“Mostly the things Stanley recommends for me. The Russians. Early British literature. Fallows, of course.”
“Fallows,” she repeated. “What do you think of him?”
“I hate him,” Owen said, his voice dropping a notch, as if he feared Dean Fisk might hear him. “I can’t understand all the fuss you people make for him.”
“Fallows is an acquired taste.”
The nurse laughed sharply. “That must be it,” he said. “Because otherwise Stanley has wasted most of his life on the ravings of a lunatic.”
With that there was a sharp clack on the door outside. Someone else had arrived.
* * *
“Ah, our own celebrity—Alex Shipley.”
Christian Kane stepped through the door and took her by the elbow. He kissed her on both cheeks and then leaned back to regard her, nodding as if she had passed a test. He carried nothing but a yellow umbrella and a paperback book. He smelled of the kind of cologne Peter used and wore a corduroy jacket with a fray on the elbow. He had a three-day beard that she didn’t recognize from the last photograph she had seen of him in Poets & Writers. The paperback was one of his own.
The writer moved into the great room now and looked around, curling his mouth at the state of the place. Then he looked at Alex and held out the book. “Page 107,” he said.
Tentatively, she took the book and opened it to the page. It had been dog-eared, and one paragraph in the middle had been underlined by an uneasy hand.
. . . when Barker came into the library he saw what had happeneda there. The professor’s body was on the floor, broken and discarded like a lump of rags, and for a moment Barker could not tell what he was looking at. Then it dawned on him, the horrible truth: the man had been murdered and covered with books. A pile of volumes, their heaviness sighing now against the man’s dead flesh, the pages rustling as if a legion of mites had crawled inside the texts to feast. Even over the professor’s eyes there was a book, the image of the cover across his face as if it were a mask. Barker stepped forward.
“Why are you showing this to me, Christian?”
The man regarded her. Of the students she had seen so far, Christian had changed the least. He was still the suave, thin kid he had been as a student at Jasper. Now, fifteen years later, he looked less like a bestselling novelist and more like a man playing the part in one of his own stories. “Isn’t it obvious, Alex?” he said.
“I’m afraid it isn’t.”
He sighed, slapping the paperback closed. Barker at Night—the fourth book of the series, written five years ago, was her least favorite.
“Aldiss never liked me,” Kane said now, leaning over her. He was thin and his graying hair was tousled, his appearance almost boyish. He’d caught fire after his first novel, Barker at Work, appeared just two years after their graduation from Jasper. Now, after twelve novels and two Hollywood adaptations—one of them starring, in a bit role, their old friend Frank Marsden—his career had begun to wind down. His most recent novels had been published to little fanfare in crude paperback editions, and Alex thought she detected something of a fall even in the way the man dressed. Even in his slick green eyes, which had dimmed a bit since she had seen him last.
“What do you mean, Christian?”
“The professor was always bitter toward me.”
“That’s just the way he is.”
“No,” the man said sharply. “No, Alex. He was worse toward me. You and Keller and the rest of them—you were his pets. His projects. I was just a nuisance. Even Daniel got more respect in that classroom.”
“I saw him this morning,” she said. “He doesn’t believe you had anything to do with this.” That’s not quite true, is it? she thought, flushing with shame over the lie.
Christian laughed. His teeth were yellowed, nicotine-stained, and she made a mental note to bum a cigarette later; she had run out on her short drive from Aldiss’s house. “I live twenty minutes from campus,” he said. “I see Aldiss sometimes. Out. He doesn’t speak. He treats me as if I’m this . . . ghost. And of course with my history with Michael—”
“What do you mean? What history?”
He looked at her strangely. Didn’t you know? the look said.
“We’d been playing the game again,” Christian told her.
She gasped.
