The Chosen One

35

Aberdeen, Washington, Friday March 24, 15.24 PST

‘I see you’ve already made yourself at home here.’

Maggie heard herself panting. ‘You gave me quite a start.’

‘Did I? I am sorry.’ The voice was old, but steady. In the basement gloom, Maggie could still not make out a face.

‘My name is Ashley Muir, from Alpha Insurance,’ she brazened. She thought about extending a hand, but fear got the better of her.

‘Yes. So Mrs Stephenson said.’

Maggie’s breath came in heavy, pounding gulps.

‘I have to tell you, I don’t like people coming down here. Not without me.’

She looked over at the door. Desperation made her cut the politeness. ‘Who are you?’

‘My name is Ray Schilling. I am the principal of this school.’

A wave of relief broke over her. ‘Oh, good. I am glad to hear that.’ She smiled an absurdly wide smile. ‘Can we perhaps talk in your office?’

‘So you can understand my wariness, Ms Muir.’

‘Completely,’ Maggie said, enjoying the warmth of a mug of coffee in her hand.

‘We didn’t have many journalists last summer – Stephen Baker was a student here for such a short while. But those that did come: devious people, Ms Muir. Devious.’

‘Devious,’ Maggie agreed.

‘So when I heard this story about insurance claims and whatnot, well, I thought “Here we go again”.’

‘Of course you did.’

‘Not that you’d have found anything there, even if you had been looking for it.’ The Principal, white-haired with a long, narrow face, gave a self-congratulatory nod.

‘Why’s that?’

‘I removed that file myself as soon as Stephen – excuse me – as soon as the President entered the race.’

‘Removed it?’

‘Only to a place of safekeeping, Ms Muir. I wanted to be able to look reporters in the eye and tell them that the file was not here.’

‘That showed great foresight, Mr Schilling.’

‘Thank you. And now it isn’t here at all.’

‘Where is it?’

‘Did you know that they begin collecting material for a presidential library from the moment the oath is taken?’ He spoke slowly, a function, Maggie had initially assumed, of his age. Now, she realized, it was simply the speech of a man who had spent a lifetime addressing young people.

‘I didn’t know that, no.’

‘So that’s where it is. Safe and sound.’

‘Good for you.’

‘Not that it will provide much for scholars to chew on.’

‘No?’

‘No. Very thin. Must be because he was here for such a short time, you see. Unusually thin, all the same.’

‘As it happens, I was not looking for Mr Baker’s file.’

‘Someone has died, I understand.’

She had been hoping to avoid the name, but there seemed to be no choice if she was to play this scene through to the end. ‘That’s right. Robert Jackson.’

The Principal’s face, already pale, seemed to turn a shade whiter. He sat back in his seat. ‘Robert Jackson,’ he repeated softly.

‘Yes, I’m afraid so. He would have been here thirty-odd years ago.’

‘Nothing odd about it. Exactly thirty. I should know. I taught both of them.’

‘Both of them?’

‘Baker and Jackson.’

‘Of course!’ Maggie smiled. ‘You’re the Mr Schilling on the report. You ran the debate team.’

‘You saw that?’ Now he smiled, too. ‘Such a long time ago. I was very new here then. A young man, not much older than the students themselves.’

‘And now you’re the Principal.’

‘Fifteen years in this job. Time for me to quit soon. But what a thrill, to see one of our students do so well. One day this will be Stephen Baker High.’

Maybe, Maggie thought. But only if he stays in office longer than two months. ‘So you remember him when he was here?’

‘I remember all the students I teach.’ He paused, then leaned forward.

Maggie recognized the manner. There were a few Mr Schillings in her neighbourhood of Dublin, as there probably were in every middling town: the educated man among provincials. She imagined him among the lumbermen and fishermen of Aberdeen with his lonely subscription to The Economist and his fondness for the BBC World Service. No wonder he remembered the day Stephen Baker had walked into his life, brightening the gloom.

‘Stephen was always something special. No one forgot him. You couldn’t.’

‘He certainly is very charismatic,’ Maggie said, as levelly as she could manage. She wanted to seem as detached from Baker as Ashley Muir, insurance investigator and voter, would be. ‘And the policyholder that I’m looking into,’ she made a fuss with a file in her bag, ‘Robert A. Jackson. Was he memorable in any way?’

‘Well, I remember him, if that’s what you mean. But, in truth that probably has more to do with Stephen Baker than it does with him. Anyway, I’m sure this is perfectly irrelevant for your purposes. An insurance claim, was it?’

Maggie scrambled to get him back on track. ‘I’m trying to build up as full a picture of the policyholder as I can. There’s a large sum of money involved, no apparent beneficiaries. I need to find out if there’s something we’re not seeing.’

