“Elizabeth,” Dennis whispered.
“That’s right.”
Mary stared at Williams. A tiny vein pulsed on his neck. The gag had been knotted so tightly that they could only slide it down onto his throat, and now it was cinched there, dripping sweat.
“But you haven’t answered the question,” Mary said. Many holes had been filled in by Williams’s story, but the hole, the evidence that would clearly implicate Ed Orman, hadn’t been discussed at all. “Where is Deanna?”
“Ah,” said Williams. “The question of questions. In my book, I wanted to push forward the idea that Pig Stephens—an ex-cop, but still a horrifically violent man, a deviant who had been disgraced by the police department—had accidentally killed Deanna in a struggle and he and Ed Orman had been forced to hide her body. But my publisher wouldn’t let me go through with it. Not enough hard evidence, you see. Every time I got close to finding Deanna, she would disappear. This has been going on for nineteen years now, and I really am no closer to finding her than I was back in nineteen eighty-seven.”
They were on Montgomery Street now, driving into campus. It was a normal Wednesday at Winchester. The quarter was ending, and parents’ vehicles were pulled into the service entrances behind the dorms. It was 4:30 p.m. Soon, they would all be going home for the fall break and these questions would still be unanswered. Mary had just one more thing to ask Williams.
“Where’s Polly now?”
“She’s getting her degree in criminal justice at Indiana State, down in Terre Haute. It’s difficult, this forty-year-old woman sitting in a classroom with teenagers. Kids your age. She’s lived a tough life, as you would expect. But she got things turned around, and now she’s going to school full-time. She visited me on campus just a couple of weeks ago and she’s supposed to be coming back into town today or tomorrow for the break. She knows everything, of course. It was difficult to keep it from her after A Disappearance in the Fields was published, but she knows who her real father is, and she has her own suspicions about Ed Orman. He knows that he’s too old to stop us from living our lives now. He was against Jennifer and me moving onto campus a few years ago, but that passed.”
“And what about Wendy Ward?” Mary asked. “Does he still obsess over her?”
“I wouldn’t know. All I know is that he doesn’t interfere with Polly, thank God. He has resigned himself to the knowledge that he has a daughter, even though I know she must bring back terrible memories of what he did to Deanna and the cover-up that has gone on for years. That’s one reason he locks himself up in his office: he’s ashamed of his history at Winchester. I think it eats at him every day, and I intend to see to it that it continues to for the rest of his time at the university.”
“Locked away,” Dennis said, “writing his book on Milgram.”
“Did you know he and Milgram were never colleagues?” Williams said. “Not really.”
“How so?” Dennis asked.
“I mean—”
But they were on campus now, and he fell silent. They crept down Montgomery and hit the light at Pride Street, the boundary that separated the two hemispheres of Winchester.
“What are you going to do?” asked Mary. She was desperate for some conclusion, some kind of closure to the game. Finding Williams was not enough; it seemed incredibly cruel to leave Deanna still missing, and Ed Orman’s deception unchallenged.
“I’m going to do the same thing I’ve done for all these years,” Williams admitted. “I’m going to keep quiet. I’m not going to say anything. I’m going to teach Logic and Reasoning in the Winchester term, just like I always have, and I’m going to hope I have students who are as inquisitive as you three. Right now? Right now I’m going to return to my study to have a bourbon.” He paused. “I love my study. We added it on to the house a few years ago. Have you seen it, Mary?”
Mary turned to look at him. There was something in his eyes, a gleaming and almost imperceptible trace of secret information.
They fell silent, each of them gazing outside the car. It was finally fall. The sun that had been out earlier was gone behind a bank of clouds, and the air was crisp and sharp. The wind whistling through Mary’s cracked window had the bite of winter.
“Where to?” asked Dennis as the light turned green.
“Home,” replied Professor Williams.