“Don’t look at me like that, Alex. It was nothing. It was just a way to pass the time. Michael—he called me about it a couple of years ago. We got to talking about things. Books, my work and his, the way the college is changing. And of course Daniel. Then he asked me if I would come in and speak to one of his composition classes. Sure, I said. Afterward we went out for drinks, and he told me.”
“Told you what?”
The man hesitated, realizing that he had gone too far now. He said, “That he went down to Burlington every weekend. To the State U, and sometimes even to Dumant. They were still playing down there.”
“And you went with him.”
“Of course I went.” Christian pulled the back of his hand across his mouth. “The Procedure is still so intoxicating, Alex. So addictive. We both fell into it like old pros, even though it had been years since the night class. I started reading Fallows again, practicing. It wasn’t like I was some kind of criminal. But if you put it all together, if you add up the evidence against me, then it’s easy to see how Aldiss would make the leap that I had something to do with Michael being murdered.” He paused then, stepped forward into her space. For the first time, Alex’s heart began to thump. One of them is responsible. One of them . . . “Don’t listen to him, Alex,” Christian said softly, carefully. “I beg of you. Whatever Aldiss told you this morning—”
“He told me nothing, Christian. We spoke as old friends, that’s all.”
“—whatever the professor insinuated about us, you must not believe him. You can’t.”
He remained in her space for another few seconds. It felt like a lifetime. Finally he pulled away and smiled wanly. He looked up at the fissured ceiling, at the streaked windows and the crimson curtains that hung heavy with dust. “My God,” he said. “It’s like I’ve walked right into a trap.”
* * *
When Christian had gone upstairs to his room, Alex answered another knock on the door. Standing there was the first man she had ever loved.
He wore a bright orange rain slicker and his eyes were rimmed with grief. He was as large as she remembered him, a brute of a man who towered over her. Yet it was his eyes that had always drawn her to him: kind, somber eyes that were the gray of stone, or the page of an old book.
“Keller,” she said, and the man stepped forward and took her in his arms.
Once inside, they stood together in the foyer and said nothing, which was fine with Alex.
“How’s Sally?” Jacob Keller asked.
“In terrible shape. As you would expect.”
They stood apart now, Alex leaning against the bookshelves and Keller with his hands in his pockets, gazing at her. She had seen him across the room at Daniel’s funeral, but had only smiled at him. They’d kept their distance for many reasons, hers and his. Married, Melissa Lee had told her. Coaches football and teaches English at a high school about forty miles south of Jasper. You sound like you’re still interested, Alex . . .
Thinking of the poet-in-residence she’d been seeing at the time, she had looked away.
“Brutal,” Keller said now.
“Excuse me?”
“That’s what the news said this morning. The Michael Tanner murder was brutal. They’re talking about Dumant University again, Alex. They’re talking about our night class. They’re rehashing all that old stuff.”
That old stuff—it was like a wound being scraped raw. Aldiss had warned her that this would happen.
“A copycat,” she said quickly. “That’s all this is. Someone who’s read about the Dumant murders, someone who thinks he can get away with anything—”
“It’s Aldiss.”
Alex
’s mouth dropped open. “Aldiss? You can’t believe he had anything to do with this, Keller.”
“Of course I do,” he said. “And so should you.”
“I spoke to him this morning. I saw how he talked about Michael. I don’t think he—”
“Still protecting him, I see.”
Anger flashed behind her eyes. “I’m not protecting anyone,” she said. “I just know that he was innocent of the Dumant murders. Cleared. You were in Iowa with me, Keller. We finished the night class together. You know everything I know.”
“I know how devious Aldiss is, how deceptive he can be.”
Her eyes fell to the balls of dust that traced the floor. “He didn’t have anything to do with Michael’s murder,” she said again, softer this time.
Keller started to say something, then stopped himself. “Let’s not do this, Alex. It’s been four years since I’ve seen you. I want to talk to you again. Get to know you again. It’s horrible what happened to Michael, but we’ve finally got our chance to start over.”
