Obedience

16

Wednesday’s guest speaker was a policeman, introduced simply as Detective Thurman. Thurman stood at the podium and addressed the class with his hands trembling. Professor Williams took a seat with his class and scribbled notes along with his students, pondering Thurman’s points here and there, laughing at the man’s crude jokes. The detective had an impressive paunch and spoke in a smoker’s whisper. His face was just shaved and irritated, and only a mustache, stained from years of nicotine and stress, remained. He had big fat hands that were all nicked up, Mary assumed, from days spent tending his garden. He had brought Professor Williams a huge paper sack of vegetables. Tomatoes, he’d scrawled on the bag.

“It’s not how you think,” he told the class. “Solving crimes ain’t the easiest thing in the world. I know you all are smart. I mean, I know Winchester is like Yale and Harvard”-some of them had a laugh at that comment-“but still. It takes a deeper intelligence to solve crimes. They’re like locks. You pick the first tumbler, and you feel something slide into place. That’s one theory. But there’s more. The pin slides in deeper, past the first set of tumblers to the second, and you have to pick them, too. And then there’s a third set, way down in the back of the mechanism, almost impossible to get to. You’ve got a perp? Okay. Does he have an alibi? He does not. Okay. What’s his motive? He’s got a viable motive? Okay. Can you find the evidence to convict him in court? It’s a series of tumblers that you have to go through, and when the last one falls into place the lock slides apart and you can get inside the thing to look around. A lot of people think there’s some voilà moment where everything becomes clear. Well, it ain’t like that. It just isn’t.”

Thurman paused then and shuffled through his index cards. His hands were still trembling, those thick knuckles knocking against the podium. “Now,” he said, his voice quavering. “I understand you all have a crime to solve. Mr. Williams has asked me not to speak specifically about your assignment. I might, you know, give somebody some tips.” He laughed, a musical little snort that blared out of one nostril. “But I can talk about missing girls. Lord, I can go on all day about missing girls.”

The detective took a sip from the Dasani bottle he had brought with him. Cleared his throat. He was looking at the class now with a glaring intensity, his eyes slick and wet. “There was this one,” he said. “Deanna Ward. You all may have heard of her.”

Mary sucked in a breath. She’d heard that name before somewhere, but she couldn’t remember exactly when. She shut her eyes and tried to recall it.

On Professor Williams’s desk. The yellowed paper, the typewritten words:

Deanna would be the same age as Polly if not

Was this the same girl? Mary opened her eyes again and focused on the detective. She suddenly knew that she should pay close attention to what he said. There was going to be important information divulged today, she thought.

“This is when I was down in Cale, working the homicide beat,” the detective went on. “Deanna went missing-oh, ’bout ’eighty-six or so. Young girl. Teenager. Student at Cale Central there. Her momma told me she had eloped with her boyfriend. The whole family seemed unconcerned about it all. Had this ‘it’ll pass’ attitude, you know. Yet they had called the police in, so figure that. Anyway, we didn’t think too much of it. We sent one of our detectives out to snoop around, find out if they’d gone to Vegas or somewhere to get hitched. But the boy came back alone. He had just been visiting his dad in Cincinnati and when he came back he was shocked. He thought, you see, that the girl had left him for another boy.

“No, wait,” Thurman said then, gesturing in the air as if to say, Wipe that off, clean the slate. “Before then. Before the boyfriend returns, we’d brought the dad in to question him. This guy is a bum. Tattoos all over his body, profane things, Nazi propaganda and all that. He had a tattoo of the solar system on his back. Must have cost him a year’s earnings, at least. They called him Stardust. Star. Star had been up in Swani for beating a guy nearly to death a few years before. He was in a motorcycle gang we were surveilling called the Creeps. This was about six months prior to Deanna’s disappearance. One of the Creeps had been shot to death during a ride out to Santa Fe, New Mexico, and we were calling them in one by one, you know, interrogating them. We brought Star in and he said something strange, something we didn’t really put together until the boyfriend came back and it was clear that something terrible had happened to Deanna.