So Dennis drove him to the house on Pride Street, and standing outside waiting for him was Polly’s adoptive mother, Jennifer Williams. She did not look anything like Della—this woman was plump and short, and her face contained a multitude of hurt lines. The professor got out of Dennis’s car and ran up the drive toward her, and they embraced as if they hadn’t seen each other in many, many years.
41
4 hours left
“So this is it?” asked Brian. They were in Mary’s room in Brown. Dennis had dropped them off with the promise that he would call them before he left campus, and now they were sitting at what Mary called her “dinner table,” which was really a card table with a frilly tablecloth draped over it, eating McDonald’s cheeseburgers.
“I guess so,” admitted Mary. She would be going back to Louisville this evening, and all of this would be left behind. Since her cell phone had apparently been out of range in Bell City, her mother had left five messages since Tuesday afternoon asking if she was coming home for the week. The last message bordered on hysteria, so she texted her mother a brief message: Been studying hard for exams. Everything’s still a go for tonight.
“It doesn’t seem right,” Brian said. “Orman shouldn’t be allowed to just get away scot-free.”
“If Williams’s story is true.”
Brian flinched. “You think he’s lying?”
“I think it’s difficult to trust him considering what he made us go through.”
“He said it himself, Mary. He was trying to protect himself. He was trying to lead us to the clues that would tell us what we needed to know about Ed Orman and his role in Deanna’s disappearance.”
She couldn’t get the feeling out of her mind, though—the feeling that Williams was somehow deceiving them again. It’s just your paranoia, she told herself. You’ve just freaked yourself out during the two days in Bell City and Cale.
After they ate, she walked Brian out. A moment passed between them before he walked away, the knowledge that whatever they had begun wasn’t over. He took her hand, and for a moment they stood on the quad, looking in each other’s eyes. They had shared something, something so significant that neither of them would ever forget it. “Be careful in Kentucky,” he told her. “We’ll see each other after the break and we could…” He didn’t finish the thought. He didn’t have to. He walked away from her, off toward Norris Hall, leaving her standing alone outside her building.
Back inside, Mary checked her e-mail. She had nineteen new messages. There were forwards from her mother, petitions and jokes and recipes that she found—the detritus of the Internet. There was a note from Dr. Kiseley, her lit professor, asking her where she had been this morning. She would have to e-mail Kiseley before she left and figure out how to get her final paper to her. There were four or five institutional messages from Dean Orman concerning the cancellation of Professor Williams’s Logic and Reasoning 204. Nothing else of significance.
She responded to Kiseley and told her that she would e-mail the paper within the week, blaming a family emergency for the delay. Then she threw some clothes into her old suitcase and went out to her mother’s old Camry. Her heart was thudding, but it was a plaintive noise. There was a certain sadness inside her: the knowledge that Deanna would not be found, and that she, Mary, was at least a bit responsible for that fact. She had been so close to the truth but had been unable to find the missing girl.
Yet Mary had a feeling that if she looked, if she tried hard enough, logic could still lead her to Deanna.
Ed Orman, she thought. Elizabeth Orman, his wife. Deanna Ward. Wendy Ward, Deanna’s mother. Star Ward, Deanna’s father and Wendy�
�s husband. Polly Williams, Ed’s secret daughter. Jennifer Williams, Deanna’s aunt, Polly’s adopted mother, and Leonard Williams’s wife. Professor Leonard Williams. Pig Stephens, the potential abductor and murderer of Deanna Ward.
Even after all this time it was still a puzzle, one of Williams’s tangrams. Paper silhouettes. Yet she had been given a wealth of information by Williams, some of it definite and some of it presumed, and she still was no closer to finding Deanna. Maybe, like Williams had said, she just had to resign herself to the fact that some crimes remain unsolved—and hidden. After all, she had to get on with her life, didn’t she? Mary sighed and started the car. She saw on the dashboard clock that it was 6:05. Williams’s six weeks had finally passed, but Mary felt like she was moving toward another, more pivotal, deadline. Mary’s mother would be expecting her at 9:00 for dinner at the Bristol Café, where they always met when Mary came home.
