Obedience

7

“Logic tells you,” Professor Williams was saying on Monday afternoon, “that Mike was the abductor. A criminal background check reveals that he has been busted a few times. Driving while intoxicated. Public intoxication. Possession of marijuana. Kid stuff. But there is something dangerous about him. Something dark and mysterious. Something inner. You’ve seen the picture of the man who is playing him for my experiment. I chose this particular actor because in real life this man is brooding, contemplative. Does he look, to you, like he is capable of this?”

The class was silent for a moment, and then two or three students muttered, “Yes.”

“Yes!” Williams said, animated. For the first time he came out behind the podium, but gently, his hands out, easing his way toward them. “Of course. Logic draws a concrete line from Polly to Mike to the abandoned car on Stribbling Road. And your mind-your intuition-will draw an arrow. Intuition fills in blanks for you. If something is supposed to fit a certain pattern, then the mind will take you there and you will be biased against any other proposition.”

He wrote two words on the board: invincible ignorance.

“This is a circular fallacy of the highest order,” he said then, placing the marker back in the tray. “X cannot be Y because X clearly has to be Z. The mind presents you with rigid-very rigid-maps, and you do not listen to any other suggestions. This is also called, in layman’s terms, ‘tunnel vision.’ It will ruin you in this case.”

“What about randomness?” asked Dennis. He was writing on a legal pad that was resting on his briefcase. Mary noticed that he was a bit sunburned, and she wondered if he had been away somewhere for the weekend with his fraternity brothers-or perhaps with Savannah Kleppers.

“What about it?” replied Williams.

“Well, what about someone at the party? A guy sees Polly, he likes her, he calls her late that night and tells her to meet him somewhere off Stribbling Road. She meets him, and he…” But Dennis couldn’t go on, couldn’t say the word.

“And he what, Mr. Flaherty?” asked the professor.

“And he abducts her,” Dennis mustered. It was just a whisper, so soft it was nearly just a scratch in his throat.

“Randomness is always a possibility, of course,” the professor said. He retreated back behind the podium. “But in how many crimes does someone who is not in the victim’s orbit end up being the perpetrator? I’ll let you guess on that one.”

“Twenty percent of the time,” someone said.

“Less,” said Williams.

“Ten percent,” Mary offered.

“Less.”

“Five.”

“Two percent of the time,” he declared. “Two percent. That means that in five hundred crimes of this manner, about ten random suspects become perpetrators. The odds, then, Mr. Flaherty, are against you.” Williams spun on his heel again and faced the board. He wrote two more words below the last: tu quoque. “Latin,” he explained. “‘You also.’ This is a fallacy that suggests that since your theory is poor, then mine is allowed to be poor as well. But there is an inherent problem with wrongness in this class, of course.” The professor smiled and leaned forward on the podium. “If you are wrong here, then Polly dies.”

Some in the class laughed. For them, obviously, it was becoming a joke. A game. But Mary thought of the article she had read, of Leonard Williams’s crime. When she looked at him, she could not fathom someone who had knowingly stolen another scholar’s ideas and language. But of course that was invincible ignorance, because she knew that he had stolen those words.

“What about the dad?” asked Brian House. He had moved up a row for some reason, and now he was sitting right behind Mary. She wondered if he was just trying to show her up with this question, or maybe he had thought about what she had said on the viaduct Saturday night.

“Ah,” Williams exclaimed. “Good old Dad. What about him? He’s a schoolteacher. He teaches science at a local elementary school. He’s overweight. What else?”

“The man in the transparency-your actor-had a military tattoo on his arm,” Dennis said. Mary felt ashamed-she hadn’t noticed it in the picture. She suddenly felt as if she was behind the rest of them, slipping away in the current. While she had been chasing down stupid conspiracy theories about Leonard Williams, the rest of the class had been thinking about Polly.

“The last one to see her,” said the girl sitting beside Mary.

Mary knew that she better say something, or else the day was going to pass her by and she would be two weeks into a class without any headway. “Watches Letterman,” she said.

A few people in back laughed, but Mary had not meant it as a joke. The comment was made in desperation, and again she felt herself flush.

“Good, Ms. Butler,” the professor said, and Mary rose her eyes hopefully to meet his. “He watches Letterman. What could this mean? This is an important clue, I think.”

“It could mean that he likes Letterman,” said Brian wryly.

“Or that he hates Leno,” the professor retorted. “But come on. Think here. He is watching Letterman when Polly returns from the going-away party. She watches the show with him and falls asleep and he carries her to bed. What are the possible meanings of that scenario?”

Mary thought. She closed her eyes and tried to find it, to find the truth in the situation. She saw Polly opening the door, coming into the dark house. Polly was a little drunk, stumbling. She put her purse down on the kitchen counter and saw her father. She came into the living room, which was flickering with the light from the TV, and sat beside him on the couch. He put his arm around her. They didn’t say anything because they had the kind of relationship where you didn’t have to speak. Your actions, your gestures, sounds, and tiny movements, told enough of the story of your day.