“Star was talking about their ornaments, the girls who sit on the backs of their bikes and smoke cigarettes and let their hair blow wild while the men look tough in the front. He’d said, ‘Johnny Tracer’-which was the guy who’d been shot-‘was looking for a girl to ride with, and I said, “I got one for ya. I’m trying to get her off my hands anyways.” ’”

Thurman’s eyes widened and he breathed in expansively, playing up the drama of it all. “So after the boyfriend returns we call Star back in. He comes in like he owns the place. You know how they do. These bikers and hoods and criminals. They’re above the law. They’re untouchable. So this guy comes in and we ask him again what he’d meant before, which ‘girl’ he was talking about for dead old Johnny Tracer. And of course he lied. He said it was some girl he’d met at a truck stop, some hook-” Thurman wasn’t sure if he should say the word. He looked at Williams anxiously, awaiting clearance. He finally decided on “some trash.”

“Tell them about how you caught Star,” Williams led the detective. “Tell them the part about Bell City.”

Thurman said, “Well, we kept Star on a short leash. Put a man outside the house to watch his every move. For two or three days after Deanna went missing-nothing. Not a peep. He was Honest Abe. I suppose that he knew we had our eye on him, so he was just play-pretending like he was Mr. Common Joe. The guy even went to church, if you can believe it, dressed in all black.”

“And then?” Williams pushed. It was clear that he was tiring of all the extraneous detail in the man’s story.

“And then it happened,” Thurman said. “Star got on his bike one morning, real early, just after dawn, and he rode out to Bell City. He stopped a few times on the way, trying to detect a tail, but our guy was good. They played cat and mouse all the way up Highway 72. Finally, Star pulled over to a little dusty trailer right outside of Bell City. The detective stayed back a good distance and watched him through binoculars. Star went in, stayed maybe a half hour, then came outside and drove back to Cale.

“Of course we descended on the place. But get this: there was a girl in there, but it wasn’t Deanna. It looked like her. In fact, we thought it was her. We arrested Star and returned the girl to her mother, but the mother told us, ‘This isn’t my daughter.’ And it was true. One of detectives had whispered to me as we drove her from the Bell City trailer that there was something funny about her. She was…hiding her face somehow. She was disguising herself. The mother was more distraught than before. What a thing! To think that your daughter was going to be returned to you, but you get this…counterfeit. So we took the girl in, questioned her. She would only say that she ‘knew’ Star Ward. She never told us what her relationship was with him. When we asked her about the missing girl, Deanna, she denied knowing a thing about her.”

“But she looked just like Deanna, right?” Williams said.

“Right! It was the damndest thing. It struck us all: how similar she looked to Deanna. She was almost an identical copy, except she was…different somehow. She would do this thing with her face-I’ll always remember it-like tilt it to one side and blink at us innocently. It was all very bizarre and crooked, and it still gives me nightmares even now, almost twenty years later.”

“Excuse me,” someone in the back said. Mary turned and saw Brian House; he was standing up, his hand raised. “Excuse me,” he said again.

“Mr. House?” Williams said.

“I have to…” Brian sat down, put his face in his hands.

“Are you feeling well?” Williams asked.

“No,” Brian said. “I’m not. I’m sorry but I have to go.” He stood up again, gathered his things and, with his head down as if he were going to get sick, walked out of Seminary East.

“Go on, Detective,” Williams instructed the man when the door was closed.

“We never found that missing girl. Of course the father chopped her up, we all knew that, but we never could prove it. One common theory was that some of the Creeps’ rivals took her out to the desert and left her there as a sort of blood capital. But uh-uh. No. You can’t convince me that it wasn’t Daddy.

“I still think about Deanna. When I retired I would drive the streets down in Cale, looking for that girl. After Star Ward took his family and left for California, they didn’t get too many leads about Deanna down at the station. One day I followed the boyfriend-you have to understand, now, that I was off duty by this time and could have gotten in some severe trouble if I’d been found out. He went out to eat. Got gas at the Swifty. Went home and watched TV, and I watched him through the window of his apartment. Nothing. It still haunts me to this day. That one grand failure.”

Detective Thurman stopped talking. His eyes were still moist, glinting in Seminary East’s steady light. He took another slug of the Dasani. “Questions?” he asked, his voice choked and raw.

The students spent a few minutes asking questions. Thurman answered them clumsily, his language leaning heavily into cliché. When asked why he had gone into the force, he told them that police work was “noble,” and that he was just carrying on the legacy of his brother and father, who were also cops. He told them that the key to detective work was “keeping your eye on the ball” and not getting “trapped in a corner.” When asked if he had ever fired his gun, he said yes, but only as a last resort. Dennis Flaherty tried to bait him into a question about Polly, but Professor Williams jumped from his seat and announced that time was up.

