Obedience

20

Actors.

On Monday afternoon, Brian House went out looking for them. When Jason Nettles told him about Cale, his first thought had been, That’s how I can find the girl from the party. But the more he thought about it, the more he felt like driving to Cale might reveal them all. Detective Thurman, the Polly he’d met, maybe even Williams himself. He now knew that he had been tricked. They had all been tricked. The boundary between Logic and Reasoning 204 and the real world had been altered by Williams, reconstituted by the man’s deception. Brian had found himself wondering if any of it was genuine-his other professors, people he met at parties (he had not even dared hit on a girl after the Polly incident in Chop), even his roommate. Always, wherever he went, he felt this uneasiness, this fear that the world was coming unglued on him and turning inside out, its mechanisms becoming exposed like the sharp springs of an old mattress biting through the foam.

Brian wondered, not for the first time, if this is what Marcus had felt. Brian had called his brother from Winchester the day before Marcus killed himself. “I’m feeling great,” he had told Brian. But there was something under there, veiled and throbbing. Brian could still hear it, that old hurt, in his brother’s voice. “Got another audition tomorrow,” Marcus said. It was a commercial for car insurance and would pay him enough to keep his studio apartment in Brooklyn. It was a conversation between two brothers that should have been full of hope, but Brian hung up the phone with a feeling of dread. Marcus was acting.

Now here he was, trying to uncover another conspiracy. He could not help but feel that they were somehow linked, a cruel joke played only on him. The world was transparent, see-through by design. Marcus had given him clues: sending Brian boxes of his old clothes, his talk-no, his obsession-with bridges, stopping along the way from Kingston to Poughkeepsie one evening two summers ago with Brian, standing on the edge of the Route 9 bridge that overlooked the Hudson River, and asking when he got back in the car, “How high do you think it is?” And that last phone call, so plainly deceptive, an attempt to inform Brian of what was about to happen.

But he didn’t see it back then, of course. By that evening he wasn’t thinking about that phone call. In fact he was out with a girl named Cara Bright, doing shots at her apartment off campus. The next day his mother’s call woke him.

“Brian,” she said. And he knew.

It crushed his father. His father fell into a grief fugue, slow-eyed and despondent, and Brian had to push him through the motions at Marcus’s funeral. His father: sitting on the couch, three days removed, mouthing something silently. His father: refusing to eat, stomping through the house at two o’clock and three o’clock in the morning. His father: waking Brian one night and asking, “Do you know where Marcus’s old twelve-speed went?” The two of them then went outside, into the garage, and at first Brian just wanted to placate the old man but then, when the bicycle didn’t appear, it became a test, as if finding the bike would bring Marcus back. They searched till dawn, crashing through old computers and tools and boxes of junk, slinging stuff here and there, turning the place upside down in an attempt to find it.

They never did, of course. It became the Mystery of Marcus’s Old Bike. And soon thereafter, just a couple of weeks or so, with Brian now back at Winchester even though he didn’t want to be, his father left his mother with a note that read, simply, I can’t take this anymore.

Nothing Brian had begun since Marcus died had been finished. He left everything half-closed and incomplete: Katie and his mother, blown-glass vases that should have been cylindrical but had turned out, even as he cared for them and jacked them with care, flat and lumpy right before his eyes. The world dripping, melting, coming down around him. There was nothing he could do.

Or maybe there was. Brian had begun to think of Williams’s class as his way of salvaging something, as a sort of strange redemption. He had failed with Marcus, refused to see the signs of his brother’s illness that were right in front of him. Nothing had happened in his life since. Not really. He had grieved, come back to school, gone through the motions of a life. But now, here, he was finally presented with something. A challenge. In recent nights the obsession had been so fierce that he had had to pace his dorm room to allay it.

It had been a long time since he’d driven around town. His truck had been sitting outside Davis Hall, unstarted, for the better part of the fall quarter. It was good to roll down the windows and listen to the radio. It was good to be alone. He was listening to Johnny Cash, his father’s music. He tried to get the guys in Davis to try it, but of course it went over their heads. Now, in the rocking wind, Brian turned it up.

Actually, he didn’t know what he would do once he uncovered Williams’s game. He didn’t want to think about that right now. It just felt good to get out, to wander around. He drove down Montgomery and hit Pride Street. He drove past Professor Williams’s house slowly, trying to catch a glimpse of the man. There was no one home except the dog, which madly ran back and forth on its line. He headed out onto Turner Street, and then Highway 72 toward Cale. He was on the Rowe County line before he knew where he was going. The wind blasted into the cabin, obliterated everything, every thought he had. Katie. His mother. Going home. It was gone, all of it, in the wind.

Brian knew Cale. He had gone there on a few beer runs. Because Rowe County was dry, the students had to drive the twenty or so miles into Cale to one of the many liquor stores that operated right on the county line, which Winchester students referred to as the Border.

Cale was two wide expanses of farmland sandwiching the town proper. Brian kept on Highway 72 through Cale to the other side of the city limits, where he saw a sign that read BELL CITY 36. He remembered Detective Thurman’s lecture: Bell City is where the girl was found, the girl in the trailer who looked like Deanna.

Thinking of that girl, Brian got an idea.

He followed the signs to Cale Central High School just off 72. School was in session, of course, on this Monday. The cars glinted across the parking lot, and a phys ed class was taking laps around the track. The school was one of those old buildings, unchanged since the 1960s. It was like a scar on the land, low and squat as if it had been pancaked flat. A flag snapped in the wind as Brian walked toward the front doors. The sign on the front lawn showed a toothy, sneering blue hen, its wing raised in a threatening gesture. WELCOME BACK, the marquee read.

When he entered the school, a sense of nostalgia overtook him. Cale High was exactly like all the other schools he had ever been in. The floor waxed and shiny, a few students wandering here and there. Echoing off the walls was the deep thud of a basketball being bounced.

In the foyer, he searched the trophy cases. He was looking for some kind of a shrine to the girl who had attended the school years ago. As he was looking at the dusty trophies, some so old their etchings had gone black, a voice behind him said, “Can I help you?”

He turned to find a young woman, not much older than he was. She was wearing a name badge that read MRS. SUMNER.

“I’m here researching a class,” Brian said, which was an admonition resting perfectly between truth and lie. “And I was just looking for something, a memorial maybe, for that girl who went missing.”

“Deanna Ward?” she asked, as if it was part of the Cale cultural mythology, as if she had said the name a thousand times before. It implied something larger, an entire multitudinous history in itself.

“Yes,” said Brian.

“You would want to talk to Bethany Cavendish. She was kin to Deanna. She’ll be in room 213 after school lets out.”

Brian waited until the final bell rang at 2:15 p.m. and then he went upstairs to see Bethany Cavendish. She was a short, thin, masculine woman. He found her grading papers in a science room. She was wearing a Cale Blue Hens shirt that had been chemical stained in several spots, and her lab goggles were pushed up into her short, spiky hair. When Brian shook her hand, the woman gripped hard and pumped.

