Shadow of the Lions

by Christopher Swann

Genres: Literary Fiction; Noir; Psychological Thrillers

Synopsis

“My lungs began to burn as I started sprinting. It wasn’t just that I wanted to catch Fritz. I had the distinct feeling that I was chasing him, that I had to catch up with him, before something caught up with me.”

How long must we pay for the crimes of our youth? That is just one question Christopher Swann explores in this compulsively readable debut, a literary thriller set in the elite—and sometimes dark—environs of Blackburne, a prep school in Virginia. When Matthias Glass’s best friend, Fritz, vanishes without a trace in the middle of an argument during their senior year, Matthias tries to move on with his life, only to realize that until he discovers what happened to his missing friend, he will be stuck in the past, guilty, responsible, alone.

Almost ten years after Fritz’s disappearance, Matthias gets his chance. Offered a job teaching English at Blackburne, he gets swiftly drawn into the mystery. In the shadowy woods of his alma mater, he stumbles into a web of surveillance, dangerous lies, and buried secrets—and discovers the troubled underbelly of a school where the future had once always seemed bright.

A sharp tale full of false leads and surprise turns, Shadow of the Lions is also wise and moving. Christopher Swann has given us a gripping debut about friendship, redemption, and what it means to lay the past to rest.

Release date: August 1, 2017

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Print pages: 368

Sample

PROLOGUE

The two lions crouched on top of their pedestals, frozen in preparation to leap. One was snarling, its stone teeth menacing in the late-afternoon shadows, while the other stared out with disdain at the broad sweep of empty soybean fields that lay just across the state highway, a disdain made all the more pointed because the lion was missing its left eye.

The missing eye was their only major flaw. A myth of swift and terrible justice falling on those who harmed the lions had shielded them from further disfigurement over the years. Blackburne legend had it that the student who chiseled out the left eye as a class prank in 1947 died that same week, drowning in the Shenandoah Creek when his canoe tipped over. Since then, the lions had been revered by the students, and although time had worn away at these guardians of Blackburne’s front entrance, the lions remained fixed to the spot where they had sat for more than a century. The columns of Raleigh Hall, the freshman dorm, might be painted pink; a faculty member’s car might be placed inside the dining hall in the dead of night; the headmaster might open his office one morning to find every square inch filled with balloons. But the lions were left alone.

Jogging in place to keep from cooling down, I stared up at the lions, breath issuing from my open mouth like steam. It was half a mile back to the track, and the temperature was unusually cold for the middle of March. I didn’t want to cramp up. But I didn’t leave, either, just jogged in place and tried through sheer willpower to lower my heart rate and slow my breathing. Running from the track to the school gate and back was a typical warm-up, but I was alone. My teammates were running in the opposite direction, to the old closed bridge over the Shenandoah. I had asked Coach Meier if I could run to the gate, knowing he would say yes. I was a team captain and a senior—he had every reason to trust me. So when he nodded absently at me, I ran hard, sprinting away from the track and putting distance between myself and my team. Living at Blackburne, in close quarters with four hundred other boys in the Virginia countryside, could be claustrophobic. But that wasn’t why I had run away from the others, feet pounding the road even after I reached the broad belt of trees that surrounded Blackburne’s campus like a forest wall.

My father had told me the previous fall at the annual Blackburne–Manassas Prep game that in times of crisis, a man’s instinct is to do one of two things: retreat to a place of safety, or gather up his strength and hurl himself headlong into the fray. We had been talking about football—Blackburne was down ten points in the third quarter—and I had been all for the headlong hurling into the fray, in this case a grand and sweeping gesture, a trick play like a flea flicker. My father had shaken his head gently—he was always gentle when he disagreed with me—and said that we needed to stick to basics, trust our defense and our running game instead of trying to be something we weren’t. “Y’all keep throwing the ball and going nowhere, Matthias,” he said. “Play to your strengths. It may be boring, but it works.”

This had angered me, as my roommate was one of the wide receivers. Granted, he had uncharacteristically dropped one pass, but my father’s words had sounded treasonous. “Fritz is doing his best,” I told him sullenly. My irritation only deepened when Blackburne started running the ball and slowly but inexorably marched downfield, scored a touchdown with six minutes left, and then forced a turnover, running the ball back to win twenty-one to seventeen.

