A curmudgeonly instructor at a New England prep school is forced to remain on campus during Christmas break to babysit the handful of students with nowhere to go. Eventually, he forms an unlikely bond with one of them a damaged, brainy troublemaker, and with the school's head cook, who has just lost a son in Vietnam.

Suspense classic that influenced the 1960 movie, Psycho, by Alfred Hitchcock. Tells the story of a sadistic headmaster of a Parisian boarding school who is murdered by his wife and mistress, whom he has mistreated. The women dump his body in a swimming pool. When the pool is drained, the body has disappeared. Then come reports of sightings, terrifying his killers.