Dominance

by Will Lavender

  If he could somehow get out.

  This was what they were thinking in those final seconds. Some of them talked about their other classes that semester, flipped through textbooks and highlighted paragraphs in trembling arcs of yellow. But mostly they sat, saying nothing. They stared at the dead television screen. They wondered, and they waited.

  Finally the television went to a deeper black, and everyone sat up straight. Then the box began to hum, an electrical, nodish oohing, a kind of flatline that moved left to right across the room. Their professor—the MacArthur-winning genius, once a shining star at nearby Dumant University and the closest thing to celebrity a professor of literature could possibly be, the same man who had viciously murdered two graduate students twelve years before—was ready to appear.

  Then the blackness dissolved and the noise died away and the professor’s face came to them on the screen. They had seen pictures of him, many of them preserved in yellowed newsprint. There were images of the man in a dark suit (at his trial), or with his wrists shackled and smiling wolfishly (moments after the verdict), or with his hair swept back, wearing a tweed jacket and a bow tie (his faculty photograph at Dumant in 1980).

  Those photographs did not prepare the students for the man on the screen. This man’s face was harder, its lines deeper. He was in fact wearing a simple orange jumpsuit, the number that identified him barely hidden beneath the bottom edge of the screen. The V of his collar dipped low to reveal the curved edge of a faded tattoo just over his heart. Although the students did not yet know this, the tattoo was of the thumb-shaped edge of a jigsaw puzzle piece.

  The professor’s eyes seemed to pulse. Sharp, flinty eyes that betrayed a kind of dangerous intelligence. The second the students saw him there was a feeling not of surprise, not of cold shock, but rather of This, then. This is who he is. One girl sitting toward the back whispered, “God, I didn’t know he was so . . .” And then another girl, a friend sitting close by, finished, “Sexy.” The two students laughed, but quietly. Quietly.

  Now the professor sat forward. In the background the students could see his two prison guards, could make out everything but their faces—the legs of their dark slacks, the flash of their belt buckles, and the leathery batons they carried in holsters. One of them stood with legs spread wide and the other was more rigid, but otherwise they mirrored each other. The professor himself was not behind a pane of glass; the camera that was trained on him was not shielded in any way. He simply sat at a small table, his uncuffed hands before him, his breathing slow and natural. His face bore the slightest hint of a smile.

  “Hello,” he said softly. “My name is Richard Aldiss, and I will be your professor for Unraveling a Literary Mystery. Speak so I can hear you.”

  “Hello, Professor,” someone said.

  “We’re here,” said another.

  Aldiss leaned toward a microphone that must have been just out of the camera’s view. He nodded and said, “Very good. I can hear you and you can hear me. I can see you and you can see me. Now, let us begin.”

  Alex

  Present Day

  2

  Dr. Alex Shipley got out of her rental car and walked to the front door of the silent house. She’d worn heels, goddamn it, maybe on the notion that the people at Jasper College would be more impressed with someone who showed up to a crime scene dressed unlike the academic she was. Now she was ashamed of the choice. Ashamed because the professor would surely notice, and this would give him an advantage in the mind game they were about to play.

  Above her a flock of winter wrens exploded from a tree, and she flinched. It was then that Alex realized how terrified she was to be back here, to be near him again. She urged herself to focus. The professor was one of the most brilliant men in the world, but he was also deceitful. He would have fun with this—if she let him.

  She must not let him.

  “They lie. All birds are death birds.”

  Alex looked up. He leaned against the open screen door, staring at her with dead eyes. His mouth was frozen in a cruel smile. The stroke had taken his features, polished his face into a mask. One side was completely lifeless, the pasty skin stippled with reaching blue vessels, the lip curled upward into a tortured grin. The other side, the living side, had learned how to do the same—he had trained himself in a bathroom mirror. Now he always smiled, always, even when there was nothing to smile about. Even when he felt pain or sadness or rage.

  “Alexandra,” he said. Not Professor, not Dr. Shipley. (She, too, noticed these things.) He did not invite her in. In true fashion, he would make her stand there on the cold front porch, suffering a bit. Always a challenge, always a test. Alex would not give him the pleasure of seeing her put her arms around herself for warmth.

  “Good morning, Professor,” she said.

  “I was told about what happened to our mutual friend. How . . . tragic.” The smile touched his eyes. “I knew they would send you to me in due time.”

  “No one sent me,” she said.

  He was amused by the lie. “No?”

  “I came here on my own accord.”

  “To see me, then. Like old friends. Or perhaps old lovers.”

  Something caught in her throat. She stared at the destroyed face, the wind slicing against her exposed neck. Damn him.

  “Would you like to come inside, Alexandra?”

  “Please.”

  Inside the small house there were books everywhere. Piles of them, mountains of them leaning in the dark. No artificial light in the tiny, not-quite-square rooms, just the natural dishwater seep of the morning sun. Through a window she could see the dark fingerprint of a half-frozen lake behind the house.

