The Chatham School Affair

Praise For
THE CHATHAM SCHOOL AFFAIR
Winner of the 1996 Edgar Award for Best
Novel! And chosen By
The Drood Review
,
as one of 1996’s Ten Best Mysteries.

“THOMAS COOK IS AN ARTIST,
A PHILOSOPHER, AND A MAGICIAN;
HIS STORY IS SPELLBINDING.”

—
The Drood Review of Mystery

“Swift, thoughtful and plausible … As in nearly all good crime fiction, the moral and practical complications … expand like ripples in a pond….
The Chatham School Affair
is the tragic, lyrically told story of a sordid scandal, the town’s revenge on the perpetrators, and one man’s long-delayed journey toward redemption.”

—
The Boston Herald

“MOODY, ELOQUENT.”

—
The San Francisco Chronicle Examiner

“Cook is one of the most lyrical of today’s novelists. His prose flows effortlessly, yet beneath its rhythm Cook’s characters perform the most shocking and deadly of deeds…. An extraordinary writer.”

—
Sun, Calgary, Alberta

“TRANSFIXING SUSPENSE.”

—
Booknews
from The Poisoned Pen

“[Cook’s] portrait of a small—and ultimately small-minded—town is a skillful one. And just when you think the puzzle is complete, Cook artfully presents yet another piece—rearranging all your expectations.”

—
The Orlando Sentinel

PRAISE FOR THOMAS H. COOK’S
BREAKHEART HILL

“Expert storytelling … haunting … gains power and resonance with each twist.”

—
Publishers Weekly

“Haunting, lyrical … a mesmerizing tale of love and betrayal.”

—
Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine

“Intense … Impossible to put down.”

—
Rendezvous

“Cook has crafted a novel of stunning power, with a climax that is so unexpected the reader may think he has cheated. But there is no cheating here, only excellent storytelling.”

—
Booklist

“Cook’s writing is distinguished by finely cadenced prose, superior narrative skills, and the author’s patient love for the doomed characters who are the object of his attention…. Highly recommended.”

—
Library Journal
(starred review)

MORE PRAISE FOR THOMAS H. COOK

“Cook’s night visions, seen through a lens darkly, are haunting.”

—
The New York Times Book Review

“A gifted novelist, intelligent and compassionate.”

—Joyce Carol Oates,
The New York Review of Books

MORTAL MEMORY

“Cook builds a family portrait in which violence seems both impossible and inevitable. One of [
Mortal Memory
’s] greatest accomplishments is the way it defies expectations … surprising and devastating.”

—
Chicago Tribune

“Haunting … Don’t pick this up unless you’ve got time to read it through … because you will do so whether you plan to or not.”

—
Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine

EVIDENCE OF BLOOD

“In [his] previous novels … Cook has shown himself to be a writer of poetic gifts, constantly pushing against the presumed limits of crime fiction…. In this fine new book, he has gone to the edge, and survived triumphantly.”

—Charles Champlin,
Los Angeles Times Book Review

“A highly satisfying story, strong in color and atmosphere, intelligent and exacting.”

—
The New York Times Book Review

ALSO BY THOMAS H. COOK

FICTION

Peril
The Interrogation
Instruments of Night
Breakheart Hill
Mortal Memory
Evidence of Blood
The City When It Rains
Night Secrets
Streets of Fire
Flesh and Blood
Sacrificial Ground
The Orchids
Tabernacle
Elena
Blood Innocents

NONFICTION

Early Graves
Blood Echoes

For Kate Miciak

Sine qua non

He sees enough who doth his darkness see
.

LORD HERBERT OF CHERBURY

PART 1

M
y father had a favorite line. He’d taken it from Milton, and he loved to quote it to the boys of Chatham School. Standing before them on opening day, his hands thrust deep into his trouser pockets, he’d pause a moment, facing them sternly. “Be careful what you do,” he’d say, “for evil on itself doth back recoil.” In later years he could not have imagined how wrong he was, nor how profoundly I knew him to be so.

Sometimes, particularly on one of those bleak winter days so common to New England, wind tearing at the trees and shrubbery, rain battering the roofs and windows, I feel myself drift back to my father’s world, my own youth, the village he loved and in which I still live. I glance outside my office window and see the main street of Chatham as it once was—a scattering of small shops, a ghostly parade of antique cars with their lights mounted on sloping fenders. In my mind, the dead return to life, assume their earthly shapes. I see Mrs. Albertson delivering a basket of quahogs to Kessler’s Market; Mr. Lawrence lurching forward in his homemade snowmobile, skis on the front, a set of World War I tank tracks on the back, all hooked to the battered chassis of an old roadster
pickup. He waves as he goes by, a gloved hand in the timeless air.

