Dominance (3 page)

“Tell me,” he said.

“The reason I've come to you this morning is because . . .” But she could not say it. She felt him watching her even as he faced away, seeing her not as a tenured professor of comparative literature but as the dithering student she had once been. A child.

“You haven't accepted it yet,” he said. “The fact that it has happened again.”

“You're wrong.” But it was weak, hollow.

The professor caught her eyes in the reflection in the window, held them. “Michael is dead. He's dead and there's nothing you can do about that now.”

The words, the finality of them, stunned her. She looked away.

“Do you remember him?” she asked.

A beat, then, “Not especially.”

But of course he did. Dr. Michael Tanner, Jasper College resident modernist, was teaching at his alma mater. Michael had been with her in the night class fifteen years ago. She even remembered his seat: right in front, not very far from that television screen.

“The murder,” he said. “Like the others, I presume.”

“Yes—but different.”

He looked up, his interest piqued. “How so?”

“This murder was more cautious than the first two. More controlled.”

“Are there suspects?”

“None,” she said, then added, “But there has been some talk on campus. Gossip.”

“Go on.”

“There are some who believe it could have been his wife,” she said, meaning Sally Tanner, née Mitchell—another student from the night class. Alex had never imagined her with Michael, never thought they would end up married and both teaching at Jasper fifteen years later. But of course there had been so many things she had missed. “Sally discovered the body. Also the timeline she's given to the police—there are inconsistencies.”

A moment passed, then he mused, “And so the authorities contacted you.”

“They did.”

“Why?”

“I think you know why.”

The professor's eyes dragged slowly toward her. “It is not because you are brilliant with the subtleties of literature. I can think of so many other professors who might be better equipped to interpret the symbolism of this crime—and of course there will be literary symbolism, or else you would not have called on me this morning. We both know that.”

“Professor,” she sighed. “Let's not do this. If you can't help me, fine. But if you can, then I—”

“Us.”

“Excuse me?”

“If you can't help
us,
Alexandra. You have masters at Jasper now that they have called on you to play the sleuth again, do you not? And I'm sure at the university where you are currently teaching as well. I've forgotten, where is it again?”

Alex was silent. He knew she taught at Harvard.

“You have men who are above you there.”

“And women.”

“But mostly men. I've seen them. Cocksure oafs who walk into a room and each believes he is the most brilliant one there, every time. I went up to Cambridge once, before my smile was perfected. It was an awards gala in my honor, but no one seemed to want to look at me. They were intimidated. Perhaps they were afraid.”

She said nothing.

“Are they intimidated by you, Alexandra?”

Still nothing.

“You and your fuck-me shoes?”

“That's it.”

She turned around, picked up her purse, and went out the door. The house was too dark now, the sun having swung behind a cloud outside. She couldn't remember her bearings. All she could see were books and shadow-books, stacks of them leaning and toppling and forcing themselves
out from the walls. The rooms like a chambered Nautilus, spiraling outward and on top of one another. She began to move through the labyrinth, cursing herself for coming here, for believing the professor could give her any answers.
Damn it, Alex, why do you want to believe he's changed? Why—

“Dostoyevsky.”

That stopped her. She stood there, listening to the seams of the old house scream in the wind, waiting.

“Dr. Tanner,” the professor said from behind her. “I know that he was murdered by an axe. And the two others, the ones from before—they were killed in the same way. ‘He pulled the axe quite out, swung it with both arms, scarcely conscious of himself, and almost without effort, almost mechanically, brought the blunt side down on her head. He seemed not to use his own strength in this.' ”

“Crime and Punishment.”

“Yes. Not one of my favorites in the canon, but there is the answer for you, Alexandra. The connection. This is nothing but a pale copycat, a mimic on the loose. Your killer—he is a stupid man with no original ideas of his own.”

“I don't think so,” she said. “As I said before, there was something different about this crime.”

“Different how?”

Alex measured her words now. She needed to be clear at least on this, needed to say to the professor what the two men from the college had told her to say.
It has to be perfect,
they'd warned her.

“On the surface Michael's murder looks just like the ones you—just like the Dumant murders from the eighties,” she said. “But if you look closely, there is something else. Something new.”

He waited for her to go on.

And so she gave him the phrase the men had supplied to her,
the bait:
“This murder . . . it's like a puzzle.”

This made him stiffen. Just those few words, the challenge Alex Shipley had put before him—she felt the tension rise in the tiny room. She had him.

“I live just a few miles from that dreadful place,” he said then, almost to himself. “I hear the things they say. I know how they can be.”

“Is that your agreement to help, Professor?”

He gazed at her. “Do they think I had anything to do with what happened?”

She said nothing. She wanted the silence to answer for her.

“Very well. Perhaps it is good to be believed in again. To be feared.”

“Will you help, Professor?”

“Because I owe you?”

“Because whoever did this is still out there. Because we both have a history with Michael Tanner. And yes, because you owe me.”
You owe me fucking big-time.

“It's more than that, Alexandra.”

“I don't—”

“You worry that this unfortunate twist in the plot will shine a light on everyone who took the night class. Especially you.”

“This has nothing to do with the class.”

“Is that what you told yourself on the flight back to Vermont? The thought that screamed through your mind as the businessman from Amherst was oh-so-subtly hitting on you?
It's not about the night class. It's not about the night class. IT'S NOT ABOUT THE NIGHT CLASS.
” The professor's voice rose, then was swallowed by the house. Then he laughed—a cruel, nasty bark.

