Obedience

28

They had planned the Cale trip for Saturday, but it turned out that Dennis had a mandatory charity event with the Taus, so they postponed it until early the next week. Brian and Mary spent the weekend sitting in her room at Brown, anxiously waiting on a call from Dennis. They played Uno, their hands moistening the deck until it was so slick that it could not be shuffled. They watched reruns of Seinfeld and Friends and Mary’s entire DVD collection: Persuasion, Elizabeth, Mel Gibson’s Hamlet. They listened to Mary’s CDs, falling asleep here and there to the Weepies and Cat Power and the Arcade Fire. They spoke to each other in short, clipped phrases about anything not related to Deanna Ward.

On Sunday afternoon, Mary checked her mail at the campus post office and found a crude package in the box. It was a mangled manila envelope that had been taped and lined with a series of months-old Attn’s on the outside. Her name was the last in the line: M. Butler.

Mary waited until she returned to Brown Hall to open it. Inside, she found a VHS tape. Someone had written on the white strip in the middle of the tape, This might help.

She pulled out her old VCR from under the bed and plugged it in. She and Brian sat in front of the television and waited for an image to appear. The film was grainy. Lines ran through the wavering picture, making it difficult to see what was happening.

But Mary had seen this film once before. It had been freshman year, in Dr. Wade’s Psychology 101: The Milgram Experiments.

The experimenter was asking the subject a question. This man, Mary knew, was being paid by Milgram to scream when the participant pushed the buttons on the “shock generator.” When the subject answered a question incorrectly, the participant said, “You will now get a shock of one hundred and five volts,” and he pushed a button on the machine. The subject in the next room cried out in mock pain. The participant said, “Just how far can you go on this thing?”

The scientist, who was also one of Milgram’s actors, said, “As far as is necessary.”

The participant said, “What do you mean ‘as far as is necessary’?”

“To complete the test,” the scientist said.

The participant continued. The next time the subject answered incorrectly, the participant pushed a button and said, “One hundred and fifty volts.”

Again, the subject cried out. “Get me out of here!” the man shouted. “I told you I have heart problems. My heart’s starting to bother me now.”

“It is essential that you continue,” the scientist told the participant.

The screen went black. But there was still audio coming from the television, a scratching sound that resembled someone rubbing fabric over a microphone.

A man’s voice said, “I don’t-”

“Bring it here,” another man said sharply. “Bring it the hell over here.”

“Can’t,” the first man said.

“Listen, she’s got-”

“Deanna. Call her Deanna.”

“Whatever. Listen. She’s not doing good. It’s her breathing. It’s her color.”

“Like chalk.”

“What?”

“Like sidewalk chalk. That’s what she looks like. I used to play with it at my grandma’s house. We’d draw hopscotch on the sidewalks, and-”

“Listen to me. Would you shut up and listen to me? We need to do something. We need to-”

“Turn it off,” Mary whispered, and when Brian didn’t hear her she began to shout, “Turn it off! Turn it off! Please turn it off!”

Later, they sat in her room and ate lukewarm soup. They hadn’t spoken about the tape or the weird audio at the end. “Did you recognize the voices?” Mary asked.

“No. They sounded like they were…inside something. An airport hangar. Or a-”

“Cave,” she said. “It sounded like a cave. The echo.”

“Yeah,” he said, turning his soupspoon over and letting the broth drip into the bowl.

“So how old was the audio on that tape?” asked Mary.

“It sounded old,” Brian said. “Years. It was…scratchy.”

“But what if it wasn’t? What if she’s still there in that place? What if whoever sent the tape was trying to tell us something, trying to lead us to her? She’s sick, Brian. You heard it. She’s not…not breathing right. Should we take it to the police?”

“There’s no”-he picked up the package the tape had come in and studied it-“return address here. I don’t know what they would do with it. What does it say, anyway? It’s meaningless.”

Mary said nothing, only stared blankly out the window and down to the quad.

“He was testing evil,” Brian finally said.

Mary didn’t say anything. Her soup steamed in her face; she closed her eyes and felt its warmth on her lids.

“Milgram,” he went on. “Williams didn’t mention that part in class.”

“I know,” she said.

“The participant would go as far as the scientist would tell him to go. He was afraid of the scientist. He was…”

“Obedient,” Mary whispered.

“Yeah, obedient. Most of them went so far that the screams stopped in the other room. Milgram’s subject was playing dead. And still the participant would go on.”

Mary was looking off, through the open window and down to the quad. She shook her head. It was all elusive, so abstract but entirely cruel. She didn’t know what it meant, yet she had a notion about what it could mean.

“Did Williams send it?” he asked.

“I don’t think so,” she told Brian. “I think somebody’s trying to warn us about him.”

“Orman,” Brian said. “Orman studied with Milgram at Yale. Maybe he’s trying to tell us something about Williams.”

“But what about Deanna?” Mary asked.

Yes, what about Deanna? It was the only part of this she could verify; she had the documentation to prove it. What was unclear was how Williams’s story, and how Williams himself, connected with Deanna Ward. Until Mary could somehow find the answer to that question, all else-Williams’s puzzles, Brian’s story about Elizabeth Orman, and now this mysterious tape-would be inconsequential.

29

They left on Tuesday afternoon, one day before the deadline Williams had given them. They drove to Cale, unsure of where they would go once they got there. Mary had the idea that they would find Bethany Cavendish again, but it was decided among them that Cavendish was possibly a part of Williams’s game, since she had put Brian on the trail of the book that was not a book. Dennis thought they should drive out to Bell City to ask around about the girl who had been returned to Wendy Ward, the girl who had been mistaken for Deanna.

But that was for later, they decided. They had to ask a few questions in Cale first, because Cale was where it had all begun. Mary suggested that they go to the house on During Street, where the elderly couple lived (if Cavendish could be trusted with even this information), and the boys agreed that it was probably the best place to start.

They drove Dennis Flaherty’s Lexus, and Mary felt a kind of nostalgia the whole way there. She had spent time in this car. There: she had reached across and taken Dennis’s hand one night on the way back from a play in Indianapolis. And there: he had kissed her, pulling her across the seat toward him. They were confusing memories, and she had to look out the window, at the blurring scenery, to get it out of her mind.

They got lost on the back roads of Cale. Brian had the map spread across his lap in the backseat, and he and Dennis had a spat when it was determined that they’d missed their turn and gone five miles out of their way. Dennis, sighing in an exaggerated manner, turned the Lexus around in a gravel turnabout and made his way back into town.

Finally, they found During Street, its sign bent and nearly shrouded by a weeping willow that was growing beside the road. If there is such a place as the “backwoods,” they were there. During Street was a tree-shrouded lane, and from the road you could see the blue expanse of the Thatch River. The vegetation was thick-river foliage, dark leaves and dark soil, kudzu falling in torrents all around. A few cabins, probably only used in the summer, were falling into disrepair here and there.

Brian claimed that he would know the couple’s house by the field that Bethany Cavendish had described to him. And there it was, just ahead on the right, a simple Cape Cod with an American flag flying out front.

“Polly’s house,” Mary said, referring to the transparency they had seen in Williams’s class the first week.

An old man answered the door. Dennis, because he looked the part of a salesman, was appointed their speaker. “We were wondering,” Dennis said through the mesh of the screen door, “if you wouldn’t mind talking to us for a few minutes about the girl who used to live here.” Although Brian would not have used such honesty, Dennis’s tactic seemed to work. The old man opened the door for them and let them inside.

“We find some of her stuff sometimes,” an old woman explained once they were sitting at the kitchen table. Her name was Edna Collins. She fixed them instant coffee and they sat around the table, drinking and listening. The couple, just as Bethany Cavendish had said, was happy to see them. Lonely, Mary thought. They’re just aching for company.

“People come by here all the time,” the old man said. “Tourists. Taking pictures. This is a famous site, isn’t it, Edna? We’re local celebrities.” He laughed-a hearty, deep laugh that was larger than his small frame.

“Just the other day I found a doll out in the field. I told Norman, ‘I bet you it come from that girl.’ We find little things like that all the time out in that field-trinkets, toys, all sorts of objects. Possessions she may have had. All down the hillside, down to the river, we find stuff. Why, I bet you could go out there right now and find enough to fill a house.”

“They hide out there sometimes,” the old man put in. “Kids. We’ll see them out there in the field with their flashlights. God knows what they’re doing. Once they were having some kind of ceremony, some evil thing. Wicca, I reckon they call it. I went out there with my gun and told them to stop. We don’t mind pictures being taken of the house. We knew what we were getting into when we moved in. But I have to draw the line when you’re bringing Satan onto my property.”

