Obedience (23 page)

“Did she come in here?” Dennis went on.

“She was just a kid when she left Bell City. Nineteen or twenty. This wasn’t her kind of place.”

“Where did you know her from?” asked Dennis.

“I knew her aunt and uncle. They lived out on Upper Stretch Road.”

The bartender was being difficult. He was stubbing up, closing them out of some information that Mary could see he had. He was leery of them, she knew, suspicious of these questions. Just the name, the word itself-
Polly
-must have sent a charge through the residents of Bell City.

“What kind of girl was she?” Dennis tried.

“Nice,” the man said. “Sweet girl. Got involved in some stuff, you know. We all did. Made mistakes. Regretted them. Lived to see another day. It happens. Otherwise, she was just an average teenager.”

“Stuff?” asked Brian.

He was still looking at them, his gaze almost hot. He shook his head, then; laughed a little. The lights behind the bar were severe, probably on a mandate from the county because bad light led to fake identification scandals that a place like the Wobble Inn surely couldn’t afford. The man’s face was lit harshly in the glow.

He knows something, Mary thought. It’s right there. If I could just get him to open up. If I could just-

“Marco sent us,” she said, smiling at the man.

“Marco?”

“We saw him earlier today,” Brian put in, moving his stool in closer so that the bartender could refill his soda.

“Damn, Marco knows more about it than I do,” the owner said, spritzering the drink into Brian’s glass.

“But Marco’s not here,” Mary said coolly.

The bartender blinked. His eyes finally disengaged from them, and he took a step away from the bar. “Look,” he said, “everything I know is just secondhand. I got it all from Marco, anyway, so I’m not sure why he sent you to me. But if you’re really interested, there’s some stuff that will make your toes curl.”

“Such as?” Dennis asked.

“Such as: the girl was abandoned by her real mother and father. She was staying with the aunt and uncle because she had nowhere else to go. And these were good people, like I said, but they didn’t know nothin’ about raising a girl. They wanted to do what was best for Polly, but she got wild. She fell in with the Creeps. Dom Frederick started seeing Polly-and now, keep in mind, Dom was thirty-four and Polly was all of seventeen-and he was a member of that gang. Of course, that’s how she met Star, Deanna’s daddy.”

“What kind of a relationship did she have with Star?” asked Brian, urging the man forward, his foot now going crazy beneath the bar.

“Different people said different things, you know? Marco and Star went to school together down in Cale, and so Marco knew those folks pretty well. Star was fresh on the girl, I do know that. He came in here one night about that time talking sweet about her. We’d just opened. This was right before Deanna”-Mary began to see that people in these parts labeled periods of time according to that divide, Before Deanna and After Deanna-“and nobody knew a thing about what was going to happen. We were all just ignorant of it, you know, like the man standing on the bridge watching the storm coming on, and then in a few minutes lightning strikes and
zap!
The guy’s hit. He’s charred because he didn’t have enough sense to get off the bridge, poor bastard.” The bartender paused in his story, looked back toward the men playing cards. They had stopped to listen to him. He was commanding attention now. He had the floor and he didn’t intend to give it up. “Marco says that Star was seeing Polly’s aunt, but who knows. Who knows why he came around here. I never did really believe that he and Polly…you know. This guy could have had any woman in Martin County. What business would he have with this little girl?”

“Some people say Polly looked like his daughter,” Brian said.

“If by ‘looked like’ you mean that they were both teenage girls, then ‘some people’ are right. That’s about the extent of it. I saw Polly all the time around Bell, and I saw pictures of Deanna of course on the news when it happened, and there wasn’t much of a resemblance. The police fucked that one up. They said he confessed to it and everything. I never believed that. If he confessed to it, then why didn’t they arrest him?”

“Maybe the confession wasn’t about Deanna,” Dennis offered.

“You mean that New Mexico bullshit?” the bartender said. “No, there’s something more to this. I’m not a conspiracy theorist”-though, clearly, he was-“but come on. Any idiot can see that Polly was not Deanna Ward.”