When the detective had shuffled out of the room, Williams shut the door behind him. Mary braced for an important bit of information.

“There is, you’ll be happy to know, some edutainment scheduled for this weekend. There is going to be a-how shall I put this and not offend the Square Guard up at Carnegie?-a party at my house on Sunday night.”

“A soiree?” asked Dennis jokingly.

“A bash. Montgomery and Pride. Eight o’clock. You can bring a friend.”

As usual, a few people convened in the hallway after class. “Are you going?” Dennis asked the girl who sat beside him. “No way,” said the girl sharply. It was agreed upon by the group that no one would go to the party, that it was entirely too bizarre a proposition. “He’ll get us in there and murder us all,” a boy said, laughing, but it was a strangled laugh, nervous and pitchy. “You going?” Dennis asked Mary.

“Of course not,” she said. But she was lying. She had already made up her mind about what to wear.

17

It was like she was afraid she was going to reveal herself.

Later that afternoon, Brian was down at the kilns, in the forest of heat. He was thinking about what the detective said, how similar the girl in the story was to the girl he’d met. Polly. He didn’t know what it meant, but he knew that he couldn’t go back to that class. Were they trying to break him? Make him go crazy? Were they trying to embarrass him? Well, fuck that; he wasn’t going back.

Like she was afraid…

No.

…she was going to reveal herself.

Had Brian met the girl the detective was talking about, the one who’d gone missing-Deanna Ward-at the kilns that night? It was impossible. Why had the girl called herself Polly? Had Williams sent her to him to lie? Another one of his mind-fucks, another cruel twist. It was beginning to haunt him, to tear at him until he felt that he was going to be pulled into two directions by it, one Brian walking toward and one Brian walking away in fear.

What the fuck IS THIS?

He was making his mother another vase, even though she had a house full of them. The last time he had gone home he had found them in a little-used closet, dusting over and untouched. But still-it was the effort that mattered.

The Doors blared from the speakers that were mounted in the corners of the kiln room. The building was referred to on campus as Chop Hall, named for the Chinese American sculptor who was the head of the Art Department at Winchester. Dr. Lin was said to practice judo in the building when it emptied every evening, though Brian had never seen him do it. Thus the name “Chop,” the suggestion being that if your art was subpar Dr. Lin would have your ass.

Now Dr. Lin was assisting Brian at the kiln. Brian had the blowpipe and he was gathering the chips of color, greens and blues this time to match his current mood, one of those September hazes he always fell into before the term’s end. “Turn!” said Dr. Lin, and Brian spun the pipe and began to blow into it, pushing at the glass, bubbling it into a sphere of fiery orange.

The heat seared at his bare chest. He was covered in grime and sweat. The kiln roared and sucked in the air from the room. Brian found that he could scream, literally scream, when the process reached this point and no one would hear him.

“This is the end,” Jim Morrison sang above the roar, “beautiful friend. This is the end.”

When he had puntied up the vase, Dr. Lin left him. Brian tapped on the pipe and the thing stayed in one piece. There were no crazes or skeins running through it. And it was ugly, fierce, more mass than shape. It was perfect. He would call it Exodus: the act of leaving, of escaping en masse.

There were so many problems at home. Katie, for instance. She still called him most every night, sent him chintzy postcards from Vassar. She would sign every card LOVE YOU! and her aggression had begun to wear Brian down. The tyranny of distance. They had changed him, the nearly seven hundred miles separating Winchester and Vassar College. New York now felt like some distant land, a dreamy place that existed in the beiges and soft greens of Polaroid photographs taken in the 1980s. Since he had been away, his perception of home had changed, become more rigid and obscure. At times, he couldn’t even remember his mother’s face.

How many girls had there been? Ten? Twelve? It was hard to tell. Some of them he couldn’t remember. Some hadn’t mattered. A few of them, like the girl he’d met last weekend, the girl who had called herself Polly, hadn’t even made sense given the circumstances surrounding the hookup.

He thought of that girl now. She was why he had left class today. Williams was fucking with him, that much was clear. The girl was part of the professor’s ruse, part of the whole puzzle. Brian wouldn’t even have to tell Katie about her when he got back to Poughkeepsie, so he might as well mark her-this Polly-off the list. Anyway, nothing had happened between them. He could write Katie a letter and explain it all to her. Dear Katie, he’d write. You won’t believe what happened to me this weekend.