“She was so sweet,” Edna said. “I never did meet her, of course, but I’ve seen pictures. Just a little thing. Deanna. Such a sweet name. How old? Seventeen? Eighteen? Such a tragedy. Even now we look for things from our front porch. We watch to see if there’s anything suspicious going on. I always thought they could have taken her down to the river, slipped away in the quiet, you know. How easy that would have been.”

They, thought Mary.

“Do you know this man?” Brian asked, showing Edna the photograph of Williams that was on the back of A Disappearance in the Fields. They all watched the woman for anything, any tic of deception, but she studied the photo seriously, pulling her bifocals down and pondering it as if the picture were of a long-lost relative she was trying to place in the family tree.

“I don’t suppose I do,” she said. She handed the book over to her husband, and he also said that he didn’t recognize Williams. As far as Mary could tell, they were both sincere.

When they began talking again, reminiscing about their years in the home, Mary excused herself. She followed Edna’s directions to the bathroom, shut the door, and looked at herself in the mirror. Her eyes were dark, and her hair, always unruly, the curl prone to frizz and flyaways, was wilder than usual. She turned on the faucet and splashed some water on her bare face. She heard the whir of a motorboat down the hill on the Thatch, and she wondered about Dean Orman’s wife again and her story of being accosted on the boat. Does it all fit together? she wondered. Is the river the connecting theme?

She left the bathroom and walked down the hallway toward the kitchen. She could hear Edna in there, talking about a family reunion they were planning to have if they could find all the family. She stopped at the end of the hall and looked at the pictures Edna had hung: nieces and nephews, Mary assumed, daughters and sons, all of them light-haired and fair-skinned. She felt a breeze at her feet, and she turned to see if the front door had come open. It hadn’t. “It was just fantastic,” Edna was saying in the kitchen off to Mary’s left. “And they had a fireworks exhibit after the show.” Mary looked at these relatives, the kids gap-toothed and their parents too polished somehow, too perfect. One girl was wearing a Cale Central High shirt, and the picture looked to have been taken in the 1980s. Mary assumed that it was Edna and Norman’s daughter, as she showed up in later pictures with her family. She wondered if this girl had gone to school with Deanna Ward.

Then she felt it, that breeze again against her ankles. It was cool and sharp, definitely outdoor air. She walked back down the hallway, trying to find its source. She stood outside the first door and registered it, stiff, against her feet.

Mary cracked open the door and peered in.

The room was empty. The windows were blindless and raised an inch or two, and the walls were half-painted. Paint cans rested here and there around the room. Swaths of blue tarpaulin were laid out on the floor, yet there was no carpet to protect, just the bare board lying across two-by-fours.

Mary shut the door and went to the next room. She opened that door and found the same thing. A bare room, paint cans. There was no tarpaulin here, and the painting had not yet begun. Some stray paper blew around in the breeze. Mary felt her heart tugging at her again, pleading to her to get out of this, to stop it somehow.

She went to the third room. The carpet had been stored in this room, wide rolls of it that were still in their cellophane. She was just about to step inside when she heard a voice behind her: “What are you doing?”

It was Norman Collins. He was looking at her solemnly, as if he were disappointed in her.

Laughter exploded from the kitchen.

“I was just-” Mary began, but she couldn’t go on. Lying had never been easy for her. She dealt in truth, and that is what had drawn her to Dennis in the first place.

“We’re doing some work,” Norman explained. His steely eyes were still on her, probing. He smelled like the outside, like sun and breeze, like her own grandfather.

“I like the paint,” Mary managed. He nodded, still searching her with his eyes, his jaw tensing as he breathed.

He was about to say something more when Dennis appeared in the hallway. “I think it’s time that we go,” he said. Mary slipped by Norman and went to the door, and the three of them thanked the Collinses and walked down the landing steps to the Lexus. Mary could feel Norman watching her walk away, and her heart boomed with each step she took. She got in the car and exhaled loudly, sinking down in the seat beside Dennis.

“What’s wrong?” Brian asked from the back. His hand was on Mary’s shoulder, and she liked it there, liked the comfort it afforded her.

She told them about the fake rooms and Norman finding her. She hadn’t trusted his look, that curious gaze he had given her. She thought he knew something that he hadn’t told them.

“Maybe they were really doing a renovation,” Dennis said.

“Come on, Dennis,” Brian huffed. “Where do they live? That house is tiny. If all the rooms are bare, where do they sleep?”

“What is it, then?” Dennis came back. “They knew we were coming? They just happened to be there when we arrived in a…in a fake house? And are they in on this, too? Williams killed Polly-”

“Deanna,” Mary corrected him.

“-and they’re all trying to cover for him? The woman at the school. Cavendish. This Troy guy at Winchester. The fake wife. Now this old couple. How big is this thing?”

“That’s what we’ve been asking,” Brian said flatly.

“How is he doing it?” asked Dennis. “These people are forty miles apart. How is he conducting it on the fly? What, are the Collinses his relatives? Has he paid them to lie for him? Is he trying to-”

Mary had it before Dennis did. She sat up straight and asked, “Is he trying to lead us to something?”

They all thought about that for a moment. The car rolled out During and hit the chip and seal of the connecting road, and Dennis drove back toward Highway 72.

“Maybe Williams didn’t have anything to do with Deanna,” she said, “but he knows who did. Maybe the deadline…maybe it’s still applicable.”

“The deadline?” Brian asked.

“Tomorrow,” she said. “The class was going to end tomorrow. I think something is going to happen.”

“But Deanna Ward disappeared twenty years ago, Mary,” Dennis said.

“I just think…” She trailed off. Her mind was spinning. The answer was somewhere out there; the meaning of all this could be divined, if she could just concentrate hard enough, if she could just focus…

“He knows who did it,” she said.

“Why would he do that?” Brian now. “To withhold evidence like that is criminal, isn’t it? I mean, it makes Williams as culpable as anyone in this thing. In that case he’s an accomplice. If he has information, like Bethany Cavendish said, then why not just say it?”

“Puzzles,” Dennis said. His eyes were on the road, and the sunlight glinted harshly against his sunglasses.

“What?” Brian urged him on.

“He loves puzzles. You should see his study. He had these ancient puzzles from China. They’re called tangrams. You cut out these shapes, these silhouettes, and you place them in the puzzle. He had made some…weird ones.”

“What do you mean ‘weird’?” asked Brian.

“I mean some of them were lurid. Some had decapitated heads. Naked bodies. Rapes. They were disgusting. He saw me looking at them and put them away in a closet, but I had already seen enough.”

None of them said a word. The road trundled beneath them, kicking up gravel against the undercarriage. Dennis met the intersection of Highway 72 and took a right. Toward Bell City.

“So are you saying that Williams is leading us through this just because he likes puzzles?” Mary asked. “I don’t know if I buy that or not.”

“What’s the other scenario?” Dennis wanted to know. “That Williams is Deanna’s abductor? Do either of you believe that?”

Mary thought of his strength when she had pushed him that day in class. His tremendous strength. Did he abduct Deanna Ward and was he now, almost twenty years later, leading them on a wild chase to find her? Or was he intentionally leading them off base, putting up foils to their plan, placing “actors” here and there to drive them away from the truth?

Motive, she then thought. What would the motive be for playing this game?

“Well,” Dennis said, “I don’t believe it. I think what Mary said earlier was right: Williams knows who took Deanna Ward. This is all part of his game.”

“Aren’t games supposed to be fun?” asked Brian, his voice determined and lacing. “There’s nothing fun about a missing girl.”

“I’m telling you,” Dennis said, “Williams didn’t do this. I spoke to him. I know if someone is telling the truth, and he was genuine when he said that Polly was a logic puzzle and nothing more. This other thing, Deanna-I don’t know what that is, but I can assure you that Williams is trying to tell us something. Maybe he can’t say it the way he wants to say it. Maybe there’s someone who knows the truth, and Williams is trying to tell us what he knows without alerting this other person.”

Mary thought of the deadline again. She thought of Deanna Ward, and if this could possibly be about her. In a way, it made perfect sense. No wonder Williams’s logic game had been so easy: he was just preparing them for the real test.

She thought about the deadline and what it must mean. As they drove across Cale and toward Bell City, she realized that they had only twenty-four hours to locate Leonard Williams and find out what he knew.

30

Bell City is one of the poorest communities in the state of Indiana. It has about five thousand residents and rests on the border of Martin County. It became famous years ago for a basketball game played at Bloomington, where Bell East High School beat number-one-ranked Cale High for a shot at its first-ever state championship.

There is a sign commemorating that feat as you pass into the Bell City limits. It has been dented, pocked by thrown rocks, and nearly torn off its post, surely by Cale residents still bitter about a game that was played almost thirty years ago.

In Bell City there is a Dairy Queen, a bait and tackle shop, and the local high school and junior high. There are a variety of churches, most of them Baptist, some of them falling into disorder along the side of Highway 72. The road in Bell City becomes cracked and pitted because the asphalt has not been tended to in so long. The three of them were entering, it appeared, a ghost town.

