Just like Dennis. She had gotten the single room not because of trust issues, she knew now. No, she had gotten the single room because she needed that time alone to maybe understand why he had dumped her. It was hard for her to be around anyone except for Summer these days.
And now, two whole years later, she was right back in the same state of mind with Williams and Polly. Frazzled, hurt—but still desperately trying to come up with answers that would put her mind at ease. It’s not you, Mary, everyone had told her. It had nothing to do with you. Move on. Life goes on. This, too, shall pass.
Or would it?
What if you were always just stuck in one place, your mind spinning and unable to go forward like tires clenched in mud, because the answers wouldn’t reveal themselves to you? The mind needed answers to satisfy itself. Mary’s did. After all, she deserved them. What had she done to bring this on? Accepted a boy’s invitation to dinner, signed up for a stupid class? It wasn’t enough. She didn’t deserve this—what was it? Torment. Yes, that’s exactly what it was. With Dennis and now again with Williams. Torment. Torture. She didn’t deserve it.
Mary had believed that Summer McCoy meant something in that picture, but she did not. The photos were only points of reference. How had she gone so far off track? How had she lost herself? It was such a stupid mistake, to think that what she was doing existed in the real world. It was an exercise. Nothing more, nothing less. Polly was as real as Quinn; that was to say not at all. Her fate was just as important, in the scope of things, as Quinn’s survival.
But still. Still. Mary felt that what she was doing was important. She felt Polly—viscerally felt her. That meant something. It meant that she was beginning to see Polly as a real person, not just an apparition in Williams’s game. Here was a girl who’d been mistreated, wronged by this boy, this Mike. And here was Mary, who’d been similarly mistreated by Dennis. They were two of a kind. Mary felt as if she owed something to Polly. She felt as if she had no choice but to continue in the game until it was finished.
And yet Mary knew that if she got too close to the situation she would lose herself again in it, be embarrassed by Williams and the rest of the class. She had to keep a considerable distance away, she knew now, yet still find Polly.
Find Polly with the understanding that Polly was, alas, not real.
Find Polly.
She logged on to her account and read the latest e-mail from Williams.
Circumstance
Now you know where Polly was on the last night she was seen. And you know who threw the party for her: the brutish yet kind Pig, who was a father figure to Polly. You know that she returned home to her father, watched television, and went to sleep early on the morning of August 2. In fact, you have already been told about the circumstances of Polly’s disappearance. But what about Polly’s circumstance: the facts of her life that may or may not play a part in her disappearance and potential murder?
First, we know that Polly was going away to college. She was planning to major in nursing at Grady Technical College in Piercetown, which is forty miles away from where Polly grew up. The college sits out at the end of a road and overlooks Interstate 64; she had already put some of her things in the U-Stor-It storage facility that was beside campus. She had secured an apartment, where she would be staying with her friend Nicole. For the last two weeks, Polly and Nicole had driven to Piercetown to survey the campus. They partied with some people there and had a good time. Polly was looking forward to going to school, to finally getting started with her life. Nicole dated a man named Lawrence Tripp. Everyone called him Trippy, for short, because he was always high on something. Polly didn’t trust him, but she didn’t worry about Trippy too much because he and Nicole had been on the outs recently, and Polly was fairly confident that once they moved to Piercetown, Trippy would disappear.
There was also the circumstance of Polly’s mother: for the first time in a long while Polly’s mother was back in the picture. Her mother had been gone for almost a year, having left for San Francisco with a lithographer. Now her mother was calling again and Polly was afraid that her mother was going to return and, like she always did, ruin things for her.
And what about Polly’s father, Eli? Eli was an elementary school teacher at the Butler School on During Street. He had been teaching for almost thirty years and was on the verge of retirement. He enjoyed his job, but for the past few years things had begun to wear on him. When Polly disappeared, he took a leave of absence. He couldn’t imagine himself ever going back. To make matters worse, he had a run-in with an irate parent just a week before Polly disappeared that had left him cynical about the current administration at Butler. This man approached him in the parking lot after school one day and threatened him. Apparently Eli had sent this man’s son to the principal’s office “for no good reason,” as the father put it. As Eli remembered it, the boy had drawn a naked woman on the chalkboard, her legs spread. The father was incensed. Eli, for the first time in a long while, was afraid. He was a large man and could have handled this father easily, but he was timid, shy. Reserved. People referred to him as “quiet.” And here was this spark plug of a man with his finger in Eli’s face, accusing him of something he clearly didn’t do. Eli didn’t say anything to the man, just kept walking to his truck. He got in and shut the door, but the man was still there, at the glass. He was spitting mad. Eli pulled out of the parking lot and watched the man recede into the distance. When he was called on the 4th of August by the girl, the girl in the well who had said, “I’m here,” his first and immediate thought was this: The boy’s father has her.