It would all be a joke. Yes, he’d kissed that girl. But Katie had kissed a boy last year, a boy named Michael, and Brian didn’t care. It happened and he’d gotten over it. Same with this, except…

Except what would Williams want to prove by doing that? What was he supposed to do with the information the girl had given him? The more he thought about it, the more pissed off he became. It was his private life that Williams was screwing around with, after all. Was Williams fucked up, some sort of psycho who liked to play with his students’ heads? Was he trying to expose Brian somehow, set him up, or possibly-

“House?”

Brian turned around and saw the guy he had seen that night in Chop. “That’s me,” he said.

“Were you in here last Friday?” the guy asked. Brian remembered: the guy had been drinking coffee; steam had come out of the cup in little wisps.

“I might have been.”

“Who was that girl you were with?”

“I have no idea. Just some girl.” Brian thought he knew where this was going. “Look, man. We were really drunk. I don’t even remember what I said. I-”

“I think I know that girl.”

“Oh yeah?” Brian was intrigued now.

“Yeah. She…It’s funny. This is going to sound crazy, but that girl is dead.”

Brian stared at the boy. “What are you talking about?”

“At least that’s what they told us. She went missing from my hometown a long time ago, back in the eighties, and when I was in school they found her remains out in California somewhere. Near San Francisco. Murdered, you know. Her family had all moved away by that time. But I swear to God, dude-she looked just like the pictures I’ve seen of her. But the girl you were with was…younger. It couldn’t have been her. The girl from my town would have to be almost forty years old by now. I wanted to stop her, you know, but she looked pretty upset.”

Brian, embarrassed, looked away. But then something else occurred to him. “Where you from?”

“Cale, Indiana,” the boy said. “Home of the Blue Hens. You know us?”

“No,” Brian said, thinking.

“Jason Nettles,” the boy said, putting out a color-streaked hand for Brian to shake. “Call me Net. Painting, with a minor in glass.”

But Brian had already drifted off. Those tumblers in his mind were falling into place, one by one by one.

Cale. Where the detective had worked. The detective had told a story about a missing girl. Could the girl that Brian brought to the kilns be connected in any way to the detective’s story?

Williams, he thought. Williams is planting it. Setting it up.

Before he knew it, Brian was jamming his shirt over his head and brushing past the other boy, on the way out of Chop and into the crooked world.

18

That night Mary was back into City of Glass. Quinn was decoding Stillman’s steps through the city into letters that read the Tower of Babel. Mary was finally intrigued by the story. Auster had her, and she was beginning to worry about Quinn’s sanity-how he was going to cope with this addiction to Stillman, this obsession for not necessarily solving the puzzle but for the puzzle itself.

It was all familiar to her. Even though she knew now that cracking the code of Williams’s class-really cracking, really solving it completely-was going to be impossible because there were too many twists and turns and inconsistencies and false leads, she was going to have to decide on a theory and go with it. Run with it, headlong. There was no other way to placate her mind. Two years ago she had told herself that Dennis had simply changed. (Boys just change, Mary, Summer McCoy had told her.) That allowed her some peace, finally.

Now she was going to have to decide on a plan and work through it. Damn the consequences if she was wrong. She had to start working, had to put her mind to the task of finding Polly. Dithering now would only cost her time, and with only three weeks left to find the missing girl, time was something Mary couldn’t waste.

“A note to himself?” Quinn was thinking in the book. “A message?”

The phone rang.

“This is Brian,” the voice on the other line said. “I’ve found something.”

“Why did you leave class today?” Mary asked.

“Personal reasons. Look, I didn’t know who else to call. I found you in the campus directory. I-I thought you would want to hear it.”

“Hear what, Brian?”

“That detective? Thurman? He was a fake.”

Mary let it sink in. For a second she thought that Brian might be trying to fool her by playing some nasty trick on her. Or, worse, that Williams had somehow gotten to Brian and they were in on the deception together. Perhaps the game-the class, the professor, the students, the Summer McCoy photo-was all some clever hoax at Mary’s expense. All this flashed through her mind so fleetingly that she could not grasp it, any of it. It had come and gone before she had had time to register its impact, and then Brian was talking again.

“I called the Cale Police Department. No one had ever heard of him down there, Mary. I checked around. Bell City. DeLane. Shelton. Nothing. No Detective Thurman. No record of him anywhere.”