“Deanna was in trouble a lot,” Bethany said when they were sitting. They sat at one of the desks beside a window. “I had to go down to Mr. Phillips’s almost every week and talk them out of expelling her. I wouldn’t have done that if I didn’t love her momma, Wendy. Such a sweet woman. My cousin, you know. One of the only Cavendishes who came back to Cale. I felt so sorry for her, having to put up with Deanna and that man of hers at the same time.”

She said it bluntly, almost spitting the word at Brian: man.

“Deanna disappeared on August first. This was twenty years ago now, back in ’eighty-six. Everybody thought she’d run off and got married to Daniel Jones. They were both in a funny kind of love. Danny was older, and Deanna had fallen for him hard. I mean, like, hard. I had her in Chemistry II that semester, and all her day would consist of was doodling Danny’s name all over her notebooks and skin. She would leave school like a human mural, all hearts and ‘4evers’ and declarations of undying love. It was disturbing to watch, really. It was obsession more than anything.”

“They thought Danny had something to do with it at first, didn’t they?” Brian asked.

“At first. But we all knew. We all knew who was responsible.”

“Her father?” Brian asked.

“Uh-huh. Star. That was Deanna’s daddy. He was accused of that crime out in New Mexico. They thought he’d shot a man and dumped him out in the desert. He probably did, knowing Star. He started out as Stardust, you know, then he became Star. He was into astronomy, telescopes and all that. He got interested in how what we’re seeing when we look up could be the beginning of the universe.”

“The Big Bang,” Brian said.

“He even had stars custom painted on his bike, which cost him and Wendy a pretty penny they didn’t have. He was tatted up with the universe, the whole solar system sketched and labeled on his back and arms. She told me that tattoo had cost almost two thousand dollars. I let him borrow some of my equipment one time, some cheap telescopes I had, and of course he never brought them back. That’s the way he was.”

“Did he kill the man you talked about? In New Mexico?”

“I believe so. No, let me rephrase that: I know so. Star was as dangerous as they come. I have no idea what sweet Wendy was doing with him. He’d probably taken her out on his bike one night and named all the constellations, and she thought he was something. That’s how it always goes in Cale. These girls, smart as tacks and pretty as they come, get swept under by these no-count boys. That’s the legacy of this town. Nothing else to do here, I guess, except run off with some crazy. She should have stayed at Winchester when she was there, but of course she got pregnant and dropped out.”

“She was a student at Winchester?”

“Should have been class of ’sixty-six, but it never turned out like that. She got pregnant and moved out here to Cale, and the rest is…”

“Yes,” Brian said, leading her.

“Anyway, they were all over Star for his New Mexico stuff. I heard they almost had that murder pinned on him, but then Deanna ran off. And suddenly all of Cale was in a frenzy, and we sort of forgot about Star. I never forgot about him, though. I always thought he had killed that girl and hid her somewhere out on his property.”

“His own daughter.” Brian said it more to himself than to Bethany Cavendish. He was thinking of Polly’s father, of Mary Butler’s wild theory. He wondered now if Mary was right.

“When I told anybody this,” the teacher said, “they looked at me like I was sick. It almost goes beyond the human capacity to understand, how a father would kill his own daughter and hide the body. But people don’t know the whole story. This was not your normal, run-of-the-mill dude. He was bitter to the core. Evil. I wouldn’t have put anything past him. Not anything.

“And when Danny came back from Cincinnati without Deanna, it turned into a full-fledged crisis in Cale. The Indianapolis Star ran a front-page story about it. There was pressure on the sheriff to make an arrest, even if Deanna was still missing, and so they focused on Star. He admitted to something when they brought him in as a suspect for the New Mexico shooting, something about having a girl that he wanted to have taken off his hands. This is the way the Creeps were with girls: they used them, beat them, spit on them, and just left them damaged by the side of the road somewhere. This is how it was with Wendy. For all intents and purposes, Star had left her. She was back there in that old crappy house off During Street, taking care of the two little ones, mourning Deanna.”

During Street, he thought. Where Polly lived. Suddenly the two narratives were running perfectly together, and Brian knew he’d come to the right place. He was beginning to see what Professor Williams was doing: leading them to Deanna Ward’s killer by creating this game-this logic puzzle-starring a girl called Polly. But why? There is no logic, Brian reminded himself. Only randomness.

“I went to see her one day. She was broken up by it. Assaulted. A beaten woman. But Wendy wouldn’t give Star up. I pressed her on that. I wanted her to say that he did it, you know, to have it all over with. But she wouldn’t. She said she was horrified at the thought. She told me that Star had some flaws but he wasn’t as bad as all of us thought.”

“The police were on him, though,” Brian interjected. “They tailed him out to Bell City.”

“Yes. The cops followed Star. And I guess they found this little girl. He was keeping her out in Bell City in this trailer, and they raided it and arrested Star, and thinking the girl was Deanna, they took her back to Wendy. But it wasn’t the right girl. I never could figure that, how the police could do something so stupid. I talked to a newspaper writer about it, a few years ago. Nick Bourdoix. He ate breakfast at the McDonald’s every morning, and I finally got up the nerve to talk to him.”

Nick Bourdoix. Brian couldn’t remember where he’d heard that name, but it was familiar.

“Bourdoix said that the girl had been dressed up to look like Deanna. Same hair color. Same clothes. Said she’d been scripted into answering their questions. She lived with her aunt and uncle in Bell City, and police were on those two for a while. Thought they’d been coaching this girl, you know. When the cops asked the girl if she was Deanna, she’d said she was. They never knew what it meant. I never did, either.”

“She said she was Deanna?”

“That’s how I heard it. She told them she was Deanna, she looked like Deanna, and so obviously they thought…” She stopped speaking. She took off her glasses and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “But still, you can’t do that. You can’t make mistakes like that. It’s just inhuman.”

“What happened to Star?” Brian asked.

“They had to let him go, of course. They had nothing on him. He and Wendy and the two boys moved out to San Francisco, where his family’s from. And Deanna was never found. I kept telling them: I said, ‘Dig around the old house on During Street, down by the river. She’s there somewhere, in that field, out by where he kept all the parts of his old motorcycles.’ There’s no doubt in my mind that she’s there.”

“The house is still out there.” It wasn’t a question. He was thinking of Williams’s transparencies, of Polly’s house. Williams had been there to take those pictures. Brian thought about driving by Deanna Ward’s house to see it for himself.

“I drive by it sometimes. Think about getting out and poking around. A family lives there now, an elderly couple. The Collinses. I knocked on the door one day and they let me in. I didn’t tell them what I was there for, and they didn’t ask. I guess they were just happy to have somebody to talk to. I didn’t tell them the history of that place, about the girl who had gone missing. I suppose they knew. We just talked, like me and you are doing right now, but the whole time I was wondering how I could get outside and dig up their field.”

“Are they still living there?”

“I don’t know. That was five years ago. I still think about her. And Wendy, too. There was a rumor a few years ago that Deanna had been found dead out in California. But it wasn’t true. Just kids spreading tales. I fantasize sometimes-that she’s still out there, that Wendy will come back to Cale and buy her mother’s old house. With what money, I don’t know. But I envision it, the mother and the girl living out there so happy, with the past all behind them.”

Bethany Cavendish stopped speaking again. Her hands were shaking, her rings scuffing the table a bit. She looked away, out the window and down to the football field, where the team was hitting, forming lines and rushing across and knocking each other flat to the ground.

