She reached out and gingerly slid the book off the shelf, and as she did she heard a click. A small, rasping bite just beneath the text. She looked closely at the empty space on the shelf. An opening had been created behind Aldiss’s Ghost, a carved notch in the wall roughly the shape of a mailbox. Curved inside the space was a manuscript.
Heart fluttering now, Alex put her fingers on the paper and pulled.
“Alex?” Startled, she spun around. “What are you doing up here?”
Keller stood in the doorway. He was leaning against the threshold, a beer in his hand. A flash, then, to when they were students. Her knees would have weakened under different circumstances.
“I—I’m not doing anything. Just looking at Fisk’s collection.”
He stepped into the room. Said, “So. Lucy Wiggins, huh?”
Alex turned her back to the shelf, hoping beyond hope that Keller hadn’t seen the secret space. “I know. Isn’t it wild?”
“Different than I thought she would be.” He sipped his beer. “I saw her on CSI: Miami a few months ago. Googled her. Married with children, sitcom star in the nineties, rehab a few times. The usual. I wonder if she knows Frank’s married.”
“How could she not?” Alex rolled her eyes. Then, “They look happy.”
“So they do.”
He came deeper into the room, swept past the pale lamplight. “You’re going back to see Aldiss tonight, aren’t you?” he asked.
“After I meet with the detective, yes.”
“What do you hope he’ll say? That he knows who killed Michael? That he has all the answers? How could he, Alex?”
“Aldiss is smarter than us all.”
“Of course he is. He’s also more dangerous.”
She looked away. “I have to go back.”
Keller waited.
“I have to go back because if he had anything to do with this, then everything we did in Iowa doesn’t matter. Don’t you see that, Keller? Don’t you understand?”
She watched him breathe. The alcohol was burning in his cheeks a little, and he took another drink. He said, “Melissa says Daniel didn’t kill himself.”
Something dropped inside her. “What do you mean?”
“While you were meeting with the detective she knocked on my door. We talked. She says she spoke to Daniel sometimes. Says she went with her family once to Manhattan and he came to meet her. She spent the day with him, meeting all his cop friends.”
“And?”
“And he was fine, Alex. Happy. Not a man who was apt to blow his brains out in the front seat of his squad car.”
Alex thought. The temperature in the room seemed to have dropped, the cool night pressing in. There was the feeling again of running wildly along, of being pulled in every direction at once. She steadied herself on the bookshelf. “What does it mean, Keller?”
He shrugged. “Daniel had a stressful job. A detective? With the NYPD? Maybe the atrocities he saw became too much to handle . . .” He trailed off, couldn’t find the words. “Or maybe Melissa is right and all this—Daniel and Michael and all the rest of it—has something to do with Aldiss.”
A flash of anger behind her eyes. “Impossible.”
“Listen, Alex,” Keller said, taking a step toward her. “Listen to me. You have to be careful out there. You have to watch him, pay attention to him. Close attention. If he is lying as everyone in this house except you believes, if he has anything remotely to do with Michael’s and Daniel’s deaths, then this is a pattern. And you could be putting yourself right inside that pattern.” He stopped speaking. He was looking at her as intently as he ever had, but she couldn’t hold his gaze. She looked away, back to the secret space, which gaped open not six inches from Keller’s hand. “You could be next.”
14
Detective Bradley Black was waiting for her when she crossed over Harper’s Knoll. He was reading a paperback novel—she knew instinctively, by the way the pages bent, by the aged-brown tinge of the book, that it was Fallows’s The Coil—and he folded the book into his pocket when he saw her.
“I wanted you to see,” the detective said, falling into stride beside her. “Wanted you to get at least one look at it without that asshole Rice around.”
She stared at him. “You mean Michael’s library.”
He nodded. His boots echoed sharply over the quads as they walked.
“I appreciate it, Detective. I really do. But I don’t need your charity.”
