Who Sharpens the Pencils

There were two distinct reasons why Ms. Morton knew that, overnight, all the pencils in the mug on her desk had been sharpened. First, the pencils stood in the mug blades-up, the exact opposite of how she stored them. Second, she’d never been in the habit of regularly sharpening her pencils. Ms. Morton, a seventh grade algebra teacher, was the kind of person who’d wait until she’d dulled every last pencil she owned before sharpening the lot of them. Early that cold autumn morning, a Monday in October, she figured that at least half her supply, before the sharpening had occurred, had been, for her, too dull to write with.

She suspected that her colleague, Mr. Colfax, was the one behind all this. On Saturday, she’d told him over dinner, at a restaurant not far from the school where they worked, that she enjoyed few things better than solving a quadratic equation with a freshly sharpened pencil. Sometimes she even preferred a freshly sharpened pencil to a bouquet of yellow roses, her favorite flower. Saturday night had been her first date with Mr. Colfax, and now she could plainly see that, unlike her ex-husband, Richard, and the few men in rural Tompkins, Oregon with whom she’d gone out in the two years since the divorce, Mr. Colfax had actually listened to her. He’d put the pencils blades-up, she thought, so that she might not miss what he’d done.

During that morning’s first two periods, Ms. Morton felt a wondrous sense of lightness, as if she were a bright orange buoy rocking gently back and forth in the warm, shimmery waters of Mr. Colfax’s bay. It was an unprecedented feeling—the kind she wished would never, ever leave her.

At break she found him in his classroom on the far side of campus where the sciences were housed and thanked him for his thoughtfulness. But Mr. Colfax had nary a clue what she was talking about.

“You sharpened my pencils,” said Ms. Morton.

Mr. Colfax, who was wearing a rubber apron and washing beakers in the sink, spoke without looking up. “I’d like to take the credit, but it wasn’t me. Maybe,” he suggested, “it was a student.”

The bell rang, and Ms. Morton, her buoy having come untethered, drifted into the traffic of the hall.

***

No one who knew Ms. Morton well would describe her as easily distracted. Richard, in fact, during their first year of marriage—back when they were living in Lincoln City and Ms. Morton was pursuing her teaching credential—would often praise his wife’s ability to concentrate. Her ability to sit at the kitchen table before bed, after a long shift spent serving cocktails at the casino where Richard worked security, and complete the required reading for her morning classes.

And yet Ms. Morton knew at the start of third period that she’d never get through another lesson on integers if she didn’t first ask her students whether any of them had sharpened her pencils. When she did, nineteen blank faces stared back at her. She asked her fourth period students the same question and got the same response.

In the teachers’ lounge during lunch, Ms. Morton was joined by Ms. Hobart, a gym teacher and fellow divorcée.

“This might sound bizarre,” Ms. Hobart began, “but were all the pencils on your desk sharpened this morning?”

Ms. Morton’s eyes flicked up from the pool of ranch dressing into which she’d just dipped a greasy drumstick. “Yes, why?”

“Mine were, too,” said Ms. Hobart. “And so were Mrs. Sherman’s.”

Ms. Morton’s grip loosened, and the drumstick, like a meaty pendulum, swung down from her fingers. “How do you know?” she said.

“How do I know what?”

“That your pencils were sharpened.”

Ms. Hobart bit into a meatloaf sandwich, and in the midst of chewing, said, “All we’ve ever had are dull pencils.” She brushed some dirt off the pant leg of her tracksuit, then took another bite. “I wonder what could be going on.”

***

At the end of the twentieth century, Tompkins was a coastal town of about three thousand residents in the heart of what was once considered Moltnuk land. Ms. Wallace, a social studies teacher, was the only one on faculty of indigenous heritage. She was also the only one who didn’t keep any pencils in her classroom. She had little use for them, and quite frankly, found no good reason for their existence. The pencil, in her estimation, was an inferior writing instrument; its hexagonal shaft always felt strange in her hand; the scratchy sound lead makes when it travels across paper annoyed her. Ms. Wallace wrote only in ballpoint pen and preferred her students, on their exams and assignments, do the same.

That day, Ms. Wallace ate her lunch—a Thermos full of split pea soup and a peanut butter and jelly on rye—alone at her desk. Halfway through her meal, she received a call from Ms. Hendricks, the principal’s secretary. A bouquet of purple roses with her name on them had just arrived at the front office.

“They’re from your daughter in Tillamook,” said Ms. Hendricks, when Ms. Wallace came to pick them up.

“I wasn’t expecting flowers,” said Ms. Wallace. She inspected the accompanying card, which had been tucked into the prongs of a long plastic stem, and added, “It’s the anniversary of my mother’s death,” as if it were news to her.

“Yes,” said Ms. Hendricks. “I mean—I’m sorry. I’m not usually one to snoop.” Her nervous, slender hands busied themselves with rearranging the folders on her desk. “How long has it been, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“How long has what been, dear?”

“Since your mom’s passing.”

Ms. Wallace buried her nose in one of the roses and, eyes closed, inhaled. “They say before the Fall of Man the rose had no thorns.”

Ms. Hendricks cocked her head and furrowed her brows as though slightly alarmed by the change of subject. “Is that so?”

“Imagine,” said Ms. Wallace, dreamily. “A thornless rose.” She looked off for a moment, then studied the secretary’s face. “You’re new to the area, aren’t you, Ms. Hamilton? Phoenix, someone said?”

“It’s Hendricks, actually,” said the secretary, though Ms. Wallace made no attempt at an apology. “And I’m originally from Tucson.”

“And what brought you so far north to our little hamlet?”

Ms. Hendricks’ eyes gleamed and passed over the roses before settling elsewhere. “Love, at first. But now that’s over and done with, and I suppose I’m staying for the weather.”

“Ah,” said Ms. Wallace. The bell rang, signaling the end of lunch; outside the window, in the rain-soaked quad, the students began dispersing, tramping back to their classrooms. “And has anyone explained the woods to you?”

“I didn’t know they required explanation.”

Ms. Wallace nodded knowingly. “Just be cautious, young lady. It may look like the Garden of Eden, but snakes are the least of your troubles out there.”

Ms. Wallace left with her bouquet then, and Ms. Hendricks, who’d never been very superstitious, much less outdoorsy, and who, like others she knew, suspected that Ms. Wallace was going a bit senile, paid the old woman’s warning no mind.

***

Ms. Morton had found Ms. Hobart’s news peculiar and decided not to mention anything about the pencils to her fifth and sixth period classes.

As was customary, she’d used the same pencil all day. To take notes, to take attendance. To doodle. The blade consequently had lost a good measure of its sharpness. It was shorter now, and rounded, like a shiny black doll’s button. Before Ms. Morton went home, she put this pencil back in the mug, eraser-up, as a test, to see what if anything would happen.

The following morning, she found the pencil as she’d left it, seemingly untouched. But when she pulled it out of the mug, the blade was no longer dull but as sharp as the others.

The results of her test made Ms. Morton feel a little bothered. A little troubled. She appreciated having her pencils sharpened, and knew now that her pencils weren’t the only ones being attended to. But the question of the sharpener’s identity kept her from taking as much pleasure in the favor as she would’ve liked.

She had to assure herself that it wasn’t Richard.

Her suspicion stemmed from her ex-husband’s fondness, when he was still loving and sober and hadn’t yet committed a state crime, for occasionally playing tricks on her. To make her think she was going insane. Case in point: the week he kept surreptitiously transferring her toothbrush from the medicine cabinet to the silverware drawer, while insisting all along that perhaps she’d become a sleepwalker and was moving her things around in the night. Ms. Morton didn’t like feeling stupid, or duped, and was infuriated with Richard once she figured him out. The pencils could’ve been his handiwork; but for Richard to have been the culprit, she rationalized—for him to have visited Coos County within the last forty-eight hours—he would’ve had to somehow break out of the correctional facility clear up in Pendleton, where he was now doing time for assault.