“Is this for the school newspaper?” she asked.

Brian told her that he was writing a paper on unsolved crimes.

“They come over here sometimes,” she said. “Students from Winchester. They’re interested in it. I guess in the fact that it’s unsolved. They want answers to everything, as if there are answers to everything. You young idealists. I know: I believed the world was perfectly rational when I was young, when Wendy and I were students at Winchester. We commuted every Tuesday and Thursday night in her daddy’s old Chevrolet.” Brian tried to imagine this woman at Winchester, walking over the viaduct, partying on Up Campus. He couldn’t. “There was that book that one of their professors wrote a few years ago.”

“Book?”

“Yeah, some true-crime nonsense. It made him a lot of money, though, I guess. It was called A Disappearance in the Fields. ‘The Fields’ referring to, I suppose, cornfields. I don’t know. It was all a shot at Cale, at how backward we are. I thought it was damn insulting, but it got everybody interested in Deanna again. He came to Cale High to speak. This funny man who looked like an insurance salesman.”

“What was his name?” asked Brian, thinking, Actors. Actors. His heart felt squeezed, tightened and strummed like a rubber band.

“Williams, I believe. Leon Williams. He’s still teaching over there as far as I know. I heard they reprimanded him for the book, though. A good Presbyterian school having a professor who is interested in the abduction of young girls is a no-no, I suppose. I heard he was planning a follow-up to A Disappearance in the Fields-some new information or something. But that was three or four years ago and a book never came.”

He’s planning a follow-up, Brian thought. Some new information.

“I tried to get into contact with him. Wrote him an e-mail telling him about the stretch of dirt over at During Street, but he never responded. Never even sent me a thank-you note for my information.”

“He’s probably busy,” said Brian sarcastically.

“Yeah. Anyway, you should check out the book sometime. He knew a lot more than I know about Deanna, that’s for sure. The details. The sights and sounds. It was almost like-you’re going to think this is crazy, but it was like this guy, this professor-it was like he was there.”

21

Williams sent the next clue early this time, on Monday afternoon, two hours before Logic and Reasoning 204 began.

Motive

Whenever one is attempting to solve a crime, one of the first questions that must be asked is this: What was the motive of your suspect? Motive asks the fundamental question, Why? Because it is not enough to suspect someone of committing the crime; in a court of law there has to be a clear and identifiable motive that suggests-either implicitly or explicitly-why this person is the culprit. In the disappearance of Polly, there are five main suspects that we have encountered along the way: Mike, the abusive boyfriend; Pig, the protective father figure; Eli, Polly’s biological father; Trippy, the boyfriend of Polly’s friend Nicole; and the man who approached Eli at the elementary school, the vindictive father. Let’s look now at the possible motives for each man.

MIKE: We can say without any hesitation that Mike was abusive toward Polly. He hit her on more than one occasion, and the police had to investigate a domestic disturbance once at Mike’s apartment in Needlebush. Mike’s motive is clear: he is obsessive about Polly. Polly is going away to Grady Tech in the fall, and Mike knows that he is going to lose her. If he can’t have her, then nobody should. He has been heard in town talking about what a “bitch” Polly is. He has been threatened by Pig at Polly’s going-away party, and everyone assumes that Pig has warned Mike to stay away from her. Mike is a loose cannon. He drinks too much, smokes too much dope, is finding himself losing control in the weeks leading up to Polly’s leaving.

PIG: Pig’s motive is less clear than Mike’s, of course, but there are still some inconsistencies of character that could be investigated. First, Pig is almost forty years old. He considers himself a father type to Polly, but many have observed that Pig’s relationship with Polly borders on the unhealthy. Pig has not dated a woman for over a year, and many of his closest friends assume that he is waiting for Mike to step out of the picture so that he can have Polly. Because you have been told that Polly is to be murdered in the next two weeks, you know that if Pig has abducted her then his incentive to do so has to be malevolent-as does his motive. One theory is this: Pig feels that Polly will never give up Mike. He is tired of waiting for her to come to a decision, tired of seeing her be harmed. In his mind, Polly is harming herself with her indecision. Pig has a criminal record that is at least as long as Mike’s, and there are more violent marks in his record. He is quick with his temper. Perhaps he has abducted Polly and, in a fit of jealous rage, has demanded that she leave Mike. Perhaps Polly has refused to do this, and so Pig has given her an ultimatum. An ultimatum that will run out when the term ends next Wednesday. Nine days.

ELI: Eli is the most mysterious of our characters. He seems like the perfect family man: his wife has left him for a West Coast artist, and he has taken on the challenge of raising a teenage girl on his own. We know that he has threatened Mike in the past, so he is aware of the disputes between the lovers. We also know that Eli was waiting for Polly to return from the party, and that when she went to sleep he carried her to bed. Eli was the last person to see Polly before she was abducted. A motive here could be, simply, malice. Eli could possibly see something in his daughter that he saw in his wife: the same flightiness, the same inability to be content. In his despondency over his wife’s leaving, he could possibly be to the point where he is at his end, ready to take it out on the only person who is readily available to him. Eli’s colleagues say that he has walked around for the past few months in a fog. They are all worried about him. He is not, for all intents and purposes, the same man he was before his wife left. “I wonder sometimes if he’s not just going to snap,” one of his colleagues said. “Fly off the handle and just smack one of those kids. He lets them just run all over him. I watch him sometimes, although he doesn’t see me. I’ll observe from the open doorway of his classroom. The kids are going crazy. And there’s Eli in the middle of it, reading from the chapter, the noise of the classroom making it impossible for anyone to hear. Mr. Dry, our principal, asked Eli about it once, but Eli said that he was fine. But everybody knows he’s not. We all know that he hurts inside. You can see it on him: the pain. It’s indescribable, really.”

TRIPPY: Trippy is engaged to Nicole. They are all friends with Pig, and after Mike and Polly moved out of the upstairs apartment at Pig’s house, Nicole and Trippy moved in. Trippy is a two-bit criminal. He has a drug habit that borders on severe, and it is not an exaggeration to say that Polly worries that he is going to kill Nicole. Nicole has told Trippy, in one of their arguments, that Polly doesn’t like him. She has also told him that she and Polly are going to be staying in an apartment near Grady Tech next semester. So a motive here is clear: Trippy abducted Polly to save his relationship with Nicole, which would clearly end if Polly and Nicole rented the apartment near Grady Tech. In the weeks before she was abducted, Trippy was becoming more volatile toward Polly. It started as playful ribbing, but turned malevolent in the week or so before the going-away party. The group of friends went together to the swimming hole on Porch Creek one day, and Trippy repeatedly asked Polly to jump from the highest rock into the creek, even though he knew-everyone knows-that Polly is afraid of the rocks. Trippy kept on until Polly was in tears, and indignantly she climbed the muddy bank up to the rock. Terrified, she jumped. Trippy’s manic laughter followed her all the way down until she crashed, feet first, into the water. Polly told Pig about this incident, and he told her to “stay away from him.”

