Desperate Measures (30 page)

Meecham, whose gaze had been steady, blinked twice.

“He dropped out of the political science course that he was taking with the grand counselors,” Pittman said. “And then he
stopped attending Grollier altogether.”

“I’ve changed my mind, Frederick,” Meecham said. “The San Francisco office can talk to me tomorrow. When the phone rings,
tell them I’m unavailable.”

“Very good, sir.”

“Please, serve the martinis.”

“Certainly, sir.”

Meecham sat again, looking uncomfortable. Pittman and Jill lowered themselves back into their chairs. Frederick poured the
martinis and brought a tray to each of them, offering a choice of olives or pearl onions.

Pittman sipped, enjoying the cold, smooth taste, suddenly realizing how little alcohol he had had to drink since he’d followed
Millgate to the Scarsdale estate five nights earlier. Prior to then, he’d been really putting it away, guzzling it. He hadn’t
been able to face the day—and especially the nights—without it. He had needed to distance himself from reality. Now he couldn’t
allow anything to keep him from facing reality.

The situation became awkward. No one said anything, waiting for Frederick to leave.

As the door was finally closed, Meecham said, an edge in his voice, “What do you really want?”

“Just what we told you—to know your father’s attitude toward Grollier and the grand counselors,” Pittman said.

“If you’re aware that my father never graduated from Grollier, that he dropped out in his junior year and went to another
school, it must be obvious to you that he had ambivalent feelings.”

“Did he ever say anything about one of his teachers? Duncan Kline?”

Meecham’s gaze became piercingly direct. “This has nothing to do with a book about education.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You’re not here because you’re doing a history of Grollier.” Meecham stood abruptly. “You know about Grollier. You keep talking
around the subject, hinting about it, but you know.”

“I don’t understand,” Pittman said.

“Otherwise, you wouldn’t have mentioned Duncan Kline.”

“He taught the political science class that your father dropped out of.”

“The man was perverted.”

Pittman had taken a sip from his martini. Surprised by Meecham’s comment, he swallowed hard. “Perverted?”

“You mean you actually don’t know?” Meecham looked threatened, as if he’d let down his defenses.

“We know something happened there,” Pittman said. “Something traumatic enough to make Jonathan Millgate obsessed about it,
even all these years later, on his deathbed.”

“I can’t speak for Jonathan Millgate. All I know is what my father told me when I suggested that I send my own boys to Grollier.
It was one of the few times he ever showed open emotion. He told me that under no circumstances was I to send his grandsons
there. I was to send them to a decent school, a place like Groton, from where my father had eventually graduated and then
gone to Yale.”

“But why did he dislike Grollier so much?” Jill asked.

Meecham scowled at the floor, debating with himself. “Maybe it’s time.” He looked up. “Maybe Grollier hasn’t changed. Someone
should have done something long ago to make sure it stopped.”

“To make sure
what
stopped?”

Meecham nervously tapped his fingers against his martini glass. “This is all off the record.”

“If that’s the way you want it.”

“It’s the way it
has
to be.” Meecham seemed to struggle with himself in order to say the words. “Duncan Kline was a pedophile.”

Pittman stared.

After further painful hesitation, Meecham continued. “A boy’s prep school was a perfect environment for him. From what my
father told me, I gather that Duncan Kline was a brilliant instructor, quick, amusing, encouraging, the sort of charismatic
figure who attracts the brightest of students. Apparently he was also an athlete, particularly when it came to rowing. His
policy was to assess each incoming class, to select the most promising boys, a very small group, a half dozen or so, and then
to nurture them throughout their four years at Grollier. I suspect that he also chose them on the basis of how emotionally
distant they were from their parents, how keenly they needed a substitute father. Certainly my father was never close to
his
father. Duncan Kline encouraged them to take small private seminars from him. He trained them to be oarsmen and to outdistance
the best official Grollier team. He gradually became more and more intimate with them, until by their junior year… As I said,
one group from each incoming class. That way, as one group graduated and went on to college, another was there to take that
group’s place.”

Pittman felt sick.

