"I don't know either," Bunting said.
"Carter?"
The blood was pounding a tom-tom beat in Carter's head now, but he tried to keep his features in control.
"You've got me," he said, giving his voice the proper amount of disdain. Acting as if it didn't matter.
But it did matter. He dreaded Archie's next move. The announcement that someone had tipped Leon off about the visit.
Silence as Archie's eyes swept the room again. Inscrutable eyes that revealed nothing, told no secrets. Did his eyes linger on me a moment longer than anyone else? Carter wondered, knowing the secret of that "something else." He was relieved to hear Bunting interrupt Archie's scrutiny.
"Can't we still arrange a day off from school?" Bunting asked. "Everybody's going to be. . teed off." He'd almost said pissed off, which would have landed him in trouble again. "We put a lot of work into the arrangements."
"The project is canceled," Archie said flatly. "Without the Bishop, it's pointless."
Carter didn't know what to do with the damn gavel. Was Archie about to end the meeting?
"Anybody know what the something else is?" Archie asked, not belligerent, seeming to be genuinely interested in a possible response.
No response. Everybody wanted simply to get out of there.
Archie glanced at Carter.
"The gavel, Carter," Archie reminded. "The meeting's over."
The gavel struck the desk like a hammer driving a nail through wood into flesh.
Although he hated the smell of the storage room, the stench of boy sweat and overripe socks and sneakers, Archie remained behind after everyone had gone.
To add up the score.
He hadn't managed a confrontation between Obie and Bunting, but none had been necessary. He knew Obie intimately, could almost read his mind, could certainly read his expressions, Obie's face like a relief map with nothing hidden. He had seen a stunned and subdued Obie, obviously still reeling from the events of the night before, but not suspicious, not ready to spring into action. Obie had barely glanced at anyone in the room, had not sought out Bunting in any way. Archie was willing to bet his reputation on the fact that Obie did not know who had attacked him and his, girl in the car.
The other result of the meeting was even more obvious to Archie. And more satisfying.
Carter was the traitor, of course. Carter, who had showed no enthusiasm for the Bishop's visit from the start. Carter, who obviously hated his role as gavel wielder. Carter had stumbled through the meeting as if in a trance, missing his cues with the gavel. Dropping it, for crissakes. Guilt had spread on Carter's face like a coat of paint. Paint the color of blood. Carter the jock, lost without his stupid sports. Carter, who had suddenly developed a conscience. From the moment the meeting started, Archie had been aware of Carter's haunted eyes, pale face, the jock turned jellyfish, turned stool pigeon.
Carter was the traitor.
Further proof would be needed, of course, to eliminate any doubt. But Archie would get that proof.
He stood in the foul, fetid air of the storage room and thought:
Poor Carter.
Carter's We would never be the same again.
Laurie wasn't home.
Or maybe she wasn't responding to the doorbell, just as she might have been refusing to answer the telephone.
He pressed the button again, heard the faint echo of the bell — ding, ding, ding — within the house. But no activity. Somehow, the house felt empty. Laurie's presence had always been blazingly immediate to him, charging the air, alerting his senses. Now: nothing. Her mother's VW wasn't in the driveway either.
He rapped on the door, not expecting a response now, but having to do something.
Damn it. He ached to see her. Was filled with guilt and loneliness and longing. Felt hounded, his thoughts swirling around like the snowflakes in those glass globes people keep on mantelpieces.
Turning away, walking down the steps, feeling as though he was in retreat from a skirmish he had just lost, he plodded to his car. The merriment of the spring day mocked him. Brilliant sun, whiff of lilac in the air, all of it empty somehow.
This was his second visit to Laurie's house this afternoon. He had come here directly from Trinity, found no response, and driven to Monument High. The campus was deserted. Peering in the front door, he had seen a custodian pushing a mop down the corridor. He was an outsider at her school. As he walked back to his car, he realized how little he knew about her life, her daily existence. She talked sometimes of her girl friends and he had met two or three of them — but their faces were a blur and their names a vague litany of Debbies and Donnas.
Resting his chin on the steering wheel now, disconsolate, he stared at Laurie's house. His vigil seemed hopeless; the house wore an air of vacancy, abandonment.
His mind went to the Vigils meeting and Archie's strange performance. Under ordinary circumstances he would have been figuring out all the angles, pondering the potential meaning of Archie's behavior. But he couldn't concentrate on Archie now. Laurie and his anguish dominated everything else.
Fifteen minutes went by. More frustrated than ever, sighing almost to the point of hyperventilating — he often had trouble drawing a deep breath when he faced tough situations — he started the car, raced the motor. Couldn't stand doing nothing any longer.
There was only one bright spot in the day, not exactly bright but at least not as downbeat, grim, and depressing as everything else: Ray Bannister's deliverance from his assignment on the day of the visit. The project had been canceled and so had Ray's part in it all.
At least he could deliver a bit of good news to someone on this most rotten of all days.
A while later Ray Bannister's mother directed him to the cellar.
"He's working on his secret project, so he might not let you in," she said good-naturedly. She had the most astonishing tan Obie had ever seen. Deep and rich, like melted caramel. He followed her directions through the house and down the cellar stairs. "Don't forget to knock," she called after him.
The door at the bottom of the stairs was closed. Secret project? He knocked.
"Who's there?" Ray's voice was faint on the other side of the door.
"Obie."
A few moments later Obie confronted the secret project. It looked, for crying out loud, like a guillotine.
Which, as it turned out, was exactly what it was, Ray Bannister said. Then explained: "Well, not exactly a guillotine. It's an illusion. But one of the best."
"Did you build it yourself?" Obie asked, both attracted and repulsed by the apparatus, sensing a threat in its presence, ugly in the cellar's dim light.
Ray seemed shy suddenly. "I always liked working with my hands." Running his hand over the side of the blade, he said: "I was just about to test it. Want to help?"
Obie stepped back instinctively, wanted nothing to do with this lethal piece of machinery. Yet he had to admit that he was fascinated. His eyes kept straying to the crossblock with the carved-out groove on which the victim's neck would rest. Victim was the wrong word, of course. After all, this was only fun and games. Illusion, like Ray Bannister said.
Ray walked over to the workbench and picked up a shopping bag. Smiling wickedly at Obie, he pulled out a head of cabbage. "See, Obie? I'll give a demonstration, just like a regular magician. A real cabbage — my mother got it at the supermarket for forty-nine cents. She's a good egg, didn't even ask me what I needed a head of cabbage for."
Ray Bannister placed the cabbage in the curved groove, about three feet below the slanted blade. The blade looked menacing, extremely dangerous poised above the cabbage. Suppose it wasn't a head of cabbage but a real head? Obie recoiled from the thought.
"Watch," Ray Bannister said, drawing out the syllable, letting his voice trail off dramatically. He pressed a button near the top of the guillotine. The blade plummeted, flashing brilliantly for a moment as it caught a ray of light from the ceding bulb, hitting the cabbage, exploding the vegetable into a thousand pieces of moist green and yellow leaves.