The Secret History - Donna Tartt [159]
Henry looked back down the hill to where we waited in the car. He reached into his pocket for a piece of paper and scribbled a note that he folded and wedged in the crack of the door.
“Are there students out with the search parties?” Henry asked on the way back to Hampden. “I don’t want to go down there if we’ll be making ourselves conspicuous. But on the other hand, it does seem rather callous, don’t you think, to just go home?”
He was quiet a moment, thinking. “Maybe we should have a look,” he said. “Charles, you’ve done quite enough for one day. Maybe you should just go home.”
After we dropped the twins off, the three of us went on to campus. I had expected that by now the search party would have grown tired and gone home but I was surprised to find the enterprise busier than ever. There were policemen, college administrators, boy scouts, maintenance workers and security guards, about thirty Hampden students (some in an official, student-councily-looking group, the rest just along for the ride), and mobs of townspeople. It was a large assembly, but as the three of us looked down at it from the top of the rise, it seemed oddly muffled and small in the great expanse of snow.
We went down the hill—Francis, sulky because he hadn’t wanted to come, followed two or three paces behind—and wandered through the crowd. No one paid us the least bit of attention. Behind me I heard the indistinct, aborted garble of a walkie-talkie; and, startled, I walked backward into the Chief of Security.
“Watch it,” he shouted. He was a squat, bulldoggish man with liver spots on his nose and jowls.
“Sorry,” I said hastily. “Can you tell me what—”
“College kids,” he muttered, turning his head away as if to spit. “Stumbling around, getting in the way, don’t know what the hell you’re suppose to do.”
“Well, that’s what we’re trying to find out,” snapped Henry.
The guard turned quickly, and somehow his gaze landed not on Henry but on Francis, who was standing staring into space. “So it’s you, is it?” he said with venom. “Mr. Off-Campus who thinks he can park in the faculty parking lot.”
Francis started, a wild look in his eye.
“Yes, you. You know how many unpaid violations you’re carrying? Nine. I turned your registration in to the Dean just last week. They can put you on probation, hold your transcripts, what have you. Suspend your library privileges. If it was up to me they’d put you in jail.”
Francis gaped at him. Henry caught him by the sleeve and pulled him away.
A long, straggly line of townspeople was crunching through the snow, some of them swiping listlessly at the ground with sticks. We walked to the end of the queue, then fell into step with them.
The knowledge that Bunny’s body actually lay about two miles to the southwest did not lend much interest or urgency to the search, and I plodded along in a daze, my eyes on the ground. At the front of the rank an authoritative cluster of state troopers and policemen marched ahead, heads bent, talking in low voices as a barking German shepherd dog circled around them at a trot. The air had a heavy quality and the sky over the mountains was overcast and stormy. Francis’s coat whipped out behind him in theatrical billows; he kept glancing furtively around to see if his inquisitor was anywhere nearby and from time to time he emitted a faint, self-pitying cough.
“Why the hell haven’t you paid those parking tickets?” Henry whispered to him.
“Leave me alone.”
We crept through the snow for what seemed like hours, until the energetic needle pricks in my feet subsided to an uncomfortable numbness; heavy boots of policemen, crunching black in the snow, night sticks swinging ponderously from heavy belts. A helicopter overhead swooped in with a roar over the trees, hovered above us for a moment, then darted back the way it had come. The light was