  He led her to a back room and sat in a frayed armchair, facing that window. More books here, studies on dead writers, an Underwood on a small desk buried beneath a landslide of ink-crowded paper. Above that a poster depicting a man’s face, one solitary word scrawled across his eyes, nose, mouth. The word was Who?, a pencil dusting barely visible in the weak light. The face was that of the mysterious novelist Paul Fallows. Below, in a fierce red font, the poster’s caption read:

  WHO IS FALLOWS?

  He did not offer her a chair. She stood in the center of the room, watching the great professor breathe. Even there, with his back turned to her, he emitted a kind of ferocity. It was worse now. Worse, she figured, because he knew they needed him. She needed him.

  “Tell me,” he said.

  “The reason I’ve come to you this morning is because . . .” But she could not say it. She felt him watching her even as he faced away, seeing her not as a tenured professor of comparative literature but as the dithering student she had once been. A child.

  “You haven’t accepted it yet,” he said. “The fact that it has happened again.”

  “You’re wrong.” But it was weak, hollow.

  The professor caught her eyes in the reflection in the window, held them. “Michael is dead. He’s dead and there’s nothing you can do about that now.”

  The words, the finality of them, stunned her. She looked away.

  “Do you remember him?” she asked.

  A beat, then, “Not especially.”

  But of course he did. Dr. Michael Tanner, Jasper College resident modernist, was teaching at his alma mater. Michael had been with her in the night class fifteen years ago. She even remembered his seat: right in front, not very far from that television screen.

  “The murder,” he said. “Like the others, I presume.”

  “Yes—but different.”

  He looked up, his interest piqued. “How so?”

  “This murder was more cautious than the first two. More controlled.”

  “Are there suspects?”

  “None,” she said, then added, “But there has been some talk on campus. Gossip.”

  “Go on.”

  “There are some who believe it could have been his wife,” she said, meaning Sally Tanner, née Mitchell—another student from the night class. Alex
had never imagined her with Michael, never thought they would end up married and both teaching at Jasper fifteen years later. But of course there had been so many things she had missed. “Sally discovered the body. Also the timeline she’s given to the police—there are inconsistencies.”

  A moment passed, then he mused, “And so the authorities contacted you.”

  “They did.”

  “Why?”

  “I think you know why.”

  The professor’s eyes dragged slowly toward her. “It is not because you are brilliant with the subtleties of literature. I can think of so many other professors who might be better equipped to interpret the symbolism of this crime—and of course there will be literary symbolism, or else you would not have called on me this morning. We both know that.”

  “Professor,” she sighed. “Let’s not do this. If you can’t help me, fine. But if you can, then I—”

  “Us.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “If you can’t help us, Alexandra. You have masters at Jasper now that they have called on you to play the sleuth again, do you not? And I’m sure at the university where you are currently teaching as well. I’ve forgotten, where is it again?”

  Alex was silent. He knew she taught at Harvard.

  “You have men who are above you there.”

  “And women.”

  “But mostly men. I’ve seen them. Cocksure oafs who walk into a room and each believes he is the most brilliant one there, every time. I went up to Cambridge once, before my smile was perfected. It was an awards gala in my honor, but no one seemed to want to look at me. They were intimidated. Perhaps they were afraid.”

  She said nothing.

  “Are they intimidated by you, Alexandra?”

  Still nothing.

  “You and your fuck-me shoes?”

  “That’s it.”

  She turned around, picked up her purse, and went out the door. The house was too dark now, the sun having swung behind a cloud outside. She couldn’t remember her bearings. All she could see were books and shadow-books, stacks of them leaning and toppling and forcing themselves out from the walls. The rooms like a chambered Nautilus, spiraling outward and on top of one another. She began to move through the labyrinth, cursing herself for coming here, for believing the professor could give her any answers. Damn it, Alex, why do you want to believe he’s changed? Why—

  “Dostoyevsky.”

  That stopped her. She stood there, listening to the seams of the old house scream in the wind, waiting.

  “Dr. Tanner,” the professor said from behind her. “I know that he was murdered by an axe. And the two others, the ones from before—they were killed in the same way. ‘He pulled the axe quite out, swung it with both arms, scarcely conscious of himself, and almost without effort, almost mechanically, brought the blunt side down on her head. He seemed not to use his own strength in this.’ ”

  “Crime and Punishment.”

  “Yes. Not one of my favorites in the canon, but there is the answer for you, Alexandra. The connection. This is nothing but a pale copycat, a mimic on the loose. Your killer—he is a stupid man with no original ideas of his own.”

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “As I said before, there was something different about this crime.”

  “Different how?”

  Alex measured her words now. She needed to be clear at least on this, needed to say to the professor what the two men from the college had told her to say. It has to be perfect, they’d warned her.

  “On the surface Michael’s murder looks just like the ones you—just like the Dumant murders from the eighties,” she said. “But if you look closely, there is something else. Something new.”

  He waited for her to go on.

  And so she gave him the phrase the men had supplied to her, the bait: “This murder . . . it’s like a puzzle.”