“He was waiting for her,” she said.

“Why?” Williams asked.

“Because he was worried about Mike.”

“Of course,” the professor said. He was smiling, proud of her for getting there. “He was waiting for her because of Mike. Because there had-what?-been something going on in the last week before she disappeared. Because he was concerned with the old trouble again. Maybe Mike had been coming around again. Does a guy who teaches elementary school children seem to you like a late-night television fan?”

“No,” half the class agreed.

“Are guys with military tattoos normally Letterman fans?”

“No.”

“So what was Polly’s father doing watching television late that night? Of course, he had to be waiting on her. Which means that Mike may have been-may have been-up to his old tricks.”

Williams wrote one more word on the board: retroduction.

“This is a type of logic that suggests that we can account for a truth based on an observed set of facts. It has been proven, or observed, that Polly watched television with her father. It has been observed that Mike and Polly’s father had had run-ins in the past, and that, according to a police report, the two men ‘hated’ each other. It has been observed that Mike physically abused Polly in the past. So we know retroductively, based on Letterman and her father taking Polly to bed, that perhaps he was waiting for her to come in. And thus Mike becomes more of a suspect.”

“It doesn’t fit,” said Dennis then. The familiar light was moving forward, almost to the podium now.

“Mr. Flaherty has an objection!” said Professor Williams. He was still smiling, playing with them, seeing how far they could go with these theories.

“Mike was at the party,” Dennis said.

“He was at the party, yes,” agreed the professor. “Many people saw him that night. That’s what you call a rock-solid alibi. Go on.”

Dennis did not know how to go on. Mary could see the doodles and shapes all over his legal pad, boxes and stars and squares. Dennis had the habit-or perhaps the gift-of listening and not listening at the same time, of being there in spirit and off somewhere simultaneously. Whenever they had been at a restaurant eating, Dennis could look off, his eyes darting here and there, while she spoke. When she questioned him about it, saying, “If you were listening to me, what was I just saying?” he could repeat what she’d said word for word.

“Well,” he finally said, “this means that Mike could not have abducted Polly.”

Another phrase went up on the board: tainted data.

“And why was the data tainted?” the professor asked the class.

“Because everybody at that party was drunk,” Brian said.

“That’s one reason. But there’s something else, something that you don’t know about yet. What was Polly doing that night? Where was she that night?”

“Place,” the girl beside Mary said.

“That’s right, Ms. Bell. Place. And tonight you will find out just a bit more of this intricate puzzle. Be sure to check your e-mail.”

With that, he was through the open door and out of their lives once again.

8

It was not that Dennis Flaherty regretted doing it. Quite the opposite-he wished that he could do it again. All day he had been craving her, starving for her as if the woman were some kind of sustenance. The only respite had been Dr. Williams’s creepy logic class, but now that he was back in his room at the Tau house, he was feeling it again.

Elizabeth. Somehow her name was more powerful than her body, a body he had roved across for an entire afternoon in the inner sanctum of the old man’s yacht. The old man sleeping above deck, the creek and whisper of the river below them, and Elizabeth teaching him things about himself that he had never dreamed could be true.

The day after the fund-raiser she had called him to ask if he would like to go out with her and the dean to the Thatch River. Her voice was even, almost businesslike, yet it was hiding something. “Sure,” he said. And then, “What is this, Elizabeth?” But she had already hung up on him. It was done. No turning back now.

They had taken out the old man’s cruiser yacht, named The Dante, which he kept in a slip at the Rowe County Marina. Because townies would often break into the marina and damage the boats, Dean Orman had been forced to hire his own man, a retired cop called Pig who circled the parking lot and beamed a spotlight down on the slips every couple of hours or so.

It was one of the last hot-weather weekends, and the lake had been crowded with kids on speedboats. The giant wake of pontoons jarred the old man as he fought with the wheel. They had sailed out toward Little Fork, where you could see Winchester University high up in the trees. “This is where we go,” Dean Orman explained. “It’s quiet here.” They took the yacht back in a cove and anchored it there in the shade.

Orman took the Times up front, where there was some sun cutting a jagged line across the bow. Dennis and Elizabeth went swimming together. They both knew what was going to happen, had been communicating it silently all morning. When the old man’s mouth gaped open, his head tilted back at a strange angle and the Times slack on his chest, they climbed back onto the yacht and crept below deck. There was a little room down there. A bed. Satin sheets that were stiff from weeks of disuse. A musty, stained pillow without a pillowcase. Dennis could barely fit on the bed-he lay on his back with his feet flat on the cold plastic of the boat wall. He was naked and soft. He waited. He told himself that he was doing this for a reason, to finish things with her. It was going to be hard and driving and severe. The boat rocked in the current, and with each rock Dennis’s heart nearly cracked. The old man must surely be waking, coming downstairs to find them.