The apprehension was still there, the clawing thought that Keller was one of the very people Aldiss had instructed her to watch. He knew as much as any of the rest of them about the Dumant murders, and for this reason she would have to observe him just as impartially as she would the others.
“Let me ask you something,” he said.
“Anything.”
“Do you read anymore?”
She opened her mouth, faltered. What kind of question was that for a lit professor?
“Of course you do,” he said. “I read about you in the alumni newsletter. I know what you do for a living. I mean I’m not a stalker or anything”—Keller laughed—“but I know, okay?” He stopped, glanced off toward the window. “I couldn’t do what you do. I coach varsity football at a nowhere high school, and I don’t read anything. Even the books my students read I just scan, or I go off memory from classes I took at Jasper.”
Puzzled, Alex waited for him to go on.
“I’m afraid if I read something I’ll go back to Fallows, and I’ll fall into it again. Poof—right there, right back into the labyrinth. I’ll end up just like Daniel ended up.”
He trailed off, and the room burned with silence. Then he looked at her again, tried to erase what he had just said with a shake of his head.
“Right now,” he said, “I would like to rest a bit. I couldn’t sleep at all last night. I just kept thinking about Michael and Sally and the helplessness of it all.”
“Me too.”
Keller smiled, but cautiously.
“Your room’s upstairs,” she said. “Melissa, Christian, Frank—oh, and his friend.” Alex raised her eyebrows toward the second floor. “They’re all up there now. I’ve got somewhere to be in a few minutes, but I can show you.”
She led him to the stairs, and as he went up in front of her she noticed something odd. Something that spiked through her with a girlish shame.
Keller was not wearing a ring.
* * *
The last student was Lewis Prine. He was the warden of an asylum for the criminally insane in upstate Vermont and the man who had told her about the manuscript Stanley Fisk was said to be hiding in this very house. It’s there, Alex, he’d told her again just months ago. The third Fallows. It’s somewhere in that mansion.
Prine never showed.
10
The lead detective was named Bradley Black, and he seemed to know that she was hiding something. They met that afternoon in a fourth-floor office of the Tower with the dean who had called her to Vermont the night before. Alex could meet neither man’s gaze.
“Tell us,” said the detective now, his voice as slow and mellifluous as his eyes, “what Dr. Richard Aldiss knows.”
“It’s going to take time,” she said. All the way across campus from the Fisk mansion, through the glassy, postmorning sun, she had thought, He didn’t do this. He couldn’t have. Now, sitting in Jasper College’s ivy-choked administrative building with these two strange, officious men, Alex recounted the conversation. “The professor treats everything as if it’s a puzzle. If he knows who murdered Michael Tanner, he will not be quick with his knowledge. You have to earn what you get from him.”
“Goddamn it,” spat Dean Anthony Rice. He looked at the detective. “You people are going to have to get a search warrant, go in there and—”
“No,” Alex said. “That’s not the way to deal with him. You’re going to have to let me do this. If Aldiss knows anything, I will get it. He trusts me.”
“Let’s get real here, Dr. Shipley. Aldiss is toying with you. This is what he does. He got off too easy the last time. He might not have killed those two students at Dumant—”
“He didn’t.”
“—but he still got off way too damn easy. A lot of people at this college—people who know Aldiss very well—believe there is blood on his hands.” The dean paused, and Alex knew what was coming. “And, by extension, yours.”
She ignored it. “If he knows anything, then I will have it soon.”
“We may not have that much time.”
She bit her tongue. No shit, Sherlock.
“How sure are you that he is copycatting the Dumant murders?” she asked.
Black’s eyes slid to Rice, and the dean nodded. Then photographs appeared on the walnut desk, the topmost crevassed and browning and the others slick and warm and fresh. Alex spread them with her fingertips. She sucked in her breath.
