Dominance (16 page)

“That sounds nice.”

“My stomping ground, then,” Keller said. “Rebecca's. Seven sharp.”

“I'll be there.”

Keller nodded and left her on the walk. When she got inside her dorm, she realized she hadn't been breathing.

The next morning, Alex returned to Dean Fisk's mansion on the hill. The old man was waiting for her this time.

“Tell me about Iowa,” she said when they were seated in the great room. “Professor Aldiss said we should begin there, in Rutherford's birthplace. Did something happen there?”

“Iowa is where many of Fallows's characters are from,” Fisk said. “And there you have Charles Rutherford as well. It was always believed that Iowa was ground zero, the middle of the map. If you were going to find Fallows, that's where you would begin.”

She noticed the hesitancy in his voice. “But . . .”

“Richard disagreed. At least at first. He felt that Iowa was a smokescreen, just like the ‘author photograph' of the encyclopedia salesman. Fallows wrote about New York City, about Europe. He mailed his manuscripts from European postmarks. It was as if the entire thing was a farce, as if Fallows had deliberately chosen this nowhere place in the middle of America to start his characters' journeys. It was pure Fallows: the fact that it looked like it meant something suggested that it didn't.”

“And the town where Rutherford was from?”

“Hamlet. A void.”

“Did Aldiss go there? Before, I mean?”

“He did. He and Locke.”

“Locke?”

Fisk was surprised. “Richard hasn't told you about Benjamin Locke? Ah, you haven't even begun your night class, then.”

“Who was he?”

Fisk sat back on the sofa, crossed one leg over the other. “Dr. Benjamin Locke was a cult figure at Dumant University,” he began. “Dumant was where Richard did his undergrad and then became a professor, of course. Locke was a kind of renegade professor. The women at Dumant loved him, the men wanted to be him. He was a fixture in the burgeoning student movements of the early 1970s, wore bell bottoms and love beads to his lectures. I met him once, I think it was in '71. He was more student than professor, but you could see the genius almost drifting off of him. He was much like Richard in that way.”

“And he was Professor Aldiss's teacher?”

“That's right. Locke taught critical theory. You have to understand: Locke was firmly in the Raymond Picard school. He treated literature as if it were simply a series of mathematical patterns, and it was the reader's job to unlock those patterns and crawl into the hole. Get right in the book's insides.”

Into the hole,
she thought.
The rabbit hole.

“It was as if Ben Locke were tinkering with a machine of some kind,” Fisk went on. “In front of his classes he would cut the covers off his books and X-Acto the pages away, physically destroy the volume so that he could examine it piece by piece.”

Alex thought of the pages Aldiss had held to the screen during the night class.

“I suppose Richard saw a kind of art in that,” Fisk said. “A sort of truth. Of course they were inseparable the moment Locke saw how powerful Richard's mind was.”

“Was it Locke who turned Dr. Aldiss onto Paul Fallows?”

“Yes. At that time Fallows was an unknown, but Locke soon changed all that. It was 1972.
The Golden Silence
hadn't yet appeared, and many believed there was nothing special about Fallows. A more modern version of Edith Wharton, perhaps. In fact, it was Benjamin Locke who
was the first scholar to posit the theory that Paul Fallows might have actually been a woman.”

Alex thought about that. It fit with the hundred or so pages she had read of
The Coil.
There was something almost feminine about the writing.

“You said that Benjamin Locke changed the perception of Paul Fallows,” she said. “How did he do that?”

“He did it very carefully,” Fisk replied. “He formed an elite group of students. A small, selective group of Dumant's finest lit majors. They called themselves the Iowans.”

“And Richard Aldiss—”

“Was one of them, yes. Of course he would be. It was there, in those secret meetings in the home of Benjamin Locke, that the mythology of Paul Fallows was born.”

“But what did Locke teach them? If not much was known about the novels at that time, then what could the professor possibly have been able to give to his group?”