They were looking for the girl who had been mistakenly taken to Wendy Ward that fateful day. The police had trailed Deanna’s father, Star, to the trailer and arrested him on site. Yet the girl had turned out not to be Deanna. Brian was particularly interested in driving the twenty-five extra miles to see this trailer, though he couldn’t tell them exactly what he expected to find.

Dennis stopped for directions at a gas station just outside of downtown. He went inside while Brian put gas in the Lexus. When Dennis returned, he said the attendant had told him to drive to Gary’s Diner because apparently Gary was the guy you asked if you had questions of particular importance. The diner was right beside the courthouse, which they saw up on a hill, its dome rising out of the tree line like some sort of battlement. They would probably be able to find somebody there, the attendant said, someone they could talk to about Deanna Ward.

The town proper was nearly dead. There was a furniture store that was open across from the courthouse, and two men were carrying out sofas while others were pinning red sales tags to the upholstery. The three parked at the courthouse and walked the three blocks to Gary’s Diner, their jackets tied around their waists and the high sun beating down on their faces.

There were no cars in the parking lot, and the waitresses were all outside the diner, leaning against a picket fence that blocked the patrons’ view of the funeral parlor next door. They were all sharing a cigarette, passing it down the line and taking deep drags with their eyes closed. It was an unseasonably hot day in early October, the trees all aflame with wild color.

The women didn’t move when they saw the three students coming. They just stood there in a row by that white fence and continued to smoke their cigarette. They were wearing pink, frilly uniforms straight out of the 1950s. It was a different kind of pink, a pink that was softer and more subtle than anything you see today. Mary felt as if she had stepped back in time. Everything was unreal, beginning with Brian’s story of the book last week, to Professor Williams’s disappearance. And now here she was, in this strange little town, trying to find answers to a question she didn’t even know how to phrase.

“How are you doing today, ladies?” Dennis asked the waitresses. Always the charmer.

“We’re okay,” one of them said dubiously.

“We’ve just got a couple of questions for you, if you don’t mind.”

A tall black woman who had assumed the role of spokeswoman nodded.

“We heard about a kidnapping that happened years ago out in Cale. We were just wondering-”

“Deanna,” the girl said quickly.

“So you’ve heard of her?”

“Who hasn’t?”

“Wasn’t there some tie to Bell City? Something about a girl in a trailer home out on the outskirts of town that looked like Deanna?”

The waitresses looked at each other. Their glances were telling-they were communicating apprehension among one another, silently wondering how much they should tell these outsiders.

“You’ll have to ask Gary about that,” the woman said.

“Gary?”

“He’s the boss here. He knows everybody in Bell. He’d be able to tell you anything you wanted to know.”

“Gary here right now?” asked Brian.

“He’s on vacation,” the woman said, stubbing out the cigarette on the fence. “Daytona Beach. Be back next week.”

“We don’t-” Dennis began, but Mary cut him off. She could see where this was going, and for all Dennis’s charm he wasn’t going to get answers from these girls. She stepped in front of Dennis and smiled at the girl.

“Listen,” she said. “We’ve got this class. We’re students down in Winchester. You know how it is. We’ve all got a paper do this week about the Deanna Ward case, and we need to just drive by that trailer to look at it. For inspiration, you know.”

“I’m at Cale Community,” said one woman. “Taking twelve hours this semester.”

“I always wanted to go to Winchester,” the black woman said. “But I couldn’t afford it. I made a three-point-five in high school. Got accepted and everything. But the money, you know…” She trailed off. Then she looked at Mary, her eyes steady with some deep knowledge. “You’re talking about Polly,” she said.

Mary felt the breath go out of her. Brian, who was just beside her, took her arm involuntarily, the way you brace yourself as you’re falling. “Polly?” Mary managed to say.

“The girl the cops found in the trailer. A lot of people said she looked just like Deanna. She was a few years in front of me in school. Everybody said she was a witch. You know. You know how they do. They get to talking about you and they just don’t want to stop. Well, after that thing with Deanna, everybody started talking about Polly like she was some spirit. My mom knew her aunt and uncle. That’s who she lived with out there on Upper Stretch Road. They finally had to move away from here out to DeLane. Couldn’t take it anymore, I guess.” The woman paused, looked off in the distance. “I think in a strange way a lot of people blamed Polly for Deanna’s disappearance. I don’t know what that was about. Just because they looked alike? Just because they were both young and pretty? Please. Some people in this town are so backwards. It ain’t like Winchester.”

With nothing more to ask, the three thanked the waitresses and returned to the Lexus. The day was still and smooth, a few clouds drifted lazily across the sky. Dennis opened all the doors, and they waited as the seats cooled. They felt it now. They were close, close enough where they were nearly one step removed from Deanna Ward.

“What does this mean?” Brian finally asked.

That Williams is the culprit here, Mary thought but didn’t say. She didn’t want to get into that again, because it was clear that Dennis didn’t agree with her theory. She didn’t feel like arguing with him, at least not until she knew a little bit more.

“It means that we have to go out to Upper Stretch Road to find that trailer,” Dennis said.

“But you heard her, Dennis,” Mary said. “They moved away. Polly’s gone.”

“I think he’s leading us there, Mary,” Brian said plaintively. “I think we’re supposed to go. The detective talked about the trailer, Bethany Cavendish did, and now that waitress.”

Mary remained silent. She couldn’t debate the point that it seemed as if Williams was, in fact, leading them to the trailer for some reason. She thought about that old comic strip of the carrot on a string leading the mule. This is what she felt like: led, played, not in control of anything she did.

Just as Dennis was bending into the driver’s seat, Brian said, “Wait. I have something to tell you.” They both looked at him. Mary braced herself for some acknowledgment that Brian had been in on it all along, or that Brian knew where Williams was but had not told them for some reason. But he only said, his voice soft and hesitant, “I met Polly.”

“You what?” Dennis asked.

“It was two weeks ago. I’d had too much to drink. This girl started following me around, and we ended up”-diverting his eyes from Mary now, refusing to look at her-“down in Chop Hall, by the kilns. She told me her name was Polly, and of course I didn’t believe her. I think I got mad. Irate. I screamed at her. I thought she was part of this, you know. I thought Williams had sent her there to show me up. The next day, this guy told me the story of Deanna Ward.”

“How old would Polly be?” asked Mary.

“Thirty-five?” Dennis guessed. “Forty?”

“It was hard to tell,” Brian said. “She looked-she looked young. But she was hiding her face. Her hair was over one eye and she kept turning to the side, like she was afraid she was going to reveal herself. Look, guys, I didn’t know what it meant. I would have told you if”-he looked at Mary, shame in his face-“if I thought it meant something.”

Mary couldn’t stifle the laughter that was in her throat then. She let it out and it crashed out into the air like an animal uncaged, her soul finally, after weeks of pressure, finding release in what Brian had said.

“What?” he asked, reddening.

She couldn’t answer. She only laughed, and when they were in the car and heading toward Upper Stretch Road, she was still laughing, giggling every now and then into her fist. “Shit,” she heard Brian mutter. But then he was laughing, too, and then Dennis, until they couldn’t contain themselves anymore.

How silly! thought Mary. Everything means something.

31

Upper Stretch Road was a sinking stretch of highway in northern Martin County. If they had felt as if they were in the backwoods at the Collinses’ house on During Street, then now they were beyond the pale of civilization. Rusted car hulks burned orange under the sun out in front lawns. A group of children, many of them in diapers, played inside the carcass of an old Cale school bus. The road was just a whisper now, nonexistent, pitted and damaged and crumbling down the hillside.

They drove for two or three miles. They were beginning to wonder if they had missed it when the forest to their right opened up and they saw the trailer. It was in a sad shape, dilapidated and caving, its facade red with rust. The color gave the impression of blood, and Mary could not help but feel that she was entering into the final chapter of Williams’s game. What would it be like, to find a lost girl? But what if the girl was dead and Williams had killed her? There were still so many questions-but there was something about this abandoned trailer out in this expanse of nothingness. An answer was in there. She knew it.

They got out of the Lexus and stomped through the high grass. The trailer had been set up on cinder blocks, and every time the wind blew the whole thing creaked, as if it were going to tip over and break apart into a thousand pieces. The sky was graying up now, and a little mist was beginning to fall. The grass swayed at their knees, and wisps of oak seed blew here and there, white as snow.

“Look,” Brian said, dragging up the remains of a tricycle out of the muck. The significance was clear: these are the things that had belonged to Polly. Finally, she was more than a misty apparition they were trying to find for credit in some stupid class. She was real, and they were standing outside the place where she had grown up.

