by David Bell
It turns out I did know the woman. She was Madeline.
“You left before the book signing,” I say.
“I don’t like crowds. And there were a lot of familiar faces there. I needed to be careful.”
“How did you get in here?”
“The basement. You should get a dead bolt down there.”
“It’s Gatewood. Most people don’t even lock their doors.”
“That’s a mistake,” she says. “You never know who will come in.”
It’s strange. When Madeline disappeared at the age of twenty-two, I was anguished. Scared. Confused. Devastated that someone so young could fall victim to a seemingly random and horrible crime. Her disappearance—and apparent death—during her senior year of college brought back a lot of feelings I’d been working to move past, feelings that lingered from the losses I’d unexpectedly suffered when my wife and son died. For weeks after Madeline disappeared, I wandered around in a haze. And so did my colleagues on campus and my students. We were all shocked.
But I don’t feel relief with Madeline sitting in my living room. Her reemergence is so abrupt, so disconcerting, that I scramble to think of ways to get her out of the house. If she doesn’t want my help, if she won’t let me call the police, then I’m not sure I want her here at all.
I don’t want her here because I know what she really wants.
“I told you I started reading this book earlier today,” she says. “And I haven’t stopped. I haven’t stopped even though I know every single thing that’s going to happen.”
CHAPTER THREE
MADELINE
SPRING, TWO YEARS EARLIER
Dubliners billed itself as an authentic Irish pub.
Madeline had never been to Ireland, had never been anywhere, really, but she felt certain the bar wasn’t close to authentic. Posters on the wall showed foamy crashing waves and lush green fields. Or else ads for Guinness. The bartender sometimes spoke with an accent, although he once told her he grew up two hours away in Lexington, Kentucky. And that was about it for authenticity.
But the students didn’t care about authenticity. The beer was cheap, and the pub was close enough to campus to walk.
Sometimes, when business was slow, the bartender didn’t bother to card. It didn’t matter to Madeline, who was twenty-two, or to her classmates in advanced fiction writing since everyone was a senior and old enough to drink legally. But it sure made Dubliners appealing to a lot of students, even though the place smelled like stale beer and fried food. And your shoes stuck to the floor pretty much everywhere you walked. Step-stick. Step-stick.
Dr. Nye—or “Connor” as he let them call him on those occasions when they all went out drinking—said anyone who was over twenty-one and wanted to go out for a beer should gather at Dubliners after their senior fiction-writing seminar. His treat. No student was going to pass up that chance. When professors offered to drink with students—and to pay—students showed up. Madeline had learned—from hard experience—there were professors she didn’t mind being around when they were drinking and professors she knew she needed to avoid when they were drinking.
Madeline ordered a pint of Harp and stood at the end of the bar, tapping her foot to the Lynyrd Skynyrd song a guy in a red flannel shirt had played on the jukebox. She had been hoping to speak with Dr. Nye after class anyway. No, not just hoped to speak with him. She needed to speak with him. She needed his advice. That was why she had come to Dubliners more than anything else. Not for the free beer—although she certainly didn’t mind that. But for his wisdom and knowledge.
Connor met her eye once but was surrounded by the three or four neediest students in the class. They were the ones who laughed loudest at his jokes, spent the most time in his office hours, wrote stories not because they wanted to write them but because they thought Connor would like them. Madeline felt certain he was smart enough to see through it. She gave him credit for being able to cut through the bullshit.
But she hung back, waiting. She wanted to talk to Dr. Nye, wanted to talk to him about her thesis.
She wanted to talk to him about so much more. But the thesis she’d turned in the day before was at the front of her mind. Almost the second she’d handed it over to him and walked out of his office, she regretted it.
She wished she hadn’t written about things that were so real and raw, even though that was exactly what Nye always told them to do.
But Madeline feared she’d been just a little too real and raw. . . .