Mary made sure to check the in-box a second time. There was another message there, called “Study Guide.” Mary clicked on it.
It was a picture of a dog, one of those big, happy breeds you see on television commercials. Beneath the dog Williams had typed, “Here is Pig’s dog, Lady.”
Lady was a black Lab.
15
On Tuesday Dennis tried to see Elizabeth, but she wouldn’t take his phone calls. When he got the old man he hung up quickly.
He walked around campus, then jogged, then broke out into a full sprint down Montgomery Street. He was in his khakis and blazer, his glasses sliding down his face, his hair smacking his forehead. When he got to the end of the street he stopped, bent over with his hand on his knees, and closed his eyes tightly. It had been a long time since he’d run, years, and it felt good. The muscles in his legs surged with heat. His heart banged in his chest. Torture yourself, Dennis, he thought. Go on. The stoplight changed, and Dennis started to cross Pride when he heard her behind him.
“I was working.”
He faced her. She was wearing a beige trench coat, and her books were slung up on her shoulder. It was true, she had been working: her eyes were tired, blood vessels broken here and there. He reached out for her hand but she pulled away from him.
“There’s so much going on,” she explained.
Dennis looked off. Evening was falling, and the streetlights were coming to life. “Yeah,” he said.
“My dissertation is coming up soon. It’s just not right to work all these years and not give it my best.”
“What are you writing it on, Elizabeth?” he asked. He looked in her eyes, trying to gauge her. She didn’t flinch.
“You know that, Dennis. Caretaking. How human beings take care of one another. How innately human that is.”
“Protection,” Dennis said.
“Yes.”
“Good luck with that.”
“Thank you, Dennis.”
“I just have one thing to ask you,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Is the link San Francisco?” he asked. “Or is it Pig?”
Again, there was no movement. No slit of the eyes, nothing. She stared at him. But when she opened her mouth to speak he saw it, just barely, in the way she failed to say anything. In the way her voice just slightly changed timbre.
“I don’t know what you’re talking abo
ut.”
He nodded. It was over, then. As quickly as it had begun. He turned back toward the intersection, and when there were no cars coming he broke into a sprint again and felt the roar in his ears. A hundred feet on, when he looked back to see if she was still there, she was. Standing in the same spot. That night he would wonder about it ceaselessly: Had she been crying? Was that movement to her face a tug of the collar over her cheeks to block the wind, or was it something else?
Elizabeth reminded him, standing there, of his father. How strange. How you never could quite figure him out. His posture, his glances. How you would often look back at him after he’d left you somewhere—at school, at a soccer match—and wonder what he was thinking. Teaching, he’d told Dennis, is the greatest learning tool. And back to his papers he would go. He would shut himself inside his den for hours, and when Dennis’s mother said, “Go check on your father,” he would peek in to find the man slumped over at his desk, head down, asleep.
It was a long, sleepless night. Dennis had known it was over with Elizabeth before, when she dropped him off after the Kingsley Hotel, but there was a lack of closure. Hadn’t she granted it to him? Hadn’t she given him what he needed?
Yes. But it was all so backhanded. Underhanded, even. Wrong.
Because he still wanted her. Before she had met him yesterday on Montgomery, he was through with it. Now, suddenly, she crowded his thoughts.
Wrong. It was fucking wrong to do someone the way she had.
There was still a way, he knew. Elizabeth Orman herself had given it to him at the Kingsley. She had given him the trump card, his way back to her. He couldn’t get to her by calling her on the phone, just as he couldn’t get to his father by knocking on the door of his den and asking to come in. Even with all his honesty and his charm he knew that he would have to find another way back to Elizabeth.
And so Dennis decided to play the card she had given him.
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 mor
ning, 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.
Obedience Page 9