She stripped off the wet bathing suit and left it in a heap at her jeweled feet. Suddenly, she was transformed. She had shaved her pussy into a little fine arrow of fuzz. Dennis saw in her nakedness a sort of youth, a kind of playfulness he had never seen in their library meetings. How old was Elizabeth? Thirty-five? Forty? He still didn’t know, but she now looked ten years younger than that. She was suddenly achingly beautiful to him, and without really registering what he was doing he was reaching out toward her, touching her, and pulling her down onto him.

But that was the extent of Dennis’s power over Elizabeth Orman. His plan, as Jeremy Price had suggested, had been to pin her down, thrust into her a few times, make it as awful as anything she could imagine so that anything between them after today would be moot. But she would have none of that. She straddled him. And then she began to ride him, her hips matching the sliding, glassy rhythm of the Thatch below them. Dennis wondered: What kind of a woman shaves her pussy? Before he knew it he was coming, losing himself in the frenzied wake, the sloshing sound of the cove now a roar, Elizabeth with her head thrown back on top of him and her tits cupped in her own hands.

Afterward she lay on top of him, both of them bundled together like piles of rope, and listened to the lick of the river. “What about…?” he asked. She put one finger over his lips to hush him. “Don’t worry,” she breathed, and for some reason he didn’t.

Sometime much later Dennis was awakened by the old man yelling his wife’s name. Dennis tried to leap up and grab his clothes, but Elizabeth held him to the bed. She mouthed, “Shhh,” and slid back into her bathing suit. She paused a moment before she opened the door, gathering herself. And then she went up to her husband, saying-too cheerfully for Dennis’s taste-“Yes, darling.” Dennis heard him say, “Where’s Dennis?” and Elizabeth replied, “Taking a nap.” Dennis had his shoulder against the door at that point, fearing that the old man was going to rush below deck in a rage and beat him senseless.

Instead, Dennis heard a splash-someone diving in. And then a second. He put on his trunks and returned to the world. The sun had moved while he slept, and now the cove was almost completely in shadow. When the old man saw him he playfully called, “Jump in!” So Dennis did, and the three of them swam together into the evening, as if nothing had happened.

Now Dennis could not get her off his mind. Her body, her name, her-rhythm. She was so different from the unlearned, clumsy Savannah Kleppers. Savannah wanted the lights off and the stereo on, so that others in the house wouldn’t hear them. She wanted Dennis on top or else it burned. She cried after sex, whether it was good or bad, and her tears would run in streams down his shoulders and chest and he was always afraid to ask her what was wrong, why was she crying, because he was afraid that her answer would somehow have to do with him.

With Elizabeth Orman, though, there was nothing of the sort. Nothing private, nothing emotional, nothing of substance except the raw thrust of pleasure. And so here he was, looking up at his ceiling in the Tau house, thinking of nothing else.

When he couldn’t take it anymore, he called her at home, on her private line that she had slipped him on their way back to campus Sunday. At the sound of her voice Dennis almost sank to the floor, his knees weak and his gut hollowed.

“I have to come over,” he sighed.

Then he was out on campus, late on a Monday night, walking Montgomery Street. He knew he should have been studying for an economics quiz, but what was done was done. He could no more dam this feeling than he could stop time.

After a weekend with temperatures that topped eighty degrees, the first hint of fall was now descending on Winchester. The wind was sharp, autumn cool, and the autumnalis trees were turning a fierce pink. The first leaves were falling, drifting down in front of the statue, The Scientist, which had been dedicated in honor of Dean Orman’s lifelong friendship with Stanley Milgram. Dennis walked by the fountain outside Carnegie, which was choked with fallen leaves. A few students were around, their words blasted away by the harsh wind, but none of it registered with Dennis. Not a thing. He could see the lights of the Ormans’ from here, their cottage-style home on Grace Hill. Normally he would have driven, but she had told him to come in the side door and cut his headlights in the drive. Screw it, he’d thought, I’ll walk. He didn’t trust himself to make it up their steep drive with no light. He imagined himself losing control of the wheel, veering onto the grass, crashing through the old man’s front window. What a scandal! It sort of intrigued him, the danger of it all. Dennis the Menace was finally living up to his name.

She let him in the side door. The house was dark; Dennis assumed that the old man had an early bedtime. They tiptoed through the kitchen and stood for a moment kissing in the living room. She was wearing a robe, and she smelled like bathwater and fingernail polish. He felt under the robe, groped her feverishly as if he were in junior high, but she turned away and led him up the stairs. They made their way through a hall, and halfway down she jabbed her red fingernail at a closed door. The old man.

Into the guest bedroom then. Another cramped bed. Another solitary, lonely pillow. She didn’t so much toss him on the bed as she unfolded him there, and again she disrobed. She was glistening in the moonlight that came in through the curtains. He would have come immediately, had she just touched him. It was the same routine: Elizabeth straddling him, pressing down on him, her head thrown back, those red-nailed hands cupping her tits. Too quickly Dennis felt the roil of his body. And then everything was crashing forward and she softly covered his mouth so that he could not cry out.

