“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.<
br />
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.
28
They had planned the Cale trip for Saturday, but it turned out that Dennis had a mandatory charity event with the Taus, so they postponed it until early the next week. Brian and Mary spent the weekend sitting in her room at Brown, anxiously waiting on a call from Dennis. They played Uno, their hands moistening the deck until it was so slick that it could not be shuffled. They watched reruns of Seinfeld and Friends and Mary’s entire DVD collection: Persuasion, Elizabeth, Mel Gibson’s Hamlet. They listened to Mary’s CDs, falling asleep here and there to the Weepies and Cat Power and the Arcade Fire. They spoke to each other in short, clipped phrases about anything not related to Deanna Ward.
On Sunday afternoon, Mary checked her mail at the campus post office and found a crude package in the box. It was a mangled manila envelope that had been taped and lined with a series of months-old Attn’s on the outside. Her name was the last in the line: M. Butler.
Mary waited until she returned to Brown Hall to open it. Inside, she found a VHS tape. Someone had written on the white strip in the middle of the tape, This might help.
She pulled out her old VCR from under the bed and plugged it in. She and Brian sat in front of the television and waited for an image to appear. The film was grainy. Lines ran through the wavering picture, making it difficult to see what was happening.
But Mary had seen this film once before. It had been freshman year, in Dr. Wade’s Psychology 101: The Milgram Experiments.
The experimenter was asking the subject a question. This man, Mary knew, was being paid by Milgram to scream when the participant pushed the buttons on the “shock generator.” When the subject answered a question incorrectly, the participant said, “You will now get a shock of one hundred and five volts,” and he pushed a button on the machine. The subject in the next room cried out in mock pain. The participant said, “Just how far can you go on this thing?”
The scientist, who was also one of Milgram’s actors, said, “As far as is necessary.”
The participant said, “What do you mean ‘as far as is necessary’?”
“To complete the test,” the scientist said.
The participant continued. The next time the subject answered incorrectly, the participant pushed a button and said, “One hundred and fifty volts.”
Again, the subject cried out. “Get me out of here!” the man shouted. “I told you I have heart problems. My heart’s starting to bother me now.”
“It is essential that you continue,” the scientist told the participant.
The screen went black. But there was still audio coming from the television, a scratching sound that resembled someone rubbing fabric over a microphone.
A man’s voice said, “I don’t—”
“Bring it here,” another man said sharply. “Bring it the hell over here.”
“Can’t,” the first man said.
“Listen, she’s got—”
“Deanna. Call her Deanna.”
“Whatever. Listen. She’s not doing good. It’s her breathing. It’s her color.”
“Like chalk.”
“What?”
“Like sidewalk chalk. That’s what she looks like. I used to play with it at my grandma’s house. We’d draw hopscotch on the sidewalks, and—”
“Listen to me. Would you shut up and listen to me? We need to do something. We need to—”
“Turn it off,” Mary whispered, and when Brian didn’t hear her she began to shout, “Turn it off! Turn it off! Please turn it off!”
Later, they sat in her room and ate lukewarm soup. They hadn’t spoken about the tape or the weird audio at the end. “Did you recognize the voices?” Mary asked.
“No. They sounded like they were…inside something. An airport hangar. Or a—”
“Cave,” she said. “It sounded like a cave. The echo.”
“Yeah,” he said, turning his soupspoon over and letting the broth drip into the bowl.
“So how old was the audio on that tape?” asked Mary.
“It sounded old,” Brian said. “Years. It was…scratchy.”
“But what if it wasn’t? What if she’s still there in that place? What if whoever sent the tape was trying to tell us something, trying to lead us to her? She’s sick, Brian. You heard it. She’s not…not breathing right. Should we take it to the police?”
“There’s no”—he picked up the package the tape had come in and studied it—“return address here. I don’t know what they would do with it. What does it say, anyway? It’s meaningless.”
Mary said nothing, only stared blankly out the window and down to the quad.
“He was testing evil,” Brian finally said.
Mary didn’t say anything. Her soup steamed in her face; she closed her eyes and felt its warmth on her lids.
“Milgram,” he went on. “Williams didn’t mention that part in class.”
“I know,” she said.
“The participant would go as far as the scientist would tell him to go. He was afraid of the scientist. He was…”
“Obedient,” Mary whispered.
“Yeah, obedient. Most of them went so far that the screams stopped in the other room. Milgram’s subject was playing dead. And still the participant would go on.”
Mary was looking off, through the open window and down to the quad. She shook her head. It was all elusive, so abstract but entirely cruel. She didn’t know what it meant, yet she had a notion about what it could mean.
“Did Williams send it?” he asked.
“I don’t think so,” she told Brian. “I think somebody’s trying to warn us about him.”
“Orman,” Brian said. “Orman studied with Milgram at Yale. Maybe he’s trying to tell us something about Williams.”
“But what about Deanna?” Mary asked.
Yes, what about Deanna? It was the only part of this she could verify; she had the documentation to prove it. What was unclear was how Williams’s story, and how Williams himself, connected with Deanna Ward. Until Mary could somehow find the answer to that question, all else—Williams’s puzzles, Brian’s story about Elizabeth Orman, and now this mysterious tape—would be inconsequential.
29
They left on Tuesday afternoon, one day before the deadline Williams had given them. They drove to Cale, unsure of where they would go once they got there. Mary had the idea that they would find Bethany Cavendish again, but it was decided among them that Cavendish was possibly a part of Williams’s game, since she had put Brian on the trail of the book that was not a book. Dennis thought they should drive out to Bell City to ask around about the girl who had been returned to Wendy Ward, the girl who had been mistaken for Deanna.
But that was for later, they decided. They had to ask a few questions in Cale first, because Cale was where it had all begun. Mary suggested that they go to the house on During Street, where the elderly couple lived (if Cavendish could be trusted with even this information), and the boys agreed that it was probably the best place to start.
They drove Dennis Flaherty’s Lexus, and Mary felt a kind of nostalgia the whole way there. She had spent time in this car. There: she had reached across and taken Dennis’s hand one night on the way back from a play in Indianapolis. And there: he had kissed her, pulling her across the seat toward him. They were confusing memories, and she had to look out the window, at the blurring scenery, to get it out of her mind.
They got lost on the back roads of Cale. Brian had the map spread across his lap in the backseat, and he and Dennis had a spat when it was determined that they’d missed their turn and gone five miles out of their way. Dennis, sighing in an exaggerated manner, turned the Lexus around in a gravel turnabout and made his way back into town.
Finally, they found During Street, its sign bent and nearly shrouded by a weeping willow that was growing beside the road. If there is such a place as the “backwoods,” they were there. During Street was a tree-shrouded lane, and from the road you could see the blue expanse of the Thatch River. The vegetation was thick—river foliage, dark leaves and dark soil, kudzu falling in torrents all around. A few cabins, probably only used in the summer, were falling into disrepair here and there.
Brian claimed that he would know the couple’s house by the field that Bethany Cavendish had described to him. And there it was, just ahead on the right, a simple Cape Cod with an American flag flying out front.
“Polly’s house,” Mary said, referring to the transparency they had seen in Williams’s class the first week.
An old man answered the door. Dennis, because he looked the part of a salesman, was appointed their speaker. “We were wondering,” Dennis said through the mesh of the screen door, “if you wouldn’t mind talking to us for a few minutes about the girl who used to live here.” Although Brian would not have used such honesty, Dennis’s tactic seemed to work. The old man opened the door for them and let them inside.
Obedience Page 15
