He approached the house, and as he did something caught his eye in the distance. It was the Seminary Building looming over the evergreen trees just across Loquax Avenue. The lights were on up there in Seminary East.
Why the hell would the lights be on? Brian wondered.
He went around to the side of Williams’s house to get a better look. Yes, they were definitely on. He saw them on the east side of the building as well. And was that—
He squinted to see.
There were people up there. A whole crowd of them. They were sitting in the student desks, and someone was at the podium addressing them. But he couldn’t see who it was. The side of the building obscured his vision.
At that point Brian knew.
He knew where he needed to go.
53
“I’m glad you made it,” Elizabeth Orman said to Mary. “We were worried there for a bit.” She gestured at the crowded room. There were perhaps twenty people there. Some stood against the wall, but most sat at the desks. They, too, were smiling at Mary. “And I assume you know these people,” Elizabeth said. “I guess no introductions are necessary.”
“No,” Mary managed, her voice hollow and ruined.
No introductions at all. In fact, back in the back corner, Mary recognized the boy they’d taken to the park, the boy called Paul. When he saw her looking at him, he waved.
“What is this?” Mary asked.
“This is the Polly Experiment.” Mary looked at Elizabeth Orman. The woman was in a black dress, different from the one she’d been wearing earlier. Her hair was perfect, her jewelry flashed in the fluorescent light. She had been preparing for this, Mary knew. This was her big night.
“What are you talking about?” Mary was bracing herself against the wall, the crowded room reeling around her.
“It’s my dissertation,” Elizabeth said. “I’m a PhD student in behavioral psychology, and you and Brian House have been my subjects.”
“You were performing a test on us?” Mary asked.
“Not on you, no,” Elizabeth said. “Not at all. I was using you to test certain results. Certain hypotheses. For instance: Did you know that a human being cares for a person that they’ve never even met? Did you know that a human being will go out of her or his way to save this hypothetical person given the right circumstances? If a human being feels that another is in danger, then that human being will ‘care for’ this other person in a profound, utterly human manner.”
“But not always.” It was a man’s voice. He was somewhere in the middle of the room, and when he stood up Mary gasped.
Troy Hardings.
He was dressed in a suit. It was silk, Mary saw: the light glinted off it when he moved. The facial hair was gone, the smirk had been replaced by a rigid smile. He looked completely professional, like a businessman—or perhaps someone acting like a businessman, Mary reminded herself.
“This is Dr. Troy Hardings,” Elizabeth Orman said. “He was my faculty adviser for this project.”
“To register the impact of this study, we have to remember Kitty Genovese,” Hardings said. “We have to remember the so-called bystander effect. What the Polly Experiment proves is that human beings are more apt to help a potential victim, an assumed victim, than they are if they, say, saw a woman being stabbed below their window at night.”
“Deanna,” Mary said weakly.
“Yes,” Elizabeth Orman replied. “Deanna Ward was completely fabricated. A lot of things in the Polly Experiment were fabricated. Or ‘exaggerated,’ as Troy liked to say. The night Brian saw me beside the road, for example. That was a ruse to pull in Brian. We thought he might be straying, so we found the perfect method of bringing him back. And the day you found Troy in the office. That was all done on the fly—we had no idea that you were coming up. We had literally nailed Leonard’s name to the door five minutes earlier.”
“And these people?” Mary asked. She closed her eyes. She couldn’t look at them, couldn’t turn to face the crowd. It was not embarrassment that she felt, not shame or guilt. It was fear: fear that there was another twist in the game coming, another misdirection. Mary didn’t know if she could handle it. Not now.
“We hired them to play roles,” Elizabeth explained. “They all did a beautiful job. And of course you know who we hired to play the part of your professor.”
Leonard Williams stood up from his chair and nodded. “In real life he’s in a theater troupe here in DeLane. His stage name is Mike Williams. And he was often disguised, so there was no way you could have uncovered him.” Mary thought about the first time she’d seen him, of the acne pits on his face. Makeup, she knew now.
There was a pause, a moment where nobody spoke. Then Williams approached Mary. He was smiling, trying to disarm her with his charm. In an instant he was beside her, putting his hand on her shoulder. “Mary,” he said softly.
And then something happened.
54
Brian crept slowly onto the floor where Seminary East was. The door was open, and yellow light spilled out and bathed half the hallway. He heard a woman’s voice coming from inside, but because he was sliding along the wall he couldn’t see anyone in the room.
“In real life he’s in a theater troupe here in DeLane,” the woman said.
And then another voice. This second voice was very low and weak, barely discernible. “Mary,” it said. And he did discern it: it was Leonard Williams.
Brian moved faster down the hall, his hand on the gun in his pocket. He had turned it now so that his finger was on the trigger.
When he stepped inside his knees almost buckled. He almost pitched forward into the crowd, but somehow he maintained his balance and stood, staring at them.
They were all there. All the actors. Marco, the Collinses, the boy from the park named Paul. Bethany Cavendish from the high school. The waitresses they’d met in Bell City. Even Dean Orman, sitting toward the front and wearing his fedora. All of them were here, waiting for him.