‘What might that be?’

‘A surviving relative, maybe children from a marriage that didn’t work out. I’ve decided to start at the beginning and take it from there. In my experience, the unlikeliest information can prove useful. You said he stayed in your memory because of Stephen Baker?’

‘As I remember it, Jackson was not a bad debater. He could be sharp and precise. But he was so – there’s no nice way to say this – overshadowed.’

‘Overshadowed?’

‘He used to be the captain of the debate team at James Madison High. He got far in several competitions. Even reached a final in Olympia – though he lost that.’

‘And then?’

‘And then Stephen Baker arrived in the final year. Funnily enough, they had a lot in common. Both so interested in politics, in history. I remember they got on quite well. Stephen used to tease him, called him by his middle name: Andrew. Like the president.’

‘Stephen Baker and Robert Jackson were friends?’

‘I would say so, yes. Same class, same interests. They began debating together, a tag-team if you will. Against others in the school, then other schools. They were very effective.’

‘So what went wrong?’

‘Well, I made this point to the reporters who came here to interview me about Stephen – about the President. He had true star quality, even then. A tremendous magnetism. Wherever he went in the school, people would follow. Especially the girls. Even the teachers were not immune.’

‘So what happened?’

‘It’s a minor thing, but in the light of what you’ve told me about poor Robert, I feel rather guilty. After just a short time at the school it was clear that Baker was special and it struck me that with him as captain, our debate team might finally have a chance of success.’

‘So you replaced Jackson with Baker.’

‘Yes.’

‘Did it work?’

Schilling smiled. ‘Bigtime, as the students would say now. James Madison won the statewide cup. Took on all those elite schools in Seattle and Redmond and Olympia and won. You have to know what that meant to a small town like Aberdeen. Things were already pretty depressed back then, logging was contracting, plenty of fathers at the school were out of work. And then, there was this…star.’

‘So you talent-spotted a future president of the United States.’

‘That’s what I tell the reporters who come here. That’s the public story. But Robert took it very badly. It broke his friendship with Stephen Baker instantly.’

‘And that’s been on your conscience?’

‘Oh, gosh no! High school friendships are a dime a dozen, Ms Muir, as I’m sure you know. No, it wasn’t that. What mattered was the effect it had on Robert. It did seem to change him. He retreated into himself. He had never been adept socially but now he became very introverted. He resigned from the debate team – didn’t want to be on it if he were no longer captain.’ He looked into Maggie’s eyes, as if gauging whether he could trust her. ‘He became very bitter. It’s a very strong word to use about an eighteen-yearold boy, but I sensed that he became hateful.’

‘Did he do something?’

‘No, though these days you’d keep a close eye on him. After Columbine, no one takes any chances.’

‘Good God.’

‘Sorry, that was the wrong thing to say. He committed no acts of violence. But I had got to know him well and I saw that his resentment of Stephen Baker became unhealthy. When Baker applied to Harvard, so did Jackson. Baker, as you know, sailed in. They were throwing scholarships at him.’

‘And Jackson was rejected.’

‘Yes. Yes, he was.’ He paused. ‘Are you a mother yourself, Ms Muir?’

Immediately a picture of Liz and three-year-old Calum popped into Maggie’s head. ‘No, Mr Schilling. I’m afraid I’m not.’

‘Well, people don’t realize how fragile kids are at that age. These are the formative years. A young man can be shaped by what happens to him at that age.’

‘And what happened to Robert Jackson?’

‘I would say he developed an unhealthy interest in Stephen Baker. An obsession, you’d call it. Baker became a kind of mirror to Robert, and whatever he saw in that mirror was never good enough. Robert wasn’t as smart, he wasn’t as handsome, he wasn’t as popular. And it wasn’t just a phase, either. I ran into Robert a year or two afterwards, and he still seemed to be in the grip of this fixation.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘It was strange really. But Robert had a file with him. One of those high school files, with a rubber band across the front? He showed it to me.’

‘And what was inside?’

‘Clippings about Stephen. Items from the local paper, neatly cut out and filed in date order. Too neat. It made me shudder.’

‘Did they still know each other then?’

‘Well, Stephen’s father still worked here, in the timber trade. He couldn’t afford to retire. So Aberdeen is where Stephen came back to during the vacations.’

Maggie tried to collect her thoughts. ‘And you say you feared Robert Jackson would do something…something he might regret?’

‘You’ve just reminded me of something I said to my wife at the time. Gosh, thirty years ago and it’s just come back to me.’

‘What did you say?’

‘I said that an obsession like this only ends in destruction. Jackson will either destroy Stephen Baker – or he will destroy himself.’