Common sense told Ms. Morton this was highly improbable. Basically impossible. There was no need to alert the authorities; Richard wasn’t that resourceful. But if it wasn’t him, or Mr. Colfax, then who?

She asked her first and second period students if they knew anything about the pencils. But like the boys and girls in her third and fourth periods the day before, no one spoke up.

She was tempted at break to go and speak with Principal Fairbanks to make him aware of what was happening. Then she remembered he was in Seattle for a conference that week and wouldn’t return until the following Tuesday.

Mr. Colfax peeked his head into her room just before the start of third period and asked if anyone had come forward.

“Not yet,” was Ms. Morton’s reply. “Unless you have something to confess.”

But again, Mr. Colfax told her no, that it wasn’t him.

Later the two of them ate lunch together in the teachers’ lounge and learned that, overnight, the mystery of the pencils had thickened. The classrooms of both English teachers had been visited. As with Ms. Morton’s test pencil, the ones Ms. Hobart and Mrs. Sherman had used the day before had been sharpened again.

Ms. Morton asked Mr. Colfax a third time, over the phone that evening, while flipping idly through a clothing catalog, if he was the one sharpening her pencils. If he was sharpening the other teachers’ pencils to throw her off the scent.

“How come you think it’s me,” he asked, “and not someone else?”

Ms. Morton detected a playfulness in his tone and responded in kind. “Because of what I said on our date.”

“What was that? You’ll have to remind me.”

“The remark I made about freshly sharpened pencils.”

“I don’t remember that remark.” His tone had become serious.

“Don’t play dumb.”

“I’m not. I really don’t remember.”

“You really don’t remember what I said only a few days ago?”

Mr. Colfax chuckled. “Guess not.”

Along the tracks that bifurcated Ms. Morton’s neighborhood, a train clattered. She stared at the cover of her catalog and saw nothing but colors, bleary and formless. Blues, greens. Grays. It was as though a veil of fog had all of a sudden descended upon her buoy, just dense enough to obscure her view of land.

“I thought you were listening to me, Chuck,” she said. She thought it had meant something when he linked his fingers with hers as they strolled along the beach. When he serenaded her with that sweet impromptu song about her freckled face. When he knelt to dust the sand off her bare feet before driving her home.

A woman’s laughter pierced the quiet on the other end of the line.

“Someone there with you?”

“Television,” coughed Mr. Colfax, almost cutting her off. “Got a deaf guy next door.”

“Awfully loud.”

“Tell me about it.” He coughed again, more sharply this time, and added, “I’m sorry, Roni, for not paying more attention. Really.”

“It’s okay,” said Ms. Morton. “You’re fine.” At least Mr. Colfax had apologized and was sincere about it. After Richard had lost his job and started drinking, remorse, genuine or otherwise, had been hard to come by.

Mr. Colfax changed the subject by asking Ms. Morton if she might like to catch a movie in Coos Bay that weekend. “Something funny, light” was his preference. “And you left your scarf in my car the other night,” he said. “Remind me to return it to you.”

She said all right to it all, because it did sound all right, and went into the kitchen to fix herself a warm glass of sherry.

A few minutes of small talk later, they bid one another goodnight.

***

Word spread across campus and the number affected grew. By Friday morning it seemed that, between faculty and staff, there wasn’t a dull pencil to be found anywhere.

“I think we can all agree it’s a harmless gesture,” said the school counselor in the teachers’ lounge that afternoon at lunch. “And maybe I’m alone in this, but I’m actually kind of enjoying the nightly pencil sharpening.”

The art teacher nodded. “It saves my students time not having to sharpen the colored pencils.”

“Having my pencils sharpened for me,” said the school nurse, “has been good for my arthritis.”

Ms. Hamlin, the home economics teacher, agreed that it was harmless. “But if it’s a student,” she added, “or more than one student, how are they getting into our classrooms? Only teachers and custodians have keys.”

“Precisely,” said Mr. Humphrey, one of the English teachers affected on Tuesday. “We lock our doors at the end of the day. At night, the janitors unlock our doors, then lock back up after they clean. We open our classrooms ourselves in the morning. And I don’t know about any of you,” he added, wagging a limp mozzarella stick at no one, “but right now my door is locked. I don’t leave my classroom open when I’m not there. So when would any student get in?”

“I asked my kids yesterday,” said Ms. Hamlin, “if any of them were responsible.” She took a sip of her Coke. “They looked at me like I was speaking Mandarin Chinese.”

“Tomorrow’s Halloween,” noted Ms. Hobart. “Could be an evil spirit.”

“More like a greedy janitor,” asserted Mr. Humphrey. He leaned back in his chair and folded his arms. “Those boys want a wage increase. I’m sure of it.”

The art teacher and a few others concurred that, while there was no immediate cause for concern, it might be wise to speak to the custodians. “But not until Mr. Fairbanks returns from his conference,” said Ms. Hendricks.

Mr. Humphrey grumbled. “To hell with Fairbanks. We don’t need his blessing.”

“I’m with Millie,” said the art teacher. “Best not to do anything rash while he’s away.”

Mr. Humphrey balked at their deference to authority.

Ms. Morton, who’d been listening quietly from a corner table, disagreed with Mr. Humphrey’s theory. “I don’t think it has anything to do with money,” she said, and caught the eye of Mr. Colfax, who’d informed her on Thursday that his pencils had been sharpened Wednesday night. Although Mr. Colfax denied that he was the sharpener, Ms. Morton still held out a smidgen of hope that he was bluffing. Mr. Colfax was a clever man, too clever to be a teacher, really, the kind of man, she thought, capable of carrying out an elaborate scheme. He’d mentioned during their date that in college he’d taken acting lessons. He knew how to pretend, how to play a part. “Sometimes,” said Ms. Morton, “people do things just to be nice. To flirt, even.”

“Naturally,” said Mr. Colfax, maintaining eye contact with her. “But other times,” he added, darkly, addressing the group, “people do things to threaten those around them.”

“Here, here,” said Mr. Humphrey. “I like to know who’s touching my things, as a matter of principle.” With that, he stood up, dumped his food scraps into the trash, and vowed, more to himself than to his colleagues, to crack the case.

***

Around eight o’clock that evening, after having dinner with his wife at home, Mr. Humphrey returned to the school in the midst of a downpour and tracked down the lead custodian, an older man by the name of Polk. He and a tattooed fellow in his early twenties were busy cleaning Ms. Morton’s room.

“First I heard of it,” said Polk, when Mr. Humphrey asked him if he or his crewmembers knew anything about the pencils. “Maybe Georgie knows something.” He turned to the tattooed man, who was busy scrubbing a blackboard clean on the opposite side of the room. “You hearing all this, son?”

Georgie paused his scrubbing and made a funny face at them. Eyes crossed, tongue lolling. Then he got back to work.

“He’s screwing with you,” said Polk, interpreting. “But I can tell you, we don’t touch the teachers’ desks.”

“What about your other men?” asked Mr. Humphrey. “There are more of you, aren’t there?”

“Just Andy.” Polk glanced in the direction of Ms. Wallace’s classroom across the hall, where a man in overalls was mopping the linoleum. “Cousins, he and Georgie. I don’t know what Andy knows. He doesn’t talk very much. But I assure you, we leave those desks alone. You have my word on that.”

