Dominance (25 page)

“Hi, Daddy. How have you been?”

The man's eyes were rimmed red, and the strands of his thinning hair were pulled away from his forehead. She touched him there, pushed his moist hair up with her palm, blew softly onto his cheeks.

“The same, Allie,” he said. “Always the same.”

“Mom have you doing chores?”

The man smiled weakly. Even this was a task. “She's good to me. Don't talk about your mother like she isn't here.”

“Hey, Mom.”

Alex turned and saw her mother. She had been crying, as she usually did in the mornings. A Kleenex was balled in her fist, and her nose glistened. “My girl.” The woman came over and wrapped Alex up in a
hug, and for a skittish moment she thought,
I won't go. I'll stay here with them and I won't finish the class.

But then it passed and her mother stepped back to observe her.

“Skinny!” she said. “Have they been feeding you over at that college?”

“Yes, Mom,” Alex said. She drifted into the kitchen, opened a cabinet and took out the Ovaltine, and filled her favorite
VERMONT: FREEDOM AND UNITY
glass with milk. This, all of this: familiar, safe.

“He's declining,” her mother said now, her voice at a whisper. Both women were in the kitchen, the morning light bleeding through her mother's grapevine curtains above the sink. Alex turned and stared through the slit at the white foaming trees in her old front yard. “When you go off to Harvard, Alex, I just don't know what we'll do. What I'll do.”

“What if I don't go to Harvard?”

She felt her mother close in on her. “What do you mean?”

“I mean . . .” She stopped. She didn't know what she meant, not exactly.

“What's wrong with you, Alex? What's going on?”

“Nothing's going on, Mom. Nothing.”

“Something is. I can see it.”

“It's . . .”
A boy,
she wanted to say.
A new boy.
But that would have only been part of it. A small part.

“It's that class, isn't it? That evil man. I told you not to get involved with him.”

“No,” Alex said, maybe too defensively. “It isn't that.”

“Then what?”

Alex opened her mouth, wanted to say something, to tell her mother that this morning she would go off to a place she had never been, would board an airplane for only the third time in her life with someone who was still a stranger to her, and together the two of them would try to solve a twenty-year-old mystery. It was comical even to her.

“I just want you to know I love you,” she said. “Whatever happens, whatever comes at me, just know that I love you both more than anything.”

Her mother's chin quivered, one tear toppling over and sliding down her face. “Well. I'm sure your father will be pleased that you took some time to check on him.”

Her father. Alex poured the rest of the chocolate milk out and went back to him.

She leaned down, got close to his ear. “I'll come back to see you in a few days, Daddy. I promise.”

The man finally turned and looked at her. Smiled again, his lips cracking in places, the purple skin underneath showing through. It was as if the cancer were tearing him apart.

“It's okay, Allie,” he whispered. “Everything's going to be okay.”

Then she was gone. She had a plane to catch.

*   *   *

He was waiting for her in front of Culver, his backpack slung across his shoulder and the note cards out. He tapped his foot nervously, mumbling to himself as she approached him from behind. “Don't even know the plays yet, Keller?”

He turned on her. She knew by his eyes that he hadn't slept. “Just ready to get going,” he said.

“Do you think the others . . .”

“No,” he said. “It's only us. We're the only ones brave enough to finish it.”

“Or crazy enough.”

They walked toward the east campus, where Keller's pickup waited to take them to the airport. They had pooled all their money together—five hundred and eighty dollars, just enough to last them until Sunday.

“You okay?”

Alex looked up. “Yeah, just thinking.”

“You scared?”

She thought about the question. Turned it around in her mind and said, in a voice as pale as a whisper, “Yeah. Yeah, I am.”

And with that, Keller took her hand and they went out together into the unknown.

Just before two o'clock they stepped out of the airport and found that winter in Iowa was a different animal than it was in Vermont. The cold was sharper, the wind laid bare. They looked around and saw nothing in the distance. No trees, no mountains. It was as if she and Keller had entered a room devoid of furniture, a landscape without context.
Strangers,
Alex thought.
We're strangers here.

