If We Were Villains: A Novel

The first day of December was bright and crisp and freezing cold. Classes were scheduled to resume the following day, and we were told when we arrived on campus that we’d be allowed to move back into the Castle at four o’clock in the afternoon. Alexander and Filippa settled into our usual booth at the Bore’s Head, warming their hands with mugs of spiked cider, while James had tea with Frederick. Meredith was waiting on a delayed flight out of LaGuardia. We had no word from Wren.

I hauled my bags up the stairs to the third floor of the Hall for a brief meeting with Dean Holinshed, where he presented the solution to my sudden lack of funding: a combination of loans, unused scholarship dollars, and work-study. I listened and nodded and thanked him profusely and, when he dismissed me, shouldered my bag again and started down the trail through the trees. One of my work-study occupations, Holinshed explained, would be to take over the cleaning and maintenance of the Castle. It didn’t even occur to me to be humiliated. I was so desperately glad not to be leaving Dellecher that I would have scrubbed every toilet in the Hall if he had asked.

The place was as much of a mess as it had been when we left. I decided to begin in the kitchen, where refuse from the disastrous Caesar party was scattered on every surface. Cleaning supplies, I’d been told, were under the sink—a place I’d never before bothered to explore. But first, I lit a fire in the library. It was painfully cold in the Castle, as if winter had crept in between the stones and made a home there in our absence. I crumpled a few sheets of newspaper from the basket on the hearth and wedged them underneath two new logs without clearing away the old ashes. A few minutes’ fumbling with the fireplace matches yielded a small but persistent flame, and I rubbed my hands over it until I could feel them again.

As I straightened up, I heard a door open downstairs. I froze, waiting. Had Alexander snuck back in three hours early? I cursed him silently and tiptoed down the stairs, hoping to head him off in the kitchen, racking my brains for a plausible excuse for why I was already there. (I didn’t want to burden him or any of the others with my family drama. We had enough drama of our own.)

An unfamiliar voice stopped me two steps from the bottom.

“Remind me again why we’re here?”

“Because I want to have a look around before all those kids move back in.”

“Whatever you say, Joe.”

I squatted on the last step and peered through the doorway. Two men were standing in the dining room, with their backs to me. I recognized the taller one—or, rather, I recognized his brown bomber jacket. Colborne. The shorter one was wearing a blue quilted coat and a knobby yellow scarf that was almost certainly handmade. A crop of unruly blazing-red hair gave the impression that his head was on fire. (His name, I would eventually learn, was Ned Walton.) He rolled back and forth on the balls of his feet and glanced around. “What’re we looking for, Chief?”

“Don’t call me Chief,” Colborne said, with a sigh that suggested it wasn’t the first time he’d given that instruction. “I’m not the chief. And don’t touch anything.”

As Walton wandered toward the window, he pulled his gloves off by the fingertips, with his teeth, and stuffed them in his pockets. I wondered if he could see the dock from where he was standing.

Walton: “Is this the first time they’ve lost a student?”

Colborne: “A dancer committed suicide about ten years ago. Found out she didn’t make the cut for fourth year, went up to her room, and slit her wrists.”

Walton: “Jesus.”

Colborne: “I’d seen her around. Pretty girl. Looked like she was made of tissue paper. The media went wild over it, accused the school of ‘driving students to desperation.’”

Walton: “Is that what happened to this kid?”

Colborne turned on the spot, hands on his hips—expression pinched, contemplative. “No. He was the star of the program, from what I understand. Did you see those big red posters around town? I am Caesar?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s him.”

“Scary dude,” Walton said.

Colborne nodded. “The kids have all shut right up about it, but I get the sense that not everyone liked him.”

“Oh no?” Walton asked, one ginger eyebrow rising.

“No.”

Walton frowned across the room at Colborne. “Is that why we’re here?” he asked. “I thought we ruled it an accident.”

“Yeah.” A shadow flitted across Colborne’s face. “We did.”

“Okay,” Walton said, and the word had an interrogative upward tilt. He leaned on the windowsill, arms folded. “Take me through it.”

Colborne took one slow step forward, eyes fixed on the floor. “About nine days ago,” he said, “the fourth-years and bunch of other drama students are all in a show up at the Fine Arts Building.” He pointed northeast, in the direction of the FAB. I sat back on my heels, put one hand on the wall to steady myself. My breath came light and fast through my nose, the cold air stinging in my lungs. Colborne kept walking, putting one foot carefully in front of the other, making a wide circle around the room. “The show ends around ten thirty,” he went on, “and the kids come down through the woods to here, where the party’s already in full swing. Music, dancing, drugs, booze. Richard holes himself up in the library with a bottle of Scotch.”

“If he was the star, why was he lurking up there?”

“Well, that’s what nobody seems to want to tell me. He was in a mood, everyone agrees on that, but why? One of the third-years suggested he was having girlfriend trouble.”

“Who’s the girlfriend?”

“Meredith Dardenne, another fourth-year.”

“Why’s that name sound familiar?”

“Her family makes the fancy watches. They could buy the whole town if they wanted to.”

“You think that’s why no one’s pointing at her?”

