Dominance (10 page)

Frank stepped into the great room and scanned the bookshelf in the corner. “I just talked to Michael not long ago,” he said, his back to Alex.

Alex's pulse quickened. “And what did he say?”

“He seemed fine. He just wanted to catch up. Said it was too bad we hadn't got together since Hayden. All that unholy mess. Said he thought about us sometimes. About how everybody said we hated each other when we took the night class.” Marsden stopped, focused on Alex as if he wanted this next piece of information to sink in. “I never had any animosity toward Michael, Alex. You have to believe that. The others invented this thing between us. That we were jealous of each other. I love—loved Michael. I never wished anything bad on him, no matter what any of the others tell you.” Then his gaze drifted off again, swept across the floor. “I was shooting a film in Canada when he called, you know, and didn't have much time. But now—now I wish . . .”

She watched his bloodshot eyes drop, a hand come up to his brow. Lucy went to him and put her arm around him.
They haven't been together long,
Alex thought.
They just met
. “Baby,” Frank said to her. “Baby, baby, baby. You don't understand the history here. You don't understand what I went through with these people.”

Alex waited. Then Frank turned around and smiled weakly.

“Our room,” he said.

“Upstairs. Melissa's already gone up.”

Frank made a face and Alex said nothing. The gray afternoon clouds shifted outside, and sunlight poured in on him for the first time. She saw how drunk he really was now. Lucy practically held him upright.

“We'll go on up,” he said. “Get some rest before we start planning the memorial service.”

“Of course.”

They walked then, arm in arm, out of the foyer. When he got to the foot of the stairs, Frank hesitated and turned back toward Alex. He'd changed suddenly, morphed into the actor he was. A fake face, a put-on grin—none of it was the truth.

“Alex?” he said.

“Yes, Frank.”

“Why are we all here together? Is it so you can watch us?”

Alex froze. She looked at Lucy again, and the woman too seemed to be waiting on an answer, some kind of explanation for being brought here.

Alex opened her mouth to speak but Frank interrupted her. He began to laugh—riotous, bellowing laughter. And then he ascended the steps, one by one, until his laughter was nothing but an echo.

*   *   *

After Frank and Lucy were gone, Matthew Owen came downstairs and entered the kitchen. Alex was there drinking her tepid soup, waiting for the rest to arrive. She turned and watched the nurse move to a bank of cabinets and remove a prescription pill bottle. He hadn't seen her there, and because she didn't want to frighten him she gently coughed. Owen quickly palmed the pills and turned around, his free hand to his heart.

“You scared the shit out of me,” he said.

“Sorry.”

His eyes held on her for a moment, then he swiped his hand over his mouth and swallowed the pills. She watched his jaw work.

“This must be an intrusion,” she said. “For us all to be back here.”

“Not at all,” the nurse said. “Stanley's wanted to have guests over for a long time. It's just that we never thought it would be under these circumstances.”

“How long have you been employed by the dean?”

The man shook his head. “Employed by him? Hardly. Stanley doesn't want me here. He just wants it to be over with. I go upstairs every day and expect to find him . . . Anyway, he's talked about it many
times, even asked me to do it for him.” Owen's eyes drifted away, and Alex glanced at the cabinet behind his back. “I've been employed by the college for seven years now—I was here when you all . . . when Daniel Hayden died.” Alex vaguely remembered Owen, a floating presence through the rooms. She hardly remembered anything about that weekend. “I just wasn't as necessary back then. I took this job after leaving a hospital in Burlington. Too much political bullshit. Here it's just me and this old house.”

“And Dean Fisk.”

“Yes, and him,” Owen said flatly. “Sometimes I hear him at night in the hallways, his wheelchair sliding down the floors. That's the only time he'll come out of his study. He doesn't want anyone to look at him, so he hides himself. He says it's his age, his face—they tell me he was always a vain man. But I don't believe it.”

“What is it, then?”

