Obedience (24 page)

“Well, that wasn’t first but that cemented it in my mind,” Dennis said. “Polly’s mother left and went away to San Francisco. Elizabeth told me a story about her mother running off to San Francisco with this guy. That’s when I figured out the link between Williams and Elizabeth Orman.”

Dennis Flaherty told them about Elizabeth Orman. He didn’t tell them all of it, of course, just bits and pieces. He told them about the boat, and about his reasons for going to the Thatch that day. He told them about their relationship, and some of what she had told him at the Kingsley Hotel. He told them about speaking to Dean Orman that night at the house on the hill. And then he told them his secret: Elizabeth Orman used to see Leonard Williams.

“It was a few years ago,” Dennis explained. “She didn’t think anything of it, you know. Just a fling, to her. But Williams was smitten with her. He fell in love with her, I think. When she tried to break it off, he wasn’t happy. He started getting crazy. Sending her flowers every day. Showing up at their home and just standing outside, watching her. She got scared. She finally told Dr. Orman, and the dean was furious. He confronted Williams at a faculty meeting. It got real bad. Drama. The two men almost came to blows, right there on the third floor of the Carnegie Building. Williams was reprimanded, put on some kind of suspension. They sent him overseas to teach. Sort of to get him out of the way, you know? When he came back, the dean got worried about him again. That’s when he hired this guy, this former cop, to watch after his boat. He was afraid Williams was going to deface it or something. Apparently he’d threatened to set it on fire. This former cop, of course-his name is Pig Stephens.”

“Do you think he’s part of this thing?” Brian asked.

“No,” Dennis said. “I think that Williams put Pig into his narrative just to get a dig in at the Ormans. He was into irony like that. A coal black sense of humor. He told me about Elizabeth when we talked. Was real forthcoming. He claimed the affair was nothing but Dean Orman, who had always been intimidated by him, made it into something much more than it really was. But…”

“What?” Brian urged.

“But I don’t know what this means. I don’t know why Pig would hurt Elizabeth. Unless, you know, unless it’s just random. Unless it’s just a random thing and Pig just flew off the handle one night. Hell, I don’t know.”

“Williams says there is no randomness,” Brian said, sarcasm thick in his voice. “Everything happens for a reason.”

The two boys laughed at that, but Mary had stopped hearing them. She could only think of Dennis and Elizabeth Orman. The image kept flashing through her mind, the sickening image of the two of them together. It shouldn’t have bothered her. She knew that. She and Dennis had had a thing once, a long time ago-freshman year, for goodness sake-and now they were through. At least she thought so. Hoped so. But still the image was there, dogging her, teasing her. She shut her eyes against it but that only made it stronger, more vivid. Suddenly she wanted to be home, away from this mess, this game. She felt hot tears in her eyes, and she had no choice but to let them come.

In the morning Mary found Brian outside on their little balcony, sitting on a plastic chair and looking out at the bustling traffic moving down Highway 72. She took a seat beside him, and they silently watched the gray Wednesday morning shift in the early, diffuse sunlight. “We’re at the end, aren’t we?” she asked him.

“Six weeks to the day,” Brian replied. “Williams’s deadline.”

Neither of them knew exactly what it meant. But something was going to happen today-something horrible, perhaps. They just had to figure out what it was. That was the only way they could stop it: by going back, back to the clues Williams had supplied them regarding Polly.

Polly is Deanna. Deanna is Polly.

When they had all showered, they decided to return to Cale Central. Even if Bethany Cavendish was a player-an actor-in this thing, she might be able to lead them somewhere they hadn’t been. The book was the key, Dennis offered. If they could understand the book, then they could understand it all. So it was decided. He would go in to talk to Bethany Cavendish this time, show her the book, and try to get an answer from her about what it was, what it meant.

