“And then he came back. He came back and he took the blindfold off and I saw that I was in this garage. There was a motorcycle there, all these stray parts laying around. He said that he would kill me if I told anyone what he had done. He said…” She wept then, just a little jagged sob, into her hands.
“I don’t want my husband to know,” she told Brian. “He’ll kill him if he finds out. He’ll just murder him.” She flicked her wrist toward a steep side road that spurred off Pride Street, and they sat in front of her house, the engine running. All the lights were on inside, and apparently the old man was waiting inside. Brian felt immovable, heavy with fear. He managed to ask if she needed help getting inside. “It’s okay,” she whispered. She got out of the truck and closed the door behind her. Through the open window she thanked him. The night was harsh, too dark somehow. Elizabeth Orman’s black, ragged dress disappeared up the walk and then she appeared again when the front door opened, inside the slice of light from the living room. Then she was gone.
24
Mary was sleeping when Brian knocked on her door. It had to be after eleven o’clock at night, maybe later. She bolted upright, banging her head on the bar that ran beneath the top bed. (She had kept the bunks because it was a school rule to have bunk beds in every dorm room. “Just in case,” one of the deans had told her indignantly, “something happens and you have to take on a mate.”)
She found Brian pacing nervously in the hall. “Something’s happened,” he told her when she opened the door.
Inside, she made him some of the cheap Lipton tea that she drank. He didn’t touch it. His attention was elsewhere. He wouldn’t sit for long, even though she had pulled up a chair for him. All he could do was walk, pace the room, and shake his head as if to clear it of unwanted thoughts.
“First,” he said. “Williams wrote a book about that girl, the one that detective told us about. Deanna.”
“What?”
“Yeah,” said Brian. “But here’s the interesting part.” Brian took the book out of his bag and handed it to Mary. He handled it as if it were electric, as if the thing held some deadly power. The cover of A Disappearance in the Fields showed a house bordering cornfields and a pitch-black, ominous sky. It was written by Leon Williams.
“Look in it,” he said. “Flip through it.”
She did.
As the pages crept across her thumb, she felt her heart pattering with the same uneven, clipped rhythm as it had earlier in the day, when she was close to finding Polly.
There were only sentences on the first few pages. The rest of the pages were nonsense, two words appearing back to back for the entirety of the book: for the. Page after page of those two words: for the for the for the for the.
“Why?” was all she could say.
“I don’t know,” Brian admitted.
“Could be a mistake. Could be that the publisher made an error.”
“I thought of that. So I drove all the way out to Cale Community College. They were closed. Had to beg the reference librarian to let me in. Same thing in that book. A few pages of text and then”—he flipped through the book as Mary had done, marveling at the thing—“this. Two books with mistakes this severe? No way.”
“What does it mean, Brian?”
“I think it’s Williams,” he said. “I think he’s doing this. He’s trying to see how far we’ll go with it. Trying to lead us off track. It’s all part of the class.”
Mary thought about that explanation. “But,” she told him, “the class ended.”
“What?”
“I figured it out. Williams said something about a storage facility, and I remembered one of the earlier clues. It’s Pig. Pig has Polly.”
Brian looked distraught, as if he could not quite understand what she had just told him.
“There’s one other thing, though,” she said.
“What is it?”
“It’s just that—”
“Tell me, Mary.”
“It’s just that it was so easy. It was like Williams wanted us to have the answer. After all this, after all these games, why would he just tell us the answer?”
“Maybe it wasn’t the answer,” Brian said.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean maybe there’s more. Maybe there’s a whole other level to this thing.”
Mary considered that. Her tea steamed in her face, and she kept her mug there, feeling the warmth on her eyes.
“But you could tell,” she said. “You could tell that I had cracked it, Brian. The way he talked. The way he walked out of the room. It was like he was…like he was shocked.”
“You said it yourself, Mary,” Brian urged. “You said that it didn’t feel right. It doesn’t to me either. What about this girl, Deanna Ward? What about his book? What parts do they play?”
“Did you know that his wife wrote me a note? Saying that she wasn’t—that none of it was real?”
“A note?”
“At the party Sunday night.”
“You went to the party?”
“Yes,” Mary said. She felt herself blush; she was ashamed for not having told him. “She was trying to tell me something, Brian,” she continued. “She was trying to get me involved, and I didn’t listen to her. I thought it was all part of the hoax. But now…now I don’t know.”
Again, she was beginning to feel the familiar uneasiness that she had felt all along. She was beginning to slip back into it, like Quinn with Stillman in City of Glass, and no matter how she fought it now it was coming on, forcing her to rethink all that she had believed to be true just seven hours earlier.
