tried to keep it quiet,’ he answered.
‘Who told you this crazy idea?’
‘I…I can’t say.’
There was a tingling sensation in her stomach. ‘And are you implying Scott encouraged these boys to…?’ She trailed off, touching the mantelpiece.
‘Of course not,’ Michael said. ‘That’s not—’
‘What about the head coach? Mr Fontaine? What does he have to say?’
‘He’s in England, visiting his mother. He left after the season ended. We’re trying to reach him.’
‘And how many boys on the team corroborated this story?’
‘I didn’t hear it from any of them, Mrs Bates-McAllister.’
‘There you go.’ Sylvie’s heart was beating fast. ‘Someone made this up. You know how teenagers get with rumors. You know how they embellish things. Something can be whispered to one person and by lunch it’s a huge scandal.’
There was a long pause. ‘I’m not suggesting I believe it,’ the headmaster said. ‘I’m just explaining what I’ve heard. We take everything seriously, as you know. For now, I’m arranging for a few people to meet with Scott. It will be an independent council of teachers, none of your colleagues on the board. I don’t want this to get out of hand, either for us or for you. Your family has done so much for the school, after all. And I know there have been some attempts at…how shall I put this? Some attempts at character assassination, I suppose, regarding certain members of your family in the past. I assure you that I intend to be discreet.’
Sylvie ground her nails into the fabric of the sofa. Character assassination. Discreet. He had a way of making the words sound so dirty. ‘This is unprofessional.’ She paced around the room. ‘You shouldn’t call someone in to talk to them about a rumor. And you shouldn’t come to me with something like this unless you know.’
‘Calling Scott in to talk to him seems fair. If there was a rumor going around about someone else on the staff, another teacher, another coach, you’d want us to feel that person out about it, wouldn’t you, Mrs Bates-McAllister?’
When Sylvie pressed her hand to her forehead, she felt a muscle in her temple throb, a tiny flutter under her skin. She glanced out the window in the kitchen; Scott’s car wasn’t in the driveway. She dared to think of what he was doing. Lifting weights at the gym. Playing video games. Driving the Mercedes too fast, whipping around the turns and grinding the gears. She thought of the jobs he’d held – the stint as an auto mechanic, mostly learning the ropes so he could soup up his own car, which he’d since crashed. Pouring concrete, coming home covered in gray film. Even that time he caddied at James’s golf club, though that had lasted only a day – he’d said the golfers were racist, giving him accusing looks like he was going to walk off with their clubs. She’d felt urgently optimistic with each job he took, praying that this one would be his true path, the thing that set him straight. He quit each job after only a matter of weeks.
Something else appeared in her mind, too. When Scott was ten or eleven, she had come upon him in the basement. He was crouched in the corner, watching something. A mouse was trapped under a large glass vase, slowly suffocating. It clawed the sides of the vase, its little paws scrambling. How had it gotten there? It took her a few moments to understand. ‘Scott!’ she’d cried out, but her voice was so weak, so ineffectual. Always so ineffectual. When he’d done nothing, she’d pushed him aside, lifted the vase, and let the mouse go. Scott had looked at her crazily. She complained about mice in the basement all the time – didn’t she want them dead? But it was Scott’s expression as he’d watched the mouse flail under the dome that had made her set it free. The look on his face was one of iron-cold indifference, like he’d almost enjoyed the poor creature’s suffering.
Oh God, she thought now, a rushing feeling between her ears. Oh God.
‘Mrs Bates-McAllister?’ the new headmaster said softly into the phone. ‘Are you still there?’
‘Thank you for calling,’ she said in the strongest voice she could find. ‘But I think what you’re suggesting—’
‘I’m not suggesting anything,’ he broke in. ‘You’ve misunderstood—’
‘—is a mistake,’ she finished. She hung up.
The living room was foolishly quiet. The antique armchair was tilted toward the bookshelf at a rakish angle. The old etchings of The Swithin School, commissioned by Sylvie’s grandfather and handed down to her when she had inherited this house, were at perfect right angles on the walls. Sylvie looked at the framed photograph of her grandparents that sat on the top of the sideboard. Her grandfather’s cunning, sepia-toned eyes seemed more narrowed than usual, as though he’d heard both sides of the phone conversation.
Oh, how she’d cared for everything in this house. How she’d taken pride in all its details, how she’d preserved it to the letter, thinking that keeping everything exactly the same would embalm the spirit and ideals of her grandfather forever. This house essentially was her grandfather – the local press had dubbed it Roderick, the middle name he often went by. But the resemblance didn’t stop there. The old leather books on the shelves were like the smooth tops of her grandfather’s hands. The curled vines that climbed the stone walls were his thick mass of hair. The scalloped cornices on the porch resembled his moustache. When Sylvie walked through certain rooms, she could still smell her grandfather, spicy yet clean, like tobacco and books and linen. She sometimes glimpsed a flicker out of the corner of her eye, a glimmer in a mirror, the wattage in a light bulb adjusting just so – all signs, maybe, that he was watching.
Hazing. She couldn’t quite connect it to the meaning the new headmaster had given. She saw a fogged window instead, fresh with dew. A method pastry chefs use to brown the top of a crème brûlée. Hazing. It was too artful a word to have such a connotation.
‘Well,’ she said aloud, and brushed her already-clean hands on her pants.
She climbed up the staircase and stood in front of James’s office door. It had become her ritual to linger there a moment before going in. Sometimes she even knocked, as if he could still be inside. The room was colder and darker than the rest of the house. James had only been gone for two months, but the office had lost his essence – the general chaos of his papers, the constantly illuminated message light on his office line’s phone. All the books had been put away on the old bookshelves. James’s desk, a clean, modern thing of glass and metal that had long ago replaced Sylvie’s grandfather’s old, mahogany mammoth, had been wiped down weeks ago, not a fingerprint marring its surface.
A month ago, Sylvie finally found the key to James’s filing cabinet nestled behind one of the books on the shelves. It sat on the base of the lamp now, waiting. Sylvie could easily imagine sliding it into the lock on the filing cabinet. She could almost hear the click of the barrel releasing, the metallic hiss as the drawer opened. Judging by how James handled everything else in his life, she guessed that he saved the most significant documents of his life on paper, in hard copy, not stored on his computer’s hard drive. All she had to do was unlock the drawer, riffle through a folder, and finally have a name to connect with how he’d hurt her. That was all it took to know.
She remained in the office for a minute or so, daring herself. Then, when things began to get too close, she turned around and left the room.
Joanna Bates-McAllister – née Farrow – had always thought her husband Charles’s adopted brother, Scott, was an asshole. A mooching, ungrateful, intimidating asshole, to be precise, though she’d never admit the scary part,