He stopped talking and poured himself a beer. His hands were shaking a little, and it was obvious that the story had rattled him. The men in the back resumed their game.
No,
thought Mary. There’s more. There’s something that he left out.

“That’s about all I know,” he said, his voice scratchy now and nearly gone.

“Thank you,” Dennis said.

They turned to leave. As they were walking out of the bar, Mary whispered to Brian, “There’s more to find here. He didn’t tell us anything that we didn’t already know. The guy-Marco-said that we would get our answers from this guy.”

“That’s all he’s got, Mary,” Brian said. They reached the door and opened it. The world outside had the thick and heavy smell of rain. As Marco had said, she could hear the nearby echo of eighteen-wheelers surging down I-64. The trees dripped, and somewhere nearby a creek rushed noisily down through the hollow on its way toward the Thatch River.

A sudden thought came to Mary. She stopped at the door, one foot outside.

“Do you have the book?” she asked Brian. He removed it from his pocket, just as he had done for Dennis that day on the Tau roof.

She returned to the bar and got the bartender’s attention. “Yeah?” he asked, clearly disturbed to see her again.

“Have you ever seen this man?” Mary asked, holding the book into the bar light so the bartender could see Leonard Williams on the back flap.

The man’s eyes widened. “Oh yeah,” he said. “I’ve seen him. That’s Polly’s uncle.”

It was late when they made it back onto Highway 72. It began to rain again, harder even than before, and when Dennis could not see the road any longer he pulled into a Days Inn, the students deciding to stay overnight in Cale. They pooled together all the money in their pockets, sixty-five dollars exactly, and got the cheapest room at the hotel.

There was an uncomfortable moment when Brian and Mary were in the room together and Dennis, who had sprinted to be the first in the bathroom, was changing. They were all wet from their run from the car, and Brian and Mary looked at each other warily, their clothes dripping on the carpet. Finally, when it was clear that Dennis was showering, they turned their backs on each other and got undressed, putting on some golf clothes that Dennis had in the trunk of the Lexus. Mary wore a long PING oxford and her underwear, and before Brian could turn around she dove into the bed so that he could not see her. Brian had put on a pair of bright-colored, checkered shorts, and he stood by the mirror shirtless, looking at himself. Mary had to laugh at the sight of it, and she lost it when Dennis appeared from the bathroom wearing pants in an identical pattern. He and Brian climbed into bed together as if they were twins, regarding each other suspiciously and creating a boundary down the middle of the bed with pillows so their skin couldn’t touch during the night.

When the lights were off, Mary said, “What next?”

The boys shifted in their bed. A car passed in the parking lot and spread a white arc of light into the room, blanching the walls.

“What are our choices?” Brian asked, his voice muffled in the pillow.

“We could go back to Winchester,” she said, “and tell people what we know. We could tell Dean Orman, get the folks at Carnegie to take action.”

“But what do we know?” Dennis asked skeptically.

“We know that Williams was Polly’s uncle,” replied Mary. “We know that Polly and Deanna Ward were connected somehow, not just because they looked alike, but also because Deanna’s father was driving out to Bell City to see Polly. In that way, we have Williams tied to the missing girl. We have the telephone call from the campus cops, which was clearly rigged by Williams. We have Williams’s ‘wife’ giving me that note, and then the weirdness at the Collinses’ house on During Street.”

“And Troy,” Brian put in. “We’ve got Troy Hardings admitting to a conspiracy over e-mail.”

“It’s not enough,” Dennis offered. He kicked off the covers, and Mary could see his plaid legs doing bicycle kicks in the bed. Mary remembered this tic. When he was nervous, Dennis always lay on the floor and began his bicycle routine. Sometimes he would go for a half hour or more; it made her tired just watching him. “They’ll just ask what we were doing, wasting our time in Cale looking for a girl the police have been searching for for at least twenty years. I shouldn’t even be out here on this-this wild
chase.
Christ, Mary, I’ve got an exam tomorrow.”

It was the first time Mary had thought about her other class. She had her lit class in the morning. They were wrapping up City of Glass, and she didn’t want to miss their last discussion of the novella. But right now, it certainly wasn’t looking good that she would get back to Winchester in time to make it.

