Dominance (35 page)

I destroyed one copy immediately. It was exquisite, scattering pieces of Fallows over the prison yard, sending his words up in smoke, plotting my next move. The other I kept very close.

For it contained Charlie Rutherford's confession.

And a lost Fallows.

This was my new information. My reason for teaching the night class.

Now we are here again, past and present having collided, and yet you are alive. If you don't mind, I have a simple request for you: I would like to see you, Alex, one last time. I have something important to show you before you leave. Please.

Richard

Instead she returned to Harvard and picked up the pieces of her life. Peter was gone, and the rumors were that he was seeing one of his grad students now. Alex wished him the best. She too had moved on.

Keller called on a Friday. “Summer break,” he said.

“When are you taking your road trip?”

“The last day of your term. I'll be there then. Promise.”

She almost screamed with joy. She had missed him terribly.

*   *   *

The package arrived that Monday. It came in a simple manila envelope. Her name had been written on the front in Aldiss's tight, careful hand.

The note inside read, simply,
You should have come, Alexandra.

There was something else. A page from a book. Thin, grayed—it was a simple paperback page. Aldiss had X-Acto'd it out, and she stood in her bedroom holding it, her fingers visible on the other side. A name in the top right corner—Christian Kane. It was from
Barker in the Storm.

There was nothing else.

“Not this time, Professor,” she said aloud. “I'm not going to play along.” She dropped the page on her bedside table.

*   *   *

Two days later she graded the last of her semester exams in her office and then rushed home, feeling as if she were walking on air. Just a few hours until Keller arrived.

Back home, she showered and toweled off. Afterward she walked through her cool apartment, trying to decide what to wear. Today was a fresh start, a new life. After what had happened at Jasper, after all the horrors of Matthew Owen—

No. She wouldn't think of that madman. She sat down on the bed, let her hair down, and began to dry her roots. As she did she glanced over at the bedside table. At the page Aldiss had sent her. That mysterious page . . .

Despite herself she picked it up. Scanned it. It was nothing. Just another one of Aldiss's games.

Barker in the Storm.

Alex read the title and as she did a memory came to her. There was something about it. Something she remembered from the Fisk mansion.

She scanned the words. Read the paragraphs, then traced her eye back and reread them. As she did a sickening feeling swept through her.

“No,” she said.

She knew what Aldiss wanted her to see. The reason he'd asked her to visit him before she left Vermont. It was a paragraph in the middle of the page:

She called the man she had once loved. He was a simple man now. He lived in an old farmhouse. Divorced, he was able to cultivate his disguise. It was the night when he prowled. He was best in the dark, when nobody could see him for who he was. A large man, hulking and strong, he had always protected her. Had almost died for her. But what she did not know was that he was part of the game just like the rest of them. He had always been part of the game, and that night he planned to show her who he really was. “When can we see each other?” she asked him. “Soon,” he said. “Promise.”

Letting the towel drop, Alex stood. She backed into the corner, fear roiling through her. She tried to remember what Christian had said to
her that night at the Fisk mansion. What he'd said about his work, his latest book.

I plagiarized from Fallows. In my last novel,
Barker in the Storm.
Not word for word, nothing like that. I simply stole his style, his rhythm.
Maybe I had this crazy notion that people would be playing the Procedure to my novels, I don't know.

She took a step toward the door but stopped. Something moved outside, shifted against her bedroom window. She thought of Aldiss, of her first meeting with him. Of how adamant he had been that someone from the night class had turned. That one of her friends was responsible for what had happened.

Playing the Procedure to my novels . . .

The page trembled in her hand. Alex stepped back. She was against the wall now. Her blood ran cold.

The doorbell rang.

Thank you again to my wonderful agent, Laney Katz Becker, who stayed with me through the tough times as this idea was taking shape. Thanks to my editor, Sarah Knight. Sarah saw this book through and helped me when I needed her most, and for that I will always be grateful. A true professional. Thank you to all the folks at Simon & Schuster, especially Jessica Abell, Molly Lindley, and Kelly Welsh. Thanks to my family in Louisville, Burnside, and Whitley City—Granny, Mom, Dad, Emily, Riley and Isabella, Donna, Jason and Mindy C., Bill and Jennifer S., Pap, Stephanie, Beth and John, Karen, Ann, Jo Ann, Carolyn, Randy, Cherie, Gary, Cindy, Bruce, Jill, and (Super)Joe. Thanks to the folks at LRC—Robert, Katie, Laura, Andrew, Charles. Thanks to Drew Trimble, who listened as I talked about early drafts, and gave some wonderful feedback. Major thanks to the folks who operate Joseph-Beth Booksellers in Lexington, Kentucky. I can honestly say that without Joseph-Beth, you would not be holding this book. A good part of my education happened inside that wonderful store. Thanks to all those who worked the Louisville coffee shops and bookstores where this novel was almost entirely written—the Borders on Hurstbourne, the Barnes & Noble on Hurstbourne, the Carmichael's on Bardstown, and the free public library in Fern Creek. And thanks above all to my family—my children, Jonathan and Jenna, and the love of my life, Sharon Faye. I couldn't even begin to count the suns . . .