His face tight with emotion, Meecham took a long sip from his martini. “My father rejected Kline’s advances. Kline backed
off. But soon he came back and
persisted
in making advances. This time, when my father rejected him, Kline was either so indignant or else frightened of being exposed
that he made academic life intolerable for my father, giving him impossible assignments, ridiculing him at every opportunity.
My father’s grades declined. So did his morale. And his health. Apparently he had some kind of collapse at home during the
Easter break of his junior year. He never went back to Grollier.”

Pittman couldn’t keep dismay from his voice. “But didn’t your father’s parents do anything about Duncan Kline?”

“Do what?” Meecham shook his head, puzzled. “What would you have had them do?”

“They should have reported Kline to the authorities. They should have reported the whole mess to the headmaster of the school.”

Meecham looked at Pittman as if he’d gone insane.

“Reported…? You obviously don’t grasp the situation. This happened in the early 1930s. The time was repressive. I assure you
that topics such as child molestation were definitely not considered fit for conversation. Not in polite society. That type
of sordidness existed. Everyone tacitly knew that. But surely it didn’t occur often, and when it did, it happened to other
people, lesser people, unrefined, crass people who were economic and moral inferiors.”

“Dear Lord,” Pittman said.

Meecham looked more disturbed as he took another long sip from his martini. “That was the prevailing opinion of the time.
Grollier boasts governors, senators, congressmen, even a President of the United States among its distinguished alumni. For
a student to claim that sexual abuse occurred on a regular basis at that school would have been unthinkable. So many reputations
would have been at stake that the authorities would never have treated the charge seriously. They would have been forced to
conclude that the student was grievously mistaken, that he was making such an outrageous accusation because he needed to blame
someone for his poor grades. As a matter of fact, when my father told
his
father what was happening at Grollier, his father slapped him, called him a liar, and told him never to repeat such filth
again.”

Pittman was astonished.

“So my father kept it a secret and never told another person until I suggested to him that Grollier might be a good prep school
for my sons.”

“But surely the other students would have supported your father’s claim,” Pittman said.

“Would they have? Or would their parents ever have allowed them to be subjected to questions of such a gross nature? I wonder.
In any case, it’s a moot issue. The matter never got that far.”

Her blue eyes intense, Jill leaned forward. “Are we to assume that Duncan Kline made advances to the grand counselors, also?
That those advances were accepted?”

Meecham stared at his martini glass. “They were Duncan Kline’s chosen few, and they did continue to take his seminars. By
the time my father told me this—my sons went to prep school in the mid-seventies—it was too late to do anything about Kline
himself. He died in the early fifties. By then he’d retired from Grollier and had a place here in Boston. My father said that
one of the happiest days of his life was when he read Kline’s obituary. Believe me, my father had very few happy days.”

Meecham finished his martini and frowned toward the pitcher as if he could use another drink. “I don’t know what you’ve set
out to prove, but if there were other instructors like Kline at Grollier and if their counterparts still teach there and if
your book exposes them, we’ve both done some good.”

Suspecting something, Pittman asked, “Would you be willing to be quoted?”

Meecham reacted sharply. “Of course not. Do you think I’d want that kind of public attention? I told you before, this conversation
is strictly off the record. I’m just pointing you in the right direction. Surely someone else would be willing to substantiate
what I’ve told you. Ask the grand counselors.” Meecham looked bitterly amused. “See how willing
they’d
be to go on record.”

“When Jonathan Millgate was in intensive care, he told his nurse, ‘Duncan. The snow. Grollier.’ What do you suppose he meant
by the reference to snow?”

“I have no idea. Certainly my father never mentioned anything that linked Duncan Kline with snow.”

“It’s a slang expression for—Could it be a reference to cocaine?”

“Again, I have no idea. Was that expression even used back in the early thirties? Would someone as distinguished as Jonathan
Millgate reduce himself to that type of language?”

Pittman shrugged in discouragement, then turned, hearing a knock on the door.

Frederick stepped in. “Mr. Meecham, two policemen are at the door.”

Pittman felt a hot rush of adrenaline.