Polk excused himself then to the restroom. While he was away, Mr. Humphrey went into the hall and watched Andy go about his business. He’d put the mop down and was vacuuming now. When he came to Ms. Wallace’s desk, he pulled out the chair so he could clean underneath. Then he returned the chair to its place.

It was apparent to Mr. Humphrey that the janitors carried out their duties well, but he couldn’t help but wonder, even so, if there wasn’t something a tad fishy about them. Polk’s abrupt retreat to the john. The way the cousins kept their heads down, as if they were hiding something. It was all a bit weird.

But perhaps he was barking up the wrong tree. Sniffing out a story where there was none. He’d been guilty of that in the past. Like the time he suspected his wife of cheating on him with the man at the hardware store, on account of the number of calls she’d made to Tom as itemized on that month’s phone bill, when in reality she’d been working with him on a design for Mr. Humphrey’s surprise fiftieth birthday present: a custom-built shed for the backyard.

He decided to give the janitors the benefit of the doubt. Then something occurred to him.

“Mr. Polk,” said Mr. Humphrey when the custodian returned. “Do you and your men happen to empty the wall-mounted pencil sharpeners?”

Polk rubbed the side of his nose with his thumb and, after a moment, shook his head. “I know I don’t. These boys might take it upon themselves, but we aren’t contractually obligated, as they say, to fulfill that task, no, sir.”

“Answer me this,” said Mr. Humphrey. “Have you seen more pencil shavings than usual in the trash cans lately? Over the last week, say?”

Polk grabbed a wet rag out of his cart and stamped back into the room as if Mr. Humphrey, with his questions, had loaded his pockets with bricks. In a slightly raised voice he said, “Don’t know for sure,” and the rag dropped with a splat onto Ms. Morton’s back counter. “Thing is, I don’t look much at what’s in the trash. I just take it out.”

Mr. Humphrey considered this and nodded. “Right.”

Polk flashed a silver-toothed smirk and went on at the same volume. “Three of us work hard around here, Mr. Humphrey. We don’t cut corners, no, sir.” In wiping down the counter, his circular strokes seemed needlessly vigorous, as if only to prove his point.

Mr. Humphrey, afraid he’d worn out his welcome with the janitor and perhaps also offended him, said, “Of course not.”

“We like to move fast and get home early,” said Polk.

“Understood.”

“So if there’s nothing else you need to know.”

“No,” said Mr. Humphrey. “I’ve troubled you enough. That’ll be all.”

“Fine, then.”

“Just let me inspect the sharpener in here, if that’s all right.”

Polk shot a puff of air through his nostrils and said, “Do what you got to do,” before tossing the rag back onto his cart.

Mr. Humphrey made his way to the front of the classroom where Georgie was still working and found the sharpener there empty of shavings. Clean as a whistle, in fact, as if fresh off the assembly line.

Interesting, thought Mr. Humphrey. Most interesting.

With Polk’s permission, he shadowed the crew from classroom to classroom until their job was done, almost two hours later. He inspected every sharpener he could find and discovered not a shred of wood in any of them.

***

On Sunday morning, Ms. Morton went for a jog in the woods behind her house. Like Ms. Hendricks, she’d been warned by Ms. Wallace to avoid the woods, even in broad daylight. But Ms. Wallace’s superstitions didn’t scare her. Ms. Morton had grown up tromping about the mossy outskirts of Astoria, and the woods in Tompkins were too beautiful, too inviting, to keep away from.

Amongst the pines she heard nothing but her own footfalls and the calls of sparrows and buntings. It felt good to be outside, surrounded by life. To take in some rare November sun.

To her chagrin, Mr. Colfax had stood her up Halloween night. He’d promised to pick her up at six-thirty to make the seven o’clock showing, and she’d waited, like a dog for its master, by the door. Fifteen minutes passed, and she called his house, but no answer. After another ten minutes, she called again but to no avail. Then the doorbell rang, but it was only the first group of trick-or-treaters, and Ms. Morton figured that perhaps she’d misremembered things and Mr. Colfax was waiting for her outside the theater. But when she got there, he was nowhere to be found. She asked the guy at the ticket counter, who made a rather convincing Dracula, if he’d seen a tall, fortyish blonde man with graying sideburns. The guy said maybe, he wasn’t sure, in a bad Romanian accent. Undaunted, Ms. Morton bought her ticket and went inside, but the only other person there was an old woman in a puffy coat. She knew then what had happened, but decided to stay and watch the movie since she’d come all that way.

Afterward, she drove by Mr. Colfax’s condo. The place was dark and his garage had no windows, so there was no telling whether his car was inside. She rang his doorbell because she knew he didn’t go to bed that early, but there was no answer, even after a second ring, a third. She tried the door—at that point, why not?—but found it locked.

That night she’d gone to bed feeling less like a buoy and more like a waterlogged castaway, washed up on a vast, desolate sandbar. When she awoke, she thought a jog might help her determine how to proceed with Mr. Colfax. It had worked for her, anyway, on the day she decided to leave Richard.

Before he could play another juvenile trick on her.

Before he could take another drink. Another swipe.

A jog would give her thoughts space to roam, detangle, and align, so that a plan might emerge. So that a solution might be found. But like her breath in the cold, clarity would materialize before her and then just as quickly disappear.

Half an hour into her jog, the sky began to cloud over. She stopped at a meadow where on several occasions she’d been lucky enough to espy a grazing deer. Where a student of hers had once found a spearhead and, after digging deeply enough, a shard of pottery.

It hadn’t been long since she’d last visited this place, and yet the landscape had visibly changed.

A rosebush, mature in stature, stood atop a far knoll. It was the only plant in the meadow taller than a dandelion and the only plant of its kind in the woods; and so its presence there, for Ms. Morton, was rather shocking. When she climbed the knoll, she found that the bush was taller than she was and about as wide as the sedan in her driveway.

Goodness, she thought. Nothing except bamboo could have grown so much in so short a time.

Someone had planted the bush. Otherwise it didn’t make sense.

And whoever had planted it, coincidentally, seemed to have done so just for her. The bush’s blooms were bright yellow, like the new traffic signs she’d seen along the highway, and as massive as heads of cauliflower. Their plumpness seemed to defy gravity, to defy Nature itself.

But the blooms were less surprising than the stems that supported them. Unlike any rosebush Ms. Morton had ever seen, the stems sported no thorns. Not a single one.

She considered taking one of the flowers home with her to put in water, but decided they were all too magnificent to pluck. She’d have to settle for the satisfaction that came from seeing the blooms up close before the deer could munch them out of existence.

***

Ms. Morton returned home just as it was beginning to drizzle.

She hung her jacket on the hall tree and, in the kitchen, found the number “01” on her answering machine.

Mr. Colfax’s voice crackled through the speaker, and her heartbeat quickened.

He sounded tired, a little congested. Coming down with something, perhaps. His hope for her to have picked up when he rang made Ms. Morton regret the jog.

Mr. Colfax apologized for the movies, how rude of him it was not to call. His mother had raised him better than that.

“But I need to be honest with you, Roni,” he said, and then came the news no woman in Ms. Morton’s position would ever hope to hear.

He explained himself as tenderly as he could. How he’d dated other teachers in the past. How when those relationships ended, things at school became complicated. He said he never should have strayed from the promise he’d made to himself not to go down that old path again. He didn’t like causing anyone pain. “I hope we can remain friends” was how he’d wrapped up.

Just before his message ended, Ms. Morton heard that same woman’s laughter from before in the background. Only it wasn’t the same. It wasn’t the television.

