Obedience

40

8 hours left

They untied Williams and got him to the car. He was mumbling, despondent. He had been beaten badly. His eye was swollen almost shut, and a couple of teeth were bloody and loose. Mary used her cell phone to dial 911, but they were so far removed from civilization that the call wouldn’t connect.

As they were driving back toward campus, Williams began to speak. His words were like a bomb in the nervous silence of the car.

“I set it all up,” he said weakly. His head was still down, his eyes trained on the floor. Mary thought he looked like a child who had been caught stealing candy from a store.

“Set what up?” asked Dennis. They were passing through Cale, where they had spent the previous night. Mary didn’t know if it had all been worth it. She wondered, as she had six weeks ago, what Professor Williams’s role was in his own game. It was the last day of the quarter. The deadline. In three hours, at 6:00 p.m., when Logic and Reasoning 204 officially ended, would something happen, or would the time pass with no incident? Would it all turn out to be, in the end, just a puzzle? The beaten man next to her told her no.

“The whole thing,” said Williams flatly. “The Collinses’ house. The detective. The party at the house on Pride Street. The bar owner at the tavern who led you to me. The little boy and the woman, Della, whom I hired to play my wife. My wife’s name is Jennifer, by the way. She wanted nothing to do with all this, so I had to bring in someone else to…play her role. We don’t have any children of our own. The call from the policeman that night to your room, Mary. Marco and the inn, of course. And the storage facility. But of course you weren’t supposed to find me in that garage. You were supposed to find…other things.”

“What other things?” asked Mary.

“Information. Facts. Evidence I found when writing my books.”

“But the book is a fake. We saw it. It’s just those two words over and over again.”

“That’s the work of my enemies,” he said.

“Your enemies?” Dennis asked.

“These are people who didn’t want that book to be seen by the people in Cale or Bell City. Didn’t want them to read about Deanna and Polly. So they censored me. My enemies-they have powerful friends. They can do these things. This is why I have to speak in code. This is why I have to create a puzzle.”

“Who are they?” Mary wanted to know.

Williams mumbled something. He looked down again at the floor and closed his eyes.

“Talk to us, damnit!” shouted Brian. He was in the back with Williams, and he grabbed the man and shook him. Williams pulled away from Brian and stubbornly turned his gaze out the window.

“Brian,” Mary said calmly.

“What had you found out about Deanna Ward?” asked Dennis.

Williams inhaled before he spoke. As always, his gestures were soft, unassuming, almost meaningless in their simplicity. “Five years ago, I started writing another book,” he told them. “I had gotten some new information from one of my contacts in Cale. It was solid stuff. As I was writing the book, I learned that I would not be asked back to Winchester. They were going to fire me if I continued on with what I knew. Well, I couldn’t lose my job. You can’t be disgraced like that in the academic profession. Word gets around. You don’t get hired again. So I ceased and desisted, and I put all my information in that storage garage in Bell City.”

“Polly is your niece,” Mary said.

“Yes. Jennifer and I raised her. We couldn’t have any children of our own, so in 1967, when a relative of Jennifer’s asked us if we could take this little girl, we jumped at the opportunity.”

“Deanna’s father,” Mary went on. “He was seeing Polly. Sleeping with her.”

“Laughable,” Williams said, looking up at her. He had a harrowing look on his face, as if he had seen the unspeakable and was just now trying to rationalize it all. “You all have done well in the class, but there are things that you still do not understand.”

“Tell us, then,” Brian said. “Who put you in that garage?”

“Pig Stephens,” Williams said. “They thought I knew too much. About Deanna Ward. They had heard from someone that the class was getting too specific. It used to just be a game, you know, an exercise in logic. But a couple of years ago I began to see the possibilities. If I could tell my students where my information was, and if they could find it, then I would be in the clear and the students would solve the crime and not me. It was a kind of cloaking device.”

“But your enemies figured out what you were doing,” said Mary.

“Yes. Somehow he found out about it and sent his henchman. Now they have the information I gathered, and there’s no doubt in my mind that it’s all floating out in the Thatch River by now.”

“Who’s ‘he’?” asked Mary, but of course she already knew.

“Orman,” said Williams. “Ed Orman. If anyone has the answers to this puzzle, it’s him. But if you get close to him…well, you see what happens.” Williams gestured toward his damaged right eye.

“Did you send us that tape?” Brian asked. “The one with Milgram and the…those voices?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Williams whispered. He looked away, out the window to the bare Indiana landscape.

“Why would he be afraid of the information you found?” Mary asked.

Williams breathed in, steeled himself before he answered. “Ed Orman is Polly’s father.”

The weight of Williams’s revelation nearly doubled Mary over. Of course, she thought. Ed Orman lied to us about Williams’s disappearance because he was afraid of where we were going. When Brian called him to complain about the class, that was his chance to take Williams out of the picture.

“So what’s the connection to Deanna?” asked Brian.

“She’s Polly’s half sister,” Williams said. “Why do you think they looked so much alike? A woman named Wendy Ward went to Winchester for a semester back in the midseventies. She studied under Ed Orman, and they had a thing. This was before he was a dean. He was a respected professor, one of the finest researchers the university had. He had worked with Stanley Milgram at Yale, of course. That was his claim to fame. He didn’t want to sully his reputation, you see, and so he kept the affair secret. A man of his stature, admitting an affair with a student? A townie at that? It would have been professional suicide.”

Mary said, “But he couldn’t hide the fact that she was pregnant.”

“When Wendy got pregnant with Polly, he had it arranged so she would go back to Cale. I don’t know how he got her to stay quiet, but I assume he paid her a good deal of money. A year later, Wendy met Star, this biker who was the complete opposite of Ed Orman, and they had their first child together, Deanna. It was clear they couldn’t take care of two young children, so Star called a relative to ask her if she would be interested in ‘helping him out,’ as he put it.”

“Jennifer,” Mary said.

“Yes. My wife is a cousin of Star’s. I was just finishing my PhD at Tulane and was looking for a job. Jennifer ran the idea by me, and it was intriguing. I interviewed at Winchester and got the job. Ed was against my hiring, of course, but he had no clout at the time. By the time he moved up into his perch at Carnegie, I had written a book and was tenured. Of course, he even tried to take that from me…”

The plagiarism incident, thought Mary. Ed Orman tried to frame him.

“At the beginning of my career I was a visiting lecturer, making very little money. All Jennifer and I could afford was the trailer out in Bell City. I drove the hour and a half from Bell City to DeLane to teach. Wendy wanted Polly far away from Orman, anyway. At a remove. She was afraid of him for some reason. At that point, you see, I didn’t know what I do now about the man. I thought Polly was just the result of an unfortunate fling, something that happened between two consenting adults. I couldn’t have been more wrong.”

“What did Ed Orman think about your role in Polly’s life?” Mary asked.

“He distrusted me. He was paranoid, constantly worried that I would blow his cover and tell someone who Polly really was. But of course I didn’t want to sacrifice my relationship with Polly. For all she knew, we were her parents. She was just a little over one when we adopted her, and she never knew anything else but Jennifer and me.”

Dennis said, “It must have been awful on you at Winchester.”

“Of course,” Williams admitted wearily. “I was living a lie. I never talked about Polly. I couldn’t. Ed had a muzzle on me. It sent me into a dark depression. Finally, we were able to get away from it. I was offered a job in Strasburg, and in nineteen ninety I taught in France. But when that was over, I returned to Bell City and resumed my daily commute to Winchester. To my lie of a life. I wanted to be open about my family, to not live in this secrecy, but of course Wendy and Star would have none of it for fear of Orman.”

“Did Star ever come to visit Polly?” Mary wondered.

“All the time. I think he was trying to understand Wendy’s old life. Her life before him, the one she’d had with Ed Orman at Winchester. That’s what started the whole thing, of course.”

“Started what?” Dennis asked. He was driving slowly, trying to take his time so that Williams could tell the whole story.

“Star came out to visit Polly two days after Deanna went missing,” Williams went on. “He sat down on the couch with her and asked her if she would be their daughter now that Deanna was gone. Star was distraught, out of his mind. He was calling Polly ‘Deanna.’ It was excruciating to watch, and it made me hate the son of a bitch who had taken Deanna.”

“In your…game,” Mary said, “you led us to believe Star did it. Why?”

“I needed to get you to the trailer and then to the Wobble Inn. The only way to get you to the trailer was through Bethany Cavendish’s story, and the role she played was of the distrustful aunt. She is Wendy Ward’s cousin, but her story about Star was trumped up. She knows what I know: that Ed Orman is the culprit here.”

Dennis asked, “When did you start researching Deanna Ward’s case?”

“I began what Jennifer came to call my ‘crusade’ to find Deanna’s abductor in ninety eighty-seven. Somehow Ed Orman’s people found out about it. That’s when they dove into my dissertation and found that I had borrowed from John Dawe Brown. Everybody borrows from time to time. Yet they planted the information in the paper, and it became a big deal. The word plagiarism was there beside my name, and in academic circles that does irreversible damage to your reputation.”