“I think he gets off on hiding. My bedroom is on the fourth floor. Sometimes he'll call for me and I'll go room to room, looking. Searching. It's like a game to Stanley. I get tired of it, but at least I've learned every inch of this godforsaken house. And what could I say to him? He's a legend around here and I'm nobody.” Owen's eyes fell away, down to the chipped and scratched tile. “That's why the place is so dark. Even when I bathe him he scolds me for looking at him.”

“Do you enjoy the work?” she asked.

“Enjoy,” the man scoffed bitterly, as if the word itself had a texture, a flavor. “Mostly I spend my days walking up and down the halls. It's good exercise if you keep moving. And of course I read.”

“What do you read?”

“Mostly the things Stanley recommends for me. The Russians. Early British literature. Fallows, of course.”

“Fallows,” she repeated. “What do you think of him?”

“I hate him,” Owen said, his voice dropping a notch, as if he feared Dean Fisk might hear him. “I can't understand all the fuss you people make for him.”

“Fallows is an acquired taste.”

The nurse laughed sharply. “That must be it,” he said. “Because otherwise Stanley has wasted most of his life on the ravings of a lunatic.”

With that there was a sharp clack on the door outside. Someone else had arrived.

*   *   *

“Ah, our own celebrity—Alex Shipley.”

Christian Kane stepped through the door and took her by the elbow. He kissed her on both cheeks and then leaned back to regard her, nodding as if she had passed a test. He carried nothing but a yellow umbrella and a paperback book. He smelled of the kind of cologne Peter used and wore a corduroy jacket with a fray on the elbow. He had a three-day beard that she didn't recognize from the last photograph she had seen of him in
Poets & Writers.
The paperback was one of his own.

The writer moved into the great room now and looked around, curling his mouth at the state of the place. Then he looked at Alex and held out the book. “Page 107,” he said.

Tentatively, she took the book and opened it to the page. It had been dog-eared, and one paragraph in the middle had been underlined by an uneasy hand.

. . . when Barker came into the library he saw what had happeneda there. The professor's body was on the floor, broken and discarded like a lump of rags, and for a moment Barker could not tell what he was looking at. Then it dawned on him, the horrible truth: the man had been murdered and covered with books. A pile of volumes, their heaviness sighing now against the man's dead flesh, the pages rustling as if a legion of mites had crawled inside the texts to feast. Even over the professor's eyes there was a book, the image of the cover across his face as if it were a mask. Barker stepped forward.

“Why are you showing this to me, Christian?”

The man regarded her. Of the students she had seen so far, Christian had changed the least. He was still the suave, thin kid he had been as a student at Jasper. Now, fifteen years later, he looked less like a bestselling novelist and more like a man playing the part in one of his own stories. “Isn't it obvious, Alex?” he said.

“I'm afraid it isn't.”

He sighed, slapping the paperback closed.
Barker at Night
—the fourth book of the series, written five years ago, was her least favorite.

“Aldiss never liked me,” Kane said now, leaning over her. He was thin and his graying hair was tousled, his appearance almost boyish. He'd caught fire after his first novel,
Barker at Work,
appeared just two years after their graduation from Jasper. Now, after twelve novels and two Hollywood adaptations—one of them starring, in a bit role, their old friend Frank Marsden—his career had begun to wind down. His most recent novels had been published to little fanfare in crude paperback editions, and Alex thought she detected something of a fall even in the way the man dressed. Even in his slick green eyes, which had dimmed a bit since she had seen him last.

“What do you mean, Christian?”

“The professor was always bitter toward me.”

“That's just the way he is.”

“No,” the man said sharply. “No, Alex. He was worse toward me. You and Keller and the rest of them—you were his pets. His projects. I was just a nuisance. Even Daniel got more respect in that classroom.”

“I saw him this morning,” she said. “He doesn't believe you had anything to do with this.”
That's not quite true, is it?
she thought, flushing with shame over the lie.