Standing once again at the threshold of my past, I feel fifteen again, with a full head of hair and not a single liver spot, heaven far away, no thought of hell. I even sense a certain goodness at the core of life.

Then, from out of nowhere, I think of her again. Not as the young woman I’d known so long ago, but as a little girl, peering out over a glittering blue sea, her father standing beside her in a white linen suit, telling her what fathers have always told their children: that the future is open to them, a field of grass, harboring no dark wood. In my mind I see her as she stood in her cottage that day, hear her voice again, her words like distant bells, sounding the faith she briefly held in life.
Take as much as you want, Henry. There is plenty
.

In those days, the Congregationalist Church stood at the eastern entrance of Chatham, immaculately white save for its tall, dark spire. There was a bus stop at the southern corner of the church, marked by a stubby white pillar, the site where Boston buses picked up and deposited passengers who, for whatever reason, had no liking for the train.

On that August afternoon in 1926, I’d been sitting on the church steps, reading some work of military history, my addiction at the time, when the bus pulled to a stop yards away. From that distance I’d watched its doors open, the metal hinges creaking in the warm late-summer air. A large woman with two children emerged first, followed by an elderly man who smoked a pipe and wore a navy blue captain’s cap, the sort of old salt” often seen on Cape Cod in those days. Then there’d been a moment of suspension, when no one emerged from the shadowy interior of the bus, so that I’d expected it to pull away, swing left and head toward the neighboring
town of Orleans, a trail of dust following behind it like an old feather boa.

But the bus had stayed in place, its engine rumbling softly as it idled by the road. I could not imagine why it remained so until I saw another figure rise from a seat near the back. It was a woman, and she moved forward slowly, smoothly, a dark silhouette. Near the door she paused, her arm raised slightly, her hand suspended in midair even as it reached for the metal rail that would have guided her down the stairs.

At the time I couldn’t have guessed the cause for her sudden hesitation. But in the years since then, I’ve come to believe that it was precisely at that moment she must have realized just how fully separate our world was from the one she’d lived in with her father during the many years they’d traveled together, the things she’d seen with him, Florence in its summer splendor, the canals of Venice, Paris from the steps of Sacre-Coeur. How could anything in Chatham ever have compared with that?

Something at last urged her forward. Perhaps necessity, the fact that with her father’s recent death she had no other option. Perhaps a hope that she could, in the end, make her life with us. I will never know. Whatever the reason, she drew in a deep breath, grasped the iron rail, and made her way down the stairs and into the afternoon stillness of a tiny seacoast village where no great artist had ever lived, no great event ever happened, save for those meted out by sudden storms or the torturous movement of geologic time.

It was my father who greeted her when she stepped from the bus that afternoon. He was headmaster of Chatham School, a man of medium height, but whose manner, so expansive and full of authority, made him seem larger than he was. In one of the many pictures I have of him from that time, this one printed in the Chatham School Annual for 1926, he is seated in his office, behind a massive oak desk, his hands resting on its polished surface, his eyes staring directly into the camera. It was
the usual pose of a respectable and accomplished man in those days, one that made him appear quite stern, perhaps even a bit hard, though he was nothing of the kind. Indeed, when I remember him as he was in those days, it is usually as a cheerful, ebullient man with an energetic and kindly manner, slow to anger, quick to forgive, his feelings always visible in his eyes. “The heart is what matters, Henry,” he said to me not long before his death, a principle he’d often voiced through the years, but never for one moment truly lived by. For surely, of all the men I’ve ever known, he was the least enslaved by passion. Now an old man too, it is hard for me to imagine how in my youth I could have despised him so.

But I did despise him. Silently. Sullenly. Giving him no hint of my low regard, so that I must have seemed a perfectly obedient son, given to moodiness, perhaps, but otherwise quite normal, rocked by nothing darker than the usual winds of adolescence. Remembering him, as I often do, I marvel at how much he knew of Cicero and Thucydides, and how little of the boy who lived in the room upstairs.

Earlier that morning he’d found me lounging in the swing on the front porch, given me a disapproving look, and said, “What, nothing to do, Henry?”

I shrugged.

“Well, come with me, then,” he said, then bounded down the front steps and out to our car, a bulky old Ford whose headlights stuck out like stubby horns.

I rose, followed my father down the stairs, got into the car, and sat silently as he pulled out of the driveway, my face showing a faint sourness, the only form of rebellion I was allowed.

On the road my father drove at a leisurely pace through the village, careful to slow even further at the approach of pedestrians or horses. He nodded to Mrs. Cavenaugh as she came out of Warren’s Sundries, and gave a short cautionary beep on the horn when he saw
Davey Bryant chasing Hattie Shaw a little too aggressively across the lighthouse grounds.