Looking from one lion to the other while I ran as if on an invisible treadmill, I did not know whether I was retreating to a place of safety to lick my wounds, or trying to gather myself together before heading back to school and facing what I had done.

The Blackburne School, like most boarding schools in America, has its own fiercely held traditions. Some are idiosyncratic, like the bonfire torches that freshmen—third formers in Blackburne parlance—must construct out of burlap, wire, and two-by-fours. Others are born out of a fundamental belief in certain core principles, a belief that borders on fervor. The honor code at Blackburne is rooted in such a belief. Its rules are stark as barbed wire against snow: you will not lie, or cheat, or steal, or tolerate those who do. The punishment for being found guilty of violating the honor code is expulsion. And I had violated the code.

Running in place between the two lions, I didn’t hear Fritz coming down the drive. One moment, I was alone; the next, Fritz appeared from out of the trees that were beginning to soften with shade as the sun lowered to the horizon. He ran up, gasping, and stopped by the lion with the missing eye. “Ho, Matthias,” he said, and then bent at the waist, sucking in air through his mouth, hands at his hips.

“Ho, Fritz,” I said halfheartedly. It was our typical way of greeting each other, almost a call-and-response. Both of us had been teased about our Germanic first names when we started rooming together our fourth form year. The Huns, some of our classmates called us. At first we ignored the nickname, and then we gave in to it. Apart from being a rather mild joke at our expense, it was now an identifying label, another thread in the fabric of our class. Daryl Cooper was called Diamond, Jay Organ was Beef, and Fritz and I were the Huns. Such tags were a sign of acceptance, even approval, and they often had odd effects on those who bore them. One morning when the clock alarm went off and I was slow to hit the snooze button, Fritz looked over the rail of his upper bunk and stared blearily down at me. “Ho, Matthias,” he said. I looked up at him. “Ho, Fritz,” I said. And that was that. People outside of all-male boarding schools might snigger about the close relationships that develop between boys, imagining some sort of fervid buggery in the basements of the classroom buildings or the shower stalls of the dorms. While this wasn’t true, at least in my experience, students at Blackburne did establish intense, long-lasting friendships with one another, something that on a platonic level was most likely not experienced again until marriage. Fritz and I had that bond. We weren’t brothers; we were beyond that. He was perhaps the one person whose counsel and opinion I held higher than my own.

Facing Fritz at the lions, I realized with a soul-biting irony that I could tell him anything except what I had done, because aside from possibly being furious, he would also be ashamed for me, and I wouldn’t be able to bear it.

“You really ran here,” Fritz was saying. He was looking at me, waiting for a reply.

“Just needed to,” I said, still jogging in place, hands flopping at the end of my arms. “Wanted to see how far I could push it, you know?”

Fritz wasn’t buying it, I could tell, but he just looked off at the fields and gave a knowing nod. It was one of a hundred slight, deliberate gestures boys granted to one another at Blackburne. A warning shake of the head meant Watch out, as in Watch out for Mr. Downing—he’s on the warpath. A one-shouldered shrug was a studied gesture of indifference. Cutting your eyes away from a classmate you passed in the hall could be as cruel as sneering in his face. Fritz’s nod meant he didn’t believe me, but he affected understanding—he knew I wasn’t telling the truth but accepted my lie all the same. That nod about did me in. I had to blink away tears, which thankfully I could blame on the sharp weather. My emotions welled up and threatened to spill out of my throat, but I choked them down with an effort.

“Mail came,” Fritz was saying.

I was taken aback, and then relaxed. This was familiar territory. “And?”

“Nothing.”

“It’s early yet.”

“True.”

“Look, you’re gonna get in, Fritz. If not UVA, then Georgetown, or Washington and Lee, or William and Mary.”

Fritz stared over the fields. They were brown and rutted—nothing had even been planted yet. “Okay, but . . . ,” he began, and then sighed.

Since the start of the school year, Fritz’s anxiety over getting accepted into college had grown until he was muttering to himself between classes, in the dining hall, and when he plodded to the bathroom to brush his teeth. At night he twisted and turned, so by morning his bedsheets were an absolute wreck. It didn’t matter that his grades were excellent, that he was a shoo-in for the Latin medal, and that his family was rich and could trace its lineage back at least to the Jamestown colony. It didn’t matter that included among his relatives were one grandfather who had been a Pacific combat veteran in WWII, another grandfather who had been a shipping magnate, and an uncle who knew everyone of importance in Washington, D.C. Despite all of this, whenever college was brought up, Fritz looked panicked, as if he couldn’t get enough air.