They were crime scene photos. She had seen the older ones before, during the night class. Stark, hectic images of two empty apartments. Someone had written the date in chalk and placed a block in the bottom left-hand corner: January 1982. Blood slashed up the walls in a pattern that resembled the burning butterfly of the famous Rorschach inkblot test. There were two sets of photos for the two victims, both grad students in literature. Both had been murdered, like Michael Tanner, in their home libraries. She did not—could not—dwell on these pictures.
Her eyes moved to the newer shots, taken just the morning before. They were interiors of Michael Tanner’s house across campus. These were digital photos, brilliant and clean, the Rorschach pattern on the wall almost identical to the others, except here it was a dark, electric crimson. Again there were books on the floor, spread in what appeared to be the same pattern as the others. A swimming pool of books piled in the room, carefully placed and evenly spread. They could be the same fucking room, Alex thought. The same victim.
But no, she remembered. The other two were students, while Michael was—
A student as well, once upon a time. A student in the night class.
“Identical MO,” Black was saying, his voice slicing into her reverie. “Murder them in their homes and cover the bodies with books. Same type of victim aside from their gender. Same pattern of education, even the same program of study: literature, specifically modern lit. Superimpose the Tanner library on photographs of the apartments from Dumant and the similarities are striking. Beyond striking.”
Black paused, appraising her again in his careful way. “How well did you know Professor Tanner?” he asked. He made a show of flipping through his notes, the dry flick of the Gregg notebook the only sound in the room.
“Pretty well. Michael and I got together often at academic conferences. I always thought he was one of the most brilliant men in the comparative literature field, and that’s including any of my colleagues at Harvard.”
“Did he ever speak to you about Richard Aldiss? Did he show any signs that he may have been holding on to the class? In an unhealthy way, I mean.”
“No. Never.”
“What about e-mails? Correspondence about the class, about Aldiss or the Dumant murders.”
Alex shook her head. “We all wanted to forget, Detective. The night class . . . it changed us. Some of us in profound ways. It wasn’t something we wanted to dwell on.” Her mind flashed to her old friend Daniel Hayden and what happened to him, and then she shook it free. “It happened, and
there’s no taking it back—but nobody wants to relive it.”
She watched something pass over Black, something like the answer to a question that had not been asked. Alex knew it was that one phrase, the damning word right in the middle of it, ticking like a bomb: changed. She thought again of her meeting with Aldiss that morning.
“I want to see the library,” she said.
“Impossible,” said Rice.
“You’re going to bring me back to Jasper to be your messenger, Dean Rice, and you’re not going to tell me all you know? That’s called tilting the playing field.”
“It’s called due process. Tell us more about Aldiss.”
“The professor believes Sally Tanner is innocent.” A lie, but it was worth a chance. Fuck them if they wouldn’t share. A look passed between the two men.
“Has he spoken with either Tanner recently?”
“Your turn,” she said.
Black sighed and said, “You’re a tough one, Dr. Shipley.”
She smiled.
“This killer,” Black continued, “he studied the murders at Dumant. I mean studied them intensely. Learned them. He was not just tipping his hat to those crimes, he was re-creating them. Everything, down to the flares on the Rorschach bloodstain and the books and the time of Michael Tanner’s death—everything was the same.”
Re-creating them, Alex thought. The phrase was like a flash, a pinpoint of hot light. She blinked twice, hard, trying to sweep it away.
“Aldiss knows more than he’s saying,” Rice finally broke in. The dean sat forward, steepling his chin in his fat fingers. He was constant movement, the perfect antithesis to the still, methodical Black. “And he knows we know. We won’t go on with this dance too much longer, Dr. Shipley. Tell him that. Tell him that if he has been in correspondence with someone who is interested in the Dumant murders, if he has been a mentor in any way with someone, then he will be dealt with. Deliver that message to him, will you?”
“Richard Aldiss doesn’t take kindly to messages from interim deans,” she said.
Rice reddened, looked off toward the office’s only window. Wind rattled the pane. For a moment the three of them sat silently.
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