“We might as well go to the police if we’re going to go that route,” Dennis scoffed then.

“Maybe we should,” she said diffidently.

“And tell them what? Tell them that we have all these fake leads and this fake book and that we think we might be a part of an intricate game with a professor from the university who has disappeared off the face of the planet? They’ll laugh us right out of the station. None of it makes sense, Mary. None of it makes a damn bit of sense.”

They lay there, each of them looking up at the dark ceiling. She had to agree with him, of course.
Sense
was not a word that could be rationally applied to their situation at the moment. Across the room, Dennis churned his legs and counted under his breath.

“What do you think, Brian?” Mary asked. Over on his side of the bed, he was quiet.

“I don’t know,” he sighed. Mary knew that, like her, he was exhausting himself from turning all the complexities of the game around and around in his mind. “I seriously…I seriously think about hurting him.”

“Hurting who?” Dennis asked.

“Williams. At all this shit he’s caused. I haven’t slept in a week. I can’t-I can’t seem to get my mind off it. If I could get to him and demand answers, you know. Even if he told us Deanna was dead, then that would at least be something.”

“She’s not dead,” Mary said softly.

“It makes me wonder about Dean Orman’s wife,” said Brian.

Dennis stopped kicking. “What does?” he asked.

“This,” Brian replied. “All this. After seeing her that night, I just wonder if she was part of this thing or if Williams was somehow…” He trailed off, couldn’t define the thought.

“That night?” Dennis asked.

“I saw her out on Montgomery Street. By the Thatch River. She’d been beaten. She said that something had happened between her and the guy that looked after their boat for them. A former cop, she said. She wouldn’t let me tell the dean because she was afraid Orman would kill the guy.”

“Pig,” Dennis whispered.

Brian bolted upright in the bed. “What did you say?” he asked Dennis.

“The guy who looks after their boat,” Dennis said. “He’s called Pig. That’s where Williams got his name for the bad guy in his Polly story.”

On her side of the room, Mary tried to figure it out. She worked it around in her head, fused the two narratives, Polly’s and Deanna Ward’s, and now this third narrative that starred Dean Orman’s wife and the former police officer called Pig. But she couldn’t come up with anything. It was all a muddle, jumbled, like the bar owner’s theory of the pancaked universes. What was real, what was fake, what was part of the game and what wasn’t? She lay back down and shut her eyes.

“How could it all be related?” She realized, too late, that she had said it aloud.

“I don’t know,” Brian replied. “But I just have a feeling now, after all we’ve seen today, that it was too coincidental. Too freakish, you know. How could Elizabeth Orman have been there just as I was driving back to campus? It was like she-like she was
waiting
for me.”

“We have to go to the police,” Mary said.

“No.” Dennis now, speaking in such a hushed voice that it was barely above a whisper.

“What do you mean ‘no’?” Mary said angrily.

“I mean no. Out of the question. It’s too soon, Mary.”

“People’s lives could be in danger, Dennis. This is going beyond some-what did you call it?-some
tangram.
This is real life here.” She realized she had stood up, and she was approaching him across the bedroom. Her underwear was showing, but she didn’t care. She was losing control of herself, of her emotions; she was past the tipping point now. She was so angry-at Williams, at Dennis, at Polly for getting involved in all this somehow. She wanted it all to go back to normal, to when it was just a class. But somewhere along the way they had crossed some imaginary boundary and things had spilled over into the real.

“I know Elizabeth Orman,” Dennis said. Mary stopped. She knew what he meant by his voice, by the seemingly innocuous word know, and the thought of it deflated her, sent her back to her bed where she collapsed face down into the pillow.

“What do you mean?” Brian asked.

“I mean I knew her. I’m familiar with her. Listen…” Dennis began the bicycle thing again. Mary could not listen to him. There was a roar through her entire body, a piercing noise that filled her with an old, familiar ache. “Listen,” he said again, his legs kicking madly and his breath chopped and labored, “there’s something I haven’t told you. I figured it out by…by the San Francisco thing.”

“The San Francisco thing?” Brian asked.