came over to talk. Blaire told her about Mr. Pomeroy and the things he said to her, how he wanted to make her a special friend, how he talked about her hair. “This is all happening very fast,” said Sally.

CHAPTER 6

Pulse Optional

C ALVIN FLIPPED OPEN his laptop, called up a new document on Word, and began to type: We are talking here about the most worthless of men, a genuine cancer on society with no redeeming qualities. This is a man who gambled away his life at Foxwoods Casino, losing his wife and children in the process—a man who frittered away what was left of his money and self-regard on a series of pointless affairs with sketchy women and, eventually, developed a severe opioid addiction. Yet we kept him on the faculty all through his long record of stupidity. And now, on this evening, we celebrate Mark Banion’s retirement after thirty years of employment at the Roger Ludlowe School. And good goddamn riddance, I say. All of our lives will improve when we no longer have to see this sad excuse for a human being scurrying down the hallways of our workplace. Now, you may ask why I and my predecessors as heaster kept him employed all these years. I think I can speak for my forebears when I say that Mark Banion survived because he was the most aggressive suck-up any of us had ever encountered. This is a man who knew exactly how to offer himself up in the presence of his boss. He made it clear that he would do anything to please. And, believe me, I tested his limits over the years. He was, by and large, my most active spy, poking his nose into the more interesting crevices of this place— which faculty were closeted gays, which were having affairs with each other, which were diddling the students, which students were selling drugs, which seemed to be plotting suicide. He was a sneaky little rodent, and he somehow oozed his way into the secrets of the school—and reported them back

to me promptly. But, as useful as he was, he was, in many ways, a disgusting human being. I am certain I will be able to replace his reports through the spying and treachery of many of you in this room. So, in conclusion, I must say that I am very grateful never to see this man’s sad, oily, pathetic face ever again. Calvin read it over, chuckled, then deleted the entire text. He began to type again: This is a sad day for all of us, for one of our own, a stalwart member of the Roger Ludlowe community for some thirty years, is leaving to take up his wellearned retirement. Mark Banion will be missed. (WAIT FOR APPLAUSE) For those of you unfamiliar with Marks’s illustrious career at Ludlowe, let me summarize his many exploits—assistant gym coach, physical education instructor, home-room counselor, a brief tour as assistant girl’s field hockey coach. In each of these roles, Mark was seldom absent, earning some measure of respect from students and colleagues. “You could always count on Mark to be there when something strange was going on,” said one of his fellow teachers. Mark always had his hand on the pulse of Roger Ludlowe, and he was always eager to keep s aware of the ebb and flow of daily events at our school. We shall all miss his bone-dry wit and his annual appearance as an elf in the annual Christmas show. So, let us all raise a glass of this moderately priced champagne—have to watch the budget, after all, (WAIT FOR LAUGH). Here’s to Mark Banion, a reliable man in his own way. (RAISE GLASS, TAKE SIP) The speech went off without a hitch the next night at Banion’s farewell dinner, held in the rear banquet room at the Fairfield Fish Co. Calvin felt gratified, full of good cheer when he finished his toast and sat back down. Half of the people in the room didn’t get some of Calvin’s inside jokes—Banion got fired as assistant field hockey coach when he got caught taking cellphone pictures inside the girls’ locker room; he was a man without discernible wit, bone-dry or otherwise; each year he disgraced himself at the Christmas festival, showing up drunk and sweaty and then stuffing his fat frame into a skintight green body stocking. Some veteran faculty considered his performance, staggering around the stage with a silly grin on his face, to be the low point of their holiday

season. Still, Calvin felt that enough of the crowd would notice his cleverness, and several people murmured their approval of his remarks as he walked back to his table. He felt like the center of attention, the most important man in the room. He hadn’t even wanted to give the speech, but it turned out that a woman from the town Board of Education would be attending the dinner. It never hurt to dazzle a crowd with his erudition when a potentially useful politician was around to take note. The superintendent’s job, with a salary nicely up in the six figures, would be open within the next two years and Calvin saw no reason why he wouldn’t be considered a favorite for the job. He endured the dinner, baked scrod with whipped potatoes and buttered carrots, and tolerated the inane chatter of the faculty within his earshot. By the time the lemon meringue pie finally appeared, he had lost most of the bonhomie he had summoned up on stage. He drained his coffee, gave a vague wave to the people sitting near him, and moved toward the front door. As he made his way out, he saw that the owner of the restaurant, Sally Moses, was behind the bar, toweling a wet spot and chatting up customers. He avoided her gaze, which he often found disturbing, as if she could see inside him. Then he saw that the Hatcher girl and her insipid father were perched on stools at the rear of the bar. Just as he ed them, the girl raised her head from the paperwork in front of her and caught his eye. She stared at him for perhaps five seconds, a haughty, insolent stare, and then she turned her eyes back onto the papers on the bar, as if dismissing him. On the ride home, Calvin couldn’t stop obsessing about the girl. Yes, he wanted to have her sexually, to strip her down and make her touch him whenever or wherever he wanted. More than that though, he wanted her to bend her will to him, to make her stop looking at him as if she had the power. She was a mere girl, a child, and she needed to understand how the world worked. She needed to know that she only walked around the school with her nose in the air because she had been allowed to by people too weak or careless to teach her some humility. Calvin thought about her naked in the picture on his laptop, coming out of the shower, wrapping the towel around her long red hair. He could feel the heat rushing to his groin; for a moment, he thought he would be forced to pull over into a parking lot somewhere and masturbate. He was still rock-hard when he pulled into his driveway.

Emma and his mother were unsurprisingly huddled in front of the television screen in the sunroom. They were watching a movie about a plucky frontier family on the Hallmark Channel, and his mother was sobbing and pressing a handkerchief to her face. “It’s just not fair, what happened to these people,” she said. “They make some of the Indians to be decent human beings in these movies, but they were all really just savages.” Calvin sat down and he exchanged glances with Emma, who seemed to be halfasleep or half-drunk on Pino Grigio. “Not too politically correct,” he said. “This been going on all night?” “Oh, there was some violence early on that set her off, nothing too graphic,” said Emma. “These people were just barely human,” said his mother. It was a Friday, not a traditional sex night, but Calvin was ripe for it. By the time the movie ended happily—a large dinner scene with settlers and Indians sharing a meal—his mother was sound asleep, snoring, with her head draped against the couch cushion. They got her to her room, and Emma spent ten minutes getting her into bed. When she got back to the living room, Calvin had mixed them both Daquiris. “I know this isn’t a regular night for it, but what would you say to a session?” “Okay,” she said. “But you might have to do a couple things I want.” Those things turned out to be quite pedestrian—-some light whipping, vile language—and they managed to copulate effectively twice. “That was quite vigorous,” she said just before he shut off the light. “You must have been angry at someone.”

Next day at school, Calvin faced an early-morning meeting with a 32-year-old music teacher who had been accused of taking liberties with a sophomore girl. The girl’s parents had not yet filed an official report, but they had been by his office to let him know one was coming. The accused, a skinny, slightly hunched-backed man called Armitage, showed up five minutes early and shuffled to a chair, eyes down on the carpet the whole

way in. “Soooo,” said Calvin, “we’ve got a bit of a mess here.” “Tell me about it,” said the man, tapping his black-frame glasses up off the end of his nose. “You know, a young lady, a sophomore, just sixteen years old, has made an accusation against you,” said Calvin. “She says you coerced her into various sexual situations. Coerced. That’s the word her parents used when they came to see me. I’m guessing their lawyer told them to use that word.” “I kissed her maybe ten times and touched her breasts maybe three times, but that’s it.” “That’s enough for these people to derail your entire life, you moron.” “I probably deserve it. I guess I took advantage of an innocent girl. I’m very sorry about it. Will that help? If I apologize to the parents?” Calvin leaned forward, palms flat on his desk. “That would be an extremely dumb thing to do,” he said. Armitage looked confused, mouth hanging on. “I don’t know why that would be,” he said. “I really am sorry.” “Nobody cares. You should go find yourself a lawyer and come up with some kind of defense.” “I believe I am just going to it the whole thing. I deserve to pay for what I did.” “You really are an idiot. Now, does the girl have any proof of any kind that any of this groping took place? Pictures on her phone? Text messages where you say you want to ravage her? Anything like that?” “No, nothing. It just happened a few times after I gave her a lesson.” “Then you just deny it. It never happened. The girl is delusional, possibly schizophrenic.”

“None of that is true.” “So what. I doubt the girl’s parents will wish to drag their child into court and hear all these stories go public. Just deny the whole thing. I’ll probably have to fire you, but I can probably keep it off your record so you can get another job. That’s better than facing charges. You could end up in jail, getting coerced by a bunch of Latin Kings.” “So, I just say it never happened.” “Just a little girl’s fantasy,” said Calvin. “Poor thing had a crush on her favorite teacher and now she’s the sophomore scorned, trying to get even.” “I guess people might believe that,” said Armitage. “So, how do I go about telling everyone nothing happened?” Goldschmidt waddled into Calvin’s office a few minutes after the poor soul departed. He presented his usual sweaty, unpleasant figure, his rolls of fat wedged into a blue blazer and khakis. “That tie is an abomination,” said Calvin. “Sort of a mustardy color, with green stripes the color of vomit. Must have picked that up on sale at the CVS.” Goldschmidt swallowed hard three times and sat down. “It was a gift,” he said. “From my aunt.” “That must be the blind aunt,” said Calvin. “Now, what are you here for? I’ve got to get through a staff meeting at ten and I was hoping to have a cup of tea and a moment’s peace before that fresh hell begins.” “It’s about my annual employee review,” he said. “I was supposed to get it in December. Then, when I asked you about it in January, you told me you’d be getting back to me. And nothing happened. So, I’m wondering when I might expect to get the, you know, review.” Calvin leaned back in his high-backed chair. He knew that the conversation had nothing to do with an employee review—Calvin worked the man over every year, shredding him until he was close to tears. He could hardly be anxious to hear the annual savaging. But, in almost every case, the employee review is accompanied by a salary increase of some sort. Calvin had little control over the raises the unionized faculty and staff were given, but Goldschmidt was

management. He also had a wife with tastes richer than his income, and she was the sort of woman who made it clear that her husband was showing every sign of being a major loser. Calvin had complete control over the man’s life, and he was enjoying the moment. “Don’t know why you’re in such a hurry to hear about your obvious limitations,” he said. “No, no, it’s just …” “Just, just. We both know you are hoping to extract a larger slice of the very precarious management budget.” Goldschmidt was beaten, head down. “We’ll talk more at the proper time,” said Calvin. After Goldschmidt left, he chuckled to himself for a full minute.

The staff meeting took place in a large conference room near the entrance of the school, and Calvin, as the chair of any such meeting, enjoyed making people wait for him. Often, as faculty and staff got bored, they would blurt out negative comments about the school and how Calvin was running it. Goldschmidt and at least two or three other people were there to write down whatever the critics had to say and then report back to him. Calvin took his time walking along the empty hallways from his office, peering into the glass window of a classroom now and then. A young math teacher, a nervous blonde with a slight limp, on the first floor appeared to drop her chalk when she spotted him watching her. The murmuring of the crowd ceased when he entered. All of the thirty-six seats at the main table were filled and another dozen people were perched on folding chairs around the corners of the room. “Ah, a full house,” he said, when he took his seat at the head of the table. “Everyone must want something.” He ruffled through a stack of papers Goldschmidt had placed in a manila folder for him. “Terribly busy this week,” he said. “I’m afraid I didn’t have time to go over the notes for this meeting. Perhaps the embattled Mr. Goldschmidt would be good enough to outline the agenda.” Goldschmidt’s fat face was flushed and his hair was matted with sweat. “Ah, we have to go over the stuff from the BOE,” he said.

“Ah, the latest set of edicts from Big Brother,” said Calvin. “Truly always a joy to hear what they have to say.” He looked around the room and saw that no representative from the town’s Board of Education had deigned to attend the gathering to explain or defend the rulings—not a good sign. “Okay, I gather you have all seen the latest missives,” he said. “Tell me why what they want us to do is stupid and how we can keep from doing it.” A senior history teacher, a wiry man with curly brown hair, said that a new ruling from the BOE barred any member of the teachers’ union from ing all new teachers for the first two months they are on the job. The man, who happened to be on the board of directors of the union, said that the ruling violated their current contract with the town and was also in violation of a specific codicil of the Connecticut State Constitution. The teacher said the rule is so obviously illegal that it would be quashed in the courts, but the union would rather not waste a lot of money on lawyers. Calvin said the union should probably just ignore the whole thing and keep talking to new teachers. If someone complains, you threaten to go to court. That means somebody on the BOE will have to convince the selectmen to allocate money and time to fight the case. Whatever genius came up with this notion will probably be told to forget about it and move on. “Worth a chance, anyway,” said Calvin. Next, the chief security guard, a plump, excitable man named Petrocelli, said that a new BOE ruling required that all students’ cellphones were to be turned off and put away during classes. The ruling called for the confiscation of the phones of repeat offenders. Petrocelli said that over the past month there had been eleven physical confrontations between students and teachers who tried to take their phones. He said the kids completely lose it when someone gets near their electronics. He said one kid had tried to stab a chemistry teacher with a broken Bunsen burner. Calvin said they should follow the policy of a phone-free classroom, but refrain from confiscating any students’ electronic gear. “Some of these kids are walking around the school with $5,000 worth of phones, laptops, and I-Watches,” he said. “There are probably, I don’t know, a million dollars of personal electronics in this school every day. We can’t become responsible for any of it. We can’t take possession of it” “So, we should simply ignore the kids who are on their phones basically all the time,” said a sad, dumpy man named Steve Flax, recently demoted from chairman of the biology department.

Flax was a whiner, endlessly complaining about everything from the curriculum to the color of the curtains in his classroom. Calvin despised the man, seizing on mediocre test scores in the department, to replace him with a woman younger and far less qualified. “Yes, you will simply ignore the cretins who stare at their screens, watching cats copulate all day,” he said. “They are already lost, another generation of morons.” The room went silent. “What else?” said Calvin. Then a sociology teacher named Hanrahan, a tall, bulky man in a bright red sweater, stood up and raised his hand. “Um, I’m, um, the liaison with the BOE on drug issues and they have issued some statistics on the whole opioid thing.” Calvin had appointed Hanrahan to the job largely because he seemed too stupid to raise much fuss in the role. Calvin was aware of the horrific spread of opioid use in the town and in the state. He saw the outbreak as a way to thin the human herd of its weaker , improving the species in the process. “So, what are the terrifying totals?” he said. Hanrahan read some numbers off a clipboard he held in front of him—“Over the past six months, there were 37 overdoses and two deaths reported in the town of Fairfield due to opioid use. In 31 of those incidents, the victims were students at one of the town’s middle or high schools.” “Victims,” said Calvin. “Terrible, terrible situation. Can we wrap this up? Anybody have anything else urgent?” His heart sank when Victoria Farmer raised her highly manicured fingers. She was a tall, 40ish woman with straightened black hair and a prominent nose, one of two black teachers at the school, and Calvin, required to fill a slot on the BOE’s committee on racial issues, had picked her, hoping never to hear another word about the committee or her again. Sadly, she often insisted on filling his ear with the latest news on the racial front. “Roger Ludlowe has once again been cited for the lack of diversity among its faculty,” she said. She nodded her head toward the Pakistani woman who taught English grammar on one end of the table and the elderly black man who taught math. “With just three minority , we trail the other high school and most middle schools in this town.” Calvin always felt he detected some exotic, unsettling odor when he was around black people. “Bring me superior candidates of any sex, creed, or color and I

will hire them in a flash,” he said. “That’s it.”

Goldschmidt screwed up his lunch order again, providing a limp haddock filet instead of the sea bass he had stipulated. He ate it anyway, but he was in a foul mood and nothing he could find on the internet amused him. Finally, he buzzed the new girl in the outer office and told her to go fetch the Bronson girl from her civics class. The girl was more sallow than usual, with blue-yellow half-moons beneath her eyes. “You’re not sick, are you?” he said. “You look half-dead.” “I caught like a minor flu thing over the weekend,” she said. “But I’m all right now.” “Get on with it then,” he said. “Tell me something evil that you did.” He pointed his phone at her and pushed Record. “I went down on Melanie McCubbin at this sleepover on Saturday,” she said, looking straight into the screen. “I liked it too.” She fellated him then, competently enough, but he came before he wanted to and he didn’t feel she had put all that much energy into it. “Swallow it, he said. At home that night, as he sat at the dinner table watching his dotty mother and his strange fish of a wife masticate their food, he thought not for the first time that he would cheerfully murder then both if he thought he could get away with it. Later, after dinner, he left them in front of an Antiques Roadshow rerun and walked back to his study and locked the door. He opened his laptop and scrolled down his chat-room file until he came to FATTIES. He called it up and landed in the middle of a conversation about the joys of cunillingus with obese Asian women: JOYBOY: IT’S LIKE YOU GET THE ENTIRE TASTE OF THE ORIENT RIGHT THERE ON YOUR TONGUE. IT’S LIKE FRIED RICE WITH A LOT OF SOY SAUCE. RALPHIE: I ONCE SPENT A HALF-HOUR WORKING ON THIS FILIPINO FATTIE. LITTLE SHORT GIRL, HAD A KIND OF WANDERING EYE AND

THESE BIG FLAT TITS. JOYBOY: JESUS, YOU WOULD FUCK ANY FATTIE WITH A PULSE. RALPHIE: PULSE OPTIONAL.

