Dominance (4 page)

“Four years ago I received a package in the campus mail,” Alex explained now. “The warden of an asylum for pathologically violent offenders in upstate Vermont sent it to me. There was a short note attached to the manuscript. It read in part,
Could this be it?
The warden took the night class with me at Jasper College. His name is Lewis Prine. Lewis had heard of the existence of another, unpublished Fallows novel and he wanted me to read the page and see if this could be part of that lost manuscript.”

“And is it?”

Alex sighed and stepped to the document camera, ran her palm across the veined paper. “I have rigorously studied the document. Five hundred words inside one unbroken paragraph, with bizarre notes in the margins. Sort of reminds me of the essays I receive from some of you.”

Laughter, and then one of them asked, “Is there more?”

“No. This single page was all Warden Prine had been given. We believe that the rest of the manuscript is in the possession of Dr. Stanley Fisk, my old friend and one of the last great Fallows scholars . . .” She trailed off, thinking of what else Lewis had said in his note to her: that Fisk had slipped in his old age and allowed someone to steal a single page from his treasure. This could mean only one thing: the manuscript was real.
Can you imagine, Alex,
he'd written,
what it would be like to finally discover the third Fallows? Daniel would have loved this.

“Is it legit?” someone asked, bringing her back to the North Yard classroom. “Is there any doubt that Fallows wrote that page?”

“There is absolutely no doubt in my mind.”

The class chattered in astonishment. They knew how major the find was, how important the image burning on the projector screen would be to scholars worldwide if Professor Shipley could ever really prove its authenticity. They wondered what was stopping her—the monetary worth of one page alone would be staggering.

But Alex did not share in her students' excitement. For years she had felt, each time she touched the page, a sense of absolute fear.

*   *   *

That night Alex went out with her boyfriend, Dr. Peter Mueller. He was a few years older, but so what? He was a psych professor who was good-looking in an older-prof way. Interesting in bed. A shock of dark hair fell over his left eye. He took her dancing. Alex could have done worse at Harvard. Much worse.

They ate at a new place in Boston called the Well. A throng of students gathered there, the room churning and loose—just as she liked it. Peter didn't. He was a whisperer, enjoyed leaning close to her ear and telling her what he might do to her later. But Alex liked the noise, the sounds of college life. It reminded her of Jasper.

She took a bite of her bacon cheeseburger and followed it with a swig of cheap beer. Vampire Weekend trilled out of the old-school jukebox.

“Faculty reviews coming up soon,” Peter said. It was not a conversation she wanted to get into, not tonight. She looked away, swept her eyes over the room. One of her old students was in the corner with a rugged townie, the girl too sweet for her own good. Alex was always falling for them, the students with pensive smiles and fiery minds, who knew the answer to every question but rarely spoke it aloud for fear of being wrong.
Girls like you, Alex. Girls just like you before you took the night class. Before Aldiss.

“Alexandra, are you listening to me?” She looked at Peter, at that dangling hair, those liquid blue eyes. She hated it when he used her full name.

“I'm listening,” she said. “Loud and clear.”

“Are you going to apply to Oxford again?”

This was, what, the fourth or fifth time he'd brought it up? The summer in London. The grant money, the semester to finish her book. It wasn't a book yet, really, just a seed. A true-crime thing. A book on the night class, about what happened to them in that classroom. What happened to her.

“I don't think so,” she said.

“Why not? Alex, we could both apply. Get away, spend a semester in Europe together working, teaching, learning. Learning each other . . .” He squeezed her hand under the table. Despite herself, she pulled away.

Peter made a face, poked absently at his steak.

“You should've gotten the position last time,” he said.

Alex shrugged.

“I know it. Everyone knows it. To hell with Tom Headley. You're one of the best this university has to offer, Alex. If only you could play by the rules a bit more, humor Headley and the rest of them.”

It was then that her cell phone chirped, saving her.

“Excuse me,” she said, and slipped out of the restaurant.

