there in five minutes,” I tell her. She leaves, as loathe to be near the old man as I am. For one thing, I realize as I sit down beside him, he smells. “I imagine this is terrible for you, Mr. Hull,” I say carefully.
“Not as bad for me as it will be for you,” he says.
“What?” Is this senile blathering? But Woody Hull’s eyes don’t look vague right now; they look keen as a hawk’s. They’re fixed on me with all the sharp attention I recall from the last time he called me into his office.
“I’ve had a word with the police,” he says, “and I see where their questioning is going. I think you’d better prepare yourself.”
My mouth turns dry. Have the police actually told him they suspect Rudy? “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He grabs my arm with a claw-like grip and all the breath goes out of my lungs. “I understand the instinct to deny the truth. Heaven knows I’ve been guilty of that myself. Do you remember Luther Gunn?”
“What?” The name shocks me into speech. Of course I remember him. Luther Gunn taught Senior Seminar—the class I teach now. Every senior took that class. I no longer think Haywood Hull is senile; he knows exactly what he’s doing.
“He was a fine teacher. A fine young man. I knew his parents, and hired him myself to teach English.” Woody goes on, “All the girls loved him. But then that girl accused him of making unwelcome advances toward her.”
“Ashley Burton,” I say, the name rising up in my throat on a surge of bile.
“Yes, Ashley Burton,” Woody repeats with a look of distaste on his face. “The little slut.”
I look around to see if anyone is close enough to have heard those words come out of our former headmaster’s mouth, but no one in the chapel is recoiling with shock and horror. Did I imagine he just called one of his former students a slut?
“But of course I did have to do something. I felt terrible about letting Luther go, but what choice did I have? It had become a witch hunt! A thing like that ruins a man’s reputation. Apparently he just vanished afterward, went off backpacking through Nepal and was never heard from again.” He looks at me as if I might tell him what became of Luther Gunn. He looks at me as if he knows I know. “It can be so hard,” he says with a horrible gentleness, “to face the truth about the people we believed in.”
“Yes,” I say, getting to my feet. I have to get away from him, now. I push past him in the pew, my skin crawling as my legs brush his knobby knees. I have to get to Rudy. Hull might be calling my name as I run down the aisle but I don’t hear him. All I hear is a voice in my head crying, I’m drowning I’m drowning I’m drowning.
Chapter Eight
I get in the car to drive to the station but my hands are shaking so much I drop the keys twice. It finally gets through to me that if I can’t hold the keys, maybe I shouldn’t be driving.
I can still feel Woody Hull’s bony hand on my arm. The place he touched me burns. The name Luther Gunn is drumming through my head like a jackhammer. Why did Woody Hull bring him up? As an object lesson of how we never know people and therefore I can’t even really know my own son?
Or because he knows?
I grip the steering wheel and look through the windshield. I’d parked at the back of the lot, facing Warden House. It looks in even worse shape than when it was faculty housing. The paint has been stripped off the clapboard, and tarps cover the slanting gabled roof. The cupola on top is encaged in metal scaffolding to stabilize the structure while it’s being renovated. Jean has done an amazing job raising funds for the building’s renovation but part of me wishes she’d let it collapse and rot. Not all relics of the past should be preserved.
Luther Gunn lived here when I was a student at Haywood and he held his senior English seminar in the faded grandeur of the east parlor. Why not take advantage of this historic landmark to teach the landmarks of English literature? he would say. It was the kind of unconventional idea he liked to put into motion, like taking the Senior