Next morning at school, Goldschmidt was waiting in his outer office. He had an anxious look on his fat face, like he was about to vomit. “Now you are not the first person I wanted to see on my doorstep,” said Calvin. “It’s just, just the whole annual review thing,” he said. “Fine,” said Calvin. He looked at the new girl on the reception desk, a heavyset brunette, “Have someone get me a double espresso,” he said. He looked back at Goldschmidt. “Come in,” he said. When they were settled, Calvin put his feet up on his desk and leaned back in his brown leather chair. “Let’s make this simple,” he said. “I find your services wanting almost every day. You are incapable of executing the simplest tasks with any degree of competence. You sweat constantly.” Goldschmidt was hunched forward in his chair, hands knotted in front of him. Now he really did look like he had stomach trouble of some kind. “I’m trying to do the best I can,” he said. “Sadly, that is probably true,” said Calvin. “Let us say that over the past few months you have amply demonstrated your limitations. As for your salary, I believe that you are somewhere around one-half as competent as most of the other geniuses who wander around this place, and so you will receive one-half of the average raise people received in the last year. The overall average was 3.5 percent, so you will receive a 1.5 percent increase. I rounded down.” For just a moment, Goldschmidt appeared to want to debate the issue, but then he mumbled something unintelligible and scurried out of the office. The session with Goldschmidt put Calvin in a good mood. The girl messed up the coffee order the first time, but managed to produce a able double espresso the second, and for a moment at least he felt that the day would not be as bad as he had feared. Every third Friday during the school year, his presence

was required at a luncheon meeting at the Board of Education headquarters in a four-story monstrosity of a building on the far east side of town. The food was always the same—mid-level Asian takeout from a local restaurant. The cast was always the same as well—the superintendent, a tall, broad-hipped woman who was rumored to be a closeted lesbian; her simpering assistants, a 30ish male with enormous teeth and a fat 40ish female with thick glasses; the six middle-school principals and his fellow high-school heaster, a bent, befuddled man on the cusp of retirement. That day, he arrived fifteen minutes late to avoid the pre-meeting chit-chat and slipped into a chair at the far end of the conference table. He nodded as pleasantly as he could manage at the middle-school principals on either side of him. The soup was lukewarm and the noodles were greasy, and by the time they had cleared the wrappers and begun the agenda he was in a foul mood. He could feel his contempt building as the superintendent babbled about faulty paperwork coming into her department. “It’s becoming impossible to maintain our records because so many reports are filled out incorrectly or are not submitted at all,” she said. “I’ve had to use like a person-and-a-half in my office just to do nothing but file reports to you and the state and the Feds and I don’t know who else,” said Taylor, the frizzy-haired principal of a middle school near the shoreline. Everyone but the superintendent and her minions laughed and nodded their heads. The next item on the program involved a new state directive regarding school safety. A half-dozen schools around the country had been shot up by crazed students over the previous few months and the brainiacs in Hartfold had stirred themselves to respond in their usual way, with a blizzard of paperwork and a new commission. Calvin, who kept a fully loaded .38 Smith and Wesson revolver in his desk drawer, let his mind wander while the people at the table exchanged platitudes about the limits of gun control and the sorry state of mental-health care. He felt certain that if some pimpled moron with a firearm showed up in his office, he could protect himself, and that was his sole interest in the issue. The meeting ended on a sour note, when two middle-school principals got into an argument about funding for their respective building plans. One of them, a fat bald 40ish man named Farnham, had his heart set on a new gym floor, and the

other, a chunky, black-haired, 35ish woman named diPietro, was focused on a new computer lab. The superintendent had been playing them off each other for most of the semester and they were becoming edgy. Farnham at one point referred to diPietro as “a gross human being in all respects.” She called him “a raging narcissist.”

Classes were letting out by the time Calvin got back to the school, but the parking lot was still half-full because a dual track meet with Weston High School was taking place on the athletic field. He dropped his laptop and briefcase on his desk and then climbed two flights of stairs to the roof of the school, which overlooked the field and the track meet that appeared to be in its early stages. He scanned the field with his binoculars until he spotted the Hatcher girl. She looked reed-thin in her outfit, a tight white uniform top and brief blue shorts. That hair had been pulled back and gathered in a thick crimson ponytail. Calvin watched as she did a series of stretching exercises, then moved over to a bench and sat down next to her two friends, the obviously homosexual Bridgeport girl. The three of them were huddled together and seemed to all be talking at once. After twenty minutes or so, the announcer called for the 1500 meter race and the Hatcher girl moved onto the track with a half-dozen other runners. She took the lead from the beginning, her red tail flowing behind her. Calvin had to ire the grace and fluidity with which she ran, a coltish stride that powered her ahead. She maintained a ten-yard lead until the last lap, when she broke into a full sprint and won by at least thirty yards. After a moment, the announcer declared that she had just broken the league record for the 1500. Calvin took up his binoculars and stared at her face, flushed and beaming with her victory, as the girls from the Ludlowe team crowded around her. A few minutes later, as she sat on a bench changing her shoes, Wilson Barnes walked behind her, bent over, and kissed the top of her head. Calvin walked back down to his office and quickly buzzed Goldschmidt. “In here now,” he said over the intercom. Goldschmidt showed up less than a minute later. “Don’t sit down,” said Calvin. “And write down what I tell you. You have the memory of an 80-year-old.” Goldschmidt fumbled in his tweed jacket for a notebook and pen. “Okay,” he

said. “Ready.” “That contraband the security guard seized from that junior in the parking lot in December, right around the holidays,” said Calvin. “I presume it is still in your custody.” “Like you told me,” said Goldschmidt. “Locked in a safe in my attic.” Well, get it,” said Calvin. “Then distribute samples of it in the lockers of the following students: Wilson Barnes, Ginger Sackett, and Carmen Floria.” “Put it in their lockers?” “Precisely. Do it yourself after hours, when there’s nobody around.” “Why?” “That is not a word you are permitted to use in my presence,” said Calvin.

CHAPTER 7

No Fun Intended

D OUG WAS IN the middle of a walk along Beach Road, ambling past a stretch of grossly oversized houses lined up on the sand, when his phone began buzzing in the pocket of his sweat pants. It was Sally. “Something’s going on with Blaire at school,” she said. “You need to come see me now.” “Shouldn’t I go to school to see Blaire?” said Doug. “No, what’s happening hasn’t happened yet,” she said. “I just need to explain some things to you.” “I’m confused now,” he said. “Just come here,” she said. Doug jogged back to his car in the Penfield Beach parking lot and made it to Sally’s restaurant in ten minutes. She was behind the bar, trying to break up an argument between two 60ish men wearing golf outfits. The subject was apparently the current White House occupant. “Anyone who is still riding that train is too stupid to talk to,” said one the men—fat-faced with a full mustache. “Then why don’t you just shut up?” said the other man—taller, thinner, balder. “Because you just keep spouting this nonsense,” said the first man. “Tariffs. The goddamn wall.” “You’re just unwilling to it that you’re a closet Commie,” said the second man. “You know, I read the other day that the North Koreans have a department of propaganda and agitation. You should apply for a job there.” “All right, you two,” said Sally. “Finish up and go chase a little white ball

around for a while. You’re bringing down the mood of the place.” She walked over to Doug. “I’ve got to do the thing,” she said. Then she moved her left hand a few inches and the two men down the bar and the couple at the table in the corner and the waitress bringing their drinks and everything else stopped and fell into the shadows while a bright white light spilled onto the bar in front of Doug. “I’m never gonna get used to this,” he said. Sally seemed to glow slightly, her yellow hair shimmering in the light. “Just pay attention,” she said. “This is important.” “It’s just not, you know, normal,” he said. Sally leaned forward, locking into his eyes. “Now listen,” she said. “Later this afternoon, the heaster at Blaire’s school is going to set in motion a series of events that will involve her in some challenging situations. You have to be there for her.” “The heaster?” he said. “That guy Pomeroy. Creepy Cal.” “Yes,” she said. “Now, I just wanted to let you know that this whole thing has started.” “I need a glass of wine,” said Doug. “Can you do that while we’re in this weird light.” “Sure,” she said and leaned over to grab a bottle of the pinot grigio from the refrigerator. “I guess I’m not surprised that you know all about this stuff before it happens,” he said. “But maybe you could tell me if this is why I’m here in the first place, I mean in Fairfield. I mean my book getting republished, then the award. It all seems like some sort of set-up.” “Don’t overthink it,” she said. “Just help Blaire through this.” Sally waved her hand again and the restaurant came alive. Doug had two glasses of wine and a bowl of Rhode Island chowder, then Sally told him to go to Burr House and work for two hours and come back to the bar. “Blaire will be calling,” she said.

Doug took notes from a slim biographical sketch about Levi Burr, who captained a forty-foot sloop called the Ganges during the early 1800s. He had a deep-water career early on, hauling fifty-ton loads of lumber up the coast to New York from the Carolinas, then settled back in Fairfield and pulled loads of onions from Southport Harbor to New York City. He got rich when he figured out a return cargo that Connecticut onion and tobacco farmers treasured—horse manure from the city. He had occasionally picked up a load of lumber or coal in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, but most of the time he had sailed back to Southport with empty holds. In the warm weather, the smell coming off the Ganges was so rank that, after his crew had unloaded all the manure, the harbormaster required that he anchor out a quarter-mile from the dock and row in with a dinghy. Doug dutifully took notes about Captain Levi, with no concept of what he was learning that would help him write his book. Then he thought about what Sally had said about Blaire and he could feel his heart flutter just a bit when he tried to choke back the panic. Both the bar and the dining room were half-full when he got back to Sally’s. She was busy making drinks and chatting up the patrons, but she found time to drift by his stool and place a glass of white wine in front of him. “You should take it easy,” she said. “You’ll need to have your wits about you later.” “I hate it when people say that,” said Doug. “Like I spend most of the time with my wits off in the ozone somewhere.” She hit him with her smile. Doug sipped at his wine while he waited for whatever was about to occur. A 40ish couple across the bar from him began to raise their voices, not quite to argument level but close. The woman, a slim brunette with a long narrow face, was apparently upset with her companion, a chubby man with black hair going gray, over his dining tactics. “What sort of person eats their whole entrée first, then his starch, then his veg?” she said. “A silly man, that’s who.” The man put down his fork. “I don’t know of any rule book that says you have to eat a little bit of everything along the way,” he said. “If I’m gonna have a steak, I like to go ahead and eat the steak.” “You are pathetic,” said the woman. A few minutes later, another couple came in and took two stools next to Doug.

“Thanks for keeping me company while I sucked down my nicotine fix,” said the man—thin, olive-skinned, with a high-pitched, almost feminine voice. “God, I wish I could quit. You’re so smart not to have started.” “Oh, I smoked for about five years, right after high school,” said the woman— short, stocky, with brown hair tied up in a bun. “But that’s a whole other thing.” “A whole other thing?” “It’s like this,” she said. “When I got to high school, my father said he’d buy me a car for graduation if I didn’t smoke during the whole four years.” “So you were a non-smoker in high school then went tobacco crazy in college?” “No, you see my father had this very profitable business, a chain of dry-cleaning stores, when he made that promise to me. But then, during my sophomore year, his partner stole a bunch of money and the whole business like imploded. So my father couldn’t have bought me a car.” “So?” “So I started smoking to let him off the hook, quit five years later.” Blaire called a few minutes later, her voice at an hysterical pitch. Something bad has happened, she said, and she didn’t know what to do. Doug told her to get a ride to Sally’s and the three of them would work it out. She showed up a half-hour later, clutching an armful of books, and settled into the stool next to Doug. Her eyes were rimmed in red and her arms were folded in front of her in a protective mode. “I don’t believe this,” she said. “You don’t believe what?” “During seventh period, Fairfield cops came into the school and started opening lockers,” she said. “They say they found dope in Wil’s locker and in Ginger’s and in Carmen’s too. They went into all their classes and took them away in handcuffs.” “What the hell is going on?” said Doug. “I can’t believe the girls are involved in anything like that. And I gotta believe Wil is too smart to bring anything to

school after all he’s been through.” Blaire spit out her words. “It’s Mr. Pomeroy,” she said. “I saw him in the hallway after all the stuff happened and he gave me this sick smile, like he wanted me to know he had someone plant the stuff in the lockers.” “Now, why would he do that?” said Doug. Blaire looked over at him with the face of the young child she once was, about to break into tears over all the pain the world can hand a five-year-old. “It’s complicated,” she said. Sally came over then and grabbed Blaire’s hand. They huddled together, heads inches from each other, and began to talk in quiet tones that Doug could not quite make out. He sipped his wine for a while, then got up to find the men’s room. As he ed the entrance to the rear dining room, he spotted a large banner across the back wall. It read: NO FUN INTENDED. Sally and Blaire had finished talking by the time Doug got back to the bar. “So, what’s the deal with the people in the back room?” he said to Sally. “There’s about twenty of them and half the men are wearing bow ties and tweed jackets, it’s like a nerdfest, and they’ve got a strange banner up on the back wall.” “Ah, that’s the Fairfield MENSA chapter,” said Sally. “They meet here every month. They’re very big on irony.” When Sally left to tend to another customer, Doug swiveled his stool around to face Blaire. “You know, I love it that you have Sally to talk to,” he said. “But I’m here too if you want to tell me what’s going on.” She looked at him, and her face said she had secrets he could never imagine. “Well, Sally just convinced me that we have to face up to the situation with Mr. Pomeroy,” she said. “Has he approached you in some sort of … romantic way?” said Doug. “Sort of,” she said. “But it’s pervier than that. It’s like he wants me to be his slave.” Doug sat there for a moment, trying to decide whether he was more scared than

angry, and Sally came back to take their order. “You know you have to confront this man,” she said. “He’s not gonna leave you alone.” “Do we call the cops?” said Doug. “I can’t prove anything,” said Blaire. “He brings you into his office and pervs out, nobody else there. And I can’t tell the cops I know he planted the drugs because he gave me his sick-ass smile.” “There’s another way,” said Sally. “We have to find a way to make this man uncomfortable.” “I have no idea what that means,” said Doug. “That’s all right,” said Sally. “You don’t have to.” Blaire was quiet on the drive home and she went straight to her room and shut the door. Doug got drunk for the first time in three months that night, managing to get through a half-bottle of Patron Silver left over from taco night before he ed out on the couch.

Blaire didn’t disturb him when she left for school and he lurched awake, sweaty and nauseous, just before noon. On most days, he could have stayed home and nursed his hangover, but that Friday he had to go to the city to talk to Mark Bradley, the editor of the Burr book. Doug was at that point four months late in delivering the first set of chapters to the publisher and Bradley had insisted on a one-on-one in-person discussion. “We are right at the point of becoming concerned about your progress,” he said. Doug hustled through his ablutions, jumped into the Volvo, and made it to the train station for the 12:32 express to Grand Central with a couple minutes to spare. He read a book, the Essays of E.B. White, during the 79 minutes into the city, while every other person around him was fiddling with their cellphones or laptops. He tried to decide whether he was becoming an eccentric person; he had always found eccentric people annoying. He was supposed to meet Bradley at the Knickerbocker Bar and Grill in the Village and he slumped into the back seat of the cab as it careened through the traffic on the way downtown.

A heavyset, dark-skinned man wearing a dark blue suit waved at Doug from the bar as he walked into the place. Doug went over to him and stuck out his hand. “Hi,” he said, “I’m looking for a fella named Mark Bradley. Don’t know what he looks like.” The man’s broad face broke into a dazzling display of perfect white teeth. “I’m your man,” he said in that high- voice. “I’m betting you weren’t looking for a South Asian fellow. Pakistani on my mother’s side. Scotch-Irish on my father’s. Long story.” Doug took a stool next to him. Bradley was working on what looked like a Campari-soda; Doug asked for a draft beer and a chilled shot of Patron Silver. “Just a smidgen of a hangover,” he said. “Nothing too heinous.” After they had ordered their lunch—poached salmon for Bradley, a rare lamb burger and a wedge salad for Doug—Bradley came out with it: “So, we may as well get right to it—what’s going on with our Burr project?” Doug waved the bartender over for another tequila shot. “Well, I’ve turned up a lot of interesting stuff about Burr’s family roots in Connecticut,” he said. “Quite a fascinating bunch—tavern owners, politicians, onion farmers. There’s a sea captain worth a chapter all by himself.” “That’s … not really what we’ve been hoping for on this project,” said Bradley. “We’re hoping that you focus more on the man himself and, you know, his relationship with Hamilton.” “Go right for the gunplay, that about right?” said Doug. “Well, something focused. Happily, Bill O’Reilly is no longer a rival after all the unpleasantness at Fox. But someone is sure to come out with a Burr book.” Doug took down his shot. “Things have gotten a bit complicated in Fairfield,” he said. He waved the bartender over for another beer. “My daughter has got herself into some sort of fix. And there’s this woman, owns a restaurant, who has sort of taken us under her wing. In order to do some new research on Aaron, I’ll need to spend a lot of time at the New York Public Library and then out to Princeton. And I’ll need to get through some of the records up at the statehouse in Albany. Then, Washington, to work in the archives at the Library of Congress. Anyway, I need to be in Connecticut before I move on to those other places to handle this

thing with my daughter.” The food arrived. Bradley’s large brown eyes looked sad. “So, you feel you will need some extra time to complete this project,” he said. “Lots,” said Doug. “Jesus, this lamb burger is insane. Who came up with mint mayonnaise?”

He drove directly to Sally’s restaurant when he got to Fairfield that afternoon. It was a gloomy Friday with rain in the forecast, and the bar was jammed with happy-hour regulars. He found a stool next to Tony, a tall, doughy man with a thick crop of snow-white hair; he told people that at age thirty he had written an investment algorithm that he leases to a German bank for $100,000 per month. He says he gets paid extra if he has to teach some of the bank’s analysts how to use it. He claims he is writing an autobiography about his days on Wall Street called How White Men Steal. Tony was about three-quarters drunk and arguing across the bar with Jeff, a round-faced man with glasses and a brown brush cut who taught civics at Joel Barlow High School in Easton; when drunk, he would tell anyone who would listen that he was writing a book about his career in the classroom called Smart Kids Don’t Pee. “You never see an A student asking for the bathroom key,” he would say. Doug couldn’t quite determine what the two of them were arguing about— something involving how technology was destroying the next generation of humans around the world. “If we were looking for excitement, we would shake the snow globe,” said Jeff. “They are living in the snow globe.” Sally came over then with a glass of Pinot Grigio for him. “You look terrible,” she said. “It’s the demon rum,” he said. “For some reason, I had a bunch of tequila last night and then some shots with this clown in New York at lunch. Finished three beers on the train ride back out here.” “There’s always a reason for that sort of thing,” she said. “Sometimes, it’s not all bad.” “Well, I’m really confused about Blaire’s situation,” he said. “And now this editor wants to know why I’m not spinning out a quickie book about Aaron Burr.”

“Maybe you don’t really want to write about Aaron Burr,” she said. “And the thing with Blaire will work itself work.” Doug sipped the wine. “Where is she, by the way?” he said. “She has a dual meet in Danbury, then spending the night with a couple of her teammates,” she said. “She called me an hour ago, said she couldn’t reach your cell.” “I let the battery run out,” he said. “I am an analog guy in a digital world.” “Well, finish your wine and then you’re gonna eat a nice piece of sea bass and drink two cups of coffee. You’re gonna chat up the regulars and then you’re gonna come home with me.” “Nice to have clear instructions,” said Doug.

Sally took him someplace new in bed that night, right to the edge of what he could handle. After, they lay back on the pillows and he tried to catch his breath. “I don’t know that that last thing is good for my heart,” he said. She leaned over and fluffed up the hairs on the center of his chest. “You’ll be fine,” she said. “There’s plenty left of you.” Later, she warmed up some leftover chili and cut up large chunks of corn bread. She opened a bottle of Cotes du Rhone. They ate naked at the kitchen table, listening to Thelonius Monk. Before he left in the morning, Sally handed him another set of vellum pages. “I think you should read this a few times,” she said. “It’s relevant.” “To what?” he said. “Oh,” she said, “you’ll see.”