That I had been accepted early to UVA didn’t help. Fritz was not petty or shallow—not once did he openly express anything but congratulations for my early acceptance. And yet I knew it had to be eating away at him. At Blackburne, seniors taped their college acceptance letters to the doors of their rooms, icons of our devotion to academic achievement. When I got the UVA letter, my first thought, after experiencing a fierce pang of delight, was to look in Fritz’s mailbox. It was empty—he hadn’t gotten a letter. At the time, I didn’t resent how his disappointment might cast an unwelcome shadow over my success; instead, I worried how I would break the news to him. I even considered hiding the letter. Of course, I ended up telling him that evening during study hall in our room. He gave me his typically lopsided grin and even hugged me, slapping me twice on the back, and then stood expectantly in the middle of the room. “Well?” he asked, and I got some tape out of my desk drawer and affixed the letter to the door, leaving room next to it for its twin when Fritz got his own letter. Every day, Fritz had to pass by that letter and the blank space next to it. Only once did I see him react to it. He was coming into the room—I was at my desk, working—and he paused in the doorway, a hand lifted in greeting, and glanced at the letter on the door. The look on his face was like watching the sun disappear behind a cloud. It passed and then Fritz entered, complaining loudly about a Latin test, but that momentary glance had been all I needed.

Standing by the one-eyed lion, Fritz looked out forlornly over the empty fields. He fingered the Saint Christopher medal he wore around his neck, a gift from his grandfather who’d fought in WWII. Watching him fiddle with that medal, I was annoyed. It was something of a shock to realize that. It felt like a betrayal, but it was also liberating. Tamping down my excitement about UVA had created a resentment that now swelled and threatened to burst. Fritz was being neurotic and self-indulgent and attention-seeking. I knew any minute he would sigh and talk in a defeated tone about college. And I couldn’t take it. Not then, not while I was consumed by my own guilt, wrapped up in my own garbage.

Oblivious to all of this, Fritz shook his head. “It’s stupid, but it’s just—there are all these expectations,” he said. “I mean, I go to Blackburne, so I’m supposed to be set, right? But what if I’m not? When I was a kid, I told my father I wanted to be a cowboy. He handed me a copy of Lonesome Dove and said that was as close as I’d get, that I was meant for things. But what? Granddad got a medal at Okinawa. Grandpa Joe built a shipping company out of nothing. My father is a defense contractor who minored in English. He built his own company from the ground up, and he can quote Shakespeare and Tennyson at the drop of a hat.” He stopped, grimaced, and then shook his head again. “Jesus, listen to me,” he said. “I’m sorry. After all you had to go through today with the J-Board and everything, here I am bitching about college and all the crap in my life.”

The J-Board, or Judicial Board, was the school’s organization of student-elected prefects, the students who embodied the honor code. When a student was accused of violating the honor code, the J-Board determined whether or not that student was guilty. Fritz was a prefect, and I had appeared before the J-Board that morning.

“It’s okay,” Fritz said, mistaking my silence for feeling awkward about the hearing, having had to sit across from a group of my peers, including my roommate, and be judged. Fritz shrugged with that half smile of his. “I knew you couldn’t have done it.”

The moment stretched and took on weight like a branch bowing under a load of snow. Long past the point when I should have affirmed my innocence, I said nothing. Fritz stared at me, his eyes widening. It must have been all over my face.

“Fritz,” I said, and then stopped. What could I possibly say?

“Jesus Christ,” Fritz said. His face was pale. “You fucking did it, didn’t you?”

“Fritz, I—”

“I stood up for you. I said there was no way you would’ve—”

“I know,” I said, rushing through my confession. “I know, I’m sorry—”

“Do you get what you’ve done? What kind of position you just put me in?” His voice rose, tightening like a screw biting into wood. “I have to turn you in, Matthias!”

“You can’t do that!” I said. “Please, Fritz. It was an accident, I swear.”

“You cheated by accident?” Fritz looked at me as if I were a stranger, someone contemptible. The pain I felt from his look was so bright and immediate that I was unable then to consider whether or not he was right to judge me that way. He was right, of course. But at the time, all I could see was a rejection of nearly four years of friendship. “Was it an accident when you lied to the Judicial Board?” he said. “When you lied to me?” He raised his hands to his head as if he would pull out his hair. “Jesus,” he said. “It’s too much. It’s too goddamn much. I can’t trust anyone.”

