Obedience

by Will Lavender

  They all stepped back and looked at the garage door. Mary’s breath caught in her throat, and she nearly choked again on the dust. The door had two giant red letters spray painted on the front:

  Dennis opened the door.

  Sitting inside the garage, at a small table, was Leonard Williams.

  He was sitting in a rolling chair that could have been the one from Seminary East. His hands were tied behind him. There was a typewriter on the table with a sheet of paper rolled onto the platen. “Professor Williams?” Mary asked. The man’s head was hung, and there was a dirty gag stuffed in his mouth. He didn’t look up at his students, but it was clear he was alive: he blinked away the sunlight when it fell through the open door on him.

  There was nothing in Mary’s mind but raw, coursing fear. Brian had her hand now and he was pulling her inside.

  They entered the garage. Williams was still looking at the floor. His eyes, however, were open and aware. Someone had assaulted him. He had a shiny knot under his right eye. He looked, Mary thought, more ashamed than anything.

  They approached Williams, but he did not acknowledge their presence. His eyes remained down, at the concrete floor. “The typewriter,” Dennis whispered. They made their way around the table and looked at the sheet of paper. When she saw what was written there, Mary’s knees buckled and Brian had to hold her upright. “I want to go home,” she said, although she didn’t even realize she was speaking aloud. It was just a string of words, a sort of notation, an expression of her fear. It was an involuntary reaction—nothing so much as her mouth sending out a distress signal for the mind that was locked up now, frozen with a kind of obliterating dread.

  For the, read the page. Over and over again, filling up the white sheet entirely until there was no white space.

  For the for the for the for the for the

  40

  8 hours left

  They untied Williams and got him to the car. He was mumbling, despondent. He had been beaten badly. His eye was swollen almost shut, and a couple of teeth were bloody and loose. Mary used her cell phone to dial 911, but they were so far removed from civilization that the call wouldn’t connect.

  As they were driving back toward campus, Williams began to speak. His words were like a bomb in the nervous silence of the car.

  “I set it all up,” he said weakly. His head was still down, his eyes trained on the floor. Mary thought he looked like a child who had been caught stealing candy from a store.

  “Set what up?” asked Dennis. They were passing through Cale, where they had spent the previous night. Mary didn’t know if it had all been worth it. She wondered, as she had six weeks ago, what Professor Williams’s role was in his own game. It was the last day of the quarter. The deadline. In three hours, at 6:00 p.m., when Logic and Reasoning 204 officially ended, would something happen, or would the time pass with no incident? Would it all turn out to be, in the end, just a puzzle? The beaten man next to her told her no.

  “The whole thing,” said Williams flatly. “The Collinses’ house. The detective. The party at the house on Pride Street. The bar owner at the tavern who led you to me. The little boy and the woman, Della, whom I hired to play my wife. My wife’s name is Jennifer, by the way. She wanted nothing to do with all this, so I had to bring in someone else to…play her role. We don’t have any children of our own. The call from the policeman that night to your room, Mary. Marco and the inn, of course. And the storage facility. But of course you weren’t supposed to find me in that garage. You were supposed to find…other things.”

  “What other things?” asked Mary.

  “Information. Facts. Evidence I found when writing my books.”

  “But the book is a fake. We saw it. It’s just those two words over and over again.”

  “That’s the work of my enemies,” he said.

  “Your enemies?” Dennis asked.

  “These are people who didn’t want that book to be seen by the people in Cale or Bell City. Didn’t want them to read about Deanna and Polly. So they censored me. My enemies—they have powerful friends. They can do these things. This is why I have to speak in code. This is why I have to create a puzzle.”

  “Who are they?” Mary wanted to know.

  Williams mumbled something. He looked down again at the floor and closed his eyes.

  “Talk to us, damnit!” shouted Brian. He was in the back with Williams, and he grabbed the man and shook him. Williams pulled away from Brian and stubbornly turned his gaze out the window.

  “Brian,” Mary said calmly.

  “What had you found out about Deanna Ward?” asked Dennis.

  Williams inhaled before he spoke. As always, his gestures were soft, unassuming, almost meaningless in their simplicity. “Five years ago, I started writing another book,” he told them. “I had gotten some new information from one of my contacts in Cale. It was solid stuff. As I was writing the book, I learned that I would not be asked back to Winchester. They were going to fire me if I continued on with what I knew. Well, I couldn’t lose my job. You can’t be disgraced like that in the academic profession. Word gets around. You don’t get hired again. So I ceased and desisted, and I put all my information in that storage garage in Bell City.”

  “Polly is your niece,” Mary said.

  “Yes. Jennifer and I raised her. We couldn’t have any children of our own, so in 1967, when a relative of Jennifer’s asked us if we could take this little girl, we jumped at the opportunity.”