“What do we do?” she asked him.
“We’ve got to stop the class. It’s madness that he’s been allowed to go on this long anyway.”
“Dean Orman,” she said. “We go to his office tomorrow morning and tell him what we know. We show him the book.”
Brian said nothing. She felt in his silence something else, some other pressing issue that he wanted to tell her but hadn’t yet.
“What, Brian?” she prodded him.
Brian sat down across from her. She pulled two folding chairs up to the card table she used to eat her dinner when she cooked in Brown. He didn’t sit so much as he crashed down, the chair creaking a little under him. He exhaled loudly and rubbed his face with both hands as if to wipe away some of what he had seen. “Orman’s wife,” he said. “Elizabeth? I picked her up tonight in the bushes down by the Thatch River. She’d been beaten by someone.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“As a heart attack. Listen, she told me not to tell anyone. She said Orman would kill the guy if I told. So we have to keep that quiet until I can figure out something else. I really don’t think—Mary, I don’t think that was part of the game. I think she was telling the truth. She looked awful.”
“Oh God,” Mary said. She felt tears in her eyes, the heat of anxiety in the pit of her stomach. She closed her eyes and tried to will herself not to cry. “Oh no. Oh God.”
“Mary,” Brian said gently. “Here.” And then his arm was around her. They were hugging each other, but strangely there was nothing romantic about it. It was just something you did, a healing act. She felt his heat and she stayed there in his chest until he pulled away, and when she was standing up on her own she didn’t regret what she’d done.
He lay on the top bunk and she took the bottom. Mary knew that he wasn’t sleeping by his uneven breath, by the way he could not be still. Like him, her rest was labored, erratic. “Brian,” she said. It was late, sometime after midnight. A siren passed outside, screamed down Pride Street. “Did you know that Williams has an assistant?”
25
They found Troy in the online campus directory. Beside his name they saw the familiar lightning bolt, which meant that he was online. “Let’s e-mail him,” Brian said.
“You mean now?”
“Hell yeah, now. I want to see what he knows.”
Slowly, still pacing the room
, Brian dictated the message to Mary.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: Professor Williams
Troy,
We found Williams’s book, A Disappearance in the Fields. A very fine book. A masterpiece. We were wondering—did Williams write that himself, or did he have help from someone in the Philosophy Department? By the way, it was Pig. I guess you know that by now.
M
They waited. Mary refreshed her screen a few times, hoping that Troy would get the e-mail and respond to it immediately. Brian made himself another mug of tea in the microwave. Down on the quad, a fire burned—the every-Monday bonfire of the Delta girls, who were notorious for showing up to their early classes smelling of smoke and with their hands stained with soot.
“Maybe he’s working on a paper,” Brian said.
Mary felt the first signs of exhaustion coming on. It descended on her suddenly, pulling her down toward the floor. If she could just lie down, if she could just—
“Mary.” Brian was pushing her shoulder, waking her. She looked at him. Blinked. He pointed at the screen, and she saw a message from Troy in her in-box.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: Belated Congratulations
M,
Congrats on the solve! I solved the one in the spring of ’04, and it was a great moment. They were all talking about it today in the department. Leonard thought he was going to fool you all this time, but I guess not.
And yes, I have read Leonard’s book. I’m not into true crime, but A Disappearance… is one of the classics of that genre. A shame it never got the recognition it deserved. That girl, Deanna Ward, she’s still missing, you know. Leonard thought he got some new leads a few years ago, but they turned out to be dead ends.
All the best,
Troy
“Why would he lie?” Brian asked.
“Why is anyone lying? Why is the woman at the high school lying, making up a story about a fake book? It’s part of the game, Brian. Obviously Troy is playing it, too.” She still felt the buzz of sleep in her head, that flagging sensation of late-night fatigue.
“Ask him,” Brian said.
“What are you talking about?”
“I mean, ask him. Tell him that the book’s a fake. See what he says.”
Mary would have never done it had she not been drunk with fatigue. She had spent her life sidestepping such confrontations, but tonight she was feeling bold, ready to tear down Williams’s game and get to the heart of this thing that had been plaguing her for the last month.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: One More Thing
Troy,
The book’s a fake. A friend and I have secured two copies, and both of them have text on exactly twenty-five pages, an introduction by “Leon Williams,” and then nothing for the rest of the book. When we Google A Disappearance in the Fields, we get nothing. No Amazon listing, nothing in the Library of Congress database. Winchester University Press hasn’t published anything for the last twenty-five years. We want to know exactly what this is and we want it to stop. You and Williams are playing a dangerous game.
M.