“Yet they kept you on,” Brian said. “Why?” He had moved as far away from Williams as possible, his body wedged against the back door of the Lexus. The professor’s story had not allayed Brian’s fears, Mary knew.

“I would have been forced out of Winchester completely if not for Dr. Lewis and some of my allies in the Philosophy Department. They were longtime enemies of Orman’s. I confided in one of them, Drew Peasant, and he became my research assistant on A Disappearance in the Fields. When they found out Drew was working for me, they got rid of him. At this point, I had tenure and he didn’t. I still think about him. I should have never brought him in to this mess, but at that time I didn’t know the lengths they would go to, to protect themselves.”

“The book is nonsense, though,” Brian said. “It’s blank. We thought it was…” He faltered. A prop, Mary thought. That’s what he wanted to say.

“When the book was published,” Williams said, “Orman tried to have it censored. He wrote an anonymous letter to the Cale Star blasting me and my credibility. And of course he somehow got copies altered so that they were unreadable. Many people in Cale have never read the book because Ed has made it so that the library and the bookstore on 72 do not stock copies.”

“Oh, they stock them,” Brian said.

“Let me guess,” Williams added. “They’re mostly gibberish.”

Brian nodded.

“The book went out of print faster than most books even though it sold fairly well,” Williams said. “There’s no doubt in my mind that Ed was threatening my publisher. But at that point I couldn’t do much. I could just wait and see if he confessed to his role in Deanna Ward’s disappearance. I had implicated him in the book, even though I didn’t have the concrete information to accuse him outright.”

“But why would Ed Orman abduct Deanna?” asked Mary. They were entering DeLane and were only about ten minutes from the Winchester campus. Any information they wanted out of Williams they had better get now, because Mary had a feeling that he wasn’t going to be as receptive to their questions once he got home, with the presence of Ed Orman and Pig Stephens bearing down on him again.

“Ed was wildly in love with Wendy; he still had this burning passion for her. Wendy was beautiful. Just like Deanna and Polly. I think it started as a game, as something he was doing just because he felt like he could get away with it. This is the kind of man Ed Orman is. He is brutally egotistical. He believes that his brilliance is unmatched, that he can intimidate you until he gets what he wants.”

“He feels the same way about you,” Dennis said dryly.

“Yes. Well. Who do you believe?” Again, he gestured toward his scratched and bloody face. “It’s my theory-and this is what I was working on in the follow-up to A Disappearance in the Fields until I was ordered to stop-that Ed had Pig Stephens, this former cop who does all of Ed’s handiwork, kidnap Deanna.”

“Why would he do that?” asked Mary.

“To ruin Star and Wendy. He wanted to pin Deanna’s abduction on Star, the crazy father. Maybe, just maybe, Orman thought, Wendy would return to him if Star were out of the picture, or at least suspected of such an awful crime. Star had a massive criminal record from his time with the Creeps, so it wasn’t that much of a leap to suggest that he might have had a hand in his daughter’s disappearance.”

“But abducting your own daughter?” Mary said incredulously. She thought of Eli and Polly in Williams’s tale. She thought of how adamant Williams had been that day when she’d suggested Eli might be the culprit.

“It sounds crazy,” Williams said, “but look at it this way: here you have a thug, a man with a violent past who admitted to giving up a girl to possibly be murdered in New Mexico a few months before.”

It did make sense to Mary. There was no randomness, Williams had said. Most every crime is perpetrated by someone in the victim’s orbit. The police must have thought, It’s only logical that Star Ward is to blame.

“The police arrested Star,” Williams said, “and they took Polly back with them. We tried to tell them that Polly wasn’t the girl they wanted, but they wouldn’t listen. She looked so much like Deanna, and I think those cops wanted it to be Deanna so bad. Polly was confused. She was just a girl. Nineteen at the time. They were asking her questions and answering them for her. When they looked at her, she turned her face away because she didn’t want to be Deanna. She told me later that it was the way they were looking at her-as if they were trying to see this other girl, this lost girl. It was all illogical-the police drawing conclusions from evidence that just wasn’t there. It came out in the papers that Polly was asked if she was Deanna, and she said yes. That’s a lie. That never happened. They made a mistake, and it was never responsibly acknowledged.”

“But his plan backfired,” Mary said. “The charges against Star wouldn’t stick.”

“At first, it looked like Ed Orman got exactly what he wanted. The police were wrapped up in their theories about Star for weeks, and Ed had the husband out of the picture. But of course Star was released. They realized they had nothing on him. He and Wendy and their two boys left Cale for California six months later, and Ed fell into a great despondency. When he came out of it, another student was there to console him. This time she was a master’s student in behavioral psychology. Now she’s in the doctoral program at Winchester.”

“Elizabeth,” Dennis whispered.

“That’s right.”

Mary stared at Williams. A tiny vein pulsed on his neck. The gag had been knotted so tightly that they could only slide it down onto his throat, and now it was cinched there, dripping sweat.

“But you haven’t answered the question,” Mary said. Many holes had been filled in by Williams’s story, but the hole, the evidence that would clearly implicate Ed Orman, hadn’t been discussed at all. “Where is Deanna?”

“Ah,” said Williams. “The question of questions. In my book, I wanted to push forward the idea that Pig Stephens-an ex-cop, but still a horrifically violent man, a deviant who had been disgraced by the police department-had accidentally killed Deanna in a struggle and he and Ed Orman had been forced to hide her body. But my publisher wouldn’t let me go through with it. Not enough hard evidence, you see. Every time I got close to finding Deanna, she would disappear. This has been going on for nineteen years now, and I really am no closer to finding her than I was back in nineteen eighty-seven.”

They were on Montgomery Street now, driving into campus. It was a normal Wednesday at Winchester. The quarter was ending, and parents’ vehicles were pulled into the service entrances behind the dorms. It was 4:30 p.m. Soon, they would all be going home for the fall break and these questions would still be unanswered. Mary had just one more thing to ask Williams.

“Where’s Polly now?”

“She’s getting her degree in criminal justice at Indiana State, down in Terre Haute. It’s difficult, this forty-year-old woman sitting in a classroom with teenagers. Kids your age. She’s lived a tough life, as you would expect. But she got things turned around, and now she’s going to school full-time. She visited me on campus just a couple of weeks ago and she’s supposed to be coming back into town today or tomorrow for the break. She knows everything, of course. It was difficult to keep it from her after A Disappearance in the Fields was published, but she knows who her real father is, and she has her own suspicions about Ed Orman. He knows that he’s too old to stop us from living our lives now. He was against Jennifer and me moving onto campus a few years ago, but that passed.”

“And what about Wendy Ward?” Mary asked. “Does he still obsess over her?”

“I wouldn’t know. All I know is that he doesn’t interfere with Polly, thank God. He has resigned himself to the knowledge that he has a daughter, even though I know she must bring back terrible memories of what he did to Deanna and the cover-up that has gone on for years. That’s one reason he locks himself up in his office: he’s ashamed of his history at Winchester. I think it eats at him every day, and I intend to see to it that it continues to for the rest of his time at the university.”

“Locked away,” Dennis said, “writing his book on Milgram.”

“Did you know he and Milgram were never colleagues?” Williams said. “Not really.”

“How so?” Dennis asked.

“I mean-”

But they were on campus now, and he fell silent. They crept down Montgomery and hit the light at Pride Street, the boundary that separated the two hemispheres of Winchester.

“What are you going to do?” asked Mary. She was desperate for some conclusion, some kind of closure to the game. Finding Williams was not enough; it seemed incredibly cruel to leave Deanna still missing, and Ed Orman’s deception unchallenged.

“I’m going to do the same thing I’ve done for all these years,” Williams admitted. “I’m going to keep quiet. I’m not going to say anything. I’m going to teach Logic and Reasoning in the Winchester term, just like I always have, and I’m going to hope I have students who are as inquisitive as you three. Right now? Right now I’m going to return to my study to have a bourbon.” He paused. “I love my study. We added it on to the house a few years ago. Have you seen it, Mary?”

Mary turned to look at him. There was something in his eyes, a gleaming and almost imperceptible trace of secret information.

They fell silent, each of them gazing outside the car. It was finally fall. The sun that had been out earlier was gone behind a bank of clouds, and the air was crisp and sharp. The wind whistling through Mary’s cracked window had the bite of winter.

“Where to?” asked Dennis as the light turned green.

“Home,” replied Professor Williams.

So Dennis drove him to the house on Pride Street, and standing outside waiting for him was Polly’s adoptive mother, Jennifer Williams. She did not look anything like Della-this woman was plump and short, and her face contained a multitude of hurt lines. The professor got out of Dennis’s car and ran up the drive toward her, and they embraced as if they hadn’t seen each other in many, many years.

