Page 67 of The Villains of Winter

How he meandered through the wilderness.

Professor Ilaria had proficiently taught herself Ancient Greek and Ancient Latin, therefore it would be of little effort to teach herself the handwriting of a distraught college boy.

Lucien would make it clear that he had no intention to kill himself, but he’d gone swimming in high tides, the notebook would mention. He would remark how swimming in brisk water took his mind off matters. The last entry date would be a night of treacherously high tides for the winter.

On the corpse’s body, there would be scarred tissue from a puncture wound. The exact location where Lucien had suffered the abdomen injury last October.

The Banebury Police Department would declare the hemophiliac body as Lucien Montclair. A misfortune that two boys lost their lives that December.

The frozen river preserved dead bodies nearly perfectly. Almost without exception, a body would resurface in the waters, which was why she had to dump the body right then in January so that it would be discovered far later in March. There would be no signs of struggle in the tendons nor broken ligaments nor fractured bones. Due to the composition of inhaled water in the lungs, Lucien would be recorded as an accidental drowning victim.

The corpse would have compression swim wear that likely restricted his oxygen intake, the coroner and medical examiner pre-agreed to determine. Of course, Professor Ilaria had close relations to the coroner’s office in her affiliations to the cabal. The local medical examiners and coroners were dear friends of hers and society members with Wulfram.

A corpse could be procured for either of them at any time.

In conclusion, the body would be wearing Lucien Montclair’s athletic wear. The exact clothes from Swiðhun Hall that he’d often worn whenever he went for an afternoon swim. The College had given her entry into Lucien’s dormitory before they even permitted the police department on campus.

All James needed to do was sufficiently atone with amends, propitiation, prostration, and offerings.

She expected James to be impressed with her. A reminder of her talent, wit, strategy, and forethought. She needed profuse compliments and contrition for her wounded pride.

He refused.

James locked the paper in the Brattleborough Athletic Facility so the evidence wouldn’t be located in his room. He couldn’t turn it into the Banebury Police Department without incriminating himself.

Professor Ilaria had left Elliott for slaughter.

He would never plead to her.

He would never beg her on his knees.

He hated that fucking desgraçada.

​​ CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

JAMES COULDN’T STAND THE SIGHT of the lucent New Years streamers in the Common Room. Knowing Elliott almost lost his life, his best friend nearly taken from him, suffocated with cuts and bruises, made James retch until his head cleared.

The barren campus was Soviet gray outside the solitary buildings and abandoned athenaeums in early January. The desolate fog conjured itself through desiccated trees, skeletal leaves, and hoary mountainside that thickened with lumber freight trucks and rusted road salt trucks. There was no one on the muted college grounds that existed to him. The earth was deathless and stilled, a tundra of wind and sleet, hardened and sterile to him.

He barely made it through his speech in front of Congressman Pittman and his staff.

All he could think of was Elliott.

James thought of how he didn’t mind the mornings where he brushed his teeth next to Elliott in the dormitory sink. He didn’t mind waking up next to Elliott’s nest of riotous bed hair, and his watercolored eyes that crinkled at him in a lazy smile beside him. He didn’t mind shaving his jawline with a straight razor while Elliott tamed his waves with pomade in the mornings. With a thread of pain, he realized that the three years of college spent with Elliott had been the best years of his life.

During his inarticulate speech, he compared paired swans to the State of the Union Address, and then he rambled a comparison of intimate friendship to the laws of nature, all while Congressman Pittman gave him a gaze of complete perplexity. Hesitantly, his head of staff told him they’d be in touch. Mystified.

However, by the first week of January, James needed to concentrate for an entirely separate reason.

He was under investigation for the disappearance of Lucien Claude Montclair.

Before even the end of December, the Montclairs immediately reported Lucien missing after forty-eight hours when he was absent from the financier meetings for his father’s 40th Philharmonic Orchestra Philanthropy Reception. A fucking financier meeting for a philanthropy reception.

James endured a nineteen-hour interrogation with two state detectives from the State Bureau of Investigation. The men were a pair of plain-clothes detectives without the affinity and familiarity for James that Sheriff Sangerfield favored him with through the Yule midwinter festival of ale and mead. I’m sorry as hell to bother you through the Yuletide, James. I only have a few questions. Keep in mind–you’re only a person of interest, you’re not a suspect, alright?

The Montclairs contacted the state department.

The SBI detectives wanted to wear him down into a confession. They wanted to know where James had disposed of Lucien’s body. Did he put it in a dumpster? Was Lucien rotted underground in the national park?