Dominance (23 page)

“Alex,” someone hissed. It was Keller. The seriousness of his face disarmed her; she wanted to tell him to not take it so seriously, that it was nothing more than a game—but that wasn't true, was it? Now that she was here, inside the scene, it had taken on an urgency. A pulse. The boy motioned to her. “Your line.”

Alex came back to the room, the scene. “Ann Marie,” she croaked. “How long has it been?”

“Hello, Claire,” Lee said, her voice accented, perfectly fake. “So nice of you to come all the way to Iowa to see me. I want you to meet my father.” She gestured to Tanner, and the boy nodded. “And this is our maid, Olivia.”

Mitchell said, “How do you do?”

“And this is Mr. Berman, Esquire.”

Keller extended a hand. This was wrong: Berman, the officious lawyer, did not come in until later. Alex paused but Keller remained there, his eyes wandering off.
Stoned,
Alex thought.
They're all stoned.
She shook the boy's sweating hand and he smiled sloppily and then sat
down again. The CD skipped on the stereo. Lee turned for the first time to face Alex, her lips an old-fashioned bright red and antique turquoise earrings hanging in her ears. Her hair had been pulled up into the style of the time, but she still wore her Pearl Jam T-shirt, her Doc Marten boots, her chipped black nails.

“What brings you back to Iowa?” the girl asked.

“Business,” Alex said.

“What type of business?”

“Business about . . .” Again she was frozen. The room seemed to spin wildly. She willed the words, but nothing would come. The others seemed to be waiting on her, urging her to continue. “About . . .” She reached for the book on Lee's desk-cum-boudoir.

“No,” Lee said, pulling the volume away. “Don't. You know this, Alex.”

Alex bit her lip.
Damn you.
She tried to think of the scene, to remember her lines. But it wouldn't come. Fallows's text swirled just out of her reach.

“I . . . I can't . . .”

“I thought you'd been accepted to Harvard,” Lee said. “I thought you would be better than this.” The girl's dark eyes judged her cruelly.
She's taken something. She's not herself.
Smoke curled from somewhere, making the air thick. Alex coughed, and then the ball in her throat became bigger and she coughed again. Soon it was coming out in thick, violent bursts and she was bending over. Keller was there, rubbing her back, saying, “Are you okay, Alex? Do you need me to get you a glass of water?”

“Let her go, Keller,” Lee said. “She's fine.”

Alex stood up, shame burning her face. She'd failed; she'd failed Aldiss and all the rest of them and she shouldn't be here. She didn't deserve to be. She turned and went out into the hall, where Nirvana was throbbing, and down into the lobby. The scene had broken loose there, and she saw Lewis Prine gibbering in a nonsensical language as the extras stared at him in perfect silence. They had been in tableau.

Alex rushed through the crowd and burst outside, gulping air.

For a moment she stood alone in the snow, the wind burning her face. Then she walked away. She was finished for tonight. Done. To hell with them and their stupid game.

Thirty steps to Culver Hall, and then she slipped down the same back way and out toward Front Street. Soon she would be home and she could forget about this, put the Procedure behind her and get back to her books. It was a stupid thing to have done, and she regretted ever having—

“Shawna Wheatley and Abigail Murray.”

Alex stopped. Sitting on a bench, his face half bathed in the glow from a security light, was Daniel Hayden. She watched him for a moment, saying nothing.

“You've heard of them?”

“The two victims,” she said tentatively, her breath frosting the air. “The students Aldiss was accused of . . . the girls he killed at Dumant.”

“The others are too busy playing their games,” the boy went on. “But not me, Alex. I've been reading up on Aldiss. Studying him. What he did to those two girls . . . I can't get past it. I want to drop the night class, stay as far away from him as possible, but I have to stay with it. I have to see how it ends.”

“Why are you telling me this, Daniel? It's late and I have an early class tomorrow.”