41

4 hours left

“So this is it?” asked Brian. They were in Mary’s room in Brown. Dennis had dropped them off with the promise that he would call them before he left campus, and now they were sitting at what Mary called her “dinner table,” which was really a card table with a frilly tablecloth draped over it, eating McDonald’s cheeseburgers.

“I guess so,” admitted Mary. She would be going back to Louisville this evening, and all of this would be left behind. Since her cell phone had apparently been out of range in Bell City, her mother had left five messages since Tuesday afternoon asking if she was coming home for the week. The last message bordered on hysteria, so she texted her mother a brief message: Been studying hard for exams. Everything’s still a go for tonight.

“It doesn’t seem right,” Brian said. “Orman shouldn’t be allowed to just get away scot-free.”

“If Williams’s story is true.”

Brian flinched. “You think he’s lying?”

“I think it’s difficult to trust him considering what he made us go through.”

“He said it himself, Mary. He was trying to protect himself. He was trying to lead us to the clues that would tell us what we needed to know about Ed Orman and his role in Deanna’s disappearance.”

She couldn’t get the feeling out of her mind, though-the feeling that Williams was somehow deceiving them again. It’s just your paranoia, she told herself. You’ve just freaked yourself out during the two days in Bell City and Cale.

After they ate, she walked Brian out. A moment passed between them before he walked away, the knowledge that whatever they had begun wasn’t over. He took her hand, and for a moment they stood on the quad, looking in each other’s eyes. They had shared something, something so significant that neither of them would ever forget it. “Be careful in Kentucky,” he told her. “We’ll see each other after the break and we could…” He didn’t finish the thought. He didn’t have to. He walked away from her, off toward Norris Hall, leaving her standing alone outside her building.

Back inside, Mary checked her e-mail. She had nineteen new messages. There were forwards from her mother, petitions and jokes and recipes that she found-the detritus of the Internet. There was a note from Dr. Kiseley, her lit professor, asking her where she had been this morning. She would have to e-mail Kiseley before she left and figure out how to get her final paper to her. There were four or five institutional messages from Dean Orman concerning the cancellation of Professor Williams’s Logic and Reasoning 204. Nothing else of significance.

She responded to Kiseley and told her that she would e-mail the paper within the week, blaming a family emergency for the delay. Then she threw some clothes into her old suitcase and went out to her mother’s old Camry. Her heart was thudding, but it was a plaintive noise. There was a certain sadness inside her: the knowledge that Deanna would not be found, and that she, Mary, was at least a bit responsible for that fact. She had been so close to the truth but had been unable to find the missing girl.

Yet Mary had a feeling that if she looked, if she tried hard enough, logic could still lead her to Deanna.

Ed Orman, she thought. Elizabeth Orman, his wife. Deanna Ward. Wendy Ward, Deanna’s mother. Star Ward, Deanna’s father and Wendy’s husband. Polly Williams, Ed’s secret daughter. Jennifer Williams, Deanna’s aunt, Polly’s adopted mother, and Leonard Williams’s wife. Professor Leonard Williams. Pig Stephens, the potential abductor and murderer of Deanna Ward.

Even after all this time it was still a puzzle, one of Williams’s tangrams. Paper silhouettes. Yet she had been given a wealth of information by Williams, some of it definite and some of it presumed, and she still was no closer to finding Deanna. Maybe, like Williams had said, she just had to resign herself to the fact that some crimes remain unsolved-and hidden. After all, she had to get on with her life, didn’t she? Mary sighed and started the car. She saw on the dashboard clock that it was 6:05. Williams’s six weeks had finally passed, but Mary felt like she was moving toward another, more pivotal, deadline. Mary’s mother would be expecting her at 9:00 for dinner at the Bristol Café, where they always met when Mary came home.

She turned out of the parking lot at Brown and then took a right onto Montgomery. In three hours, she would be in Kentucky and this nightmare would be behind her.

42

Mary drove along Montgomery and came to the stoplight at the corner of Pride Street. Students carrying overstuffed suitcases passed in front of the car. It was just a six-mile drive to I-64, which would lead her back to Kentucky. But Mary was feeling the tug of something. It was a conscious thing, an awareness of something left unopened, like a wound. A lack of closure. An imperfection.

I love my study. Have you seen it, Mary?

She turned right onto Pride. She narrowly avoided a student who was crossing the street, and he cursed at her as she hit the gas and sped down Pride. She had no idea where she was going-she just drove, hoping her intuition would take her wherever she needed to go.

Professor Williams’s house was just down on the right. She slowed in the front and noticed that his pickup was not in the driveway. She stopped at the curb and got out.

What are you doing, Mary? she asked herself.

But she was already walking toward the front door. She rang the doorbell and waited. The maple tree that towered above the Williams’s house was blazing orange.

When no one came to the door, Mary went around the side of the house and looked in one of the windows. She expected bare walls and dusty floors, just like at the tavern or the Collinses’, but it was the same living room she had seen on the night of the party. There was the couch Williams had been sitting on when she’d left that night, and the dinner table was cluttered with dishes that had recently been used. Even the butter was still out.

Mary went around to the back door. She walked up the landing steps and looked through the inlaid glass on the back door. The same thing from this angle: a normal house that looked positively lived in. She saw the kitchen, and beyond it the hallway that led to the Williamses’ bedroom.

You’re an idiot, Mary. You’ve let this get to your head. Now let’s go home. Let’s get as far away from this as we possibly can.

As she was turning to leave, something inside caught her eye. She could see a door at the front of the hallway. Williams’s study. The door was open, and inside was a desk. On the desk, something was glinting in the shifting evening light. Mary squinted to see this object, and just as she got her face to the glass someone was behind her, stepping through the fallen leaves in the yard.

“Can I help you?” the person said.

Mary turned and saw the woman.

Polly.

43

“I…I’ve…” Mary stammered. “I have Professor Williams in logic class, and he has a paper of mine that I need.”

“Didn’t the term end today?” Polly asked. She was wearing a pea-coat and she had her arms crossed in front of her, protecting herself from the cutting breeze. Polly didn’t look forty years old to Mary. She carried herself like a young woman, but her face was damaged from years of tragic worry. She had the dog on a leash, and she reached up and clipped the leash to the clothesline that ran between the two maples in the Williamses’ backyard.

“Yes,” Mary explained, “but I’ll get an incomplete if the paper isn’t finished before the Winchester term starts.”

“Oh,” said Polly. “Do you know where it is?”

“Yeah. I think he told me that he would leave it on his desk.”

“I’ll let you inside, then. Dad is off God knows where. He keeps everything important in his study, though, so I’m sure you’ll find it somewhere in his clutter.”

Polly unlocked the back door and the two women went into the house. As Polly went about cleaning up the dishes that were spread across the table, Mary found her way to the study. She checked to see if Polly was watching her, and then she began to search Williams’s desk.

What the hell are you looking for?

She didn’t know. She opened drawers and shuffled papers, still keeping her eye on Polly in the other room. Outside the clouds passed across the day’s last sunlight, and again an object glinted on the desk.

Mary located it, right there in the center. A paperweight.

The paperweight was sitting atop a manila envelope. As Mary removed the weight and picked up the envelope, Polly said from the other room, “Do you like his class?”

“Oh, sure,” Mary called. “He’s…interesting.”

“Other people tell me that his class is weird. He won’t tell me what he teaches, but I know he’s into puzzles. My father is the kind of guy who won’t tell you the answer to anything. He makes you figure it out for yourself. He’s always been like that.”

“Yeah,” said Mary, her tone distracted. Inside the envelope there was a note addressed to her.

Dear Mary,

I knew you couldn’t leave it alone. There were some things that I couldn’t tell you in the car. I have a feeling that you are one who will not rest until you know the whole story. Well, that I can’t give to you. But here is the rest of what I know. This is what Orman and Pig did not find in the storage garage. I hope it helps.

Sincerely,

Leonard Williams

Inside the envelope there were two photographs she had already seen: the red Honda Civic and the black Labrador. Nothing else.

“Did you find it?” Polly asked. She was standing at the door. She had taken off her coat and was drying a plate with a dish towel. She had long dark hair, and Mary looked in her eyes. She saw in them a lifetime of secret pain.

“Yep,” Mary said, holding up the envelope.

“Good. Dad keeps this room such a mess that you’re lucky to find anything in there. Every time I come home to visit I spend most of my time picking up after him.”

Polly led Mary out, this time through the front. There was much that Mary wanted to ask the woman, but of course she could not. As she was walking to her car Polly called, “Have a great break.”

“I will,” Mary said.

Polly closed the door and turned on the porch light. It was, after all, getting dark.

44

Across campus, Dennis Flaherty was in his room at the Tau house waiting for the phone to ring. He was thinking of Elizabeth, as he often did, wondering how it had come this far. On the bed beside him was the black garbage bag. He was having trouble opening it. They were at the end now, and it was difficult to finish it even though he knew he had to if he wanted to go on with his life-and if he wanted to find a way back to Elizabeth.

