Dominance

by Will Lavender

  “A bullet wound,” Black was saying, “just behind the right ear.”

  “I have no guns in my house,” Fisk said defensively. “If you find the weapon, then it was brought here by the killer.”

  “My men are searching,” Black said, and Alex thought of the book she had hidden in her room. The object within and the place where she’d left it that morning. Black caught her eyes and she looked quickly away. “What we need to do now is get everyone who was in the mansion this morning back here. Prine was murdered then, either just before or just after everyone left.”

  “But someone would have seen him,” the dean pleaded. “We would have surely run into—”

  “Which way did you leave the house, Dr. Fisk?” Black asked.

  The dean gestured to Matthew Owen. “Through the kitchen,” the nurse said.

  “So it is possible,” deduced Black, “that when you left you simply did not encounter Lewis Prine. The man was running late, and when he arrived, someone here, someone who was staying in this house, murdered him.”

  Fisk scoffed. “Impossible.”

  “After the murder of Michael Tanner,” Black said, “we have to examine every possibility.” The detective looked at Alex and said, “You visited Aldiss last night.”

  “He hasn’t been here,” she said. It was too quick, too defensive. “He wouldn’t come to a memorial service. It isn’t his style.”

  “Every possibility,” Black repeated.

  Then the man backed into the hallway and said something to Dean Rice, who looked pale and shaken. The dean nodded and left the house.

  “Is everyone back from the service?” one of Black’s lieutenants asked.

  Alex looked around. The great room was a swarm of activity now, cops and technicians working within the wide space cordoned off to preserve the crime scene; it had taken the former students nearly an hour to work their way free of the people at the service, past the crush of reporters pushing forward against the stage. Through the grimy window she could see a clutch of reporters. Rice was giving them some sort of statement.

  Aldiss was right, she thought. He was exactly right about all of this.

  “Is that everyone?” Black asked again.

  “Everyone,” said Keller, still fixed firmly at her side, “except for one.”

  Alex scanned the room and noticed that someone had indeed not returned from the service. When she saw who it was, a mix of anger and confusion swept through her.

  “Melissa Lee,” she said aloud.

  Black nodded and motioned to the lieutenant. “Find Lee and bring her back here,” he said. “Everyone who stayed in this house last night is a possible target—and a suspect.”

  The Class

  1994

  23

  When the students arrived the next night in Culver Hall, they found the classroom empty. The television cart had been pushed to a back corner and on the chalkboard someone had written NO CLASS—PROF. ALDISS HAD BLACKOUT.

  The nine students went back out into the night. They walked together, the wind burning their cheeks. The campus rested, the high windows in the Tower throwing grids of yellow light onto the quads. The wind screamed through the corridor of dormitories on the west campus. For the longest time no one in the small group spoke.

  It was Melissa Lee who broke their silence.

  “The game,” the girl simply said.

  “What about it?” Keller asked.

  “We should play. Here, tonight.”

  The others stopped walking. Lewis Prine said, “I don’t know if that’s such a good idea, Melissa.”

  “I have a friend at Dumant,” Lee continued. “Russian lit major. She says they still play the Procedure on weekends. It’s nothing—just something to do for fun. We’ve read enough of The Coil to at least fake it.” Her eyes jumped from face to face. She wanted this.

  “I don’t understand it,” said Sally Mitchell quietly. “It all sounds . . . cliquish.”

  “Come on, Sal. Do you think there’s anybody else at Jasper who could play this game? No, only us. We’re the best. I think this is what Aldiss was telling us the other night. He was urging us to start our own game. To begin the Procedure on this campus.” Lee fell silent. They were in front of the Fisk Library now, a lone streetlamp illuminating their group.

  Finally Daniel Hayden spoke, the boy’s voice clear and sharp in the night: “I don’t want any part of this,” he said. And he turned and left. The others watched him go, his footsteps crunching away over the ice, and when his figure was merely a speck on the dark quad, Lee said, “Anybody else scared?”

  No one moved. It was an agreement.