He looked up at her, his hands trembling on his lap. “Because I know what you're doing,” he said. “I've seen you on campus. You're doing research too. Why do you think I left the note in your book last night?” She started to speak, but Hayden waved it away. “I was trying to lead you,” he said. “To point you in a certain direction. My dad was a cop, so I know a little bit about murder investigations.”

“Daniel, I still don't understand why you're—”

“I'm telling you this so you can do it the right way, Alex. Your research, whatever you've been doing at the Fisk Library and up on the hill with the old dean—you need a focus. No more flying blind. You have to start at the beginning. Go back to his victims. Go back to Dumant University. That's where Aldiss was born.”

The microfiche reader was antiquated and shoved to a back corner of the library. The light in the tiny, closet-size space streamed yellow and weak. Cobwebs glinted in the corners. Alex had the place to herself.

She fanned through the alphabetized strips.
You have to start at the beginning,
she thought. The shame she'd felt earlier at having botched the Procedure was all but gone now, replaced by the information Hayden had given her. It meshed perfectly with what Fisk had said—she had to go back to the root, to the two victims themselves. She had to follow Aldiss outward from there. She'd been doing it the wrong way, trying to use the text to solve the riddle. Now she saw her mistake.

A for Aldiss. F for Fallows. H for Hamlet. D for Dumant.

Dumant University. 1982. The murders of Wheatley and Murray. The beginning.

She took out the W strip and put it on the machine.

W for Shawna Wheatley, the first victim.

Alex had been able to find articles on Richard Aldiss, on the Dumant crimes themselves and on the man's vast scholarship—but about his (
No, Alex,
she thought, catching herself,
not his but someone else's, the real killer's
) victims there was little. The only photos she'd found were the ones Fisk had shown her.

She moved the wheel through the sheets of microfiche, tracking words with her eyes.
Killer. Investigation. Upheaval. Campus. Methodology. Aldiss.
She stopped only now and then—on a photograph of a young Aldiss, an aerial shot of the Dumant campus with a black circle where Shawna's body had been found—but mostly she moved through the information, looking for anything about Wheatley.

“Ms. Shipley?”

Alex, startled, turned to see the librarian in the door.

“Yes, Ms. Daws,” she said. “Everything's fine.”

The woman left Alex alone.

She shook her head, clearing the exhaustion. It was nearing midnight now and so much had happened. She thought again of Melissa Lee, of her eyes in that false mirror, of Keller's pitying hands on her back.

“Come on,” she said aloud, clearing the thoughts. “Focus, Alex.”

She thought of poor Shawna Wheatley. Everybody was searching for Paul Fallows, trying to uncover the identity of the writer, but no one was trying to find the truth about Shawna. No one was looking for an answer to what had really happened to either of those two students at Dumant University.

Alex closed her eyes, remembering something. It was something Fisk had shown her that day, a small piece of those terrible articles on the Dumant crimes.

You should look into Shawna Wheatley.

It was what Aldiss had said when they brought him in for questioning. She'd always felt there was something strange about it, something buried inside those words that might lead her to answers.
Look into,
she thought, pinching her eyes fiercely, nails digging painfully into her temples.
Look into . . .

She almost missed the article by scrolling too quickly.

It had been written in the fall of 1981, just months before Wheatley was murdered.

A simple story about a graduate fellowship in literature at Dumant. A hometown-pride angle, the mother quoted. In the accompanying photograph Wheatley wore thick glasses and a turtleneck sweater, her smile wide and innocent. The microfiche reader whirred in the small, dust-filled room.

“Who are you?” Alex asked aloud. “Who are you really, Shawna?”

She looked at the story again. Read each word, her eyes stinging.

Nothing. There was nothing there.

But there had to be. She was on the last microfiche sheet now.

Goddamn you, Aldiss,
she cursed silently. She was exhausted, getting loopy. Losing herself.
Goddamn you for doing this to me. To her.

Promising herself this was it, Alex read the story one last time.

It was then that she saw it. Just a few throwaway lines at the bottom of the page. She leaned close to the screen, the cheap plastic chair scratching the floor beneath her.