The phone rang.

“You ready?” asked the voice on the other end.

“Yes,” Dennis lied.

The man hung up, and Dennis sat in the crackling silence. He wondered if there was another way to do it. Another way to finish this thing.

But there was no use. He knew that soon he would have to be ready to go.

For the first time in as long as he could remember, he crossed himself.

Then he opened the garbage bag and took out what was inside.

45

Mary pulled into the parking lot of the natatorium on Pride Street and studied the pictures again. The red car she had seen in the photographs Williams had sent, of course. But it had also come up in their time in Bell City. It was the car that Paul said was for sale at the house on St. Louis Street. Was Williams trying to lead her back there, to where he had once lived with Jennifer and Polly?

The Camry idled as night fell. She had to turn on the interior light to see the pictures. It was almost 7:00 p.m. and her mother and father would be getting ready, her father showering, her mother out of the tub with a towel around her wet hair. But Mary wouldn’t be meeting them at the restaurant. She still had business to attend to at Winchester, and she intended to finish what she had started. She called her mother’s cell. She would be home later, she explained, but don’t wait up. Yes, everything was okay. Yes, she had done well on her tests. No, she didn’t need anything. She would see them both later, and promise-Promise me, Mom-that you won’t wait up.

She closed her eyes and thought. How was she going to use these photographs, these “clues” of Williams’s, to figure out anything? There was a small roar in her ears, the roar of anticipation, and she knew that feeling would go to waste if she didn’t figure out what Williams was trying to tell her now.

I don’t think it was part of the game, Brian had said regarding the ride he’d given to Elizabeth Orman. I think she was serious.

Mary did a U-turn on Pride Street and went back toward Winchester. On the hill to her right, which the students called Grace Hill, she saw Dean Orman’s house. She turned into the drive and climbed the hill toward the cottage. “Cottage” really didn’t do it justice. It was essentially a mansion fashioned as a nineteenth-century country carriage house. Rising high into the trees was the house’s A-frame. The house, Mary knew, had four stories and was over five thousand square feet.

Mary got out of the car and went to the front door. She had no idea what she was going to tell Elizabeth Orman if the woman answered the door. That her husband was an accomplice in a murder twenty years ago? That she knew the woman had slept with Dennis Flaherty? Mary rang the bell and waited. She heard faint footsteps from inside, and the door cracked open to reveal Dean Orman.

“Can I help you?” he asked.

“I think I have some information you’d like to know about Professor Leonard Williams,” Mary said. She was flying blind now, talking off the top of her head. It was an exhilarating feeling, and she went with it.

The man’s eyes took on a dark and knowing tint. “Come in,” he said.

Mary followed him inside. Orman had his newspaper spread out on the floor next to the couch and ESPN was on the plasma television that loomed in the corner. “Forgive my mess,” he said, pushing some of the paper beneath the couch. He gestured for Mary to sit, and she took a seat on an antique lolling chair beside him. Orman was more disheveled than usual. He was wearing a Winchester U sweatshirt with jogging pants. There were holes in his socks, she noticed. His orange hair was matted and tufted on one side, as if he had just risen from a nap.

“Talk,” he said.

“I was in his logic class this semester,” began Mary. “And some of the things that he told us were-let’s just say they were highly unusual.”

“What sorts of things?” Orman was interested now. He was leaning forward, toward Mary, with his bifocals clutched between his interlaced fingers.

“Things about Deanna Ward.”

The man did not move when Mary said the name. She searched him for something, some tic of recognition, but he was stock still.

“Things about the disappearance of this girl,” Mary went on, “and another girl, named Polly, who he claimed you knew.”

Orman laughed. It was a deep and guttural chuckle, barely registering as an exterior noise at all.

“Leonard says things all the time,” Orman said. “He’s been talking off and on for twenty years. Here at Winchester we tend to ignore his theories. Most of them are innocent, but some of them are in bad taste, let alone potentially dangerous. I have talked to Leonard about this more times than you can imagine. He tells me, each time, that he will do better. But he doesn’t. Empty promises, you see. And we think this is why Leonard left.”

“Because you spoke to him about his teaching practices?” Mary asked.

“Because he was tired of playing by our rules,” said the dean. “Well, when you are part of a business you have to read the company line sometimes. It’s the American way, you know. Leonard couldn’t abide by that, so he left in the night and will never teach here again.”

“You’ve fired him?” she asked.

“Of course not. We don’t fire professors with tenure. But we can make it so that Leonard has no course load. Or that he is reading research grants for a living in the basement of Carnegie. Anything to get him out of the classroom. There was a time when he was a brilliant lecturer. But not now. He’s too worried about the nonessential, the clutter of our daily lives, to teach students well.”

“Who is Deanna Ward?” Mary pressed him.

The dean looked at her. Again, there was no stir or awkwardness that told her he knew about Deanna. “A Cale girl who went missing years ago,” said Orman lightly. “Leonard wrote a book about the case, and for years since then he has been trying to sell his crackpot theory to anybody who will listen.”

“What was his theory?”

And then: an almost imperceptible narrowing of his eyes. Was she taking it too far?

“I don’t know,” Orman told her, resignation in his voice. “I never read the book. It was, as far as I was concerned, a penny dreadful.”

She decided to let it rest for a moment. They talked about the class, and how she would get credit for it. Mary feigned anxiety about getting proper credit for Logic and Reasoning 204. Orman walked her through the steps and gave her a timeline in which the grade could be expected on her transcript.

“I’m just trying to keep my GPA,” she said. Now, Mary realized, the tables had turned. Now she was doing the acting, and she found herself strangely enjoying it.

“I’m aware of that, Ms. Butler. Winchester is going to do all we can to make up for your lost time.”

She stood, then, and Orman stood with her. “Do you mind if I use the bathroom before I go?” she asked him. “It’s a long drive back to Kentucky.”

He showed her down a hall off to the right, and she stepped into a spare bathroom that contained only a toilet and a sink. Mary paced the bathroom, trying to get straight in her mind what she was going to ask Orman when she came out. Think, she demanded of herself. You’re close to breaking him. Push him about Deanna Ward. As she was standing in front of the mirror, she heard the back door open and close. Then a feminine voice was just outside the bathroom, in the hallway leading to the kitchen. Elizabeth Orman.

When Mary came out of the bathroom, the Ormans were in the kitchen. The woman had brought in grocery bags, and the dean was putting some vegetables in the refrigerator.

“I’ll just be going,” Mary said.

Elizabeth turned and saw her. Dean Orman said, “Lizzy, this is Mary Butler. She was just talking to me about Professor Williams’s logic class.”

Elizabeth nodded slightly and went back to her groceries. Mary searched her face for abrasions but saw nothing. Could she have healed so quickly? Was she simply, as Brian had wondered, putting on a performance that night in the woods?

Dean Orman let Mary out, and she returned to her car. She hadn’t gotten the information she needed, but she knew she couldn’t push Orman about Deanna Ward without him becoming suspicious.

Outside, the night was complete. She fell with a thud into the driver’s seat and sat with the heat blowing onto her cheeks. She was, finally, at a dead end. She put the Camry in reverse and started carefully backing down the hill. But as she was pulling down the drive, she saw something in her periphery. When she looked more closely, she saw that the Ormans’ garage door was still open and the security light was on. Mary put the Camry into park and got out of the car. She crept around the side of the house and looked into the garage at Elizabeth Orman’s car. The car cracked and hissed, its chassis still settling from Elizabeth’s trip to the grocery store.

It was a red Honda Civic.

The car’s back door was open, and Mary could see grocery bags stacked in the backseat. There was a bumper sticker that read SCIENTISTS MAKE THE BEST LOVERS. She turned to go back to her car when-

“I just don’t understand why she came here,” said a woman’s voice from inside the door that led from the garage into the house. Mary hunched low, so low that she was almost underneath the back end of the car. The woman wouldn’t be able to see her, Mary knew, unless she came outside the garage.

As Elizabeth Orman descended the steps, Mary scrambled completely beneath the car. She watched Elizabeth’s feet, felt the click of her heels vibrating against her ear. She must have been talking on her cell phone.

“But why?” Elizabeth continued. “I don’t understand it. I think we might be losing her.” Again, she stopped to listen. Mary heard the voice on the other end, but she could not make out the words. It was just a scratchy, distant, masculine buzz. Elizabeth exhaled loudly, and then said, “I hope you’re right. It’s just-it’s just that we’re so close now. I would hate to lose her and have to start all over again.”

At that moment, a can of tomato soup dropped onto the ground. It was just two feet from Mary’s nose, rolling under the car in a little arc toward her. Mary recoiled, tried to wriggle back toward the opposite side of the car without making a sound. Elizabeth’s hand came into Mary’s line of vision. Elizabeth knelt without looking beneath the car and felt around for the soup. When she found the can she rolled it toward her with her fingers, and Mary heard her place it in the sack.