A cool night, April just coming on, traffic crawling down Tremont Street. Sometimes she imagined them, the passengers in those cars. Imagined where they were going, who they really were. To be anywhere but here—the thought enticed her, but then she swept it back with indignation. Hadn't there been a time when she would have done almost anything to get a chance to teach at Harvard University?

She checked the face of her cell, saw a Vermont number. She dialed it.

“Hello?” a man answered.

“With whom am I speaking?”

“This is Dr. Anthony Rice, interim dean of Jasper College.”

Alex recognized the name from a research conference somewhere in the Midwest. Rice hadn't been at Jasper when she was a student there.

“What is this about, Dr. Rice? I was in the middle of dinner.”

“I won't keep you long. We've had . . . something happen at Jasper. A tragedy.”

Oh God. Oh no. Not again, please.

“Dr. Shipley?”

“Yes,” Alex said, composing herself. She saw Peter staring out at her from their table and turned her back to the front window of the restaurant. “Go on.”

“Michael Tanner was murdered last night.”

Everything fluttered. She focused on the dean's words, watched their heat bloom outward in her mind as if they were a spreading stain. The streetlights along Tremont seemed to blink once, hard, off and on. Alex was leaning now against the stone building, her forehead scraping the uneven cut of the jagged brick, the pain reminding her that she was there. (A memory: Michael at a frat party one night doing a perfect impersonation of Aldiss. His eyes became sharper and his voice dropped to an eerie, pitchless calm and everything about him
changed.
Laughter
around her, but all Alex felt was a cold dread.
Please stop, Michael,
she wanted to say.
He'll find out about you.
)

“Are you okay?” the dean was saying.

“Sally,” Alex managed. “Is she . . .”

The dean did not respond, and in his evasion Alex knew the answer to her question.

“Let me explain to you what we know,” Rice went on.

He gave her the known details: Michael Tanner's ransacked house, the book-strewn library, the staged signs of struggle, the young professor's blood type on the wall painted in a kind of Rorschach pattern, his books carefully arranged on the floor, Sally Tanner coming home to find her husband's body. It was all, of course, achingly familiar.
Dumant University,
Alex thought.
Whoever did this was copying the murders at Dumant. Christ.

“Jasper police have just begun their investigation,” Rice said. “Right now there are few leads. And the crime scene—they think it was staged. There was no sign of forced entry, so their theory is that Dr. Tanner must have known his attacker.” Alex could almost hear the man wince.

“What does it all mean?”

“It could mean nothing. The professor might have upset a disturbed student, or maybe someone knew of his history as an undergrad at this college. But given what happened to the victims at Dumant twenty-seven years ago . . . we are taking everything into consideration, of course.”

Everything.
The word jarred her. What he meant was
everyone.

“We are a small school, Dr. Shipley. You know this as well as anyone. We are not Harvard. Our size has always defined us. We call ourselves
quaint
in the brochures, and we use that word without irony. We believe in our insularity. Nothing like this has ever happened at Jasper. Everyone is in a state of shock.”

“Have you spoken to Richard Aldiss?” she asked.

Another pause. She knew exactly what it meant.

“This is the reason I called you tonight,” Rice said. “We thought that maybe you could do that for us.”

*   *   *

Later she and Peter lay in bed.

“You don't have to go back,” Peter said.

“I do.”

“We don't have to do anything we don't want to do, Alex.”

She didn't answer him. She knew how untrue it was.

He burrowed into her hair, breathed hotly in her ear. Normally it turned her on, but tonight it only annoyed her. The Chemical Brothers played on the stereo. Theirs was a students' existence, and Peter wouldn't have it any other way. But lately Alex had begun to want something different. Something deeper. She knew it would not be with him. Perhaps she had always known.

“How come,” Peter said now, “you never talk about your past?”

“What is there to talk about?”

“Scars.”

“I don't have any.”