Shivering off the wind, she followed Keller to the rental car. It was a small Mazda, better than the rugged little car of her father's she drove back at Jasper.

“Go on,” he said, reading her mind.

“Thanks.”

He tossed her the keys and Alex got behind the wheel, gunning it out of the lot. Out of the corner of her eye she saw him grab frantically for the handle above the window.

They found a Ramada five miles from Hamlet. “There it is,” Keller said, pointing. “Our war room.” Alex pulled off the road, tires screeching. When she stopped, he fell out of the backseat and kissed the ground.

Inside, they lumped their packs on one side of the room, removed the books they thought they would need. Of course there were the two
Fallows titles,
The Coil
and
The Golden Silence,
but there was also an Iowa tourist guide. She had even brought along a book she'd found in the Fisk Library that morning: Richard Aldiss's
Ghost.
Alex turned it over and saw the author photo—the man in prison, his face haggard and his eyes cold and wan. Inside the front cover of one of her volumes she saw a jagged strip of paper, and Alex pulled it out and read.

The two mysteries are one. Best of luck to you on your journey, young Alex. What you are involved in is of the greatest importance, and you are almost to the end. Almost there now.

Stanley Fisk

She smiled and slipped the note in her coat pocket before Keller could see.

After they had unpacked, Keller lay down. Looking up at where she stood tentatively beside the bed, he said, “It's okay. I don't bite.” She lay beside him.
Normal,
she thought.
It's like this is all normal.

For a while neither of them spoke. Finally she said, “So. We made it to Iowa.”

“We did,” he echoed. “Now what?”

Alex stared up at the ceiling. She'd always wanted to get away from Jasper, to assume a new identity somewhere. A new life. Her acceptance letter from Harvard had been a kind of promise: that she would soon be away from there, untethered and fending for herself. But now she couldn't shake the certainty that everything was wrong. That they were walking into one of Aldiss's traps.

“Alex?”

She turned. The last sunlight gashed through the curtains and fell on his face, and she wanted to hold him. To grab on to him and let his strength pull her from the depths of her fear. But there would be time for that later. Now she was weary from the flight and they had work to do.

“Now,” she said, “we have two days. Two days until our return flight and the class ends. Two days to find Fallows.”

Dean Anthony Rice was the sort of man who could not tolerate the flaw of human stupidity. Red-faced and constantly out of breath, he was forty-seven pounds overweight and looked more like a numbers man at a small-town accounting firm than a professor of dead languages.

On Friday afternoon, as the former students of Unraveling a Literary Mystery were sequestered in an upstairs room of the Fisk mansion, he paced his office on the second floor of the Tower. He had taken his heart pill, his blood pressure pill, his antidepressants. There was a half-peeled banana going brown on the walnut desk. Lamplight streamed over the surface, illuminating a copy of Paul Fallows's novel
The Golden Silence.
The book's back was broken, and Rice had littered the text with a hundred pink Post-its that held incomprehensible notes. On the floor was a pillow and blanket where he had slept the night before.

Rice could feel it. The sudden rage of his predicament.

The problem was bringing in Shipley from Harvard. It had been Detective Bradley Black's idea. She might have been a cult hero at the college fifteen years ago, but not all cult heroes were to be celebrated. Some—he thought of old Richard Aldiss in particular—were only remembered by their mistakes. And Shipley had made so many mistakes
during the night class. Yes, she had exonerated Aldiss—but to Rice that meant nothing. It was not the victory those who seemed to
worship
Shipley made it out to be. He had met Aldiss once, and there was something about the man. Something almost inhuman. Maybe it was his frozen smile, or maybe the way his black eyes held you, judged you, drew you down. Rice shivered at the memory.

