“But it’s … not … true…” Carlos’s voice was now unmistakably shaking, and Harrison suddenly recalled that this particular classmate had been a national debate champion. “I wouldn’t dream of stealing somebody else’s work. I never have and I never would. I can’t imagine why,” he turned toward his accuser, but Eli continued to glare at some spot on the rug, “Eli, why you would say this.”
Professor Alcock cleared his throat. “Eli? Can I see the notebook, please?”
With great solemnity, Eli Absalom Stone rose and left the room. They all watched him go, silent as if by agreement. Eli, unlike the rest of them, had acquired no physical traits of the outdoorsman while at Roarke, likely because his nonacademic assignments had pretty much kept him away from animals and out of the fields. Of course, he was no more interested in the workings of the farm than Harrison himself was; he was interested in things like the Roman sources for Titus Andronicus. Harrison felt a little chill. He liked Carlos. He liked all of them. Especially Carlos, or was this just occurring to him now, under these rather extreme circumstances? Did he like Eli? It was not the pertinent question. What he really wanted, what he had wanted from the very first moment in that New Hampshire parking lot, what he had likely wanted from the day he sat down with Against Youth, eighteen months earlier, was for Eli to like him. He had no idea whether Eli liked him.
Eli came back to the lounge carrying a simple marble-cover notebook, and everyone stared at it as if they’d never seen such an object, though this was the type commonly used by Roarke students, not to mention by primary and secondary school students all over the country, and so commonplace that office supply stores and drug stores and even supermarkets stocked them in bulk each August for Back-to-School. Eli himself was likely in charge of ordering a supply of these notebooks for the Roarke community, where students tended to write a lot and no one had a personal computer. Harrison, for example, carried six of these notebooks, one for each of his five seminars and a sixth for egg production records.
Eli handed over the notebook. In Alcock’s hands, it fell open easily to a place where pages—possibly many pages—had been roughly ripped out, leaving Eli’s distinctive thick and spiky handwriting on either side. “What am I looking at?” he said.
“About ten pages missing,” said Eli. “Mainly Philomela. But at least a couple of pages on the Seneca sources, too.”
“It’s absolutely untrue,” Carlos said, but his voice was now pleading. “I haven’t touched that notebook. I’ve never even seen it before.”
“It was on my bed about six days ago, then I couldn’t find it. I just figured I’d misplaced it somewhere. I’d moved on to another paper topic anyway, so I just kind of let it go. When I read Carlos’s paper I thought, well, that’s a coincidence. But then I found the notebook up in the Stearns Room.”
He stopped here. He must have known how this would land. The Stearns Room was one of several study areas around the small campus, outfitted like the rest with tables and chairs and a couple of couches, but it wasn’t as popular as the library or the backhouse lounge, both of which had fireplaces. Only a small, regular group opted for the Stearns, leaving their work out on the tables and bringing up mugs of tea from the kitchen directly underneath. This group had always included Carlos.
“Where?” Professor Alcock asked.
“Down the back of the sofa. The pages on Seneca and Philomela were missing. Like I said, I just kind of sat with it. I guess I was trying to persuade myself that it wasn’t, you know, that.”
“I discussed my paper topic with Professor Willem!” Carlos said suddenly. “A week ago!”
Professor Willem was not in the room. He was an adjunct, or what passed as an adjunct at Roarke, which meant that he came in one afternoon a week from Dartmouth to teach the Shakespeare seminar, and a seminar on Milton and Spenser.
“All right.” Alcock got to his feet. “I’m going to stop this now. Carlos, Eli, come with me.”