Something in me gave way, a floodgate opening to vent my fear and self-loathing. “Don’t give me that holier-than-thou crap,” I said. “You’re telling me you haven’t ever made a mistake?”

He stared at me. “I’ve never cheated,” he said. “Not once.”

“Because you haven’t had to,” I said, warming to my ugliness as if I were holding my frozen hands over a fire, gathering comfort from its heat. “You’re a fucking genius who’s going to get into college. Yes, you are,” I said as he opened his mouth. “You are. And so am I. But the difference is that you don’t have to worry about paying for it, or even getting in. You’ve got the grades and the extracurriculars and all that shit. I mean, Jesus, look at your family. You think your father and your uncle won’t pull strings for you if they have to? Stop being such a fucking drama queen about it. God.”

For a few frozen seconds, we stared at each other, stunned and hurt, but only one of us in the wrong. A jay cried in its harsh voice from the darkening wood. Aside from that, we were alone, locked into a terrible moment at the edge of our friendship.

Fritz made the first move. He let the Saint Christopher medal drop from his fingers to dangle on the chain around his neck; then, without a word, he turned and began running up the drive, back to school. Within ten seconds, he was among the trees, and then the drive curved and Fritz curved with it, vanishing from my sight.

After a few more precious seconds passed, I, too, began running, trailing my roommate. My breathing was harsh in my ears as I ran down the drive, leaving the lions behind. I entered the trees, the air beneath the boughs dank and dim and slightly chill. There was a damp, organic smell to the oaks, an earthy scent like ground coffee. I glimpsed Fritz ahead, his tee shirt a white blur, and then he was gone again. I ran after him, my feet and legs registering each impact with the pavement. I felt uneasy, as if I were missing something, or about to. I couldn’t see Fritz. Ahead of me, the drive straightened into a short stretch before the final curve, and after that curve, the trees would fall away before the playing fields. The road was empty—no Fritz, no anybody. An invisible hand threatened to squeeze my heart, my stomach. My lungs began to burn as I started sprinting. It wasn’t just that I wanted to catch Fritz. I had the distinct feeling that I was chasing him, that I had to catch up with him, before something caught up with me. The trees loomed around me; the road seemed to buckle at my feet. I would have sworn something was behind me, but terror seized me at the thought of turning around to look. To say that I thought the lions had finally leapt off their perches and come bounding after me would sound insane. But I ran up the last hundred yards of that driveway as if I had to outrun whatever imagined thing was pursuing me, or be caught and suffer some horrific fate.

I burst out of the trees and into the wide, sheltered bowl of the playing fields, gasping like a man emerging from a forest fire. I stopped and bent over, trying to catch my breath, hands on my knees. My pulse sledgehammered in my temples. I looked up to see the drive stretch before me and up the Hill, a good quarter mile of asphalt bordered by the track, the golf course, and various dotted stands of trees. Fritz was nowhere to be seen. I turned back to face the wood, half afraid of what I might see, but it was simply a belt of trees that stood there, silent, unrewarding, a dark green forest wall shaded with black as the sun fell. “Fritz?” I called out. “I’m sorry. Where are you?” Nothing. There was no way he could have already made it up the Hill. I could see a few people at the track, but none of them was Fritz. Where the hell had he gone? Maybe he was in the trees behind me, hiding. Or maybe he had made it to the track and I just couldn’t tell—the light was dim, fading moment by moment, except for the bright red bars of the clouds overhead, glowing like a grate in a forge with the light of the setting sun.

I gave up. Fritz was hiding, or he had run faster than I thought. I’d apologize to him later, somehow. We would fix this. It would be okay. So I tried to convince myself as I began walking, slowly, up the Hill and to the dorms.

I DIDN’T APOLOGIZE TO Fritz that night. Not because I changed my mind or didn’t need to. I still need to, all these years later. I didn’t apologize to him because he wasn’t there to apologize to. No Fritz at dinner; no Fritz at study period. He was gone.

By lights-out, the sheriff had been called. By the next morning, searchers were combing the campus—every building, every subbasement and attic, every shed and grove and hillside. We weren’t allowed to join in the search. Dr. Simmons, the headmaster, insisted that we continue with classes, maintain our routine. I think the sheriff probably didn’t want us involved, anyway, especially if—as the prevailing theory came to be at the time—Fritz had killed himself. No one wanted a student to stumble across a classmate’s corpse.