He thought of the professor now. Not surprisingly, the incompetent Shipley had been able to get nothing out of him. What if someone else spoke to him, someone with nothing to gain but the truth? Aldiss would appreciate his honesty; Aldiss would see him as a man with equal, perhaps even greater, intelligence. No more slutty young professors with the motive of making their name at Harvard, no more petty games. He would go to Aldiss and ask him about the murders of Michael Tanner and Lewis Prine, and they would speak to each other like two learned men who were after nothing less than truth.

Yes, that was it exactly. No more digging in a forgotten novel, no more of this nonsense. He would pay a visit to Aldiss that afternoon and end this thing once and for all.

Alex returned to the room from her meeting with Black, feeling the heat of the others' eyes on her. She sat down and caught her breath.
This has to end. It just can't continue like this. We can't stay caged in this old house like animals.

“Frank was telling us about Daniel Hayden and your—Aldiss—while you were gone, Alex.” It was Lucy Wiggins. The woman leaned against the wall beside the fireplace, a cool smile on her face. Frank Marsden stood across from her, a hand covering the angry red mark on his cheek where the actress had torn at him earlier.

“Lucy,” Frank said weakly. “Please.”

“Tell her, Frank. Tell her what you told us.”

The man sighed and said, “I spent a little time with Daniel the summer before he . . . you know. I was preparing for a role, just doing a little research on the NYPD. I felt like I was getting to know him. I don't think any of us really got to know him back then.”

Alex leaned forward, focused on the man's words. “What did he tell you, Frank?” she asked almost breathlessly.

“He said . . .”

“Say it, Frank,” Dean Fisk prompted. “Go on and tell her.”

“Daniel told me that Aldiss wanted him to do something for him.
At first I thought it was insane, but the more Daniel talked the more I believed him. We were on the Upper East Side, driving around in his cruiser. It was clear he wanted to just get it out, tell someone his secret.”

“What did Aldiss want him to do?” Alex asked.

Frank looked at her and said, “The professor wanted him to investigate us, Alex. He wanted Daniel to check into us, to dig up dirt on us. He was convinced that someone from the night class had gone bad.”

Alex looked at the familiar TV actor and old friend, the weight of what he'd just said pressing down on her. Could Frank be believed, or was this an act, a script written to throw her off?

The door opened and Black appeared. He asked to see Sally Tanner, and the widow grudgingly followed him into the hallway. The younger cop closed the door behind Black, locked it with a heavy
thwick.

Alex looked around the room.
One of these people
, she thought again,
is a killer.

Rice had trouble finding the little house. In all his years at Jasper he had never visited Aldiss out here, even though the house was only a few miles from campus. Too busy, he told himself, too much of a course load. The truth was he'd heard stories about the professor, stories that made his skin crawl.

He got lost in a town called Burnaway and stopped to ask an old man at a gas station. The man was all jowls and lean muscle, and Rice stood back so that he would not have to smell him. This part of Vermont was unknown to him. He would have rather been up the coast, maybe at Harvard—it couldn't have been that difficult to win a professorship there, not if people like Shipley were doing it. The man smeared something over his windshield and then wiped it away, and the glass burned blue.

Rice knew he'd need to ingratiate himself, get on the old man's level. He started dropping his
g
's, felt the pang of superiority course through his veins.

“You know where the professor lives?” he asked the man. “It's gettin' a little late and I need to be gettin' back to campus soon. Just thought I would come up to see if I could—”

“You mean Aldiss. The smiling one.”

“Yeah, him.”

The old man wrung water out at his feet, then swept around to the other side of the car. Rice caught the scent—tobacco and sweat and heat. He would have been fine staying at Jasper for the rest of his days and not getting into this. But there were things to do, a task now. There had been a second murder this morning. His time was running out; everyone's time was. He felt his stomach constrict and belch out something hot.

“Try Route 2,” the old man said. “Right at the red barn up at Mansfield, then the road dies away. Take the gravel up the hill and you'll see it in the distance. Little house on the hem of the woods up there. But be careful.”