THE MAN AT THE SCHOOL: The man at the school has a clear motive: he abducted Polly because of the perceived slight toward his son. Yet a motive, to be admissible in court, must be grounded in reality. Is it realistic to say that this man, who may have been simply angry about his son being punished, would have taken things to such a severe level as to abduct a girl and be willing to murder her? What else do we know about this man? Very little, right now. All we know is that he had a confrontation with Eli, and when the mysterious phone call was made on August 4, Eli’s first thought was of this man.

Mary clicked on the second e-mail, which was titled “What About That Phone Call?” Inside the message, there was a sound clip. When she clicked on the link, a female voice emanated from her computer’s speakers. “I’m…here.” A faraway voice. Polly. Mary dragged the play bar back, held it, let it go again.

I’m…here.

22

“Let’s talk about Polly,” Professor Williams said on Monday afternoon.

“You first,” Dennis Flaherty replied. A joke. Everyone laughed but Mary. For the past day, after she received the note from the woman playing Della Williams at the party, she had been anxious. She could not shake the fear that everyone was a potential player in this game. She went through the line at the dining hall and felt the servers’ eyes on her. She listened to the students in her lit class talk about Auster and Quinn, and she wondered if City of Glass was somehow part of Williams’s plan. She felt as if it was reaching a critical point now, this game, racing toward its climax. She was a week and a half away from the deadline and she had still not found any hard evidence. In a lot of ways, she felt that she wasn’t at all closer to solving the case than she had been in the first week of class.

“Okay,” agreed Williams. “What do you think Polly is feeling right now? Imagine her. Everybody close your eyes and imagine her.” They sat thinking about this fictional girl and her possible emotional state.

“She’s scared,” said someone in the back. Mary turned and saw that it was the girl who usually sat beside Brian House who had spoken. His seat was empty.

“She would be, wouldn’t she?” asked Williams softly. “So close now to the end. Just nine days away.” They all felt it in the classroom, the jarring concussion of the words: nine days. “Where is she?”

“She’s in a cellar, I think.”

“In a cellar.” Williams. “She can’t see out. He has her tied up. How does she eat? How does she live?”

“He brings her water and food every day.” Dennis Flaherty. “Maybe he feeds her like she is a child. Maybe he takes care of her.”

Eli, thought Mary.

“Does she scream for help?”

“Often.” Mary now. She was beginning to feel the exercise; she saw the girl, trapped and struggling, the ropes burning her arms, the air heavy and choked with dust. She awaited him, the man who opened the door every afternoon and entered to feed her. What else did he do? Wash her face for her? Was he gentle with her? Did he tell her that there were only a few days left unless someone found her, or did she know that she was going to be murdered?

“Trippy says she’s in a storage facility, just off of Interstate 64 in Piercetown.”

“That’s where that college is,” said someone. “Grady Tech.”

Mary opened her eyes. She felt it: the electricity, the closeness of vital information. It was right there, behind Williams’s closed eyes. If she could only know what he knew then she could find Polly.

She wasn’t being logical enough. She knew that. She wasn’t seeing the thing the way it was presented. She had been playing wild cards this whole time when she should have been safer. Not anymore, she thought.

“If Trippy knows where she is, then that limits our suspects,” she said, her voice definite and rigid.

“It does, doesn’t it,” Williams agreed.

“Mike or Pig,” someone else said.

“Or Trippy himself,” put in Dennis Flaherty.

Wait, she thought.

Williams had given it to her. Yes. It was right there in front of her.

Interstate 64.

That’s where that college is. Grady Tech.

Suddenly, with startling clarity, it came to her. It was there before she knew it, flashing across her mind. She realized that she had always known it, she had just needed the slightest provocation to give her the proof.

“The bike,” Mary said.

“Ms. Butler?”

“The motorcycle. Pig’s. He kept it in a storage facility off Interstate 64. That’s where Polly is.”

Everyone in the class now was wide-eyed. They were all looking straight at her. She felt the buzz of success, the nearly electric whistle in her ears. She was suddenly euphoric. She almost couldn’t contain it: it ricocheted within her, snapped this way and that and made her, for the first time that term, alive with the possibilities her discovery had presented.

“Motive?” asked Williams slyly. But she could see it in his eyes: she had broken him. She had tied the clues together and had given him his man.

“Obsession,” Dennis Flaherty replied, still looking at Mary. His eyes said all she needed to know: Well done, Mary.

“Yes,” Williams said. He was disoriented, looking away. Mary had shocked him, and now he didn’t know how to carry on with the class. “Well. Check your e-mail tonight. There might be a little more information about Polly there. We will review for our final exam on Wednesday, and we will take the exam next week.” With that, he walked out of the classroom. Even his walk was hesitant, disturbed somehow. None of the students moved from their seats; they sat listening to his footsteps recede down the hallway toward the stairs that would lead him up to his office.

Afterward, as the others stood in the hallway and talked, Mary again stood off to the side. They were all pleased, chattering excitedly as if they had received their final marks in the class. Now, of course, everyone would receive an A for Logic and Reasoning 204. “Mary, you trumped my theory,” Dennis Flaherty said, faux hurt in his voice. “I thought for sure it was Mike.” They all agreed. Everyone had thought it was Mike, the boyfriend, the most obvious of the suspects. Williams seemed, they said, like someone who would be big on obvious misdirection-present something so apparent that everyone would discredit it because of its simplicity. It had to turn out to be Mike in the end, they had all thought. But Mary had seen through his ruse and connected the storage facility to Pig. “Did you see how he walked out of class?” said one girl. “It was like he was an angry child.” And Williams had looked like a child, stunned and pouting. Mary should have been pleased, but something was bothering her. She stood with her laptop clutched to her chest, her mind wandering.

Dennis walked her back to the Tau house for her shoes. He apologized for Saturday night, claimed that she had misinterpreted what he’d actually said. “It was just a thing you say, you know,” said Dennis, looking at the sidewalk. “It turned out to be the wrong thing, though.” It was drizzling in one of those sideways manners, coming down cold against their faces. Mary should have been happy, and at first she had been. But seeing Williams walk out of the room had disturbed her for some reason.

An act.

“Is something wrong?” Dennis asked her. She didn’t say anything, but yes-something was wrong. Something was very wrong, but of course she couldn’t tell Dennis. He left her in the great room of the frat house, which was nearly empty. At 5:00 p.m. everyone was out to the dining commons or on a beer run to the Border. Someone was playing Oasis in an upstairs room. She could smell the moistness of marijuana in the air. She looked around the room. There were bookshelves built into one wall. Instead of books, the Taus had lined the shelves with DVDs and CDs, many of them pirated from the Internet and labeled with crude, markered covers. She rifled through some of the movies-action flicks, the Austin Powers films, directors’ cuts of kung fu movies-and as she was doing this she saw something etched on the back wall of the shelf. She leaned closer, squinting so that the image became clear in the shadow.

She had seen the image before. It was a serpentine S and the soft P tangled together. It had been carved into the shelf. Mary traced her finger over it, felt the harshness of the cut rubbing across her finger.

Troy Hardings’s hand. His tattoo.

She wanted to get closer, to look-

“Ready?” Dennis asked. She spun around as if she had been caught stealing. He was holding her shoes.