And it was going to bite her in the ass. Hard. And she was doing what she always did, what she’d been taught to do since she was a child—look for the exit. Find the fastest way out. Don’t wait for trouble to pin you down.
No, she told herself. Try to stay for a change. Try not to run. . . .
Someone slipped up next to her, a guy she’d taken a few classes with over the years, Isaac Frank. Isaac wrote science fiction stories riddled with grammatical errors. Madeline wanted to pull her hair out when she read them. But he was a nice enough guy, someone she liked to talk to before class. Isaac was trying to convince his parents to pay for him to travel abroad over the summer before he went to graduate school. Not study abroad. Travel abroad. Travel. As in . . . just for fun. But Isaac had told her just the other day his parents were willing to pay for only three weeks of travel instead of the four he wanted. Madeline listened, pretending she could in any way relate to Isaac’s first-world problems.
She hoped summer plans weren’t on Isaac’s mind in Dubliners. He leaned in close to Madeline at the bar, sipping from a Guinness, and she decided if he started complaining about not going to Prague she was going to dump a beer on his head. She just couldn’t listen.
“Hey, Madeline,” he said.
“What’s up, Isaac?” she asked.
Madeline didn’t listen to Isaac’s response. She stared down the length of the bar where Connor stood with the sycophants. One of them, a sorority girl named Hannah, was going on and on about something, and Madeline watched Connor listening and occasionally smiling. But the smile looked forced. His mouth moved. His teeth showed. But his eyes remained flat.
“Should we go rescue Dr. Nye?” Madeline asked. “Hannah won’t shut up. She literally hasn’t taken a breath in five minutes.”
“He’s on, like, his fourth drink.”
“He’s a writer. What do you expect?”
“We’ve only been here an hour or so,” Isaac said.
She started tapping her index fingernail against her glass. Ping. Ping. Ping.
“Nervous much?” Isaac asked.
“What?”
“You seem kind of stressed. Or something.”
“I’m fine, Isaac.” She realized she’d snapped at him. And he looked like a hurt puppy. Isaac was clearly one of those guys who couldn’t handle a woman speaking harshly to him. “I’m sorry. No. I mean, I just turned my thesis in yesterday. It’s a novel.”
“Oh. Sweet. One step closer to graduation.”
“Yeah. Maybe. It’s pretty . . . Well, I put some stuff in there I don’t know about. I want to ask Nye about it.”
“Is it sex stuff? Nye doesn’t care about that.”
“Not sex,” Madeline said. “Just . . . Well, I think I want it back before he reads it. I might change it. Maybe write something different. Something less . . . real, I guess. I’m afraid Nye will think the wrong things about me. And other professors might get the wrong impression of me.”
“Really? He’s pretty chill.”
“Professors tend to stick together,” she said. “They’re like cops. You know? The blue wall?”
“They do that in the Mafia too. They call it omorta.”
“You mean omertà. That’s the code of silence. I read a book about it once.”
Isaac glanced at Nye. “Well, he looks pretty sad,” Isaac said.
&n
bsp; “Wouldn’t you if Hannah was babbling in your face?”
The music seemed to get louder. The TV showed the university’s basketball team running up and down the court, shooting and passing. It looked kind of pointless to Madeline, all the back and forth, back and forth. But it was Kentucky, and everyone in the damn state talked about basketball all year round. Even Isaac watched it, his face deadly serious, like he was viewing a documentary about World War II or some other major historical event. Had she heard someone say it was an important tournament? Something called the NIT? Was that a big deal?
“It’s not that,” Isaac said, eyes on the TV. “He’s sad because his wife and kid died. Tragically.”
Madeline wanted to sigh, but she held it in. She’d been corrected by professors before because she sighed when her classmates said something particularly stupid. The rumor had been going around as long as she’d been an English major that Dr. Nye’s wife and teenage son had died a few years earlier. Sometimes the story said they’d died in a car accident. Sometimes people said they’d been murdered. Once Madeline heard they’d both died when a neighbor’s dog went mad and attacked them in the backyard. When Nye had come home from work that day, so the story went, he found the dog standing over their mauled bodies, licking his bloody chops.