Blaire was sitting at the kitchen table eating a bowl of Shredded Wheat when he

got home. It was the first time that morning that he realized it was a Saturday. “How did the meet go?” he said. “I almost lost the 1500 to some girl I beat by a half-minute last month,” she said. “And the team got waxed. Everybody’s messed up because of Ginger and Carmen.” “I was gonna have a run up Beach Road,” he said. “Think you can go slow enough to come along?” “Sure,” she said. “I miss our little slow jogs.” They parked at Jennings and ran a four-mile loop along the Beach Road and then along Old Post Road back to the car. Doug was puffing and sweaty by the end; Blaire looked as if she had just stepped out for a stroll. After they had stopped at home for showers and a change of clothes, Doug drove them to Sally’s restaurant. It was almost 1:30 and the lunch crowd had thinned out, with just three tables occupied and just two 60ish men at the bar. Doug found two stools next to the window, but Sally swooped in and took Blaire around to the far side of the bar. “My friend and I need to talk,” she said. She brought Doug a glass of pinot grigio and a list of the daily specials. The two 60ish men seemed to be just under half-drunk and their voices had raised enough so that he could hear them clearly. “Do you get all that from those ridiculous Ayn Rand novels?” said one of the men—squat, almost bald, red-faced. “Better than your precious Bible,” said the other man—tall, portly, thick black hair, black-framed glasses. “Look,” he said, “all I’m saying is that when you gave me that trout, you were getting something out of it, the act of giving someone a gift made you feel better about yourself. People don’t do things without getting something in return. By the way, I sautéed the filets in butter, lemon, a little parsley, and some capers. Crazy good.” “I’m so pleased that you enjoyed them,” said the bald man. “My wife loved it. Little yellow rice and some asparagus. Bottle of Italian white.” “Fabulous, but please just consider for a moment that doing something nice for

someone else can really be more than some sort of transaction, that it’s more like the connective tissue between people, the way people have survived down the centuries. You know the words—Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” “See, that’s exactly my point. You do something nice so the person you do it for will do something nice for you. It’s like now I owe you for the goddamn trout.”

Blaire was quiet, solemn when she came back around the bar. “I don’t suppose you want to tell me what’s going on,” he said. She looked at him with those sad eyes. “Oh, it’s a whole thing that I’m working out with Sally,” she said. “It’s kind of complicated.” They both had crab cakes for dinner and then she said she needed to go home to work on a paper for her history class. She disappeared into her bedroom when they got there and Doug tried to get interested in a TV movie about King Arthur and his knights, but his mind kept drifting back to the troubled girl up in her bedroom and the demons that seemed to be afflicting her. He fished his cellphone out of his back pocket and punched in Sally’s number. “I think I’m gonna close early,” she said. “Place is empty except for two drunks at the bar who are about to experience the joy of Uber.” “I’m just sitting here trying to figure out what’s happening with my daughter,” he said. “And she won’t tell me anything.” She was quiet on the line for three or four seconds. “Have you read the new pages I gave you?” she said. “Not yet,” he said. “I’ve been sort of edgy.” “Well, read them,” she said. “That’s the best thing you could do right now for Blaire.” After she hung up, he brewed a pot of Earl Gray and carried it to his office desk. He pulled the rolled pages out of his bottom drawer, flattened them onto the desktop, and began to read:

DAY THREE

I woke in the darkest part of the night and lay there in my misery for an hour, listening to the rats scratching at the strands of filth in the corner of the cell, before I drifted off again into a dream of imps and demons. The old woman came in an hour or so past the gray dawn, carrying another tin plate loaded with her porridge and a larger urn full of water and a blue bowl. “They said you may use this water to clean yourself as best you can,” she said. “They said they will be bringing you out in public later this morning.” I washed myself, the grime staining the threadbare towel the old woman gave me, and I felt better, strong enough to eat four spoonfuls of the porridge. The horrid Roger Ludlow and two of his cohorts came into the cell sometime around midday. Since the town women had seen the marks of witchery on my body, said the dreaded Ludlow, I would this day be subjected to another test. He said I would be tied to a chair and lowered into Black Rock Pond. If I floated to the surface, it would be another sign of my witchery. If I sunk to the bottom, I would be rescued before I succumbed to the waters. He gestured toward his two henchmen and they left the cell. Ludlow sat then on the three-legged stool. “I know this is an unfortunate circumstance in which you have found yourself,” he said. “And I am certain that I could prevail upon the townsmen to end this inquiry if you were to cooperate with us and identify the women you have been conspiring with. The name Mary Staples, for example, has come up several times on this matter in recent weeks.” “I have said, and I will say again, that I have had no close counsel with Mary Staples,” I said. “I have seen her in the market a few times, that is all.” Ludlow, gray-faced and solemn, gave a great sigh. “So be it,” he said. “Goodwife, you have brought these events on yourself. May God have mercy on you.”

Soon after he left, a hard rain erupted outside, with flashes of lightning and rumbles of thunder. The storm did not clear the coast until late afternoon, and so barely an hour of daylight was left to us when they came to get me. Two sour-smelling men I did not recognize took me by the arms and halfdragged me out of my cell, down the hallway, and out into the courtyard in front of the municipal building. They placed me in a rickety wooden chair and bound my hands and feet to it with loops of thick twine. They picked up the chair and carried it out of the courtyard and into the street. There, they put the chair in the back of a farm wagon, drawn by two black mares. A dozen or so townsmen came out of the building then, chattering and smoking cigars as they approached the wagon. I could see Ludlow in the back of the crowd, marching along with his head down. Most of the men were sipping from pewter cups and seemed to be given to drink. “Well, let’s go then,” shouted one of the men, a fat banker named Sherwood, and they fell in behind as the wagon began a slow mile-long journey to Black Rock Pond. Dozens of people came out of their houses along the way to watch my shame and none of them said a word as I ed, only staring with widened eyes as this uncommon sight. Another fifty or sixty people had gathered in the field next to the pond and they stood in a ragged circle around the south end of the waters. The same two faceless men clamored onto the bed of the wagon when we stopped. They checked their knots on the ties that bound me to the chair and then lifted me up and out the back end of the wagon and onto the ground. The wretched Ludlow then stepped out from the pack of town elders and waved his arms for quiet. He stood in front of the crowd and read from a parchment sheet he held in front of him. “By the power of the first selectman and the representative town meeting,” he said, “I declare that the woman here, Goodwife Knapp, has been accused of witchery in the town of Fairfield. She has been shown to have the marks of a devil on her body, giving some assurance that the accusations against this woman have weight. Today, we shall perform another test of her attachment to witchery.” Then he turned and waved his left hand toward the two men, who picked up my chair and carried me to the edge of the pond. One of the men tied a length of rope to the back of the chair and then they both carried it to the edge of the pond. After an instant’s pause, they threw me and my chair out onto the surface of the water, perhaps twelve to fifteen feet from the shoreline.

In the moments that I soared through the air on my trip to the water, I felt free from all my tribulations. I thought during that journey that my chair would slip quietly to the bottom and the fools standing on the shore would let me drown. It would all be over. But somehow those two imbeciles threw me directly on top of a large boulder barely submerged under the surface. I landed with a jolt that broke a leg off the bottom of the chair and then I just sat there, the waters no higher than my shoulders. My precious God decided at that moment that I should neither sink nor float that day. The moment suddenly amused me and I could not keep from emitting a sour laugh. This seemed to infuriate Ludlow and the other townsmen standing on the shore. I could hear him barking out orders and then the two louts pulled me out of the pond and hustled me to the back of the wagon. The crowd was silent as they watched and no souls from the town came out of their houses to see my return to the foul cell within I then dwelled. I slept well that night for the first time since my ordeal began, but the dread came over me again in the morning, another gray dawn showing through my small window.

CHAPTER 8

Retroactive Abortion

B LAIRE THOUGHT SHE would cry when she started, slicing off the bottom foot of her hair with a pair of scissors she found in a kitchen drawer, but then she got into it. She whacked off another six inches, then used a smaller pair of scissors and a comb to chop it down close to the skull. She used her father’s electric razor to finish the job. She looked in the mirror afterward and saw a bald alien freak, some creature from a Star Trek movie, staring back at her. She didn’t cry until she began to clean up the thick red strands from the bathroom floor Her father showed up an hour later. She was at the stove, heating up some of Sunday night’s stew, when she heard him enter the living room and then stop fast and emit a loud gasp when he saw her. She kept stirring the stew. “What … what happened?” he said finally, in a kind of croak. “It was Sally’s idea,” said Blaire. “She said we have to get some attention if we’re gonna do anything about Creepy Cal.” “But, really, did you have to do that to yourself?” said her father. “It will grow back,” she said. “It’s not like I lopped off an ear or something.” “Was that an option?” he said. “Not really,” she said. “But one of the girls on the track team did say something about neck tattoos. Like I said, the hair will grow back, and meanwhile Mr. Pomeroy will have one less thing to be pervy about.”

Later that evening, she actually started to feel good about going bald. At least she was doing something, after a week of horrors. Wil’s parents had whisked

him off to a rehab facility in California, and he had stopped reaching out to her after a few strained texts and one long phone call during which he sounded semisuicidal. Carmen had lost her place in the program that allowed kids from surrounding towns to attend Fairfield schools and she had enrolled at Bassick High School in Bridgeport. She called to say the classes were a joke and Bassick’s track team was pathetic. Ginger got hit with a two-week suspension and said her parents weren’t sure if they wanted her to get back to running. She said her father had threatened to send her to boarding school if she didn’t tell the police where she got the drugs they found in her locker. “It’s like my whole life just exploded,” she said. Blaire obsessed about her friends, she lingered in the pack during track practice, she couldn’t eat or sleep or concentrate in class. She got a D on a quiz in AP History and a C- on an English paper. For the first time she could ever , she began to think that maybe her dreams of a gilded future were in danger of becoming a fantasy. Pomeroy, meanwhile, was still stalking her. Three or four times a day, he managed to be in a nearby corridor when she was changing classes. He watched her as she ed, wearing that weird smile of his. Sometimes during track practice, she would look up and see him perched on the roof of the school, watching her through binoculars. Twice he sent notes to her in class, suggesting she drop by his office for a meeting. She ignored both notes. Once, as she was ing him in the hallway, he reached out and gathered several strands of her hair in his hand and then let them drop.

That night at the restaurant, she told Sally about Pomeroy touching her. “Well,” said Sally, “I believe this has gone far enough without some sort of response.” “What can I do?” said Blaire. “I can’t do anything.” Sally looked out over the half-full bar. Blaire’s father was standing at the elbow, chatting with a 70ish couple from Maine who were apparently in the early stages of a cross-country driving trip. Her father had spread out several bar napkins on the bar and seemed to be drawing up some sort of map. “Our boy may have snuck in an extra glass or two this evening,” said Sally. “You said something about a response,” said Blaire. “Let me get rid of some of the riff-raff and then we can talk,” said Sally.

Blaire ordered a lemonade and opened her History book to prepare for the next day’s quiz, but her mind kept wandering and she soon found herself listening to the bar chatter all around her. On the stools next to her, two women in their thirties, who seemed to be some kind of junior executives at a large company, were discussing the limitations of their boss. “I finally went on Google to try to figure out just what’s wrong with him,” said one of them, a slim woman with short brown hair. “And I came across something called the Dunning-Kruger effect.” “What’s that?” said the other woman, heavier with long black hair. “Is it something that makes you tell bad jokes and spew coffee breath on everyone?” “It’s more like a general attitude. Some people are sort of too stupid to realize how stupid they are. They actually think they’re on top of things, but they really aren’t.” “Well, that is our Arthur, for sure. Guy is constantly making decisions that makes no sense, but he walks around like God’s gift to management.” “In one of the examples I found, some guy walked into like three banks and robbed them without wearing a mask or anything. Turns out he was a frequent felon in the town, and the cops identified him right away from the cameras. When they arrested him, he was shocked. He said he had used the ‘juice’. Apparently, someone had told him that if you put lemon juice on your face the cameras can’t see you.” Two 70ish men on nearby stools, both apparently hard of hearing, were speaking at high volume, almost shouting at each other. “I can’t things anymore,” said one of them. “What can’t you ?” said the second one. “I forget,” said the first one. After a ten-second silence, the first guy spoke again. “That guy at the VA said they were testing a new drug for memory loss, but I can’t the name of it.” Two 25ish men across the bar, who seemed to be drunk or stoned or both were arguing about President Truman’s decision to drop atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II. “Just ask yourself one question,” said the larger of the two men, a curly-haired guy. “Would he have dropped one of them on some town in ? On white people?”

Blaire’s father came back to his stool then and they ordered some shrimp scampi. After they had finished eating, he moved off again to talk to an elderly couple at the far end of the bar. Sally came by soon after he left. “So,” she said, “I guess it’s about time to take some action.” Blaire could feel the emotion welling up in her throat. “What action?” she said. “Pomeroy has all the power.” “That’s largely because nobody really knows what he’s doing,” said Sally. “We need to do something to get people to look his way.” “He has all these spies around the school. It’s like he knows everything before it happens.” “What’s the thing we need to do right away?” “This whole drug thing with Wil and Carmen and Ginger. They’re going ahead with the case and everybody has to hire lawyers. Carmen’s family can’t afford even a cheap lawyer.” “OK,” said Sally. “We need to gather some attention to the case.” “How?” said Blaire. “What’s the creepiest thing he’s done to you, I mean directly?” “Twice now, he has reached out and run his hand through my hair when I was walking by in the hallway. Just totally creeps me out.” “I think,” said Sally, “we should deny him that pleasure.”

Next day at track practice, Blaire called the whole girls’ team together in the locker room and related the whole campaign Sally had outlined in the bar: A bunch of girls on the team shave their heads in solidarity with Ginger and Carmen and Will. In the ensuing uproar, they tell anyone who will listen that they did it to correct the injustice that had been done to their teammates. The

publicity would throw the whole thing into the open and various parents, the town, the police, somebody, would look into it. Most of the kids on the team looked confused, but three of them, all seniors and good friends of both Ginger and Carmen, said they were in right away and several more said they would think about it. In the end, seven of Blaire’s teammates went bald. Four others said they would have but their parents got wind of the scheme and prevented them from whacking off their hair. They all showed up at school the following Monday—no hats, no scarves, just their shiny white heads dotting the crowd in the hallway swarming for first period. By the end of the third period, every student and most of the teachers had heard that the girls were protesting the drug busts and the subsequent suspensions and whatever criminal proceeding might take place. Five minutes into Blaire’s fifth-period class, AP Calculus, Mr. Goldschmidt crashed into the classroom and pointed at her in the second row. He looked sweaty and disheveled and he didn’t say a word to her as he escorted her down to the firstfloor conference room. Four of Blaire’s bald teammates were already there and the other two came in within a few minutes. They took seats around the big table and waited. “I think we look like aliens,” Blaire said afer a few minutes. “I keep rubbing it,” said a girl named Carol, a junior middle-distance runner. “It feels weird, but kinda nice at the same time.” Molly, a senior sprinter, started to laugh. “I know this is serious,” she said. “But we look so ridiculous that it’s kind of hilarious too.” All seven of them were laughing when Pomeroy walked in. He seemed taken aback for a moment as he walked around the table to his chair at the head. Goldschmidt, ever more sweaty, ever more stressed, trailed behind him and took a seat at the boss’s right hand. “Isn’t it nice that you people can find some humor in all this,” said Pomeroy. “Just so we understand each other, this … mutilation you have performed on yourselves constitutes an intentional breach of peace violation. You are all subject to suspensions and whatever other punishment I and the school board deem appropriate.” He leaned forward then, elbows on the table and stared them down, flicking his dark eyes at each face in turn. “Thing is,” said Cheryl, a junior hurdler, “I talked to my dad before I did this— about this bogus drug bust and other stuff too. He said the school couldn’t do anything about it if I shaved my head. He said he’d looked up all the student regulations just to be sure. My dad’s a First Amendment lawyer, by the way,

works for this media company in New York. He said he’d love to take on the town over this.” Pomeroy leaned back, his narrow face slightly reddened and his breathing jacked up. Claire decided she had never looked at an uglier man. When he finally spoke, his voice came out as a growl, as if he could barely contain his rage. “We shall see, Ms. Sherwood,” he said. “In any case, we will be proceeding with this issue. I wanted you all to know that. And I want you to know that you can mitigate your situations if you lower your profile. Obviously, we can’t do anything about your heads, but you must not make any further commotion.”

Blaire and the others began to make further commotion immediately. First, two more girls on the team defied their parents and shaved their heads; all nine of them told whoever asked that they were protesting the phony drug bust. Next, they Xeroxed hundreds of pictures of Wil, Carmen, and Ginger and put them all over the campus–on the lockers, in the bathrooms, in the gym, under the windshield wipers of all the cars in the parking lot. Within the first week, the story of the bald girls and their protest had started to filter all through the town. Blaire’s father said he heard people talking about it at the grocery store, Starbucks, Dunkin’ Donuts, and the Chinese restaurant where he picked up their dinner twice a week. Whenever Blaire walked into Sally’s bar, the patrons gathered around to hear her story. The whole thing blew up on a Friday, when all nine bald girls participated in a dual meet at Staples High School in Westport. Dozens of spectators took pictures of the girls running and doing field events and posted them all over the Internet; someone posted a two-minute YouTube video of Blaire winning the 1500, with other bald girls finishing second and fourth. The video and other posts on Instragram, Facebook, and Twitter went totally viral. A reporter from The Fairfield Citizen-News called Blaire at home and asked for an interview. Blaire outlined the reasons for the protest and the reporter wrote a story that appeared on the paper’s web site and on the front page of the print edition later in the week. Then a producer at CNN called to say that they were running a brief clip of the dual meet and asked for a few details for the anchor to read along with it. Blaire kept her on the phone for twenty minutes and, when the piece ran on the air that

night, Wolf Blitzer spent a full minute explaining the “ruckus in the leafy Connecticut suburb of Fairfield, where nine girls on the school track team have shaved their heads to protest what they say is a fraudulent drug bust that involved some of their friends.” The CNN story changed everything. A half-dozen other tabloid news shows followed up, running the YouTube videos of the shiny white heads bouncing along the track like so many hard-boiled eggs. Satellite vans from the local TV stations were clustered in the corner of the parking lot more of less permanently. Claire’s father unplugged their land line at home to ward off all the reporters, producers, publishers, agents, and assorted media people who wanted a piece of Blaire. Somehow, many of them found the cell numbers for both him and Blaire, so they had to keep their phones off most of the time and then dump all the messages every couple hours.

Blaire almost missed the all-caps text from her mother: WHAT ON EARTH IS GOING ON? IMPOSSIBLE TO REACH YOU!!! Blaire called her mother, who seemed to be crying when she came on the line. “Oh, my god,” she said. “Your hair, your beautiful hair.” “You know it will grow back, right?” said Blaire. “Don’t be rude,” said her mother. “I want to know if this is something your father put you up to.” “No, he’s not really been too involved,” “And what are you actually doing?” “It’s kind of complicated. There’s this insane heaster here and he set up three of my friends on a phony drug bust. The bald thing seemed to be the only way we could get anyone to listen to us.” “And why did he attack your friends?” “He’s like a perv.”

“Oh.” Her mother was quiet for a moment. “It’s sort of an endless frustration, this thing with men,” she said finally. “You sound sad,” said Blaire. “Like you have been crying.” “I hate living alone,” said her mother. “I came to hate living with Geoffrey and some parts are better now. But, you know, I’m lonely.” “I can’t go back there,” said Blaire. “Well, you certainly seem to be having a tough time where you are,” said her mother. “But it’s like I’m supposed to be here,” said Blaire.

That night at Sally’s bar, two women in their 50s on the stools next to Blaire were discussing on-line dating. “I ed on some site that’s supposed to be only for PhDs, thought I’d weed out the mouth-breathers, you know?” said one of women—tall, gray-haired, big nose. “I understand the impulse,” said the other woman— shorter, dark hair cut short. “But it does sound sort of, I don’t know, elitist. Like nobody who hasn’t spent years in graduate school is worth talking to.” “Well, it didn’t work out anyway,” said the first woman. “Half the guys I went out with had rapy eyes, and most of them got their degrees from some Internet college I never heard of.” Later, two women, both blondes in their 20s, came in and sat at the bar across from Blaire. They soon began to discuss a new technique involving beeswax candles. One blonde was showing the other a picture on her phone. “See, you just put the narrow end in your ear and light the candle,” she said. “When it gets down to the end, the wax just gets sucked right out. That wax, you know, can affect your balance and, I don’t know, other stuff.” “Besides being gross,” said the other blonde.