He walked her back to Brown. He was quiet the entire way, and Mary found herself feeling sorry for him. “I didn’t know Troy Hardings was a Tau,” she said.

“Who?” Dennis asked.

“Troy. Professor Williams’s gofer.”

“I don’t know who that is.”

Mary thought about this. She wondered what it meant, that aggressive S and the passive P tangled up in a casual dance. And then something absurd came into her mind. A bizarre thought.

Save Polly.

Perhaps a Tau had taken Williams’s class long ago and had etched the symbol on the wall. Maybe Troy Hardings saw the image there at a party one night and liked the way it looked so much that he tattooed himself with it.

Maybe, Mary thought. But still-there was something about the image that frightened her. She didn’t like how the feminine P was being squeezed and taunted by the more masculine S. There was something cultish about the image, something mockingly boyish. It was an inside joke. She tried to imagine Dennis tattooing himself with the image, sneering at the needle as it bit into his flesh-but the thought was so ludicrous that it fell apart.

Later, back at Brown Hall, she took the elevator up to her room and sat at her desk, watching the rain slant off the room’s only window.

Later, when it got dark and the rain began to fall harder, she checked her e-mail. There was a message in the box titled “Where Is She?” Mary opened the message and another photograph appeared on the screen, this one of a U-Stor-It beside a busy freeway.

That was the only message, which meant that Williams was admitting Polly’s location and her abductor.

But still there was that feeling inside Mary, that incomplete feeling. It was the same feeling she had gotten in high school when the teacher left the room one day during an exam, and the students had taken out their textbooks from under their desks, furiously paging through them to find the answers.

Her victory, then, if it could even be called that, had been Pyrrhic.

Finding Polly had been too easy.

23

A Disappearance in the Fields had been checked out of the Orman Library. Brian knew what that meant: someone else in the class had beaten him to it. But there was still hope. He searched the computerized card catalog and found that the public library had a copy of the book. He drove there, Johnny Cash howling “Ring of Fire” on the stereo, with the rain falling hard on his windshield.

As he drove, Brian thought of Deanna Ward. And he thought of her doppelgänger, the girl from the trailer in Bell City.

It struck us all: how similar she looked to Deanna, the man playing Detective Thurman had told the class. She was almost an identical copy, except she was…different somehow.

By Monday afternoon, as the rest of the logic class was meeting in Seminary East and Mary was solving Polly’s disappearance, Brian was working on another vase for his mother at the kilns. He was trying to get his mind off Polly.

But by that night he was thinking of the book Bethany Cavendish had told him about earlier in the day. The thought of it was like a hunger pang. He couldn’t shake it no matter what he did. He went back to Chop, started a second glass vase, but before he could get the blowpipe into the kiln he was thinking about the book again.

The thing was this: he had possibly played a small part in this drama. By meeting the girl named Polly at the Deke party, he had intervened in the mythology that Leonard Williams had created. And shouldn’t he be interested in something that he had personally been involved in, Brian rationalized in front of the glowing kiln, no matter how indirectly?

And what about the second narrative, the real one? Shouldn’t he be interested in Deanna Ward, a girl who had been missing for twenty years?

He had decided to check the public library, and now, powerless against this urge to find out more, he drove down Pride Street and into the town proper. There was no one in the library when he went in except the librarian, and Brian found the book easily. It had been moved down from its spot on the shelf and was leaning apart from the other books, making it apparent that someone had been there before him. The title was printed large across the front in bold red letters to give the effect of blood writing. On the back, Leonard Williams smiled at him. It was a younger, more polished Williams. His face was thinner, and he had a fine trace of a mustache. The book had been published in 1995 by Winchester University Press. “Leon Williams is a professor at Winchester University in DeLane, Indiana,” the bio on the inside jacket read. “A Disappearance in the Fields is his first book. He lives in DeLane with his wife.”

As Brian was checking out the book, the librarian, an older woman who taught a study skills class at the university, looked at him curiously. Immediately, without hesitation, he thought: Actor.

“Do you reat much true crime?” she asked conversationally, her accent thick and difficult to place.

“No,” he said. “I’m just reading this one for a class.”

“Oh. This is a goot one. He came here for a reating once. Williams. Right after it was published? Ya. He set he had some ‘new information,’ but he couldn’t give it to us. Promised a new book in the spring. That was almost five years ago.”

Brian took out A Disappearance in the Fields and drove back toward campus. He turned right out of the library onto Pride, which was one way in downtown DeLane, and followed it all the way to the bypass and hit Highway 72-the quickest way back to campus. The highway drops down and turns onto Montgomery Street, which winds around the Thatch River and then rises a hill to Winchester.

As he was turning onto Montgomery, he saw a figure crouched in the undergrowth to his right. At first he thought it had been a trick of the light. An animal, probably. But before he could speed up the thing rose and stepped out of the undergrowth. It had one arm up, signaling him to stop. A woman.

Brian stopped the truck and eased onto the shoulder. He rolled down the passenger window. The woman leaned into the cab and said breathlessly, “You’ve got to help me.” The woman was familiar to him, somehow, but he couldn’t place her. Had he seen her around Winchester? It was so dark with the dense clouds masking the moon.

Brian, before he knew what he was doing, unlocked the door and the woman climbed in. She was wearing a cocktail dress that was torn, and her face was scratched and bloodied. Her fingernails were black with mud. He drove toward Winchester and listened to the woman’s harsh, labored breath. She looked straight ahead, never at him, her eyes wide open with shock.

“What happened to you?” he finally asked. “Do you want me to take you to the hospital?”

The woman shook her head softly. The wind was whistling through the cab, and it chilled Brian to the bone. The woman, even though her arms were bare, did not seem to notice.

“Here,” she said, pointing at Turner Avenue. They drove straight down Turner, the street that skirted the southern edge of campus.

He stopped at the light in front of the Gray Brick Building and a few students crossed the street. The woman, who had not spoken more than that one word since he picked her up, said, “I told him not to. I told him not to. I told him.” She was crying now. Brian noticed a nick on her temple that was oozing blood. The driver in the car behind him blew his horn, and Brian looked up to see that the light had turned green. The woman had her face buried in her hands now, and he asked, “Who? Who hurt you?” She shook her head again, trying to regain control of herself. She gestured for him to turn onto Pride. “My husband owns a boat,” she said, and suddenly Brian realized who she was. “And there’s a man who watches it for us. This…former cop. Here.” Brian made a right onto Pride Street. “He drives by every now and then and just keeps the kids away.” She stopped, pointed to a side road for Brian to turn onto. “Tonight I was on the boat, just cleaning some stuff up, you know. Getting it ready for some people who are coming by next weekend. And he came onto the boat. I didn’t know who it was at first. I tried to get him off me, but he wouldn’t. He kept tearing at me, ripping at my face. He was in a rage. He was…he was impossible to stop. He covered my eyes and took me out somewhere, to this…room or something. I don’t know. I couldn’t see anything. No one came. I was there for what seemed like hours, and no one came.

“And then he came back. He came back and he took the blindfold off and I saw that I was in this garage. There was a motorcycle there, all these stray parts laying around. He said that he would kill me if I told anyone what he had done. He said…” She wept then, just a little jagged sob, into her hands.

