Obedience (27 page)

“Did Star ever come to visit Polly?” Mary wondered.

“All the time. I think he was trying to understand Wendy’s old life. Her life before him, the one she’d had with Ed Orman at Winchester. That’s what started the whole thing, of course.”

“Started what?” Dennis asked. He was driving slowly, trying to take his time so that Williams could tell the whole story.

“Star came out to visit Polly two days after Deanna went missing,” Williams went on. “He sat down on the couch with her and asked her if she would be their daughter now that Deanna was gone. Star was distraught, out of his mind. He was calling Polly ‘Deanna.’ It was excruciating to watch, and it made me hate the son of a bitch who had taken Deanna.”

“In your…game,” Mary said, “you led us to believe Star did it. Why?”

“I needed to get you to the trailer and then to the Wobble Inn. The only way to get you to the trailer was through Bethany Cavendish’s story, and the role she played was of the distrustful aunt. She is Wendy Ward’s cousin, but her story about Star was trumped up. She knows what I know: that Ed Orman is the culprit here.”

Dennis asked, “When did you start researching Deanna Ward’s case?”

“I began what Jennifer came to call my ‘crusade’ to find Deanna’s abductor in ninety eighty-seven. Somehow Ed Orman’s people found out about it. That’s when they dove into my dissertation and found that I had borrowed from John Dawe Brown.
Everybody
borrows from time to time. Yet they planted the information in the paper, and it became a big deal. The word
plagiarism
was there beside my name, and in academic circles that does irreversible damage to your reputation.”

“Yet they kept you on,” Brian said. “Why?” He had moved as far away from Williams as possible, his body wedged against the back door of the Lexus. The professor’s story had not allayed Brian’s fears, Mary knew.

“I would have been forced out of Winchester completely if not for Dr. Lewis and some of my allies in the Philosophy Department. They were longtime enemies of Orman’s. I confided in one of them, Drew Peasant, and he became my research assistant on A Disappearance in the Fields. When they found out Drew was working for me, they got rid of him. At this point, I had tenure and he didn’t. I still think about him. I should have never brought him in to this mess, but at that time I didn’t know the lengths they would go to, to protect themselves.”

“The book is nonsense, though,” Brian said. “It’s blank. We thought it was…” He faltered.
A prop,
Mary thought.
That’s what he wanted to say.

“When the book was published,” Williams said, “Orman tried to have it censored. He wrote an anonymous letter to the Cale Star blasting me and my credibility. And of course he somehow got copies altered so that they were unreadable. Many people in Cale have never read the book because Ed has made it so that the library and the bookstore on 72 do not stock copies.”

“Oh, they stock them,” Brian said.

“Let me guess,” Williams added. “They’re mostly gibberish.”

Brian nodded.

“The book went out of print faster than most books even though it sold fairly well,” Williams said. “There’s no doubt in my mind that Ed was threatening my publisher. But at that point I couldn’t do much. I could just wait and see if he confessed to his role in Deanna Ward’s disappearance. I had implicated him in the book, even though I didn’t have the concrete information to accuse him outright.”

“But why would Ed Orman abduct Deanna?” asked Mary. They were entering DeLane and were only about ten minutes from the Winchester campus. Any information they wanted out of Williams they had better get now, because Mary had a feeling that he wasn’t going to be as receptive to their questions once he got home, with the presence of Ed Orman and Pig Stephens bearing down on him again.

“Ed was wildly in love with Wendy; he still had this burning passion for her. Wendy was beautiful. Just like Deanna and Polly. I think it started as a game, as something he was doing just because he felt like he could get away with it. This is the kind of man Ed Orman is. He is brutally egotistical. He believes that his brilliance is unmatched, that he can intimidate you until he gets what he wants.”

“He feels the same way about you,” Dennis said dryly.

“Yes. Well. Who do you believe?” Again, he gestured toward his scratched and bloody face. “It’s my theory-and this is what I was working on in the follow-up to A Disappearance in the Fields until I was ordered to stop-that Ed had Pig Stephens, this former cop who does all of Ed’s handiwork, kidnap Deanna.”

“Why would he do that?” asked Mary.

