Page 7 of Return of the Spider

A tiny dynamo of a woman in her late forties, Wolcott had taught English before turning to administration. “What does she have you covering today?”

“‘The Lagoon,’” he said.

“Ah, Joseph Conrad. I know you went to Penn, but your degree is in computer science. You feel up to this?”

He managed a smile and said, “I reread it last night. At first the tale seems incoherent, like a dream, but then you start seeing what the author does with light and darkness when the white guy goes up the canal into the jungle lagoon, and then it becomes a nightmare when the one Malay boy abandons his brother to the raja’s men hunting them.”

“To save his dying girlfriend,” the headmistress said. “It’s a moral-quandary story that suggests many of the themes later amplified inHeart of Darkness.”

“That’s how I plan to teach it,” Soneji replied. “A sketch for them to consider beforeHeart of Darkness.”

“Let me know how it goes,” Wolcott said as they reached the top of the stairs. She headed toward the administration offices.

“I will,” Soneji said, and he turned toward Fowler Hall on the quadrangle, thinking once again how deeply satisfying it would be to snuff out her sanctimonious life.

The halls of Fowler were bustling with teenagers in school uniforms, clutching books, heading toward their first-period classes. Ms. Porter’s classroom was on the second floor.

Soneji loved taking on a substitute-teaching role from time to time. It was a break from his boring real job, selling heating oil. A chance to be someone else, someone who by necessity was surrounded by youth. And here at the Charles School, they were the youth of privilege, though not of super-wealth or super-power.

Still, these were elite youth, and they interested Soneji very much. So much promise to be toyed with. So much potential to—

He reached the second floor and spotted seventeen-year-old Abby Howard leaning back against the wall, laughing with Conrad Talbot, who wore his Charles School lacrosse captain jacket and stood very close to her.

Soneji had met Abby in class two days ago, and she reminded him of Joyce Adams, a freshman at Princeton who’d mysteriously vanished years ago. He had fond memories of Joyce, how long and lean she’d been, the first to sate a particular craving in him. But now, years later, the hunger was coming again. Every time he glanced at Abby, he thought of Joyce and how wonderful it would be to repeat that sweet episode.

A knot of students came down the hall, causing Soneji to take a few steps to his right. He stopped with his back almost to Conrad and Abby, close enough to overhear them.

“C’mon, Abs,” the boy said. “I’ve got my brother’s Bronco for the week.”

“You know my mom doesn’t let me go out on school nights.”

“Tomorrow morning everyone’s doing SAT prep, but we don’t need to retake them, so we don’t have to be here until noon.”

“I did score well already,” Abby said.

“You scored through the roof, and so did I. C’mon, Abs, we’llget something to eat in Georgetown and then go to this place my brother told me about on Bear Island, off the canal bicycle path.”

“On our bikes?” she asked skeptically.

“No, in the Bronco,” he said.

“Is that, like, legal?”

“Nah. But it’s okay if you go late enough that no one’s there and you drive with just your running lights across the bridge and down the wide dirt path there. My brother’s done it a bunch of times. Bet we don’t even need the lights tonight. There’s a full moon and there’s this cutoff to a maintenance road that goes right above the river. You can see Little Falls from there. We’ll look at the falls and the moon.”

“No, we won’t,” Abby said playfully. “At least I hope not.”

“No moon-gazing, then,” Conrad said and laughed.

Soneji wanted to linger, longed to hear more. But he had a class to teach.

He moved on, thinking about the young lovers, thinking about Joyce Adams, and wondering how the genius he’d been studying might handle the situation.

CHAPTER

2

Washington, DC