Obedience (18 page)

As Brian was checking out the book, the librarian, an older woman who taught a study skills class at the university, looked at him curiously. Immediately, without hesitation, he thought: Actor.

“Do you reat much true crime?” she asked conversationally, her accent thick and difficult to place.

“No,” he said. “I’m just reading this one for a class.”

“Oh. This is a goot one. He came here for a reating once. Williams. Right after it was published? Ya. He set he had some ‘new information,’ but he couldn’t give it to us. Promised a new book in the spring. That was almost five years ago.”

Brian took out A Disappearance in the Fields and drove back toward campus. He turned right out of the library onto Pride, which was one way in downtown DeLane, and followed it all the way to the bypass and hit Highway 72-the quickest way back to campus. The highway drops down and turns onto Montgomery Street, which winds around the Thatch River and then rises a hill to Winchester.

As he was turning onto Montgomery, he saw a figure crouched in the undergrowth to his right. At first he thought it had been a trick of the light. An animal, probably. But before he could speed up the thing rose and stepped out of the undergrowth. It had one arm up, signaling him to stop.
A woman.

Brian stopped the truck and eased onto the shoulder. He rolled down the passenger window. The woman leaned into the cab and said breathlessly, “You’ve got to help me.” The woman was familiar to him, somehow, but he couldn’t place her. Had he seen her around Winchester? It was so dark with the dense clouds masking the moon.

Brian, before he knew what he was doing, unlocked the door and the woman climbed in. She was wearing a cocktail dress that was torn, and her face was scratched and bloodied. Her fingernails were black with mud. He drove toward Winchester and listened to the woman’s harsh, labored breath. She looked straight ahead, never at him, her eyes wide open with shock.

“What happened to you?” he finally asked. “Do you want me to take you to the hospital?”

The woman shook her head softly. The wind was whistling through the cab, and it chilled Brian to the bone. The woman, even though her arms were bare, did not seem to notice.

“Here,” she said, pointing at Turner Avenue. They drove straight down Turner, the street that skirted the southern edge of campus.

He stopped at the light in front of the Gray Brick Building and a few students crossed the street. The woman, who had not spoken more than that one word since he picked her up, said, “I told him not to. I told him not to. I
told him.”
She was crying now. Brian noticed a nick on her temple that was oozing blood. The driver in the car behind him blew his horn, and Brian looked up to see that the light had turned green. The woman had her face buried in her hands now, and he asked, “Who? Who hurt you?” She shook her head again, trying to regain control of herself. She gestured for him to turn onto Pride. “My husband owns a boat,” she said, and suddenly Brian realized who she was. “And there’s a man who watches it for us. This…former cop. Here.” Brian made a right onto Pride Street. “He drives by every now and then and just keeps the kids away.” She stopped, pointed to a side road for Brian to turn onto. “Tonight I was on the boat, just cleaning some stuff up, you know. Getting it ready for some people who are coming by next weekend. And he came onto the boat. I didn’t know who it was at first. I tried to get him off me, but he wouldn’t. He kept
tearing
at me,
ripping
at my face. He was in a rage. He was…he was impossible to stop. He covered my eyes and took me out somewhere, to this…room or something. I don’t know. I couldn’t see anything. No one came. I was there for what seemed like hours, and no one came.

“And then he came back. He came back and he took the blindfold off and I saw that I was in this garage. There was a motorcycle there, all these stray parts laying around. He said that he would kill me if I told anyone what he had done. He said…” She wept then, just a little jagged sob, into her hands.

“I don’t want my husband to know,” she told Brian. “He’ll kill him if he finds out. He’ll just murder him.” She flicked her wrist toward a steep side road that spurred off Pride Street, and they sat in front of her house, the engine running. All the lights were on inside, and apparently the old man was waiting inside. Brian felt immovable, heavy with fear. He managed to ask if she needed help getting inside. “It’s okay,” she whispered. She got out of the truck and closed the door behind her. Through the open window she thanked him. The night was harsh, too dark somehow. Elizabeth Orman’s black, ragged dress disappeared up the walk and then she appeared again when the front door opened, inside the slice of light from the living room. Then she was gone.