“To ruin Star and Wendy. He wanted to pin Deanna’s abduction on Star, the crazy father. Maybe, just maybe, Orman thought, Wendy would return to him if Star were out of the picture, or at least suspected of such an awful crime. Star had a massive criminal record from his time with the Creeps, so it wasn’t that much of a leap to suggest that he might have had a hand in his daughter’s disappearance.”

“But abducting your own daughter?” Mary said incredulously. She thought of Eli and Polly in Williams’s tale. She thought of how adamant Williams had been that day when she’d suggested Eli might be the culprit.

“It sounds crazy,” Williams said, “but look at it this way: here you have a thug, a man with a violent past who admitted to giving up a girl to possibly be murdered in New Mexico a few months before.”

It did make sense to Mary. There was no randomness, Williams had said. Most every crime is perpetrated by someone in the victim’s orbit. The police must have thought, It’s only logical that Star Ward is to blame.

“The police arrested Star,” Williams said, “and they took Polly back with them. We tried to tell them that Polly wasn’t the girl they wanted, but they wouldn’t listen. She looked so much like Deanna, and I think those cops wanted it to be Deanna so bad. Polly was confused. She was just a girl. Nineteen at the time. They were asking her questions and answering them for her. When they looked at her, she turned her face away because she didn’t want to be Deanna. She told me later that it was the way they were looking at her-as if they were trying to see this other girl, this lost girl. It was all illogical-the police drawing conclusions from evidence that just wasn’t there. It came out in the papers that Polly was asked if she was Deanna, and she said yes. That’s a lie. That never happened. They made a mistake, and it was never responsibly acknowledged.”

“But his plan backfired,” Mary said. “The charges against Star wouldn’t stick.”

“At first, it looked like Ed Orman got exactly what he wanted. The police were wrapped up in their theories about Star for weeks, and Ed had the husband out of the picture. But of course Star was released. They realized they had nothing on him. He and Wendy and their two boys left Cale for California six months later, and Ed fell into a great despondency. When he came out of it, another student was there to console him. This time she was a master’s student in behavioral psychology. Now she’s in the doctoral program at Winchester.”

“Elizabeth,” Dennis whispered.

“That’s right.”

Mary stared at Williams. A tiny vein pulsed on his neck. The gag had been knotted so tightly that they could only slide it down onto his throat, and now it was cinched there, dripping sweat.

“But you haven’t answered the question,” Mary said. Many holes had been filled in by Williams’s story, but the hole, the evidence that would clearly implicate Ed Orman, hadn’t been discussed at all. “Where is Deanna?”

“Ah,” said Williams. “The question of questions. In my book, I wanted to push forward the idea that Pig Stephens-an ex-cop, but still a horrifically violent man, a deviant who had been disgraced by the police department-had accidentally killed Deanna in a struggle and he and Ed Orman had been forced to hide her body. But my publisher wouldn’t let me go through with it. Not enough hard evidence, you see. Every time I got close to finding Deanna, she would disappear. This has been going on for nineteen years now, and I really am no closer to finding her than I was back in nineteen eighty-seven.”

They were on Montgomery Street now, driving into campus. It was a normal Wednesday at Winchester. The quarter was ending, and parents’ vehicles were pulled into the service entrances behind the dorms. It was 4:30 p.m. Soon, they would all be going home for the fall break and these questions would still be unanswered. Mary had just one more thing to ask Williams.

“Where’s Polly now?”

“She’s getting her degree in criminal justice at Indiana State, down in Terre Haute. It’s difficult, this forty-year-old woman sitting in a classroom with teenagers. Kids your age. She’s lived a tough life, as you would expect. But she got things turned around, and now she’s going to school full-time. She visited me on campus just a couple of weeks ago and she’s supposed to be coming back into town today or tomorrow for the break. She knows everything, of course. It was difficult to keep it from her after A Disappearance in the Fields was published, but she knows who her real father is, and she has her own suspicions about Ed Orman. He knows that he’s too old to stop us from living our lives now. He was against Jennifer and me moving onto campus a few years ago, but that passed.”

“And what about Wendy Ward?” Mary asked. “Does he still obsess over her?”