“What does this mean?” she asked. The world was at a roar now on each side of her, whooshing across the plane of her perception. So much chaos out there. So much disorder. Randomness.

“It means that Williams is toying with us. It’s part of the class.”

“It’s not against the law, Brian,” she said. Taking up for Williams now. Protecting him.

“Not against the law, no, but there must be some ethics regulation. Some policy on the books that prohibits this kind of thing.”

He was breathless, ragged, nearly desperate.

“I called around, tried to see what I could do. To-to stop this bullshit. The people in Student Services told me to call Dean Orman, so I did,” he said.

“No,” she said. Later, she would wonder why she had said it.

“Told him all about it: Polly. The detective. The fake story Thurman had given us. He seemed…disturbed by it. Told me that he would have it taken care of. Told me not to meet with Williams if he asked me to his office. If I saw him on the sidewalk, keep walking. Orman sounded as if he had maybe had some thing with Williams in the past. It was like he wasn’t even surprised by what I was telling him.”

Mary told Brian about the plagiarism issue. She told him all that she knew, about the note on Williams’s desk and her meeting with Troy Hardings, about the weird phone call she had received from the campus police that night, even how strong Leonard Williams had been blocking her at the classroom door. She could hear his labored, quick breath on the other end of the line following her through the story.

Brian said, “If you saw a note about her and this guy, his assistant-”

“Troy.”

“If you saw a note about her, then that must mean-”

“It’s true. I went through the EBSCOhost database and found an old article about her. Written by-I’ve got it printed out here. Written by a guy named Nicholas Bourdoix. August nineteen eighty-six.”

“My God, Mary,” Brian said. “Why would Williams do this?”

“I really hadn’t thought about it,” she told him. But that wasn’t true. She had given the question considerable thought ever since she’d found the Bourdoix article. Did Williams have something to do with Deanna Ward’s disappearance? She found herself thinking about Williams’s awful strength again, his tremendous weight pushing against her.

Stay.

“My question is why,” Brian said, snapping Mary out of her reverie. “Why is he still at Winchester? Don’t you think there’s something wrong with him, Mary?”

She didn’t answer. She thought of Dennis, for some reason, about when he had gone back with her to Kentucky for Thanksgiving two years ago. Her father had found her late that first night, watching television alone. Don’t you think there’s something wrong with him, Mary? he’d asked. When she had castigated him for saying it, turned her face so that he couldn’t see that she was crying, he had softly apologized. A month later Dennis was with Savannah Kleppers.

“I mean, he’s mysterious,” Brian went on. “The way he talks. The way he acts. There’s something forced about him, Mary. Scripted. I know it. I’ve seen it before. My brother-”

“What?” Mary asked. Something was holding Brian back, some internal boundary he was afraid to cross.

“My brother was an actor. He did Shakespeare, mostly. Some local stuff up in the Hudson Valley. He was brilliant. He’d just landed a commercial when he shot himself.”

Neither of them spoke for a few moments. Their silence was broken when some girls screamed with delight out on the quad in front of Brown. It was Friday night, and Mary suddenly had a great urge to be back in Kentucky, at home. It came up on her so quickly she had to choke it down. She was into something, she thought, for the first time, something larger than herself.

“Anyway,” said Brian, “I’m not going back to his class.”

“You’re not?”

“Hell no. That class scares the shit out of me. I made up my mind as the good detective was giving his spiel. They can have it. I’ll take the F. Polly is just a game anyway, deception on a mass scale.”

It’s just a game, he’d said. But she’d known that. Hadn’t they known that all along? Williams had admitted that it was a logic puzzle on the first day, designed to teach them rational thinking skills. What had changed? A fake detective, a false story? A story about another girl who had gone missing? It was possible that the real world had encroached too far into the ruse and scared them both away. Mary thought of Quinn in City of Glass. The mystery had become his life, had turned into something as tangible as a red notebook that he held in his lap and scribbled wild entries into. Ceaselessly, confoundingly, those entries went into the notebook until they made up a record of his obsession and his fall.

“Brian,” Mary whispered. And when he didn’t answer, she said it louder.

“Yeah,” he said. “I’m still here.”

“I think Williams is…” She closed her eyes, unable to find the word.

“I know what you mean,” Brian said.