“You’re right,” she was saying now. “I shouldn’t worry. It’s always like this. I always worry about things that are out of my control. If she goes home, then we’ll find a way to get her back. If she does what she’s supposed to do and shows up at the other place, then it ends tonight. Thanks. You’ve been a big help. I’ve got to get back in to Ed now. We’re fixing dinner tonight before the thing, if it goes through. I know, I know. When. When it goes through. Anyway, I’ll talk to you later tonight.”

With that, Elizabeth snapped the phone shut. She climbed the steps and went inside, shutting the door behind her. Thankfully, she had left the garage door open. Mary slid from under the car and, in a hunched-over run, went around to the front of the house and climbed back inside her Camry. After a moment of composing herself, she started back down Grace Hill.

It wasn’t until she was at the bottom that she reminded herself to breathe.

46

Deadline

Mary drove along Highway 72 thinking about what she had seen-and heard. Who had Elizabeth Orman been speaking to? Williams? Were they in this together? It certainly appeared that way. But that was inconceivable. Perhaps-and now her mind was racing, careening in a thousand different directions at once-perhaps Professor Williams had gotten to Elizabeth Orman and convinced her that her husband was an accomplice in Deanna Ward’s disappearance. That had to be it. That had to be the reason Williams had given her the photograph of Elizabeth Orman’s car-to try and show Mary that Elizabeth Orman was in with them, that she was part of their effort.

She came here before she went to the other place, Elizabeth Orman had said.

The other place.

If she does what she’s supposed to do and shows up at the other place, then it ends tonight.

Where? Where was this other place? Was it in Bell City? In Cale? Was it Professor Williams’s house?

Mary couldn’t stop thinking as she drove down Pride. It was getting dark, and she turned on her headlights as she pulled up to the corner of Montgomery.

Other place.

And then she knew. The link had to be Pig Stephens. He was the only character in the play that she hadn’t spoken to. She knew nothing about him other than what Williams had told them in the car. He was dangerous, she knew that, and he was in league with Orman. Perhaps the dean had found out about Elizabeth and Leonard Williams, and he had sent Pig to punish his wife.

Find Pig Stephens, she thought.

But where? She needed a place now, a location to go to. She needed to follow Williams’s script so that it could, as Elizabeth Orman had said, “end tonight.”

Where could she find Pig Stephens? Where had Brian House found Elizabeth Orman that night?

The light turned green, and she turned right onto Montgomery. Brian had found her just down the road from here. Afterward, he had driven straight to Mary’s dorm. He had been to the public library, and had taken the bypass back to campus. So he must have passed on his way-

That’s it, she thought. Has to be.

The Thatch River. They were trying to point her toward the boat. Ed Orman’s yacht.

According to Dennis, Pig Stephens, the former cop, took care of Ed Orman’s weekender. Brian had found Elizabeth Orman out where Montgomery Street overlooks the Thatch, about three miles from campus. Mary was sure, suddenly, that Professor Williams was leading her there.

She took a right on the bypass and made her way toward the Rowe County Marina. The marina appeared out of the foliage at the bottom of a hill just below Montgomery Street. The lights of the slips were on and dotting the cove. A few men walked here and there across the dock, mooring their boats. Mary found a parking space and walked down the slick, mossy steps to the slips. She had never seen Orman’s boat, but she guessed that it was probably the biggest one in the marina. There were four docks that intersected out on the water, and there were close to a hundred slips along each dock. It would take her an hour to traverse the whole thing.

She walked out onto one of the docks and found the office. She knocked on the door, and a man’s voice told her to come in. The man was brown from the sun, and he was smoking a chewed cigar that was frayed on the end like a gag gift. He was sitting at a cramped desk in the office, stuffing paychecks into envelopes.

“Help you?” he asked.

“I’m looking for Pig Stephens,” Mary said.

“Pig comes by around about 10:00 p.m.,” replied the man. “Keeps an eye on Ed Orman’s yacht.”

“Ah,” Mary said. “The Ancient Mariner?” She knew that Orman would name the boat after a line or a title from the classics.

“Naw,” said the man. “His is The Dante.”

“Thanks,” Mary said, and she went back out on the docks and began her search for the boat.

It didn’t take her long. The mast of The Dante rose high above the marina. The boat was close to the bank, Mary assumed because it would be easier for Pig Stephens to pull down and spotlight the docks to see if anyone was vandalizing it.

She stood in front of the rocking boat. The wind was pitching higher, sending spray off the top of the water and onto her cheeks. It was bitterly cold by now, and almost completely dark. Mary had no idea why she was here or what she was looking for, but something of interest had to be here somewhere. Elizabeth Orman was the link to Pig Stephens, and this is where Pig came every night to take care of his client’s investment. Was she supposed to wait until 10:00 and talk to Pig personally?

Mary sat on the dock, her legs pulled up into her chest. The Dante’s mast rattled in the heavy wake. She closed her eyes, as Williams had instructed them to do so long ago in Seminary East, and tried to make sense of all she had found. The only photograph she hadn’t explained was of the dog, the black Labrador. But there would be no dogs here, of course.

The dock rocked gently, and she pulled herself farther into her coat, until almost no skin was exposed. She thought about Deanna Ward, wondered where she could be, all these years later. Deanna, and Polly, and Professor Williams. So many questions answered, but still so many left. She thought about that day in 1986, when Polly was brought mistakenly back to Wendy Ward. What must Wendy have thought when she saw Polly? Was she being punished for her tryst with Dean Orman? Did she feel, in that moment, as if she had deserved that fate?

“Ma’am?” said a voice above her.

Mary sat up and blinked at the man. It was the man she had seen earlier, in the office.

“You were asleep,” he said. “We don’t really like people to sleep on the docks. Afraid they’ll roll off into the water. It’s happened a few times.” The orange eye of the cigar pulsed and then swung down to his side.

“Yes, I’m sorry,” Mary said. She scrambled to her feet. It took her a moment to orient herself, but then it came to her. The marina. Then she thought, Pig. “What time is it?” she asked the man.

“It’s about nine forty-five,” he said. “You been out here for a good while. I bet you’re about froze to death.”

Now that he mentioned it, Mary was numb. Her feet were stiff and aching. Her hands, which she had squeezed tight into the sleeves of her coat, were sore from where she had clenched her fists so fiercely.

She thanked the man and walked away from him toward the bank. In the parking lot, she sat in her Camry with the heat on, waiting. How would she know Pig Stephens? Maybe he was the owner of the black Labrador. Maybe he kept it in his truck, a sort of companion on his rounds at the marina. She assumed he would pull up and stop, get out of his vehicle, and approach The Dante. She waited, blinking the sleep out of her eyes. What would she do when he got here? She had no idea. She might approach him, possibly, as she had done to Dean Orman. She figured by now, after playing the game for so long, that she would be used to acting on instinct. At least she hoped so.

To her right, she heard a truck pull into the lot. The truck swung close to the river and stopped. A man got out. He was carrying a heavy flashlight, and he shined it down on the docks. Mary got out of her Camry and walked toward the man. “Pig?” she called, but her voice caught on the wind and was carried away. She called his name again, and the man turned. He swung the spotlight at her, and momentarily she was blinded.

“Who’s that?” he asked. His voice was deep, inflected with a thick Southern accent.

“I just want to ask you some questions,” she said, the light still piercing her eyes.

“Kind of questions?” he asked.

“Some questions about Ed Orman.”

He lowered the flashlight. “Go on,” he said.

“What do you know about him?” she asked.

“I just know he cuts me a check every month. That’s good enough for me.”

“Do you know that he fathered a child with one of his students?”

The man shifted. Mary still couldn’t see his face, but she could see that he was overweight, his stomach bulging out over his belt. “What business is it of mine?” Pig asked.

“It’s just that your name has come up in some of Ed Orman’s doings.”

“Doings?”

“The disappearance of a girl named Deanna Ward, for instance.” Mary was pressing on now, trying to reach something. Whatever inhibitions she had at the beginning of the day had now dissolved, and there was something enlivening about standing in front of him and talking as if she were the one in control of the situation.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the man said.

“Ed Orman thinks you do.”

They let that hang between them. Down the bank, the Thatch rocked and swayed, and the boats banged in their slips, making a cacophony of sound in the night. Just as she opened her mouth to speak, the flashlight exploded on again and she lost her vision. Mary held her arm up to her eyes, and she was able to see his feet-just his boots, walking toward her. She scrambled away from him, but he was grabbing her, forcing her back toward him. Still blind, she smelled his breath, musty and thick and strangely earthy.