“Yes, you do. You think you’re a hero around this place, and in some ways you are. I expect them to rename the library in your honor when Fisk kicks the bucket, slap a bronze statue right out there on the great lawn. But there are a lot of people here who think you saved the ass of a man who wasn’t innocent.”
“And what makes you think I care what people think?” she bristled.
“You’ve got a tattoo on your shoulder.”
“So what?”
“There are two kinds of women,” he said, a smile touching his lips for the first time. She wanted to like him. “Those who have tattoos and those who don’t. Those who do know they are the center of attention. They know people are staring at them, trying to read them. To puzzle them out. What does it say?”
She felt the six-year-old tattoo burn her shoulder blade now, remembered the drunken night she’d gotten it in Cambridge. It was a string of bluing words written in the most ornate fashion the pierced and goateed artist could pull off: “Un buon libro non ha fine.”
“I have no idea what that means, Professor.”
“A good book has no ending.”
They walked toward the fringe of campus. Black kept his eyes down at the concrete. She had the feeling that he wanted to say something but couldn’t quite find the words.
“If this crime is just like the other two,” he finally said as they passed in front of Bacon Hall, where Michael Tanner would have taught his undergrads, “the killer will not be satisfied with one. There were two murders at Dumant, two victims.”
“I know that, Detective.” Then she gentled her voice. “I remember.”
Black stopped. Something caught his gaze, a blackbird tearing away from a beech on the quad. He tracked the animal’s movement until it was a crumb in the sky, and then he said, “We studied you. Back in police school. The others—they laughed it off. An English major solving a murder? Some joke. But I was always fascinated by what you were able to do.”
She looked more closely, studied his face. “Is this an invitation, Detective?”
Black started on ahead of her. He had a way of not looking at you as he spoke, of connecting even as he remained elusive. She reminded herself to be careful around him. “Dean Rice says you’re unpredictable,” he said. “That you have no regard for the rules. That some of the things you did during the night class could have gotten the Jasper brass in trouble. That you could have gotten you and that boyfriend of yours killed.”
This stung her, but she said nothing.
“But if you want to know what I think, I think this investigation could use a little unpredictability. You could be our go-between with Aldiss, you could do what you did back in ’94.”
She reached into her pocket for the nicotine gum, slid a piece between her fingers, as if it might take effect through touch alone. “Tell me one thing, Detective.”
“Anything.”
“Why are you harassing Sally Tanner?”
The man tumbled away again, followed the air with his eyes. “In a murder, the spouse is always the first—”
“Don’t give me that bullshit,” Alex said. “This isn’t some lovers’ spat. This crime was calculated, scripted. Whoever did this is trying to create some twisted work of art. That’s not how Sally was—is.” Alex bolstered herself. “Please. She’s suffered enough.”
The man’s mouth went tight. “She was sleeping around on Michael,” he said. “Driving downstate, maybe seeing another professor. Or perhaps even a student.”
“Are you sure?”
<
br /> He nodded. “She was gone every weekend to Dumant University.”
Alex remembered what Christian had said earlier. The Procedure, she thought. Sally was playing it too.
The detective measured her. Finally he said, pointing off toward a grid of police tape in the distance, “Let’s move on. It’s getting late.”
* * *
Michael and Sally Tanner’s house was a modified Cape Cod on Front Street. A dog barked shrilly in the neighborhood and a Jasper Police cruiser sat in the drive, its flashers languidly throwing blue light over the house.
Two cops sat on the hood of the car, sharing a bent cigarette. They eyed Alex as she approached.
“Davidson,” Black said. “Warren. Meet Dr. Alex Shipley.”
“Pleasure,” the shorter man said.
The other man’s eyes held low.
“Go on,” Alex said. “Say it. No need to save it for later.”
The cop’s jaw tensed. Beside her Black coughed into his fist. Then he tugged on her coat and they went for the front door.
“Are you ready?” Black said at the front door.
