Obedience

by Will Lavender

  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 d
amaged 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.”