Later, when she was asleep, he dressed and left the room. The house was creaking, still. He went downstairs, into the dark of the living room. He made his way back the same way he had come, down the stairs and toward the kitchen, and when he turned the corner by the wood burning stove he saw it: a light. Dennis froze, crouched, tried to find another way out, another door.

And then: “Who’s there?” It was the old man’s voice.

Dennis stayed still, low to the ground, below the light. Strangely, he was calm. It must have been the calm of a soldier, the ease before battle. He did not move until he saw the man’s head peeking out at him. “What are you doing there, son?” Dean Orman asked.

“I’m trying to figure out how to escape your house, sir,” Dennis answered. He had found that the most brutal honesty worked in these situations much better than embarrassing, fantastical lies. Not that he had ever been in a situation quite like this before.

“Come in here.”

Dennis went into the kitchen. The old man was eating a sandwich in the nook. He had pulled out a bar stool and had a magazine open on the counter before him. “Know this,” he said almost dismissively, his eyes down on the magazine. “You’re not the first.”

Dennis didn’t say anything. He could only stand there, shamefully, and listen. The old man was wearing boxer shorts and a dingy T-shirt, what the Taus might call a “wife beater.” He was just an old man; he was supposed to be vulnerable, weak, maybe even halfcocked-but here he was interrogating Dennis.

“There was the boy from England,” Dean Orman said ruefully. “The soccer player. There was the kid from California that she was taken with last year. There have been lecturers and such. And now you.” He took a bite of the sandwich, licked his fingers, and turned a page in the magazine. “It’s just something we do. We agreed on it a long time ago. There is no love in this marriage. There never is at our age. My age. Do you think that those vows are still applicable?”

“I don’t…,” Dennis began.

“Of course not,” Dean Orman cut him off. “That’s absurd. You get to the point where you can’t stand the way she walks, the way she sits on the toilet, the way she mismatches your goddamned socks. This is the way of the world, son. Get used to it.” Another bite of the sandwich, another turned page. Dennis wondered if he was done, if that was all there was. But the old man went on: “Of course I have my own…debilitas. There are two young secretaries that come over on occasion, and Elizabeth watches us although she doesn’t like it. She says it’s unbecoming. What she really means, of course, is that it’s unbecoming of a man my age in the same space, in the same vicinity, as two young beauties. Ah yes. Ah well.”

Dennis went to the door. He opened it onto the night, and the sharp wind hit him in the face, chilling him to the bone. “Do you love her?” the dean asked.

“No,” said Dennis. Too quickly.

“The boy from England did. It was a messy, messy thing. Just awful. The boy crying on the couch, Elizabeth standing there breaking his heart, bringing him Kleenex like some caring mother. It was a scene. I watched it all from the balcony upstairs.” He laughed at the memory, shook his head as if to clear it from his thoughts.

“Good-bye, Dr. Orman,” Dennis said.

“Wait,” the old man called. Dennis stepped back into the kitchen. “I meant to ask you about this class. You mentioned it the other night. With Leonard.”

“Dr. Williams, yes,” said Dennis. The name was funny to him, unfitting: Leonard.

“What do you think about it?”

“It’s…different,” admitted Dennis.

“Yes, I imagine it would be. How do you like him, though, the old boy who teaches it?”

“I don’t know how to take him yet. It’s still early.”

“Let me tell you something about Leonard Williams,” the dean said. He lifted his eyes from the bar to Dennis’s face for the first time, and there was something serious about the movement, something punctuated and dire. “He is not a nice man. In fact, many of us wanted to get rid of him a few years ago when that whole fiasco began with his book.”

“His book?” Dennis asked, remembering what Orman had said at the party.

“Yes. The plagiarism thing. Messy indeed. It almost ruined us all, those of us who had been behind his hiring in the first place. Those of us who granted him tenure. It should have been the end of him, but he has loyal friends in the department, people who will swear by his genius. And he is brilliant. I don’t think there’s any doubt.”

“He plays a game in class,” Dennis said. He didn’t know why he’d said it; it was just something to placate the dean, to win the dean over to his side. Implicate Williams, cast Williams as a fool, he thought. Save yourself.

“A game?” the old man asked.

“It’s very silly. It’s-a forensics game. Like a case we have to solve.”

“Ah yes,” Orman said. “I’ve heard of it. These puzzles and games-people say he’s obsessed with them. Part of his brilliance, I guess. But that’s not the question, is it? No. Of course not. We’re all brilliant, some more than others. The question is this: what kind of representative is he for this university? And it’s been proven, time and again, that he is a dubious one at best. Oh, they think I’m just paranoid. A silly old man. Crazy. They think that I’m just too old fashioned for Williams’s teaching practices. But there’s something there. Something …off about the man.”

“I’ve felt it, too,” Dennis admitted. He wanted to go on but he was careful about what he said. It was best, his father often said of academia, not to have too many enemies.

