Obedience (21 page)

“She was so sweet,” Edna said. “I never did meet her, of course, but I’ve seen pictures. Just a little thing. Deanna. Such a sweet name. How old? Seventeen? Eighteen? Such a tragedy. Even now we look for things from our front porch. We watch to see if there’s anything suspicious going on. I always thought they could have taken her down to the river, slipped away in the quiet, you know. How easy that would have been.”

They, thought Mary.

“Do you know this man?” Brian asked, showing Edna the photograph of Williams that was on the back of A Disappearance in the Fields. They all watched the woman for anything, any tic of deception, but she studied the photo seriously, pulling her bifocals down and pondering it as if the picture were of a long-lost relative she was trying to place in the family tree.

“I don’t suppose I do,” she said. She handed the book over to her husband, and he also said that he didn’t recognize Williams. As far as Mary could tell, they were both sincere.

When they began talking again, reminiscing about their years in the home, Mary excused herself. She followed Edna’s directions to the bathroom, shut the door, and looked at herself in the mirror. Her eyes were dark, and her hair, always unruly, the curl prone to frizz and flyaways, was wilder than usual. She turned on the faucet and splashed some water on her bare face. She heard the whir of a motorboat down the hill on the Thatch, and she wondered about Dean Orman’s wife again and her story of being accosted on the boat.
Does it all fit together?
she wondered.
Is the river the connecting theme?

She left the bathroom and walked down the hallway toward the kitchen. She could hear Edna in there, talking about a family reunion they were planning to have if they could find all the family. She stopped at the end of the hall and looked at the pictures Edna had hung: nieces and nephews, Mary assumed, daughters and sons, all of them light-haired and fair-skinned. She felt a breeze at her feet, and she turned to see if the front door had come open. It hadn’t. “It was just fantastic,” Edna was saying in the kitchen off to Mary’s left. “And they had a fireworks exhibit after the show.” Mary looked at these relatives, the kids gap-toothed and their parents too polished somehow, too perfect. One girl was wearing a Cale Central High shirt, and the picture looked to have been taken in the 1980s. Mary assumed that it was Edna and Norman’s daughter, as she showed up in later pictures with her family. She wondered if this girl had gone to school with Deanna Ward.

Then she felt it, that breeze again against her ankles. It was cool and sharp, definitely outdoor air. She walked back down the hallway, trying to find its source. She stood outside the first door and registered it, stiff, against her feet.

Mary cracked open the door and peered in.

The room was empty. The windows were blindless and raised an inch or two, and the walls were half-painted. Paint cans rested here and there around the room. Swaths of blue tarpaulin were laid out on the floor, yet there was no carpet to protect, just the bare board lying across two-by-fours.

Mary shut the door and went to the next room. She opened that door and found the same thing. A bare room, paint cans. There was no tarpaulin here, and the painting had not yet begun. Some stray paper blew around in the breeze. Mary felt her heart tugging at her again, pleading to her to get out of this, to stop it somehow.

She went to the third room. The carpet had been stored in this room, wide rolls of it that were still in their cellophane. She was just about to step inside when she heard a voice behind her: “What are you doing?”

It was Norman Collins. He was looking at her solemnly, as if he were disappointed in her.

Laughter exploded from the kitchen.

“I was just-” Mary began, but she couldn’t go on. Lying had never been easy for her. She dealt in truth, and that is what had drawn her to Dennis in the first place.

“We’re doing some work,” Norman explained. His steely eyes were still on her, probing. He smelled like the outside, like sun and breeze, like her own grandfather.

“I like the paint,” Mary managed. He nodded, still searching her with his eyes, his jaw tensing as he breathed.

He was about to say something more when Dennis appeared in the hallway. “I think it’s time that we go,” he said. Mary slipped by Norman and went to the door, and the three of them thanked the Collinses and walked down the landing steps to the Lexus. Mary could feel Norman watching her walk away, and her heart boomed with each step she took. She got in the car and exhaled loudly, sinking down in the seat beside Dennis.

“What’s wrong?” Brian asked from the back. His hand was on Mary’s shoulder, and she liked it there, liked the comfort it afforded her.