Ms. Morton thought again of Mr. Colfax’s hand in hers, of his song and his gentlemanly gesture after walking the beach. She wondered now what it had all been for; whether he’d dusted off her feet simply to keep sand out of his car; whether she was only a stopgap while the laughing woman made up her mind about him. It all left Ms. Morton feeling as if she’d been used.

But she wouldn’t fret. Not for long. Whoever this other woman was, it didn’t matter. And it’s not like she’d submitted herself to him. No—the only piece of her still in his possession was an orange wool scarf, which after wearing she’d deemed too itchy for her comfort.

She’d allow herself time to wallow, but not to excess. Mr. Colfax didn’t deserve a long, drawn-out wallowing. He hadn’t listened to her or shown much consideration for her feelings. He most certainly hadn’t sharpened her pencils or planted that rosebush. She could rule him out entirely. For him there’d be a short lament and then she’d be fine. She was old and wise enough now to know that she deserved a lot better. Much, much better.

She let out her ponytail and went into the den and got under a throw blanket on the sofa. Then she rolled over and cried warm, salty tears into the cushions until her throat felt coarse and dry.

***

The rain let up Monday morning. As was becoming normal, every dull pencil belonging to either faculty or staff was found sharpened.

That afternoon in the teachers’ lounge, Mr. Humphrey shared the prior week’s discovery with those around him. “Long and short of it is, the janitors are innocent. They said they didn’t know a thing about our pencils, and I believe them.”

Ms. Wallace shuddered. “Oh, dear.”

“Intriguing,” said Ms. Hendricks.

The art teacher raised a fat-knuckled index finger. “I remember hearing from my cousin once that pencil shavings are a good moth repellent.”

“Mr. Adams wears a lot of cashmere sweaters,” offered Ms. Wallace.

“Wore, you mean,” said Mrs. Sherman, the gym teacher.

“Wore?”

Mrs. Sherman cleared her throat. “Mr. Adams died three years ago, Helen.”

“Oh,” said Ms. Wallace, and some of those present beheld her with pity.

A moment passed and the art teacher added, “Pencil shavings can also be used for mulch.”

“Maybe our perpetrator is a gardener,” guessed Ms. Hendricks.

“Whatever he is,” said Mrs. Sherman, “he’s using his own sharpener. Either that or he’s using our sharpeners and then emptying them all.”

“But not just emptying, right, Dan?” said Ms. Hendricks, before crunching into a cracker. She’d woken up that morning with an upset stomach and had brought saltines to assuage it. “You said there wasn’t any residual dust in the sharpeners either.”

“Correct,” said Mr. Humphrey. “This person is wiping them clean.”

“Doesn’t want to get caught,” said the counselor.

“But why such secrecy and evasiveness?” said Ms. Hendricks. “Why would someone sharpen all these pencils and then take the shavings and not want some recognition? At least after a while?”

“That’s the mystery,” said Mr. Humphrey. “There’s no telling, at least not yet, what this person’s motivation is. We only know it’s probably not money.”

“What’s your take on it, Ms. Hamlin?” said the counselor. “You look deep in thought.”

Ms. Hamlin set her rib sandwich on the table and napkined barbeque sauce off her lips. “I think there’s more to this than sharpened pencils,” she said. “In fact, I don’t think it’s really about the pencils at all. It’s not about what the perpetrator leaves behind, valuable as a sharpened pencil is. It’s about what he takes with him. Or she with her. And I don’t buy for a second that the perpetrator is using the shavings to repel insects or grow daisies. Tom’s Hardware sells bug spray. They sell fertilizer. These things aren’t expensive, and they aren’t in short supply. And the effort involved in sharpening pencils far outweighs the market value of shavings, whatever that is. You’d have to be crazy to risk being charged with breaking and entering for something that’s basically worthless. And I’m not ruling that out, either—whoever’s doing this could be a real nut. But that’s beside the point. The point is, our pencil shavings mean something to someone that goes beyond fame and fortune. This person isn’t trying to be helpful, and they aren’t trying to be a pest, either. It’s not about us. It’s about the shavings. Otherwise, why collect the dust?”

***

Mr. Colfax had been in the room that afternoon with Humphrey and the rest, before leaving school for a doctor’s appointment on account of an excruciatingly sore throat.

He knew Ms. Hamlin was on to something, but what exactly, he wasn’t sure. The dust seemed a crucial detail; it was one thing to steal pencil shavings, quite another to wipe the sharpeners clean. It suggested more than just a covering of one’s tracks; the sharpening seemed to be less about evading capture and more about fulfilling a particular need. But what need could that be? If not fame or fortune, or to feed one’s garden, then what?

Mr. Colfax had no leads himself. Ms. Morton had suspected it was him, but she couldn’t have been more wrong. He had nothing to gain from pencil shavings, and he’d never been one to surprise women—or men, for that matter—with random acts of kindness. That just wasn’t his style. And it wasn’t his style, either, to intentionally try to irk people, the way Ms. Morton’s ex-husband had done. Mr. Colfax believed in treating people with respect; and when he failed to do so, as in the case of Ms. Morton, he always apologized.

If he had to guess—and that was all anyone could do at the moment, no matter how sure they said they were—he’d say it was the janitors, since they were the only ones at the school at night, which was the only logical time for the sharpening to take place. The janitors were the only ones, too, who had keys to all the classrooms on campus. Only Principal Fairbanks had such privileged access, and he hadn’t been in Tompkins all week. Mr. Colfax figured the janitors must be screwing with Humphrey—who, in Colfax’s experience, wasn’t a very good judge of character or a very astute observer of things.

Still, if it was the janitors and it wasn’t money they wanted, why were they sharpening the pencils? Out of the goodness of their own hearts? To stave off boredom on the job? To Mr. Colfax, it didn’t quite add up.

***

Tompkins was atypical of southern Oregon towns in that it had its fair share of transplants. For every native there were at least two for whom Tompkins represented perhaps, at one time or still to this day, an escape from urban anxieties, or a second chance at life, or a place to hide out for a while, until conditions improved. What Tompkins offered everyone, personal history notwithstanding and whether they liked it or not, was year-round rain and fog, giant coniferous trees, and a short drive or bicycle ride to the Pacific.

Charles Schuyler Colfax was Tompkins-born and bred and one of the few from his high school graduating class to have settled in town. Most of the people with whom Mr. Colfax had grown up had gone off to college and had never come back. And understandably so—unless you worked at one of the schools, or the logging facility north of town, or were independently wealthy, there wasn’t much incentive to. Never mind the fact that Tompkins had only one grocery store, one pizzeria, and one bar. That if you needed a new pair of pants, you’d have to drive to Coos Bay to buy them. But none of this disagreed with Mr. Colfax. Tompkins, he’d heard it once said, was a town just big enough for something resembling modern life to take place; and for him, that was about as good as towns got.

Very few people in Coos County at large, natives and transplants alike, knew or even cared about the Moltnuk. The tribe had all but died out; its last vestiges survived in Ms. Wallace, her daughter, and other mixed-bloods throughout the state. Ms. Wallace’s husband, also part Moltnuk but now deceased, had published some years ago a book on tribe mythology; it was sold now for a nominal fee at the front counter of Bandon Antiques.

Ms. Wallace was the only other Tompkins native besides Mr. Colfax on faculty at the middle school, and she happened to have had young Charles, early in her career, as a social studies student.

Back then, Mr. Colfax lived at the north end of Gresham Avenue, which he would come to learn from Ms. Wallace, in his eighth grade year, was far less haunted than the south. Her tradition every October was to ask all the boys and girls in class for their addresses, then rate how haunted their houses were on a scale from one to five. Ms. Wallace scored Mr. Colfax’s house a one, whereas Will Breckinridge’s Victorian several doors down earned a four. Those houses close to the train tracks and east of the cemetery with numbers that, when summed, amounted to seven or greater, were all fives. “No exceptions,” she said.