Sally came by then. “I just got a message from your father,” she said. “He said he couldn’t reach you.” “I turned my phone off,” said Blaire. “Lots of texts from people I don’t know.” “Well, he said he’ll be here in ten minutes,” said Sally. “And he says he’s got some good news.” “That would be fabulous,” said Blaire. “Another thing, do you know anything about ear wax?”

Blaire’s father arrived twenty minutes later. First thing, even before he sat down, he rubbed her head. “You know, I’m starting to get used to your new look,” he said. “I’m growing it back,” she said. “What is the good news you told Sally about?” He sat down and took a sip of her lemonade. “Good,” he said, “I might have her throw a little vodka in one of those.” “Good news?” “Oh, well, some of the parents have been meeting to deal with this whole thing. That guy Sherwood is sort of leading the pack—he seems really pissed-off about his daughter’s head. Anyway, several of the parents went to see the Board of Ed and now there’s gonna be some kind of hearing, to thrash out how the drug arrests happened and whether the suspensions make any sense.” “You know that Pomeroy wants to charge us with something for shaving our heads.’ “Well, that’s not gonna happen,” said her father. “That guy Sherwood went off on the board when he heard about that. Quoted the Constitution.” Later, after the baked salmon and rice, her father went off to chat up two 60ish men who seemed to be about three-quarters drunk. Blaire tried to read her History textbook, but then two 30ish women came in and sat down on the two stools next to her. “I’m telling you, the child is a monster,” said one of the

women. “The kid hates me and refuses to do anything I tell her to. At the same time, she sucks up to her father all the time. Sometimes, I find myself wishing I’d never had her.” She was quiet for ten seconds or so. “Is that awful of me?” she said finally. “I have a friend who has three kids, all of them screwups” said the second woman. “They’re into drugs, cutting school, shoplifting, you name it. She says there should be such a thing as retroactive abortion.”

The Board of Education inquiry was scheduled for the following week, to be held at the Board’s hearing room at its headquarters in a large office building on the eastern edge of town. But so many people called in to say they wanted to attend, and then a half-dozen local TV stations said they were sending crews, so the meeting was moved to the Ludlowe gymnasium. By the time Blaire and her father arrived, the parking lot was full and they had to park the Volvo on a side street a quarter-mile from the school. Inside, a knot of people were milling around in front of the double doors, so Blaire led her father around the back of the building to another set of doors. She wasn’t ready for the crowd, which already filled the bleachers all the way to the ceiling. The TV crews had set up their cameras in front of a long table that had been erected underneath one of the basketball rims; the whole end of the room was lit up like a movie set as the Board shuffled around for a while and then took their seats. Her father said he had learned that there were nine elected to the Board, but one seat was currently empty because the woman who held it had gotten a divorce and moved to California. Her father said that rumors were circulating that her husband, some sort of Wall Street executive, had been caught in a tax-fraud scheme and would soon be put on trial. “I’m finding out all sorts of things about people in this town,” said her father. “And a lot of it isn’t particularly encouraging.” The first witness to come up and sit in front of the microphone was a 50ish Puerto Rican woman who said her name was Rosario Molina. She said she was the principal of the middle school that Carmen had attended in Bridgeport. She said Carmen was easily the finest student she had met during her 25 years in education and had been devastated by the charges being levied against her. “This child has been falsely accused,” she said, a sharp snap to her voice.

Next came a series of witnesses who extolled the life and character of Ginger— two middle-school teachers, a longtime neighbor who said she had once rescued her dog from a drainpipe, the track coach, and two of her AP teachers. The board looked bored and asked no questions. Pomeroy, seated in the front row of the crowd stared lasers into the backs of each of the witnesses. Then Wil’s father, a slim, nervous man wearing horn-rimmed glasses and a gray pinstripe suit, came to the microphone and said that his son was in a drugrehabilitation program in Arizona and was “doing spectacularly well.” He pulled a piece of paper out of his inside pocket and held it up to the board . “This is a progress report signed by the director of the institute,” he said. “It will attest to the progress my son has made.” One of the board , a dour older man with a rim of white hair and a large reddish nose, made a grumbling sound and leaned over into the microphone of the table in front of him. “I gather this is not the first brush the boy has had with the law,” he said. The TV lights caught the glisten of the sweat trickling down Wil’s father’s forehead. “Yes, but there seems to be a difference here,” he said. “At his last school, he freely itted everything he had done and accepted the consequences. This time, he says he didn’t do it. He says someone put the drugs in his locker.” A quiet rumble began to roll through the crowd. “I think we can move on from here,” said the board chairman, a portly woman with short gray hair and a prominent string of pearls. “But perhaps a half-hour break first,” she said.

Blaire and her father stayed in their seats as half the crowd moved out into the hallway and began chattering in small groups. “What do you think people are talking about out there?” she said. Her father craned his neck around and scanned the crowd. “Oh, they’re trying to figure out what this whole thing entails,” he said. “And there are rumors. About Pomeroy. I know, because I started some of them.” “You didn’t say anything about me, right?” she said.

“No, of course not. You’re simply one of the girls who shaved her head in solidarity with your friends.” “So what did you say about Pomeroy?” “I have let it be known he may be behind the whole thing, as some sort of vengeful act.” “How are you gonna prove that?” she said. “Sally says she’s not sure we have to,” he said. “The idea is to throw enough doubt about the drug bust to get your friends off the hook. That man Sherwood, the lawyer, has turned up all sorts of things and he’s prepped a couple of the board . Their questions could get interesting.” The chairman gaveled the meeting back to order and called the next witness, the town police chief, a 50ish man named Thomas McNab. He was seen often on the local television news shows; he appeared to be extremely fit, had unusually large blue eyes, and somehow managed to maintain a year-round tan. He was always seen in full uniform, with multiple rows of service medals adorning his shirt. “Perhaps you would like to tell us just how this whole mess began,” said one of the board , a 40ish woman with thick black-framed glasses and dark hair cut into severe bangs in the front. McNab tried to answer, but had a sudden coughing fit. After he had drunk a halfglass of water, he cleared his throat twice and then leaned into the microphone. “Ah, this all began with a phone call to my office from the heaster of the school, Mr. Pomeroy.” “And what was the nature of this call,” said the woman. “Mr. Pomeroy said he had received an anonymous phone call informing him that certain students were selling drugs in the school,” said McNab. “And he named the students,” said the woman. “Yes, the three students whose lockers were subsequently searched and found to contain substantial quantities of illegal drugs.”

“Let me ask you something, chief,” said another board member sitting next to the woman with the bangs. He was an older man, in his sixties, with unruly gray hair and a ruddy complexion. “Just how long have you known Calvin Pomeroy?” “Oh, like fifteen years or more,” said the chief. “My kids went to the high school when he was a teacher and then deputy heaster. I’d have to say he’s a friend of my family.” “You socialize then?” said the gray-haired man. “Oh, a barbecue or two in the summer, maybe a charity event now and then.” “And so,” said the gray-haired man, “this good friend calls you up and says he had received some stray rumor about these children. And that is enough for you to bring—what?—five, six officers into the school and invade these children’s privacy.” “I believe there were three officers, plus a canine unit,” said McNab. “Ah, you brought in a dog.” “Two, actually,” said McNab. “We deployed both of our canine units.” The crowd behind Blaire began to rumble again. “Now, tell us what happened when your troops got to the school,” said the woman with bangs. “Well,” said McNab, “we were escorted to the lockers of the three students.” “By whom?” said the woman. “The deputy heaster,” said McNab. “A Mr. Goldschmidt.” “Then you cracked open the lockers and found the drugs?” said the woman. “That about right?” “Uh, yes. In each case, the plastic bags were right there on top of books and whatever.” “No trying to conceal them? No hiding them under other things?”

“No.” So then you arrested these children,” said the gray-haired man. “Before you tested the materials or did anything else to prove their guilt.” “Uh, yes.” “You pulled them of their classrooms and—what?—handcuffed and perp-walked them out of the school in front of all their classmates.” “Yes.” “And all this was based on an anonymous phone call to Mr. Pomeroy. Did you ever find out just who called? Why they called? Any investigation whatsoever?” “You will have to ask Mr. Pomeroy about that,” said McNab. He seemed to be sweating through his crisp white uniform shirt. “We intend to,” said the woman with bangs. Mr. Pomeroy was next. He walked up to the table and settled in front of the microphone. He had a sheaf of papers in his hand and took a swig from a bottle of water in front of him. “I have a statement to read before we continue on with this circus,” he said. “Of course,” said the gray-haired man. “Perhaps it will clear up some of the questions we have.” “That may or may not be,” said Pomeroy. He looked down at the papers on the table and began to read. “I will begin by saying that this entire enterprise you are running here is a joke,” he said. “This matter is a simple one: I received an anonymous phone call informing me that three of my students were dealing drugs in the school. It was my duty to inform the police of this phone call, and I did so. As you are aware, the police found drugs among the property of all three students and all three have been suspended from classes and face criminal charges. That is all I know, and any inferences that there is something sinister going on here are completely false.” He looked up from the papers and glared at the gray-haired man. “That is my statement,” he said. “And that’s all I wish to say about this charade.”

“So, Mr. Pomeroy, let’s talk about this phone call,” said the woman with bangs. “It came in the afternoon, during the fifth period,” he said. “It was an adolescent male voice, very nervous. He said simply that three students at the school were involved in selling drugs, and he named them.” “You have no idea who this person is who called?’ “None.” “Yet, on the basis of this faceless voice on the phone you immediately phoned the police.” “That is protocol under such circumstances.” “Not really,” said the man with the wild gray hair. “We have issued a set of guidelines that in no way mention immediate calls to the police in what did not seem to be an emergency situation.” “You might call it an emergency if indeed there is some sort of drug ring operating in our high school,” said Pomeroy. “Tell me about the locks,” said the gray-haired man. “The locks?” “The locks on the student lockers.” “Well,” said Pomeroy, “they are all combination locks. A student is provided with his or her own combination during freshman year.” “And,” said the woman with bangs, “you of course maintain a master list of all those combinations.” “Correct. We have determined that access to the students’ lockers is necessary.” “So, anyone who could get their hands on that list could plant, say, a big bag of drugs in any kid’s locker,” said the woman. “That file is securely held in the deputy heaster’s office,” said Pomeroy.

“And I suppose there is a digital record as well,” said the woman. “Yes, on the deputy heaster’s computer.” “And you yourself have access to that file, is that correct?” “Yes, of course,” said Pomeroy. There was a brief pause while the man with wild gray hair whispered into the ear of the woman with bangs. “One other thing,” said the woman. “I understand you have been plagued now and then with students painting some sort of graffiti outside your office.” Pomeroy sounded like his throat had tightened up. “Unfortunately, this has occurred,” he said. “And what would provoke such behavior?” said the woman. “I gather these incidents involve some sort of personal insult toward you.” “I have worked with adolescents for more than twenty years,” he said. “and I have seen some who have essentially depraved souls. These students are irredeemable, and I am afraid they will grow up to be irredeemable adults.” “Interesting point of view for an educator,” said the woman. “Oh, last thing, I should mention that the board was alerted about some sort of punishment suggested for the girls in your school who have shaved their heads,” she said. “We have been informed by counsel that any such punishment would probably be illegal on First Amendment grounds. So, basically hands off.” The crowd began to rumble again as Pomeroy got up and walked toward the back of the room, but Claire couldn’t make out what anyone was saying. Her father leaned over and whispered in her ear. “That was just about the way it was supposed to go,” he said. “I really kind of hate all of this,” said Blaire, and just then, for the first time, she began to worry that things could get much worse.

CHAPTER 9

Degloved

C ALVIN HAD NEVER in his life experienced such a defeat, such a total insult to his very character, and he was swept up in such a rage that he could barely contain himself as he went about his day. One week after the hearing about the drug case and the suspensions, the Board of Education had issued a statement that completely exonerated the students, canceling their suspensions and restoring their status at the school. The Board declared that no punishment would be meted out to the students who had shaved their heads. The statement also called on the police to drop all criminal charges against the students, onishing both Calvin and Chief McNab for overreacting to the anonymous phone call. Finally, the statement charged that security measures at the high school were inadequate, with such crucial information as the locker combinations of the students too available to hackers or thieves—all but announcing its suspicions that the entire affair was some sort of set-up. The fact that most of what the Board found was true did not still Calvin’s anger at having been so humiliated. He was certain that teachers at the school were gossiping about the case, tittering about him in the hallways and in the teachers’ lounge. Students too, who might usually look down when they saw him approaching, seemed to stare at him and smile. It was as if his entire world had shifted; for the first time in his life, he felt out of control. Calvin found himself treating the people around him with an unusual savagery. He ordered Goldschmidt to take on every humbling task he could find— supervising the parking lot in the morning and after school ended, heading up a crew to renovate the second-floor bathrooms, reordering all the student records according to their birthdates. The man seemed ready to break a few times, sputtering some mild objection, but he continued to labor on, anguish on his fat sweaty face. Calvin screamed so often at the interns working outside his office that two of

them just disappeared one day and never returned. He fired the assistant men’s soccer coach because he didn’t like his haircut, demoted three office assistants for no reason at all, and made the new history teacher cry by calling her “rather repulsive in appearance and apparently an idiot in the classroom.” Calvin’s anger seemed to stoke his sexual desires. He spent hours on some of the darkest sites he had frequented over the years—lots of bondage, whips and harnesses, ugly people of various sizes, shapes, and ethnicity engaged in frantic coupling. He sent for the Bronson girl at least once a day and used her unmercifully. He found himself most aroused when she seemed close to tears. At home, he ignored the usual sex schedule and asked Emma to accommodate him every night. Much of their coupling was unmemorable, but a few times he became rough enough to provoke complaints from her. He could barely stand to be in the same room as his mother. Her constant prattling about her dreary life grated on him—endless complaints about rude shopkeepers, the sad bickering among the old crones at the Daughters of American Revolution clubhouse. He ached to tell her to shut up. Once, he spit in her coffee before serving it to her in the sunroom. Another time, he masturbated onto her bed spread. What made it all so painful was that he still saw the Hatcher girl daily at school. She tended not to look at him as they ed in the hallway, but somehow he felt that she was gloating quietly inside. He fantasized constantly about her, the humiliations he could devise to pay her back for her defiance. He felt constrained by all the attention her schemes had garnered, but he couldn’t stifle his obsessions about the girl. He managed to be in the hallways when she changed classes and in the lunchroom whenever she was there. During her afterschool practices, he watched her through his field glasses as she circled the track. At least twice a week, he drove by the small frame house she shared with her father, hoping to catch a glimpse of her through the window. Twice, he stopped by the Fairfield Fish Co. to pick up takeout chowder around the time the girl and her father were usually there. He watched the two of them from across the bar—the father chattering away with the pitiful drunks who frequented the place, the girl alternately reading her school books and talking with the tall blonde bartender.

It all got worse when the two girls, Ginger Sackett and Carmen Floria, returned to the school. They had both shaved their heads before reporting for classes, so now it seemed there were bald girls wherever he looked. They all seemed to be laughing at him behind his back.

Calvin exploded on a dank Friday afternoon in late April. He had been immersed in pointless meetings throughout the day, and he had been forced to rush through his session with the Bronson girl because she had a dental appointment. He was driving along the Old Post Road through downtown Fairfield, trying to decide whether to drop in at Fairfield Fish to get a glimpse of the Hatcher girl, when he came to the four-way stop signs in front of the Town Hall. He waited for a man in a giant SUV to make his turn in front of him and then began to enter the intersection when a driver in a Mercedes sedan blew through the stop sign and blasted past him, narrowly missing his front end. Calvin paused for a moment, then saw red. He made a quick U-turn and followed the Mercedes south on Penfield Ave. toward the beach. He caught up with it at the second stop sign and pulled around in front of it, blocking its path. He jumped out of his car and hustled toward the Mercedes. As he approached, he could see that the driver was a 40ish woman with a narrow face and her dyed-blonde hair pulled back in a bun. She was staring at him with wide eyes and talking on her phone. He got to the side of her car and knocked hard on the driver-side window. She lowered it and immediately began to shout at him in an hysterical high pitch: “I AM ON THE PHONE WITH THE POLICE RIGHT NOW!!! GET AWAY FROM ME!!!” Calvin felt a tingle of alarm at where this moment was going, but the woman’s screeching went through him like a chain-saw. He didn’t how it happened, but somehow he found himself with both of his hands around the woman’s neck, doing all he could to squeeze the annoying life out of her. The next moments came as in a dream—the woman pointing a small plastic device on her key chain at him and then spraying his eyes with what felt like liquid needles. Then two men, who turned out to be illegal immigrants working on a lawn across the street, were grabbing him by his arms and bringing him to the ground. He lay there, half-blind, smelling the immigrants’ sweat for what seemed like an

hour, but was probably no more than five minutes. The police arrived, what seemed like a half-dozen officers, and he was handcuffed and guided to the back of a squad car. When they arrived at the headquarters building a few blocks away, they hustled him from the parking lot, took off the cuffs, and placed him in a small holding cell just off the main entrance. He asked for and received a wet towel to clean his eyes and then told an officer, a short fat white woman, that Chief McNab would be interested in his situation and suggested she call him and mention that Calvin Pomeroy was at that moment residing in his jail. McNab himself showed up within five minutes and took him to his office on the second floor of the headquarters of the building. “You look like you need a couple fingers of Scotch, Cal,” he said once he had closed the door. They each had a few sips. “Okay, you tell me what the hell is going on?” said McNab. “This … woman, this harridan, ran through a stop sign and narrowly missed my vehicle,” said Calvin. “I attempted to chastise her and she sprayed me with some sort of chemical. Then two of our friends from Central America threw me to the ground. I intend to sue everyone involved.” McNab put his feet up on his desk. “Well, the woman tells a different story,” he said. “Says you tried to strangle her.” “That’s absurd. I did nothing of the sort. She attacked me.” “Woman’s husband is some sort of real-estate developer, by the way. Lives in Southport. Lots of money.” “Good, I intend to take some of it from her.” “This is gonna basically be he-said-she-said. The leaf blowers split as soon as my people showed up.” “Not surprised. The two of them literally threw me to the ground. I’m sure they are concerned about their deportation status.” “One more thing,” said McNab. “The woman has a DUI and a couple speeding tickets on her record. We didn’t give her a breathalyzer, but I believe one of my officers might put in the report that he smelled alcohol on her breath.”

“I must thank you, Gerry,” said Calvin. “You are handling this sorry mess with great professionalism.” They sat there, smiling at each other for a moment. “I guess if she is willing to look past it, I will drop the case as well,” said Calvin. “We’ll see if we can keep this out of the official records,” said the chief. “Better for all concerned. Better for the town.” “Ah, yes, the town,” said Calvin. Two days later, McNab called to say that the woman’s husband first threatened a lawsuit against both Calvin and the town unless he got some action, then settled down when confronted by his wife’s driving record and the recollections of the officers on the scene. The husband called back later that day to say that they would drop the matter. “Still sounds pissed-off,” said McNab. “But he’s a guy with a lot of deals going and I don’t think he wants this to hit the papers. People tell me not all the money this guy raises for his projects is kosher. He’s probably working with folks who aren’t wild about publicity.” “Lucky me,” said Calvin.