She turned out of the parking lot at Brown and then took a right onto Montgomery. In three hours, she would be in Kentucky and this nightmare would be behind her.
42
Mary drove along Montgomery and came to the stoplight at the corner of Pride Street. Students carrying overstuffed suitcases passed in front of the car. It was just a six-mile drive to I-64, which would lead her back to Kentucky. But Mary was feeling the tug of something. It was a conscious thing, an awareness of something left unopened, like a wound. A lack of closure. An imperfection.
I love my study. Have you seen it, Mary?
She turned right onto Pride. She narrowly avoided a student who was crossing the street, and he cursed at her as she hit the gas and sped down Pride. She had no idea where she was going—she just drove, hoping her intuition would take her wherever she needed to go.
Professor Williams’s house was just down on the right. She slowed in the front and noticed that his pickup was not in the driveway. She stopped at the curb and got out.
What are you doing, Mary? she asked herself.
But she was already walking toward the front door. She rang the doorbell and waited. The maple tree that towered above the Williams’s house was blazing orange.
When no one came to the door, Mary went around the side of the house and looked in one of the windows. She expected bare walls and dusty floors, just like at the tavern or the Collinses’, but it was the same living room she had seen on the night of the party. There was the couch Williams had been sitting on when she’d left that night, and the dinner table was cluttered with dishes that had recently been used. Even the butter was still out.
Mary went around to the back door. She walked up the landing steps and looked through the inlaid glass on the back door. The same thing from this angle: a normal house that looked positively lived in. She saw the kitchen, and beyond it the hallway that led to the Williamses’ bedroom.
You’re an idiot, Mary. You’ve let this get to your head. Now let’s go home. Let’s get as far away from this as we possibly can.
As she was turning to leave, something inside caught her eye. She could see a door at the front of the hallway. Williams’s study. The door was open, and inside was a desk. On the desk, something was glinting in the shifting evening light. Mary squinted to see this object, and just as she got her face to the glass someone was behind her, stepping through the fallen leaves in the yard.
“Can I help you?” the person said.
Mary turned and saw the woman.
Polly.
43
“I…I’ve…” Mary stammered. “I have Professor Williams in logic class, and he has a paper of mine that I need.”
“Didn’t the term end today?” Polly asked. She was wearing a pea-coat and she had her arms crossed in front of her, protecting herself from the cutting breeze. Polly didn’t look forty years old to Mary. She carried herself like a young woman, but her face was damaged from years of tragic worry. She had the dog on a leash, and she reached up and clipped the leash to the clothesline that ran between the two maples in the Williamses’ backyard.
“Yes,” Mary explained, “but I’ll get an incomplete if the paper isn’t finished before the Winchester term starts.”
“Oh,” said Polly. “Do you know where it is?”
“Yeah. I think he told me that he would leave it on his desk.”
“I’ll let you inside, then. Dad is off God knows where. He keeps everything important in his study, though, so I’m sure you’ll find it somewhere in his clutter.”
Polly unlocked the back door and the two women went into the house. As Polly went about cleaning up the dishes that were spread across the table, Mary found her way to the study. She checked to see if Polly was watching her, and then she began to search Williams’s desk.
What the hell are you looking for?
She didn’t know. She opened drawers and shuffled papers, still keeping her eye on Polly in the other room. Outside the clouds passed across the day’s last sunlight, and again an object glinted on the desk.
Mary located it, right there in the center. A paperweight.
The paperweight was sitting atop a manila envelope. As Mary removed the weight and picked up the envelope, Polly said from the other room, “Do you like his class?”
“Oh, sure,” Mary called. “He’s…interesting.”
“Other people tell me that his class is weird. He won’t tell me what he teaches, but I know he’s into puzzles. My father is the kind of guy who won’t tell you the answer to anything. He makes you figure it out for yourself. He’s always been like that.”