“But why?” said Tyler King, the class pariah, who lived in one of these houses. “You haven’t told us why our homes are haunted.”

Ms. Wallace simply grinned. “Ask the ghosts who inhabit them, Mr. King.”

“I live downtown by the post office,” said one girl rather meekly. “What about my house?”

“Behind the post office or on the same street as the post office?”

“Does it matter?”

“Of course it matters!” said Ms. Wallace, throwing her hands up in the air. “Second Street is only one of the most haunted in town, especially near the bridge and especially when the moon is full.” Some years ago a man had been walking the bridge at night, she added, and claimed to have been pushed by an invisible force into the Coquille River below. “And the woods are the most haunted of all.”

“You’re just trying to scare us, Ms. Wallace,” said John Quayle, one of the smartest boys in school.

“Yeah,” chimed in Tyler, who sat beside him. “My dad says all this Moltnuk stuff is a bunch of baloney.”

Mr. Colfax had been zoning out prior to having his house scored and was now zoning out again, as was his tendency in Ms. Wallace’s class and all his classes besides science; anything school-related that wasn’t hands-on, that didn’t involve experimentation, Mr. Colfax found boring. But this next part of the conversation was one he had yet in adulthood to forget.

“Does your father know why they say the woods are haunted, Mr. King?” said Ms. Wallace.

“Beats me.”

“Does anyone know why the woods are haunted?”

“I bet you’re going to tell us,” said John. Others laughed.

Ms. Wallace cast a stern eye at her class, then assumed her known storytelling position: the small of her back pressed against the blackboard, her arms folded over her sternum. “There once was a spear maker who lived with his wife on the edge of the village. He was a well-liked member of his tribe, and his spears were admired for their durability. One day, while he was out in the woods, the spear maker met a rosebush and immediately noticed that it had no thorns. He mocked the bush, and said he could protect himself better than it ever could, and ripped off a whole branch of roses to wear around his neck just to prove he was right. The rosebush did nothing. But the spear maker didn’t realize what he’d done. He didn’t know what the bush was capable of.” She broke from the blackboard and crouched in between Tyler’s desk and John’s, where she concluded her tale in a hushed tone, as if speaking only to them. “That night the bush sang to the spear maker’s wife in a dream and lured her out of bed. In the morning, a villager found the woman lying beside the rosebush, choked to death by its branches.”

The two boys exchanged looks of mild distress. Mr. Colfax heard Tyler gulp.

Then Irene Garner, who lived in a somewhat haunted house (“two and a half” was Ms. Wallace’s assessment), and who was known as Snow Flame for her extremely pale skin and vividly red hair, said: “There aren’t any rosebushes in the forest, you guys. My big brother takes me out there all the time, and I’ve never seen one. And I’d know because roses are my absolute favorite.”

Ms. Wallace grinned again, slyly this time. She stood and selected a stick of purple chalk from the blackboard tray, and held it up for everyone to see. “Sometimes it’s much harder to know what does exist than what doesn’t,” she said, and cupped her hands around the chalk, then opened them back up to reveal, to seventeen astonished faces, nothing but bare palms.

***

Principal Fairbanks was an avid golfer and decided after returning home on Monday from his conference to play a twilight round by himself at the pitch-and-putt in town.

Once he got settled in his office Tuesday morning, Ms. Hendricks brought the pencil predicament to his attention. Like Ms. Morton, Fairbanks only sharpened his pencils when he absolutely had to; so upon inspecting the pencils in his desk drawer, he could tell they’d all been sharpened.

“Let’s schedule a meeting,” he concluded. “Mandatory. Gymnasium. Four o’clock.”

Ms. Hendricks distributed a memo and, at the scheduled time, faculty and staff assembled on the bleachers.

Fairbanks stood at center court in a silk blazer and with his arms akimbo and spoke in a sonorant, sure voice that, if amplified through a formidable enough speaker, could have stirred the banners hanging from the rafters. “I am here to tell you there is no need to panic,” he said. “Our students have pulled similar pranks in the past, and the best course of action, as history has proven, is simply to ignore them. This tomfoolery will come to an end if we pay it no attention. Therefore, I implore you not to discuss the pencils with your students.”

Fairbanks began to pace, and the school nurse snickered at the squishing of his sneakers on the hardwood, as if their soles were wrapped in seaweed. “As you all very well know,” the principal went on, “we’ve already lost ten-percent of our enrollment to the new charter school in North Bend. The last thing we want is to scare our students, and thus give parents yet another reason to educate their children elsewhere. I repeat: we absolutely cannot afford to lose any more students. So, let us keep the pencils problem to ourselves from this point forward. Let us be vigilant. Keep an eye out for any suspicious persons and report these persons immediately, either to me or to Ms. Hendricks.”

After he wished them all a good evening, and left, some in attendance expressed their frustration with Fairbanks’ nonchalance.

“I want answers,” said Ms. Hamlin.

“Leave it to old Fairbanks,” quipped Mr. Humphrey.

But even the dissenters knew the principal was right about protecting their enrollment and, thus, their funding. And so far the sharpened pencils had harmed no one, so everyone resolved to follow orders.

***

Before school the next morning, Ms. Morton sat at her desk, drumming one of her pencils on a stack of ungraded quizzes.

Mr. Colfax had been out sick since Monday afternoon.

It was a relief not seeing him.

Still, if she touched the tip of the pencil to the vein in her wrist and pressed down hard enough, she was sure the blade would break skin. She was sure it would draw blood.

Would there be love for her in this life? In the next, if there was one?

The existence of the thornless roses quieted her.

At the start of first period, Fairbanks came over the intercom and admitted to the students that he’d been the one responsible for the pencil sharpening. He’d asked Curtis, his disabled war vet nephew who lived with him, to go to the school late every night over the past week to sharpen faculty and staff pencils as a means of implementing a brand-new, campus-wide random acts of kindness initiative. Now that Fairbanks was back in town, he’d take over his nephew’s duties indefinitely. “I encourage each and every one of you,” he said, “to do nice things for your peers.”

After the announcement, some students jokingly applauded, much to the glee of those sitting near them. Others just shrugged. Faculty and staff, more satisfied than not with the principal’s lie, said nothing.

***

Wednesday morning marked the tenth consecutive day of the nightly sharpening. Thursday morning marked the eleventh.

That night, Principal Fairbanks watched a documentary on spy technology with Curtis and came away from the viewing with an idea.

In the morning, he called Mr. Wheeler, an old friend of his and a retired teacher who’d stayed in the area, and who used to supervise the audio-visual club when there was still money for extracurriculars.

“How can I help you, Levi?” said Mr. Wheeler.

Fairbanks explained the pencils problem and asked him a favor.

“You know I don’t own that kind of equipment,” said Mr. Wheeler. “We’re talking several hundred dollars here. Maybe more.”

“This is important,” said Fairbanks. “If you buy what we need, I’ll reimburse you in full.”

***

On Saturday afternoon, Mr. Wheeler climbed into his truck and drove two hours to Eugene, where he knew a guy who sold night vision cameras. The guy, whose name was Spiro, gave Mr. Wheeler a sizable discount, so Mr. Wheeler took him out for an old fashioned at a nearby bar before gassing up and heading back home.

At the school, he placed the cameras in discreet locations so as to canvas his old classroom, which was used now by Ms. Hamlin, and for which he still had a key.

On each workstation he left a pair of dull pencils. It was almost too easy. But the night vision cameras picked up nothing. When Mr. Wheeler returned the next day to review the tapes, the pencils had all been sharpened, but nearly twenty-four hours of video showed no activity whatsoever.