They arrived before 8:00 a.m. School had yet to begin. Students were pulling into the parking lot in their converted cars, trucks that rode low to the ground and had been painted outrageous colors, sports cars that were blinding with chrome. Brian and Mary waited for Dennis outside, under that manic American flag. “What do you think about him?” Brian asked Mary.

“Him?”

“Dennis. You like him?”

“I dated him once,” she said. There was no reason to keep it from him now.

“I know,” Brian said.

They let that hang between them. Mary sat on the curb and Brian kicked pebbles around the parking lot. It was now 8:15. Dr. Kiseley’s lit class would have started by now back at Winchester. They would be discussing the book
City of Glass,
pondering on Quinn’s last days, talking about the symbolic meaning of the red notebook that the main character used to document his life. Existentialism and all that. The meaning of
real.
“To write it down is to make it become real,” Kiseley had told them. “What Quinn is doing is fighting off the idea of the interior. By writing in the red notebook, he is admitting that he is invested in facts and not the imagination. In this way, he is bringing into the world the details of his own demise.”

“I could tell by the way you two acted together,” Brian was saying. “It’s nothing. Don’t worry about it. We all have our own past. I don’t begrudge you for it.” He smiled, cuffed her on the arm playfully.

Mary looked away, her face hot. “It was…” She didn’t know what word to use.
Nothing
probably, but she was sure Brian would see through the lie.

Out of her periphery she saw two students leave the school grounds. They were walking briskly, their heads down, going toward the woods beside the school.
Playing hooky,
thought Mary. One of them had a shock of white-blond hair. When he turned, checking to see if anyone was following him, Mary recognized him immediately.

He was in one of the pictures at the Collinses’ house. One of the grandsons.

“I know that kid,” she told Brian.

He looked over, but the boys had already gone down the hill and were out of sight.

At first, she didn’t know what to think. But the longer they sat there, she began to wonder if this was not another test. Was Williams trying to tell them something else? Another plot twist, maybe?

She told Brian that she would be right back and jogged over to the edge of the woods. She looked into the dark trees, to the clearing that seemed to open up at the bottom of the hill, but she couldn’t see the boys. A light fog had descended, pulled down like a cloak through the tree line. Mary took a few steps into the woods, but she still couldn’t see the boys. “Hello?” she called.
It’s no use,
she thought.
They’re gone by now. All the way out to the highway.
She could hear I-64 out in the distance, the rock of those big trucks passing through Cale on their way to Indianapolis.

But then-a noise. Just off to her right.

Mary turned and saw something darting. Some presence. A boy, crouched and low.

“Are you there?” she called.

Again she saw something move, low to the ground. Then she saw him, just up ahead to her right. That white hair. Standing in the reeds of fog, the boy was like an apparition.

“What are you doing?” she called.

Nothing. Silence. The forest moved in the wind.

“Are you there?”

“What the fuck do you want, lady?” one of the boys asked.

“I just wanted to see if you knew anything about Polly.”

“Who the hell is Polly?”

Mary felt ashamed. It was getting to her now, all this chasing and uncovering. It was making her paranoid.

“Sorry,” she muttered, and she walked back out of the woods. Brian and Dennis were in the car when she got back. She slid into the front seat of the Lexus and they left Cale Central. On the service road that took them back to Highway 72 she saw him again. It was just him this time, the white-haired boy. He was standing on the shoulder of the road and watching the car pass. She was afraid to look in his eyes, afraid that she might see something that would make her want to go back and ask more questions.

“Bethany Cavendish is in on it,” Dennis announced. They were eating breakfast at a Denny’s near the high school. Mary had missed her lit class and now Dennis had missed his economics exam. It was becoming clear that they would all pay dearly for this little excursion. “She got all nervous. Started walking around the room, you know. Looking out the windows, like she was afraid someone might break in on us. She said that she didn’t know a thing about the book.”

“What do you mean?” Brian asked incredulously.

“She says that it had to be just a mistake. A printing malfunction.”

“Did you tell her about the book in Cale?”