  * * *

  Twenty-four hours later, Alex pulled on her gloves and slipped outside. She stopped on her dorm’s front porch and looked across the campus into an unsettling blackness, unusual for a winter’s night. Where was the moon?

  She walked, her breath steaming in her eyes. She kept her head down and went instinctively; every turn on the campus she knew by heart. It took her three minutes and seventeen seconds to reach her destination.

  The party was already throbbing. The Alpha Sigma Tau house was crammed full, students clumped into the living room and standing before a blazing fire. Someone bumped against her, offered her a cup. It sloshed over into her bare hand, scorching cold. Alex took it and drank. The music raged.

  She looked for Keller. She had begun to do this out on campus, at these random parties: search the room for his smile. Sometimes she saw him and sometimes not, but always she looked and felt empty when she couldn’t find him.

  At the back of the house now. A set of tall windows looking out over the vast east campus, the darkness here more unstable. A few students were sitting on floor cushions, playing truth or dare. Keller wasn’t among them. The song—Throwing Muses’“Cry Baby Cry”—ebbed away and another replaced it.

  Someone brushed past her again. “Hey,” Alex said, the drink still burning her throat. She looked up, but the person had bled into the crowd.

  No. Not quite. They had left something.

  A note. Another piece of confetti dropped into her cup, swimming upward, four words bleeding away just as she read them.

  Culver Hall. It begins.

  Alex felt her throat constrict. Again she looked around, laughing despite her fear. She’d forgotten about the Procedure in the day’s studying, blotted it out with Fallows. The real Fallows, not the legion of subtext: The Coil, the end of that strange book coming on now, the meaning she knew was there taunting her, just out of reach.

  Maybe you need to get deeper, she told herself now. Maybe you need to go where Aldiss went.

  Alex left the house, went back out into the cutting wind. She made her way to Culver.

  The building was as black as the night. Nothing moved; nothing rustled.

  At first Alex didn’t see anyone. The drink, the smoky frat house, the fear she felt knocked through her, tremored her limbs. Made her legs weak. The cold became sharper, the moonless night more bottomless. She wondered if she’d been tricked, if this was Lee’s way of pulling a prank. That bitch, she thought—and it was then that she saw a shape flit against the building’s dark facade. Someone was coming.

  Frank Marsden appeared before her, a loopy smile on his face. “Miss Claire?” he said.

  Alex wanted to laugh. To be doing this here, tonight . . . it was ridiculous. And yet another part of her wanted to keep it going, to see if she could play the game Aldiss had spoken about in his lecture. To see if she was worthy. She remembered his words that night: The strange thing about the Procedure was that you didn’t know you were inside it until you realized something had changed.

  “Yes, sir?” she said.

  “Welcome home, my dear lady,” Marsden went on, falling into the part like the actor he was. “Welcome to . . . Fuck.” He shook his head and brought up a paperback book he’d brought with him. It was The Coil. Marsden had brought a penlight, and he shone it on the page. Finally he said, “Welcome
to Hamlet, Iowa. Is there anything I can get you?”

  Alex opened her mouth to speak but nothing came out. Nothing but a girlish little squeak that made Marsden shift and Alex flush with shame. She remembered the scene but couldn’t find the words. The details. Now everything left her, got sucked away as if some kind of vacuum lock had been cracked, and a feeling of panic swept over her. She didn’t want to go to the book, to show Marsden that she’d already forgotten. Then you are shunned. And as a Fallows scholar, to not be inside, to not be one of them—that is a fate worse than death.

  “The book,” Marsden whispered, offering his copy. She smelled whiskey on his breath; it was all a game, she told herself, nothing but a deviation from midterm exams on a Thursday night. Just a little fun. She tried to relax. “Your line.”

  Alex took the book from him, opened it. Found the scene and read, “You can show me where—”

  “No reading,” Marsden said. “That’s one of the rules. Sorry, Alex.”

  She lowered the book, closed her eyes. “You can show me where Ann Marie is staying. It has been so long since I’ve seen her.”

  Marsden said, “Right this way.”