Dumbfounded, Mr. Wheeler called Fairbanks, who cut short a game of chess with Curtis to come down to the school to see him.

“I can’t explain it, Levi,” said Mr. Wheeler, as he ejected one videotape from the VCR to play another. He fast-forwarded through the second tape to show how the green image remained static, unchanging. “These are top-of-the-line, military-grade cameras. They would’ve caught a gnat buzzing by.”

Fairbanks put his fingertips together, five-to-five, and bowed his head in thought. On the chessboard, as in this situation, his remaining moves were limited.

“Let’s give it one more night,” he said, and cut Mr. Wheeler a check on the spot to cover the cost of the cameras. “If nothing happens, we’ll try another approach.”

Sunday night was a failure, too, as uneventful as the one before, and so on Monday morning, Ms. Hendricks, per the principal’s request, put out another memo to faculty and staff.

***

Mr. Humphrey was the first and only person to volunteer to spend the night. He showed up at the school around nine o’clock, brewed an extra-strong pot of coffee in the teachers’ lounge, stuck a never-sharpened pencil in his breast pocket, and, flashlight in hand, began patrolling the halls.

The custodial crew was almost through making their rounds. Polk noticed Mr. Humphrey and waved.

“Carry on, good sir,” Mr. Humphrey called out, and asked if Polk or one of the cousins might turn on the lights in all the classrooms before they finished up.

During his shift, Mr. Humphrey drank enough coffee to keep some men awake all night and into the morning. But the caffeine was only potent enough to fortify him until three, when he passed out on a cafeteria table.

A couple of hours later, one of the lunch ladies who always came early to prep the day’s meal found him there with the flashlight still shining in his hand. When she roused Mr. Humphrey, he leapt in fear at the sight of her.

“It’s only me, Dan,” she said, taking a step backward.

He withdrew the pencil from his pocket and his face puckered like that of a child who’s just learned the impermanence of something he thought would last forever. “How? How?” was all he could say.

The lunch lady patted Mr. Humphrey softly on the shoulder and brought him into her kitchen. There she fixed him a fried egg and toast, neither of which he had the stomach to eat.

Fairbanks arrived around seven to find Mr. Humphrey standing by the window in his office. The principal had never before seen a man look so weary, so defeated; as fragile as one of the leaves still clinging to the sycamore outside. The whites of Mr. Humphrey’s eyes were cracked with red. His hands twitched and twitched.

Mr. Humphrey gave Fairbanks the sharpened pencil, and Fairbanks, knowing what this meant, saw him out.

***

Mr. Humphrey went home that day to rest at the urging of Ms. Hendricks, who’d subbed for him before, and who, as a one-time insomniac, sympathized with the sleep-deprived.

By now the nightly sharpening had been going on for more than two weeks.

Over the next day or so, the story of Mr. Humphrey circulated amongst faculty and staff. Reaction to the news varied.

Ms. Hamlin decided that enough was enough and in one fell swoop threw all her pencils into the trash. Then she placed an order with Ms. Hendricks for a package of mechanical pencils in addition to plenty of sticks of lead.

Ms. Hobart, who was fascinated by Mr. Humphrey’s experience, and the sharpening, in general, felt inspired to test the perpetrator’s skillfulness. On Wednesday after school let out, she hid a never-sharpened pencil under a bag of shuttlecocks in the gymnasium’s storage closet. Next she locked a pencil inside the trophy case in the administration building. Then she got down on her hands and knees in the girls’ shower stalls and duct-taped a pencil to the inside wall of a drain.

The following morning, she discovered all three pencils, sharpened, right where she’d left them.

For Ms. Wallace, these sharpened pencils in particular confirmed the veracity of a theory too spooky or too outlandish, depending on how one looked at it, to share with anybody.

At lunch, she called the district office and accepted the early retirement package the State had been imploring her to take for months. The week of Thanksgiving, she’d pack up her two-bedroom house and pet cat Rockefeller and move to Tillamook to be closer to her daughter.

When Principal Fairbanks caught wind of Ms. Wallace’s decision, he called her into his office and addressed her as a father would his misinformed child. “Helen,” he said, “you can’t leave before the end of the semester.”

“I’m afraid I must, Mr. Fairbanks.”

“But the students,” he countered. “Final exams.”

“Let someone else proctor them.”

“I’d rather you proctor them.”

“I’m sorry. I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“I’d prefer not to say.”

Fairbanks stared at Ms. Wallace unblinkingly, and she stared right back. He hadn’t felt such puzzlement since the first time he saw her perform her disappearing chalk trick. Eventually she told him her secret (“timing and wide sleeves”); now she was hiding something else.

Dedicated educators like her didn’t just up and quit. “After nine years of friendship,” said Fairbanks, getting up from his chair to sit beside her, “I think I deserve an explanation.”

“You do.”

“So tell me.”

Ms. Wallace folded her hands in her lap and shook her head. “You’ll think I’m a senile old woman.”

“Maybe not.”

“And if you do?”

“It won’t matter. You’re already halfway out the door.”

They smiled at each other warmly and Ms. Wallace acquiesced.

Fairbanks listened to her theory and was at first amused. He thought she was only kidding him and, at one point, almost laughed. But by the time she was through, it seemed to Fairbanks that Ms. Wallace was serious, and dreadfully so. Ms. Wallace had always been endearingly one apple short of a bushel; the pencils predicament, he was sure, had robbed her of a few more.

He thanked her for her service and told her to keep in touch.

Between Ms. Wallace’s departure and Ms. Hobart’s doings, Fairbanks felt at a supreme loss. He called Mr. Wheeler, who racked his brain until it became clear to him that, at this stage, nothing, not even the impossible, could be ruled out.

There was one more test to conduct.

***

On Saturday morning, Mr. Wheeler showed up at the Fairbanks residence unannounced just as the principal, still in his robe and slippers, was about to have breakfast.

“What’s up, Joe?” said Fairbanks. But Mr. Wheeler, breathing hard, said nothing as he burst into the living room like a fugitive seeking asylum.

Hastily he began turning down the blinds. In his hand was a videotape.

“What are you doing?” said Fairbanks.

“Lock the door, Levi.”

“Is everything all right?”

“And kill the lights.”

“But there aren’t any on.”

Mr. Wheeler was red in the face. He coughed through his panting.

“What’d you do? Run here?” Fairbanks said.

“Yes.”

“You need to slow down, Joe. What’s the matter?”

But Mr. Wheeler had no answer. Coughing, he adjusted an askew metal slat so that it fell in with the others and so the outside world was completely shut out. “Is Curtis home?” he said.

“He’s asleep.”

“Where?”

“Where?”

“Where in the house.”

“Upstairs.”

“Where upstairs?”

“In his room. Where else?”

“Can he hear us?”

“How do I know what he can and can’t hear?”

Mr. Wheeler caught his breath a bit and took note of Fairbanks’ mounting frustration. “Let’s just keep our voices low,” he said. He knelt beside the entertainment system in the corner. “Now lock the door, Levi. Come on.”

“Is someone after you?”

“No. Just lock the door. Please.”

“I’ve never seen you like this.”

“Well, you’re about to understand why. The door.”

Confused, yet compliant, Fairbanks did as he was told, and Mr. Wheeler fed the tape into the VCR. He punched on the television and Fairbanks frowned. “What is this?” he said.

“It’s all right, Levi,” said Mr. Wheeler. In a softened tone, he explained the events of Friday afternoon, his return to his old room after Ms. Hamlin had left. How he’d taken two heavy cookbooks and had set them facedown, side-by-side, on a workstation. How in the space between them he’d stuck a dull pencil standing blade-up. How he’d placed a night vision camera beside the workstation and had zoomed in the lens so that the pencil blade occupied the entire frame.