Meecham looked surprised. “Policemen?”

“Detectives,” Frederick said. “They want to know if you’ve had any contact with someone named Matthew Pittman. He’s traveling
with a woman and…” Frederick’s gaze settled on Pittman and Jill.

Meecham frowned.

“Where does that door lead?” Pittman stood unexpectedly and crossed the room toward a door in a wall that faced the rear of
the house. The door was the only other way out of the room, and since Pittman had no intention of using the door through which
Frederick had come, of going out to the corridor where the detectives might see him, he had to take this route. He heard Jill’s
footsteps behind him.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Meecham demanded.

By then, Pittman had pulled the door open and was lunging into a narrow hallway, Jill hurrying to follow. Pittman’s breathing
quickened.

“Stop!” Meecham said.

On the left, Pittman passed the entrance to the mansion’s kitchen. He had a glimpse of a male cook in a white uniform, who
opened his mouth in surprise. Then Pittman, flanked rapidly by Jill, was out of sight, running farther down the hallway, reaching
a door, the window of which revealed a cobblestone courtyard.

Pittman jerked the door open and felt pressure in his chest as he realized that the dusky courtyard was bordered by a high
barred gate, an even higher wall, and a carriage house turned into a garage. We’ll never get out of here!

Dismayed, he swung to look behind him. Frederick appeared at the opposite end of the hallway. The cook appeared at the entrance
to the kitchen. Heavy footsteps pounded toward the hallway from the front of the house.

To the right of the door, stairs led upward. Pittman suddenly thought of a way to escape and charged up, tugging Jill behind
him. At a landing, the stairs veered up on another angle, and Pittman bounded higher, reaching a hallway on an upper level
of the house.

Closed doors lined the hallway. Meecham was making indignant demands to someone downstairs. He flinched as a door came open
across from him.

Meecham’s elderly mother appeared, deceptively frail. “So much noise. I can barely hear the television.”

Pittman made a soothing gesture. “Mrs. Meecham, does your bedroom have a lock?”

“Of course it has a lock. Doesn’t every bedroom have a lock? Do you think I want people barging in on me? What are you doing
up here?”

“Thanks.” Pittman hurried with Jill, who didn’t understand what Pittman was doing.

“You can’t go in there,” Mrs. Meecham said.

Pittman slammed and locked the door. From a television in the corner of the well-appointed lace-curtained room, complete with
a four-poster bed, the opening theme music for a nature program almost obscured Mrs. Meecham’s feeble pounding on the door.

Jill swung toward Pittman. “What are we
doing
in here?”

A look of sudden understanding crossed her face as Pittman rushed toward a window. It faced the back of the house, above the
peaked roof of the garage. Pittman opened it. “Come on.”

Inexplicably Jill seemed frozen.

“What’s wrong?”

Jill stared toward the door. She turned her head and stared at Pittman.

“Come on!” Pittman said.

At once Jill became animated, taking off her pumps. “Of all the times to be wearing a skirt.”

The hem tore as she raised her legs and climbed out the window. The pounding on the bedroom door became louder. Angry male
voices were on the other side. The door shuddered as if shoulders were being heaved against it.

Wincing from pain in his injured ribs, Pittman squirmed out the open window after Jill. The garage roof sloped down on each
side, and Pittman tried to stay balanced while running along the peak. Behind him, something crashed in the bedroom. Jill
reached the end of the roof and jumped down onto something, appearing to run on the shadowy air as she disappeared around
the corner of another house.

When Pittman came to the end of the garage, he saw that what Jill had jumped down onto was the foot-wide top of the high wall
that enclosed the courtyard. That wall continued to the left, bordering the courtyards of other houses, bisecting the block.
Hearing a shout behind him, Pittman climbed down as well and followed her, breathing so deeply and quickly that his lungs
felt on fire.

Then he, too, was out of sight from the window. He concentrated not to topple from the wall as he hurried after Jill, who
clutched her shoes in one hand, her purse in the other, and scrambled in bare feet across the peak of another carriage house
turned into a garage.