Mary pulled away from him and ran. She felt him, felt his heat, close behind her. She saw her Camry, its door still open. There was a ringing coming from inside it: her cell phone. It seemed like a thousand miles away, but the car could have been no more than a hundred feet in front of her. Oh God, Mary. What have you done? Somehow, she made it to the driver’s seat and shut the door. Pig was a step behind her, and when she tried to slam the door his hand was inside. “Arrrrrll,” he growled, falling back onto the car beside hers. Behind the wheel, she backed out onto Montgomery Street and gunned the engine toward Winchester. By the time she was out on the highway, she had forgotten the phone.

47

Mary drove the long way toward campus, trying to lose Pig Stephens. There was a wail in her ears, a piercing red scream, and she could barely hold on to the wheel. She knew that if Pig caught up to her, he would surely kill her. She had gotten herself into something she could never imagine. But now-now, she knew, there was no way out.

She drove toward Professor Williams’s house. If she could somehow tell him that she was in danger, maybe he would help. Her mind was spinning, torturing her with fear. Repeatedly, she checked her rearview mirror for Pig Stephens’s truck.

What have you done, Mary? What have you gotten yourself into?

Mary drove into the Winchester campus, going sixty miles per hour in a thirty-five zone. It was 10:30 p.m. now, and the campus was almost entirely deserted. Only a few remaining students strolled around here and there. She stopped at the light on the corner of Pride and Montgomery, her car rocking violently to a stop. She checked behind her, but there was no sign of Pig. Please, she thought. Please God turn, please turn.

Finally, the light turned green.

As she began to pull through the light, something flashed in the corner of her vision. She jammed the brakes and lurched forward, the seat belt snapping her back into the seat. When she managed to look up, she saw someone crossing in front of her. It was a man. He was leading a dog on a leash.

A black Lab.

Mary watched him cross the street. He was wearing a Windbreaker he had zipped high on his face and a Boston Red Sox cap pulled low over his eyes, and when he got directly in front of her car he glanced at her. That was all, one short glance. But she knew what it meant.

The man began to walk down Pride, and she turned right and followed him. He broke into a jog, but he did not turn into the trees of the campus proper; he kept on Pride so that she could easily stay behind him. He passed Professor Williams’s house, and then Dean Orman’s mansion on Grace Hill. At the corner of Pride and Turner, he took a right and headed into the heart of campus. Mary stayed close behind. The man ran all the way to the edge of Up Campus, and then he cut into the woods beside the gymnasium. She pulled to the curb and watched him disappear into a ground floor entrance of a shadow-cloaked building about a hundred yards from where she had stopped.

Seminary.

The spires of the Seminary Building were unlit. The high stained-glass windows were dark and devoid of the religious imagery that burned through them during the day. The building had been the convocation hall when the school had first unified into one college, and just a decade ago it had been turned into a classroom building. On this night it had the look of a fortress, something that the darkness protected and kept hidden.

Mary got out of her car. The wind was still sharp, almost bitterly cold now. She walked under the canopy of oaks, which were shuddering in the wind. She made her way through the darkness to the door on the east side of the building, and she went inside. The steps loomed in front of her. She went up, her footsteps echoing in the dark.

48

Brian House had reached the Indiana state line when his obsession got the best of him.

He drove with the radio off. His plan was to drive to I-71, get into Columbus, Ohio, and then rest for the night before making the second leg of the trip to Poughkeepsie tomorrow morning. It was already 6:00 p.m. He couldn’t turn around or he would lose two hours and wouldn’t get home until tomorrow evening. No, he had to go on. He only wished there were some way to turn off his thoughts, to silence his roaring mind.

They killed Deanna Ward, he thought.

Shut up.

Dean Orman had Deanna Ward killed.

No.

Williams tried to stop them.

Quit this, Brian. Stop.

Williams couldn’t stop him, but-

But?

But Williams will not tell the police. He only invents a puzzle for-

For?

For us. To terrorize us. Like Polly at the kilns that night, but-

But he didn’t mention Polly.

He didn’t mention Polly, did he?

In the car he hadn’t mentioned the girl Brian had met. He’d explained everything, the fake wife and Dean Orman and Pig Stephens, but he hadn’t mentioned Polly.

Was that his daughter? Had Williams’s own daughter been in on the game?

No. Impossible. She would have to be in her forties. The girl at the kilns was much younger.

And so what did that mean?

It meant that there were still hidden truths. It meant that the deception was still ongoing. Williams told them he had explained it all, but he hadn’t. There were still pieces to the puzzle that needed to be added.

And if the puzzle is unsolved, then that means-

What?

That means he’s still lying.

And if he was lying, then the story about Dean Orman was false. It was just another ruse. A hoax. It meant that Williams was trying to implicate Orman. For what? For some long-standing grudge? Professional jealousy. It meant-

What? Say it.

It meant that Williams had killed Deanna Ward.

It was the only logical solution. The thought plagued Brian, scratched at him like a sort of mad itch. At some point-perhaps as he passed the Bell City exit-the thoughts became geometric. Physical. They dashed and prodded their way inside his skull. They had edges that scraped at him sharply.

Leonard Williams killed Deanna Ward.

I think it’s difficult to trust him considering what he made us do, Mary had said to him.

And it made perfect sense. Williams killed Deanna, and his guilt continually drove him to the brink of madness. To assuage his guilt he tried to implicate a man who had always been his better, a man who had overstepped him in the academy, who had a legendary friendship with a famous scientist named Stanley Milgram: Ed Orman.

Slowly, pitifully, the crime had driven Leonard Williams crazy. He orchestrated a scenario where he set the lies in place. A system of intricate mistruths. A false book that made it look like his interest was merely professional. The adopted daughter, Polly. Williams as a hero. Williams as a savior. Yet-

Yet? His conscience egged him on.

It was much easier to link Williams to Deanna Ward than it was Ed Orman.

After all, it was Williams, not Orman, who had lived close to Cale and Deanna Ward in Bell City. It was Williams, not Orman, who had the unhealthy interest in the case, who devised the Polly story with its horrifying details. It was Williams, not Orman, who loved those gruesome and violent tangrams Dennis had told Brian and Mary about.

He wanted to see Williams punished for what he’d done to him. Williams was a potential murderer, and he had entrapped his students in his twisted game because-

Because why? Because the man was fucking sick. It was clear to Brian now. He had finally seen through the lies Williams had told them as they drove back from Bell City this morning. It was all just a smokescreen.

Suddenly he felt an uncontrollable hatred for Williams.

The viaduct. The Thing buried there.

Can you do it? he asked himself.

Could he?

What choice do you have when your world has been turned upside down by a cruel game? What do you do, Brian wondered, when all the clues and signs point to one solution? What do you do when place, time, motive, and circumstance point to one man?

You turn around. You go back to finish it.

Which is exactly what Brian House did.

49

“Hello?” Mary called after the man in the Red Sox cap.

Silence. Inside Seminary there was a high, fixed silence. Nothing moved.

She climbed the flight of stairs to the second floor and went in. Down the hall, a light was burning in Williams’s classroom. She walked down the hall toward that light. What if Orman is in there? she thought. What if I’m being drawn into a trap?

But she couldn’t stop now. The game was ending, and she had to complete it or else she could not forgive herself for coming so close to finding the answers and failing. She had to find out how it ended. Deanna Ward was still missing, and someone in that room knew where she was. Stopping now would sacrifice everything she had learned in these six weeks.

Mary walked through the door.

50

Brian arrived on campus a little after nightfall. The dorms were dark and still. No cars crept down Montgomery, and even the streetlights seemed to be darker, throwing off a misty and incomplete gray rather than the blinding orange they normally did.

They say you become obsessive after tragedies befall you. He wondered if that was it-if his ability to quell his own impulses had been shattered after Marcus’s suicide. That would explain a lot-the nagging obedience he felt to Williams’s game, the paranoia after meeting the girl at the kilns. His craving tonight for some kind of closure.

Brian dialed Mary’s cell phone but got no answer. He drove to Brown, parked on the curb, and left his truck running. This dorm, like all the others, was empty. He had to try, though. He had to warn Mary about Williams before she contacted him.

He took the elevator up to her floor, and when he stepped into the hall he saw the hunched figure of a girl. She was sitting on the floor, her back to Mary’s door.

“Polly?” he asked.

The girl looked up at him. Her eyes were weary and red. She’d been crying.

“Who?” she asked.

It was Summer McCoy, Mary’s friend.

“I was waiting on Mary,” the girl said.

“I’ve been trying to call her,” Brian replied.

“Who are you?”

“My name is Brian. I’m a…a friend of Mary’s.”

“She’s mentioned you,” Summer said. “She thinks you’re cute.”

At another time, Brian might have pursued that comment, might have asked the girl what exactly Mary had said. But not now. All he said was, “Where is she?”

“I don’t know,” she replied. “I’ve been waiting here for an hour. I don’t know what else to do. I just need to tell her…” The girl trailed off. She put her head down again. Her clothes looked too big for her, somehow; her wrists were thin, her cheeks sunken. She looked emaciated, broken down.