Now, in Fairbanks’ living room, the green image of the blade filled the screen. Up close, the blunt tip looked like the nose of a ballistic missile prime for launch.

Mr. Wheeler gestured to the armchair and gave a nod of reassurance. “Go on.”

Tentatively, Fairbanks sat down, and Mr. Wheeler pushed play. “Keep your eyes on the screen now. Don’t look away.”

About ten seconds later, when the image hadn’t changed, Fairbanks said, “Nothing’s happening.”

“Patience,” said Mr. Wheeler. He coughed and went behind the chair and stood there, facing away from the television. “You’ll see.”

A minute went by. Then another.

“Nothing’s happening, Joe. Am I supposed to be seeing some—”

“Just wait,” said Mr. Wheeler. “And keep your voice down. Watch.”

Fairbanks, trying hard to concentrate, gripped his knees and craned his neck. “I’ve seen Italian art films more intriguing than this,” he mumbled.

Then the sharpening, or what could only be called sharpening, occurred, and Fairbanks went quiet, as if someone had unplugged his brain. All the muscles in his face slackened so that he no longer squinted his eyes and his jaw hung loose. His lower lip protruded slightly; his tongue, unlike his other muscles, wiggled across his bottom row of teeth. Involuntarily, he rose and lurched toward the television as though hypnotized, like a mummy come alive, with one trembling hand stretched out before him.

When he was inches from the screen, the tape ended and the image went black.

Mr. Wheeler crossed the carpet to the window, where he removed his glasses and rubbed them clean on his sweater. He put them back on and opened the blinds. Outside, a big page of newspaper scuttled in the street. A rabbit stood frozen in place on its haunches on the neighbor’s lawn, as though waiting for a signal.

Fairbanks, coming out of his trance, lowered his arm. He looked back at the chair, which he hadn’t known he’d left. “How many times have you watched that?” he said. “Tell me.”

Mr. Wheeler moved from the window. “Twice at school. Twice more at home.” He eased into the armchair where Fairbanks had been sitting. “Had to make sure it wasn’t the VCR.”

Fairbanks shifted his jaw to one side. For a moment, he was mute, still.

Then he tightened the belt of his robe and went to eject the tape. “I’m glad you shut the blinds, Joe,” he said.

“Material like this requires extra precaution.”

“Undoubtedly.”

“I’m sorry to have alarmed you, but I think you see now why I came in the way I did.”

“I do.”

“This is unprecedented,” Mr. Wheeler said, to further justify his behavior.

Fairbanks turned the tape over in his hands as if inspecting it for a secret code—an encryption only legible if the tape were held at the right angle, under a certain kind of light.

“So,” Mr. Wheeler said. “What are we going to do?”

Fairbanks looked up from the tape at a dark spot on the ceiling. Unrepaired water damage; something that’d been bothering him for months. In the chess game of the fall semester, the sharpener was a king too elusive to capture, a king impervious to checkmate.

But how would anyone know the king was in play, thought Fairbanks, if he didn’t appear on the board? If all evidence of him was—

At impact, Mr. Wheeler shivered in his seat, and the rabbit in the neighbor’s yard darted out of sight. The shattering of plastic on the tile and subsequent stomping of feet had come without warning and had woken Curtis, who suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. His one-armed body hit the carpeted floor of his room. “Calling in back-up!” he yelled.

“Stand down, private,” Fairbanks replied brightly, gathering the mess at his feet. “Television came on too loud.”

Curtis said, “Ten-four,” and Fairbanks took the tape—shell, guts, and all—to the fireplace, where he withdrew a box of matches from his robe.

***

Five minutes later, Fairbanks poured two steaming hot mugs of coffee in the kitchen and brought one out to Mr. Wheeler, who’d been watching the flames for what had felt like an hour.

“A cup of joe for Joe,” cracked the principal in an effort to lighten the mood. Mr. Wheeler accepted the mug with a half-smile—a prayer written on his face for coffee and a soft joke, however forced, to soothe their nerves.

The room stunk of chemicals, so Fairbanks opened a window.

Mr. Wheeler, in acknowledgement, said, “A little fresh air will do us good.”

Fairbanks sat down beside him on the couch and rested his own mug on his belly. A moment later, the shower blasted on upstairs. “You should go before my nephew sees you,” said Fairbanks. A log tumbled over in the fireplace, spitting embers onto the hearth. “He doesn’t know about the pencils.”

Mr. Wheeler sipped his coffee perfunctorily. “You could say the same for us.”

Fairbanks, staring straight ahead, groaned in agreement. “Guess so.”

The loose page of newspaper was caught now between the curb and the back right tire of Fairbanks’ truck. High cirrus clouds muddled the sun like a gauzy shade covering a low-wattage bulb.

“In fact,” said Fairbanks, “given what I just saw, I don’t know how much I know about anything anymore.”

“My feelings exactly,” said Mr. Wheeler.

“So much so that my coffee tastes a bit funny.”

“Mine does too.”

Fairbanks set his mug on the table. “I probably shouldn’t have destroyed that tape.”

“I disagree entirely.”

“You do?”

“It was for the best. There was no part of me that felt like stopping you.”

“I couldn’t have had that in my house,” Fairbanks asserted. “As superstitious as that might seem.”

“I wouldn’t have wanted it in my house either.”

“We would’ve had to keep it somewhere. Like in a safety deposit box.”

“If you hadn’t destroyed it, I probably would’ve buried it in the woods someplace.”

“Speaking of which,” said Fairbanks, reminded of Ms. Wallace and her reason for leaving. Was he the only one who thought she was crazy? Could he still hold that opinion of her after all this? “Helen didn’t come see you, by chance, before she left?”

“She quit, she said.”

“So you know.”

“Moving away.”

“You know why.”

Mr. Wheeler nodded solemnly.

“That old tale of wounded pride,” said Fairbanks.

“A tale of revenge is what that legend is.”

“Indeed.”

“You heard about her dream.”

“What dream?”

“So she didn’t tell you.”

“No.”

Mr. Wheeler’s gaze drifted to the floor, and he nodded again. “She was in her classroom,” he said, recalling Ms. Wallace’s words, “on a school day, only there wasn’t anybody else around. No students, no teachers. She went out into the hall, and from the other side of the library she heard a man calling out in agony. She went past the library to the quad, which had become a garden of rosebushes—rosebushes with huge blooms, bigger than she’d ever seen—and then she saw him wandering around in tears. Ms. Wallace couldn’t make out the name he was calling, but she knew, the way you know things in dreams, that the man was the spear maker, and he was searching for his beloved. And as the dream went on, the bushes got taller and they populated so that the whole quad was filled with them. Eventually the spear maker disappeared from view and the roses, Levi—no thorns.”

Hearing this, Fairbanks took a deep breath.

“What do you make of it?” said Mr. Wheeler.

The principal rubbed his hands together, but the motion failed to produce a spark—a rational explanation for what he’d heard, for what he’d seen. “That’s just it,” he said. “I don’t know.”

“We’re dealing with the supernatural here. There’s no doubting that.”

“I’ve never believed in supernatural things.”

“What about now?”

Fairbanks glanced again at the dark spot overhead and sighed.

“Proof of something,” said Mr. Wheeler, “doesn’t care what you believe. Proof is—”

“You think she’s right, then.”

The upstairs shower shut off and Mr. Wheeler rose.

“Joe.”

“Yeah.”

“You think she’s right?”

The old photographer ran a hand over his stubbly cheek. Fairbanks asked his question more pointedly and took his mug from him, as if the courtesy necessitated an answer.