19

Mary showed up at Professor Williams’s house early on Sunday. It was a warm night, and she had walked across the Great Lawn, in front of the Orman Library, and cut back onto Pride Street. It was only a block up. Mary had passed his house many times on her jogs around campus. An unassuming house, nothing really, just some dark brick and a gravel driveway with a pickup truck parked in the front. A dog barking out back, running along a clothesline. It was all normal, quaint even-not in the least what she had expected.

Dennis had called and asked Mary to meet him there. He had spoken to Professor Williams, he told Mary, and there were going to be surprises at the party. Mary imagined it as extra credit, a leg up on the rest of the class. Williams was worried that no one would come, Dennis told Mary, and so he had lined up an exciting evening pertaining to Polly.

Oh, she had fought the urge. With everything in her she had fought it. She thought about Brian House, how distraught he had sounded on the phone. She knew better. As she walked across the lawn that evening, she knew she was wrong and he was right. She was like the girl in the horror movie, opening the door although no one was home. She was exactly like that girl. But still she walked, her heels digging in to the moist grass, the leaves above her rattling and dropping into her hair.

Dennis met her at the door and took her jacket. In that one action she knew: he had been speaking with Professor Williams. How else to explain his ease in Williams’s home? It was really undeniable. He took the jacket away toward the back of the house, into some dark bedroom. There were a few people buzzing around, drinking beer out of plastic cups. Some Mary recognized from the class and some were unfamiliar. Troy was there. He was talking to one of the girls from the class, and when he saw her he nodded. She gave a little half wave back. A slightly older woman was standing in the kitchen, leaning against the bar, drinking wine. Williams’s wife, Mary figured. A little boy, maybe five years old, screeched through the room, the bowl of his yellow hair bouncing on his head like a helmet.

She saw Williams outside on the patio, talking to someone and smoking a cigarette. They were both laughing, heads thrown back, as if nothing in the world were wrong.

“Della Williams,” someone behind her said.

Mary turned and the woman from the kitchen was right in front of her. Heavy mauve lipstick, a low-cut blouse-she was beautiful. Too beautiful for Williams. She was younger than the professor by ten or fifteen years, which explained the age of the boy. The dark ringlets of her hair fell gracefully on her shoulders and caught the light. The wineglass, Mary noticed, was mauve all around its circumference, as if the woman had been rotating the glass with each sip.

Mary introduced herself to the woman.

“That’s Jacob,” Della said, as the screaming boy ran back through the living room at their knees. She smiled as if to say, What can you do?

An awkward silence came between them. Mary looked at the floor and noted the vacuum lines were still fresh.

“So, do you have Leonard this semester?” the woman asked.

“Yes,” replied Mary. “Logic.”

“Ah. The girl.”

“Exactly. The girl.”

There seemed to be nothing else between them, and just as Mary was planning her escape, he was right there, with his arm around his wife. Williams was wearing a Hawaiian shirt and cargo pants. She smelled bug spray on him and the heavy odor of beer.

“Thanks for coming,” he said gently, and she tried to read those words for something deeper. Had he thought she wouldn’t come? Perhaps he knew about her discussion with Brian House. But how? Again, there was that lingering gaze he always gave her. Those enchanted, almost astonished eyes.

And then Dennis was at her arm and leading her outside. He drew her a beer out of the keg and she accepted it, and for the first time in many months she drank alcohol. The night was fresh, mystical, the sky high and starless. The dog ran back and forth on its line. She stood close to Dennis, swayed against him in the light breeze. “How have you been?” he asked, and Mary told him. Stressed from school. Fighting with Paul Auster’s City of Glass mostly. Dennis brought out something in her, an urge to confide, and if he would have given her a few more minutes she would have unquestionably told him about Brian and Detective Thurman.

But the professor called them all inside, and they crowded around him in his living room. He sat on a rolling stool with his boy on his knee. The boy had a toy truck and was wheeling it across Leonard’s thigh. The mother, Della, stood back in the kitchen, drinking the last of her wine. It was all very domestic and placid. Mary was suddenly glad she had come.

“There’s been an event,” Williams said. The word was underscored, stressed, and uppercased. Event. “But first, let me ask all of you a question.” The boy rolled the truck off Williams’s leg and onto the floor and made a crashing sound, then puffed his cheeks out and blew in a little explosion. “Are any of you disturbed by me?”

“Terrified.” It was Troy. He laughed and hummed the theme from The Twilight Zone.