And there, leaning against the back wall, was the girl from the kilns. She’d pulled her hair back. She looked very young, thirty or so, and she was staring at him in a way that was so sickening, so fucking sickening.
“Polly,” he said.
Ashamed, the girl looked down at the floor.
“Brian,” someone said to his left.
When he turned he saw not Elizabeth Orman, who had spoken to him, but Leonard Williams.
Williams’s hand was on Mary’s arm. He was—was he pulling on her? Pulling her toward him?
“Brian,” Elizabeth said again from the front of the class.
But he paid no attention. Williams was staring at Brian so oddly, so coldly that Brian knew he was trying to impart some information. The professor’s gaze said something, it spoke of something awful.
What? Brian mouthed.
But Williams still stared at him, his eyes hooded, his hand still tight on Mary’s shoulder. She looked shocked and terrified, as if she were in tremendous pain. Did Williams’s mouth move? Did he say some word, reveal something?
What the fuck do you want? Brian mouthed. Let her go!
“Brian, we want you to know that this began during your freshman years,” Elizabeth Orman said. But Brian already had the Thing out of his pocket and he was aiming it at Leonard Williams.
55
When Williams released his grip on Mary’s arm and fell backward onto the desk, coming to rest right in front of Edna Collins, everyone laughed. They thought it was part of the game, another trick. Another wrinkle thrown in the narrative.
But Mary knew better. She saw Brian’s hand, saw through the wispy smoke that he was holding a gun. A gun that had just been fired.
The atmosphere changed around her. It became charged; the whole room dimmed as if a fuse had blown somewhere. The dog tore away from the man he had been kneeling beside, the man in the baseball cap, and ran out of the room.
At that point everyone moved.
Dean Orman was the first to Will
iams. “Get an ambulance!” he shouted.
A couple of the other men collapsed on Williams. It was all moving fast, so fast. They were tearing off his shirt. They were slapping him, trying to keep him awake.
And to her right Brian was moving. He was not trying to escape, but rather he was coming into the room, toward the frantic throng of actors and actresses.
He was walking toward Elizabeth Orman with the gun.
“Brian,” Mary said softly.
56
Mary said his name, and he stopped.
That movement—the stopping, the turning around to face her—was what allowed the man in the Red Sox cap to reach him.
“Stop,” the man said. He was dressed strangely, Brian saw. His jacket had been zipped high and the cap had been pulled down low so that his face was obscured. The dog he’d had beside him, the black Lab, had run out of the room. The man held the snapped leash limply in his right hand.
“I couldn’t,” Brian said to this man, this stranger. “I just couldn’t let him continue hurting us.”
“I know, I know,” the man said. “But put the gun down and we’ll figure it all out.” His voice was soothing, familiar.
Suddenly, Brian knew who he was.
Brian reached up and unzipped the man’s jacket and revealed Dennis Flaherty.
57
Dennis took the gun away from Brian and put it on the table. Mary was so close to Dennis that he could hear her voice. “Why?” she said.
“Let’s talk about this later, Mary,” he said. He was holding Brian by the shoulders. Both boys looked vulnerable, weak, as if they had stepped into a nightmare that they couldn’t wake up from.
Dennis took a few steps toward where Williams lay, but he couldn’t get through to the man. Mary went around to the other side and found her way to him. They had him on the floor, and she could see by his pallor that he was dead. He was gray and still. She knelt and touched his hand, and he was unresponsive to her touch. “Professor,” she whispered. Nothing. The man who had played Marco was performing CPR, and all the actors and actresses were watching passively now. The air had been taken out of the room. They had finally reached the end.
58
Some time later, after Marco had stopped trying to save Williams, after some of the actors and actresses had left the room to retch in the hallway, Mary looked at Dennis. She didn’t have to say anything: he knew what she needed him to say.
He took a deep breath. “I was intrigued. When I figured it out, I thought it was so brilliant. A real-life behavior experiment, you know. So I joined them. They sent me to Cale and Bell City. I was their emissary. I made all the phone calls so they could track us. I called the Collinses beforehand; I called the diner from the store where we stopped to get directions. I went in to speak to Bethany Cavendish this morning and we sent out Paul. They needed someone to help them, and so I did. And there was also…” Dennis trailed off.
“Her,” Mary said.
“Excuse me?”
“You wanted to be near Elizabeth.” It was Brian. His head was leaned back against the wall, and Dennis still held him by the shoulders. Mary knew that if Brian wanted to break free he could, but he was resigned to this now. He had conceded defeat.
“That’s absurd,” Dennis said, his voice nearly a whisper. “I was going to say that there was also my father. How I wanted to be like him, more ‘serious-minded,’ as he liked to say. More academic. More worthwhile.” But Mary could see that was also a lie. The truth was that Dennis’s part in the study had, in fact, everything to do with Elizabeth Orman and little to do with his interest in the science or with his father.
“How pathetic,” she said to him. Dennis didn’t respond, and in that silence she saw that in some twisted way he agreed with her.
“No,” Dennis said. “It had nothing to do with her. Not after I got involved with it. Not after I started talking to Leonard and Troy Hardings. It became a—a purely academic thing. I began to see what my father saw. The proof opening up, the answer revealing itself. The study was so perfect, so mathematical.”