  This made him stiffen. Just those few words, the challenge Alex Shipley had put before him—she felt the tension rise in the tiny room. She had him.

  “I live just a few miles from that dreadful place,” he said then, almost to himself. “I hear the things they say. I know how they can be.”

  “Is that your agreement to help, Professor?”

  He gazed at her. “Do they think I had anything to do with what happened?”

  She said nothing. She wanted the silence to answer for her.

  “Very well. Perhaps it is good to be believed in again. To be feared.”

  “Will you help, Professor?”

  “Because I owe you?”

  “Because whoever did this is still out there. Because we both have a history with Michael Tanner. And yes, because you owe me.” You owe me fucking big-time.

  “It’s more than that, Alexandra.”

  “I don’t—”

  “You worry that this unfortunate twist in the plot will shine a light on everyone who took the night class. Especially you.”

  “This has nothing to do with the class.”

  “Is that what you told yourself on the flight back to Vermont? The thought that screamed through your mind as the businessman from Amherst was oh-so-subtly hitting on you? It’s not about the night class. It’s not about the night class. IT’S NOT ABOUT THE NIGHT CLASS.” The professor’s voice rose, then was swallowed by the house. Then he laughed—a cruel, nasty bark.

  “Michael,” she said softly. “He was part of it. He loved books, just as we do. He lived for literature. Whoever did this to him had a plan, had been perfecting that plan for a long time. What you said before—there is some truth there. The police believe this killer is a copycat, that he is re-creating what happened twenty-seven years ago at Dumant University. The victim is a literary scholar, there is blood on the wall in the Rorschach pattern, the books have been arranged around Michael’s library—the killer studied those old crime scene photographs, Professor. He learned them.”

  She fell silent, watching him. She could feel his mind moving, somehow, the electric churn of his thoughts. He was the most brilliant and the most aggressive man she had ever known. In the strangest hours she would find herself thinking about him, remembering the class, the search for the identity of a mysterious writer and all the secrets she would uncover about the professor’s own crimes.

  “Please,” Alex said. “I need an answer.”

  “Just one question.”

  Alex waited. She recalled the faces of the men that morning. Two faces, a college dean’s and a police detective’s, broken by what they had seen in Michael Tanner’s cluttered home library across campus. She knew; she carried those same scars.

  “Anything,” she said.

  Dr. Richard Aldiss leaned closer. “Tell me again how you discovered that I was innocent.”

  3

  Twenty-four hours earlier Alex Shipley strode into her lecture hall and the room fell silent. There were stares, as always. The electronic chatter on campus about Shipley was immense. She was tall, lean, beautiful—but she was also brilliant and extremely demanding of her students. Her classes were some of the most popular at the university, and it was not uncommon to walk into a Shipley lecture and see students lining the walls, like a queue at a rock concert. This course in particular was a hit: it was called The Forger’s Pen: Literary Hoaxes of the 20th Century, and teaching it was what had made her name as a young professor at Harvard.

  She wore a pencil skirt because the weather was getting warmer, a thin knit jacket her mother had sent from Vermont. She never carried a bag, because at her age a bag made her look even more like a student. The comparative lit department chair, Dr. Thomas Headley, needed no more reason to treat her like someone who should be sitting at the children’s table.

  She carried only a few sheaves of transparency paper and a single text. One leather-bound volume, the threads on the spine catching the stark light of the classroom and glinting. The book was Paul Fallows’s masterpiece, The Coil.

  “What are you doing tonight, Dr. Shipley?”

  Alex looked
up, found the student who had posed the question. Anthony Neil III. He sat in a middle row, a frat-boy smirk on his face. His friends flanked him, hiding behind their Norton Anthologies.

  “I’m working on my Camus translation,” she said flatly. “Do you read French, Mr. Neil?”

  “Tu as un corps parfait,” the boy said.

  “Funny, I don’t remember that line in The Stranger.”

  “Try the abridged edition.”

  Alex kept her eyes straight on the boy and said, “That must have been the version of the text you read before our last exam.”

  Then she turned away and began to make notes on the whiteboard as the class howled.

  * * *

  “What is literature?” she asked when everyone was quiet. It was the question she always asked, without hyperbole, to begin this particular lecture.

  “Literature is emotion,” said a dark-haired girl from a back row.

  “Literature is a writer’s secret life recorded in symbols.”

  Alex nodded. “Great books are both of those things,” she said. “The emotion in Anna Karenina is fierce. The symbolism in books such as Ulysses and Beneath the Wheel and Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, is still being fought over in lit programs across the world.” She paused for effect, drawing them in. Forty faces, all of them belonging to upperclass English majors on their way to bigger and better things, were held by her words. “But what if literature were more than that. What if it were a game?”

  “A game?” a gaunt boy toward the front asked. “How do you mean?”

  “I mean,” she said, “what if you could read a book and treat it as a competition between you and its author? Like a contest.”

  “In any contest there has to be a winner,” another student said. “How do you win against a book?”