They walked around to the back. An old children’s pool was there, turned upside down. A swing set without the swings. The ground here and there had been burned, and Mary thought about what Edna Collins had said about kids building fires on their property. It seemed that the same activities went on at this trailer, and suddenly Mary felt sad for Polly, that the girl had unwillingly caused all of this. And for what? Just because she bore a striking resemblance to a missing girl from Cale? There had to be more than that.

“Over here,” Dennis called.

He was standing on a small embankment that overlooked a stream. At the bottom of the embankment was a motorcycle. Its wheels were missing but the bike was otherwise intact. “What is that?” Brian said, pointing. They strained to see. “There,” he directed them, “painted on the side of the bike.”

“It looks like…stars,” Mary said.

“It’s his,” Brian said unequivocally. “Deanna’s father’s motorcycle.”

They went back to the trailer and looked in the dirty windows, swiping away the grime that had accumulated on the panes with their sleeves. There was no furniture inside. The walls and floor were stripped bare, and in one corner there was a lump of rags and trash. There was something about the lump, though, something angular and strange-

The lump moved.

Mary jumped back from the window. “What the hell is that?” asked Brian, who was standing next to her on a milk crate, looking in the kitchen window.

Mary looked back inside. The man was sitting up now, rubbing his eyes as if he were just waking up from a long sleep.

The mist had turned into a light rain, which now slanted down and ticked off the window, striking Mary sharply on the cheeks. She was too afraid to run or move or do much of anything but stare at the man. This, she thought. This is where it ends.

“What?” she said aloud. She didn’t know why she had said it, but it was the word that had come out, choked and broken like a gasp.

From across the room where he lay the man looked at her. He looked right at her. The window was so streaked that it looked as if the inside of the trailer was the inside of a lung, or a storm cloud-everything was blurred and stretched. The man got up and took a few steps toward the window.

“What the hell does he want?” Brian asked. He was suddenly at her arm, squeezing it, priming her maybe for a mad dash to the car.

The man slid open the window. It broke and cracked away from the nails that held it down to the rotted sill. The man leaned out as if he were serving them from a drive thru window. “Afternoon,” he said.

Mary felt his hot breath on her face. She tasted him-his breath was dirty, as if he had been eating soil. His teeth were ruined, and little wisps of oily hair splayed out on both sides of his head. But there was something attractive about the man, something Mary couldn’t identify. He had been someone’s lover once, a long time ago.

“You the folks here about Polly?” he asked.

Mary nodded. She was still locked in place, immobile.

“Sharon called me from the diner. That’s my girl. Said there were some kids down from DeLane looking into the Deanna Ward thing. Anyway. Said I might know something about that. I said, ‘Yes ma’am, I certainly do. Or I know someone who does.’”

“Who would that be?” Dennis asked.

“He’s at the Wobble Inn. That’s down on Rattlesnake Ridge, out there by I-64. You just take Upper Stretch all the way to its end and take a right on Hopper Road. You’ll be on the ridge then. Follow the signs toward the interstate. The inn is up on the right-hand side, just a mile off the freeway. You can hear the rumble of the semitrucks from there.”

“Who are we supposed to see at the inn?” Brian this time.

“You’ll know him. Tends bar there nights. You tell him Marco sent you, and he’ll tell you everything he knows. Which is a lot, let me tell you. The boy is like a goddamned encyclopedia on Deanna Ward. Some folks said he might have been involved in it, but that ain’t the truth. He’s just curious, you know, like you all.”

The man smiled his ruined smile again. “I don’t want you all thinking I’m some crazy,” he said.

“No.” Dennis again, assuring the man. “Not at all.”

“It ain’t like I live here or nothin’. This is just…temporary. Just until I get on my feet and Sharon gets her own place. Look, I got it nice in here. Hot plate. Cell phone. I’m twenty-first century, baby.” Mary saw that he was trying to convince himself more than them. The man did an odd little bow then and leaned back into the shadows of the trailer. Slowly, as if favoring a hurt leg, he returned to that corner, where he curled up among his rags and old quilts.

Then the sky opened up and the rain came flat across the wind into their eyes and faces. “Run!” Dennis said, and they all dashed for the Lexus. Inside, the rain crashed against the windshield and their breath steamed every surface, making it impossible to see. For a few minutes they sat in the car without speaking. The inn is just a mile off the freeway, Mary thought. There was something to that statement but she didn’t know what. She decided to let it be until she could articulate it; she had found in the last six weeks that there were “private” thoughts, such as her curiosity about Summer McCoy in the Mike photograph and the call from the campus police, and there were more shared thoughts, possible facts that she needed someone to check. Confusing the two, she knew, would only get her into trouble.

“Are we ready?” Dennis asked when the rain had slacked a bit.

“I guess,” Mary said, too soft for anyone to hear.

They set off down Upper Stretch Road, toward the Wobble Inn.

32

The bartender was a member of MENSA. He was telling them about his many failed attempts to get a degree, how the “establishment” had robbed him every time. When Dennis asked what his interests were, he said, “How much time do you have?” He began to list them: seventeenth-century poetry, fluid mechanics, string theory, game theory, chaos theory. He looked at them squarely, gauging their level of intimidation. Brian sipped his Diet Coke. “Anyway,” the man said, wiping down a glass with the long towel he had draped over his shoulder, “none of it is applicable to the real world. I guess that’s why I’m here.” He spread his arms so they could behold it, this dark little dive off to the side of a rarely traveled stretch of two-lane highway. There were four or five people there, all men, and they were huddled in a back corner playing Texas Hold ’Em. Mary wondered if the man on Upper Stretch Road had somehow led them astray.

They were trying to bide their time with the bartender, disarm him somehow so they could ask about Polly. He was going on now about one of his theories-the one where there were multiple galaxies “pancaked,” as he explained it, on top of one another. “It’s a certainty that there is extraterrestrial life in this model,” he said, his tone deftly serious. And then he leaned closer to them, his finger pointed toward Dennis’s chest. “An absolute certainty.”

Brian was getting anxious. His foot was tapping below the bar, and he was down to the water in his Coke. The men in the back fell into sudden laughter, the sound like a shot in the close acoustics of the tavern. “Did you know Polly?” he finally asked.

The man stared at them. He wiped out another glass and placed it on a high shelf, his eyes never leaving Brian’s. “Sure,” he said, his voice calm now and searing. “Everybody did.”

“Did she come in here?” Dennis went on.

“She was just a kid when she left Bell City. Nineteen or twenty. This wasn’t her kind of place.”

“Where did you know her from?” asked Dennis.

“I knew her aunt and uncle. They lived out on Upper Stretch Road.”

The bartender was being difficult. He was stubbing up, closing them out of some information that Mary could see he had. He was leery of them, she knew, suspicious of these questions. Just the name, the word itself-Polly-must have sent a charge through the residents of Bell City.

“What kind of girl was she?” Dennis tried.

“Nice,” the man said. “Sweet girl. Got involved in some stuff, you know. We all did. Made mistakes. Regretted them. Lived to see another day. It happens. Otherwise, she was just an average teenager.”

“Stuff?” asked Brian.

He was still looking at them, his gaze almost hot. He shook his head, then; laughed a little. The lights behind the bar were severe, probably on a mandate from the county because bad light led to fake identification scandals that a place like the Wobble Inn surely couldn’t afford. The man’s face was lit harshly in the glow.

He knows something, Mary thought. It’s right there. If I could just get him to open up. If I could just-

“Marco sent us,” she said, smiling at the man.

“Marco?”

“We saw him earlier today,” Brian put in, moving his stool in closer so that the bartender could refill his soda.

“Damn, Marco knows more about it than I do,” the owner said, spritzering the drink into Brian’s glass.

“But Marco’s not here,” Mary said coolly.

The bartender blinked. His eyes finally disengaged from them, and he took a step away from the bar. “Look,” he said, “everything I know is just secondhand. I got it all from Marco, anyway, so I’m not sure why he sent you to me. But if you’re really interested, there’s some stuff that will make your toes curl.”

“Such as?” Dennis asked.

“Such as: the girl was abandoned by her real mother and father. She was staying with the aunt and uncle because she had nowhere else to go. And these were good people, like I said, but they didn’t know nothin’ about raising a girl. They wanted to do what was best for Polly, but she got wild. She fell in with the Creeps. Dom Frederick started seeing Polly-and now, keep in mind, Dom was thirty-four and Polly was all of seventeen-and he was a member of that gang. Of course, that’s how she met Star, Deanna’s daddy.”

“What kind of a relationship did she have with Star?” asked Brian, urging the man forward, his foot now going crazy beneath the bar.