Colborne shrugged. “Couldn’t say. But apparently the two of them had a knock-down, drag-out fight in front of everyone, and by the end of the night she was making out with someone else.”

Walton let out a low, dangerous whistle. I leaned forward, my hands on my knees. Blood had rushed up from my chest and limbs and was swimming in my ears.

Walton: “Who was that?”

Colborne: “Nobody really wanted to say, but someone suggested Oliver Marks. He’s another fourth-year. He admitted to going upstairs with her, but according to him they were just ‘talking.’”

Walton: “Seems unlikely.”

Colborne: “You haven’t seen this girl. You don’t understand how unlikely.”

Walton chuckled. “What did she have to say about it?”

“Well, her story matches his,” Colborne said. “She claims they went up to her room, where they talked until Richard came up and tried to break the door down. They didn’t let him in and eventually he stormed off. And this is where it gets fuzzy.”

“Fuzzy how?”

Colborne stopped, standing face-to-face with Walton, scowling, like his own confusion annoyed him. “At about this time—and nobody seems to be able to say for sure what time it was—pretty much everyone but the fourth-years is gone. Richard storms away from his girlfriend’s room, where maybe she’s hooking up with one of their mutual friends or maybe they’re just talking, grabs a bottle of Glenfiddich, and heads outside. He’s already drunk—he was a belligerent drunk, too, everyone agrees on that—and he stumbles out into the yard, where his cousin is talking with James Farrow.”

Walton: “Another fourth-year?”

Colborne: “Marks’s roommate. They live in the attic room upstairs.”

Walton: “All right, then what?”

“Wren—the cousin—tries to talk him down, but he ‘shakes her off.’ Farrow’s words. When I asked him what that meant he clammed up. Makes me wonder if it might have been a little violent, because neither one of them went after him. Anyway, Farrow stays with the cousin, and Richard disappears into the trees.” Colborne’s face darkened, his thick eyebrows sinking low over his eyes. “Nobody sees him again until the following morning when Alexander Vass—he’s the last of the fourth-years—goes down to the dock for a smoke and finds him in the water. So, we have about three hours where we don’t know where Richard was or what he was up to.”

They were both quiet for a moment, looking out the same narrow window. The day outside was awash with stark white sunlight that did nothing to soften the bitter cold.

“What did the ME have to say?” Walton asked.

“Well, there was a hard blow to the head, but she couldn’t say with what. Originally we assumed that was what killed him.”

Walton’s forehead wrinkled. “Wasn’t it?”

“No.” Colborne exhaled heavily, and his shoulders sank down an inch or two. “He was alive when he hit the water. Alive, but unconscious or too stunned to roll himself over. Whatever it was hit him right in the face, and the damage was bad, but it shouldn’t have been fatal.”

“How did he die, then?”

“He drowned,” Colborne said. “In a manner of speaking. Choked on his own blood.”

I turned away from the door, pressed my back flat against the wall. I felt light-headed, the thrum of my pulse faint and far away, and I wondered if that was what it felt like—the slow loss of air, life seeping out into the surrounding water, and your own blood, thick as an oil spill, creeping into every empty space until it reached your eyes and the whole world went red. Asphyxia. System failure. Fade to black.

Colborne’s voice came in sharp and clear from the next room: “It doesn’t add up. We’re missing something.”

“Did we find the Scotch bottle?”

“In the woods, about a quarter mile from the dock. We thought that’s what he might’ve been hit with, but it was intact. Empty, intact, no blood on it, and nobody’s fingerprints but his. So what the hell was he doing between three in the morning and six?”

“Was that the time of death?”

“As close as the ME could figure it.”

They were both silent for a while. I didn’t dare move in my hiding place.

“What are you thinking?” Walton asked, eventually.

Colborne made a soft, impatient sound. I eased forward slowly until I could see him again, shaking his head, tongue pinched between his teeth. “These kids,” he said. “The fourth-years. I don’t trust them.”

“Why not?”

“They’re a bunch of fucking actors,” Colborne said. “They could all be lying through their teeth, and how would we know?”

“Christ.” They were quiet again until Walton said, “What do we do?”

“We keep a close eye on them. Wait for one of them to snap.” He glanced around the empty dining room. “The six of them holed up out here, alone? It won’t take long.”

The floorboards groaned as they moved toward the kitchen.

“My money’s on the cousin,” Walton said.

“Maybe,” Colborne said. “We’ll see.”

“Where to?”

“I want to walk through the woods to where we found the bottle, see if I can sort out how Richard got down to the dock from there.”

“Okay, then what?”

“Don’t know. Depends if we find anything.”

Walton replied, but his voice had faded low enough that I couldn’t hear what he said. The door closed behind them with a scrape and a thud. I slid to the floor, my legs weak and boneless underneath me. Richard loomed enormous in my mind, and if I could have spoken, I would have said to him, Had you such leisure in the time of death / To gaze upon the secrets of the deep?

To which he in my fantasy replied, Methought I had; and often did I strive / To yield the ghost: but still the envious flood / Kept in my soul, and would not let it forth / To seek the empty, vast and wandering air.

Awaked you not with this sore agony? I asked.

At last he abandoned his Shakespeare and said only, No.