Obedience

by Will Lavender

  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 th
at 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.