“Different people said different things, you know? Marco and Star went to school together down in Cale, and so Marco knew those folks pretty well. Star was fresh on the girl, I do know that. He came in here one night about that time talking sweet about her. We’d just opened. This was right before Deanna”-Mary began to see that people in these parts labeled periods of time according to that divide, Before Deanna and After Deanna-“and nobody knew a thing about what was going to happen. We were all just ignorant of it, you know, like the man standing on the bridge watching the storm coming on, and then in a few minutes lightning strikes and zap! The guy’s hit. He’s charred because he didn’t have enough sense to get off the bridge, poor bastard.” The bartender paused in his story, looked back toward the men playing cards. They had stopped to listen to him. He was commanding attention now. He had the floor and he didn’t intend to give it up. “Marco says that Star was seeing Polly’s aunt, but who knows. Who knows why he came around here. I never did really believe that he and Polly…you know. This guy could have had any woman in Martin County. What business would he have with this little girl?”

“Some people say Polly looked like his daughter,” Brian said.

“If by ‘looked like’ you mean that they were both teenage girls, then ‘some people’ are right. That’s about the extent of it. I saw Polly all the time around Bell, and I saw pictures of Deanna of course on the news when it happened, and there wasn’t much of a resemblance. The police fucked that one up. They said he confessed to it and everything. I never believed that. If he confessed to it, then why didn’t they arrest him?”

“Maybe the confession wasn’t about Deanna,” Dennis offered.

“You mean that New Mexico bullshit?” the bartender said. “No, there’s something more to this. I’m not a conspiracy theorist”-though, clearly, he was-“but come on. Any idiot can see that Polly was not Deanna Ward.”

He stopped talking and poured himself a beer. His hands were shaking a little, and it was obvious that the story had rattled him. The men in the back resumed their game. No, thought Mary. There’s more. There’s something that he left out.

“That’s about all I know,” he said, his voice scratchy now and nearly gone.

“Thank you,” Dennis said.

They turned to leave. As they were walking out of the bar, Mary whispered to Brian, “There’s more to find here. He didn’t tell us anything that we didn’t already know. The guy-Marco-said that we would get our answers from this guy.”

“That’s all he’s got, Mary,” Brian said. They reached the door and opened it. The world outside had the thick and heavy smell of rain. As Marco had said, she could hear the nearby echo of eighteen-wheelers surging down I-64. The trees dripped, and somewhere nearby a creek rushed noisily down through the hollow on its way toward the Thatch River.

A sudden thought came to Mary. She stopped at the door, one foot outside.

“Do you have the book?” she asked Brian. He removed it from his pocket, just as he had done for Dennis that day on the Tau roof.

She returned to the bar and got the bartender’s attention. “Yeah?” he asked, clearly disturbed to see her again.

“Have you ever seen this man?” Mary asked, holding the book into the bar light so the bartender could see Leonard Williams on the back flap.

The man’s eyes widened. “Oh yeah,” he said. “I’ve seen him. That’s Polly’s uncle.”

33

It was late when they made it back onto Highway 72. It began to rain again, harder even than before, and when Dennis could not see the road any longer he pulled into a Days Inn, the students deciding to stay overnight in Cale. They pooled together all the money in their pockets, sixty-five dollars exactly, and got the cheapest room at the hotel.

There was an uncomfortable moment when Brian and Mary were in the room together and Dennis, who had sprinted to be the first in the bathroom, was changing. They were all wet from their run from the car, and Brian and Mary looked at each other warily, their clothes dripping on the carpet. Finally, when it was clear that Dennis was showering, they turned their backs on each other and got undressed, putting on some golf clothes that Dennis had in the trunk of the Lexus. Mary wore a long PING oxford and her underwear, and before Brian could turn around she dove into the bed so that he could not see her. Brian had put on a pair of bright-colored, checkered shorts, and he stood by the mirror shirtless, looking at himself. Mary had to laugh at the sight of it, and she lost it when Dennis appeared from the bathroom wearing pants in an identical pattern. He and Brian climbed into bed together as if they were twins, regarding each other suspiciously and creating a boundary down the middle of the bed with pillows so their skin couldn’t touch during the night.

When the lights were off, Mary said, “What next?”

The boys shifted in their bed. A car passed in the parking lot and spread a white arc of light into the room, blanching the walls.

“What are our choices?” Brian asked, his voice muffled in the pillow.

“We could go back to Winchester,” she said, “and tell people what we know. We could tell Dean Orman, get the folks at Carnegie to take action.”

“But what do we know?” Dennis asked skeptically.

“We know that Williams was Polly’s uncle,” replied Mary. “We know that Polly and Deanna Ward were connected somehow, not just because they looked alike, but also because Deanna’s father was driving out to Bell City to see Polly. In that way, we have Williams tied to the missing girl. We have the telephone call from the campus cops, which was clearly rigged by Williams. We have Williams’s ‘wife’ giving me that note, and then the weirdness at the Collinses’ house on During Street.”

“And Troy,” Brian put in. “We’ve got Troy Hardings admitting to a conspiracy over e-mail.”

“It’s not enough,” Dennis offered. He kicked off the covers, and Mary could see his plaid legs doing bicycle kicks in the bed. Mary remembered this tic. When he was nervous, Dennis always lay on the floor and began his bicycle routine. Sometimes he would go for a half hour or more; it made her tired just watching him. “They’ll just ask what we were doing, wasting our time in Cale looking for a girl the police have been searching for for at least twenty years. I shouldn’t even be out here on this-this wild chase. Christ, Mary, I’ve got an exam tomorrow.”

It was the first time Mary had thought about her other class. She had her lit class in the morning. They were wrapping up City of Glass, and she didn’t want to miss their last discussion of the novella. But right now, it certainly wasn’t looking good that she would get back to Winchester in time to make it.

“We might as well go to the police if we’re going to go that route,” Dennis scoffed then.

“Maybe we should,” she said diffidently.

“And tell them what? Tell them that we have all these fake leads and this fake book and that we think we might be a part of an intricate game with a professor from the university who has disappeared off the face of the planet? They’ll laugh us right out of the station. None of it makes sense, Mary. None of it makes a damn bit of sense.”

They lay there, each of them looking up at the dark ceiling. She had to agree with him, of course. Sense was not a word that could be rationally applied to their situation at the moment. Across the room, Dennis churned his legs and counted under his breath.

“What do you think, Brian?” Mary asked. Over on his side of the bed, he was quiet.

“I don’t know,” he sighed. Mary knew that, like her, he was exhausting himself from turning all the complexities of the game around and around in his mind. “I seriously…I seriously think about hurting him.”

“Hurting who?” Dennis asked.

“Williams. At all this shit he’s caused. I haven’t slept in a week. I can’t-I can’t seem to get my mind off it. If I could get to him and demand answers, you know. Even if he told us Deanna was dead, then that would at least be something.”

“She’s not dead,” Mary said softly.

“It makes me wonder about Dean Orman’s wife,” said Brian.

Dennis stopped kicking. “What does?” he asked.

“This,” Brian replied. “All this. After seeing her that night, I just wonder if she was part of this thing or if Williams was somehow…” He trailed off, couldn’t define the thought.

“That night?” Dennis asked.

“I saw her out on Montgomery Street. By the Thatch River. She’d been beaten. She said that something had happened between her and the guy that looked after their boat for them. A former cop, she said. She wouldn’t let me tell the dean because she was afraid Orman would kill the guy.”

“Pig,” Dennis whispered.

Brian bolted upright in the bed. “What did you say?” he asked Dennis.

“The guy who looks after their boat,” Dennis said. “He’s called Pig. That’s where Williams got his name for the bad guy in his Polly story.”

On her side of the room, Mary tried to figure it out. She worked it around in her head, fused the two narratives, Polly’s and Deanna Ward’s, and now this third narrative that starred Dean Orman’s wife and the former police officer called Pig. But she couldn’t come up with anything. It was all a muddle, jumbled, like the bar owner’s theory of the pancaked universes. What was real, what was fake, what was part of the game and what wasn’t? She lay back down and shut her eyes.

“How could it all be related?” She realized, too late, that she had said it aloud.

“I don’t know,” Brian replied. “But I just have a feeling now, after all we’ve seen today, that it was too coincidental. Too freakish, you know. How could Elizabeth Orman have been there just as I was driving back to campus? It was like she-like she was waiting for me.”

“We have to go to the police,” Mary said.

“No.” Dennis now, speaking in such a hushed voice that it was barely above a whisper.

“What do you mean ‘no’?” Mary said angrily.

“I mean no. Out of the question. It’s too soon, Mary.”

“People’s lives could be in danger, Dennis. This is going beyond some-what did you call it?-some tangram. This is real life here.” She realized she had stood up, and she was approaching him across the bedroom. Her underwear was showing, but she didn’t care. She was losing control of herself, of her emotions; she was past the tipping point now. She was so angry-at Williams, at Dennis, at Polly for getting involved in all this somehow. She wanted it all to go back to normal, to when it was just a class. But somewhere along the way they had crossed some imaginary boundary and things had spilled over into the real.