“I don’t want my husband to know,” she told Brian. “He’ll kill him if he finds out. He’ll just murder him.” She flicked her wrist toward a steep side road that spurred off Pride Street, and they sat in front of her house, the engine running. All the lights were on inside, and apparently the old man was waiting inside. Brian felt immovable, heavy with fear. He managed to ask if she needed help getting inside. “It’s okay,” she whispered. She got out of the truck and closed the door behind her. Through the open window she thanked him. The night was harsh, too dark somehow. Elizabeth Orman’s black, ragged dress disappeared up the walk and then she appeared again when the front door opened, inside the slice of light from the living room. Then she was gone.

24

Mary was sleeping when Brian knocked on her door. It had to be after eleven o’clock at night, maybe later. She bolted upright, banging her head on the bar that ran beneath the top bed. (She had kept the bunks because it was a school rule to have bunk beds in every dorm room. “Just in case,” one of the deans had told her indignantly, “something happens and you have to take on a mate.”)

She found Brian pacing nervously in the hall. “Something’s happened,” he told her when she opened the door.

Inside, she made him some of the cheap Lipton tea that she drank. He didn’t touch it. His attention was elsewhere. He wouldn’t sit for long, even though she had pulled up a chair for him. All he could do was walk, pace the room, and shake his head as if to clear it of unwanted thoughts.

“First,” he said. “Williams wrote a book about that girl, the one that detective told us about. Deanna.”

“What?”

“Yeah,” said Brian. “But here’s the interesting part.” Brian took the book out of his bag and handed it to Mary. He handled it as if it were electric, as if the thing held some deadly power. The cover of A Disappearance in the Fields showed a house bordering cornfields and a pitch-black, ominous sky. It was written by Leon Williams.

“Look in it,” he said. “Flip through it.”

She did.

As the pages crept across her thumb, she felt her heart pattering with the same uneven, clipped rhythm as it had earlier in the day, when she was close to finding Polly.

There were only sentences on the first few pages. The rest of the pages were nonsense, two words appearing back to back for the entirety of the book: for the. Page after page of those two words: for the for the for the for the.

“Why?” was all she could say.

“I don’t know,” Brian admitted.

“Could be a mistake. Could be that the publisher made an error.”

“I thought of that. So I drove all the way out to Cale Community College. They were closed. Had to beg the reference librarian to let me in. Same thing in that book. A few pages of text and then”-he flipped through the book as Mary had done, marveling at the thing-“this. Two books with mistakes this severe? No way.”

“What does it mean, Brian?”

“I think it’s Williams,” he said. “I think he’s doing this. He’s trying to see how far we’ll go with it. Trying to lead us off track. It’s all part of the class.”

Mary thought about that explanation. “But,” she told him, “the class ended.”

“What?”

“I figured it out. Williams said something about a storage facility, and I remembered one of the earlier clues. It’s Pig. Pig has Polly.”

Brian looked distraught, as if he could not quite understand what she had just told him.

“There’s one other thing, though,” she said.

“What is it?”

“It’s just that-”

“Tell me, Mary.”

“It’s just that it was so easy. It was like Williams wanted us to have the answer. After all this, after all these games, why would he just tell us the answer?”

“Maybe it wasn’t the answer,” Brian said.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean maybe there’s more. Maybe there’s a whole other level to this thing.”

Mary considered that. Her tea steamed in her face, and she kept her mug there, feeling the warmth on her eyes.

“But you could tell,” she said. “You could tell that I had cracked it, Brian. The way he talked. The way he walked out of the room. It was like he was…like he was shocked.”

“You said it yourself, Mary,” Brian urged. “You said that it didn’t feel right. It doesn’t to me either. What about this girl, Deanna Ward? What about his book? What parts do they play?”

“Did you know that his wife wrote me a note? Saying that she wasn’t-that none of it was real?”

“A note?”

“At the party Sunday night.”

“You went to the party?”

“Yes,” Mary said. She felt herself blush; she was ashamed for not having told him. “She was trying to tell me something, Brian,” she continued. “She was trying to get me involved, and I didn’t listen to her. I thought it was all part of the hoax. But now…now I don’t know.”

Again, she was beginning to feel the familiar uneasiness that she had felt all along. She was beginning to slip back into it, like Quinn with Stillman in City of Glass, and no matter how she fought it now it was coming on, forcing her to rethink all that she had believed to be true just seven hours earlier.

“What do we do?” she asked him.

“We’ve got to stop the class. It’s madness that he’s been allowed to go on this long anyway.”

“Dean Orman,” she said. “We go to his office tomorrow morning and tell him what we know. We show him the book.”

Brian said nothing. She felt in his silence something else, some other pressing issue that he wanted to tell her but hadn’t yet.

“What, Brian?” she prodded him.

Brian sat down across from her. She pulled two folding chairs up to the card table she used to eat her dinner when she cooked in Brown. He didn’t sit so much as he crashed down, the chair creaking a little under him. He exhaled loudly and rubbed his face with both hands as if to wipe away some of what he had seen. “Orman’s wife,” he said. “Elizabeth? I picked her up tonight in the bushes down by the Thatch River. She’d been beaten by someone.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“As a heart attack. Listen, she told me not to tell anyone. She said Orman would kill the guy if I told. So we have to keep that quiet until I can figure out something else. I really don’t think-Mary, I don’t think that was part of the game. I think she was telling the truth. She looked awful.”

“Oh God,” Mary said. She felt tears in her eyes, the heat of anxiety in the pit of her stomach. She closed her eyes and tried to will herself not to cry. “Oh no. Oh God.”

“Mary,” Brian said gently. “Here.” And then his arm was around her. They were hugging each other, but strangely there was nothing romantic about it. It was just something you did, a healing act. She felt his heat and she stayed there in his chest until he pulled away, and when she was standing up on her own she didn’t regret what she’d done.

He lay on the top bunk and she took the bottom. Mary knew that he wasn’t sleeping by his uneven breath, by the way he could not be still. Like him, her rest was labored, erratic. “Brian,” she said. It was late, sometime after midnight. A siren passed outside, screamed down Pride Street. “Did you know that Williams has an assistant?”

25

They found Troy in the online campus directory. Beside his name they saw the familiar lightning bolt, which meant that he was online. “Let’s e-mail him,” Brian said.

“You mean now?”

“Hell yeah, now. I want to see what he knows.”

Slowly, still pacing the room, Brian dictated the message to Mary.

To: thardings@winchester.edu

From: mbutler@winchester.edu

Subject: Professor Williams

Troy,

We found Williams’s book, A Disappearance in the Fields. A very fine book. A masterpiece. We were wondering-did Williams write that himself, or did he have help from someone in the Philosophy Department? By the way, it was Pig. I guess you know that by now.

M

They waited. Mary refreshed her screen a few times, hoping that Troy would get the e-mail and respond to it immediately. Brian made himself another mug of tea in the microwave. Down on the quad, a fire burned-the every-Monday bonfire of the Delta girls, who were notorious for showing up to their early classes smelling of smoke and with their hands stained with soot.

“Maybe he’s working on a paper,” Brian said.