“Tell her what?” Brian asked. So slowly, he was walking toward her. The movement was almost unconscious, as if he were separated from his body now. He wanted to be as close as he could possibly get to her. He needed to hear what this girl said to him, needed to understand why she was here, in front of Mary’s door, tonight of all nights.

“I wanted to tell her that what they’ve been doing is wrong,” she said.

“Williams,” Brian gasped. He was tuning up again, just like earlier in the truck. The girl blurred, and he shut his eyes to keep the world from spinning. He leaned against the wall opposite her, forced himself to breathe.

“The professor,” she said, “and the others. I don’t know their names. I never met them in person. Dr. Williams showed up at my dorm one night and asked me if I would do something for him. Take a picture with a boy. It was nothing. Just a snapshot on a couch-the couch was green, I’ll remember that for as long as live-with his arm around me. They told me that they were going to send it to Mary for that class she was taking, the logic class. It was nothing. And I did it. I didn’t know what the picture meant. They paid me, you see. It was nothing but I-I needed the money. But then I heard about Dr. Williams disappearing from campus and I called the number they’d given me.”

“The number?”

“It was on the back of Dr. Williams’s business card,” she said. “Just in case I had problems. Just in case Mary started asking me stuff. Questions. A man answered. It wasn’t Dr. Williams. This guy was younger, like a student. I asked him if Dr. Williams was okay, and he told me not to worry about it. He said that it was nothing, just a rumor. So I drove to his house.”

“You drove to Williams’s house?”

“Yes. On Pride Street. And there in the driveway was Dean Orman’s car. I knew it was his because I’d seen it around campus. He parks it in the lot at Carnegie, where I do my work study.”

“What was Orman doing at Williams’s house, Summer?”

The girl continued. Her stare was broken, her voice wavering. She didn’t want to go on, Brian knew, but couldn’t stop now. “I was going to just knock on the door. Just tell them I wasn’t comfortable with whatever they were doing. I didn’t like to deceive Mary. She’s like my best friend at Winchester. Why would I want to do anything to her, you know?”

“You saw them in there, didn’t you?”

She nodded. “I heard a bunch of voices coming from inside. Like a big party was going on. So I walked around to the side of the house and I saw…I saw…”

“What did you see, Summer? Tell me.”

“I saw them tying Williams up. They were taping his hands with, you know, masking tape. Or duct tape. Something. They were putting his hands behind his back and leading him around the room. But-”

“But what, damnit?” Brian asked. He was getting impatient with her. The hall was spinning, and it was all he could do to steady himself against the wall.

“They were all laughing. Like it was all a joke. Dean Orman was there. A few other people I didn’t recognize. And then-oh God-and then Williams turned and saw me. Through the window. He saw me. Or at least I thought he did. Later I couldn’t be sure. Thought I might have just imagined it. But I swear he looked-”

“Dangerous,” Brian finished for her.

“Exactly,” Summer said. “Dangerous. He looked like he had caught me in something. And so I ran. I drove off campus and stayed at a friend’s apartment in St. Owsley. I flunked both my classes. I haven’t told my parents anything. I just couldn’t…”

“Have you heard from them?” he asked.

“No. They called my cell, but I didn’t pick up. I eventually just turned it off. I haven’t spoken with Mary for a week or two. She probably thinks I’m dead.”

Mary’s got her own problems right now, Brian thought but didn’t say.

“But last night it just got to me,” Summer went on. “I thought about what I’d done. For fifty bucks, you know. Fifty bucks! For a fucking picture on a green couch. I couldn’t keep silent anymore. I thought Mary was in danger. The way Dr. Williams looked at me through that window, I thought maybe Mary was in trouble. I wondered if maybe I was responsible somehow…”

Brian waited, but she didn’t go on. She put her head down again and started to sob. It was a weeping at first, and soon it was a deep, ragged sob.

But he was no longer focused on the girl. He thought about what she’d said last: I thought Mary was in danger.

Williams was trying to hurt Mary.

Brian didn’t bother with the slow elevator at Brown Hall. He bolted down the stairs and burst out into the cold night. He knew exactly where he needed to go, knew that the only way to end this was to get to Williams before he could do any more damage.

I thought Mary was in danger.

Brian went to his favorite place on the Winchester campus: the viaduct. He threw his leg over the barrier and climbed across. He started down the bank toward Miller’s Creek, slipping here and there in the mud. There were no students around, thank God-no one to see him crawling on his hands and knees into the muck, just as he had in an early dawn three years ago, just days after he’d returned to Winchester. A security light on the viaduct gave him some light, enough to see his own hands becoming smeared with black as he dug.

Soon, he felt it. It was still wrapped in the towel he’d put it in.

He pulled it up out of the dirt, the ground below him making a sucking sound, and removed the towel. The Thing appeared in the sickly light off the viaduct. It was a gun-the 9 mm Smith & Wesson Marcus had used to shoot himself. Brian had kept it because there didn’t seem as if there was anything else to do. For weeks he’d carried it around in his truck, the Thing pulsing with some invisible energy from the glove compartment. When he came to Winchester, he’d wrapped it in a towel and packed it away. When he got here there was nowhere to keep it, nowhere to really hide it. And so he’d brought it down to the banks of Miller’s Creek and buried it, the closest thing he could think of to actually destroying it.

Afterward, his arms and knees covered with the black muck of the creek side, the Thing hidden in his coat pocket, he walked toward Up Campus. Toward Leonard Williams’s house.

51

The first thing Mary noticed when she entered Seminary East: the room was full of people. They were people she had seen before, all of them familiar to her. The second thing she noticed was that Elizabeth Orman was standing at the podium, where Professor Williams had stood during their classes. The woman was smiling a strange, almost beatific smile.

52

Brian walked slowly. He’d cut his knee on a rock, and the dirt in the torn skin began to burn when he reached Pride Street. There were no cars. The campus was completely silent; the only sound was the traffic moving up and down Montgomery three blocks ahead of him.

Williams’s house came into view up ahead, and Brian began to jog. He heard the dog barking, saw the man’s pickup truck in the drive. He put his hand in his pocket, felt the weight of the gun, held it still as his coat jostled. Brian had shot a gun only once, with his father years ago. He had no intention of shooting one tonight; he wanted only to have protection in case…

In case what?

In case Mary was there, in the man’s house.

And they were laughing, Summer McCoy had told him.

Laughing? Why had they been laughing?

He was right in front of Williams’s house. It was dark; no lights were on inside at all.

Weird, thought Brian. Maybe they’re in the basement.

He approached the house, and as he did something caught his eye in the distance. It was the Seminary Building looming over the evergreen trees just across Loquax Avenue. The lights were on up there in Seminary East.

Why the hell would the lights be on? Brian wondered.

He went around to the side of Williams’s house to get a better look. Yes, they were definitely on. He saw them on the east side of the building as well. And was that-

He squinted to see.

There were people up there. A whole crowd of them. They were sitting in the student desks, and someone was at the podium addressing them. But he couldn’t see who it was. The side of the building obscured his vision.

At that point Brian knew.

He knew where he needed to go.

53

“I’m glad you made it,” Elizabeth Orman said to Mary. “We were worried there for a bit.” She gestured at the crowded room. There were perhaps twenty people there. Some stood against the wall, but most sat at the desks. They, too, were smiling at Mary. “And I assume you know these people,” Elizabeth said. “I guess no introductions are necessary.”

“No,” Mary managed, her voice hollow and ruined.

No introductions at all. In fact, back in the back corner, Mary recognized the boy they’d taken to the park, the boy called Paul. When he saw her looking at him, he waved.

“What is this?” Mary asked.

“This is the Polly Experiment.” Mary looked at Elizabeth Orman. The woman was in a black dress, different from the one she’d been wearing earlier. Her hair was perfect, her jewelry flashed in the fluorescent light. She had been preparing for this, Mary knew. This was her big night.

“What are you talking about?” Mary was bracing herself against the wall, the crowded room reeling around her.

“It’s my dissertation,” Elizabeth said. “I’m a PhD student in behavioral psychology, and you and Brian House have been my subjects.”

“You were performing a test on us?” Mary asked.

“Not on you, no,” Elizabeth said. “Not at all. I was using you to test certain results. Certain hypotheses. For instance: Did you know that a human being cares for a person that they’ve never even met? Did you know that a human being will go out of her or his way to save this hypothetical person given the right circumstances? If a human being feels that another is in danger, then that human being will ‘care for’ this other person in a profound, utterly human manner.”

“But not always.” It was a man’s voice. He was somewhere in the middle of the room, and when he stood up Mary gasped.

Troy Hardings.

He was dressed in a suit. It was silk, Mary saw: the light glinted off it when he moved. The facial hair was gone, the smirk had been replaced by a rigid smile. He looked completely professional, like a businessman-or perhaps someone acting like a businessman, Mary reminded herself.

“This is Dr. Troy Hardings,” Elizabeth Orman said. “He was my faculty adviser for this project.”