“I know Elizabeth Orman,” Dennis said. Mary stopped. She knew what he meant by his voice, by the seemingly innocuous word know, and the thought of it deflated her, sent her back to her bed where she collapsed face down into the pillow.

“What do you mean?” Brian asked.

“I mean I knew her. I’m familiar with her. Listen…” Dennis began the bicycle thing again. Mary could not listen to him. There was a roar through her entire body, a piercing noise that filled her with an old, familiar ache. “Listen,” he said again, his legs kicking madly and his breath chopped and labored, “there’s something I haven’t told you. I figured it out by…by the San Francisco thing.”

“The San Francisco thing?” Brian asked.

“Well, that wasn’t first but that cemented it in my mind,” Dennis said. “Polly’s mother left and went away to San Francisco. Elizabeth told me a story about her mother running off to San Francisco with this guy. That’s when I figured out the link between Williams and Elizabeth Orman.”

34

Dennis Flaherty told them about Elizabeth Orman. He didn’t tell them all of it, of course, just bits and pieces. He told them about the boat, and about his reasons for going to the Thatch that day. He told them about their relationship, and some of what she had told him at the Kingsley Hotel. He told them about speaking to Dean Orman that night at the house on the hill. And then he told them his secret: Elizabeth Orman used to see Leonard Williams.

“It was a few years ago,” Dennis explained. “She didn’t think anything of it, you know. Just a fling, to her. But Williams was smitten with her. He fell in love with her, I think. When she tried to break it off, he wasn’t happy. He started getting crazy. Sending her flowers every day. Showing up at their home and just standing outside, watching her. She got scared. She finally told Dr. Orman, and the dean was furious. He confronted Williams at a faculty meeting. It got real bad. Drama. The two men almost came to blows, right there on the third floor of the Carnegie Building. Williams was reprimanded, put on some kind of suspension. They sent him overseas to teach. Sort of to get him out of the way, you know? When he came back, the dean got worried about him again. That’s when he hired this guy, this former cop, to watch after his boat. He was afraid Williams was going to deface it or something. Apparently he’d threatened to set it on fire. This former cop, of course-his name is Pig Stephens.”

“Do you think he’s part of this thing?” Brian asked.

“No,” Dennis said. “I think that Williams put Pig into his narrative just to get a dig in at the Ormans. He was into irony like that. A coal black sense of humor. He told me about Elizabeth when we talked. Was real forthcoming. He claimed the affair was nothing but Dean Orman, who had always been intimidated by him, made it into something much more than it really was. But…”

“What?” Brian urged.

“But I don’t know what this means. I don’t know why Pig would hurt Elizabeth. Unless, you know, unless it’s just random. Unless it’s just a random thing and Pig just flew off the handle one night. Hell, I don’t know.”

“Williams says there is no randomness,” Brian said, sarcasm thick in his voice. “Everything happens for a reason.”

The two boys laughed at that, but Mary had stopped hearing them. She could only think of Dennis and Elizabeth Orman. The image kept flashing through her mind, the sickening image of the two of them together. It shouldn’t have bothered her. She knew that. She and Dennis had had a thing once, a long time ago-freshman year, for goodness sake-and now they were through. At least she thought so. Hoped so. But still the image was there, dogging her, teasing her. She shut her eyes against it but that only made it stronger, more vivid. Suddenly she wanted to be home, away from this mess, this game. She felt hot tears in her eyes, and she had no choice but to let them come.

35

In the morning Mary found Brian outside on their little balcony, sitting on a plastic chair and looking out at the bustling traffic moving down Highway 72. She took a seat beside him, and they silently watched the gray Wednesday morning shift in the early, diffuse sunlight. “We’re at the end, aren’t we?” she asked him.

“Six weeks to the day,” Brian replied. “Williams’s deadline.”

Neither of them knew exactly what it meant. But something was going to happen today-something horrible, perhaps. They just had to figure out what it was. That was the only way they could stop it: by going back, back to the clues Williams had supplied them regarding Polly.

Polly is Deanna. Deanna is Polly.

When they had all showered, they decided to return to Cale Central. Even if Bethany Cavendish was a player-an actor-in this thing, she might be able to lead them somewhere they hadn’t been. The book was the key, Dennis offered. If they could understand the book, then they could understand it all. So it was decided. He would go in to talk to Bethany Cavendish this time, show her the book, and try to get an answer from her about what it was, what it meant.

They arrived before 8:00 a.m. School had yet to begin. Students were pulling into the parking lot in their converted cars, trucks that rode low to the ground and had been painted outrageous colors, sports cars that were blinding with chrome. Brian and Mary waited for Dennis outside, under that manic American flag. “What do you think about him?” Brian asked Mary.

“Him?”

“Dennis. You like him?”

“I dated him once,” she said. There was no reason to keep it from him now.

“I know,” Brian said.

They let that hang between them. Mary sat on the curb and Brian kicked pebbles around the parking lot. It was now 8:15. Dr. Kiseley’s lit class would have started by now back at Winchester. They would be discussing the book City of Glass, pondering on Quinn’s last days, talking about the symbolic meaning of the red notebook that the main character used to document his life. Existentialism and all that. The meaning of real. “To write it down is to make it become real,” Kiseley had told them. “What Quinn is doing is fighting off the idea of the interior. By writing in the red notebook, he is admitting that he is invested in facts and not the imagination. In this way, he is bringing into the world the details of his own demise.”

“I could tell by the way you two acted together,” Brian was saying. “It’s nothing. Don’t worry about it. We all have our own past. I don’t begrudge you for it.” He smiled, cuffed her on the arm playfully.

Mary looked away, her face hot. “It was…” She didn’t know what word to use. Nothing probably, but she was sure Brian would see through the lie.

Out of her periphery she saw two students leave the school grounds. They were walking briskly, their heads down, going toward the woods beside the school. Playing hooky, thought Mary. One of them had a shock of white-blond hair. When he turned, checking to see if anyone was following him, Mary recognized him immediately.

He was in one of the pictures at the Collinses’ house. One of the grandsons.

“I know that kid,” she told Brian.

He looked over, but the boys had already gone down the hill and were out of sight.

At first, she didn’t know what to think. But the longer they sat there, she began to wonder if this was not another test. Was Williams trying to tell them something else? Another plot twist, maybe?

She told Brian that she would be right back and jogged over to the edge of the woods. She looked into the dark trees, to the clearing that seemed to open up at the bottom of the hill, but she couldn’t see the boys. A light fog had descended, pulled down like a cloak through the tree line. Mary took a few steps into the woods, but she still couldn’t see the boys. “Hello?” she called. It’s no use, she thought. They’re gone by now. All the way out to the highway. She could hear I-64 out in the distance, the rock of those big trucks passing through Cale on their way to Indianapolis.

But then-a noise. Just off to her right.

Mary turned and saw something darting. Some presence. A boy, crouched and low.

“Are you there?” she called.

Again she saw something move, low to the ground. Then she saw him, just up ahead to her right. That white hair. Standing in the reeds of fog, the boy was like an apparition.

“What are you doing?” she called.

Nothing. Silence. The forest moved in the wind.

“Are you there?”

“What the fuck do you want, lady?” one of the boys asked.

“I just wanted to see if you knew anything about Polly.”

“Who the hell is Polly?”

Mary felt ashamed. It was getting to her now, all this chasing and uncovering. It was making her paranoid.

“Sorry,” she muttered, and she walked back out of the woods. Brian and Dennis were in the car when she got back. She slid into the front seat of the Lexus and they left Cale Central. On the service road that took them back to Highway 72 she saw him again. It was just him this time, the white-haired boy. He was standing on the shoulder of the road and watching the car pass. She was afraid to look in his eyes, afraid that she might see something that would make her want to go back and ask more questions.

36

“Bethany Cavendish is in on it,” Dennis announced. They were eating breakfast at a Denny’s near the high school. Mary had missed her lit class and now Dennis had missed his economics exam. It was becoming clear that they would all pay dearly for this little excursion. “She got all nervous. Started walking around the room, you know. Looking out the windows, like she was afraid someone might break in on us. She said that she didn’t know a thing about the book.”

“What do you mean?” Brian asked incredulously.

“She says that it had to be just a mistake. A printing malfunction.”

“Did you tell her about the book in Cale?”

“Of course. She said the same thing: printer malfunction. She said that the two books in DeLane and the one in Cale would have been shipped by the same company. Probably all the books in this part of the state would have the same glitch. But she was lying.” Dennis took a bite of his scrambled eggs. Mary was having toast (her appetite was almost nonexistent), and Brian wasn’t eating at all. Only Dennis seemed to have the composure to feed himself.

“What did she say when you asked her about Polly?”

“She told me the same thing she told you. That she didn’t really know anything about Polly. She said that Wendy and Star had left Cale about six months after Deanna disappeared, and now they were living somewhere near San Francisco. She knew there was a girl out in Bell City who looked like Deanna, but she just thought it had something to do with Star. Said that the man was a sleaze-ball. Scum.”