Recently Shawna began her dissertation. Under the tutelage of her favorite professor, she has begun to read books in ways she never imagined. “Dr. Aldiss has taught me so much,” she said. “He wants me to go to Iowa for research, just like he did when he was a student here. If I can find someone to go with me, I might just make that trip.”

Trembling, Alex stared at the screen. The girl had fallen away; all the texture in the small, cramped room had dissolved. She was alone. Completely alone. Someone walked past the door, heels clicking. She barely heard it.

Someone to go with me . . .

Alex reached forward and turned off the machine and the room fell dark.

*   *   *

At just after one in the morning she knocked on Keller's door. The football dorm smelled of pizza and vomit and aerosol deodorant. Someone had hung a jockstrap on the fire spigot. She waited, her mind racing with unanswered questions.

Keller pulled the door open, blinked into the harsh corridor light. His eyes were glazed with sleep, his hair spiked into tufts. He was shirtless and Alex made herself focus on his face, his bloodshot eyes.

“Alex, if this is about the Procedure, then—”

“The photograph you found,” she said. “The one of Rutherford. I think I know what it means.”

“What are you talking about, Alex?”

She told him in one breathless rush. She told him everything she had learned about Shawna Wheatley that night.

When she was finished, Keller asked, “What do we do now?”

She didn't have to think. The answer was obvious, right there on the tip of her tongue. It had been obvious the moment she'd found the article on the microfiche reader, maybe even earlier than that—when she'd seen that strange photograph of Charles Rutherford in the bar, or when she'd read those time-withered newspaper articles in Fisk's treasure room. All she'd needed was Daniel Hayden to push her in the right direction.

“It means,” Alex said finally, “that we have to go to Iowa. Aldiss is leading us there.”

After the murder of Lewis Prine, the remaining classmates had been locked in an upstairs room of the Fisk mansion.

It was early afternoon and the sun knifed in through curtains the color of feathered pages. There was another fireplace here, two massive shelves flanking the hearth, and a wooden clock hanging above it all that had stopped on some long-passed 3:38. Christian Kane was mumbling frantically about his innocence; yes, it was a book—his book—that had been placed over the dead man's eyes, but
what did that really mean, what did it mean when everyone in this house had a copy, what did it mean when—

“That's enough, Christian,” Keller said, and the writer fell quiet like a scolded puppy. The nurse, Matthew Owen, stood to the side, hands kneading the handles of Dean Fisk's wheelchair. Sally Tanner and Lucy Wiggins stood on opposite sides of the room, the widow frighteningly composed and the actress tracing nervous ellipses across the furred dust on the mantelpiece while Frank Marsden watched her unblinkingly, a shadow of disbelief on his face. And inside a clot of shadows Alex observed them all as Aldiss had instructed, wondering which of her classmates had turned.

A young cop guarded the door, his arms crossed and a look of vigilance on his face.

“Look at him,” Keller whispered to her. “The kid's scared shitless. No wonder they didn't send him out to talk to Aldiss.”

She would have laughed under different circumstances.

“Why hasn't Melissa returned?” Fisk asked. Behind the old man, Owen continued to massage the handles of the chair, his movements almost hypnotic. Alex tried to shake off the lurid memory of Melissa's head in his lap, of the way he—

Owen turned his gaze on her and she looked away.

“No one knows,” Keller said. The woman still hadn't returned from the memorial service.

“Melissa didn't have anything to do with that . . . thing downstairs,” Christian said, his voice on the edge of panic. “She couldn't have.”

“She talked a lot about Daniel,” Frank said. Lucy stopped moving her finger through the dust and stepped away from the dead, blackened fireplace. “She seemed a little obsessed with his death.”

“What do you mean?” Keller asked.

“I mean she seemed convinced that his death wasn't a suicide. She talked to me a little last night, before bed. I wasn't thinking clearly. We had some drinks on the plane and then again when Sally visited and my mind . . . you know. I didn't think much of it. But now, given what happened to Michael and Lewis— My God, do you think she might have been right and Daniel was the first one?”