Now she felt sped up, her senses awake and aware and her heart mashing through her chest. Brian was pacing again. Outside, the orange flames of the Deltas’ fire licked up toward the sky. Mary stared at the screen. She refreshed. Nothing. She drummed her fingers, all the nails bitten to the quick, on her desk. Refreshed again. Nothing. Where was he? Maybe they had scared him off. Maybe they had driven him away. Was it possible that Troy was calling Williams right now and asking what he should do? She expected a call from the “campus police” any minute, another admonition to stop what she was doing. Maybe—
Another message appeared in her box.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: Re: One More Thing
M.,
You and your “friend” don’t know what you are getting into here.
Troy
Upon reading it, Brian murmured, “Fuck him,” under his breath. With some force, he took the mouse from Mary and clicked Compose. Then he began to type.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: The Game
Troy,
Apparently you don’t understand. What’s going on here is a criminal enterprise. We have spoken to a woman from Cale High School who has told us the story about Deanna Ward. Leonard Williams has brought in a man impersonating a former police officer, and that man told the class a story about the same girl. Now we have found a book about that girl that was apparently “written” by this Leon character, and the book is a fake. We have already contacted Dean Orman, and he has personally told us that he is keeping Williams on a “short leash.” His words. You all do not seem to understand the complexity of this thing. You are dealing with real people, real events, and it doesn’t seem to faze you one bit. Now, I suggest you tell us what you know before I come over to Perkins Hall.
It took only a matter of minutes for the next message to appear in her box.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: Re: The Game
M. (or whomever),
I assume that I am not speaking to Mary Butler anymore. It’s not the most feminine thing to do, threatening to beat someone up at 12:15 a.m. Anyway. As for your concerns:
This is not a “game,” as you seem to think. What’s happening now is bigger than anything you have ever experienced before. Suffice it to say that you or your girlfriend have NOTHING to do with any of this. You are just bystanders, mere extras. You will be used when your time comes, but do not think for one moment that you have any central role in this. Don’t fool yourselves. You are simply being played right now, and when these six weeks are over you will go back to your lonely, simple lives as college students. You say, “You all do not seem to understand the complexity of this thing.” No, it is YOU who do not understand the complexity of this. But you soon will.
As for Dean Orman, we are not the least worried about him. We have—how shall I say it—dominion over the dean.
Good night.
Troy
They both sat, staring at the monitor. Neither of them quite believed what they had just read. What was this “happening” that Troy had referred to, Mary wondered. But no sooner had she asked the question than Troy’s lightning bolt disappeared, signaling that he was offline.
Back in their beds again, Mary asked Brian, “Do you think we’re in danger?”
At first he didn’t answer. And then he said, “I don’t know what to think anymore.”
According to the clock, it was after 3:30 a.m. by the time she went to sleep. She knew that Brian was awake because he was still tossing above her on the top bunk, and even though she was afraid she closed her eyes and an impenetrable weight closed in over her. The last thing she thought was, What if Brian is in on it?
26
Mary walked into Seminary East that Wednesday expecting to review for the exam that Williams was giving next week.
But Williams was late. As they waited, a few students talked about their other classes or gossiped about the goings-on around campus. Dennis Flaherty opened his briefcase and took out his economics text and began to highlight a chapter. The girl beside Mary filed her nails. Brian was still boycotting the class, and his back-row seat remained empty.
Five minutes passed, and there was discussion about how long they should give Williams before they abandoned the classroom. “Knowing Williams,” someone said, “he’s scheduled a field trip and hasn’t told anyone.” They all had a laugh over that. But Mary was concerned. She could not help but wonder if her and Brian’s discussion with Troy Hardings had something to do with the professor’s lateness.
&nbs
p; At 4:20 p.m., Dean Orman walked into the room. As always, he was overdressed, with his three-piece suit and Cole Haan loafers. The wind had ripped him apart; his orange hair was disheveled and the ridiculous flower he wore in his lapel was almost shredded to nothing.
Orman took Williams’s place at the podium. He looked small up there, tiny. He sighed, as if he were about to deliver some devastating piece of news to the class. Mary could not help but think of the man’s wife and what Brian had said about her, and she wondered if Dean Orman had found out about what had happened to her.
“As a dean,” Orman began, “it’s never easy to inform a class that something will…impede the process of learning. ‘In delay there lies no plenty,’ as Shakespeare said. But what’s done is done, and it is now my duty to inform you about what has happened.”
Orman steeled himself. Mary thought, Williams is dead. They’ve killed him. But she had no earthly idea about who “they” might be, nor could she summon in her mind any possible situation that would pit Williams as the victim in this whole thing.
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