“I can see them all over you, Alex.” He ran a hand up her abdomen, traced a circle around her navel. Sometimes he would write words there, ancient verse for her to identify. “I can feel them.”

“We all have scars.”

“Some of us more than others.”

“I'm all Vermont. Grew up in Vermont, went to undergrad there. You know all this, Peter.”

“I know about the class, Alex. I know you were a hero. But it always seems so . . .” She looked at him. “I don't know. It's like you've never told me the whole story.”

She rolled away. “Not tonight.”

“Is it Aldiss?” Peter asked. “Is he in trouble again?”

She tensed, hoped he didn't notice it. She rarely spoke of Aldiss and the night class to him, and usually Peter had to press her for information.

“Did he do it?”

“No,” she said hotly, defensively. “Of course not.”

“But they think—”

“To hell with what they think. They don't know Dr. Aldiss like I do.”

A moment of silence passed. The CD ended, shuffled back to the first track.

“So is that why you're going back there? To save him again?”

“No.”

“Then why?”

“Because they need me.”

That was all. The room fell still. She felt him draw even closer. His leg went up and over her, pulling her tight, trapping her. She thought she heard him whisper, thought she heard two muffled words on his lips—
Don't go
—but Alex could not be sure.

Then Peter's breathing became even, and she carefully maneuvered herself out from under him and went into the library down the hall. There was a window on the far side of the room blocked by a dust-heavy fold of venetian blinds. Alex picked the blinds up and removed what was on the sill. The pack was cold from touching the glass. She checked the doorway for Peter and then lifted the window a sliver with her fingertips. For a moment she listened to the breathing of far-off traffic, and then she took one of the cigarettes from the pack and lit it. Sucked in with her eyes closed, listening. Thinking.

She did not turn on a light. She simply smoked in the clinging darkness, waiting. Waiting for what? Waiting for a sign, a truth, some notion that she was doing the right thing by going back to Jasper.

She remembered Michael Tanner. Dead now, dead and quiet. She remembered Michael's face when they were in the class. In her memory the classroom was always semidark, hazy—everything stretched and elastic. The students were framed in static darkness, as if the night had forced its way inside.

Do you like this class?
he'd asked one night.

No,
she said.
Not at all.

Neither do I. None of us do.

Right then, standing in the little library that could have been a closet, surrounded by books, nothing happened and everything happened. The world outside roared along. All those strangers continued on to wherever they were going and Alex was stuck here with all her unanswered questions about a dead professor.

But no. That wasn't quite right. A big question had been answered tonight.

It had very much been answered. Alex was sure of that.

The game had begun again.

Richard Aldiss's eyes remained open, that permanent smile etched on his face. He appeared to be waiting for something. An answer, perhaps. A solution to the puzzles of the dead. Alex's hands, meanwhile, fluttered to her jacket pocket. The nicotine gum was there, and she had to fight the urge to slip it out, press a square from the package and chew like mad.

Instead she merely watched the professor. Watched and said nothing and thought,
Please tell me you had nothing to do with this.

“There is a type of very rare puzzle,” Aldiss said finally. “It is called a
cyndrot.
Its pieces are found in the world. A sharp stick, perhaps, the page of a book. The rules are moving and unfixed, as in any good game. Chaotic. You will receive a clue, a sheet with the number two written on it, and then you will begin your search. Two sticks, two pages, two socks. The best players, however, go outside the game. They do not collect objects in exact pairs, they collect objects that
reciprocate
each other. A stick and a seed. A seed grew the tree that formed the branch that created the stick. A book and a pen. The pen wrote the page that made up the book. Everything is genesis, evolution.”

“What does this have to do with Michael Tanner?”

Aldiss waited. His breathing was soft, plaintive.

“Perhaps nothing, Alexandra. Or perhaps it is heavy with meaning.” He stood up, whirled out of the dark toward her. His hands were out. Instinctively Alex leaned back, away from him. “Please,” he said. “Let me show you what I mean.”