“Of course. She said the same thing: printer malfunction. She said that the two books in DeLane and the one in Cale would have been shipped by the same company. Probably all the books in this part of the state would have the same glitch. But she was lying.” Dennis took a bite of his scrambled eggs. Mary was having toast (her appetite was almost nonexistent), and Brian wasn’t eating at all. Only Dennis seemed to have the composure to feed himself.

“What did she say when you asked her about Polly?”

“She told me the same thing she told you. That she didn’t really know anything about Polly. She said that Wendy and Star had left Cale about six months after Deanna disappeared, and now they were living somewhere near San Francisco. She knew there was a girl out in Bell City who looked like Deanna, but she just thought it had something to do with Star. Said that the man was a sleaze-ball. Scum.”

So they hadn’t found out anything more than they had yesterday. They weren’t necessarily back to square one, but they were close. Mary knew that they would have to return to Winchester in the afternoon, and if they returned without finding out what part Leonard Williams played in the Deanna Ward abduction, then why had they even come to Bell City and Cale in the first place?

“Do you think that girl you met at the kilns is still on campus, Brian?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I guess we could go back and find out. She wasn’t a student, because I looked her up. I asked some of the Dekes if they had seen me with her, but they were all drunk and couldn’t remember anything. She had just-
appeared
there. It’s like she was searching me out.”

They thought about that as Dennis read the newspaper at the table. When he came to the story in the Local section about Williams’s sudden departure, he read it aloud to them. They already knew everything in the story: that Williams had left before the semester ended, that Williams taught logic and philosophy courses at the school, that his office had been cleaned out. There was a statement by Dean Orman that read, “We are very concerned with these goings-on. We will get to the bottom of this. The first thing, of course, is to find out if Dr. Williams is well. Then we will get to the business of discovering why he chose to leave Winchester before the term was out.”

“Why did he leave?” Brian asked. He was drinking slowly from a glass of water, a few sips here and there. Mary noticed that he was as frazzled as she was, maybe even more so.

“You said it yourself,” Dennis said. “He left because he knew you all had gotten to Troy Hardings.”

“But Troy offered up the information about the book himself,” replied Mary. “It wasn’t like we were threatening him or anything. Well, actually Brian did threaten him. But that’s beside the point. He clearly wasn’t afraid of us. He could have just denied that the book was genuine, like Bethany Cavendish did. He could have just remained silent and not responded to our e-mails.”

“Maybe Williams and this Troy Hardings character were trying to tell us something,” Dennis tried. “By just disappearing like that, maybe they were trying to bring it to a head. They were trying to force our hand in some way. Trying to show us that the game was really just beginning.”

Mary thought,
The game.
Had the first five weeks of the course been simply a test, a sort of exhibition, for the real thing that was happening right now in Cale? How were Williams’s “clues” a part of this? She recalled that hanged man from the syllabus, and wondered who Williams imagined under the velvet hood. She thought about the red Honda Civic and the railroad tracks that the professor had strangely digitally imposed into the image. The house that had turned out to be a real house on During Street, the house where Deanna Ward lived before she disappeared. The dog, that black Labrador that had apparently belonged to Pig. And finally the U-Stor-It facility out by I-64 where Williams’s Polly had been kept.

What’s there? Mary wondered. What are we supposed to find? Something we aren’t seeing because we’re suddenly too close to the situation?

She put a couple of dollars down on the table and went to the bathroom. She washed her face and stood before the mirror, breathing deeply, trying to balance herself. She looked awful. Depleted and exhausted.
Horrible.

When she came out of the bathroom the kid was standing there. He had on a big coat, too heavy for this time of year, and his white hair was long and in his eyes. He had been younger in the photos she had seen: a school picture with his smile gapped by missing teeth, and then later, with his mother and father and younger siblings in a family shot.

“What do you want?” she asked.

The boy continued to look at her. He was sizing her up, trying to gauge her intent.

“That name you said before,” he said. “That girl.”