She told them about the fake rooms and Norman finding her. She hadn’t trusted his look, that curious gaze he had given her. She thought he knew something that he hadn’t told them.

“Maybe they were really doing a renovation,” Dennis said.

“Come on, Dennis,” Brian huffed. “Where do they live? That house is tiny. If all the rooms are bare, where do they sleep?”

“What is it, then?” Dennis came back. “They knew we were coming? They just happened to be there when we arrived in a…in a fake house? And are they in on this, too? Williams killed Polly-”

“Deanna,” Mary corrected him.

“-and they’re all trying to cover for him? The woman at the school. Cavendish. This Troy guy at Winchester. The fake wife. Now this old couple. How big is this thing?”

“That’s what we’ve been asking,” Brian said flatly.

“How is he doing it?” asked Dennis. “These people are forty miles apart. How is he conducting it on the fly? What, are the Collinses his relatives? Has he paid them to lie for him? Is he trying to-”

Mary had it before Dennis did. She sat up straight and asked, “Is he trying to lead us to something?”

They all thought about that for a moment. The car rolled out During and hit the chip and seal of the connecting road, and Dennis drove back toward Highway 72.

“Maybe Williams didn’t have anything to do with Deanna,” she said, “but he knows who did. Maybe the deadline…maybe it’s still applicable.”

“The deadline?” Brian asked.

“Tomorrow,” she said. “The class was going to end tomorrow. I think something is going to happen.”

“But Deanna Ward disappeared twenty years ago, Mary,” Dennis said.

“I just think…” She trailed off. Her mind was spinning. The answer was somewhere out there; the meaning of all this could be divined, if she could just concentrate hard enough, if she could just focus…

“He knows who did it,” she said.

“Why would he do that?” Brian now. “To withhold evidence like that is criminal, isn’t it? I mean, it makes Williams as culpable as anyone in this thing. In that case he’s an accomplice. If he has information, like Bethany Cavendish said, then why not just say it?”

“Puzzles,” Dennis said. His eyes were on the road, and the sunlight glinted harshly against his sunglasses.

“What?” Brian urged him on.

“He loves puzzles. You should see his study. He had these ancient puzzles from China. They’re called tangrams. You cut out these shapes, these silhouettes, and you place them in the puzzle. He had made some…weird ones.”

“What do you mean ‘weird’?” asked Brian.

“I mean some of them were lurid. Some had decapitated heads. Naked bodies. Rapes. They were disgusting. He saw me looking at them and put them away in a closet, but I had already seen enough.”

None of them said a word. The road trundled beneath them, kicking up gravel against the undercarriage. Dennis met the intersection of Highway 72 and took a right. Toward Bell City.

“So are you saying that Williams is leading us through this just because he likes puzzles?” Mary asked. “I don’t know if I buy that or not.”

“What’s the other scenario?” Dennis wanted to know. “That Williams is Deanna’s abductor? Do either of you believe that?”

Mary thought of his strength when she had pushed him that day in class. His tremendous strength. Did he abduct Deanna Ward and was he now, almost twenty years later, leading them on a wild chase to find her? Or was he intentionally leading them off base, putting up foils to their plan, placing “actors” here and there to drive them away from the truth?

Motive, she then thought. What would the motive be for playing this game?

“Well,” Dennis said, “I don’t believe it. I think what Mary said earlier was right: Williams knows who took Deanna Ward. This is all part of his game.”

“Aren’t games supposed to be fun?” asked Brian, his voice determined and lacing. “There’s nothing fun about a missing girl.”

“I’m telling you,” Dennis said, “Williams didn’t do this. I spoke to him. I know if someone is telling the truth, and he was genuine when he said that Polly was a logic puzzle and nothing more. This other thing, Deanna-I don’t know what that is, but I can assure you that Williams is trying to tell us something. Maybe he can’t say it the way he wants to say it. Maybe there’s someone who knows the truth, and Williams is trying to tell us what he knows without alerting this other person.”

