When the lights were off, Mary said, “What next?”
The boys shifted in their bed. A car passed in the parking lot and spread a white arc of light into the room, blanching the walls.
“What are our choices?” Brian asked, his voice muffled in the pillow.
“We could go back to Winchester,” she said, “and tell people what we know. We could tell Dean Orman, get the folks at Carnegie to take action.”
“But what do we know?” Dennis asked skeptically.
“We know that Williams was Polly’s uncle,” replied Mary. “We know that Polly and Deanna Ward were connected somehow, not just because they looked alike, but also because Deanna’s father was driving out to Bell City to see Polly. In that way, we have Williams tied to the missing girl. We have the telephone call from the campus cops, which was clearly rigged by Williams. We have Williams’s ‘wife’ giving me that note, and then the weirdness at the Collinses’ house on During Street.”
“And Troy,” Brian put in. “We’ve got Troy Hardings admitting to a conspiracy over e-mail.”
“It’s not enough,” Dennis offered. He kicked off the covers, and Mary could see his plaid legs doing bicycle kicks in the bed. Mary remembered this tic. When he was nervous, Dennis always lay on the floor and began his bicycle routine. Sometimes he would go for a half hour or more; it made her tired just watching him. “They’ll just ask what we were doing, wasting our time in Cale looking for a girl the police have been searching for for at least twenty years. I shouldn’t even be out here on this—this wild chase. Christ, Mary, I’ve got an exam tomorrow.”
It was the first time Mary had thought about her other class. She had her lit class in the morning. They were wrapping up City of Glass, and she didn’t want to miss their last discussion of the novella. But right now, it certainly wasn’t looking good that she would get back to Winchester in time to make it.
“We might as well go to the police if we’re going to go that route,” Dennis scoffed then.
“Maybe we should,” she said diffidently.
“And tell them what? Tell them that we have all these fake leads and this fake book and that we think we might be a part of an intricate game with a professor from the university who has disappeared off the face of the planet? They’ll laugh us right out of the station. None of it makes sense, Mary. None of it makes a damn bit of sense.”
They lay there, each of them looking up at the dark ceiling. She had to agree with him, of course. Sense was not a word that could be rationally applied to their situation at the moment. Across the room, Dennis churned his legs and counted under his breath.
“What do you think, Brian?” Mary asked. Over on his side of the bed, he was quiet.
“I don’t know,” he sighed. Mary knew that, like her, he was exhausting himself from turning all the complexities of the game around and around in his mind. “I seriously…I seriously think about hurting him.”
“Hurting who?” Dennis asked.
“Williams. At all this shit he’s caused. I haven’t slept in a week. I can’t—I can’t seem to get my mind off it. If I could get to him and demand answers, you know. Even if he told us Deanna was dead, then that would at least be something.”
“She’s not dead,” Mary said softly.
“It makes me wonder about Dean Orman’s wife,” said Brian.
Dennis stopped kicking. “What does?” he asked.
“This,” Brian replied. “All this. After seeing her that night, I just wonder if she was part of this thing or if Williams was somehow…” He trailed off, couldn’t define the thought.
“That night?” Dennis asked.
“I saw her out on Montgomery Street. By the Thatch River. She’d been beaten. She said that something had happened between her and the guy that looked after their boat for them. A former cop, she said. She wouldn’t let me tell the dean because she was afraid Orman would kill the guy.”
“Pig,” Dennis whispered.
Brian bolted upright in the bed. “What did you say?” he asked Dennis.
“The guy who looks after their boat,” Dennis said. “He’s called Pig. That’s where Williams got his name for the bad guy in his Polly story.”
On her side of the room, Mary tried to figure it out. She worked it around in her head, fused the two narratives, Polly’s and Deanna Ward’s, and now this third narrative that starred Dean Orman’s wife and the former police officer called Pig. But she couldn’t come up with anything. It was all a muddle, jumbled, like the bar owner’s theory of the pancaked universes. What was real, what was fake, what was part of the game and what wasn’t? She lay back down and shut her eyes.
“How could it all be related?” She realized, too late, that she had said it aloud.
“I don’t know,” Brian replied. “But I just have a feeling now, after all we’ve seen today, that it was too coincidental. Too freakish, you know. How could Elizabeth Orman have been there just as I was driving back to campus? It was like she—like she was waiting for me.”
“We have to go to the police,” Mary said.
“No.” Dennis now, speaking in such a hushed voice that it was barely above a whisper.
“What do you mean ‘no’?” Mary said angrily.
“I mean no. Out of the question. It’s too soon, Mary.”
“People’s lives could be in danger, Dennis. This is going beyond some—what did you call it?—some tangram. This is real life here.” She realized she had stood up, and she was approaching him across the bedroom. Her underwear was showing, but she didn’t care. She was losing control of herself, of her emotions; she was past the tipping point now. She was so angry—at Williams, at Dennis, at Polly for getting involved in all this somehow. She wanted it all to go back to normal, to when it was just a class. But somewhere along the way they had crossed some imaginary boundary and things had spilled over into the real.