Mary was sleeping when Brian knocked on her door. It had to be after eleven o’clock at night, maybe later. She bolted upright, banging her head on the bar that ran beneath the top bed. (She had kept the bunks because it was a school rule to have bunk beds in every dorm room. “Just in case,” one of the deans had told her indignantly, “something happens and you have to take on a mate.”)

She found Brian pacing nervously in the hall. “Something’s happened,” he told her when she opened the door.

Inside, she made him some of the cheap Lipton tea that she drank. He didn’t touch it. His attention was elsewhere. He wouldn’t sit for long, even though she had pulled up a chair for him. All he could do was walk, pace the room, and shake his head as if to clear it of unwanted thoughts.

“First,” he said. “Williams wrote a book about that girl, the one that detective told us about. Deanna.”

“What?”

“Yeah,” said Brian. “But here’s the interesting part.” Brian took the book out of his bag and handed it to Mary. He handled it as if it were electric, as if the thing held some deadly power. The cover of A Disappearance in the Fields showed a house bordering cornfields and a pitch-black, ominous sky. It was written by Leon Williams.

“Look in it,” he said. “Flip through it.”

She did.

As the pages crept across her thumb, she felt her heart pattering with the same uneven, clipped rhythm as it had earlier in the day, when she was close to finding Polly.

There were only sentences on the first few pages. The rest of the pages were nonsense, two words appearing back to back for the entirety of the book:
for the.
Page after page of those two words:
for the for the for the for the.

“Why?” was all she could say.

“I don’t know,” Brian admitted.

“Could be a mistake. Could be that the publisher made an error.”

“I thought of that. So I drove all the way out to Cale Community College. They were closed. Had to beg the reference librarian to let me in. Same thing in that book. A few pages of text and then”-he flipped through the book as Mary had done, marveling at the thing-“this. Two books with mistakes this severe? No way.”

“What does it mean, Brian?”

“I think it’s Williams,” he said. “I think he’s doing this. He’s trying to see how far we’ll go with it. Trying to lead us off track. It’s all part of the class.”

Mary thought about that explanation. “But,” she told him, “the class ended.”

“What?”

“I figured it out. Williams said something about a storage facility, and I remembered one of the earlier clues. It’s Pig. Pig has Polly.”

Brian looked distraught, as if he could not quite understand what she had just told him.

“There’s one other thing, though,” she said.

“What is it?”

“It’s just that-”

“Tell me, Mary.”

“It’s just that it was so
easy.
It was like Williams wanted us to have the answer. After all this, after all these games, why would he just
tell us the answer?”

“Maybe it wasn’t the answer,” Brian said.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean maybe there’s more. Maybe there’s a whole other level to this thing.”

Mary considered that. Her tea steamed in her face, and she kept her mug there, feeling the warmth on her eyes.

“But you could tell,” she said. “You could tell that I had cracked it, Brian. The way he talked. The way he walked out of the room. It was like he was…like he was
shocked.”

“You said it yourself, Mary,” Brian urged. “You said that it didn’t feel right. It doesn’t to me either. What about this girl, Deanna Ward? What about his book? What parts do they play?”

“Did you know that his wife wrote me a note? Saying that she wasn’t-that none of it was real?”

“A note?”

“At the party Sunday night.”

“You went to the party?”

“Yes,” Mary said. She felt herself blush; she was ashamed for not having told him. “She was trying to tell me something, Brian,” she continued. “She was trying to get me involved, and I didn’t listen to her. I thought it was all part of the hoax. But now…now I don’t know.”

Again, she was beginning to feel the familiar uneasiness that she had felt all along. She was beginning to slip back into it, like Quinn with Stillman in
City of Glass,
and no matter how she fought it now it was coming on, forcing her to rethink all that she had believed to be true just seven hours earlier.