So they hadn’t found out anything more than they had yesterday. They weren’t necessarily back to square one, but they were close. Mary knew that they would have to return to Winchester in the afternoon, and if they returned without finding out what part Leonard Williams played in the Deanna Ward abduction, then why had they even come to Bell City and Cale in the first place?

“Do you think that girl you met at the kilns is still on campus, Brian?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I guess we could go back and find out. She wasn’t a student, because I looked her up. I asked some of the Dekes if they had seen me with her, but they were all drunk and couldn’t remember anything. She had just-appeared there. It’s like she was searching me out.”

They thought about that as Dennis read the newspaper at the table. When he came to the story in the Local section about Williams’s sudden departure, he read it aloud to them. They already knew everything in the story: that Williams had left before the semester ended, that Williams taught logic and philosophy courses at the school, that his office had been cleaned out. There was a statement by Dean Orman that read, “We are very concerned with these goings-on. We will get to the bottom of this. The first thing, of course, is to find out if Dr. Williams is well. Then we will get to the business of discovering why he chose to leave Winchester before the term was out.”

“Why did he leave?” Brian asked. He was drinking slowly from a glass of water, a few sips here and there. Mary noticed that he was as frazzled as she was, maybe even more so.

“You said it yourself,” Dennis said. “He left because he knew you all had gotten to Troy Hardings.”

“But Troy offered up the information about the book himself,” replied Mary. “It wasn’t like we were threatening him or anything. Well, actually Brian did threaten him. But that’s beside the point. He clearly wasn’t afraid of us. He could have just denied that the book was genuine, like Bethany Cavendish did. He could have just remained silent and not responded to our e-mails.”

“Maybe Williams and this Troy Hardings character were trying to tell us something,” Dennis tried. “By just disappearing like that, maybe they were trying to bring it to a head. They were trying to force our hand in some way. Trying to show us that the game was really just beginning.”

Mary thought, The game. Had the first five weeks of the course been simply a test, a sort of exhibition, for the real thing that was happening right now in Cale? How were Williams’s “clues” a part of this? She recalled that hanged man from the syllabus, and wondered who Williams imagined under the velvet hood. She thought about the red Honda Civic and the railroad tracks that the professor had strangely digitally imposed into the image. The house that had turned out to be a real house on During Street, the house where Deanna Ward lived before she disappeared. The dog, that black Labrador that had apparently belonged to Pig. And finally the U-Stor-It facility out by I-64 where Williams’s Polly had been kept.

What’s there? Mary wondered. What are we supposed to find? Something we aren’t seeing because we’re suddenly too close to the situation?

She put a couple of dollars down on the table and went to the bathroom. She washed her face and stood before the mirror, breathing deeply, trying to balance herself. She looked awful. Depleted and exhausted. Horrible.

When she came out of the bathroom the kid was standing there. He had on a big coat, too heavy for this time of year, and his white hair was long and in his eyes. He had been younger in the photos she had seen: a school picture with his smile gapped by missing teeth, and then later, with his mother and father and younger siblings in a family shot.

“What do you want?” she asked.

The boy continued to look at her. He was sizing her up, trying to gauge her intent.

“That name you said before,” he said. “That girl.”

“Polly?”

“Yeah. I know who she is.”

37

His name was Paul. They took him to the Cale Community Park, which had been his destination anyway. He said that some friends were meeting there. School, to him, was just a waste of his time. None of it mattered. The teachers sucked, and he got picked on all the time by the jocks. He was a frail kid, tiny in that big jacket, and Mary could see how he would be a favorite of the bullies at Cale Central. She had gone to Holy Cross in Louisville, and even at that Catholic school there were kids like Paul, kids who were the brunt of jokes, too scrawny to take up for themselves. Kids who had become bitter toward the system, and toward any adult. Paul’s clothes, his look, his face, even, asked the question: Why don’t you help me? Why didn’t you help me?

“My grandparents live in the house where that girl lived,” Paul told them. “Deanna. The one who went missing from Cale. Two or three years ago my friend Tony and me heard about this other girl, the one who looked like Deanna. My friends at school are dogging me all the time, you know, trying to have me get my grandparents to let them come over and have a séance. Sometimes we go over there in the field beside their house and smoke cigarettes. Drink wine coolers and stuff. My girlfriend, Therese, is big on that spiritual stuff. We took a Ouija board out there once and the thing started going crazy. It freaked us all out.”

“You’re lucky you didn’t get shot,” Mary said.

“Oh, Papa wouldn’t shoot anybody,” the boy said. “His shotgun isn’t even loaded. Anyway. Tony told me his older brother went to school out at Bell East with this girl who looked just like Deanna. It didn’t really mean anything to me until I started doing some research. In the computers at the library one day I looked her up on the computer. Saw a picture of her. They could have been the same girl. Polly and Deanna. Deanna and Polly. I started thinking about it, you know. Started wondering where it was leading.”

I know exactly how you feel, thought Mary.

“Well, one day me and Tony were bored and we decided to go out to Bell City to try to find out about this girl. This woman, I mean. We asked around, and someone said she was living down on Rattlesnake Ridge with some guy. Her family had left Bell City, but Polly hadn’t liked it so she came back. This was just down the road from that old bar, the Wobble Inn. Tony-he’s older than me, you know, out of school-we drove over there and talked to them. Acted like we were just interested in buying a car this guy had for sale, this red Honda. I kept looking at the woman, kept trying to place her, and man, was she weird. Kept hiding her face from me, turning it to one side so that I couldn’t, like, get a good look at her. It was almost like she was wearing a disguise.

“Of course I thought it was Deanna. Tony did, too. We got back to school and told a few people, and you know how that goes. Everybody wanted to see this woman. They’d all heard about her, back when it happened, back when their parents were in school. But it was like another chapter was opening now, and we had started it. We thought we were going to hit it big, solve this old crime and get famous, but it never turned out like that. Polly, or Deanna, or whoever the hell she was, left Bell City. It made the papers. Polly’s aunt and uncle even made a statement, said that it was ridiculous to suggest she and Deanna were the same person. They’d raised her from when she was a little girl. Her uncle even wrote a book about Deanna, I heard. Or at least that’s what Mrs. Sumner says at school. I never read it.”

“I don’t recommend it,” Brian said bitterly. “It’s boring.”

“So anyway, it blew over. We never did go back there to that house in Bell City. We were too scared to. My mom and dad got a letter from someone, a real heated thing, saying we had opened up old wounds that should have never been opened. It wasn’t too long after that that someone started that rumor about Deanna’s remains being found out in California, but I never believed it. I think she’s still out there somewhere, and I think if you can find Polly you’ll find Deanna.”

Mary looked at this scrawny boy, trying to register what he had said. Some girls played tennis up on the park courts, laughing at every missed hit. The playground was empty, the swings blowing back and forth, their rusted chains squeaking. She could not get her mind off something Paul had said, some bit of information that was almost buried in there.

The car. A red Honda.

Mary knew that they would have to return to Bell City to find the house Polly had stayed in when she returned to Bell City with her red car. The car would not be there, of course-not now. But this is where they needed to go, Mary knew that much. Once again, they were being led. The kid lit a wrinkled cigarette, and the smoke caught in the wind and trailed away across the field off to their right.

A car pulled up then, an old Bondo’d Mustang that was packed with kids who looked just like Paul except for the white hair. He said good-bye and piled in the car, and the kids disappeared down a little dirt road into the heart of the park.

“Where now?” asked Dennis. But of course he already knew.

38

The house on Rattlesnake Ridge was easy to see. It was just up the hill from the Wobble Inn on a little switchback-heavy road named St. Louis Street. Through the trees you could see the top of the inn where they had questioned the bartender just twelve hours ago.

The house was dilapidated and probably empty, but Dennis knocked on the door anyway. “Nobody’s home,” he said. They all stood around the car, waiting for some divine inspiration. It was after 11:00 a.m. They had missed all of their classes now, and still they hadn’t made any progress since last night.

“Let’s go down the hill to the bar,” Brian said. Mary shrugged. They didn’t have anything better to do.

There were no cars parked at the Wobble Inn today. The place had a desolate air, empty and ominous. Brian tried the front door, but it was locked. “Closed?” he asked. They looked in the streaky front windows, and saw that there were no tables inside as there had been last night. The booth where the men had played poker was gone. The bar itself had been torn out. Wires swung from the ceiling where the beer lights had hung.

“What the hell?” Dennis asked.

Mary felt that constriction in her heart again, just as she had at the Collinses’ yesterday. Things were beginning to move, the pattern was revealing itself. They had to figure out the pattern before this afternoon, before Williams’s deadline expired.