“That’s all bullshit, Isaac,” she said. “He looks sad because he wants to spend more time writing novels, and he can’t because he has to teach. He’s into the tortured-artist thing. It’s kind of appealing to be all sad and broody.”
Isaac’s lips spread across his face as he turned away from the TV. He looked like a condescending schoolteacher. “It’s not a rumor.” He sipped his beer and leaned his elbows on the bar. Isaac was a tall guy. Not overweight but kind of . . . doughy. He looked like he hadn’t been outside in two months. More like Dr. Hoffman, although obviously Hoffman was a lot older. And just thinking of Hoffman made her shiver and remember what she had to talk to Connor about.
And Isaac wasn’t like Dr. Nye. Or Dr. White. Guys who managed to stay fit even in middle age. Stay fit and look good.
“I Googled it one night and found an article,” Isaac said. “I guess Nye’s wife is—was—some kind of researcher. Like management consulting or something. She had to go to some conference up in Maine, and she took their son, who was, like, fifteen years old, with her. And while they were there . . . Well, it’s really kind of a freaky story.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Around ten o’clock, the students started to leave, dispersing into the cool early-spring night. Madeline was on her third beer, and when Isaac left, he offered her a ride because it was so dark. “Spring forward” had made the days longer—and cost her an hour of sleep—but not long enough.
“I’m good,” Madeline said. “Thanks.”
Isaac lingered, looking like he had something else to say.
“What?”
“Well, it’s just . . . I wouldn’t want Dr. Nye to know I told you that stuff about his family. He might think I’m talking shit about him, but I’m just repeating what I read online.”
“It’s cool, Isaac.” Madeline turned an imaginary key over her mouth. “I’m good at keeping secrets. Trust me.”
Isaac looked relieved and left Dubliners, no doubt to work on another grammatically incorrect story about an astronaut in the year 2347 having sex with a lusty robot.
Madeline checked her phone. Nothing. She felt relieved. She couldn’t deal with anyone trying to get in touch with her. She wanted to be left alone. She hoped that might finally be happening. Maybe things would blow over and calm down.
She told herself that—but life had taught her something different. If wishes were horses, Maddy girl, her mother used to say.
She wasn’t sure what she was going to do when she left Dubliners. She knew what she should do—homework. But after she’d had nearly three beers and no food, her mind wouldn’t be able to focus. If she tried to read or write, the words on the page might dance around like tiny hieroglyphs, mocking her with their refusal to form into anything sensible. And she’d been getting so little work done over the last week with everything on her mind.
Her eyes drifted up to the TV screen. For a moment, she felt curiosity about the result of the game, mild disappointment spreading over her when she saw that her school—Commonwealth University—was losing by five points with three minutes to play. She knew it was time to go when basketball started to get her emotionally engaged.
A stool scraped next to her.
She knew who it was before she turned. Connor Nye.
“You like basketball?” he asked.
“Not really. I don’t know what’s going on. Just a lot of running.”
“My son loved it,” he said. “Actually, my wife loved to watch it too. When we met in college, our first date was at a basketball game. Michigan against Purdue.”
Something tugged in Madeline’s chest. Loved. Past tense. A flush spread over her face, and it wasn’t from alcohol.
“But my son had just grown taller than me,” Nye said, “and I was having trouble beating him one-on-one.” He held a full pint of beer, and just as she looked over, the bartender placed a shot of whiskey in front of him. Connor nodded toward his glass. “Want one?”
“Sure. Why not?”
Connor pointed, and the bartender filled a shot glass for Madeline. She picked it up and said, “What are we drinking to?”
“How about to you turning in a draft of your thesis yesterday?”