It would have almost been better to find his body. Instead, Fritz ran into those woods and off the edge of the earth. Police and search-and-rescue groups descended on Blackburne, upending everything. In a way, it was almost exciting, except for the reason they were all there. I was questioned four separate times, including one painful time by Fritz’s father, who was almost unhinged with rage and grief. And it was all useless. Every lead, every possible trace, went nowhere. It was like Fritz had been deleted, erased. We didn’t even get the scant comfort of a funeral service. We grieved, sure. Boys cried; I was one of them. But at night, alone in my room—our room—for those last terrible weeks of school, it wasn’t grief that kept me awake until the deep hours of the night. Two feelings, each contradicting the other, swept through me. First, I was afraid that, because of what I had done and could not confess to doing, whatever gods there were had taken Fritz as punishment. But more than that, I felt jealousy, a bitter jealousy mixed with anger at the fact that Fritz had gone, without me. He had left me behind.

CHAPTER ONE

Years later, I stood again in front of the lions, hands in my pockets as I looked up at them, one defiant, the other coldly reserved. My car—a red Porsche Boxster, my last personal asset of any value—sat parked before the entrance, its driver’s side door flung open like an aimless wing. I could smell on the air the sharp tang of cow urine, like cider that has turned. The heat lay heavily on me, and my shirt clung to my back. Summers were always like this here, so warm and humid that you felt you would lie down and sleep forever come evening. But summer was ending, and it seemed as if everything—the trees, the fields, the sky itself—was pausing in anticipation, quietly gathering itself for the leap forward into autumn.

I reached out and ran my hand across the snarling lion’s flank. It was rough and surprisingly cool to the touch. My fingers traced the lion’s tail, ran up to its mane. I touched an ear, avoided its smooth, perfect eyes, and paused, my finger barely pressing against the tip of a tooth. The lion did not budge. I removed my hand, took a last look at it and its one-eyed partner, and returned to my car. It was getting late, and Sam Hodges was expecting me.

I drove between the lions and into the trees, winding my way slowly up the drive, and remembered something I’d learned as a student at Blackburne. The school’s founder, Colonel Harold “Harry” Blackburne, had planted these trees, mostly oaks, upon his resignation from the Army of Northern Virginia following Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. As I drove, I noticed how pristine the ground was for fifty yards on either side of the road. No virgin wood ever looked like this one, with mown lawns at the feet of the trees. It was a minor detail, but it reminded me of how attentive Blackburne was to appearances.

Returning to a place from your past is unsettling. You expect to find the place altered somehow, different in some essential way. Many alumni who return to Blackburne say that the school hasn’t changed a bit, and they find comfort in this, a constant in the rapidly shifting, twenty-first-century world. Some, however, return to campus and look disturbed, as if searching for something they cannot find. I’d always rolled my eyes when I’d seen older men gaze wistfully at the oak trees on the Lawn or at the empty football field. It had seemed somehow pathetic. But now I understood why they had looked the way they had. The unchanging school had reminded them of how they had changed, and conjured in them sorrow at the loss of intangible things, innocence and youth and time.

I’d lost all three in the nine years since I had graduated, and I’d lost more besides. Money, for one, a lot of it. A girl, too, Michele, a long-legged pouty blonde—a model, of course. She was poised to get her first magazine cover shoot, and I was a debut novelist with a starred review in Publishers Weekly. We careened through New York City like lost partygoers from one of Gatsby’s soirées, occupied with getting reservations at the hottest restaurants and being seen at the newest nightclubs and searching for the perfect designer-casual blazer—all the things that I thought were important in my new life as a Young Urban American Novelist. And after the fancy cocktails and the empty brushes with celebrity and the mounting bills and festering insecurities and the small, petty arguments with Michele that turned us into small, petty people, the one thing I’d had and could depend on—a talent for writing, one that had led to a well-received novel, a big advance for book two, and an even bigger payment for the film rights, which were now languishing in some Hollywood studio office—well, that talent had dried up, gone, vanished. It seemed like the most important things in my life vanished.

