The Secret History

'How do you think it happened?' said Henry to Sciola.

This line of questioning did not seem to me to be a wise one, especially here, now, but Sciola gri

'Yes.'

He didn't say anything for a moment, just took a drag of his cigarette and nodded. 'It doesn't make any difference what I think, son,' he said after a pause. 'This isn't a federal case.'

'What?'

'He means it's not a federal case,' Davenport said sharply.

'There's no federal offense committed here. It's for the local cops to decide. The reason they called us up here in the first place was because of that nut, you know, from the gas station, and he didn't have anything to Jo with it. D. C. faxed us a lot of information on him before we came. You want to know what kind of a nut he is? He used to send all this crank mail to Anwar Sadat in the 19705. Ex-Lax, dog turds, mail order catalogues with pictures of nude Oriental women in them. Nobody paid much attention to him, but when Mr Sadat was assassinated in, when was it, '82, the CIA ran a check on Hundy and it was the Agency made available the files we saw. Never been arrested or anything but what a nut. Runs up thousand-dollar phone bills making prank calls to the Middle East. I saw this letter he wrote to Golda Meir where he called her his kissing cousin… I mean, you have to be suspicious when somebody like him steps forward. Seemed harmless enough, wasn't even after the reward – we had an undercover approach him with a phony check, he wouldn't touch it. But it's the ones like him that you've really got to wonder. I remember Morris Lee Harden back in '78, seemed like the sweetest thing going, repairing all those clocks and watches and giving them to the poor kids, but I'll never forget the day they went out behind that jewelry shop of his with the backhoe 'These kids don't remember Morris, Harv,' said Sciola, letting the cigarette fall from his fingers. That was before their time.'

We stood there a moment or two longer, an awkward semicircle on the flagstones, and just as it seemed that everyone was going to open his mouth at once and say he had to be going, I heard a strange, choked noise from Camilla. I looked over at her in amazement. She was crying.

For a moment, no one seemed to know what to do. Davenport gave Henry and me a disgusted look and turned half away as if to say: this is all your fault.

Sciola, blinking in slow, somber consternation, twice reached to put his hand upon her arm, and on the third try his slow fingertips finally made contact with her elbow. 'Dear,' he said to her, 'dear, you want us to drop you off home on our way?'

Their car – a car you'd expect, a black Ford sedan – was parked -.*«at the bottom of the hill, in the gravel lot behind the Science ™ Building. Camilla walked ahead between the two of them. Sciola was talking to her, as soothingly as to a child; we could hear him above the crunching footsteps, the drip of water and the sift of wind in the trees overhead. 'Is your brother at home?' he said.

'Yes.'

He nodded slowly. 'You know,' he said, 'I like your brother.

He's a good kid. It's fu

'No.'

'I didn't know it, either. Did you look more alike when you were little kids? I mean, there's a family resemblance, but your hair's not even quite the same color. My wife, she's got some cousins, they're twins. They both look alike and they both work for the Welfare Department, too.' He paused peacefully. 'You and your brother, you get along pretty well, don't you?'

She made a muffled reply.

He nodded somberly. That's nice,' he said. 'I bet you kids have some interesting stories. About ESP and things like that.

My wife's cousins, they go to these twin conventions they have sometimes, you wouldn't believe the things they come back and tell us.'

White sky. Trees fading at the skyline, the mountains gone.

My hands dangled from the cuffs of my jacket as if they weren't my own. I never got used to the way the horizon there could just erase itself and leave you marooned, adrift, in an incomplete dreamscape that was like a sketch for the world you knew – the outline of a single tree standing in for a grove, lamp-posts and chimneys floating up out of context before the surrounding canvas was filled in – an amnesia-land, a kind of skewed Heaven where the old landmarks were recognizable but spaced too far apart, and disarranged, and made terrible by the emptiness around them.

An old shoe was lying on the asphalt in front of the loading dock, where the ambulance had been only minutes before. It wasn't Bu

Chapter 7

Although Bu

It was normal, then, that he should be missed, even mourned – for it's a hard thing when someone dies at a school like Hampden, where we were all so isolated, and thrown so much together. But I was surprised at the wanton display of grief which spewed forth once his death became official. It seemed not only gratuitous, but rather shameful given the circumstances. No one had seemed very torn up by his disappearance, even in those grim final days when it seemed that the news when it came must certainly be bad; nor, in the public eye, had the search seemed much besides a massive inconvenience. But now, at news of his death, people were strangely frantic. Everyone, suddenly, had known him; everyone was deranged with grief; everyone was just going to have to try and get on as well as they could without him. 'He would have wanted it that way.' That was a phrase I heard many times that week on the lips of people who had absolutely no idea what Bu

I really could go on for pages about all the public histrionics in the days after Bu

A few oddballs from the Political Science department wore black armbands. There was an agitated flurry of tree plantings, memorial services, fund-raisers and concerts. A freshman girl attempted suicide – for entirely unrelated reasons – by eating poison berries from a bush outside the Music Building, but somehow this was all tied in with the general hysteria. Everyone wore sunglasses for days. Frank and Jud, taking as always the view that Life Must Go On, went around with their paint can collecting money for a Beer Blast to be held in Bu

This was thought to be in bad taste by certain of the school officials, especially as Bu