“Except you forgot one thing,” Mary said.
“What’s that?” Dennis asked.
“The human element. It’s what you always forget, Dennis. That your actions mean something to other people. That what you do has consequences.”
She looked down and caught Brian’s gaze, and he simply shook his head. His face revealed the gravity of his mistake. Tears streamed down his face, and Mary noticed that his hand, the hand that had held the gun, was trembling slightly.
Then Mary was being led away from them, into the crowd of people. Soon she was in the back of the room with Edna Collins beside her, and through the mass of people she saw the events of Seminary East unfold: Elizabeth Orman sat on the rolling chair and buried her head in her hands; Troy Hardings came to Elizabeth and stroked her hair, and Mary saw what he was saying to her by reading his lips: “It will be okay” the ambulance arrived, the stretcher was rolled in, and they took Leonard Williams away; the word “dead” began to ripple through the room. Then, much later, when only ten or twelve of them remained, a detective came in to talk to her. He was wearing a flannel jacket and had a mustache. He could have been an actor for all Mary knew, but she was too exhausted to care.
“What’s going on here?” he asked, and Mary told him what she knew.
59
Mary Butler had begun to pick up the pieces of her life.
She was back in Kentucky and planning to enroll at another university next fall. She had answered question upon question about her role in Elizabeth Orman’s study. It was decided, finally, that she didn’t know what Brian House had been planning. It was also decided, by a faceless ethics committee put together by Winchester University, that the mistakes that had occurred in Elizabeth Orman’s Polly Experiment were completely happenstance. There was no breach of ethics, the committee found, and Elizabeth was allowed to continue her studies at Winchester.
None of this mattered now to Mary except for Brian’s fate. She had moved on. It had taken her a while, of course. She had spent three or four dark weeks in her parents’ home, sleeping between those bouts of questions. She thought of Brian often. He was awaiting trial in DeLane, and the district attorney was planning to charge him with first-degree manslaughter. Mary had been subpoenaed, and would testify at the pretrial in two weeks. It would take no preparation. She had memorized the story by now; she knew it so well that she could recite it with her eyes closed.
She took walks with her mother. She cooked dinner for her parents. She tried to regain some normalcy. But it wasn’t easy. She had, once again, trusted too much and had been hurt because of that trust.
Dennis had been dismissed from school. He had been Elizabeth’s and Troy Hardings’ patsy after all. The school had uncovered his relationship with Elizabeth, and they had ruled that he had an “unhealthy obsession with the doctoral candidate and her work.” Mary knew that this was not the case; Dennis had told her the truth in Seminary East that night. He took the fall for Elizabeth, and Mary saw something in that: he still loved Elizabeth. Perhaps she had seduced him into the study, perhaps she had stuck the knife in his back and twisted it, but he could not give her up. Poor Dennis. He called Mary one night and simply sat on the other end of the line, weeping.
Williams, of course, was dead by the time he reached the DeLane Baptist Hospital. One shot to the gut opened him up, destroyed his insides. They found cancer there, Mary heard, and it had been terminal. Eating him away in there, destroying him. She didn’t know if that was true or not. She wanted it to be.
Only one question remained: Who had sent the videotape of the Milgram experiments?
Mary had a feeling that she knew, and one day in the middle of winter she e-mailed him to test her theory.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: Milgram
Thank you for trying to warn us, Dean Orman.
It
took him only ten minutes to respond.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Milgram
I am so sorry. I told Elizabeth that it was going too far, that things were breaking down. I sent the videotape as an object lesson. They, as you know, got ahold of it. Thus the audio at the end, the voices of Hardings and a boy named Net. All that chicanery. You know now: never trust those who seem to have extramural motives. Elizabeth and I have finally drifted apart. I suppose you heard that, though. After Leonard died we just couldn’t look at each other any longer. She wants to pursue her studies; I want to settle down, retire, live my life. My good friend Pig Stephens is recovering from the broken hand you gave him. He sends his best wishes. We go out fishing from time to time on the Thatch. We ponder life and how it winds and unwinds. It’s all masculine and pathetic and, yes, disingenuous. But it is what it is. I miss her some nights. But she had a drive unlike mine; it was the same drive Stanley had. I probably married her because of that, because I became—what?—subservient to her ambition. I noticed it from my dealings with Stanley, and I’m drawn to that kind of rigor. I admit it: I’m a sucker for a strong mind.
Don’t be ashamed, Mary. You are not alone. I was thirty years old when it happened to me, so I had some years on you. I too have spent my life trying to figure out how it was that I was…deceived. I know how it feels, you see. I know how you feel.
I’ll see you in DeLane soon for the legal mess.
All the best,
Edward Orman
Milgram.
They were ready inside the laboratory at Linsly-Chittenden Hall at Yale University. There was a strong scent in there—like burning flesh. Milgram could smell it through the closed door. Why had they done that? He wondered if it was on purpose, to create some sort of deeper effect on his subjects. It certainly wasn’t his idea. He thought, Will I ever be the same after this is through?
Obedience Page 24