The affair shook Calvin to the core. He knew all too well that without his long relationship with Chief McNab, his reputation and his career might have been incalculably altered. It was quite simple—he had to get hold of himself. But, try as he might, he couldn’t get the Hatcher girl out of his mind. It was more than sex—though he thought of her servicing him in various ways, all through the day. At least twice a day, he masturbated to the naked YouTube picture of her in the locker room of her previous school. What really fed his obsession was the girl’s sheer insolence; she seemed to be mocking him. He tried to push her to some calmer place in his mind, he tried to limit his with her. He stopped patrolling the hallways during her class changes and he stopped training his binoculars on her during track practices. He stopped driving by her house. Then, on a pleasant early April evening, he decided to stop for some takeout chowder at Fairfield Fish on his way home from an evening Board of Education

meeting. As he walked in the front door, he half-hoped she wouldn’t be there. But she was at her usual corner stool, next to her insipid father. Both seemed to be working their way through a stack of steamed mussels. He found a stool on the other side of the bar and the blonde bartender came by and took his order, then brought him a glass of sauvignon blanc. He took a sip and risked a glance at the girl, who was laughing at something her father had said. Calvin could see that her hair was starting to grow back, a scarlet shadow on her white scalp. He began to listen to the two 50ish men seated on the stools next to him. “So I started dating this woman I met on Match.com and I might bring her to that thing next week,” said one of them. “Whoa, that’s bold of you, given the people who will be there,” said the other. “I presume she’s presentable.” “It’s a little weird, actually,” said the first man. “Most of the time, she’s all put together—hair in a bun, horn-rimmed glasses, plain dresses. Then, sometimes, she does a whole other thing—hair down around her shoulders, glasses off, lowcut blouses, bright red lipstick if there’s dancing involved. She says she doesn’t know which is the real her.” “Jesus,” said the second man, “you sure you want to bring her to the thing. I mean these people are loaded—Artie told me they’ve got like 300 KFC franchises in Asia.” “I don’t know,” said the first man. “She can be really entertaining.” “I’m just saying maybe they don’t want to do business with someone who’s involved with such an … obvious woman.” “I hate the fucking suburbs,” said the first man. Calvin’s takeout order arrived, but he told the bartender to keep it on the heat and bring him another glass of wine. He was halfway through it when the Hatcher girl noticed him. She immediately grabbed her father’s arm and leaned over to whisper something in his ear. Calvin gulped down the rest of his wine, shrugged on his coat, and retrieved his takeout bag. He got three steps to the door when the father made an appearance at his side. “Hey, there, Mr. Pomeroy, I was hoping to run into you. We need to talk.”

“I, I’m not sure what you’re saying,” said Calvin. “It’s just that the Board of Ed thing got sort of ugly,” said the father. “I just wanted to say that there are no hard feelings on our side of this thing.” Calvin turned to face him. “What thing are you speaking of?” said Calvin. The man suddenly seemed uncomfortable, averting his eyes. “Uh, you know, the drug thing, the bald thing,” said the father. “I don’t think anyone expected the press to become so involved.” “I believe that was in fact your intention,” said Calvin. “Nobody really wanted to make this big a deal out of it,” said the father. “We were simply concerned that these students, who happened to be my daughter’s close friends, were getting a raw deal.” “Well, you apparently persuaded enough people to believe you,” said Calvin. “Now, I must excuse myself. The chowder will be getting cold.” He snapped a glance at the girl as he ed by on his way to the front door. She was looking at him, what he thought was a slight smile on her face. When he got outside, he threw his bagful of food into the bushes. He waited until he was inside his car before he began to scream. When Calvin got home that night, his wife began to whine when he said he hadn’t had time to stop for the takeout. “Your mother will be so disappointed, she loves her Friday chowder,” she said. They were standing in the kitchen and Calvin reached out his right hand and slapped her hard across her left cheek. She staggered back for one, two steps and then collapsed to the floor. Calvin left her there and walked straight to his study at the back of the house and locked himself in. Later, after his mother had finally been put down for the night, Calvin came out and found Emma in the sunroom. She was silent, her eyes fixed on the TV screen. “I suppose sex is out of the question,” he said.

Calvin tried hard to squelch his fantasies about the Hatcher girl. He stopped

appearing in the hallways when she was changing classes, and he stayed off the roof with his binoculars. He even refrained from viewing her picture on YouTube, naked and wet from the shower. Nothing helped. His obsession for her continued to haunt him, despite the lack of , and he ached to see her every day. Then, on the Friday before spring break, he noticed a slip of paper on his desk, alerting him to that afternoon’s athletic awards ceremony in the gym. He more often than not skipped such events, letting the coaches bloviate about the exploits of their students. The memo had arrived earlier that week, and he had put it aside. But now he began to read the lineup for the ceremony and there it was—Blaire Hatcher would be receiving an award for Best Female Track Athlete. He buzzed Goldschmidt to come to his office. The man was his usual sweaty mess, stuffed into a too-small corduroy jacket and chinos. “You know,” said Calvin as his deputy took a seat, “You always seem to be uncomfortable. Is your lovely wife making your life miserable again?” Goldschmidt shifted in his chair. “Well, she doesn’t understand how this place works, the promotions, the raises,” he said. “What do you tell her?” said Calvin. “I say that it’s all about trying to make sure things work smoothly—no problems,” said Goldschmidt. “Correctamundo,” said Calvin. “But instead we have nothing but problems. For example, I stepped into several of the student bathrooms after classes the other night and imagine what I found in both the boys’ and girls’ rooms—graffiti on the stalls, filthy floors, filthy mirrors, half the toilets out of order for one reason or another. Now, please refresh my memory. I seem to recall that I appointed you to head a task force to take on this bathroom issue. Perhaps two weeks ago, I believe. So now, two weeks later, when I look into these bathrooms, what do I see?” “Problems,” said Goldschmidt. “Tell your lovely wife that story,” said Calvin. “Maybe she will come to understand you better.” He flipped open his laptop. “You can go,” he said to Goldschmidt. “Just wanted you to know that I will be attending the awards

ceremony this afternoon. Make sure there’s a decent chair for me when I get there.” Goldschmidt just sat there, staring at him for about ten seconds. “So, go, go,” said Calvin. “Think bathrooms.”

The gym was overheated and ripe with the smell of hormonal teenagers. Calvin weaved his way through the crowd and spotted Goldstein wildly gesticulating and pointing at a chair in the first row. Calvin got to it and waved Goldstein away. A dozen or so boys and girls were seated on the small stage at the far end of the gym. Calvin scanned the group until he came upon the Hatcher girl, dressed as usual in some sort of track outfit, her hair now a thin red cap over her skull. Bob Ferguson, the school’s athletic director, a balding, odious man with a great sagging belly and hideous breath, was standing at the microphone, trying to get the event started. He kept tapping at the microphone and gesturing at someone behind the curtains along the side of the stage. Calvin surmised that some apparatus—microphones, lights, audio-visual aides—malfunctioned about half the time as school events. The unseen technician worked on the glitch, while the crowd got more unruly out of boredom. Calvin called Goldschmidt over and told him to go up and settle down the miscreants who were sailing paper airplanes down from the top of the bleachers. Finally, after three or four minutes, Ferguson’s growl issued from the microphone. “All right, everyone shut it down, right now,” he said. “Let’s get this thing going.” He looked angry; Calvin realized that he was the sort of man who always seemed angry or disappointed or both. Ferguson made some desultory opening remarks, then the students came up one by one to collect their trophies as the school’s outstanding athletes—the giraffelike center on the basketball team, the thick-necked quarterback, the ape-like exchange student from Poland who was the league wrestling champion, the sassy blonde sophomore who starred in girls’ soccer. Calvin let his mind wander, clapping dutifully along with the rest of the crowd as each award was handed out, until, finally, it was the Hatcher’s girl’s turn. She had a nervous smile on her face as she walked up to the microphone, then a gaggle of her teammates in the

third row began screeching her name and she broke into a broad grin and began waving at them. Calvin watched her intently as she crossed the stage and held up her trophy to her friends. At one point, for just a moment, Calvin thought her eyes caught his. After another six awards and ten minutes, the event was mercifully over, and the crowd began to disperse. Calvin waved over Goldschmidt. “Go find the Hatcher girl,” he said to him. “Bring her to my office. Tell her I wish to congratulate her personally on her grand achievement.” Goldschmidt began shuffling from foot to foot. “What if, you know, she doesn’t want to come?” he said. “You must insist, my friend,” said Calvin.

When he got back to his office, Calvin took a Percocet and drank two quick shots of Martell brandy. He flipped open his lap top and stared again at the Hatcher girl’s naked form; he touched himself and felt his organ swell with anticipation. The girl showed up after another ten minutes or so. She marched straight in, eyes locked on his, and strode over to the brown leather chair facing his desk. “I have to tell you that my father has told me not to talk to you, especially in your office,” she said. “I tried to call him to tell him about this, but he didn’t answer his phone. He sometimes forgets to turn it on.” Calvin leaned back in his chair, peering at her over the open laptop, her nude body still on the screen. “Well, in any case, here you are.” “Mr. Goldschmidt made it sound like I didn’t have a choice,” she said. “We always have choices, young lady,” he said. “For example, you could have accepted the reality that some of your friends were involved in some very serious drug dealing. Instead, you made a spectacle of yourself and subjected the school to horrible publicity. You basically trashed your own academic community.” The girl looked at him with those insolent eyes. “I think you know better about

all that,” she said. “I think you know what that was all about.” Calvin could feel the heat rising in his scalp. “You have a remarkably direct way of addressing adults,” he said. “Is this something your father taught you? I gather the mother is not in the picture.” “I just don’t think there’s any point in not saying what is really happening to you,” she said. “I’ve gone through some of that.” Calvin looked down at his screen. “Ah, yes,” the whole PsychoBitch thing,” he said. “Seems you had a rocky go of it out in Portland.” “Are you looking at me on your laptop,” she said, a tremor in her voice. “I mean right now.” “Don’t be absurd,” said Calvin. He closed the computer. “Why am I here?” she said. “I’m supposed to take a pop quiz in Calculus.” “I simply wanted to congratulate you personally for your athletic achievement,” he said. “Really remarkable for an underclassman.” “Okay, thanks,” she said. “Can I go now?” “Sit down,” he said, more sharply than he had intended. “Your impertinence is much less charming than you seem to think it is.” “Impertinence,” she said. “I’ll have to look up that one.” Calvin found himself slipping into a higher level of rage; he could feel the sweat dripping down onto his collar. “What’s so sad is that you have the qualities to become a very special student at this school. You could be at the center of the place, a very special confidant to this istration.” She gave him a tight smile. “Yeah, people say that you have these special confidants.” Calvin slapped the desk, a loud thwack. “PEOPLE SAY!” he shouted. “STUPID PEOPLE! PEOPLE WHO NEED TO SHUT THEIR STUPID MOUTHS!”

The girl stood up and eyed the door as if she was about to flee. Calvin came around the desk and stood in front of her. Very slowly, he unfastened his belt, unbuttoned his pants, pulled down his zipper. Then he let his pants and underwear drop to the floor and confronted her with his fully erect penis. “Look at it,” he said. “This is what you have provoked in me and now you must take responsibility for it.” Her eyes were on his crotch and then she looked up at him and it seemed for a moment that she wanted to say something. But then in one swift movement she took a step forward and unleashed a hard kick directly to his scrotum. There was just a moment before Calvin felt the pain, but then it came in a great rush, dizzying him. He staggered back one step, then tripped on his pants, and fell back onto the floor. He hit the back of his head on the side of his desk, and, along with the searing pain in his groin, he felt a warm trickle of blood leaking down his neck. He lay there motionless, absorbing his agony, while she stepped over him and walked out the door. Calvin lay there for four or five minutes, trying to compose himself, and finally struggled to his feet, pulled up his pants, and staggered to his desk chair. He could feel the blood soaking his back collar now. He leaned forward then and flipped the button on his intercom. “Goldschmidt,” he said. “Call an ambulance, I have been attacked by a student.”

The EMTs injected him with something before loading him onto a gurney, and when he woke up alone in a hospital room, it was hours later, in the middle of the night. He could still feel the wounds in his groin and on the back of his head, but it was as if his brain wouldn’t accept the pain involved. He was numb. A fat black nurse showed up after a few minutes and made a show of plumping his pillows and fussing with his IV drip. “Just what the hell is happening here?” he said, his voice a deep croak. The woman seemed startled, as if surprised he was capable of speech. “Ah, I notified the doctors and they will be here shortly to explain everything,” she said. She scurried out of the room. Ten or twelve minutes later, a young man and an older woman, both dressed in green scrubs, came into the room. The man—thin, olive-skinned, thick glasses

with black plastic frames—was reading from some papers on a clipboard. “Mr., ah, Pomeroy, I suppose you would like to know about your situation,” said the woman—short, pear-shaped with graying hair cut short, close to her very round head. “Is my wife here?” said Calvin. “Or my deputy, man called Goldschmidt.” “Some people were here for you earlier,” said the man. “It seem unlikely that you’d be awake before morning, so we sent them home for some sleep.” “So, I’m my own,” he said. “Just give it to me.” “Well, we have put nine stitches in your scalp in the back of your head and the wound seems to be managed,” said the woman. You ed a concussion protocol. As for your other injuries, we have some specialists, a urologist and a surgeon, coming in to see you. I’m afraid your lower wounds will require some surgical procedures. The doctors will explain everything to you in the morning.” When they left, Calvin reached down and felt around his crotch, which seemed to be covered with some sort of oversized diaper. Somehow, after another ten minutes or so, he fell sleep and dreamed of monsters attacking him in his bed. The other doctors, both middle-aged white men in white coats, showed up in mid-morning, after he had choked down hideous powdered eggs and watery orange juice and suffered the indignity of using a bed pan. One of the two, fatfaced with a salt-and-pepper goatee, was reading from an Ipad screen. He pointed to his companion, thinner with metal-framed glasses. “Mr. Pomeroy, this is Doctor Ephraim, your urologist. “I am Doctor Paulos, I will be performing your surgery—or surgeries, I should say. I don’t believe we can address your condition with just a single procedure.” “My condition,” croaked Calvin. “Well, you have suffered some profound injuries,” said Paulos. “Specifically, your epididymis has suffered a severe trauma.” “My what?” “Epididymis, it’s a coiled tube that holds sperm for a while before they leave the testicle. Also, your spermatic cord has become twisted—it’s a condition called torsion. We have to relieve the inflammation in both cases and guard against an

infection. That would be bad.” “None of this sounds good.” “Quite,” said Ephraim. “Worst of all, your entire scrotum has been torn away from your testicles. It’s a situation referred to as degloved, as if one were taking a glove away from a hand.” “So my testicles …” said Calvin. “Completely exposed.” “So,” said Calvin. “Are my … sex organs gonna work again?” The two men shared a quick glance. “We have outlined a treatment schedule aimed at restoring you to full functionality, and that is our goal,” said Ephraim. “Dr. Paulos will operate as soon as your swelling subsides, and then we shall see where we are.” “I know where we are,” said Calvin. “We are in a very bad place.

CHAPTER 10

Machete Under My Bed

D OUG WAS SITTING in the bar, trying to drown out the noise in his head with Irish whiskey. Sally had served him three glasses of the stuff and he was considering asking for a fourth, which he knew would cause her to ask for his car keys. Two men in their 40s, both working men dressed in hoodies and jeans, who occupied stools directly opposite Doug’s perch, were about three-quarters drunk. They were right at the point where their voices were becoming louder and more insistent. “I believe I have the dumbest kid in the state of Connecticut,” said one of them —fat, dark hair, a full black beard. “He just got involved with another insane woman.” The second man—thinner, narrow face, hawk nose—-took back a shot of amber liquid and followed with a swig from a bottle of Rolling Rock. “He was with some psycho last year, right?” he said. “Oh, yeah, she hit him with a cast-iron frying pan and then called the cops and charged him with assault,” said the first man. “He got off, though, as I recall.” “Yeah, she dropped the charges, but then they had another fight at Christmas and she lit their bedroom on fire.” “Seems like she’s got an anger thing.” “I wouldn’t let her sleep in my house unless I had a machete under my bed.” “And now he’s hooked up again?” “Yeah, and get this. The first one’s name is Danielle, and guess what this one is

called.” “He’s got a second Danielle.” “They even kind of look alike.” “She get violent on him?” “Not yet,” said the first man. “My youngest son is dating this girl who dresses like a slut,” said the second. “Makes his mother crazy.”

The cops came for Blaire at noon on the day after the incident in Pomeroy’s office. She had explained everything that had happened, crying and gulping deep breaths, when he got home the night before, and so he expected them. Still, he had to stifle his fears when three squad cars pulled up in front of his house and four patrolmen bounded up the front steps and rang the doorbell. Two of the cops stood by the front door, as if guarding against an escape attempt. The tallest of them—short graying hair, a series of stripes on his dark-blue uniform shirt— presented Doug with an arrest warrant, duly signed by a judge with florid handwriting. Doug looked it over. “This doesn’t say what you’re arresting her for,” he said. “They haven’t settled on the charges yet,” said the cop. “The, uh, victim here is in the hospital and they’re trying to figure out how messed up he is.” Blaire came into the room then—dressed in a burgundy track suit, eyes downcast —and sat down on the couch. “We’re gonna have to go downtown with these guys and sign some papers,” said Doug. “Sorry.” Blaire looked up at him, and he was surprised to see some strength in her eyes, a measure of defiance. “Let’s go,” she said. At the police station downtown, a patrolman ushered them into a small conference room with harsh fluorescent lights and a large mirror along one wall. Doug had a sudden image of the thousands of TV cop dramas he had seen— miscreants being questioned in just such a room while a handful of cops watched

from behind the two-way mirror. He looked around the room for a camera, but couldn’t spot any stray electronics, just a table and four chairs. After ten minutes or so, another uniformed officer came into the room with a chubby, gray-haired man in a brown suit. The civilian introduced himself as Benjamin Marcowitz, the town attorney. When everyone had taken a chair, he tossed a short stack of papers on the table. He looked at Doug. “So, Mr. Hatcher, I gather you have custody of your minor daughter.” “It’s a t deal,” said Doug. “But we haven’t really pinned down the details. Her mother is out in Oregon. Portland.” “Well, we will need to inform her of the situation right away,” said Marcowitz. “What exactly is the situation?” said Doug. “Well, right now we will need you to sign some papers, basically an agreement to appear in court at a later date.” “I should get a lawyer, right? We need a lawyer.” “That would be advisable,” said Marcowitz. “So then we go home now?” said Blaire. Marcowitz looked over at her, less pity than curiosity on his fat face. “Yes,” he said, “but I should emphasize that this is a serious matter and we are just at the beginning of what may be a lengthy process.” “We get that,” said Doug. “Wheels of justice grind slowly and all that.” Doug signed the papers and both Marcowitz and the cop got up to leave. Neither of them looked at Doug or Blaire.