“Dennis, I urge you-no, let’s make this a demand, considering I have so much leverage over you now. I’m going to demand that you stay away from him. If he asks you to his office, don’t go. If you see him out on campus, keep walking. Your parents wouldn’t want you to get into trouble on my watch, would they?” The old man smiled sardonically, showing his short, yellow teeth. Dennis nodded and went out into that wind, closing the door gently behind him.

9

Place

As you know, Polly was at a going-away party on the last night she was seen. What you don’t know is where this party was or by whom it was given.

The party was on Slade Road, just outside of town. It was given by a man named Tucker “Pig” Stephens. Pig was older than most everybody else at the party. He was considered a “go-to” guy: you went to him for dope, for alcohol if you were underage, for solace when you were depressed or needing.

Pig owned a Harley-Davidson that was customized so that it would roar ferociously as he sped down the highway. He called his bike “the Demon,” and he’d painted the snout of a razorback along the sides that seemed to flare in a certain light. During the winter, he kept the bike in a storage facility off I-64 because he was inherently distrustful of all his friends, most of whom were members of a local motorcycle group called the Creeps that Pig also belonged to.

He was well respected by his circle and feared by cops: he had been arrested many times and had served hard time in Montoya State Prison when he was twenty years old for breaking and entering. His criminal record was long, but for the past five years it had been inactive; everyone who knew him claimed that he had turned over a new leaf.

Pig had taken Polly under his wing. He protected her. He considered Mike his younger brother, and often when you saw Pig in town Mike was with him. But Pig had soured on Mike recently. He had been heard saying that if Mike bothered Polly again, he was going to personally see to it that Mike was “put in his place.” On the night of Polly’s party, the two men were seen arguing by the pool out back. It was late and by that time everyone was drunk. No one could say for sure what the two were arguing about, but most were sure that it had to do with Polly. Pig, a huge man, weighing more than three hundred pounds, put his finger into Mike’s chest. Not long afterward, Polly left. Some people who had been standing out on the back deck (Pig lived in a duplex and rented out the top floor to his friends, including, at one point last summer, Mike and Polly) saw Polly leaving shortly after the argument. According to these witnesses, Pig saw her off. He may have even hugged her gently before she got in her car and went home, where her father was waiting.

Mary didn’t know what to do with this new information other than the fact that it brought another suspect into the equation: the older father figure, Pig. She imagined him. Pig, fat and volatile, was gentle when he needed to be and fierce when he had to be. What did he say to Mike out by the pool? That he would kill him if he touched Polly again? Was Pig secretly in love with Polly? Had they had an affair, even been in love with each other? When Mike found out about them had he hit Polly, leading her to call the police?

She still had the unread chapters of Auster’s City of Glass to read as well as the new chapters for tomorrow’s class, but she couldn’t make herself focus on the words. In the novel, Quinn was filling his red notebook with facts and observations, empirical designs, emotions and feelings. But Mary was not as fortunate: she had very little at this point. She had seen Polly’s picture on the transparency but had inexplicably forgotten what she looked like, and now she would be murdered by Mike or Pig or, heaven forbid, her own father. What would Leonard Williams think of this, her forgetfulness?

Suddenly, she was asleep and dreaming. In her dream, Mary saw Williams enter a dimly lit room. There was an overhead projector in the middle of this room. He turned it on. There was nothing on the first sheet, just a yellow wall. Nothing on the second. He shuffled through papers, one by one by one. They were all blank, empty, void yellow squares on a bare wall. Professor Williams was very angry now. His face was red, contorted, veins bulging in his neck. Mary was suddenly there-she saw herself sitting in a chair by the projector. She had dressed formally, for a performance, a presentation of some kind. She buried her face in her hands as Williams went through one blank sheet after another. Then she could feel him looking at her, the heat of his glare. Williams was now completely in control of her. He was her authority and her influence. Williams said something but his voice was muted, sliced off. It was painful even though it was soundless, and she felt herself shrinking from him. Suddenly he was coming toward her, stepping through the projector’s light. He was angry, so angry-

She woke in the early gray of the morning. Brown was silent and she knew by the color of the blinds that it was too early for her to get up. But she could not go back to sleep. She had slept unevenly, and her body was stiff when she stood. The floor was cold. It was finally autumn outside, and soon she would have to turn on the heat to shower.

As she did every morning, she checked her e-mail.

There was something she hadn’t seen last night. It had been sent just minutes after the Pig clue, but she had forgotten to recheck her messages after reading that one. This one was simply called “Evidence,” and Mary tentatively, remembering the hanged man, clicked on it.

There were two attached files in the message. Mary clicked on the first one, and a picture of a red car beside a road appeared. Polly’s Civic on Stribbling Road, she assumed.

She clicked on the second one and another photograph loaded on her screen. It looked as if it could have been of a party in one of the frat houses. The foreground was harshly lit by the flash. It was a wider shot of the photo Williams had shown on the transparency that day, the one of Mike sitting on a couch. There was Mike again, his eyes red and his hair mussed.

Sitting beside him, with her arm around his peeling shoulders, was Summer McCoy.

The wind went out of Mary.