“Michael,” she said softly. “He was part of it. He loved books, just as we do. He lived for literature. Whoever did this to him had a plan, had been perfecting that plan for a long time. What you said before—there is some truth there. The police believe this killer is a copycat, that he is re-creating what happened twenty-seven years ago at Dumant University. The victim is a literary scholar, there is blood on the wall in the Rorschach pattern, the books have been arranged around Michael's library—the killer studied those old crime scene photographs, Professor. He learned them.”

She fell silent, watching him. She could feel his mind moving, somehow, the electric churn of his thoughts. He was the most brilliant and the most aggressive man she had ever known. In the strangest hours she would find herself thinking about him, remembering the class, the search for the identity of a mysterious writer and all the secrets she would uncover about the professor's own crimes.

“Please,” Alex said. “I need an answer.”

“Just one question.”

Alex waited. She recalled the faces of the men that morning. Two faces, a college dean's and a police detective's, broken by what they had seen in Michael Tanner's cluttered home library across campus. She knew; she carried those same scars.

“Anything,” she said.

Dr. Richard Aldiss leaned closer. “Tell me again how you discovered that I was innocent.”

Twenty-four hours earlier Alex Shipley strode into her lecture hall and the room fell silent. There were stares, as always. The electronic chatter on campus about Shipley was immense. She was tall, lean, beautiful—but she was also brilliant and extremely demanding of her students. Her classes were some of the most popular at the university, and it was not uncommon to walk into a Shipley lecture and see students lining the walls, like a queue at a rock concert. This course in particular was a hit: it was called The Forger's Pen: Literary Hoaxes of the 20th Century, and teaching it was what had made her name as a young professor at Harvard.

She wore a pencil skirt because the weather was getting warmer, a thin knit jacket her mother had sent from Vermont. She never carried a bag, because at her age a bag made her look even more like a student. The comparative lit department chair, Dr. Thomas Headley, needed no more reason to treat her like someone who should be sitting at the children's table.

She carried only a few sheaves of transparency paper and a single text. One leather-bound volume, the threads on the spine catching the stark light of the classroom and glinting. The book was Paul Fallows's masterpiece,
The Coil.

“What are you doing tonight, Dr. Shipley?”

Alex looked up, found the student who had posed the question. Anthony
Neil III. He sat in a middle row, a frat-boy smirk on his face. His friends flanked him, hiding behind their Norton Anthologies.

“I'm working on my Camus translation,” she said flatly. “Do you read French, Mr. Neil?”

“Tu as un corps parfait,”
the boy said.

“Funny, I don't remember that line in
The Stranger.
”

“Try the abridged edition.”

Alex kept her eyes straight on the boy and said, “That must have been the version of the text you read before our last exam.”

Then she turned away and began to make notes on the whiteboard as the class howled.

*   *   *

“What is literature?” she asked when everyone was quiet. It was the question she always asked, without hyperbole, to begin this particular lecture.

“Literature is emotion,” said a dark-haired girl from a back row.

“Literature is a writer's secret life recorded in symbols.”

Alex nodded. “Great books are both of those things,” she said. “The emotion in
Anna Karenina
is fierce. The symbolism in books such as
Ulysses
and
Beneath the Wheel
and
Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There,
is still being fought over in lit programs across the world.” She paused for effect, drawing them in. Forty faces, all of them belonging to upperclass English majors on their way to bigger and better things, were held by her words. “But what if literature were more than that. What if it were
a game
?”

“A game?” a gaunt boy toward the front asked. “How do you mean?”

“I mean,” she said, “what if you could read a book and treat it as a competition between you and its author? Like a contest.”

“In any contest there has to be a winner,” another student said. “How do you win against a book?”

“Point duly noted,” Alex said. “But a brilliant professor once told me that you win
when you know you have won.
”

“Richard Aldiss said that?”

Alex froze. Even the professor's name did that to her. Her blood raced. It was the student from before—Neil. One of her tricksters. They always sought her out, gravitated to her because of her past.

“Paul Fallows,” Alex went on, picking up the loose thread of her lecture. “Of course you've heard of him.”

At first there was nothing, only the tight, nervous silence of the hall. They knew of her history with the writer.

Finally a boy just behind Neil said, “The reclusive writer. The madman.”

“Some say he was both. Others say he was neither.”

“What do you mean, Dr. Shipley?”

Alex steeled herself. It was still difficult to talk about Fallows, more difficult now because there had been no closure. Things had ended so suddenly that she could never truly understand how the nightmare of Aldiss's night class had gone as far as it went. Fallows, the famous recluse, was the very reason Alex was in this lecture hall right now.

She answered the student's question with movement. She approached the document camera and switched it on. The lights in the lecture hall were synched to the machine, and they automatically dimmed.

She laid the first sheet of transparency on the platform.

“What I am about to show you,” she said, “has been seen only by a select few.”

Alex stepped to the side, letting her students see what was projected on the screen behind her.

It was a page from a manuscript. The columns were rigid, the font blocky and thick. There were scratch-outs in the margins, done in a manic and careless hand. On the bottom of the page were strange glyphs—the images looked, when you studied them closely, like the legend of a bizarre map.

“What is it?” someone asked.

“It's a page from an unpublished novel by Paul Fallows,” Alex said, and the class buzzed.

“But where did you get it?” another student asked. “Fallows is dead. You found him and then you—”

“Killed the Fallows myth,” finished Neil, and when Alex looked back at the boy he smiled impishly.
Your play, Prof.

Alex shivered. There were ways to evade this topic. It had taken her years to even think of Fallows again, and when her therapist suggested teaching this class—well, at first she told him to go to hell. But as the
years passed she realized she would have to confront what she had done during the night class. Tackle it head-on. Thus this class, this lecture, these questions.