“Well,” Williams went on, “there have been some complaints. Some uneasy conversations with people up there.” He jabbed a thumb toward Carnegie, where all the decisions were made at Winchester.

“They’re intimidated by you,” Troy said. He had a stern look, and when he drank he kept his eyes rigidly on Williams. Williams was Troy’s man, Mary saw then. There was something deep and long-standing between them.

“Maybe so,” the professor sighed. “But still, I want to know right now. Do any of you feel threatened by my class? It’s been said that I’m conducting…experiments. The administration used that word in a letter to me yesterday. Told me to-what was it?-be careful. It was written by Dean Orman himself. Winchester letterhead and everything. I detected the faint aroma of horseshit wafting from the envelope slit.” Williams chuckled slightly under his breath. “Orman wrote, Be careful. Your experiments are causing some concern. I don’t know if any of you are concerned about this Polly stuff. Because if you are, we can stop and go to the textbook.”

“No, no,” they grumbled, fearing the other version of Logic and Reasoning 204 they had heard about, the one Dr. Weston taught, where the students memorized Plato and were quizzed every week on the fallacies.

“What about Polly?” Williams asked.

“What about her?” Dennis responded.

“Well, do you think that she is false enough?”

Mary turned away. She felt everyone’s eyes on her. He was talking about the photograph of Summer again, of course, and suddenly she was ashamed. Thankfully, Dennis picked her up, just as he had done a few times during Williams’s class.

“There have been times,” he admitted, “when it was as if she was real.”

“But mostly you are able to separate what is fake from the rest of your studies?” Williams asked.

No, Mary wanted to say. Not when a false detective comes into the room and tells a story about a missing girl. Not when the world begins to take on your story’s characters. It was a play within a play, like Hamlet, but figuring out which drama was most palpable was the trick.

“Good,” he said when no one objected. “Let’s get on with it, then.” The boy was at his feet now, rolling the truck around through the deep nap of the carpet. Della Williams was in the kitchen washing dishes. Mary felt Dennis beside her, tasted his sweet smell in her drink. “Something’s happened,” Williams said. “There’s been a new development.” He stopped, made them wait for it. “Wooo woooo woooo,” went the little boy, rolling off toward the kitchen with his truck. “Do you all remember Trippy?”

“Trippy?” someone said from behind Mary.

“Nicole’s boyfriend,” someone else answered.

“Trippy has been arrested on possession,” Williams said.

There were a few ironic hoots and whistles. Someone said, “Shocking,” and everyone laughed.

“So Trippy is in jail,” the professor told them. “And he has told the detectives something. He has admitted that he knows where Polly is.”

Everyone was silent. Pensively, with the trees outside swaying in the wind and making a sound like moving water, they waited.

When it was apparent that Williams wasn’t going to continue, someone said, “And?”

“To be continued,” he said, and they all groaned.

“So Trippy kidnapped her,” Mary said.

“Not necessarily,” Williams said. He stood up from the stool, grunting at the sound of his popping knees, and gestured that they could resume whatever they had been doing. The boy appeared again, this time in Della’s arms, and Williams ran his hands through his son’s fine hair. Mary wanted to approach him, to talk to him about Polly and her dad and all that she had been thinking about, but the professor was suddenly surrounded by a few boys. They were talking Winchester football.

Dennis was at her arm again. “Hey,” he said easily. There was something in his eyes, that old gleam. He led her downstairs, where Zero 7 was playing on an old, dusty stereo. There was a spread down here. A vegetable tray, some sandwiches. She and Dennis ate together, sitting side by side on an old couch that smelled of storage. A few people drifted here and there, but they were mostly alone.

“I’ve been meaning to call you,” he said.

Mary wasn’t sure where she wanted the conversation to go. There was something in her that still loved Dennis, but he had broken her heart in such an abrupt way that the act had almost been violent. She still thought about him now and then, of course, but when she did she always caught herself, forced herself to acknowledge that he was never coming back to her.

Yet here he was, in the flesh, in this damp and strange basement. Here he was. Mary almost couldn’t believe it. She would not have believed it, probably, were the heat of his body not on her skin.

“It’s just that I was crazy,” he went on. “That’s it. Crazy, Mary. What we had scared me. It was a frightening thing. I had never been in love. You know that. I fought it. Like an idiot, I stifled it until I was the one in control.”

Mary wondered, Is this happening? Am I here, really, in body?

