If We Were Villains: A Novel

Two hours later I hadn’t stopped shivering. We sat in a line against the wall in a third-floor hallway, where it was more than warm enough. I’d been given a blanket and a dry pair of jeans but no time to shower. Worse than the lingering chill was the sensation of the lake water and Richard’s blood seeping into my skin, burning and itching on every inch of my body. Filippa, sitting uncomfortably close on my left, lifted one hand without looking at me and placed it so lightly on the inside of my wrist that I barely felt it. She, James, Alexander, and Wren had already given their statements. Meredith was in the office giving hers, while I waited, in a state of catatonic anxiety, to give mine.

The door opened with a heavy scrape and Meredith reappeared. I tried unsuccessfully to catch her eye until I heard Holinshed say, “Mr. Marks.”

Filippa’s hand slid off my arm. I stood and moved toward the door with the brittle, mechanical motion of the Tin Man. Pausing on the threshold, I glanced at my classmates again. They sat with their faces all turned away, looking anywhere but at me or one another—except Alexander, who gave me the smallest secret nod. I bowed my head and ducked into the room.

It was bigger than I expected, like the gallery but lower-ceilinged, not as bright. The windows gazed out over the long sweeping drive at the front of the hall, the stately iron gate reduced to thorny black bars in the distance. I twitched as the door boomed shut behind me. There were four other people in the room—Frederick, standing in the corner by the window; Holinshed, leaning on the enormous claw-footed desk with his chin tucked against his chest; Gwendolyn, sitting behind the desk with her head in her hands; and a younger, broad-shouldered man with sandy hair, wearing a brown bomber jacket over a shirt and tie. I’d already caught a glimpse of him down at the Castle, before they herded us up to the Hall.

“Morning, Oliver.” He extended a hand, which I shook with clammy fingers, realizing that I must look vaguely ridiculous, what with a moth-eaten blanket hanging from my shoulders like some derelict sovereign’s cape.

“This is Detective Colborne,” Holinshed said. He peered at me over the rims of his glasses, expression unforgiving and severe. “He’s going to ask you some questions about Richard.”

Gwendolyn gave a small whimper and covered her mouth.

“Okay,” I said. My tongue felt like sandpaper.

“There’s no need to be nervous,” Colborne said, and that same hysterical laughter from two hours earlier echoed in my brain. “I just need you to tell me what happened, and if you don’t remember, it’s all right to tell me you don’t remember. No information is better than wrong information.”

“Okay.”

“Why don’t you sit? Might make things easier.” He gestured to the chair waiting behind me. There was another one in front of Holinshed’s desk, facing me, empty.

I lowered myself into the chair, wondering if it would vanish before I got there and let me fall to the floor. In that moment, nothing seemed certain or solid—not even the furniture. Colborne sat across from me in the other chair and reached into his pocket. His hand emerged again with a small black tape recorder, which he placed behind him on the edge of Holinshed’s desk. It was already on, a little red light glaring at me.

“Do you mind if I record this?” Colborne asked, politely enough, but I knew I couldn’t refuse. “If I don’t have to write everything down I can pay closer attention to what you’re saying.”

I nodded and adjusted my blanket. Dignity was immaterial, and I didn’t know what else to do with my hands.

Colborne leaned forward and said, “So, Oliver. All right if I call you Oliver?”

“Sure.”

“And you’re a fourth-year theatre student.”

I didn’t know if I was expected to answer, so I said, a half second too late, “Yes.”

Colborne didn’t seem to notice, only offered another nonquestion. “Dean Holinshed tells me you’re from Ohio.”

“Yes,” I said again, again too late.

“You miss home at all?” he asked, and I was almost relieved.

“No.” I could have told him that as far as I was concerned, Dellecher was home, but I didn’t want to say any more than I had to.

Colborne: “How big is your hometown?”

Me: “Average, I guess. Bigger than Broadwater.”

Colborne: “Did you do theatre in high school?”

Me: “Yes.”

Colborne: “Did you like it? How was it?”

Me: “It was all right. Not like here.”

Colborne: “Because here is…?”

Me: “Better.”

Colborne: “Are you close? The six of you.”

It sounded alien. The six of us. We had always been seven.

“Like siblings,” I said, and immediately regretted it, uncertain how quickly the word “rivalry” would come to mind.

“You share a room with James Farrow,” Colborne said, more quietly. “Is that where you slept last night?”

I nodded, not quite trusting myself to speak. We’d decided that James would account for me. The fact that one drunk first-year saw me on the stairs with Meredith didn’t mean we had to admit to what had happened after.

“And what time did you go to bed?” Colborne said.

“Two? Two thirty? Something like that.”

“Okay. Talk me through what happened at the party, and be as specific as possible.”

My eyes flicked from Colborne to Frederick to Holinshed. Gwendolyn sat staring down at the top of the desk, her hair limp and tired-looking.

“There aren’t any wrong answers,” Colborne added. His voice had a soft scratch to it that made him sound older than he was.

“Right, yeah. I’m sorry.” I tightened my grip on the blanket, wishing my palms would stop sweating. “Well. James and Alexander and I walked down from the FAB a little after ten thirty, and we weren’t in a rush so we probably got to the Castle about eleven. We got drinks, and then we all got separated. I just, I don’t know, wandered around for a while. Someone told me Richard was upstairs, drinking by himself.”