“Let’s go to the back,” Brian said. They went around the building. The back doors were locked, too. When they looked inside, it was the same thing. Emptiness. No tables, no bar stools. Nothing except the floorboards and the bare walls.

“What should we do?” Mary asked. She was feeling an anxiety like she had never felt. It poured down on her, opened her up from the inside out. She felt every notion of the world, every lick of the wind and every beam of heat from the sun. The spin of the planet, too, under her feet. She felt it, all of it, and in a strange way it was exhilarating.

“Hey!” someone shouted from up on the hill.

They all turned. He was standing in the trees, halfway down, holding himself in position by a sapling. Coming toward them.

The bartender.

“What’s going on?” Dennis called. “We came back to talk to you!”

The man didn’t say anything. He turned and began to claw up the hill. Fast, faster-grabbing trees as he went, turning up the fallen leaves with his boot heels as he tried to find his footing on the loose dirt.

“There’s a car up there,” Brian said.

There was. They could see the top of it from where they stood, parked in front of the empty house they’d just been to on St. Louis Street.

My God, Mary thought. He’s coming for us.

Before she could say anything, Brian was pulling her and they were running toward Dennis’s car. They got in and Dennis fought with the keys. “Hurry!” Brian shouted. He kept looking behind them, out the back window, for the car they had seen. Dennis finally found the right key and shoved it into the ignition. He started the car and put it in gear, and they spun out of the Wobble Inn’s parking lot, throwing a cloud of gravel behind them.

“There he is!” Brian shouted. Mary turned to see it: the car was pulling off St. Louis and speeding toward them. There were two men in the front seat.

“Oh Christ, oh Christ,” Dennis was saying.

The ridge dropped away on either side of the car, and at some points along the road there was no guardrail. Mary looked to her right and saw the tops of the trees. It was the same thing on the other side. Behind the Lexus, the car was gaining on them quickly but Dennis didn’t seem to be driving very fast.

“Faster, Dennis!” Brian shouted.

“I’m going as fast as I can!” Dennis came back at him. His voice was high pitched, girlish almost. “Do you want to end up down at the bottom of the ravine?” Things were breaking down fast now, churning toward a boiling point. Mary cursed herself for getting into this, for coming out to Cale and Bell City in the first place. She should be at Winchester, or at home, even, back in Kentucky where everything was safe.

The car was a silver, rusted Mazda RX7. It was right on their bumper now. Mary could see the two men’s faces. The bartender was driving, and the man in the passenger’s seat was the man from the trailer. Marco. Their stares were placid. Businesslike. As she stared at them, Marco raised a video camera to his eye. She could see its pulsing red light. My God, she thought, they’re filming us. The camera struck an awful fear in Mary, and she turned around and put her face in her hands.

“The interstate,” Dennis said.

She looked up in time to see it whizzing by her on the right-hand side: the sign for I-64. Straight ahead.

Dennis drove toward it. The ridge opened up into a straight stretch, and he put on the gas. But the car behind them stayed on their tail, and Brian slunk down in the seat. He was praying under his breath.

“There!” Dennis shouted.

Mary looked ahead of them. She could only see the distant clover of the freeway ramps rising out of the woods in the middle distance. “What?” she asked him.

“There! Right there!” he shouted again.

And then she saw it: a parking lot just before the on ramp. Maybe if Dennis could make a perfect turn, maybe if he could time it just right they could…

“Pull in there,” Brian said, breathless now, leaning up into the front seat.

The Mazda swung out to the left, into the other lane. Dennis slowed the Lexus and pulled sharply into a gravel parking lot, the Mazda roaring by them and onto the freeway ramp. The Lexus lost traction on the gravel, and the back end of the car swung around. Suddenly the car was in a tight spin. Dust and rock bounced around them, and Mary turned to see Dennis’s face, which was a mask of fear. She closed her eyes tight, and she prayed that they wouldn’t swing back out onto the road and be hit by an oncoming car.

They didn’t. The car came to a stop, its struts popping and gravel dropping from the underside of the chassis in little metallic clicks.

They sat in silence for a moment as the dust rolled up over the car. When it had settled, Dennis opened the door and got out. He looked around for the Mazda, but it was nowhere to be seen.

Mary got out of the car. Her knees were weak, and she had to lean against the Lexus to steady herself. The blowing dust began to choke her, and she coughed violently, spitting on the ground. Soon the urge to vomit was uncontrollable. She fell to her knees and looked at the gravel, felt pebbles digging into her legs, but she could not release it. Instead, she cried. She sobbed into her hands and tried to find a point of release, some window out there where she could throw it all away, all of what was inside her, all the pain and frustration, all the knowledge, just throw it out and be rid of it, lose it on the wind.

“Here.” It was Brian. He was behind her with his hand on her shoulder. Then he was helping her up. Then they were standing by the car again, trying to decide where to go next. It was all operatic to her now, a scripted thing, and she was acting not on her own volition, but of some other accord. She was acting for the good of Professor Williams’s script.

“We could have died,” Brian said.

“Look,” Dennis replied.

They followed his finger to the sign that rose high over the freeway.

TRIP’SU-STOR-IT.

Immediately Mary knew what it meant. “Pig’s motorcycle,” she whispered.

They were standing, of course, on almost the exact spot where Professor Williams had taken that last photograph of the storage facility, the one that showed them where Polly could be found.

39

They walked up and down the aisles, checking the many storage garages for markings or anything that would suggest that one had something of interest inside it. They all knew they had been sent here. There was no question about it. Everything that had happened in the last two days had led them here. But now that they were here, the question became where to look. There were perhaps five hundred garages in the facility-too many to check one by one.

Dennis suggested that they stand at the very spot the photograph was taken and look at the facility from that vantage. They tried to remember the photograph exactly as it was, but it proved to be difficult, considering all that had happened in the last forty-eight hours. They stood across the road, in the yard of a little white clapboard house. They were pretty sure that was where Williams had stood to take the picture. They could see both rows of garages. The photo had been taken to the side, so that the easternmost bank of garages was in the foreground.

“That one there,” Dennis said, his fingers making a lens. He pointed toward a garage.

“Which one?”

“The one in the middle. Center of the shot. It has to be that one. He was trying to point us there.”

They walked in a straight line, trying to keep their eye on the door of the garage Dennis had spotted, and when they got there Brian tugged on the lever.

Nothing. The garage was locked.

Mary leaned on the garage door, her back against it. She felt so tired, so zapped, that she could have lain down on the gravel and gone to sleep for a hundred years. There was so much weight on her, so much awful tension.

Brian was walking down the bank of garages, which contained about a hundred in all, pulling on every lever. “Brian,” Mary whispered. But he was intent. She could hear him grunting with every failed pull from where she stood, the sound of it guttural, animalistic.

Dennis was crouching beside her, tossing gravel. The sun was high and hot now, blistering down on them. She could still taste the metallic residue of the gravel dust on her tongue.

“It has to be here, doesn’t it?” Dennis asked her.

“Why else would he show us those photographs? Why else-”

“I found it!” Brian shouted from the other side of the wall.

They ran around the first bank of garages and found him in the middle of the other bank, the ones Williams had left in the background in his photograph. To confuse us, Mary thought. To keep the puzzle going on just a little longer. He was standing in front of the garage, which was still closed. “I think this is what we’re looking for,” Brian said matter-of-factly.

They all stepped back and looked at the garage door. Mary’s breath caught in her throat, and she nearly choked again on the dust. The door had two giant red letters spray painted on the front:

Dennis opened the door.

Sitting inside the garage, at a small table, was Leonard Williams.

He was sitting in a rolling chair that could have been the one from Seminary East. His hands were tied behind him. There was a typewriter on the table with a sheet of paper rolled onto the platen. “Professor Williams?” Mary asked. The man’s head was hung, and there was a dirty gag stuffed in his mouth. He didn’t look up at his students, but it was clear he was alive: he blinked away the sunlight when it fell through the open door on him.

There was nothing in Mary’s mind but raw, coursing fear. Brian had her hand now and he was pulling her inside.

They entered the garage. Williams was still looking at the floor. His eyes, however, were open and aware. Someone had assaulted him. He had a shiny knot under his right eye. He looked, Mary thought, more ashamed than anything.

They approached Williams, but he did not acknowledge their presence. His eyes remained down, at the concrete floor. “The typewriter,” Dennis whispered. They made their way around the table and looked at the sheet of paper. When she saw what was written there, Mary’s knees buckled and Brian had to hold her upright. “I want to go home,” she said, although she didn’t even realize she was speaking aloud. It was just a string of words, a sort of notation, an expression of her fear. It was an involuntary reaction-nothing so much as her mouth sending out a distress signal for the mind that was locked up now, frozen with a kind of obliterating dread.

For the, read the page. Over and over again, filling up the white sheet entirely until there was no white space.

For the for the for the for the for the