What the hell? What were the chances of that? Summer didn’t even like frat parties. And this Mike guy was definitely not her type. Yet there she was with her arm around him, her face sun-kissed and a drink in her right hand. Did Summer know Williams? Maybe the photograph was simply random, something Williams had torn from an annual and used.

Yet-what were the chances of the girl in the photo being Summer?

Mary forwarded the message to her best friend.

To: smccoy@winchester.edu

From: mbutler@winchester.edu

Subject: weird stuff

Do you know this guy?

/attached

Mary

Mary waited. She knew she should be reading City of Glass, but her mind was whirring. She closed her eyes, rubbed her forehead with her fingers trying to-

Her computer pinged with an incoming message.

To: mbutler@winchester.edu

From: smccoy@winchester.edu

Cc: admin2654@winchester.edu

Subject: Re: weird stuff

****ADMINISTRATIVE WARNING****filtertapspace/winchester servelistaccidentaladministrat/firewall/parse/messageblock*****ADMINISTRATIVE WARNING****please do not continue sending these messages, you are outside the limits of the school code****ADMINISTRATIVE WARNING**** ///do not reply to this message!///

What the hell was the “school code”? Mary thought that she may have mistyped Summer’s name, so she tried the same message again. And again, she waited. When the ping didn’t come, she refreshed her screen-still no message. She stood up and walked around her room. It felt good to stretch her legs. She would have to do some yoga tomorrow. Maybe Summer would-

Her phone rang.

“Summer?” Mary said.

“Is this Mary Butler?” said a sharp, even voice on the other end.

“It is.”

“Stop,” the man said.

“Stop what?”

“You know what. Stop. Stop sending those e-mails.”

“I don’t know what you’re-”

“Come off it, Mary. We’re sitting out here in the Gray Brick Building looking at every e-mail that’s sent. With all the shit that’s pirated at this school, they pay us twenty bucks an hour to sit out here all night. But what you’re doing is…”

“What am I doing?”

“The picture. I mean, there’s porn and then there’s that. You’re lucky we don’t send this right to the campus police. Or to Dean Orman. It’s just sick. I’m sure you think it’s a joke, I’m sure you and your girls are laughing it up, but we have to do our job.”

“My professor sent this to me,” she pleaded with the man. “I didn’t know…I didn’t-”

“Listen, I don’t have time for this. If you don’t want your Internet privileges taken away, I’d delete that picture immediately. Clean it from your hard drive. Good night.” He hung up.

Mary found the original file again and clicked on it. It would not load this time. All that appeared on her screen were lines of unbroken and meaningless code.

10

The next day Mary was so shaken by seeing Summer in Williams’s photograph that she almost didn’t go to class. But she needed to ask him what it had meant. The thought crossed her mind that perhaps Williams hadn’t even sent the photo. But there was his name in her in-box. Was he trying to impart some message about Mike? Was he trying to give Mary some kind of inside track?

It took everything she had to leave her room, but when she was outside she was glad she had decided to go to class. Surprisingly, after the cool morning, it had turned into one of the nicest days of the month, the sun high and white in the sky, the clouds thin as gauze. On the yard in front of Brown Hall, some girls were sunbathing. They were all on their stomachs with textbooks open at their noses, studying for the first set of quizzes that were coming up next week.

As she was entering Seminary, the girl who sat beside Mary in Williams’s class came out the side entrance. “No class today,” the girl told Mary. “There’s a note on the door.”

Mary stepped into the dim foyer of Seminary. Normally she would be pleased that her entire afternoon was free-she now had five chapters in City of Glass to read-but today she was anxious to discuss the photograph-and that weird phone call, too-with Williams. There were no students in Seminary at this time-it was too early before the 4:00 p.m. classes and now fifteen minutes after the last set of classes had ended.

I’ll leave a note under his office door, she thought. Even though Williams had not given them a syllabus with any of his contact information, she was pretty sure his office would be in the philosophy wing, which was right upstairs, on the top floor of Seminary.

She climbed the three flights of stairs. She passed other students in the class, including Brian House, who was hopping down the stairs three at a time. “You hear?” he asked breathlessly. She told him that she had, but he was already sliding down the rail, letting out a whoop as he disappeared down the well.

The top floor of Seminary was another world. Professors’ offices lined the halls, and students sat passively outside in uncomfortable chairs, waiting to be called in. The hum of a Xerox machine punctuated everything. Mary followed the first wall, reading the nameplates on each door. She went all the way down the hall and around the corner, toward the west side of the building, which led down a second set of stairs and into the Orman Library. Near the end of the hall she found an open door, and as she leaned inside to read the name, a voice said, “Can I help you?”

Mary started. She backed out of the room as if she had been doing something wrong. Something illegal.

“Are you looking for Dr. Williams?” the voice asked. She peeked in and saw the boy. He was standing by the bookshelves on the far side, a stack of index cards in his hand.

“Yes,” she said.