Mary felt the first signs of exhaustion coming on. It descended on her suddenly, pulling her down toward the floor. If she could just lie down, if she could just-

“Mary.” Brian was pushing her shoulder, waking her. She looked at him. Blinked. He pointed at the screen, and she saw a message from Troy in her in-box.

To: mbutler@winchester.edu

From: thardings@winchester.edu

Subject: Belated Congratulations

M,

Congrats on the solve! I solved the one in the spring of ’04, and it was a great moment. They were all talking about it today in the department. Leonard thought he was going to fool you all this time, but I guess not.

And yes, I have read Leonard’s book. I’m not into true crime, but A Disappearance… is one of the classics of that genre. A shame it never got the recognition it deserved. That girl, Deanna Ward, she’s still missing, you know. Leonard thought he got some new leads a few years ago, but they turned out to be dead ends.

All the best,

Troy

“Why would he lie?” Brian asked.

“Why is anyone lying? Why is the woman at the high school lying, making up a story about a fake book? It’s part of the game, Brian. Obviously Troy is playing it, too.” She still felt the buzz of sleep in her head, that flagging sensation of late-night fatigue.

“Ask him,” Brian said.

“What are you talking about?”

“I mean, ask him. Tell him that the book’s a fake. See what he says.”

Mary would have never done it had she not been drunk with fatigue. She had spent her life sidestepping such confrontations, but tonight she was feeling bold, ready to tear down Williams’s game and get to the heart of this thing that had been plaguing her for the last month.

To: thardings@winchester.edu

From: mbutler@winchester.edu

Subject: One More Thing

Troy,

The book’s a fake. A friend and I have secured two copies, and both of them have text on exactly twenty-five pages, an introduction by “Leon Williams,” and then nothing for the rest of the book. When we Google A Disappearance in the Fields, we get nothing. No Amazon listing, nothing in the Library of Congress database. Winchester University Press hasn’t published anything for the last twenty-five years. We want to know exactly what this is and we want it to stop. You and Williams are playing a dangerous game.

M.

Now she felt sped up, her senses awake and aware and her heart mashing through her chest. Brian was pacing again. Outside, the orange flames of the Deltas’ fire licked up toward the sky. Mary stared at the screen. She refreshed. Nothing. She drummed her fingers, all the nails bitten to the quick, on her desk. Refreshed again. Nothing. Where was he? Maybe they had scared him off. Maybe they had driven him away. Was it possible that Troy was calling Williams right now and asking what he should do? She expected a call from the “campus police” any minute, another admonition to stop what she was doing. Maybe-

Another message appeared in her box.

To: mbutler@winchester.edu

From: thardings@winchester.edu

Subject: Re: One More Thing

M.,

You and your “friend” don’t know what you are getting into here.

Troy

Upon reading it, Brian murmured, “Fuck him,” under his breath. With some force, he took the mouse from Mary and clicked Compose. Then he began to type.

To: thardings@winchester.edu

From: mbutler@winchester.edu

Subject: The Game

Troy,

Apparently you don’t understand. What’s going on here is a criminal enterprise. We have spoken to a woman from Cale High School who has told us the story about Deanna Ward. Leonard Williams has brought in a man impersonating a former police officer, and that man told the class a story about the same girl. Now we have found a book about that girl that was apparently “written” by this Leon character, and the book is a fake. We have already contacted Dean Orman, and he has personally told us that he is keeping Williams on a “short leash.” His words. You all do not seem to understand the complexity of this thing. You are dealing with real people, real events, and it doesn’t seem to faze you one bit. Now, I suggest you tell us what you know before I come over to Perkins Hall.

It took only a matter of minutes for the next message to appear in her box.

To: mbutler@winchester.edu

From: thardings@winchester.edu

Subject: Re: The Game

M. (or whomever),

I assume that I am not speaking to Mary Butler anymore. It’s not the most feminine thing to do, threatening to beat someone up at 12:15 a.m. Anyway. As for your concerns:

This is not a “game,” as you seem to think. What’s happening now is bigger than anything you have ever experienced before. Suffice it to say that you or your girlfriend have NOTHING to do with any of this. You are just bystanders, mere extras. You will be used when your time comes, but do not think for one moment that you have any central role in this. Don’t fool yourselves. You are simply being played right now, and when these six weeks are over you will go back to your lonely, simple lives as college students. You say, “You all do not seem to understand the complexity of this thing.” No, it is YOU who do not understand the complexity of this. But you soon will.

As for Dean Orman, we are not the least worried about him. We have-how shall I say it-dominion over the dean.

Good night.

Troy

They both sat, staring at the monitor. Neither of them quite believed what they had just read. What was this “happening” that Troy had referred to, Mary wondered. But no sooner had she asked the question than Troy’s lightning bolt disappeared, signaling that he was offline.

Back in their beds again, Mary asked Brian, “Do you think we’re in danger?”

At first he didn’t answer. And then he said, “I don’t know what to think anymore.”

According to the clock, it was after 3:30 a.m. by the time she went to sleep. She knew that Brian was awake because he was still tossing above her on the top bunk, and even though she was afraid she closed her eyes and an impenetrable weight closed in over her. The last thing she thought was, What if Brian is in on it?

26

Mary walked into Seminary East that Wednesday expecting to review for the exam that Williams was giving next week.

But Williams was late. As they waited, a few students talked about their other classes or gossiped about the goings-on around campus. Dennis Flaherty opened his briefcase and took out his economics text and began to highlight a chapter. The girl beside Mary filed her nails. Brian was still boycotting the class, and his back-row seat remained empty.

Five minutes passed, and there was discussion about how long they should give Williams before they abandoned the classroom. “Knowing Williams,” someone said, “he’s scheduled a field trip and hasn’t told anyone.” They all had a laugh over that. But Mary was concerned. She could not help but wonder if her and Brian’s discussion with Troy Hardings had something to do with the professor’s lateness.

At 4:20 p.m., Dean Orman walked into the room. As always, he was overdressed, with his three-piece suit and Cole Haan loafers. The wind had ripped him apart; his orange hair was disheveled and the ridiculous flower he wore in his lapel was almost shredded to nothing.

Orman took Williams’s place at the podium. He looked small up there, tiny. He sighed, as if he were about to deliver some devastating piece of news to the class. Mary could not help but think of the man’s wife and what Brian had said about her, and she wondered if Dean Orman had found out about what had happened to her.

“As a dean,” Orman began, “it’s never easy to inform a class that something will…impede the process of learning. ‘In delay there lies no plenty,’ as Shakespeare said. But what’s done is done, and it is now my duty to inform you about what has happened.”

Orman steeled himself. Mary thought, Williams is dead. They’ve killed him. But she had no earthly idea about who “they” might be, nor could she summon in her mind any possible situation that would pit Williams as the victim in this whole thing.

“Your professor is gone,” the dean said. Mary felt nothing. No fear. No confusion. She was void. Bankrupt of anything like empathy or wonder about why he had left. It, like everything else in Logic and Reasoning 204, was just a fact of the narrative, an irreversible plot detail that was simply a trope in the twisted, bizarre script Williams had written for them. “He was not in his office this morning,” said the dean, “and all his things had been cleaned out. This is a…a disturbing turn of events, to say the least. But rest assured we are trying to find Dr. Williams as we speak, and when we do we will get a full disclosure of why he chose to leave campus a week before the six weeks’ end.”

