Rodram and some divinity students carried twenty gallons of gasoline the half mile between Up and Down and poured it around the base of Trigby Hall, where Grace Murphy lived. Trigby and all the buildings around it-Norris, Filmont, the Gray Brick Building-went up in flames. In fact most of Down Campus burned that night: May 27, 1955. The next day Grace Murphy withdrew from Winchester, and it was not until the mid-1960s, a year after Winchester became a coed liberal arts institution, that a minority was allowed to enroll.
A small stream called Miller’s Creek cuts through the geographic middle of campus, a viaduct connecting the two hemispheres to take students from Down Campus to Up. This is where Brian House was walking on Saturday evening. The viaduct had myths of its own: attempted suicides, accidental deaths, an infamous and botched demolition attempt by a mentally ill student in the 1980s. During the Vietnam War, students had formed a makeshift boundary at one end of the bridge so that professors could not get from Up to Down without driving Route 17 all the way into downtown DeLane. The faculty was too proud to do this, so for a week classes were canceled altogether or held on the banks of the creek, the professors on one bank and the students sitting on the muddy grass of the other. After a six-day standoff, the students grudgingly returned to class.
Brian had already had a little to drink, and he planned on drinking much more as the night went on. It was a cool, breezy twilight in early September. High up in Norris Hall, some freshmen had their window open, and the sound of a basketball game wafted down and echoed off the buildings on each side of Miller’s Creek. Brian stopped midway across the bridge and looked down, as he often did, and listened intently to the metallic burble of the creek. Standing here always reminded him of being a kid, of the tinny sound of a faraway stream in the woods when he and his father and brother would take long hikes through the Catskills. On one of these excursions they got lost, and his father had told Brian and Marcus, “We’ll stay right here. You aren’t supposed to panic when you get lost. People walk these trails all the time.” But three hours later they were still in the same spot and no one had come for them. It was getting dark. Brian could see that his father was scared, or maybe he was cold, because he was trembling, legs and arms and shoulders all vibrating as if he had been strummed. Finally, when it was almost too dark to see, they began to walk. It was much later, probably around midnight, when they heard the sounds of a highway. They found the road and hitchhiked back to town, and for three days Brian’s father wouldn’t even look at his boys.
The creek ran off into the purple edge of the woods, snaked around Up Campus, and then disappeared near the Geary Economics Center, where it would meet the Thatch River about two miles from campus. Sometimes Brian fantasized about following it, jumping in and losing himself in the current and ending up miles away, floating faceup on the Thatch, sailing toward home.
The cool wind blew against his face, and the pink skin of the water shimmered. He tried to focus on its most distant point, out toward the mouth of the woods. Out there, under the canopy of trees, was where he buried it freshman year. The Thing, as he and his family called it. They couldn’t even give the object a name; it was just the “Thing,” as if actually calling it something would give it credence. Validity. They wanted to keep it obscure, hide it from their thoughts. And so it became, to all of them, the Thing. To this day Brian thought of it as nothing else.
It was just a disturbance of the earth down there, a claw mark in the creek’s bank. He came out here every night to check, to make sure that someone hadn’t disturbed it. No, it was just as he’d left it, the dirt-
“Brian?”
Startled, he turned to see a girl standing beside him. They were the only two people on the viaduct. Most students were on Up Campus, at one of the frat houses, getting ready for Saturday night.
“Were you…?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “I was just looking at the water, at how it…” He couldn’t explain. Hell, he didn’t need to explain himself to anyone. Who was she, anyway?
“I’m Mary,” she said, noting his confused expression. “I’m in your logic class.”
“Ah,” said Brian. “Dr. Weirdo.”
She looked off, the insult to Professor Williams stinging her. “He’s not that bad,” she whispered.
“So who did it?” Brian leaned back onto the concrete rail of the viaduct, his back turned to the girl.
“Her father did, of course,” Mary said. She wondered if she should lean on the bridge next to him. Was he inviting her over there, next to him? Did he want a long, drawn-out conversation or was he simply being casual, just idly passing the time?
“And he’s going to kill her?”
“He thinks he’s protecting her,” she said.
“But Williams is saying ‘murder.’ What kind of protection is murder?”
“Have you wondered whether Williams is telling us the truth about everything?”
“Hell yes,” Brian said sharply. “He’s misdirecting us all the time. That’s a given. But there are rules, and that must be one of them. What good is the game if it doesn’t have rules. Williams said it himself. The kidnapper is the murderer.”
“I guess,” she sighed. Defeated.
“Anyway, that whole theory is crap,” said Brian, still looking away into the trees. “Mike’s the man.”
“Mike?” asked Mary playfully. This was her first discussion out of class with anyone about the case, and she found herself enjoying it. She wasn’t supposed to meet up with Summer and the Deltas for another hour. She had just been out on campus getting some fresh air and-she had to admit-thinking about Polly and Professor Williams.
“Yes, Mike,” Brian said. “Mike told the people at the party that he was going to sleep on the couch, slipped out when no one was paying attention, drove to Polly’s house. He broke into her room, took her to some distant location. You know how it is: drunk people can’t remember anything anyway. They thought they saw Mike on the couch, but was it really Mike?”
“Hmmm,” Mary said, placating him.
“Yeah. Hmmm.” He was still looking off at that fixed point.
They stood there in the wind with night falling around them. Some of the streetlights along Montgomery were coming on, casting half the viaduct in a blanched, angular white.
Finally Brian said, “I better get going. I’m off to the Deke house to get plastered.”
“Oh, yeah,” Mary said demurely. “I should be going, too.”
He turned to face her. She noticed his eyes: how red they were, how unsettled. It was as if the pupils had been shattered like a dropped plate, skimming off into a thousand different fragments. There was something in them. Disappointment, maybe, or hurt. He looked away. “So you like the Shins?” she asked him, noting his shirt.