Mann’s heart had been removed in a small room off the infrequently used and underground corridor connecting Satis Library to the Shaker library. The heart was cut out of Mann’s chest shortly before five a.m., the preparations having taken quite some time, what with finding a drop cloth to cover the concrete floor and getting the right tools together. One should always find the right tools, decide on the correct methodology, before embarking on any project, whether it involves the investigation of a complex text or a complex chest cavity. Mann himself would have approved. Rigorous one must always be, especially when the text under consideration (isn’t the body a text?) is at risk for rigor mortis.
These tools included a small sharp saw, nothing intricate, as well as a few good knives. After all, Mann had already been dead for some time. Everything was fairly solid, not too messy, and not too hard to clean up. Easy enough to get the body in Mann’s office and prop him up in the chair, easy enough to arrange for Mann’s jacket to obscure the mess underneath, easy enough to open the windows in his office (Mann usually left one open anyway) to alleviate the smell, which was bound to become noticeable soon, and to exit.
After all, Mann’s office was on the ground floor. (Mann joked that The Evil One — as he referred to Mrs. Kunkle — put him there so as to thwart his successful commission of suicide after reading end-of-term student papers; throwing himself from the ground-floor window would prevent him from achieving his goal, and that was The Evil One’s sole ambition in life.) The amateur surgeon took the tools and the bloodied drop cloth away in a knapsack and dumped them into the Connecticut River. Remorseless, relaxed, and, surprisingly, slightly peckish, he decided to make himself a hearty breakfast when he returned home.
Hillborne lost the football game to Cornell. This was no surprise. The most exciting thing that happened was that Suki McDonnel (Colby Sawyer Junior College, ’69) slipped her hand under the Black Watch tartan rug to rub gently at Bud Norris’s heavy thigh until he got quite excited for a man his age, while her husband Petey McDonald (‘59) serenely continued to drink the mulled cider she had put in the Big Pine thermos that morning. But all this happened in the bleachers, not on the field.
Cynthia and John parted about three in the afternoon, Cynthia to go down to White River to shop and John to go back to TGBB.
They did not have sex.
That night Mann’s murderer cried and cried into his lover’s pillow.
But she assumed he cried because the Big Pine Men had practically handed the game to Cornell. She stroked the blond curls on Kicker’s head and thought how sweet he looked stripped down to the waist, like an angel, not rough at all.