Mary thought of the deadline again. She thought of Deanna Ward, and if this could possibly be about her. In a way, it made perfect sense. No wonder Williams’s logic game had been so easy: he was just preparing them for the real test.

She thought about the deadline and what it must mean. As they drove across Cale and toward Bell City, she realized that they had only twenty-four hours to locate Leonard Williams and find out what he knew.

Bell City is one of the poorest communities in the state of Indiana. It has about five thousand residents and rests on the border of Martin County. It became famous years ago for a basketball game played at Bloomington, where Bell East High School beat number-one-ranked Cale High for a shot at its first-ever state championship.

There is a sign commemorating that feat as you pass into the Bell City limits. It has been dented, pocked by thrown rocks, and nearly torn off its post, surely by Cale residents still bitter about a game that was played almost thirty years ago.

In Bell City there is a Dairy Queen, a bait and tackle shop, and the local high school and junior high. There are a variety of churches, most of them Baptist, some of them falling into disorder along the side of Highway 72. The road in Bell City becomes cracked and pitted because the asphalt has not been tended to in so long. The three of them were entering, it appeared, a ghost town.

They were looking for the girl who had been mistakenly taken to Wendy Ward that fateful day. The police had trailed Deanna’s father, Star, to the trailer and arrested him on site. Yet the girl had turned out not to be Deanna. Brian was particularly interested in driving the twenty-five extra miles to see this trailer, though he couldn’t tell them exactly what he expected to find.

Dennis stopped for directions at a gas station just outside of downtown. He went inside while Brian put gas in the Lexus. When Dennis returned, he said the attendant had told him to drive to Gary’s Diner because apparently Gary was the guy you asked if you had questions of particular importance. The diner was right beside the courthouse, which they saw up on a hill, its dome rising out of the tree line like some sort of battlement. They would probably be able to find somebody there, the attendant said, someone they could talk to about Deanna Ward.

The town proper was nearly dead. There was a furniture store that was open across from the courthouse, and two men were carrying out sofas while others were pinning red sales tags to the upholstery. The three parked at the courthouse and walked the three blocks to Gary’s Diner, their jackets tied around their waists and the high sun beating down on their faces.

There were no cars in the parking lot, and the waitresses were all outside the diner, leaning against a picket fence that blocked the patrons’ view of the funeral parlor next door. They were all sharing a cigarette, passing it down the line and taking deep drags with their eyes closed. It was an unseasonably hot day in early October, the trees all aflame with wild color.

The women didn’t move when they saw the three students coming. They just stood there in a row by that white fence and continued to smoke their cigarette. They were wearing pink, frilly uniforms straight out of the 1950s. It was a different kind of pink, a pink that was softer and more subtle than anything you see today. Mary felt as if she had stepped back in time. Everything was unreal, beginning with Brian’s story of the book last week, to Professor Williams’s disappearance. And now here she was, in this strange little town, trying to find answers to a question she didn’t even know how to phrase.

“How are you doing today, ladies?” Dennis asked the waitresses. Always the charmer.

“We’re okay,” one of them said dubiously.

“We’ve just got a couple of questions for you, if you don’t mind.”

A tall black woman who had assumed the role of spokeswoman nodded.

“We heard about a kidnapping that happened years ago out in Cale. We were just wondering-”

“Deanna,” the girl said quickly.

“So you’ve heard of her?”

“Who hasn’t?”

“Wasn’t there some tie to Bell City? Something about a girl in a trailer home out on the outskirts of town that looked like Deanna?”

The waitresses looked at each other. Their glances were telling-they were communicating apprehension among one another, silently wondering how much they should tell these outsiders.

“You’ll have to ask Gary about that,” the woman said.

“Gary?”

“He’s the boss here. He knows everybody in Bell. He’d be able to tell you anything you wanted to know.”

“Gary here right now?” asked Brian.

“He’s on vacation,” the woman said, stubbing out the cigarette on the fence. “Daytona Beach. Be back next week.”

“We don’t-” Dennis began, but Mary cut him off. She could see where this was going, and for all Dennis’s charm he wasn’t going to get answers from these girls. She stepped in front of Dennis and smiled at the girl.