  “Deanna’s father,” Mary went on. “He was seeing Polly. Sleeping with her.”

  “Laughable,” Williams said, looking up at her. He had a harrowing look on his face, as if he had seen the unspeakable and was just now trying to rationalize it all. “You all have done well in the class, but there are things that you still do not understand.”

  “Tell us, then,” Brian said. “Who put you in that garage?”

  “Pig Stephens,” Williams said. “They thought I knew too much. About Deanna Ward. They had heard from someone that the class was getting too specific. It used to just be a game, you know, an exercise in logic. But a couple of years ago I began to see the possibilities. If I could tell my students where my information was, and if they could find it, then I would be in the clear and the students would solve the crime and not me. It was a kind of cloaking device.”

  “But your enemies figured out what you were doing,” said Mary.

  “Yes. Somehow he found out about it and sent his henchman. Now they have the information I gathered, and there’s no doubt in my mind that it’s all floating out in the Thatch River by now.”

  “Who’s ‘he’?” asked Mary, but of course she already knew.

  “Orman,” said Williams. “Ed Orman. If anyone has the answers to this puzzle, it’s him. But if you get close to him…well, you see what happens.” Williams gestured toward his damaged right eye.

  “Did you send us that tape?” Brian asked. “The one with Milgram and the…those voices?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Williams whispered. He looked away, out the window to the bare Indiana landscape.

  “Why would he be afraid of the information you found?” Mary asked.

  Williams breathed in, steeled himself before he answered. “Ed Orman is Polly’s father.”

  The weight of Williams’s revelation nearly doubled Mary over. Of course, she thought. Ed Orman lied to us about Williams’s disappearance because he was afraid of where we were going. When Brian called him to complain about the class, that was his chance to take Williams out of the picture.

  “So what’s the connection to Deanna?” asked Brian.

  “She’s Polly’s half sister,” Williams said. “Why do you think they looked so much alike? A woman named Wendy Ward went to Winchester for a semester back in the midseventies. She studied under Ed Orman, and they had a thing. This was before he was a dean. He was a respected professor, one of the finest researchers the university had. He had worked with Stanley Milgram
at Yale, of course. That was his claim to fame. He didn’t want to sully his reputation, you see, and so he kept the affair secret. A man of his stature, admitting an affair with a student? A townie at that? It would have been professional suicide.”

  Mary said, “But he couldn’t hide the fact that she was pregnant.”

  “When Wendy got pregnant with Polly, he had it arranged so she would go back to Cale. I don’t know how he got her to stay quiet, but I assume he paid her a good deal of money. A year later, Wendy met Star, this biker who was the complete opposite of Ed Orman, and they had their first child together, Deanna. It was clear they couldn’t take care of two young children, so Star called a relative to ask her if she would be interested in ‘helping him out,’ as he put it.”

  “Jennifer,” Mary said.

  “Yes. My wife is a cousin of Star’s. I was just finishing my PhD at Tulane and was looking for a job. Jennifer ran the idea by me, and it was intriguing. I interviewed at Winchester and got the job. Ed was against my hiring, of course, but he had no clout at the time. By the time he moved up into his perch at Carnegie, I had written a book and was tenured. Of course, he even tried to take that from me…”

  The plagiarism incident, thought Mary. Ed Orman tried to frame him.

  “At the beginning of my career I was a visiting lecturer, making very little money. All Jennifer and I could afford was the trailer out in Bell City. I drove the hour and a half from Bell City to DeLane to teach. Wendy wanted Polly far away from Orman, anyway. At a remove. She was afraid of him for some reason. At that point, you see, I didn’t know what I do now about the man. I thought Polly was just the result of an unfortunate fling, something that happened between two consenting adults. I couldn’t have been more wrong.”

  “What did Ed Orman think about your role in Polly’s life?” Mary asked.

  “He distrusted me. He was paranoid, constantly worried that I would blow his cover and tell someone who Polly really was. But of course I didn’t want to sacrifice my relationship with Polly. For all she knew, we were her parents. She was just a little over one when we adopted her, and she never knew anything else but Jennifer and me.”

  Dennis said, “It must have been awful on you at Winchester.”

  “Of course,” Williams admitted wearily. “I was living a lie. I never talked about Polly. I couldn’t. Ed had a muzzle on me. It sent me into a dark depression. Finally, we were able to get away from it. I was offered a job in Strasburg, and in nineteen ninety I taught in France. But when that was over, I returned to Bell City and resumed my daily commute to Winchester. To my lie of a life. I wanted to be open about my family, to not live in this secrecy, but of course Wendy and Star would have none of it for fear of Orman.”

  “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.”