  She followed him. And as she did she noticed something: other people, some of them strangers and some familiar. Ten or twelve Jasper students, each passing her on both sides of Rose Street. She saw Lewis Prine. “Evening, ma’am,” he slurred, tipping an invisible hat.

  It was the scene. The scene exactly, down to the crowded street and the people swarming by.

  Fallows. They’re replicating it, re-creating the book here, on this campus.

  For some reason, the realization filled her with dread.

  Alex followed Marsden around Culver Hall, past trees glazed with snow. Branches smacked at her face but she walked, and soon they were on a different quad. In front of them was Turner Hall. This was Melissa Lee’s dorm. The students called it the Overlook, after the hotel in The Shining.

  Inside then, into the warmth. More students here, extras and outcasts. Some of them drank from plastic cups, some were already drunk and going off script. The scene in The Coil, the tiny four-page movement Lee had chosen for this game, contained only some of it.

  Someone called out, “What the fuck is a Procedure?” Another two students kissed, tongues flashing. Someone was playing the Doors on a portable stereo, “The End” filtering through it all. Frank Marsden, still in character and stumbling a bit, led Alex to the staircase. She followed him up.

  The door to Lee’s room had been cracked, just as Fallows described it, and inside there was the heavy smell of marijuana. Soft, acoustic music played, and as Alex entered she saw Lee sitting before a cardboard box wrapped in tinfoil: the “mirror scene,” one of the more important in The Coil. Aldiss had highlighted it, had finely gone over it with them, had talked about its themes and details at length. Now she was here, in this simple dorm room, inside those pages. Alex’s pulse quickened.

  The others were here: Sally Mitchell, Michael Tanner, and Keller. Her heart skipped when she saw him, but she brought herself back. They were waiting for her, sitting off to the side and not moving through the room—a little different from Fallows’s original version, but it would have to do. They were too far in now.

  “Alex,” someone hissed. It was Keller. The seriousness of his face disarmed her; she wanted to tell him to not take it so seriously, that it was nothing more than a game—but that wasn’t true, was it? Now that she was here, inside the scene, it had taken on an urgency. A pulse. The boy motioned to her. “Your line.”

  Alex came back to the room, the scene. “Ann Marie,” she croaked. “How long has it been?”

  “Hello, Claire,” Lee said, her voice accented, perfectly fake. “So nice of you to come all the way to Iowa to see me. I want you to meet my father.” She gestured to Tanner, and the boy nodded. “And this is our maid, Olivia.”

  Mitchell said, “How do you do?”

  “And this is Mr. Berman, Esquire.”

  Keller extended a hand. This was wrong: Berman, the officious lawyer, did not come in until later. Alex paused but Keller remained there, his eyes wandering off. Stoned, Alex thought. They’re all stoned. She shook the boy’s sweating hand and he smiled sloppily and then sat down again. The CD skipped on the stereo. Lee turned for the first time to face Alex, her lips an old-fashioned bright red and antique turquoise earrings hanging in her ears. Her hair had been pulled up into the style of the time, but she still wore her Pearl Jam T-shirt, her Doc Marten boots, her chipped black nails.

  “What brings you back to Iowa?” the girl asked.

  “Business,” Alex said.

  “What type of business?”

  “Business about . . .” Again she was frozen. The room seemed to spin wildly. She willed the words, but nothing would come. The others seemed to be waiting on her, urging her to continue. “About . . .” She reached for the book on Lee’s desk-cum-boudoir.

  “No,” Lee said, pulling the volume away. “Don’t. You know this, Alex.”

  Alex bit her lip. Damn you. She tried to think of the scene, to remember her lines. But it wouldn’t come. Fallows’s text swirled just out of her reach.

  “I . . . I can’t . . .”

  “I thought you’d been accepted to Harvard,” Lee said. “I thought you would be better than this.” The girl’s dark eyes judged her cruelly. She’s taken something. She’s not herself. Smoke curled from somewhere, making the air thick. Alex coughed, and then the ball in her throat became bigger and she coughed again. Soon it was coming out in thick, violent bursts and she was bending over. Keller was there, rubbing her back, saying, “Are you okay, Alex? Do you need me to get you a glass of water?”