Doug drove straight to Fairfield Fish Co. from the police station and now, as he sat at the bar contemplating a fourth Irish whiskey, Blaire was in what appeared to be an intense conversation with Sally at a table in the corner of the dining room. Their eyes were locked on each other and Sally was gripping Blaire’s right

hand. As Doug watched them, he felt powerless in the face of all the troubles they faced—the cops, the courts, the reporters who were certain to show up on their doorstep. It added up to a noise, a buzzing in his head that never went away. But the Irish dulled the racket in his skull, and when Sally and Blaire came back to him at the bar he went ahead and asked for a fourth. “You know, that means there is an Uber in your future,” said Sally, but she served him another drink with just a whisk of disapproval. Blaire had brought two of her textbooks with her and she opened one and began to read. “Would you mind telling me what you and Sally were talking about?” said Doug. “Oh, you know, what’s gonna happen with the cops and all,” said Blaire. “And she said she’s lining up a lawyer for us.” She resumed her reading, now and then sipping from a glass of diet Coke. When Sally moved to their end of the bar, Doug waved at her. “I gather you have thoughts about the lawyer,” he said. “Nice that you’re keeping me informed about things.” Sally looked at him with those eerie green eyes. “Now is not the time to worry about small things,” she said. “Well, I think we should talk about some of this,” said Doug. “When can we do that?” “Well, you can’t spend the night at my place,” she said. “I suppose we should do it now.” She made a slight waving motion with her left hand and the familiar shadows fell over the bar—even Blaire, right next to him—was obscured in the dark, while he and Sally were bathed in a bright white light. “Jesus,” said Doug, “you need to warn me when you’re gonna do that.” He looked into the gloom for Blaire and could just make out her shape on the stool beside him. “You’ve never pulled this … trick when you’re with Blaire, right?” “No, this is our thing for now,” she said. “So, what were talking about with Blaire?” he said.

“I was just trying to settle her down. Above all else, right now she has to know that this whole thing will work itself out.” “Okay,” said Doug, “when you say that, does it mean that you know the outcome of this mess and she will come out of it with her life intact?” “This ordeal will have changed her,” she said. “Everything that happens to us changes us.” “But will it have changed her for the better?” “That depends,” she said. “Like I’ve told you, we make choices.” “You may think you are teaching me something,” he said, “but all you’re really doing is confusing me.”

Blaire’s mother showed up the following morning, haggard and sweaty after a red-eye flight from Portland and a two-hour cab ride from LaGuardia. Doug felt the air go out of him when he answered the doorbell and saw her standing there. “I suppose I should have expected you, but I do wish you had let me know you were coming,” he said. “I could have picked you up at the airport or, I don’t know, arranged things.” She made a snorting sound. “Right,” she said. “You’re clearly on top of the situation around here—where is my daughter?” Doug picked up her suitcase and pointed toward the back bedroom. He went into his own room then and changed into a sweatshirt and shorts and went out for a run down to the beach and back. When he got back, mother and daughter were bustling around the kitchen. Some peppy soft-rock music was playing and they were chattering at each other about their favorite foods. “We’re making these frittatas that Mom heard about,” said Blaire. “Supposed to be awesome.” When he got back from his shower, the two of them were seated at the table, eating strawberries from a plateful of them. Doug suddenly felt awkward, the odd man out in his own house. “I think I’ll go down to the restaurant, maybe get an early lunch,” he said. “You guys good?”

“We’ll finish up here and ride those bikes I see in the garage down to the beach,” said Heather. “We’ll see you later.”

It was just past 11 A.M., an hour before Fairfield Fish would open, so he drove straight to Sally’s house. She was in the front yard, whacking away at a lilac bush with a pair of hedge clippers. “You look terrible,” she said. “I gather your ex has soured your mood.” “Of course, you know Heather has arrived,” he said. “I keep forgetting that you know everything that goes on.” “I know it’s hard to understand,” she said, reaching out to take his hand. “Come inside now.” They were naked in her bed within three minutes, and she did some things he hadn’t seen before. He forgot about his ex-wife and all of Blaire’s troubles. He forgot where he was and why he was in that house and living that moment. He forgot just about everything but the woman next to him. When the action was over and they lay on their backs on sweaty sheets, he ran his finger down the side of her leg. “Tell me again that this is all gonna work out,” he said. After a while, they got dressed and crossed the street to open the restaurant. Sally went into the back to check on the cooks, then returned with a tub of ice and poured Doug a Jameson-and-soda. A few minutes later, two 40ish, darkhaired men dressed in golf clothes showed up and took stools across from Doug. “Forgot to tell you, I had the worst night of my life last weekend,” said one of them. “You really like to embellish,” said the other one. “No, really. It was my mother’s birthday and she persuaded me to take her to see Tom Jones up at the casino.” “He’s still doing his deal?” “Yeah, tight pants, weird wig. What’s New, Pussycat? The crowd was almost all crazed women my mother’s age.”

“Jesus,” “Yeah. They started throwing their underwear onto the stage at the end. I was sure there were gonna be some adult diapers up there.” Doug had two more drinks and the crab cakes. He was thinking about a cup of coffee and a quick trip home to see what Blaire and Heather were up to when he noticed that Sally was in an intense conversation at the other end of the bar with a tall, 50ish man with a shock of white hair and a full Santa beard. He was wearing a gray tweed sport jacket over a black turtleneck and was punctuating their conversation with gusts of robust laughter. After a while, the man looked up and caught Doug’s eye, then got up from his stool and moved toward him. He was a big, broad-shouldered man with a bit of a belly, and he walked with a confident stride, as if he were a former athlete who hadn’t yet gone completely to seed. When he got to Doug’s stool, he stuck out his hand. “Professor Hatcher,” he said, “I’m Martin Kehoe. If you will have me, I am ready to represent your daughter in court.” Doug shook Kehoe’s hand. “Lawyer,” said Doug. “You’re a lawyer.” Kehoe took a stool next to Doug. “itted to the bar in Connecticut, New York, and California,” he said. “I just do criminal law.” “And Sally found you?” “Yep, I’ve known her forever. She says your daughter—Blaire?—has been wrongly charged and needs some help getting through to the proper conclusion.” “She apparently did kick the guy in his testicles,” said Doug. “I gather he deserved it.” “That’s what Blaire says,” said Doug, “and I believe her.” When Sally came by, she put a glass of bourbon neat in front of Kehoe. He took it down in two gulps, and then stuck out his hand again. “We’ll be talking,” he said, then left.

“So, we sure that guy’s right for Blair?” said Doug when Sally came by with his coffee. “Seems kind of … casual.” She took his hand in hers. “Oh, honey,” she said, “he’s the one.”

Kehoe was waiting for them on the steps of the Superior Court Building in Bridgeport one week later. “Ah, the team has assembled,” he said as Doug led Blaire and Heather up to him. “This should go fast. It’s just an arraignment, where the prosecution states that they have sworn out a criminal complaint against Blaire and then outlines the basics of their case. Then Blaire stands up and says she’s not guilty—that’s it. The judge will set a date for a preliminary hearing and we all go home.” “Will Mr. Pomeroy be there?” said Blaire, in a voice smaller than usual. “No,” said Kehoe, “I gather he’s out of the hospital, but still isn’t terribly mobile yet.” The day unspooled as Kehoe had predicted. The prosecutor, a balding, 40ish fat man in a too-tight suit, said the state was filing various charges, including a Class 1 felony charge of criminal assault against a Connecticut resident. He said that, because the victim is a public official of the town of Fairfield, the charge carries an additional recommended sentence if the defendant is found guilty. “That’s bullshit,” whispered Kehoe, loud enough for Doug to hear. The prosecutor said that on the afternoon of April 8th of this year, the defendant “willfully and maliciously attacked the heaster of her Fairfield high school, causing grievous injury.” He said various witnesses will attest to the circumstances of the attack and the severity of the victim’s wounds. He said the state would like to proceed quickly. Kehoe stood up and said the defense would also like to proceed quickly “to get this unfortunate incident behind this innocent young girl.” The judge, a 60ish black man with thinning gray hair and horn-rimmed glasses, waved a hand toward Blaire, standing next to Kehoe. “I presume this innocent young girl is pleading not guilty,” he said. “Correct, your honor,” said Kehoe. The judge wrote on some papers in front of him for perhaps a minute.

“Preliminary hearing,” he said. “Next week.” When they got home, Heather made some sort of casserole with tofu and various vegetables, but nobody could eat. Blaire went off to bed after a while, and Doug sat down at the kitchen table with Heather and opened a bottle of Barolo. She took a tentative sip, then a mouthful. “Tell me about this woman Sally Moses,” she said. “Blaire can’t stop talking about her.” “Well, she owns this seafood restaurant in town,” said Doug. “We go there a lot.” “But it’s more than that,” she said. “You are involved with her.” “Yes.” “Do you love her?” “It’s more complicated. She’s very … unusual, and she sort of takes over your life.” “And I gather she’s taken an intense interest in Blaire’s situation. Found her a lawyer and all.” Doug poured himself another glass of the wine. “I trust her,” he said. “And I want to meet her,” said Heather.

Heather and Sally met the next afternoon at the restaurant. Doug and Blaire took seats at the bar, giving their orders to the backup bartender, Kenny, a faltering 60ish man who suffered from a nervous condition that caused him to drop things —glasses, plates of food—on a regular basis. Sally and Heather went to a table in the back of the half-empty restaurant and took seats across from each other. Doug could see them—first talking intensely, both of them leaning toward each other, for about ten minutes, then leaning back like two old friends chatting away the afternoon. Someone said something to make them both burst into bouts of laughter. Blaire had taken out her history textbook and was sipping on a lemonade. Doug took a hit on his Jameson-soda and looked over the menu. Two 30ish women,

one thin, one plump, both with long, blonde-streaked hair, took stools at the elbow of the bar. “So, that bastard texted me this morning, like nothing happened,” said the thin one. “THINKING OF YOU, with a smiley-face emoji. I was so mad, I just starting crying. I hadn’t cried in a long time.” “I call bullshit on that one,” said the plump one. “Those were tears of frustration,” said the thin one. Heather came back to the bar after a while and ordered a vodka-tonic. She put her hand on Blaire’s shoulder. “Honey, after talking to Sally, I really feel like you’re in good hands here,” she said. “I’m thinking of going back to Portland and pick up my classes, and if you go to trial or whatever I’ll be back.” “That’s fine,” said Blaire. “There’s nothing you can really do here.” Heather swiveled around and looked at Doug. “Just don’t screw it up,” she said. “Do whatever Sally says.”

On the evening before Blaire’s preliminary hearing, Kehoe showed up at their front door. “I’ve got an offer from the prosecution I am legally required to share with you,” he said. Doug called for Blaire in her bedroom and the three of them sat down at the kitchen table. Kehoe pulled out a sheaf of papers from his briefcase and pawed through them for a few moments. “Ah, here,” he said. “There are some names here.” He pushed a page from a yellow note pad across the table toward Blaire. She looked at the names. “It’s Wil, Carmen, and Ginger,” she said. “Yes,” said Kehoe. “Apparently, this man Pomeroy is willing to agree to lesser charges if you state that these three people were involved in some sort of drug ring at your school.” “Never,” said Blaire. “The deal on the table is that the charge goes down to misdemeanor assault and it’s handled in Juvenile Court. Worst case you get a year’s probation and some community service.”

“What’s the alternative?” said Doug. “If Blaire loses a felony assault case in adult court, she could face multiple years in women’s prison.” “You have a recommendation here?” said Doug. “It’s up to Blaire and you,” said Kehoe. “I haven’t figured out how we defend yet. All I know is Blaire says she assaulted the man in the middle of sexual attack, and I believe her. I guess we move on from there.” “I’m not gonna say those things about my friends,” said Blaire. “They aren’t true.” “Well, truth isn’t always what people are looking for in a case like this,” said Kehoe.

The preliminary hearing took place in the same Bridgeport courtroom, varnished wooden walls and fluorescent lights that made everyone look like a ghost. The same black, gray-haired judge was presiding, and he seemed unhappy, grumbling to himself as he flipped through a short stack of papers in front of him. “All right,” he said. “let us proceed.” Kehoe and the prosecutor both stood up. “We must report, your honor, that the state’s efforts at reaching an agreement with the defendant have been unsuccessful,” said the prosecutor. “I’ve got to guess he didn’t hear us say ‘not guilty’ at the arraignment,” said Kehoe. “We’ve not met before, Mr… . Kehoe,” said the judge. “No, your honor, I haven’t had the honor to appear in your court,” said Kehoe. “Well,” said the judge, “you should know that I don’t like lawyers who think they are humorous.” “Point taken, your honor,” said Kehoe.

“And your maintaining your not-guilty plea,” said the judge. “Absolutely,” said Kehoe. The judge turned toward the prosecutor. “And you are sticking to your guns too,” he said. The prosecutor nodded. “Well, I guess we will have to find ourselves a court date,” said the judge.

After the hearing, Doug drove Blaire and Kehoe to Sally’s restaurant. Along the way, Kehoe kept up a running commentary about Fairfield. “I’ve always felt uncomfortable in the suburbs, like everyone’s waiting for me to do something they can call the cops about,” he said as they pulled into the parking lot. Doug and Blaire took stools at the bar and ordered drinks and a double order of popcorn shrimp, while Kehoe and Sally went to a small table in the back and were soon locked into what looked like a ionate conversation. Two stout gray-haired women in their sixties, drinking espresso martinis, sitting at stools on the other side of the bar, seemed about half-drunk. “You know, I wrote a check for my granddaughter’s tuition the other day—$20,000,” said one of them. “And that’s for the ridiculous prep school she’s at. I can’t even imagine what her college bills are gonna be like.” “And what can she possibly learn that makes any sense out of this goddamn world,” said the other. Later, after Kehoe had left and Sally was back behind the bar, Doug noticed that every single person at the bar except he and Blaire were fiddling with their phones—texting, scrolling through screens, simply staring at whatever cat picture, news flash, and photo of friends that shone out at them. “Can’t you get people to talk to each other?” Doug said to Sally when she came by to refill Blaire’s lemonade. “I could,” she said, “but then they’d just talk about stuff they saw on their phone.” “This whole thing can’t end well,” said Doug.

“Oh, people tend to wake up to things that are harming them sooner or later,” she said. “So, the phone thing, sooner or later?” he said. “Later,” she said. “Much later.”

Before they left for home, Sally pushed a small cloth bag across the bar. “More Goody Knapp,” she said. “You should read it right away.” After Blaire had gone to bed, Doug went to his office and unrolled the vellum manuscript on his desk. He began to read:

DAY FOUR

After the foolishness with the chair at the town pond, some small part of me held out hope that Ludlow and his pack would think better of burdening me further. But this morning, two gray-faced women arrived at my cell with a towel, a large urn of water, and a piece of brown soap of an inferior quality. They also brought along a black dress with a white-and-red section on the bodice. Wash yourself and put on the fresh clothing, one of them told me. You are going to trial today, said the other gray face. For all the fears that came over me at the prospect of a trial before the townspeople, cleansing myself and putting on clothing that didn’t reek of the foul cell, however ill-fitting, filled me with a momentary sense of joy. That reverie was ended after an hour or so when a group of men, the hideous visage of Ludlow among them, crowded into my lair. I could smell the whiskey on them. “Goodwife Knapp,” said one of the men, a thin-faced, long-nosed fellow I didn’t know, “we, your community leaders, will now escort you to the town hall to face charges of witchery. May god have mercy on your wretched soul.” Two thuggish men stepped forward from the crowd, took me by my arms,

and marched me out to learn my fate. They half-dragged me across the central green to town hall. In the main meeting hall, a long bench with three chairs had been placed on one end of the room and Ludlow and two of his pack had taken the seats. One of the men had a large round head topped with a bright orange wig, the other was an older, white-haired man who clutched an ornate cane with a duck’s head knob. The crowd filled all the chairs and dozens more townspeople stood along the rim of the room. I caught a glimpse of my poor Roger and my children as they brought me into the room. All three of them looked shocked, as if they were as afraid as I was. The thugs put me in a chair facing Ludlow and the others. After a few minutes, Ludlow stood and said any witnesses in the matter at hand should come forward. The first to do so was a wicked soul named Andrew Sackett, owner of a vast stretch of land in the Stratfield section of town. He was a fat man with oily skin, who smelled of liquor and onions. Some years before, I had been employed at his Post Road mansion to clean the floors and toilets. I quit because this Sackett reached under my skirts and tried to hold me against his odorous body whenever I was ing by with my mops and pails. This Sackett stood there and said I had stolen many precious objects from his home when he employed me. Also, he said, at various times I could be heard to utter demonic chants in the pantry. I stood up from my chair and faced the man. “Tell them how you used to paw at me like some filthy dog,” I said. The crowd erupted in a sound, half laughter, half outrage. Ludlow stood, pointed his bony finger at me, and shouted SIT DOWN! Then he waved at one of the thugs standing near the exit. The thug disappeared for a moment, then returned with a metal helmet. I had never seen such a device, but I knew instantly that it was “scold’s bridle”. Some Post Road husbands were said to employ such a device to quiet wives and daughters who offended them with their comments. The thug walked over to me and fitted the damnable muzzle onto my head, forcing an iron bit into my mouth that rendered any further speech impossible. The next person to come forward was a woman who kept a stall at the market in town center. She sold potatoes and onions and carrots, sometimes some pitifully small tomatoes, and she had a broad, lumpy face as sour as a pickle. I had some hostile dealings with her over the previous year. Once,

when I objected to her price for some shriveled yellow onions, she screamed at me for more than a minute, then spat at my feet. Another time, when I complained that most of the potatoes in her bin were streaked with dark blue mold, she tried to strike me with a stick she held behind her counter. The woman stood there and said I had twice been caught stealing from her, and she said that after I had been caught I promised to place a curse on her. Minutes after I had left the scene, she said, all the vegetables at her stall turned black and burst into blue flames. Then a grizzled old man, a potato farmer with land on Greenfield Hill, came forward and said he had seen me and several women, including one who held her head high, in a forest clearing at midnight a month before. He said that I and the other women were dancing around a fire, then an Indian brave in full warpaint came out of the woods and ed us. The man said the Indian seemed to be holding a blue flame in his bare hands. The man said it seemed to him that there was some kind of devil worship going on. When nobody else came forward, Ludlow stood and asked if anyone wished to speak in my defense. The room was silent. I turned and saw my poor Roger, his face in his hands. Ludlow stood and gestured to the thug, who came and removed my muzzle. Then Ludlow and the other two left the room, returning after five or so minutes. He stood again and announced that the court had found me guilty of engaging in acts of witchcraft to the detriment of the town of Fairfield. My sentence, he said, would be death by hanging. I was in a daze, unable to grasp the horrors I was enduring, as they dragged me back to my cell.