Christian laughed. His teeth were yellowed, nicotine-stained, and she made a mental note to bum a cigarette later; she had run out on her short drive from Aldiss's house. “I live twenty minutes from campus,” he said. “I see Aldiss sometimes. Out. He doesn't speak. He treats me as if I'm this . . . ghost. And of course with my history with Michael—”

“What do you mean? What history?”

He looked at her strangely.
Didn't you know?
the look said.

“We'd been playing the game again,” Christian told her.

She gasped.

“Don't look at me like that, Alex. It was nothing. It was just a way to pass the time. Michael—he called me about it a couple of years ago. We got to talking about things. Books, my work and his, the way the college is changing. And of course Daniel. Then he asked me if I would come in and speak to one of his composition classes. Sure, I said. Afterward we went out for drinks, and he told me.”

“Told you what?”

The man hesitated, realizing that he had gone too far now. He said, “That he went down to Burlington every weekend. To the State U, and sometimes even to Dumant. They were still playing down there.”

“And you went with him.”

“Of course I went.” Christian pulled the back of his hand across his mouth. “The Procedure is still so intoxicating, Alex. So addictive. We both fell into it like old pros, even though it had been years since the night class. I started reading Fallows again, practicing. It wasn't like I was some kind of criminal. But if you put it all together, if you add up the evidence against me, then it's easy to see how Aldiss would make the leap that I had something to do with Michael being murdered.” He paused then, stepped forward into her space. For the first time, Alex's heart began to thump.
One of them is responsible. One of them . . .
“Don't listen to him, Alex,” Christian said softly, carefully. “I beg of you. Whatever Aldiss told you this morning—”

“He told me nothing, Christian. We spoke as old friends, that's all.”

“—whatever the professor insinuated about us, you must not believe him. You can't.”

He remained in her space for another few seconds. It felt like a lifetime. Finally he pulled away and smiled wanly. He looked up at the fissured ceiling, at the streaked windows and the crimson curtains that hung heavy with dust. “My God,” he said. “It's like I've walked right into a trap.”

*   *   *

When Christian had gone upstairs to his room, Alex answered another knock on the door. Standing there was the first man she had ever loved.

He wore a bright orange rain slicker and his eyes were rimmed with grief. He was as large as she remembered him, a brute of a man who towered over her. Yet it was his eyes that had always drawn her to him: kind, somber eyes that were the gray of stone, or the page of an old book.

“Keller,” she said, and the man stepped forward and took her in his arms.

Once inside, they stood together in the foyer and said nothing, which was fine with Alex.

“How's Sally?” Jacob Keller asked.

“In terrible shape. As you would expect.”

They stood apart now, Alex leaning against the bookshelves and Keller with his hands in his pockets, gazing at her. She had seen him across the room at Daniel's funeral, but had only smiled at him. They'd kept their distance for many reasons, hers and his.
Married,
Melissa Lee had told her.
Coaches football and teaches English at a high school about forty miles south of Jasper. You sound like you're still interested, Alex . . .

Thinking of the poet-in-residence she'd been seeing at the time, she had looked away.

“Brutal,” Keller said now.

“Excuse me?”

“That's what the news said this morning. The Michael Tanner murder was
brutal.
They're talking about Dumant University again, Alex. They're talking about our night class. They're rehashing all that old stuff.”

That old stuff
—it was like a wound being scraped raw. Aldiss had warned her that this would happen.

“A copycat,” she said quickly. “That's all this is. Someone who's read about the Dumant murders, someone who thinks he can get away with anything—”

“It's Aldiss.”

Alex's mouth dropped open. “Aldiss? You can't believe he had anything to do with this, Keller.”

“Of course I do,” he said. “And so should you.”

“I spoke to him this morning. I saw how he talked about Michael. I don't think he—”

“Still protecting him, I see.”

Anger flashed behind her eyes. “I'm not protecting anyone,” she said. “I just know that he was innocent of the Dumant murders. Cleared. You were in Iowa with me, Keller. We finished the night class together. You know everything I know.”