“Any idea why he wasn’t socializing with everyone else?” Colborne asked.

“Not really,” I said. “Figured he’d come down when he was ready.”

He nodded. “Go on.”

I looked toward the window, to the long winding road that led away from Dellecher, disappearing into the gray. “I went outside. Talked to Wren. Talked to James. Then there was a—a bunch of noise, I guess, from inside. So we went in to see what was happening. It was just me and James by then. I don’t know where Wren went.”

“And you were in the yard, is that right?”

“Yes.”

“When you went inside, what happened?”

I shifted in my chair. Two different memories were fighting for dominance: the truth and the version of it we’d agreed to tell. “It was confusing,” I said, feeling some fleeting comfort in the honesty of those three words. “The music was loud and everyone was talking at the same time, but Richard had hit somebody—I don’t remember his name. Colin brought him up to the infirmary.”

“Allan Boyd,” Holinshed said. “We’ll be discussing this with him, too.”

Colborne didn’t acknowledge the interjection, his attention fixed on me. “And what then?”

“Meredick—I mean, Richard and Meredith—were arguing. I don’t know exactly what it was about.” More accurately, I wasn’t sure how much Meredith had told them.

“The others made it sound like Allan had been paying her a little more attention than Richard was comfortable with,” Colborne said.

“Maybe. I don’t know. Richard was drunk—I mean, beyond drunk. Belligerent. He said some pretty nasty things. Meredith was upset and she went upstairs, to get away from everybody. I went after her, just to make sure she was all right. We were talking in her room—” A few vivid moments of Meredith flashed in my brain—strands of auburn hair caught in her lipstick, black silk lines at the edges of her eyelids, the strap of her dress sliding down off her shoulder. “We were talking in her room and Richard came up and started pounding on the door,” I said, too quickly, hoping Colborne wouldn’t notice how warm my face and throat had gotten. “She didn’t want to talk to him and she told him as much—through the door, we were sort of afraid to open it—and eventually he went away.”

“What time was this?”

“God, I don’t remember. Late. One thirty, maybe?”

“When Richard left, do you know where he went?”

“No,” I said, exhaling a little more easily. Another scrap of truth. “We didn’t come out for a while.”

“And when you did?”

“Everyone was gone, really. I went up to bed. James was already there, but not quite asleep.” I tried to picture him rolling over on his side to whisper to me across the room. But all I could see was the dim yellow light of the bathroom, steam and hot water warping his features in the mirror. “He told me Richard had gone off into the woods with a bottle of Scotch.”

“And that was the last you heard of him?”

“Until Alexander found him?” The prismatic memories of the previous night fell away, and the cold of the morning crept through me. I could feel the water on my skin, in my hair, under my fingernails. “Yes.”

“All right,” Colborne said. He spoke gently, the way you talk to spooked horses and crazy people. “Now, I’m sorry to ask this, but I need you to tell me what you saw this morning.”

I could still see it. Richard suspended on the surface of life, bloodied, gasping—and the rest of us simply watching, waiting for the curtain to drop. Revenge tragedy, I wanted to say. Shakespeare himself couldn’t have done it better.

“I saw Richard,” I told him. Not a proper dead man, not really floating. “Just sort of hanging there. But broken and crushed, like everything was bent the wrong way.”

“And you—” He cleared his throat. “You got in the water.” It was the first time he hesitated.

“Yes.” I pulled the blanket closer, as if it could somehow thaw me, shield me from the feeling of cold water closing in around me. I knew, sitting there in the dry warmth of Holinshed’s office, that I’d never forget it—how my lungs shrank so suddenly I thought they would shatter, gasping more in shock than for oxygen. Richard’s face, much too close, white as bone. The sour iron smell of blood. That insane urge to laugh was back, as strong as the urge to vomit, and for one harrowing moment I thought I would be sick all over the carpet at Colborne’s feet. I swallowed again, choked everything down. He mistook my wave of nausea for emotion and respectfully waited for me to compose myself.

Eventually I managed to say, “Someone had to.”

“And he was dead?”

I could have told him how it felt, to reach for Richard’s throat and find the flesh cold, that vein that had once bulged and throbbed in anger flat and finally still. Instead all I said was “Yes.”

He stared at me, with a brittle sort of look, deliberately blank, like a bad poker face. Before I could guess what he didn’t want me to see he blinked, leaned back. “Well, that can’t have been easy. I’m sorry.”

I nodded, unsure of whether I was supposed to thank him or if condolences were in his job description.

“Just one more question, if you’re up for it.”

“Whatever you need.”

“Tell me about the last few weeks,” he said, loosely, as if it were only a matter of course. “You’ve all been under a lot of pressure, Richard maybe most of all. Was he behaving strangely?”

Another mosaic of memories took shape like a stained-glass window, shards of color and light. The white glow of the moon on the water at Halloween, the blue bruises on James’s arms, the bright ripe red of blood creeping out of Meredith’s silk sleeve. My stomach, knotted and clenched a moment before, unexpectedly unwound. My pulse slowed.

“No,” I said. Filippa’s words echoed softly in my head. “Before last night, everything was fine.”

Colborne watched me with curious closeness. “I think that’s all for now,” he said, after what felt like too long a pause. “I’m going to give you my contact information. If you think of anything else, please don’t hesitate to tell me.”

“Of course,” I said. “I will.”

But, of course, I wouldn’t. Not until ten years later.