CHAPTER 11

Sophisticated Stupidity

A T SOME POINT, Blaire began to notice a man who was at the bar whenever she and her father went to Sally’s restaurant. He was a tall, handsome, muscular man in his late 30s or early 40s, with short brown hair and a trimmed beard. He spent most of his time chatting with Sally, staring at her whenever she moved off to tend to other customers. Blaire thought he stared too intently. On a busy Friday night, Blaire asked Sally about the man. “Oh, that one,” said Sally. “He keeps asking me out on a date. He says he thinks I am the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen.” “He looks at you weird when your back is to him,” said Blaire. Sally sighed. “Yeah, I know. I’ve got to send him off.” Ten minutes later, Blaire saw Sally locked into a brief conversation with the man. After a minute or so, he stood up, threw some cash on the bar, and walked out. “What did you say to him?” said Blaire when Sally drifted back her way. “I told him that I really appreciated his interest in me, but I already have a partner and believe deeply in monogamy,” said Sally. “Then I said it was probably better all around if he stopped coming into the place.” “What did he say?” “He said that he saw a light inside me and he needed to be near it or he couldn’t continue on with his life.” “Wow,” said Blaire.

“Yeah, guy’s got a pretty good line of bullshit,” said Sally, “but he’s really just about racking up scores. First time he came in, I asked him what he wanted to drink. ‘Your bathwater,’” he said.

Blaire’s trial began the next Monday, a day with a chilly spring wind sweeping in from the Sound and the rain coming down in sheets. Blaire agonized for an hour over her court outfit, finally settling on a pair of plain black slacks and a dark blue shirt. When they got to the courthouse, two TV trucks were parked on the street and five or six reporters and photographers were scattered across the front steps. They formed a swarm of flashbulbs and shouted questions when Blaire, her father and mother, and Kehoe appeared. Blaire, hustled past the mob by one parent on each of her arms, felt like she was going to throw up. She shuddered inside at the thought of shots of her vomiting all over the steps on the evening news. They found their way to the same wood-ed courtroom—same judge, same gray-haired courtroom stenographer, same bearded bailiff. Most of the seats were filled, and Blaire’s father and mother squeezed into a space set aside for them in the front row. Kehoe took Blaire by her elbow and guided her to a table to the left of the judge’s bench. The fat bald prosecutor sat at a table to their right, next to a young dark-haired woman with a large pointy nose and blackframed glasses. The judge rapped his gavel twice and growled at the reporters in back of the room—“We don’t do disruptions in my courtroom. Everybody settle down or be on your way.” He said that, if nobody objected, they would begin the proceeding with jury selection. For the rest of the morning, a series of people showed up for a quick round of questioning by the prosecutor and his assistant—What do you do for a living? Ever been arrested? Ever met anybody involved in the case? Ever been the victim of an assault? Kehoe didn’t ask any questions and he didn’t even seem to be listening to the testimony, spending most of the morning humming to himself and drawing abstract doodles on his yellow legal pad. At the lunch break, Blaire’s father said a bailiff told him about a Chinese noodle shop that delivered to the courthouse and they ate in a small conference room

down the hallway without talking, all of them zoned out from the stress of the day. The afternoon wore on the same way, another series of strange faces, answering the same questions. Kehoe seemed even more detached, staring at the ceiling and fiddling with his key ring. Since he hadn’t objected to any of the potential jurors, the selection went quickly. By just past 4 P.M., the judge announced the selection was complete and they should all be back in court at nine the next morning. They all went to Sally’s restaurant after the dismissal, taking over the entire end of the bar. Blaire felt a bit dizzy, disoriented, and she guzzled two Cokes for the sugar. Her mother and father were seated on either side of Kehoe, and they seemed to be quizzing him about the day’s events. “I understand that you have a plan,” she heard her father say. “But it actually looks like you’re not paying attention.” Blaire stopped listening before she could hear Kehoe’s reply. Later, after Sally had brought her an order of crab cakes, she began to feel better. Two gray-haired middle-aged men in dark suits came in and took stools across from her. “I can’t believe you did that,” said one of them. “It doesn’t seem like something you would do.” “Well, I was 25 and, you know, stupid,” said the other man. “I’m 57 now and I’m still stupid, but it’s a more sophisticated stupidity.”

On the second day of the trial, the judge began by calling Kehoe and the prosecutors into his chambers for a half-hour. “Well, that was ridiculous,” said Kehoe when he got back to the table. “Judge says the media thing is getting out of hand, put a gag order out so we can’t taint the jury by talking to the press.” “Is that legal?” said Blaire. “Judges get to do just about whatever they want,” said Kehoe. “You can always use the dumb stuff on an appeal, but let’s not think about that.” The first witness was a slim, 25ish woman with curly brown hair who had been working as a temporary receptionist outside Pomeroy’s office on the day of the “incident”. She said Blaire and Mr. Goldschmidt arrived at her desk at approximately 3 P.M. Goldschmidt left and Blaire went into the office. After

about five minutes, the woman said, she began to hear some loud talking inside the office, followed by some kind of banging sounds. Then, she said, Blaire came out of the office and hurried out into the hallway and disappeared. “How did she appear?” said the fat prosecutor. “She looked upset, like something had happened,” said the woman. “Then what happened?” “After another minute or two, I heard some moaning sounds inside the office. Then, after another minute or two, Mr. Pomeroy buzzed the intercom and said I should call Mr. Goldschmidt to come right away.” “And you did that? “Yes, Mr. Goldstein came right away, maybe thirty seconds later, and he went into the office.” “Then what?” “Well, my shift was over and I went home.” Kehoe had no questions. Goldschmidt testified next. He was red-faced and sweaty, like he was experiencing some sort of emotional or digestive distress. “Tell me about the day of the ‘incident’,” said the prosecutor. “Like the whole day?” “No, just from the time Mr. Pomeroy summoned you to his office.” “Well, he buzzed me on the intercom and when I got to his office, maybe thirty seconds later, I found him sitting on the floor, with his back against the front of his desk. He was all … disheveled, and I could see a lot of blood on his front, his crotch area.” “What did he say?” “Something about the Hatcher girl attacking him for no reason. He said it was

like she went crazy.” “Then what happened?” “I helped him up and propped him in his desk chair. Then I called 9-1-1 and told them we needed some medical help. The ambulance and a bunch of squad cars showed up in like five minutes.” “That’s fine, Mr. Goldschmidt, I have nothing further.” Kehoe had no questions. The doctor who testified next was a plump South Asian man, perhaps a Filipino, with shiny black hair slicked back from a fat round face. He said he was a urological specialist at Yale New Haven hospital who had been brought in to help in Mr. Pomeroy’s case. Mr. Pomeroy, he said, had suffered “profound wounds to his reproductive system”. There was talk about twisted tubes and torn testicles; Blaire stopped listening after a while. “So, what is the prognosis for Mr. Pomeroy?” said the prosecutor. “Well, there has been some sepsis—an infection—in the patient’s testicle area, as well as continued swelling and significant pain. The patient has been prescribed a range of medications, which he will probably continue to need for some time. He will require at least two more surgeries.” “What’s the worst case here,” said the prosecutor. The doctor screwed up his face and stammered a bit. “I, I would rather not speculate on an outcome at this point,” he said. “But I can say that a negative outcome would be a procedure called an orchiectomy.” “Which entails what?” “Well, the surgical removal of the entire testicle sack.” “Just remove the whole thing?” “Yes, and there are often many, uh, complications for the patient, both medically and, uh, socially, psychologically.”

Kehoe had no questions.

When the lunch break came, Blaire’s father declared that, wherever they went to eat, he required that the establishment had a functioning bar. They settled on a noisy Italian place in downtown Bridgeport. They took over the corner of the bar and the adults began ordering cocktails. Blaire drank two iced teas before anybody ordered any food. An older man, perhaps sixty, with a doughy face and a thin patch of gray hair, came in and took the stool next to Blaire. After a minute or so, he turned to her. “You’re a young person, tell me something,” he said. “My son has gone to court to have his first name changed from ‘Jason’ to ‘Amazon’. He will be called Amazon Witowski. Now, who would hire someone with that name? He says he is a ‘dedicated shopper’and has decided to let the world know it. Tell me, is my boy going insane?” Blaire thought about it for a moment. “A lot of people are,” she said. A bit later, after Blaire had finished her spaghetti, two middle-aged women in jogging gear came in and settled onto stools down the bar from Blaire. “So, they have this big glass place on three acres in Weston. In the main house, there are three cats and two parrots. There used to be six cats, but three of them didn’t get along with the other three, so they built a small house in the backyard—they have to call it a barn for zoning. People can hang there during the day, but it’s really for the cats. The cats are called Scout, Harper, and Finch, by the way.” Later, just before they left for court, a young man, 25 perhaps, came in and took a stool next to Blaire’s father. He was tall and thin, with a shaved bald head and a black patch over his left eye. Blaire’s father, who by that point was about half-drunk, leaned toward the man. “So, I gotta ask, is that patch temporary or a long-term deal?” he said. “Oh, it’s permanent,” said the man. “Lost my right eye completely.’ Blaire’s father took a sip of his Irish whiskey. “Jesus, that’s a tough one,” he said. “You a soldier?”

“Nope, I was teaching English in Shanghai and I got fired for some stuff that wasn’t my fault. Thing was my credit card had been cut off and I didn’t have the cash to buy a ticket back home. I have some skills with electric gear and I ran into a guy who said he knew of a ship, a grain freighter that was looking for an electrician and was leaving for the States within a week. So I signed on.” “What the hell happened? Jesus, pirates?” “No, I was working on some gear in the aft hold and all of a sudden all this wheat just exploded. Blew out my eardrums, concussion, the eye.” “So, it just spontaneously … blew up, the wheat.” “It’s the dust coming off the wheat. The captain said he’d seen at least five wheat-dust explosions over the years.” A few minutes later, two elderly men down the bar were telling each other jokes and laughing hard, slapping the bar. “So these two cannibals are eating a clown. One guy says to the other, ‘Does this taste a bit funny?’”

After the recess, a skinny young Fairfield police officer with a black buzz cut and enormous ears took the stand. The fat prosecutor asked him what he saw that day. “Well, sir,” said the cop, “when I showed up, the victim here, Mr. Pomeroy, was slumped in his office chair. There was blood all over the front of him. He looked like he might have been in shock and the EMTs were just gathering around him, ready to take him to the ambulance.” “Did he say anything to you?” said the prosecutor. “He said a girl called Hatcher had attacked him. Then, later, at the hospital, he made a full statement, naming Blaire Hatcher as his attacker.” Kehoe had no questions. Next up was a thin, pale, very nervous girl, a junior named April Bronson. She said that on a Friday afternoon in April, she had overheard Blaire talking about Mr. Pomeroy with two of her teammates. “What precisely did she say about the victim, Mr. Pomeroy?”

The judge banged his gavel. “In lieu of any response from Mr. Kehoe, I am going to ask the state not to refer to Calvin Pomeroy as ‘the victim’ in these proceedings. It’s what we like to call prejudicial.” “Of course, your honor,” said the prosecutor. “So, what did Ms. Hatcher say about Mr. Pomeroy.” “She said that he thought he was the king around the school and someone should take him down. She said she hated him.” Kehoe had no questions. A boy Blaire sort of knew, a junior with long brown hair and bad acne, was up next. He said he had been sitting in a booth at the downtown Duchess restaurant on a Saturday night two weeks ago. He said Blaire and two of her friends were seated in a booth right behind him and he could hear everything that they said. He said he heard Blaire say she hated Mr. Pomeroy and wanted to bring him down somehow. When the boy had finished, Kehoe stood up. “One question,” he said. “What does Pomeroy have on you?” The fat prosecutor jumped up—“Objection, your honor. This is outrageous.” “Withdrawn,” said Kehoe. “I was just curious.” After the boy left the witness stand, the judge looked at his watch. “I think we can manage one more witness,” he said. A drama teacher, a skinny, oval-faced woman with short curly hair died blonde at the tips, came up next. She said she had seen Blaire that day, hustling along the hallway with Goldschmidt toward Pomeroy’s office. “She looked sort of wild-eyed to me, like she was very … emotional. She sort of pushed past people, bumping them with her shoulder. I actually thought about stopping her to ask what was wrong.” “But you didn’t speak to her.” “No, she just lurched past me and that was the last I saw of her.”

Blaire went for a long run when they got home that night, through the suburban streets to the beach, then four or five miles west on the hard low-tide sand. About halfway back, just at sunset, the rain came down. It was a cold, almost icy rain that stung her skin, but she felt somehow cleansed by it. She ran hard, face into the wind, all the way back to the house. When she got home, her father was standing in the kitchen, dressed to go out in a tweed jacket and chinos. “We were about to send out the dogs to find you,” he said. “You are completely soaked to the skin.” “It was, I don’t know, pretty great, like some of the stuff from court today got washed away,” she said. “Well, hot shower,” he said. “And then I have a surprise, a couple of your friends are coming over. There’s cash for a pizza or whatever on the kitchen counter. Your mother and I are gonna go to Sally’s for dinner and meet up with Kehoe. We thought you could use a night off from all of it.” “I could,” she said. “I can.” Ginger and Carmen showed up twenty minutes later and they all hugged and cried and rubbed each other’s heads, all grown out now with an inch of stubble. They ordered Thai food and raided Blaire’s father’s beer stash. Later, Ginger produced a t and they all had another beer. They plugged Carmen’s phone into the speakers and played Katy Perry and danced until they were sweaty. “This is the best I’ve felt since I don’t know when,” said Blaire after they were all settled down back on the couch. “It’s all been so weird,” said Carmen. “This evil man is like at war with us. I can’t believe you did what you did.” “Well, I didn’t really think about it,” said Blaire. “Just when he pulled out his thing, I got so angry I wasn’t even thinking like a rational person.” “I know this has got you into a lot of trouble,” said Ginger. “But I’m really glad you did it.”

“Me too,” said Blaire. “Though I guess I better not say that to too many people.” Wil was on the courthouse steps the next morning. He walked up to Blaire and brought her close. He looked thinner, almost skeletal, and smelled of minty aftershave. “My parents don’t know I’m here,” he said. “They’re completely freaked out.” “I get that,” said Blaire. “It’s all pretty messed up.” “This lawyer they hired says they wanted you to say me and your friends were involved in drugs after all,” said Wil. “He said you told them to screw off.” “Well,” she said, “that wasn’t gonna happen.” “I don’t know what else to say,” he said. “I just wish none of this had happened.” “Yeah,” said Blaire, “but my father’s girlfriend says you are who you are depending on how you handle the bad stuff that comes at you. She says I’m getting a chance to prove something to myself with this whole trial bullshit.” “I’m gonna go in and try to find a seat,” said Wil. “Looks like a lot of people want to see the circus.” The first witness was Blaire’s AP Calculus teacher, a short, stout, 40ish woman with a wide face and curly black hair. She was a terrible teacher, mumbling through her explanations of the work, and Blaire had never spoken to her other than to exchange perfunctory remarks about a math problem. Blaire couldn’t imagine what the woman had to say about the case. The fat prosecutor began the questioning. “On the day of the, uh, incident, did you have cause to address our, uh … Mr. Pomeroy?” “Yes,” said the woman. “That morning, I went to his office to talk to him about a student.” “What student?” “Blaire Hatcher, the, uh, defendant.” “And what was the nature of that conversation?”

“I wanted to tell him that I noticed a strange situation with Blaire.” “Strange situation?” “She seemed to have completely tuned out, staring off into space during class. She’d always been a good student, but now when she wasn’t zoned out, she was misbehaving, talking to other students, ing notes. When I tried to onish her, she became very angry. Her face was …” “I’m sorry. Her face?” “She looked like she was crazy somehow, like she was possessed by something. I thought it might be drugs, but I don’t know.” “And that day, you wanted to tell Mr. Pomeroy about this girl’s behavior?” “Yes, I thought he should know about it.” “And so,” said the fat prosecutor, “as far as you know, that was the reason Mr. Pomeroy summoned the defendant to his office on the day of the incident.” “As far as I know,” she said. Kehoe had no questions. After the math teacher left the stand, the judge called Kehoe and the prosecutor up to his bench and talked to them for a few minutes. “Apparently, their last witness will be Pomeroy,” Kehoe whispered to Blaire when he came back to the table. “Judge is sort of freaking out about the reporters and TV crews maybe turning his courtroom into a carnival.” The judge started banging his gavel then. “I would like to remind everyone in the courtroom, especially the of the media in attendance, that this is a serious place where serious business is conducted,” he said. “Anyone who forgets that will be removed immediately.” He banged his gavel again. “Call the next witness,” he said. Blaire could hear the rumble of the crowd behind her, but she forced herself to keep from turning her head to take in Mr. Pomeroy’s entrance. He stared straight ahead when he was wheeled past her and up to the front of the room to a stop

below the jury box. He looked older, his skin grayish, his eyes sunk back into his skull. He wore a navy blue suit with a white shirt and a red tie; the outfit seemed at least two sizes too big for him. His legs were covered with a pale blue blanket, and he was holding a white handkerchief in his left hand. He used it to dab at his forehead now and then. The crowd continued to buzz and the judge banged his gavel twice and glared out into the room. “Proceed,” he said when the noise subsided. The fat prosecutor jumped to his feet. “So, Mr. Pomeroy, can you describe your interactions with the defendant prior to the … incident in question,” he said. “The incident,” said Pomeroy, his voice a low rumble. “You mean the attack that has debilitated me.” The judge rapped his gavel once. “Once again, in the absence of any objection from the defense counsel, I find myself in the awkward position of acting myself. We can’t have that last statement in the court record without some objection.” “I’ll rephrase it,” said Pomeroy. “The physical confrontation that took place in my office on April 11.” The judge sighed audibly. The prosecutor was shuffling some papers on his table. “So, can you tell us about whatever s you had with the defendant?” “She came here in the fall, October I think. Good school record in of grades, but I made a call to a former colleague out there in Oregon and found out that there were social problems.” “Social problems?” “Well, it seemed there was some sort of cyber bullying going on. It wasn’t clear whether she was the perpetrator or the victim. In any case, she left the school in Portland quite suddenly and enrolled here in Fairfield. I should add that Ms. Hatcher is also something of an athletic star, a runner.” “Can you tell us of your personal interactions with the defendant?” “Well, she came to my office with her father when she first applied for a place at

the school. We had a brief chat and I welcomed them both to the town. Very ordinary meet-and-greet.” “And after that?” “I like to think that part of my job is to make students of promise such as Ms. Hatcher feel welcomed at the school, and I think I may have had her drop by my office two or three times just to check in on her.” “And how did she seem when she came in for those discussions?” “At first, she seemed to be fitting in quite well—good grades, some stellar athletic achievements.” “But later?” “She seemed to be increasingly tense, hostile, almost as if someone or something was influencing her. And I heard from other sources, teachers and other students who drop by my office now and then, that Ms. Hatcher was associating with some less desirable students—one young man in particular, who had been expelled from his previous school for dealing narcotics.” “And you attempted to counsel her in some fashion.” Pomeroy shifted in his chair. “She simply refused to listen to me,” he said. “She kept up her associations and then came the anonymous phone call I received on April 14.” “What is the significance of that call?” “The caller said certain students were operating a drug operation at the school. The students the caller identified were some of the people Ms. Hatcher had often been seen with. In any case, the incident engendered student suspensions and an investigation by the police and the town Board of Education.” “And what did Ms. Hatcher do at that time?” “Well, she and her—whatever you wish to call it—gang defaced themselves,” said Pomeroy. He pointed a crooked index finger at Blaire, a stab to her heart. “You can see what they did, look at the stubble coming out of that one’s head.”