Will Lavender is the
New York Times
bestselling author of
Obedience.
A former literature professor, he is a graduate of the MFA program at Bard College and lives with his wife and two children in Louisville, Kentucky. He is currently at work on his next novel,
The Descartes Circle
.

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ALSO BY WILL LAVENDER

Obedience

Keep reading for an excerpt from Will Lavender's heart-pounding puzzle thriller

The Descartes Circle

coming soon from Simon & Schuster

I hear on the eleven o'clock news that my twin brother is not a murderer. A battery of psychological tests has been run, an expert on torture has given his own verdict on national television, and finally they are letting him come home. I watch it all unfold through a news feed, stay glued to my television at night, waiting for the truth about Henry Malcolm.

It should be too horrible to watch. I should turn it off, get on with my life. When I see myself in one of the stock photos on
48 Hours,
smiling goofily on a ski slope, my arm draped around Henry's shoulders, I don't feel shame or regret or sadness. Maybe I should. Maybe I should seclude myself inside my house, take on some kind of monastic presence, run off the few reporters who show up at my front door looking for a sound bite.

But I do none of these things. I watch, just like you do.

*   *   *

Today there's a telephone message waiting for me when I get home.

I've been out, walking with my notebook and thinking about my brother's homecoming. What it could mean—what it
must
mean. I have ink on my left hand, one of the most annoying side effects of the
disease. A word snaking across, disappearing over the wrist and then appearing again on the delta of a vein:
Who?

What's crazy is I don't even remember writing it. This isn't uncommon with the disease. Sometimes a stray word will appear from nowhere, written across a newspaper page or in the margin of a book. I've even been known to write on other people's bodies as they sleep. Creepy, I know. I wish I could do something about it.

Now I approach the blinking answering machine light. The tabloids still call, promising me everything under the sun if I agree to talk about Henry and his lost week. Just a few days ago someone from TMZ called, offering me six figures for an interview about my brother. It would have been a chance to start over, to move somewhere else. Reinvent my life. I told them to go to hell. When I tell Henry's story, it will be on my own terms.

The red light throbs, and I stand in the dark kitchen and let it hypnotize me. A collage of Post-its hangs over the phone, bubbled black with heavy ink, the missives incomprehensible, as they almost always are. Nothing but a reaction, an impulse to WRITE, to move my hand in a way that forms a word, a sentence, a thought. I curl my fingers around an imaginary pen, scribble air on the wall beside the telephone. My mouth waters.

Finally I reach up, hit Play.

“Jonathan Malcolm, this is Anthony Schroeder.” The voice is tight, serious. Not a reporter. I let the message run. “I'm a homicide detective with the Oldham Town Police Department. We spoke once before, after your sister-in-law . . . after the incident. I wondered if you might give me a call back. I want you to know that this has nothing to do with the fact that your brother is getting out of the hospital tomorrow. This is about Laura Malcolm. I know you had a history with her, that you were one of her closest friends, and I called to ask you—”

I erase the message.

It's her name, just the sound of her name, that cuts me the deepest.

And anyway, I know what the detective wants. He's been here before, sat right there in my living room, and told me about his grand plan. It will never work, I want to tell him. Not ever. It won't work because my brother is smarter than us all.

Henry was a professor of philosophy at Oldham College in upstate New York. His vitals were revealed to the public slowly, incrementally, like a photograph taken through Vaseline: his age (thirty-four and already a rising star in academia), his famous academic father (Thomas Malcolm, professor emeritus at Oldham), his identical twin (Jonathan Malcolm, the disgraced author), even his dissertation from Yale (“True Deception: A Philosophical Inquiry of René Descartes”). He was accused of killing his wife, Laura Malcolm, bludgeoning her on the stairs of the home they shared at 22 Woodlawn Lane on the Oldham campus. The murder weapon was never found, and for days one question, so horrible in its simplicity, screamed across the ticker at the bottom of my TV screen: MURDER OR ACCIDENT? Even now, I'm certain I know the answer.

Laura was the perfect victim. A famous professor's wife, five years Henry's junior, and strikingly beautiful, she was a fixture at Oldham charity galas and campus functions. Henry claimed to have returned home from a faculty meeting one night to find her at the bottom of the spiral staircase, crumpled and broken like a rag doll. She'd been waiting up for him; they were supposed to watch a movie together, the empty DVD box casually placed on the television, a foreign film Henry
had rented from the college video store that afternoon. Henry's frantic 911 call was replayed a thousand times by the celebrity dish shows—scripted, they said, playing it back again and again, focusing on every stutter, every pause and nuance.

There was much talk about how Laura had once been a philosophy major at Oldham. She had met Henry in her senior seminar, had fallen in love with her suave professor, been swept away by him. I knew a different story, and here is the way I would tell it: Laura got pregnant, she and Henry were forced to marry because of Oldham's morality clause, the child was stillborn, and Henry spent a semester drinking and calling me at night and rambling, “John, Jonathan, listen to me—I can hear our son crying. He's just downstairs . . .”