She looked at him and nodded. “As I’ll ever be.”
They went in.
A lamp stood on the floor, shadeless, its bare bulb painting the walls white. The dust had been disturbed, and Alex covered her mouth with the collar of her trench. As Black had told her that morning, the house was not as clean as the apartments at Dumant: there was a gash on one wall, dark and ugly. An investigator had circled it with chalk. In one corner a chair had been toppled. In the kitchen the tablecloth had been pulled to the floor and dishes were scattered, some of them broken into a thousand glittering pieces. You fought him, didn’t you, Michael? You fought that bastard and you nearly won.
“Sally Tanner arrived home that night around nine,” Black said. “Found the place wrecked like this. Then she made her way to the library.”
“My God,” said Alex.
“Of course no one heard anything. No struggle, no racket. The students who rent across the street were having a party to celebrate the end of midterm exams—nothing. It was like the killer was never even here.” Black shifted in place. “Except for the disturbance in the kitchen. And this.”
He led her down a hallway. A couple of techs stood at the far end, speaking in low voices. Their eyes flicked to Alex, held for a second, then dropped away. Everything was a secret in the house of death.
Black entered a room at the far end of the hall, and Alex followed. He thinks I’m ready for this, she thought. He thinks what happened during the night class prepared me. She wanted to say something. To tell him she wasn’t ready.
She wasn’t at all ready. But she was there, inside that horrible room.
The bloodstain. It was the first thing she noticed. The police had chalk-circled this as well. The Rorschach butterfly wings, the burning fire spreading away from the shape’s edges—so meticulous, as if someone had used a paintbrush to put it there. But also so simple that it could be the work of a child.
“Notice again how precise he was,” Black was saying, his voice spinning up from a great depth. “It’s identical to the Dumant apartments, down to the shape on the wall. And the books . . .”
Alex studied the books. At first there was a chaos to them, but when she looked closer she saw how careful the pattern was. They had not merely been dropped to the floor but had rather been placed there painstakingly, like the instruments on a surgical tray. But she couldn’t focus, didn’t want to focus—the books were worse, somehow, than if she had seen Michael Tanner’s body.
“The one covering his eyes,” she said, her voice strangled. “What was it?”
“Fallows,” Black said. “The Coil.”
Of course.
“He wants us to be thinking about Dumant,” Black went on. “This thing is a carbon copy, a kind of rehashing. A revision. Will you help us, Dr. Shipley?”
“Yes,” she said weakly. This apartment, this room particularly—it had convinced her. Her throat was bone dry, her hands clenched and nails digging into her palms. Before, it had been a tragedy; now, standing here in the middle of these books, the tide of them around her, she saw it for what it was: a revulsion. Anger, quick and tight, rushed to the surface. She wanted to spit, to tear the covers off the books and demand answers from them, to hide away the terrible meaningless image of the inkblot on the wall that seemed to be an eye now, a camera staring at her. Into her. “Yes, I will.”
Black nodded and Alex stood up, sweeping over the damage in the library one last time. How could no one have heard him struggling? she wondered as she stepped past the detective. Why didn’t anyone save him?
Black glanced up from where he crouched. “Where are you going?”
“I have to see someone.”
“And who would that be?”
“Richard Aldiss,” Alex said, and then she left that awful room and the ghosts it refused to give up.
The Class
1994
15
When everyone was ready, Aldiss sat forward and scanned the lecture hall, as he often did at the beginning of his classes. His faceless guards, as always, stood watch behind him. The black legs of their trousers were slick and pressed.
“We have fully begun our journey now,” he said at last. “We are on our way toward discovering who Paul Fallows really is.”
“Why don’t you just tell us?” Melissa Lee wore a Pixies T-shirt and tattered pants slung with a man’s necktie for a belt. The girl’s black lips glistened, her dark, oily hair hung over piercing olive eyes. “If you know his identity, as you claim you do, why don’t you just reveal it to us?”