“To register the impact of this study, we have to remember Kitty Genovese,” Hardings said. “We have to remember the so-called bystander effect. What the Polly Experiment proves is that human beings are more apt to help a potential victim, an assumed victim, than they are if they, say, saw a woman being stabbed below their window at night.”

“Deanna,” Mary said weakly.

“Yes,” Elizabeth Orman replied. “Deanna Ward was completely fabricated. A lot of things in the Polly Experiment were fabricated. Or ‘exaggerated,’ as Troy liked to say. The night Brian saw me beside the road, for example. That was a ruse to pull in Brian. We thought he might be straying, so we found the perfect method of bringing him back. And the day you found Troy in the office. That was all done on the fly-we had no idea that you were coming up. We had literally nailed Leonard’s name to the door five minutes earlier.”

“And these people?” Mary asked. She closed her eyes. She couldn’t look at them, couldn’t turn to face the crowd. It was not embarrassment that she felt, not shame or guilt. It was fear: fear that there was another twist in the game coming, another misdirection. Mary didn’t know if she could handle it. Not now.

“We hired them to play roles,” Elizabeth explained. “They all did a beautiful job. And of course you know who we hired to play the part of your professor.”

Leonard Williams stood up from his chair and nodded. “In real life he’s in a theater troupe here in DeLane. His stage name is Mike Williams. And he was often disguised, so there was no way you could have uncovered him.” Mary thought about the first time she’d seen him, of the acne pits on his face. Makeup, she knew now.

There was a pause, a moment where nobody spoke. Then Williams approached Mary. He was smiling, trying to disarm her with his charm. In an instant he was beside her, putting his hand on her shoulder. “Mary,” he said softly.

And then something happened.

54

Brian crept slowly onto the floor where Seminary East was. The door was open, and yellow light spilled out and bathed half the hallway. He heard a woman’s voice coming from inside, but because he was sliding along the wall he couldn’t see anyone in the room.

“In real life he’s in a theater troupe here in DeLane,” the woman said.

And then another voice. This second voice was very low and weak, barely discernible. “Mary,” it said. And he did discern it: it was Leonard Williams.

Brian moved faster down the hall, his hand on the gun in his pocket. He had turned it now so that his finger was on the trigger.

When he stepped inside his knees almost buckled. He almost pitched forward into the crowd, but somehow he maintained his balance and stood, staring at them.

They were all there. All the actors. Marco, the Collinses, the boy from the park named Paul. Bethany Cavendish from the high school. The waitresses they’d met in Bell City. Even Dean Orman, sitting toward the front and wearing his fedora. All of them were here, waiting for him.

And there, leaning against the back wall, was the girl from the kilns. She’d pulled her hair back. She looked very young, thirty or so, and she was staring at him in a way that was so sickening, so fucking sickening.

“Polly,” he said.

Ashamed, the girl looked down at the floor.

“Brian,” someone said to his left.

When he turned he saw not Elizabeth Orman, who had spoken to him, but Leonard Williams.

Williams’s hand was on Mary’s arm. He was-was he pulling on her? Pulling her toward him?

“Brian,” Elizabeth said again from the front of the class.

But he paid no attention. Williams was staring at Brian so oddly, so coldly that Brian knew he was trying to impart some information. The professor’s gaze said something, it spoke of something awful.

What? Brian mouthed.

But Williams still stared at him, his eyes hooded, his hand still tight on Mary’s shoulder. She looked shocked and terrified, as if she were in tremendous pain. Did Williams’s mouth move? Did he say some word, reveal something?

What the fuck do you want? Brian mouthed. Let her go!

“Brian, we want you to know that this began during your freshman years,” Elizabeth Orman said. But Brian already had the Thing out of his pocket and he was aiming it at Leonard Williams.

55

When Williams released his grip on Mary’s arm and fell backward onto the desk, coming to rest right in front of Edna Collins, everyone laughed. They thought it was part of the game, another trick. Another wrinkle thrown in the narrative.

But Mary knew better. She saw Brian’s hand, saw through the wispy smoke that he was holding a gun. A gun that had just been fired.

The atmosphere changed around her. It became charged; the whole room dimmed as if a fuse had blown somewhere. The dog tore away from the man he had been kneeling beside, the man in the baseball cap, and ran out of the room.

At that point everyone moved.

Dean Orman was the first to Williams. “Get an ambulance!” he shouted.

A couple of the other men collapsed on Williams. It was all moving fast, so fast. They were tearing off his shirt. They were slapping him, trying to keep him awake.

And to her right Brian was moving. He was not trying to escape, but rather he was coming into the room, toward the frantic throng of actors and actresses.

He was walking toward Elizabeth Orman with the gun.

“Brian,” Mary said softly.

56

Mary said his name, and he stopped.

That movement-the stopping, the turning around to face her-was what allowed the man in the Red Sox cap to reach him.

“Stop,” the man said. He was dressed strangely, Brian saw. His jacket had been zipped high and the cap had been pulled down low so that his face was obscured. The dog he’d had beside him, the black Lab, had run out of the room. The man held the snapped leash limply in his right hand.

“I couldn’t,” Brian said to this man, this stranger. “I just couldn’t let him continue hurting us.”

“I know, I know,” the man said. “But put the gun down and we’ll figure it all out.” His voice was soothing, familiar.

Suddenly, Brian knew who he was.

Brian reached up and unzipped the man’s jacket and revealed Dennis Flaherty.

57

Dennis took the gun away from Brian and put it on the table. Mary was so close to Dennis that he could hear her voice. “Why?” she said.

“Let’s talk about this later, Mary,” he said. He was holding Brian by the shoulders. Both boys looked vulnerable, weak, as if they had stepped into a nightmare that they couldn’t wake up from.

Dennis took a few steps toward where Williams lay, but he couldn’t get through to the man. Mary went around to the other side and found her way to him. They had him on the floor, and she could see by his pallor that he was dead. He was gray and still. She knelt and touched his hand, and he was unresponsive to her touch. “Professor,” she whispered. Nothing. The man who had played Marco was performing CPR, and all the actors and actresses were watching passively now. The air had been taken out of the room. They had finally reached the end.

58

Some time later, after Marco had stopped trying to save Williams, after some of the actors and actresses had left the room to retch in the hallway, Mary looked at Dennis. She didn’t have to say anything: he knew what she needed him to say.

He took a deep breath. “I was intrigued. When I figured it out, I thought it was so brilliant. A real-life behavior experiment, you know. So I joined them. They sent me to Cale and Bell City. I was their emissary. I made all the phone calls so they could track us. I called the Collinses beforehand; I called the diner from the store where we stopped to get directions. I went in to speak to Bethany Cavendish this morning and we sent out Paul. They needed someone to help them, and so I did. And there was also…” Dennis trailed off.

“Her,” Mary said.

“Excuse me?”

“You wanted to be near Elizabeth.” It was Brian. His head was leaned back against the wall, and Dennis still held him by the shoulders. Mary knew that if Brian wanted to break free he could, but he was resigned to this now. He had conceded defeat.

“That’s absurd,” Dennis said, his voice nearly a whisper. “I was going to say that there was also my father. How I wanted to be like him, more ‘serious-minded,’ as he liked to say. More academic. More worthwhile.” But Mary could see that was also a lie. The truth was that Dennis’s part in the study had, in fact, everything to do with Elizabeth Orman and little to do with his interest in the science or with his father.

“How pathetic,” she said to him. Dennis didn’t respond, and in that silence she saw that in some twisted way he agreed with her.

“No,” Dennis said. “It had nothing to do with her. Not after I got involved with it. Not after I started talking to Leonard and Troy Hardings. It became a-a purely academic thing. I began to see what my father saw. The proof opening up, the answer revealing itself. The study was so perfect, so mathematical.”

“Except you forgot one thing,” Mary said.

“What’s that?” Dennis asked.

“The human element. It’s what you always forget, Dennis. That your actions mean something to other people. That what you do has consequences.”

She looked down and caught Brian’s gaze, and he simply shook his head. His face revealed the gravity of his mistake. Tears streamed down his face, and Mary noticed that his hand, the hand that had held the gun, was trembling slightly.

Then Mary was being led away from them, into the crowd of people. Soon she was in the back of the room with Edna Collins beside her, and through the mass of people she saw the events of Seminary East unfold: Elizabeth Orman sat on the rolling chair and buried her head in her hands; Troy Hardings came to Elizabeth and stroked her hair, and Mary saw what he was saying to her by reading his lips: “It will be okay” the ambulance arrived, the stretcher was rolled in, and they took Leonard Williams away; the word “dead” began to ripple through the room. Then, much later, when only ten or twelve of them remained, a detective came in to talk to her. He was wearing a flannel jacket and had a mustache. He could have been an actor for all Mary knew, but she was too exhausted to care.

“What’s going on here?” he asked, and Mary told him what she knew.