“Here’s to it,” she said, and threw the shot back. A pleasant burn in her throat. Her eyes watered. She swallowed beer to chase the shot. She’d just crossed the Rubicon and tipped over from slightly buzzed to starting to get drunk. “Although, I wanted to talk to you about that. I’m a little nervous about it.”
“That’s not unusual.”
“It’s not?” she asked. “There are some things in there . . . things that are personal. And pretty real.”
“Sounds intriguing. I’ve read enough sexy robot stories for one lifetime.”
“I think I should take the thesis back. I think . . . it’s just too personal. In fact, I’m going to have to insist on getting it back.”
“Sounds like you have cold feet.”
“I have cold everything. I don’t want . . . It’s one thing for you to read it. But eventually there will be a whole committee. And these undergraduate-thesis defenses are open to the public. Sometimes a lot of people show up. Students and . . . other professors. So people, certain people, might think the worst of me when they hear about it. Am I making any sense?”
Madeline hated the pleading, defensive tone in her voice. After all—what did she have to apologize for? Once, in class, Dr. Nye had quoted Anne Lamott and told them the people in our lives shouldn’t be offended by what you write. “If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”
Madeline agreed with Nye on that. But the stuff in her thesis. The stuff she wrote down in detail. When she wrote it, she felt certain about it, certain she was writing down the truth. She still did. She just felt less certain about sharing it with the world.
With the community in the English Department. With others who might hear about it.
She felt her hand going up to her eyebrow and caught herself. She scratched her nose instead, hoping Dr. Nye hadn’t noticed. Had he seen her annoying tic in class?
“Is there something sordid in the book?” he asked.
“No. It’s kind of violent. A woman gets killed.”
“Lots of books are violent. I can handle it.”
“I know. . . .”
“I’m pretty surprised you turned in a mostly handwritten draft,” Connor said. “What happened? Did your feather quill run out of ink?”
“Yeah, I meant to tell you about that.” Connor had a way of jabbing at his students. He could playfully kid the
m but also let them know he disapproved. “I struggled to get this thesis going. I had about five thousand words done, and then my computer died. I mean, it just croaked. Nothing could be saved. It cost me a hundred dollars to go to the shop and have them tell me they couldn’t save it.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yeah. So I started writing by hand for a while. And . . . I don’t know. It felt more organic or something. It connected me more to the words and the rhythm. Does that make sense?”
“It does. Sure. But I don’t have to accept the thesis that way.”
Madeline felt sick when he said that. Her stomach dropped to the floor.
He went on. “A lot of professors wouldn’t take handwritten work at all. Maybe you should find a way to get it typed—”
“I can’t afford a new computer. I mean, I really can’t, not with all the loans and things I have. I need to bite the bullet and buy one, but the debt scares me. And my mom can’t help at all.” She looked away and swallowed hard. Why couldn’t she have a parent with enough money to pay for basic shit? “I have to write at night because I’m working forty hours a week at the grocery store to pay for school. Sometimes more than forty. I write during downtime at the job. By the time I’m off work, it’s dark. Sometimes you can be the only student in a lab at night, and that’s kind of weird.”
“You really don’t have another way to do it? Even a friend’s computer?”
“That can be tough. Everyone has their own work to do. Look, I don’t feel safe walking around campus at night. A friend of mine . . . Well, I don’t want to say too much. I kind of based the thesis on something that happened to my friend. That’s the violent part. And I’m worried it’s telling her story in a way I shouldn’t.”
“If it affected you, it’s your story too.”
He sounded so wise. So understanding. Would she ever be grown up enough to sound like she knew what she was talking about? To sound calm and certain?
“I guess so,” she said.
Nye looked like he’d decided something. “Okay,” he said, “I’ll accept this draft in handwritten form. You’re lucky it’s legible. But you’ll have to make it a Word file for the Honors College. You’ve got a couple of months for that since the defense will be in early May. Then you can graduate.”