“I know Elizabeth Orman,” Dennis said. Mary stopped. She knew what he meant by his voice, by the seemingly innocuous word know, and the thought of it deflated her, sent her back to her bed where she collapsed face down into the pillow.
“What do you mean?” Brian asked.
“I mean I knew her. I’m familiar with her. Listen…” Dennis began the bicycle thing again. Mary could not listen to him. There was a roar through her entire body, a piercing noise that filled her with an old, familiar ache. “Listen,” he said again, his legs kicking madly and his breath chopped and labored, “there’s something I haven’t told you. I figured it out by…by the San Francisco thing.”
“The San Francisco thing?” Brian asked.
“Well, that wasn’t first but that cemented it in my mind,” Dennis said. “Polly’s mother left and went away to San Francisco. Elizabeth told me a story about her mother running off to San Francisco with this guy. That’s when I figured out the link between Williams and Elizabeth Orman.”
34
Dennis Flaherty told them about Elizabeth Orman. He didn’t tell them all of it, of course, just bits and pieces. He told them about the boat, and about his reasons for going to the Thatch that day. He told them about their relationship, and some of what she had told him at the Kingsley Hotel. He told them about speaking to Dean Orman that night at the house on the hill. And then he told them his secret: Elizabeth Orman used to see Leonard Williams.
“It was a few years ago,” Dennis explained. “She didn’t think anything of it, you know. Just a fling, to her. But Williams was smitten with her. He fell in love with her, I think. When she tried to break it off, he wasn’t happy. He started getting crazy. Sending her flowers every day. Showing up at their home and just standing outside, watching her. She got scared. She finally told Dr. Orman, and the dean was furious. He confronted Williams at a faculty meeting. It got real bad. Drama. The two men almost came to blows, right there on the third floor of the Carnegie Building. Williams was reprimanded, put on some kind of suspension. They sent him overseas to teach. Sort of to get him out of the way, you know? When
he came back, the dean got worried about him again. That’s when he hired this guy, this former cop, to watch after his boat. He was afraid Williams was going to deface it or something. Apparently he’d threatened to set it on fire. This former cop, of course—his name is Pig Stephens.”
“Do you think he’s part of this thing?” Brian asked.
“No,” Dennis said. “I think that Williams put Pig into his narrative just to get a dig in at the Ormans. He was into irony like that. A coal black sense of humor. He told me about Elizabeth when we talked. Was real forthcoming. He claimed the affair was nothing but Dean Orman, who had always been intimidated by him, made it into something much more than it really was. But…”
“What?” Brian urged.
“But I don’t know what this means. I don’t know why Pig would hurt Elizabeth. Unless, you know, unless it’s just random. Unless it’s just a random thing and Pig just flew off the handle one night. Hell, I don’t know.”
“Williams says there is no randomness,” Brian said, sarcasm thick in his voice. “Everything happens for a reason.”
The two boys laughed at that, but Mary had stopped hearing them. She could only think of Dennis and Elizabeth Orman. The image kept flashing through her mind, the sickening image of the two of them together. It shouldn’t have bothered her. She knew that. She and Dennis had had a thing once, a long time ago—freshman year, for goodness sake—and now they were through. At least she thought so. Hoped so. But still the image was there, dogging her, teasing her. She shut her eyes against it but that only made it stronger, more vivid. Suddenly she wanted to be home, away from this mess, this game. She felt hot tears in her eyes, and she had no choice but to let them come.
35
In the morning Mary found Brian outside on their little balcony, sitting on a plastic chair and looking out at the bustling traffic moving down Highway 72. She took a seat beside him, and they silently watched the gray Wednesday morning shift in the early, diffuse sunlight. “We’re at the end, aren’t we?” she asked him.
“Six weeks to the day,” Brian replied. “Williams’s deadline.”
Neither of them knew exactly what it meant. But something was going to happen today—something horrible, perhaps. They just had to figure out what it was. That was the only way they could stop it: by going back, back to the clues Williams had supplied them regarding Polly.
Polly is Deanna. Deanna is Polly.
When they had all showered, they decided to return to Cale Central. Even if Bethany Cavendish was a player—an actor—in this thing, she might be able to lead them somewhere they hadn’t been. The book was the key, Dennis offered. If they could understand the book, then they could understand it all. So it was decided. He would go in to talk to Bethany Cavendish this time, show her the book, and try to get an answer from her about what it was, what it meant.
They arrived before 8:00 a.m. School had yet to begin. Students were pulling into the parking lot in their converted cars, trucks that rode low to the ground and had been painted outrageous colors, sports cars that were blinding with chrome. Brian and Mary waited for Dennis outside, under that manic American flag. “What do you think about him?” Brian asked Mary.
“Him?”
“Dennis. You like him?”
“I dated him once,” she said. There was no reason to keep it from him now.
“I know,” Brian said.