“He’s out for the day. Something about his kid.” The boy looked back at the shelves, wrote something on one of the cards. Then he looked at Mary and said, “I’m sorry. I’m Troy Hardings. I’ll be Dr. Williams’s assistant this term.” He came toward her and offered his hand, and she shook it. He was tall, reedy, his movements awkward. His hair had been shaved into a buzz, and his scalp was unhealthy and pink. “You need to leave him a note or something?” He nodded toward the paper she had torn and was holding now, limply. “You can just give it to me and I’ll make sure he gets it.”

“Oh,” she said. “Okay.” She stepped out into the hall and put the paper to the wall and wrote, Dr. Williams, but the surface was bubbled and she could not write smoothly. She went down the hall a bit and sat down on a chair outside a professor’s office. She used City of Glass as her desktop to write her note. As she was writing, she saw Troy leave the office and walk the opposite way, down the hall, and enter a room just before the exit.

Mary suddenly had a funny idea. She stood and returned to Dr. Williams’s office. Troy had turned on just one light, a desk lamp that emitted a pale glow on the shelves. She wanted to look at his books, but she knew she didn’t have much time before Troy came back. She put her note-it was a bit unfinished, certainly not all she wanted to say, only the part about Summer McCoy, but none of the other stuff, not the Pig and Polly hypothesis that she’d been thinking about-on his desk, her eyes scanning its surface. What was she looking for? She didn’t know. But she couldn’t leave. Now that she was here, in his presence, she had to find something, didn’t she? She’d been brave enough to come this far. There was his mail, for instance. There were a few coffee mugs on the shelves. There was a poster of Einstein on the wall with the heading HE COULDN’T TIE HIS OWN SHOES. But there was nothing of substance that she could see without searching the desk drawers. Quickly she scanned the books-logic texts, philosophy treatises with their spines veined, a whole row of John Locke. But nothing else. She felt ashamed for coming, for-

On the desk, nearly hidden under a stack of envelopes, was a sentence. It was in the cold, distant font of a typewriter. It looked as if it had been written a long time ago; the text was so faded and the page so yellowed that Mary could barely read it. She leaned down to get a better look.

Deanna would be the same age as Polly if not

That was all. The rest of the words were hidden beneath the envelopes. Mary pushed the envelopes aside and leaned in for a closer look.

“What are you doing?” someone said.

It was Troy. He was standing at the door looking at her, arms at his sides, as if he couldn’t believe that she would enter the office uninvited.

“I’m just…,” she tried. “I was just putting my note on his desk.”

“I said,” Troy stated flatly, “that if you give it to me, it will get to Dr. Williams. I promise.” Then he smiled-it was a stern, rigid gesture.

“There,” said Mary, pointing at the note she had laid on his desk.

Troy read the note. He had to spin the paper around so that the words weren’t upside down, and when he did this Mary saw the weird tattoo on the back of his hand. It was an S and a P entangled. The S was almost serpentine. Its head was drawn up as if it was ready to strike down on the soft, nearly feminine P. Mary thought that whoever did this was talented, and she wanted to ask Troy what it meant.

But then he finished with the note and stood looking at her. His eyes had changed: he was more tentative with her, more cool. “So you’re trying to find Polly,” he said.

“Yes.”

Troy only nodded, but she silently urged him to go on. She badly wanted to know what he knew, but it appeared that he wasn’t going to volunteer anything more.

“Do you know him well?” she asked, trying to goad Troy into giving up some information about Williams.

“Not too well. He just called me up this summer and asked me if I would run for him. I’m just a gofer. He wants all these books catalogued before the fall term’s out. He wants someone to type some stuff for him. Just the usual crap. It’s money, though, so I couldn’t pass it up.”

“Does he ever talk about Polly?”

“No,” Troy said evenly. “That’s top secret stuff, man.” He laughed, then, a stoner’s giggle.

“Did he make it all up?”

“He made most of it up. Except…”

“Except what?” she led him.

“Except there was a real case. A long time ago, back in the eighties. This girl went missing and was never found.”

“So this girl is Polly?”

“I wouldn’t say that. Polly is fiction. She isn’t meant to symbolize anything except the illogic that is sometimes in the world. Or at least that’s what Leonard says. What, you think she’s real or something?” He stared at her. “Uh-uh. It’s like they say in the movies: Polly is based on a true story.”

“I didn’t mean it like that,” said Mary. Though she wasn’t sure if she did or not. In fact, she wasn’t sure what she’d meant. “I’m talking about him. Missing girls. Vengeful boyfriends. It’s not the stuff of academia, if you know what I mean. I was wondering if…you know.”

“If he has a daughter who was abducted? If he lived through something like this?”

“Well, it just seems so real. There’s something personal about it for him.”

“They all ask that question. Listen, he just changes her name. When I took his class, she was named Jean. Last fall she was Elizabeth. Same story, same girl, different outcome.”

Mary was disappointed. She’d wanted to hear something else, but she didn’t know what.

When it was apparent that there was nothing more to say, she thanked Troy and left Dr. Williams’s office. As she was leaving, he called down the hall to her, “Watch out for him. He was always misdirecting us.”