Sam Hodges, the academic dean at Blackburne and my former advisor, had called me in New York a month before. I hadn’t spoken to him since graduating. But when I heard him on the phone saying, “Matthias, my boy!” I could see him as if he were standing in my cramped apartment: prematurely white hair, upturned nose, and the beginnings of a potbelly, all combining to make him look like a spry elf who had his eye on the reindeer and sleigh when Santa retired. Many boys, myself among them, had made the mistake of thinking that Mr. Hodges, with his bow tie and suspenders and jolly smile, was some sort of dim, amiable hick. We hadn’t made the same mistake twice.

I couldn’t fathom why Sam Hodges would be calling me. And the reason was a genuine compliment. He told me the school had an unexpected opening in the English department—one teacher had gotten married and was moving to Atlanta, and the man they had hired to replace him had been diagnosed with cancer and had chosen to remain where he was in Milwaukee, leaving Blackburne with a spot to fill less than two months before the start of school. Sam Hodges said he’d read an interview with me in the Blackburne alumni magazine in which I was quoted as saying I would be taking some time off from writing. He asked me, if I was still taking time off, whether I would consider spending some of it teaching for a year at Blackburne.

I remembered the interview, which I’d given the previous January, just a couple of months before my agent had dropped me and things with Michele had really started falling apart. I’d been tentative about doing the interview in the first place. It would be my first real connection with Blackburne since graduation, for one thing. For another, I worried about what the interview could reveal, as if I would be submitting to an interrogation. In the end, all it involved were some e-mail exchanges and one longish phone call with a woman in Blackburne’s alumni office. It wasn’t an investigative piece by any stretch of the imagination, but more of an overview of my writing career and a few standard questions about my novel and how I’d come to write it. And now Sam Hodges was offering me a job to teach at Blackburne. Jesus.

If I hadn’t been desperate, I would have laughed at the irony. But there wasn’t anything left for me in New York, except a propensity for accumulating debt, both financial and emotional. There was no new novel coming, Michele was most definitely out of the picture, and I needed to get my shit together. I actually had some teaching experience, too—a couple of comp and lit courses while I was in grad school, nothing extensive, but I hadn’t been horrible at it. Also, at some level, I felt I owed Blackburne. I’d grown up there, written my first fiction there. And I had turned my back on the place. I had not been to my five-year reunion, nor had I seen any of my classmates since graduation except for the handful that had gone to UVA with me, and even then I’d consciously avoided them as much as I could without being openly rude. I’d cut Blackburne off like pruning a blighted branch from a tree. And now I, the product of that school so dedicated to rigorously training its students to achieve success, had soared out into the wider world, briefly scaled the empyrean heights, and then plummeted to Earth. In short, I had failed. Perhaps by returning to Blackburne I could start over.

Downshifting around the final turn before the edge of the wood, I almost didn’t see it in the fading daylight. But as the fields beyond became visible through a glimmering arch in the trees, I glimpsed movement among the gray trunks to my left. It was as if someone had suddenly shouted in my ear. Everything else fell away. I slammed on my brakes, my seat belt locking across my chest. Something next to a tree raised its head and gazed at me. I registered a long neck, a black nose, ears wide and alert above a pair of dark, cool eyes. I stared at it for a few heartbeats, and even as I thought the word deer it turned and leapt gracefully between two trees, then bounded away into the woods, its tail flashing into the dark.

I let out a shuddering breath, and as I drew air into my lungs I felt a pang of anger so fierce that I had to squeeze my steering wheel. I told myself it was because I could have hit the deer, that I could have seriously damaged my car, or killed the deer, or me. After taking a couple of deep breaths and peering carefully into the trees on both sides of the drive, I drove on, finishing the final curve. I resisted the urge to glance in my rearview mirror.

My car burst out from the protective cover of the trees onto the hard, flat playing fields. I slowed to bump gently over a speed trap, stopped briefly at the new security booth to give my name to the guard, a polite and efficient stranger, and then rolled on when the gate lifted. I cruised past the soccer goals, skeletal without their nets, and then the newly refurbished track that ringed the old football field. Next came the low field house with its roof proclaiming, in red and yellow paint, “Lions Number One!” While I had braced for it, seeing Blackburne after all that time was almost a physical shock, as if I were standing under a great bell that had just struck the hour. And then I saw up ahead, past the boxwood shrubs that lined the upper part of the drive, the gleaming white columns and Colonial brick of the Hill, and as I watched, the setting sun touched the front of the bui