They let that hang between them. Mary sat on the curb and Brian kicked pebbles around the parking lot. It was now 8:15. Dr. Kiseley’s lit class would have started by now back at Winchester. They would be discussing the book City of Glass, pondering on Quinn’s last days, talking about the symbolic meaning of the red notebook that the main character used to document his life. Existentialism and all that. The meaning of real. “To write it down is to make it become real,” Kiseley had told them. “What Quinn is doing is fighting off the idea of the interior. By writing in the red notebook, he is admitting that he is invested in facts and not the imagination. In this way, he is bringing into the world the details of his own demise.”
“I could tell by the way you two acted together,” Brian was saying. “It’s nothing. Don’t worry about it. We all have our own past. I don’t begrudge you for it.” He smiled, cuffed her on the arm playfully.
Mary looked away, her face hot. “It was…” She didn’t know what word to use. Nothing probably, but she was sure Brian would see through the lie.
Out of her periphery she saw two students leave the school grounds. They were walking briskly, their heads down, going toward the woods beside the school. Playing hooky, thought Mary. One of them had a shock of white-blond hair. When he turned, checking to see if anyone was following him, Mary recognized him immediately.
He was in one of the pictures at the Collinses’ house. One of the grandsons.
“I know that kid,” she told Brian.
He looked over, but the boys had already gone down the hill and were out of sight.
At first, she didn’t know what to think. But the longer they sat there, she began to wonder if this was not another test. Was Williams trying to tell them something else? Another plot twist, maybe?
She told Brian that she would be right back and jogged over to the edge of the woods. She looked into the dark trees, to the clearing that seemed to open up at the bottom of the hill, but she couldn’t see the boys. A light fog had descended, pulled down like a cloak through the tree line. Mary took a few steps into the woods, but she still couldn’t see the boys. “Hello?” she called. It’s no use, she thought. They’re gone by now. All the way out to the highway. She could hear I-64 out in the distance, the rock of those big trucks passing through Cale on their way to Indianapolis.
But then—a noise. Just off to her right.
Mary turned and saw something darting. Some presence. A boy, crouched and low.
“Are you there?” she called.
Again she saw something move, low to the ground. Then she saw him, just up ahead to her right. That white hair. Standing in the reeds of fog, the boy was like an apparition.
“What are you doing?” she called.
Nothing. Silence. The forest moved in the wind.
“Are you there?”
“What the fuck do you want, lady?” one of the boys asked.
“I just wanted to see if you knew anything about Polly.”
“Who the hell is Polly?”
Mary felt ashamed. It was getting to her now, all this chasing and uncovering. It was making her paranoid.
“Sorry,” she muttered, and she walked back out of the woods. Brian and Dennis were in the car when she got back. She slid into the front seat of the Lexus and they left Cale Central. On the service road that took them back to Highway 72 she saw him again. It was just him this time, the white-haired boy. He was standing on the shoulder of the road and watching the car pass. She was afraid to look in his eyes, afraid that she might see something that would make her want to go back and ask more questions.
36
“Bethany Cavendish is in on it,” Dennis announced. They were eating breakfast at a Denny’s near the high school. Mary had missed her lit class and now Dennis had missed his economics exam. It was becoming clear that they would all pay dearly for this little excursion. “She got all nervous. Started walking around the room, you know. Looking out the windows, like she was afraid someone might break in on us. She said that she didn’t know a thing about the book.”
“What do you mean?” Brian asked incredulously.
“She says that it had to be just a mistake. A printing malfunction.”
“Did you tell her about the book in Cale?”
“Of course. She said the same thing: printer malfunction. She said that the two books in DeLane and the one in Cale would have been shipped by the same company. Probably all the books in this part of the state would have the same glitch. But she was lying.” Dennis took a bite of his scrambled eggs. Mary was having toast (her appetite was almost nonexistent), and Brian w
asn’t eating at all. Only Dennis seemed to have the composure to feed himself.
“What did she say when you asked her about Polly?”
“She told me the same thing she told you. That she didn’t really know anything about Polly. She said that Wendy and Star had left Cale about six months after Deanna disappeared, and now they were living somewhere near San Francisco. She knew there was a girl out in Bell City who looked like Deanna, but she just thought it had something to do with Star. Said that the man was a sleaze-ball. Scum.”
So they hadn’t found out anything more than they had yesterday. They weren’t necessarily back to square one, but they were close. Mary knew that they would have to return to Winchester in the afternoon, and if they returned without finding out what part Leonard Williams played in the Deanna Ward abduction, then why had they even come to Bell City and Cale in the first place?
“Do you think that girl you met at the kilns is still on campus, Brian?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I guess we could go back and find out. She wasn’t a student, because I looked her up. I asked some of the Dekes if they had seen me with her, but they were all drunk and couldn’t remember anything. She had just—appeared there. It’s like she was searching me out.”
They thought about that as Dennis read the newspaper at the table. When he came to the story in the Local section about Williams’s sudden departure, he read it aloud to them. They already knew everything in the story: that Williams had left before the semester ended, that Williams taught logic and philosophy courses at the school, that his office had been cleaned out. There was a statement by Dean Orman that read, “We are very concerned with these goings-on. We will get to the bottom of this. The first thing, of course, is to find out if Dr. Williams is well. Then we will get to the business of discovering why he chose to leave Winchester before the term was out.”
Obedience Page 18