“So, you’re almost at your seminar,” he said then, shyly, just like a boy. And it was this boyishness that she had always found charming about Dennis Flaherty-the fact that he could be so innocent, so harmless, yet his intelligence was always there, like some dogged energy that he could reveal just at the precise moment.

They talked. Mary lost track of the time. At first she was nervous-she tucked her hands into the couch cushions, laughed too loudly, kicked off her shoes and slid them with her toes across the rug so that there would be some background noise, something to take his mind off the gigantic beating of her heart-but after a while she fell into a natural pattern with him. It was as if they were together again.

When the sounds from upstairs had slowed, the scrapings and thumpings of footsteps, she knew it had gotten late. But here was Dennis, still on her arm, looking at her. What did he expect from her? He probably expected things to return to normal, to how they’d been two years ago. No way, Mary thought. There was no way she could just forget about Savannah Kleppers and all that he had done to hurt Mary two years ago.

“I like you, Mary,” he was saying.

She breathed, and she felt him breathe beside her. A dual rhythm. The old couch puffing out a musty, disused odor from its cushions every time one of them shifted.

“Dennis,” she said flatly.

“Yes?” It was almost a whisper, coquettish in a strange way. So harmless.

“I’m going to go home. I’m going to think about this, and I’ll call you tomorrow.”

He was smiling at her, his eyes soft and pleading. The smile talked, as most of Dennis’s gestures did. It said, Come here.

“Please,” she said, looking away. She felt his gaze, his breath on her neck. She would have given in to it had she sat there for two more minutes. A feeling was building up inside her, that old and lost roil. That urge.

She began to stand up.

Then, perhaps feeling her pulling away, he said, “I know where Polly is.”

His words didn’t register with her for a moment. He was still looking at her, his stare now active. Then it dawned on Mary what he was propositioning, and the knowledge fell on her like an anvil. Like she had been crushed. Waylaid by it.

Of course. He was trying to get her into bed by telling her the secret.

The goddamned bastard.

She managed to fully stand. Her knees were weak, and she was in that early stage of drunkenness where everything was lurchy and loose. She made her way to the steps, one uneasy step at a time.

“Wait,” he called after her.

She kept walking, moving up into the light of Williams’s home.

“Mary,” he begged. “Your shoes.”

Too late, she realized that she had forgotten her shoes. She had kicked them off downstairs, and now they were the property of Dennis Flaherty. No worries. They were old, anyway, from high school. She would get new ones.

Mary emerged into the living room. A few people still buzzed around. Williams was sitting on one of the leather sofas, his hand gesturing wildly, talking to Troy. “Mary!” he said when he saw her, too loudly, too awkwardly. He got off the sofa and approached her, did a funny little bow. “Thanks for coming,” he said. He, too, was a little drunk, his eyes nervous and kinetic. Then he saw her bare toes, and she explained that Dennis had her shoes and he would return them to her.

“Oh,” he said. “Okay. I’ll see you tomorrow?”

She couldn’t focus on him. He was blurred, fuzzy. Swerving. Another awkward moment: she shook his hand. “Well,” she managed. And still he smiled that actor’s smile. Brian had called it-what had he called it? Scripted. Yes, Mary concurred now. There was something fake about it, something positively unreal.

As she was leaving, she thought, My jacket. She found her way into the back room. The kid was asleep in the master bedroom, and Della Williams was beside him. She had the television on. The coats were piled up next to the sleeping boy. Mary dug out her jacket and put it on. As she was zipping it the woman turned and looked at her. Della still had her dress on, was still wearing her shoes, buckles and a sensible square heel. Her legs were bare and bruised in various places, Mary noticed.

“Good-bye,” she said.

“Bye,” Mary replied.

“I wanted to give someone this,” Della Williams said anxiously, “but I could never decide who.” She revealed a slip of paper, its edges soft and moist from her hand. “Don’t read it until you’re outside.”

Mary knew what that meant: Don’t let him see it.

She left the house and ran across Montgomery Street and back onto campus, the bottoms of her feet slapping the pavement. She ran across the grass of the Great Lawn, sticks tearing at her stockings, the grass wet and cold on her toes. When she was under a security light, in the alleyway that ran beside the Orman Library and opened up onto the viaduct, she unfolded the slip of paper the woman had given her.

None of this is real, it read. I AM NOT HIS WIFE.