“So,” said the fat prosecutor, “were you at that point concerned about this student, her behavior, et cetera.” “I thought she was in a bad place and she needed to seek some professional help. I had no idea what was going on in her head.” “And so, on the day you were injured in your office, you were hoping to chat with Ms. Hatcher about her situation.” “I was going to tell her to bring her father in so we could all have a chat about counseling opportunities available to them.” “And when you broached the subject with Ms. Hatcher?” “She became enraged, flames coming out of her eyes, and jumped to her feet and stumbled toward my desk. I came around the desk to restrain her and that’s when she … assaulted me. There was an initial kick and then, when I was down, I believe she kicked or struck me again. By that time, I was semi-conscious.” “That last thing was a lie,” Blaire whispered to Kehoe, who seemed to be in a zone far from that courtroom. The fat prosecutor whirled around and looked at the crowd. “Last question,” he said. “Would you say that this assault will materially affect the rest of your life.” Pomeroy stared at Blaire again. “In every way imaginable,” he said. “The state rests,” said the prosecutor. Kehoe stood up then. “I have a couple questions for this witness,” he said. The crowd began to rumble again, and Mr. Pomeroy scowled at her from his wheelchair. “Mr. Pomeroy, is it true that you have been harassed by various of your students over the years?” “There will always be some rogue students in a high school,” said Pomeroy. “I’m asking in particular about some students who have repeatedly etched a nickname for you on the wall outside your office,” said Kehoe.

The fat prosecutor waddled to his feet: “Objection, your honor—what possible relevance can this line of questioning have?” “I’ll allow it, but only because the defense counsel has finally stirred to life. Mr. Kehoe, let’s not stray too far away from the matter at hand.” “Most certainly, your honor, said Kehoe. He turned toward Mr. Pomeroy. “So, nicknames—how they can stick sometimes when they have some relation to reality. What is the nickname that successive generations of students have written on your wall?” Pomeroy glared at Kehoe and remained silent. “So,” said Kehoe after ten seconds or so, “I gather you would rather not talk about the nickname. The kids write CREEPY CAL, isn’t that right?” The prosecutor jumped up again and the judge rapped his gavel. “That will do,” he said. “Okay, last question,” said Kehoe, “Can you give the court any reason that so many students over so many years have seen cause to behave toward you in such a fashion?” “I have been involved in secondary-school education for more than two decades” said Pomeroy, “and I could never begin to understand the darkness inside some of these children. It’s truly demonic at times.” The judge rapped his gavel one last time. “Fine,” he said, “I am involved in an appeals case that should wrap up tomorrow, so we will reconvene here on Friday at 10 A.M.” “So, what happens next?” Blaire asked Kehoe as the crowd leaked out the door behind them. “I guess we’ll have to come up with some sort of defense,” he said. “Are you like a regular lawyer?” she said. Kehoe smiled, showing tobacco-tinged teeth. “Not really,” he said.

Sally’s restaurant was mostly empty—two tables occupied and just one 30ish couple at the bar. Blaire ordered a lemonade when Sally came around and she sat sipping at it while Kehoe and her parents talked about the case, her case. Somewhere deep inside herself, in her heart and belly, she felt a swell of panic that she could barely suppress. They ordered and ate fish and chips and then Kehoe and her parents went off to throw darts. The male of the 30ish couple—brown buzz cut, wide reddish face, navy blue polo shirt a size too small—seemed to be about three-quarters drunk and his voice got louder and had begun to cut through the background chatter. “Goddamn,” he said, “I’m so goddamn hungry I could eat my grandmother’s foot.” “I would eat a cockroach if it were cooked properly,” said the female—thin, pale oval face, stringy brown hair, dark blue eye makeup. Later, the adults came back to the bar and they all had another drink. Kehoe left and her father was waving his credit card at Sally when his phone, lying on the bar, began to buzz. He picked it up and put it up to his ear. “When is this supposed to happen?” he said after a moment. He climbed off his stool. “I’ll be right back,” he said, then hustled out the door. He came back three or four minutes later. He picked up his credit card and put it back in his wallet. “One more round, I think,” he said. “All right,” said Blaire’s mother. “Exactly what the hell was that about?” Her father reached into his jacket pocket and tossed a small object onto the bar, a gray metal thumb drive. “That guy Goldschmidt, the assistant heaster or whatever, called me and said to meet him out in the parking lot,” he said. “Then he just hands me that thing and says it will help you.” “Goldschmidt,” said Blaire. “And he said he wants to help me.” “Confusing, right?” said her father.

CHAPTER 12

Brains Devolving

C ALVIN KNEW IMMEDIATELY that it was Goldschmidt who had betrayed him— that fat, sweaty Jew bastard who owed everything in his miserable life to my willingness to put up with his disgusting presence. Calvin sat in his wheelchair in the sunroom and let himself think of what he would like to do to this traitorous cretin—- smashing his fat face with a hammer, gouging out his eyeballs, slicing off his tongue and tossing it on the ground, crushing his tiny penis in a vice, slicing his throat until the blood gushed down his chest and onto the carpet. The first sign that something had gone wrong came in a phone call from the assistant prosecutor. “The trial, your trial, will be delayed until Tuesday at nine,” she said. “Why is that?” said Calvin. The woman hesitated for just a moment. “Not completely sure,” she said. “Something about new evidence.” Calvin shouted into the kitchen—“Emma, get in here.” His wife, sweaty, strands of her dark hair sticking to her forehead, came into the room, wiping her hands with a dish towel. “Your mother and I were just putting something together for dinner. She’s more or less hopeless in a kitchen.” “The prosecutor’s office called and said they are postponing the trial until Tuesday,” said Calvin. “They say why?” “Something about new evidence.”

“Perhaps they found something that will bury that little bitch once and for all.” The following day, four black Fairfield Police SUVs pulled into his driveway. A half-dozen officers wearing visored helmets and bulletproof vests came to the front door. One of them, a sergeant, presented Calvin’s wife with a warrant to “search the premises and seize all electronic materials in the residence.” Calvin, seated behind her, immediately rolled his way back to his study and locked the door behind him. He rolled around to his desk and flipped open his laptop. He had not yet laid a finger on a key before the door exploded into splinters and an officer came in and grabbed the laptop right off his desk. “You’re gonna have to vacate this office,” he said. Calvin huddled in the sunroom with Emma and his mother. His mother whined on a while about the “jackboots” in her house, then they all fell silent and listened to the bumps and thumps of men moving about. After perhaps an hour, Captain McNab walked into the room and asked the women to leave the room. McNab sat down on low couch, a sour look on his face. “I’m afraid this is bad, Calvin,” he said. “You’re gonna have to come down to the station and fill out some papers, then we’ll release you right away. You’ll be home by dark.” “You’re treating me like a criminal,” said Calvin. “If I didn’t know you for twenty years, you would be spending the night in our lockup,” said McNab. “This is outrageous—what on earth is going on here?” “Well, it’s like this: Kehoe, the Hatcher girl’s lawyer, showed up at the station with a computer thumb drive he said was relevant to your case. I called up the town attorney and a bunch of us looked at the stuff on the drive. We only got about a half-hour in when the town attorney said to get a search warrant. He’s working up some charges against you as well. I’m guessing your assault charges against the girl will be dropped.” “What are you going on about? This is absurd.” “The files on the drive were mostly filmed in your office. Young girls, students, are shown committing sexual acts on you. The Bronson girl, others. It’s definitely you—sometimes your face is shown and it’s your voice all the way

through. There’s no sex stuff with the Hatcher girl and there’s no shots of the attack, but she’s in some of files and the conversations you had with her don’t sound good.” Calvin, for one of the few times in his memory, was speechless. “That was just the first bunch of things on the drive,” said McNab. “The town attorney had somebody on his staff look at the rest of it and apparently there’s much more from your hard drive—kiddie porn, really sick stuff. Just having that stuff on your computer is a major felony.” “I feel that I am living in a police state,” said Calvin. McNab lowered his voice. “Now, look, Calvin, when we searched your office, I found the gun in your desk drawer, the .38,” he said. “I looked it up and you have a valid permit, but even so I would normally seize the weapon in a case like this. But I didn’t, I left it there.” “Why are you telling me this?” “Calvin, I’ve got to be clear here—you are going on trial for all the things that are shown on your computer. We’re looking at many, many counts of sex with underage females, and we’re not even talking about all the sick stuff on your computer. Those will bring Federal charges.” He appeared close to breaking into tears. “Calvin, you are going to die in jail, and I thought you might want an alternative to all that,” he said. The cops finally left and the large black male nurse got Calvin ready to leave the house—changing his diaper, emptying the urine sack, reinserting the catheter, applying lotion to his incisions. Emma drove him downtown to the police station; he looked out the window at the familiar buildings, people on the street who were going about their lives as if the world hadn’t suddenly changed forever. The Channel 12 TV truck was parked in front of the station and a half-dozen reporters were huddled next to the front entrance. Flashbulbs popped as Emma helped him out of the enger seat and slid him into his wheelchair. McNabb was nowhere to be seen, but the town attorney and two other cops walked him through the process of g a series of papers—an

acknowledgement that multiple felony charges have been filed against him, an acknowledgement that a warrant had been duly served to search his home and office, an agreement to appear at a preliminary hearing in Bridgeport Superior Court the following Tuesday. The reporters stirred again when Emma wheeled him down the ramp and onto the car—more flashbulbs and shouted questions—“Mr. Pomeroy, is it true that you are being charged with rape? Mr. Pomeroy, have any comment about all these rumors that you had sex with students?” At home, Calvin rolled himself into his study and locked the door. He reached into the top drawer of his desk and retrieved a yellow pill bottle. He took two Oxycontin tablets, washing them down with a large snifter of Martell brandy. He felt the glow from the pills and the liquor slowly envelope his brain.

Next morning, a Sunday, another black male nurse, this one thinner, with thick glasses, got him ready for the world. He suffered through an interminable breakfast with Emma and his mother—the old lady going on and on about the men who had invaded her house and the vengeful bureaucrats who were tormenting her son. “I intend to discuss this whole affair with certain women at the DAR, women with influence in this town. We will get to the bottom of this entire conspiracy, once and for all.” Calvin remained silent, chewing his raisin bran. He wanted more than anything to strangle the addled old bitch, once and for all. Emma loaded him into the Lincoln just past noon and they made the drive to the high school—“just a look through the office to see what the goons have done.” She steered through the empty parking lot to the side door of the school, unloaded his chair, and eased him into it. “I’ll be a half-hour or so,” he said to her. “I’ve got some things to do.” The halls were dark and empty, the sound of his wheels squeaking along toward his office. He rolled himself to his desk and found the gun in the right-hand drawer of his desk and picked it up, heavy in his hand. He checked the chamber and counted four bullets—he ed he had done some target practice in the woods behind the school a few weeks back. Four is enough to do the job, that’s for sure. One is more than enough, go right through your brain and out the

other side. Or maybe you shoot straight up from your chin, blow the top of your skull off. I suppose Emma will be the one to face the blood and brains all over the wall behind me. I wish it were one of the miserable creatures I have been forced to live with all these years—their incessant chatter, their fat pimply faces, the ignorance in their eyes. It would be perfect if some freshman girl, a little dewy-faced innocent, were to come in and see all that gore. She’d probably whip out her phone and take a picture of it, then send it to all of her dewy little friends. They would all cluck their little tongues and say what a shame that old Mr. Pomeroy did that to himself. What a weird thing to happen, they would say. They would stare at their screens and try to process the scene with their tiny minds. They would text, their delicate thumbs scattering over their keyboards, over and over, their brains devolving, as they tried to make sense of events too complex for them to understand. Yes, it would be grand if one of the little cretins happened upon my grisly remains. He put the gun down and poured himself another snifter of brandy. He took two sips and picked up the gun and pressed it against his chin. His finger was on the trigger and he thought the whole mess his life had become would be mercifully over with a small movement, just a mere twitch and then oblivion. The moment was frozen and he sat there for a full ten seconds before he knew for certain that he lacked the courage to end it like that, there in his office with his bodily fluids spattered against the wall. He opened the drawer and tossed the gun back inside, then rolled his way back to the parking lot to wait for Emma. He drank two Scotches and another brandy when they got home and he was in an altered state during dinner, another endless nightmare of drivel as the women talked and talked about nothing. After the rice pudding, he rolled to the firstfloor bathroom and gathered a half-dozen yellow pill bottles from the medicine cabinet. Then he rolled down the hallway to his office and locked the door behind him. He poured another Martell, a large glass of it, then he flipped open four of the pill bottles and poured out the contents —red, white, yellow, and light blue shapes against the dark wood of his desk. He thought it was proper—these were supposed to relieve his pain and that’s what they would do. He lined up a dozen of the pills and took them one by one, washing them down with the brandy. It took perhaps eight to ten minutes before the fog came over him, then came a kind of roaring sound in his head. At the end, he could feel his life leaving his body. He was on the way to somewhere, but the events of his life did not flash

across his mind. There was no bright light at the end of a tunnel, no dead relatives there to greet him, no celestial choir. He felt himself going somewhere dark and sinister, somewhere worse than any place he had ever been.

CHAPTER 13

A Pig’s Anus

D OUG, SEATED AT Sally’s kitchen table, unrolled the vellum manuscript and began to read:

DAY 5

That night, likely to be my last on God’s earth, ed as in a foul dream. After I was brought back from the trial, I sat on my wretched straw bed and wept so long and hard that I ran out of tears. It was dark outside my small window when one of the gray-faced women came into the cell with my dinner. It was a feast—boiled beef, with cabbage, carrots and potatoes, plus a cup of fresh goat’s milk and a suet pudding for dessert. I ate it all, every last morsel. If I would die in the morning, it would be on a full stomach. Some minutes after the gray face collected my dishes, Roger came into my cell. He seemed smaller than ever, a skinny, round-shouldered man who spent his life staring at the ground. Even then, in my greatest distress, he could not look me in the eye. “The children wanted to come see you, but they wouldn’t allow it,” he said. “Better that they don’t their mother like this,” I said. “And, praise God, please don’t bring them to the hanging tomorrow.” He began to cry, the water running down his worn cheeks. “Stop that,” I said. “You have to summon yourself. You have to be both parents to the children now.”

He stopped the wailing. “It’s just that all this didn’t need to happen,” he said. “Ludlow and the others would have let you free if you had just done what they asked.” “Lie about people I did not even know,” I said. “Call a woman a witch to gain my release when I know no such thing. What would that make me?” He had no answer and I walked across the cell and put my arms around him. “You have been the best man you could be,” I said, “and you deserved more than life gave you.” Roger began to cry again and I told him to go. “Pray for me,” I said. “Pray that I am brave tomorrow.” A few minutes later, one of the gray faces came to ask if I wanted to speak with a town minister. “One of them chases little girls and the other chases little boys,” I said. “And neither one has stood up to protest what has been done to me. A pox on both.” I lay down on my pallet and closed my eyes. I fell into a light sleep and dreamt of being a child, working in the onion fields next to my brothers. The sun shone down on us and a breeze cooled the sweat on our foreheads. We laughed at the faces my baby brother was making. I woke just as the sky was lighting up outside the window. A gray face came in with my breakfast. Two hen’s eggs and fried potatoes, with a mug of black tea. Again, I ate every bite. For some reason, I felt the need to clean up my cell and asked a gray face for a broom. I swept the place twice, replaced the fallen straw on my pallet, wiped down the small table. Then I used a wet rag to clean my face and tidy my hair. Now I am sitting on the side of my pallet, writing these last words. I pray for whoever reads them. I pray that God spares them the suffering I have endured.

Sally was naked on the bed, reading a book of Emily Dickinson poems, when Doug came into the room. He stripped down and jumped in beside her. He noticed that she had moved her tattoos around again. “Where’s the

hummingbird?” he said. “I want to kiss the hummingbird.” She lifted her left arm. There it was, on the side of her rib cage. After he had kissed it for a while, she put down the book and began stroking his head. “So, you have finished the diary,” she said. “Yeah, she sees Ralph on the last night and then they hang her in the morning,” he said. “So, you know what happened next, after they hung her, right?” “I think I read something about it at the history center, but it was a little hazy.” She faced him, propping up her head with her left arm. “Well, right after they took her down from the gallows, Mary Staples, the woman they tried to get Goody to accuse of witchery, demanded to see the body. Then, in front of several other women, she put aside Goody’s clothing and showed the others that there were no devilish nipples on her nether regions. Then, Thomas Staples, Mary’s husband and Roger Ludlowe’s great political rival, sued Ludlowe for slandering his wife. Staples won and Ludlowe had to pay a fine. Right after that, Ludlowe began to sell off all his properties—hundreds of acres all over Fairfield—and moved to Ireland, where he worked as some sort of land commissioner.” “But they still revere him here, right?” he said. “The high school named for him and everything.” He began kissing her neck. “Okay, I gotta ask,” he said. “Pomeroy. You mentioned a couple times about what happens to bad people when they die.” “Well,” she said, “First thing, anyone who commits suicide, unless we’re talking about putting an end to some incurable disease, has probably not lived a completely successful life. In a situation like Pomeroy’s, where the individual is truly awful, then a spirit has to take a fall, a big one.” “So,” he said, “what’s become of Creepy Cal?” “He’s pretty much starting over,” she said. “He’s currently an enzyme in a pig’s anus.”

Later, after a bit of grappling on the bed and then a late dinner of warm lobster salad, they were back on the mattress. She put down her book again. “So, what else did you learn from Goody’s diary?” she said. “Do you know why I gave the pages to you?” “Well, I learned that the people they call witches are mostly women who are, I don’t know, uppity, but not in a bad way.” She smiled at him, flashing the perfect whites. “Okay,” she said. “What else?” “I think I learned that if you don’t snitch on people you have a chance to suffer for it.” “But aren’t you a better person if you don’t lie to save yourself?” she said. “Blaire didn’t do it.” “True.” “And I didn’t either,” she said. “The real reason I gave you those pages is that I am Goody Knapp, or I was.” “Oh, of course,” he said. “I should have figured that out.”

Blaire thrived at the high school after Pomeroy was replaced by a plump, pleasant woman named Marie Hancock. Blair scored straight As in all her classes and led the school track team to successive state titles. She gave a valedictorian’s speech, about surviving sexual attacks, that went viral, and she won a full scholarship to Stanford. She excelled in her college classes and helped Stanford reach the NCAA finals in her junior and senior years, winning the 1500 both years and finishing second twice in the 5000. She was asked to the Olympic trials in 2020, but she pulled a quadriceps during the finals and had to drop out. She went on to CalTech to pursue a master’s in environmental science and ed a team that developed a DNA strain that might allow various tree species to absorb much more carbon dioxide, 100 times as much. Blaire, as an integral part of the team, was cited in multiple scientific publications. Blaire had continued to run all the while, and she was invited to the Olympic trials for the 2024 games in Paris. She won a bronze medal in the 5000.

Doug stopped working on the Burr biography and took teaching jobs at some of the local colleges. As a cheap fill-in with a MacArthur credential, he was a desirable adjunct. He did a seminar at Wesleyan on the American Presidency, a course on the Electoral College versus democracy at Trinity. He had a regular gig at UConn in Storrs, presiding over a series of courses on the Industrial Revolution. After Blaire went away to college, Doug dropped the lease on his house and moved in with Sally. He helps her out at the bar most nights and stays as close to her as he can. He tries to understand what Sally tells him about being a human.