“He gave them the beginnings of an obsession, Alex. Imagine them there.” With this, Fisk leaned forward, and Alex followed the man's always moving fingers, the way they stained the wall of the great room with their mad, intricate shadows. “These students learn that the one existing novel,
The Coil
, was not merely a book but . . . something else. Something like a treasure map. A map that was so new and untapped that no one had really taken the time to puzzle over it. They would be the first. Think about how immensely powerful they must have felt.”

Alex thought of the night class, of that smothering, windowless basement room. Of the feeling that overcame her when Aldiss appeared on the television screen.

“Yes,” she finally said. “I think I know how they felt.”

“And so it was easy to see how they fell into it,” Fisk continued. “I mean totally fell into it, free will and all cast aside. If the so-called Iowans were obedient to Locke before, they were now in his thrall. He not only became a mentor to them—he became a sort of spiritual guide.”

“Did they begin a search for Fallows?”

A slow, deliberate nod. “It was during Richard's final year of grad
school. Locke showed for a meeting one night looking ashen, pale. The students knew that something must be wrong. When they confronted him, Locke told his students what had happened.”

“What was it?” asked Alex, getting swept up now. Losing herself in the dean's story.

“Locke had been contacted by Fallows himself.”

Her mouth dropped open. “What do you mean, ‘contacted'?”

Fisk leaned forward. Strands of thinning hair fell down and clung wetly to his forehead. He was exhausting himself by telling this story.

“The writer had called the professor on the telephone,” he said. “He told Locke that he'd heard about his group and he would like to meet the students in person. This, of course, was shocking even then. Fallows was already known as a recluse, a man who never showed his face or granted an interview. The photograph of Charles Rutherford on the back of
The Coil
was already being called into question. When this man calling himself Fallows requested an audience with the professor and his students—well, that was enough to terrify Ben Locke.”

“He thought something didn't add up.”

“Very much so. Wouldn't you? You had spent three years digging into one novel, tunneling into it and prying it open, and the reclusive author suddenly wants to see you? Locke was afraid. He admitted to Richard that the writer had sounded strange during their conversation. Off, somehow. Not like a man but a . . .”

“What?” Alex asked. Heat gathered beneath her arms now; her heart roared.

“A recording,” Fisk said. “A machine of some kind.”

“Christ.”

“Yes. It was all very disconcerting. Nearly all of the Iowans refused to go, even though to meet Paul Fallows and discuss
The Coil
would have been beyond their wildest dreams.”

“What about Professor Aldiss?” she asked. Almost despite herself she thought of the professor as he would've been as a student—powerful, even sexy. He would have been above the obsession that drove the Fallows scholars. Something swelled in her, a kind of shameful energy. She swallowed it down harshly.

Fisk smiled. “Of course you know the answer to that already. He
was the only one who stayed by Locke's side. Richard would not be dissuaded. He very much wanted to go, whatever the risks. He is not a murderer, Alex, as I have told you, but he is a very brave man. A confident man, so sure of himself and his own notions that danger . . . well, he never considered danger. He just wanted to get to the bottom of the Fallows search. He had been working on the novel with Locke for long enough, and he craved answers.”

“So what did they do?”

Fisk paused. The light had swung again, and the living room was almost completely dark. The only artificial light was cast by a small lamp in the corner.

“Richard will have to tell you that story.”

“Dean Fisk, please.”

“I promise,” the man said again. “You will learn the answers to these questions. Either Richard will tell you, or you will discover what lies in Hamlet on your own.”

Alex thought again about the small Iowa town.

“So, Hamlet is where Aldiss is leading us? Leading me, I mean. Is that the purpose of the night class, to have me retrace his and Locke's steps so that I might be able to find what they could not?”

At first Fisk did not speak. When he did, his eyes were away from her, distant and somber, his face drawn.

“Yes,” the old man said. “That's exactly what is happening.”

This time Richard Aldiss was waiting for her.

