“Bullshit,” he said, out loud.
He had no idea if he was talking about Windsor, Massachusetts, or himself.
2
In the end Gregor went out because he had nothing else to do and because he was not the kind of person who took pills or drank seriously in order to calm his nerves. It was only half past eight, and he was as revved up and restless as he had been after breakfast this morning. He was not tired. He thought he ought to be exhausted, considering the day he’d had, all the traveling and all the stress. He couldn’t stop moving. He paced back and forth across his room until he began to worry that whoever had the room under him would call the desk to complain. His mind jumped from Windsor to Howard to Mark to Bennis and back to Mark again. He tried to stand still looking out on Main Street at the traffic moving slowly, bumper to bumper, from one end of the area he still thought of as “precious” to the other. He found himself craning slightly to his left to catch the start of the Windsor Academy grounds, as if he expected something revelatory to happen there: Mark bursting out of one of the gates screaming, “Free at last!” at the top of his lungs; Brian Sheehy finally giving in and torching the place; Liz Toliver showing up on her white charger to do … what? He didn’t know what he expected Liz to do when she got here. He only hoped she’d take her son home, whether he wanted to go or not.
Gregor got his coat, put it back on, and went out into the hall again. He wanted to walk. It would clear his head. He went downstairs, left the key at the desk for the second time since he’d checked in less than five hours ago, and went back out onto Main Street. This time, though, he didn’t stay on theinn’s side of the street. He crossed at the nearest crosswalk, which was not hard, because the people in cars seemed to assume that the pedestrian right-of-way was absolute. As soon as he stepped into the zebra walk, traffic came to a halt. He crossed without having to wait.
On the other side there was a pharmacy, then a video store, then the first of the enormous Colonial houses that were the town-side face of the Windsor Academy campus. He tried to count along the street to see how many there were, but he couldn’t see far enough. Windsor was curiously flat for a New England town. Some of the houses were Greek Revival and had pillars meant to mimic the facade of the Parthenon. Some of the houses were older than that and as plain as the plain thinking that the old Massachusetts Unitarians had put so much store in. Most of the windows in the houses were lit up. Gregor supposed that most students would be in their rooms studying at this time of night.
He came to a wrought-iron fence and a sign that said EAST GATE, but it wasn’t a gate. There was only an opening in the bars beneath a wrought-iron arch, a stylized gate, not a real one. That seemed terribly symbolic in some way he couldn’t figure out. He let it go and went through into a small parking lot along one side of a large, gray building discreetly marked with a sign that said ADMISSIONS.
He went through the parking lot into what was obviously a standard campus quadrangle and waited. Surely there were guards here somewhere. There didn’t appear to be. Nobody came out to challenge his presence on campus. Nobody stopped him from walking into the quad’s center and looking around. He looked at the buildings on every side. It was their backs that fronted the quad, which he found very odd. He wasn’t all that familiar with campuses—he’d been a commuter student at the University of Pennsylvania, and too overloaded with work at Harvard Business School to pay much attention to Harvard Yard—but he’d always had the impression that buildings faced quads. The arrangement here felt slightly off. So did the big Gothic building to his right, which didn’t look as if it belonged on the same campus.
He walked through on the path, between two large white houses and out to the other side. The path continued to his left until it reached a large building with several articulated wings. To his right there was open space that went down to a midsized pond. The building with articulated wings was relatively new, but it had been designed to “blend” with all that authentic Colonial. The pond was frozen over and obscured by thick stands of evergreens. He looked but didn’t see any sign of sports facilities. There were no cages for batters to stand in for baseball. There were no goalposts for football. There was nothing that looked like it could have held a basketball court.
He walked a little ways toward the building with articulated wings and then stopped. He could see no point in going there. He didn’t know what it was; and although it was lit up, it seemed to be deserted. He went back into the quad and paid more attention to the Gothic building. It said RIDENOUR LIBRARY on the front. He knew the name Ridenour from somewhere; he wasn’t sure where. The library looked as deserted as the newer buildings. Only the Houses looked inhabited, and he assumed they were all dorms.