“What do we do?” she asked him.

“We’ve got to stop the class. It’s madness that he’s been allowed to go on this long anyway.”

“Dean Orman,” she said. “We go to his office tomorrow morning and tell him what we know. We show him the book.”

Brian said nothing. She felt in his silence something else, some other pressing issue that he wanted to tell her but hadn’t yet.

“What, Brian?” she prodded him.

Brian sat down across from her. She pulled two folding chairs up to the card table she used to eat her dinner when she cooked in Brown. He didn’t sit so much as he
crashed
down, the chair creaking a little under him. He exhaled loudly and rubbed his face with both hands as if to wipe away some of what he had seen. “Orman’s wife,” he said. “Elizabeth? I picked her up tonight in the bushes down by the Thatch River. She’d been beaten by someone.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“As a heart attack. Listen, she told me not to tell anyone. She said Orman would kill the guy if I told. So we have to keep that quiet until I can figure out something else. I really don’t think-Mary, I don’t think that was part of the game. I think she was telling the truth. She looked awful.”

“Oh God,” Mary said. She felt tears in her eyes, the heat of anxiety in the pit of her stomach. She closed her eyes and tried to will herself not to cry. “Oh no. Oh God.”

“Mary,” Brian said gently. “Here.” And then his arm was around her. They were hugging each other, but strangely there was nothing romantic about it. It was just something you did, a healing act. She felt his heat and she stayed there in his chest until he pulled away, and when she was standing up on her own she didn’t regret what she’d done.

He lay on the top bunk and she took the bottom. Mary knew that he wasn’t sleeping by his uneven breath, by the way he could not be still. Like him, her rest was labored, erratic. “Brian,” she said. It was late, sometime after midnight. A siren passed outside, screamed down Pride Street. “Did you know that Williams has an assistant?”

They found Troy in the online campus directory. Beside his name they saw the familiar lightning bolt, which meant that he was online. “Let’s e-mail him,” Brian said.

“You mean now?”

“Hell yeah, now. I want to see what he knows.”

Slowly, still pacing the room, Brian dictated the message to Mary.

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Subject: Professor Williams

Troy,

We found Williams’s book, A Disappearance in the Fields. A very fine book. A masterpiece. We were wondering-did Williams write that himself, or did he have help from someone in the Philosophy Department? By the way, it was Pig. I guess you know that by now.

M

They waited. Mary refreshed her screen a few times, hoping that Troy would get the e-mail and respond to it immediately. Brian made himself another mug of tea in the microwave. Down on the quad, a fire burned-the every-Monday bonfire of the Delta girls, who were notorious for showing up to their early classes smelling of smoke and with their hands stained with soot.

“Maybe he’s working on a paper,” Brian said.

Mary felt the first signs of exhaustion coming on. It descended on her suddenly, pulling her down toward the floor. If she could just lie down, if she could just-

“Mary.” Brian was pushing her shoulder, waking her. She looked at him. Blinked. He pointed at the screen, and she saw a message from Troy in her in-box.

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Subject: Belated Congratulations

M,

Congrats on the solve! I solved the one in the spring of ’04, and it was a great moment. They were all talking about it today in the department. Leonard thought he was going to fool you all this time, but I guess not.

And yes, I have read Leonard’s book. I’m not into true crime, but
A Disappearance…
is one of the classics of that genre. A shame it never got the recognition it deserved. That girl, Deanna Ward, she’s still missing, you know. Leonard thought he got some new leads a few years ago, but they turned out to be dead ends.

All the best,

Troy

“Why would he lie?” Brian asked.

“Why is anyone lying? Why is the woman at the high school lying, making up a story about a fake book? It’s part of the game, Brian. Obviously Troy is playing it, too.” She still felt the buzz of sleep in her head, that flagging sensation of late-night fatigue.

“Ask him,” Brian said.