11

Brian House wanted to get fucked up. Fucked up beyond all recognition, they said. FUBAR. He wanted to lose the world and wake up tomorrow in somebody’s bathtub. Currently he was standing out on the balcony of the Deke house, drinking mojitos. Inside, some girl named Brandy tended a makeshift bar that was really just an old door laid between two cinder-block columns. He was already feeling it, that far-off buzz, the zinging collision of all the molecules in the world. When he drank, he got tuned in. It was like blowing glass or getting laid: the world softening, darkening, imploding like a breath sucked in and then held.

“Hey,” said someone at his shoulder. It was that girl, Tannie or Bonnie or whatever her name was. She was sort of ugly in the face but had a hot body, and she was coming on to him. There was something weird about her, though. The way she talked and walked and moved, as if she were faking everything. Still, it was getting late, and there were no other possibilities that he saw in his immediate future.

They went inside, where the music was pulsing and physical around them, and they danced. She was hiding her face from him for some reason. Was she scarred? Brian tried to look at her, but the mojitos were clouding everything. A song bled out and another came on. It was a slower song, grinding riffs of steel guitar, poetry in the lyrics. She leaned into him and breathed warmly onto his chest. She said something-mumbled, actually-but he couldn’t hear anything over the throbbing music.

They were outside again. On the balcony. “Get happy,” somebody said, handing him something. Acid. He’d done it before, once. He put it on his tongue and closed his eyes.

They were back inside, sitting on a ratty sofa that smelled as if it had been dragged from a fire. Two girls were sitting Indian-style on the floor, kissing with their tongues. The Dekes had all taken off their shirts and painted symbols on their chests. The paint was peeling in the heat and flaking down to the floor.

They were out on the yard. The Dekes were running naked across the lawn. Somebody was letting off fireworks. Bottle rockets zipped through the air. Soon, it would be term’s end and Brian would go home. The thought depressed him. Home. He dreaded it, the drive to New York, his mother asking him how he was doing in his classes, his father drinking beer in that pathetic apartment he was renting, the Great Pall of Marcus hanging over them all. The dreary knowledge that nothing could ever be right again. “What’s wrong?” the girl asked. Tannie or Bonnie. She was frustratingly difficult to hear. To understand. Or even see clearly. He shook his head, told her not to worry about it.

They were on the balcony again. The atmosphere was weird, charred. No one was out there. The world was bending and swerving. The girl was still at his arm, still hiding her face. “What are you doing with your face?” he asked.

“I’m saving myself for you,” she said. Or that’s what she might have said. He couldn’t be sure. The balcony rail was holding him up. Sparks ran across the Deke yard. Naked sparks. Little blurs of men. Tiny men. Scores of them. They wouldn’t stop. They were in a race with each other, running toward something fiercely, fighting for some distant finish line.

Later. They were in the art building. Down by the glassblowing kilns. Someone had spread out a blanket on the concrete floor. Brian was on his back, and the girl was on her knees beside him. She was wearing just her bra and panties. She was doing that face thing again, with her chin on her shoulder. Something was hidden. “Here,” he said, trying to take her face and turn it toward him. But she wouldn’t turn. Her dark hair was over one eye, but she looked at him intently with the other. “Who are you?” he asked.

“Polly,” the girl said.

“What the fuck did you say?” he asked.

“My name’s Polly,” the girl said. And then she laughed. It was a mad and desperate cackle, a screech. Someone was in the building with them, firing up a kiln, the growl of the fire echoing off the wide walls. “I’ve told you that twice already.”

Whatever the hell she wants, he thought. I’ll play along.

“How’s Mike?” he asked.

“Mike,” the girl said. “Goddamn Mike. I wish people would stop bringing him up. I’m through with him. I told them-I love Mike, but he’s so…flawed. It’s just the way he is. That’s Mike, you know.”

Brian let it sink in. He was losing himself here and there, falling into little sharp black trenches every so often. Daylight was coming in through the windows now, and he wondered what time it was.

“Where are you?” he asked the girl. Her face was still on her chin, her eye still on him.

“What are you talking about?”

“I mean where the fuck are you, bitch. Where are you? We’re all trying to find you.”

“Brian, this is crazy. I don’t know-I don’t-”

“Stop fucking with me. He sent you here, didn’t he? Williams. That’s why you’re hiding your face. That’s why you’re scared to show yourself.” He was sitting up now, putting his shirt back on, standing up so that he was over her. There was something about the way the girl demurred to him, stayed on her knees below him, that infuriated Brian. “Stand the fuck up!” he shouted. “Get up, goddamn you! You whore. You two-bit whore. You-”

There was somebody watching him. Some guy. Just behind another kiln, standing there with a mug of steaming coffee, looking right at him. That broke his trance. Brian came back to the world, floated down through the rafters and the glass dust and the smoke to the floor of the building. The descent buckled his knees.

“Fuck this,” he finally slurred.

And then he walked out, leaving the girl behind.