  “Let her go, Keller,” Lee said. “She’s fine.”

  Alex stood up, shame burning her face. She’d failed; she’d failed Aldiss and all the rest of them and she shouldn’t be here. She didn’t deserve to be. She turned and went out into the hall, where Nirvana was throbbing, and down into the lobby. The scene had broken loose there, and she saw Lewis Prine gibbering in a nonsensical language as the extras stared at him in perfect silence. They had been in tableau.

  Alex rushed through the crowd and burst outside, gulping air.

  For a moment she stood alone in the snow, the wind burning her face. Then she walked away. She was finished for tonight. Done. To hell with them and their stupid game.

  Thirty steps to Culver Hall, and then she slipped down the same back way and out toward Front Street. Soon she would be home and she could forget about this, put the Procedure behind her and get back to her books. It was a stupid thing to have done, and she regretted ever having—

  “Shawna Wheatley and Abigail Murray.”

  Alex stopped. Sitting on a bench, his face half bathed in the glow from a security light, was Daniel Hayden. She watched him for a moment, saying nothing.

  “You’ve heard of them?”

  “The two victims,” she said tentatively, her breath frosting the air. “The students Aldiss was accused of . . . the girls he killed at Dumant.”

  “The others are too busy playing their games,” the boy went on. “But not me, Alex. I’ve been reading up on Aldiss. Studying him. What he did to those two girls . . . I can’t get past it. I want to drop the night class, stay as far away from him as possible, but I have to stay with it. I have to see how it ends.”

  “Why are you telling me this, Daniel? It’s late and I have an early class tomorrow.”

  He looked up at her, his hands trembling on his lap. “Because I know what you’re doing,” he said. “I’ve seen you on campus. You’re doing research too. Why do you think I left the note in your book last night?” She started to speak, but Hayden waved it away. “I was trying to lead you,” he said. “To point you in a certain direction. My dad was a cop, so I know a little bit about murder investigations.”

  “Daniel, I still don’t understand why you’re—”

  “I’m telling you this so you can do it the right way, Alex
. Your research, whatever you’ve been doing at the Fisk Library and up on the hill with the old dean—you need a focus. No more flying blind. You have to start at the beginning. Go back to his victims. Go back to Dumant University. That’s where Aldiss was born.”

  24

  The microfiche reader was antiquated and shoved to a back corner of the library. The light in the tiny, closet-size space streamed yellow and weak. Cobwebs glinted in the corners. Alex had the place to herself.

  She fanned through the alphabetized strips. You have to start at the beginning, she thought. The shame she’d felt earlier at having botched the Procedure was all but gone now, replaced by the information Hayden had given her. It meshed perfectly with what Fisk had said—she had to go back to the root, to the two victims themselves. She had to follow Aldiss outward from there. She’d been doing it the wrong way, trying to use the text to solve the riddle. Now she saw her mistake.

  A for Aldiss. F for Fallows. H for Hamlet. D for Dumant.

  Dumant University. 1982. The murders of Wheatley and Murray. The beginning.

  She took out the W strip and put it on the machine.

  W for Shawna Wheatley, the first victim.

  Alex had been able to find articles on Richard Aldiss, on the Dumant crimes themselves and on the man’s vast scholarship—but about his (No, Alex, she thought, catching herself, not his but someone else’s, the real killer’s) victims there was little. The only photos she’d found were the ones Fisk had shown her.

  She moved the wheel through the sheets of microfiche, tracking words with her eyes. Killer. Investigation. Upheaval. Campus. Methodology. Aldiss. She stopped only now and then—on a photograph of a young Aldiss, an aerial shot of the Dumant campus with a black circle where Shawna’s body had been found—but mostly she moved through the information, looking for anything about Wheatley.

  “Ms. Shipley?”

  Alex, startled, turned to see the librarian in the door.