Now Williams had become a player in his own game. There was really no question. He was inside the drama, and Mary suddenly wondered if it was over or if it had just begun. She wished Brian were here to help her with this new turn of events.

“If you need anything,” Dean Orman was saying, “all you have to do is come to Student Services and talk to Wanda. She will be happy to assist you with any questions you have. And of course you will all be reimbursed for this class and awarded the full three credits.”

Afterward, Mary immediately went to find Brian. He was in the Orman Library, sitting at a table in the back. He was staring out a window, a textbook open in front of him. He had still not recovered from Monday night and their discussion with Troy Hardings, it appeared.

“Williams is gone,” she told him.

He blinked at her. “You’re kidding.”

“Cleaned out his office. Orman came to class to break the news.”

“Troy must have told him about our discussion.”

Mary didn’t say anything, but her silence betrayed her. She knew as well as Brian did that the two events could not be isolated. As Williams had told them so long ago, randomness was not the rule but rather the exception to the rule.

“What do we do now?” he asked.

“We could find Hardings and ask him about it. Find out what’s going on. Threaten him in some way.”

“Already did it,” Brian said somberly. “His roommate said he went home for the week. I had a chat with him earlier. He wasn’t very…forthcoming.”

“Of course he wasn’t.”

They sat in the silence of the library, thinking about what they should do next. It seemed they were at the end now, at the apex of the game, yet neither of them was quite sure how to proceed.

And then something dawned on her, something so obvious that Mary wondered why she had not thought about it before now.

“Dennis Flaherty,” she said.

“Dennis the Menace?” asked Brian skeptically.

“Let’s go visit him. He owes me one, anyway.”

Dennis Flaherty was grilling hot dogs on the Tau house roof. He was wearing a tank top and rubber flip-flops, and Mary thought he looked like somebody’s dad. “Mary Butler!” he greeted her, with too much enthusiasm in his voice.

“We’re here to talk about Williams,” Mary told him.

Dennis looked at Brian, a puzzled expression on his face. “Yeah, what a thing, huh?” he asked, turning one of the wieners. “You gonna join us for dinner?”

“We don’t buy our friends,” replied Brian. There was a moment of charged hesitation between the two boys, and finally Dennis broke it by looking down, smirking at the grill.

Mary stepped between them. “What happened to him, Dennis?”

“Why are you asking me?” he asked, shock in his voice. “I’m just as surprised as you are.”

“I know you were talking to him. I could tell when we were-when we spoke at his house that night.”

“What are you talking about?” He shut the grill’s lid and hung his spatula on the side. The Taus had a gigantic Weber, a veritable legend on campus, and they had been forced to chain it to the house itself to keep the Dekes from stealing it.

“Cut the shit, Dennis.” Brian took a step toward Dennis, his finger jabbing accusingly toward the other boy. “We’re not playing a game anymore.” But of course that was the problem: they were playing a game. It was all part of Williams’s game, and that was what made it so confoundingly difficult to understand.

“I talked to him once,” Dennis said, looking off the roof, toward Up Campus, where some students were staging a protest about the tuition hike that was about to come into effect. The protesters walked slowly across the viaduct, their signs bobbing in the air above them. “Maybe twice. We just talked about Polly. About the class. It was nothing. Look, if you two think that I may have had something to do with Williams skipping town-”

“It’s not that,” Mary said sharply. “It’s just that there are other things. Things you don’t know about yet.”

“What other things, Mary?”

Brian produced the book. He showed it to Dennis carefully, as if it contained a terrible secret. Brian flipped through the book, pausing on some of the pages as if a story could be told in the nonsense language.

“What the hell is it?” Dennis asked.

“It’s Williams’s book about the girl, Deanna. The girl from Cale that detective talked about.”

“Except it’s not a book,” Dennis said flatly, as if he was still trying to grasp the concept of the two words-for the for the for the for the for the-on those pages.

“Right,” Brian put in. “This is why I believe-we believe-that this is all part of some kind of…ploy on Williams’s part.” Brian explained it all to Dennis: uncovering the detective, Brian’s trip to Cale High and his discussion with Bethany Cavendish, the cryptic phrase Mary had seen on that typed page in Williams’s office, Della Williams’s note to Mary on the night of the party, and finally his and Mary’s e-mails to Troy Hardings.

“Shit,” whispered Dennis. He opened the Weber and transferred the hot dogs to a plastic plate. For a few moments he was silent, contemplating what he had heard. “So you think Williams had something to do with this girl in Cale?”

It was the first time anyone had expressed it in words. Yet it had been there, unspoken between Brian and Mary, from the moment he had showed up at Brown late two nights before. Bethany Cavendish had told Brian, It was as if he was there. An innocuous admonition at the time, but now, looking back with all the information they had gathered in the last day, it carried an undeniable weight.

“I think so,” Brian said.

The knowledge of what they were involved with now fell on them, and they stood silently on the hot roof of the Tau house, contemplating their roles in what was happening.

“What do we do?” Dennis asked. His brothers were at the door asking for the food, and he passed the plate inside.

Brian and Mary had already spoken about it on the way to the Tau house. They had decided that there was no other way around it, that if they wanted this thing to stop they had to go the whole way, and to do that they must get to the root of it. They must find a missing girl, again, for a second time, and then Williams’s role might be revealed. Mary had already resigned herself to the fact that she would not be going home this weekend to study as she had promised; in fact, she had already called and told her mother. When her mom asked if Dennis was somehow involved in Mary’s decision to stay at school, Mary had neither confirmed or denied it.

“We have to find her,” she told Dennis now, referring for the first time not to Polly but to Deanna Ward.

27

That night, he met Elizabeth at the Cossack, a little bar on the border of DeLane and Cale. She was already drunk. He slid across from her and she looked at him, her glare unfocused, sloppy. “What’s wrong with you?” he asked. They had been talking again in the library, and while Dennis had to admit it wasn’t like before, there was still a certain charge to it. She was at least acknowledging him again, looking at him and considering his thoughts.

“Nothing,” she slurred. “This-this damned dissertation.” The word was dirty on her tongue, a swear.

“So, I’m going to be busy these next few days,” he told her.

She only nodded heavily.

“I’m going with some friends of mine on a trip,” he said.

Again, that slow nod. She knew all of this, of course, but he was making sure. Making sure she knew so that she would remember when he returned, so that maybe-maybe that old energy would return. Who knew: maybe that would be his reward. In just a week, he had gone from angry at her-the kind of anger that is unhealthy, vile-to something else. Something like desperation. Yes, he admitted it: he was desperate for Elizabeth now that she had turned him away. Dennis stayed awake at night thinking of ways to bring her back.

They were silent for a moment. And then she said, “I got a tattoo.” When Dennis didn’t say anything, she continued, “Want to see?”

He stared at her as she tore back a square of gauze and showed him the back of her hand. “Isn’t it cool? You ever seen anything like that?”

“No,” he lied. “No I haven’t.”

In the blood-dotted ink he saw an S and a P, entangled.