“That our world crosses with another?” said Mr. Wheeler. “That the ghost of the spear maker is haunting the school? That he’s put some kind of benevolent hex, as oxymoronic as that is, on everybody’s pencils to make his presence known? It’s a stretch, Levi. But the evidence. I can’t say the evidence doesn’t support it.”

“I think we need to be very careful, Joe,” said Fairbanks.

“Agreed.”

“Very cautious.”

“Yes.”

“You have to promise me.”

“I know.”

“None of this gets out.”

“I’ll make sure of it.”

“I mean it, Joe. Your family, your friends. Former students, if you’ve stayed in contact.”

“No one’ll hear of this, Levi. You have my word.”

“We take this to our graves.”

“Okay.”

“You swear?”

Mr. Wheeler, a touch exasperated, reminded him. “I gave you my word.” He headed for the door. “What more do you want?”

***

A week passed. Then a month. Fairbanks kept an eye on the quad, but no rosebushes ever sprang up.

By the end of November, everyone had learned to accept the nightly pencil sharpening, or at least tolerate it.

Some folks continued to enjoy having their pencils sharpened and hoped the sharpening, however it was happening, would never stop. They remained in the dark at Fairbanks’ discretion, and thanks to Mr. Wheeler’s silence, as to the real sharpener’s identity. The students, whose pencils had never been sharpened overnight, didn’t ask any questions, and enrollment stayed approximately the same.

Mr. Humphrey, who’d been stockpiling vacation time for years, took a few more days off. Before leaving for school one morning, Ms. Hamlin, whose yard backed up to the golf course, saw Mr. Humphrey, Fairbanks, and Polk, of all people, tee off on the first hole. They were all drinking warm beverages and, from the looks of it, having fun.

Then one morning in early December, Ms. Hobart noticed that the pencils she shared with Mrs. Sherman hadn’t been sharpened overnight. As the semester drew to a close, other teachers began noticing the same.

By finals week, it appeared the sharpening was over.

Ms. Hamlin happily switched back to traditional pencils, and the wall-mounted sharpeners got more use than they had since the spring.

This development, though, was not enough to convince Ms. Wallace to come out of retirement. She and Rockefeller sent their regards from Tillamook.

***

It wasn’t until the week after Christmas that Mr. Colfax began to feel like himself. November and December had been truly miserable; the unusually nasty bug he’d caught evolved into a case of pneumonia that laid him up the rest of the semester.

Mr. Colfax didn’t handle sickness well. He enjoyed his work too much; taking it easy was a task rather than a pardon. In his debilitated state, he followed doctor’s orders and stayed in bed, but always there was the desire, amidst hours spent reading Popular Mechanics and watching television, to once again possess the energy required to teach. He missed his students and his colleagues. Luckily, loneliness never became too much of an issue; his mother brought him hot soup and good cheer on a daily basis, and Fairbanks dropped by once a week to check on him. Fairbanks had charged Mr. Wheeler with filling in for Mr. Colfax while he was out, and Ms. Hendricks, after Mr. Wheeler left town for the holidays, had proctored final exams in his stead.

The woman whose laughter Ms. Morton had heard over the phone in October—Mr. Humphrey’s wife—broke up with Mr. Colfax shortly after he fell ill. She told him one dreary afternoon after fixing him some tea that she loved her husband dearly, despite his faults, and was tired of lying to him, and Mr. Colfax assured her it was fine; he was no stranger to the pangs of guilt, and had prepared himself early on for what he’d expected to be only a brief affair. The silver lining was that Mr. Colfax didn’t love her, had never loved her, and so the split came as no major blow. There’d be other women, inevitably, for better or for worse, sure as the fog hung thick over the sea.

The Wednesday before New Year’s Eve, Mr. Colfax went for a long walk. It was late afternoon and it had just stormed, thunder and lightning. Now the sun was out, and everything around him—the houses, the telephone wires, the cars parked on the street—wore fat beads of silvery, almost viscous rainwater.

His neighborhood was quieter than normal, as it always was this time of year. Everyone was at home with their families sipping near-expired eggnog and watching the children play with their Christmas gifts. Either that or they were out of town visiting relatives. Mr. Colfax knew from Ms. Hendricks, with whom he’d spoken during finals week, that Ms. Morton had plans to spend the holidays in Astoria and then return to Tompkins after the new year. And so he’d brought with him on his walk the scarf he hadn’t yet had the chance to return to her. He’d been feeling bad as late about the way things had ended between them, and wanted to make sure Ms. Morton got back what was rightly hers. He’d deposit the scarf in her mailbox—a tacit transfer of belongings—and they could both move on.

But when he arrived at her house about half an hour later, he saw that Ms. Morton was, in fact, home. Or at least he thought she was, at first, based on the fact that all the lights both upstairs and down were on, and he could hear, through an open window, the murmur of a television set. But the longer he stood there on the curb debating whether to abandon his plan and go to the door—hadn’t he done enough already?—the more he suspected that something was wrong. That she shouldn’t be here. Not today. Not now.

And this house, this old house east of the cemetery. Its proximity to the train tracks, the sum total of its house numbers.

Mr. Colfax felt the specter of the past sidle up to him, and the scarf fell from his grip.

In the distance, the pounding of drums. A slow, steady pounding, like a funeral march. The big, hollow sound pulled him from where he stood and down the shadowy side of Ms. Morton’s house, past her vegetable garden, and into the woods beyond.

On the highest branches of the pines, birds sang. Swallows, buntings. They raised their voices to the winter sky, a wash of salmon pink swirled with gray.

In adulthood, Mr. Colfax had dismissed Ms. Wallace’s legend. Until the drums led him to what he’d known to be a clearing, to a place where, as a boy, he’d witnessed deer grazing.

***

Earlier, in the garden that had once been a meadow, Ms. Morton lay down on her back.

She’d returned to this place a few times since discovering the rosebush in the fall. To visit the blooms; to witness other bushes cropping up. When she visited, she never saw anyone else, no one coming or going, not even deer, and the place became a secret for her, one she’d kept to herself. How she’d arrived in the garden today, she wasn’t sure. The last thing she remembered was falling asleep to a black-and-white movie at home in the warmth of her queen-sized bed.

Now yellow petals drifted through the air, as if feathers in a pillow fight, from the rows upon rows of rosebushes beating their blooms, like leafy mallets, upon the ground. The petals were so gargantuan and so numerous, they all but blotted out the sky. They landed on her and covered her body like the softest blanket she’d ever known.

There was a flash overhead and the beating of the blooms intensified. Ms. Morton smelled the imminence of rain. The wind whipped. It swept her hair over her face, lifted her dress up off her thighs. She felt that buoyancy again. That lightness. That feeling she’d wished to feel always and that had gone missing for a while but now was back for good.

Just when she thought her life was over, here was this place, this haven—it was so clear to her now as the wind blew clumps of soil onto her tongue, a mixture of dirt and wood shavings—where she’d never hurt again. The roses would never tell her she was stupid. They’d never hide things from her or make her feel worthless. They’d listen to her every word and remember exactly what she said. And the man responsible for all this, the one who’d caused such a grand commotion, practically a scandal, was kinder than Richard, cleverer than Mr. Colfax. His existence gave meaning to her own. And for him she was ready.

When the more forceful beating of the blooms sent a jolt down her spine, she knew he was coming. She knew he was close.

She could hear him crying out for her.

Her fingers dug into the cool moist earth, and on the parts of her body not covered by petals, she felt raindrops land. Any moment he’d take her; and she’d wait forever if she had to, for this man who truly loved her and who knew exactly how to say so.