“Yeah,” said Mary, her tone distracted. Inside the envelope there was a note addressed to her.
Dear Mary,
I knew you couldn’t leave it alone. There were some things that I couldn’t tell you in the car. I have a feeling that you are one who will not rest until you know the whole story. Well, that I can’t give to you. But here is the rest of what I know. This is what Orman and Pig did not find in the storage garage. I hope it helps.
Sincerely,
Leonard Williams
Inside the envelope there were two photographs she had already seen: the red Honda Civic and the black Labrador. Nothing else.
“Did you find it?” Polly asked. She was standing at the door. She had taken off her coat and was drying a plate with a dish towel. She had long dark hair, and Mary looked in her eyes. She saw in them a lifetime of secret pain.
“Yep,” Mary said, holding up the envelope.
“Good. Dad keeps this room such a mess that you’re lucky to find anything in there. Every time I come home to visit I spend most of my time picking up after him.”
Polly led Mary out, this time through the front. There was much that Mary wanted to ask the woman, but of course she could not. As she was walking to her car Polly called, “Have a great break.”
“I will,” Mary said.
Polly closed the door and turned on the porch light. It was, after all, getting dark.
44
Across campus, Dennis Flaherty was in his room at the Tau house waiting for the phone to ring. He was thinking of Elizabeth, as he often did, wondering how it had come this far. On the bed beside him was the black garbage bag. He was having trouble opening it. They were at the end now, and it was difficult to finish it even though he knew he had to if he wanted to go on with his life—and if he wanted to find a way back to Elizabeth.
The phone rang.
“You ready?” asked the voice on the other end.
“Yes,” Dennis lied.
The man hung up, and Dennis sat in the crackling silence. He wondered if there was another way to do it. Another way to finish this thing.
But there was no use. He knew that soon he would have to be ready to go.
For the first time in as long as he could remember, he crossed himself.
Then he opened the garbage bag and took out what was inside.
45
Mary pulled into the parking lot of the natatorium on Pride Street and studied the pictures again. The red car she had se
en in the photographs Williams had sent, of course. But it had also come up in their time in Bell City. It was the car that Paul said was for sale at the house on St. Louis Street. Was Williams trying to lead her back there, to where he had once lived with Jennifer and Polly?
The Camry idled as night fell. She had to turn on the interior light to see the pictures. It was almost 7:00 p.m. and her mother and father would be getting ready, her father showering, her mother out of the tub with a towel around her wet hair. But Mary wouldn’t be meeting them at the restaurant. She still had business to attend to at Winchester, and she intended to finish what she had started. She called her mother’s cell. She would be home later, she explained, but don’t wait up. Yes, everything was okay. Yes, she had done well on her tests. No, she didn’t need anything. She would see them both later, and promise—Promise me, Mom—that you won’t wait up.
She closed her eyes and thought. How was she going to use these photographs, these “clues” of Williams’s, to figure out anything? There was a small roar in her ears, the roar of anticipation, and she knew that feeling would go to waste if she didn’t figure out what Williams was trying to tell her now.
I don’t think it was part of the game, Brian had said regarding the ride he’d given to Elizabeth Orman. I think she was serious.
Mary did a U-turn on Pride Street and went back toward Winchester. On the hill to her right, which the students called Grace Hill, she saw Dean Orman’s house. She turned into the drive and climbed the hill toward the cottage. “Cottage” really didn’t do it justice. It was essentially a mansion fashioned as a nineteenth-century country carriage house. Rising high into the trees was the house’s A-frame. The house, Mary knew, had four stories and was over five thousand square feet.
Mary got out of the car and went to the front door. She had no idea what she was going to tell Elizabeth Orman if the woman answered the door. That her husband was an accomplice in a murder twenty years ago? That she knew the woman had slept with Dennis Flaherty? Mary rang the bell and waited. She heard faint footsteps from inside, and the door cracked open to reveal Dean Orman.
Obedience Page 21