“I wouldn’t know. All I know is that he doesn’t interfere with Polly, thank God. He has resigned himself to the knowledge that he has a daughter, even though I know she must bring back terrible memories of what he did to Deanna and the cover-up that has gone on for years. That’s one reason he locks himself up in his office: he’s ashamed of his history at Winchester. I think it eats at him every day, and I intend to see to it that it continues to for the rest of his time at the university.”

“Locked away,” Dennis said, “writing his book on Milgram.”

“Did you know he and Milgram were never colleagues?” Williams said. “Not really.”

“How so?” Dennis asked.

“I mean-”

But they were on campus now, and he fell silent. They crept down Montgomery and hit the light at Pride Street, the boundary that separated the two hemispheres of Winchester.

“What are you going to do?” asked Mary. She was desperate for some conclusion, some kind of closure to the game. Finding Williams was not enough; it seemed incredibly cruel to leave Deanna still missing, and Ed Orman’s deception unchallenged.

“I’m going to do the same thing I’ve done for all these years,” Williams admitted. “I’m going to keep quiet. I’m not going to say anything. I’m going to teach Logic and Reasoning in the Winchester term, just like I always have, and I’m going to hope I have students who are as inquisitive as you three. Right now? Right now I’m going to return to my study to have a bourbon.” He paused. “I love my study. We added it on to the house a few years ago. Have you seen it, Mary?”

Mary turned to look at him. There was something in his eyes, a gleaming and almost imperceptible trace of secret information.

They fell silent, each of them gazing outside the car. It was finally fall. The sun that had been out earlier was gone behind a bank of clouds, and the air was crisp and sharp. The wind whistling through Mary’s cracked window had the bite of winter.

“Where to?” asked Dennis as the light turned green.

“Home,” replied Professor Williams.

So Dennis drove him to the house on Pride Street, and standing outside waiting for him was Polly’s adoptive mother, Jennifer Williams. She did not look anything like Della-this woman was plump and short, and her face contained a multitude of hurt lines. The professor got out of Dennis’s car and ran up the drive toward her, and they embraced as if they hadn’t seen each other in many, many years.

4 hours left

“So this is it?” asked Brian. They were in Mary’s room in Brown. Dennis had dropped them off with the promise that he would call them before he left campus, and now they were sitting at what Mary called her “dinner table,” which was really a card table with a frilly tablecloth draped over it, eating McDonald’s cheeseburgers.

“I guess so,” admitted Mary. She would be going back to Louisville this evening, and all of this would be left behind. Since her cell phone had apparently been out of range in Bell City, her mother had left five messages since Tuesday afternoon asking if she was coming home for the week. The last message bordered on hysteria, so she texted her mother a brief message: Been studying hard for exams. Everything’s still a go for tonight.

“It doesn’t seem right,” Brian said. “Orman shouldn’t be allowed to just get away scot-free.”

“If Williams’s story is true.”

Brian flinched. “You think he’s lying?”

“I think it’s difficult to trust him considering what he made us go through.”

“He said it himself, Mary. He was trying to protect himself. He was trying to lead us to the clues that would tell us what we needed to know about Ed Orman and his role in Deanna’s disappearance.”

She couldn’t get the feeling out of her mind, though-the feeling that Williams was somehow deceiving them again. It’s just your paranoia, she told herself. You’ve just freaked yourself out during the two days in Bell City and Cale.

After they ate, she walked Brian out. A moment passed between them before he walked away, the knowledge that whatever they had begun wasn’t over. He took her hand, and for a moment they stood on the quad, looking in each other’s eyes. They had shared something, something so significant that neither of them would ever forget it. “Be careful in Kentucky,” he told her. “We’ll see each other after the break and we could…” He didn’t finish the thought. He didn’t have to. He walked away from her, off toward Norris Hall, leaving her standing alone outside her building.

Back inside, Mary checked her e-mail. She had nineteen new messages. There were forwards from her mother, petitions and jokes and recipes that she found-the detritus of the Internet. There was a note from Dr. Kiseley, her lit professor, asking her where she had been this morning. She would have to e-mail Kiseley before she left and figure out how to get her final paper to her. There were four or five institutional messages from Dean Orman concerning the cancellation of Professor Williams’s Logic and Reasoning 204. Nothing else of significance.