“I agree with her, Professor,” said Michael Tanner, who sat beside Lee. He was a skinny, frail boy made frailer because of his baggy sweater and sharp features. There were rumors about Tanner and Lee—in fact, there were rumors about Lee and almost every guy on campus, and a few women as well—and Alex noticed how close their elbows were, how near they sat to each other. “Just tell us who you believe he is. This charade, this . . .”
“Game.”
It was Keller who had offered up the word, and no one objected. Not a mystery, as the class title suggested, but something much more complex. Something dictated by the whims of Aldiss himself.
“That’s right,” Daniel Hayden said. “This is a game. And it’s becoming a bit tedious, don’t you think?”
“I disagree.”
There were only three women in the class, Alex and Lee and Sally Mitchell. It was Mitchell who had just spoken. A quiet, mousy girl—not as opinionated as Alex nor as scandalous as Lee, Mitchell was the forgotten star of the English department. She was a Burlington girl, and like Alex she was branded because of this fact. But unlike Alex she was often invisible on the campus, absent from the frat parties and the spontaneous Front Street gatherings the English profs often put on. She, as much as anyone in the lecture hall, maybe even as much as Daniel Hayden, was an enigma to the rest of them.
“And why don’t you tell us what you think of my methods, Ms. Mitchell,” Aldiss said. He remained frighteningly composed.
“I think giving the information would be too . . . easy,” the girl said.
“Who agrees with her?”
Aldiss waited. Three students raised their hands: Alex, Lewis Prine, and Frank Marsden, the actor, in the front row. Almost everyone agreed that to see Marsden act was to see a boy who fell completely into his role, who became the character he was playing. Tonight he was fresh from rehearsals; he sat wearing full makeup, his eyes dark with shadow.
Aldiss looked at the boy. “Do you enjoy my class, Mr. Marsden?”
“Very much so.”
“And what exactly do you like about it?”
“I like the fact that it’s so unexpected. That anything can happen.”
Aldiss was pleased by this. “Mr. Prine?”
“Call it intrigue,” the boy said.
Aldiss scanned the room, and his eyes fell on Alex
. “And you, Ms. Shipley,” he said. “You also enjoy this chase I have you on?”
She didn’t exactly know how to answer. Enjoy—it wasn’t the word she wanted. “I understand why you’re doing it this way,” she said.
Aldiss cocked his head. “Do you?”
“I think so, yes. To just give us Paul Fallows’s identity, to hand over the information you’ve uncovered while you’ve been in Rock Mountain—that would not only be too easy, it would be wrong.”
“I think you understand my methods quite well,” Aldiss said. “I have waited for twelve years to get to this point, I believe I can hold out for a few more weeks.”
He laughed, and a few in the class did as well.
“Plus, I do not know for a fact that the person I believe to be Paul Fallows is really him.”
The class buzzed. No one quite knew how to take this announcement.
“What do you mean?” Tanner asked. “I thought you had new information, Professor. Stuff that has never been seen before.”
“That’s right,” Aldiss said. “But what we are working with here are possibilities. Equations. You may come to the end and find that my information was flawed. That the person I believe to be Fallows isn’t him at all. It has happened to the Fallows scholars again and again over the years. I believe I am right this time, but . . .”
For some reason, this admonition scared Alex. Terrified her. How could he not be sure?
“Does it even matter?” It was Lee again. The girl looked at Aldiss with a challenge in her eyes.
“Does what matter, Ms. Lee?”
“Finding Fallows. Will the world change if we do find him? Will it mean anything?”
“Of course it will. It will mean everything.”
Alex nodded, then stopped herself. She mustn’t get too close to him. How dangerous it was to join his side, to form a relationship with this man. The image from Dean Fisk’s newspaper articles flashed through her mind, the libraries of those dead girls . . .
The professor went on: “If you find Fallows, then you will have solved one of the world’s greatest—”
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