He had wine ready, an immaculate dinner of stewed hare and exotic vegetables on china that spread across a stark white tablecloth. There were two chairs, one on each side of the small circular table, and through the nervous flame of a candle Alex watched the professor smile at her in the half darkness of his little kitchen. At her place setting was an envelope that read,
To Alexandra.
She had refused to open it.

“Poor Michael Tanner,” the man said when they were seated.

“They're still searching,” Alex said. “The police have been watching Sally, but they haven't charged her with anything yet.”

“And is it your opinion that quiet Sally killed her husband?” he asked bluntly. He tore at the rabbit with his fork, a tortured smile stretched across his face.

“No.” The word out there, she drew herself quickly back. “I don't know.”

“ ‘No,' ” the professor repeated in a perfect imitation of her voice. “ ‘I don't know.' Which is it, Alexandra?”

“I haven't had time to observe them all yet.” She took a cautious bite. It was luxurious, but she refused to show Aldiss her pleasure. “But I will. They're staying in Dean Fisk's—”

“Fisk,” spat Aldiss. “Has the old man trotted out his mythical
manuscript yet?” Aldiss laughed, but his eyes didn't leave her. Alex looked off into the shadows of the kitchen. “Give me something of substance.”

Alex looked at him through the candle's flame.
Bastard
. “I saw the house.”

The smile curled upward. He rested his fork on the plate with a gentle
tink,
steepled his hands beneath his chin. “Go on.”

“You said before that you felt that the person who did this was someone who knew Michael.”

Aldiss nodded almost imperceptibly.

“I think you may have been right.”

“Of course I was,” he said. His hands moved. She watched his fingers dance from glass to knife to cloth and then back again. Glass, knife, cloth. His heart was racing, his mind whirling. She knew it. “You were describing Michael Tanner's house.”

But Alex didn't continue. She could feel the balance of power shifting ineluctably away from her, and she couldn't let that happen. Not again.

“Your turn, Professor,” she said, her gaze steady on him. “Were you in touch with Daniel Hayden before his death?”

“Don't be ridiculous,” Aldiss said. But it was too quick, too abrupt. “I am not interested in the past, Alexandra. I could fall silent right now. I could close myself like a book and end this lesson, and where would you turn then? To your hapless detective? To your conspiracy-theorist friends?”

She glared at him, heart thudding. Finally she nodded and said, “It was Dumant. Michael's house, the crime scene—everything was the same except the kitchen.”

Aldiss went still, looked up at her quizzically.

“There were dishes all over the floor. They had been broken, pulled from the table and strewn across the room. Shards of glass everywhere. The chairs had been toppled and there were marks across the walls.”

Aldiss thought. Then he said, “How many plates?”

“What?”

The professor sighed. “An easy question, Alexandra. How many plates were there?”

She tried to remember the kitchen, the strewn glass. But it was futile. She could remember nothing but the library, the books, the awful silence of the place—

“I don't know,” she said shamefully. “I can't remember.”

“You will,” Aldiss said, his smile tightening. “You will dream of those rooms tonight, and you will remember. When you dream, make sure you pay attention. I am wondering if there weren't others in the house with Michael.”

“Others?”

Aldiss said nothing, took a deep drink of the wine. When he put down the glass his lips were stained a dark red.

“The books,” he said. “Tell me about them.”

“At first I thought they were random,” she said, “but when I looked closer I could see that there was an arrangement there. He was careful, precise. He wanted us to know that the murder was as much about his process as it was about Michael's death.”

“Randomness does not exist. Not with this man. His obsession with the Dumant murders will have created a situation for him of unsustainability. He is writing a kind of sequel, you see, and in any sequel the writer cannot reach the point where his art matches the original. It is an impossible task.”

“You mean he's going to go off the deep end?”

“I predict so, yes. He will rattle apart, because what he is doing is not his. It belongs to the real Dumant killer, the one that you—”