Dominance

by Will Lavender

  “Yes, Ms. Daws,” she said. “Everything’s fine.”

  The woman left Alex alone.

  She shook her head, clearing the exhaustion. It was nearing midnight now and so much had happened. She thought again of Melissa Lee, of her eyes in that false mirror, of Keller’s pitying hands on her back.

  “Come on,” she said aloud, clearing the thoughts. “Focus, Alex.”

  She thought of poor Shawna Wheatley. Everybody was searching for Paul Fallows, trying to uncover the identity of the writer, but no one was trying to find the truth about Shawna. No one was looking for an answer to what had really happened to either of those two students at Dumant University.

  Alex closed her eyes, remembering something. It was something Fisk had shown her that day, a small piece of those terrible articles on the Dumant crimes.

  You should look into Shawna Wheatley.

  It was what Aldiss had said when they brought him in for questioning. She’d always felt there was something strange about it, something buried inside those words that might lead her to answers. Look into, she thought, pinching her eyes fiercely, nails digging painfully into her temples. Look into . . .

  She almost missed the article by scrolling too quickly.

  It had been written in the fall of 1981, just months before Wheatley was murdered.

  A simple story about a graduate fellowship in literature at Dumant. A hometown-pride angle, the mother quoted. In the accompanying photograph Wheatley wore thick glasses and a turtleneck sweater, her smile wide and innocent. The microfiche reader whirred in the small, dust-filled room.

  “Who are you?” Alex asked aloud. “Who are you really, Shawna?”

  She looked at the story again. Read each word, her eyes stinging.

  Nothing. There was nothing there.

  But there had to be. She was on the last microfiche sheet now.

  Goddamn you, Aldiss, she cursed silently. She was exhausted, getting loopy. Losing herself. Goddamn you for doing this to me. To her.

  Promising herself this was it, Alex read the story one last time.

  It was then that she saw it. Just a few throwaway lines at the bottom of the page. She leaned close to the screen, the cheap plastic chair scratching the floor beneath her.

  Recently Shawna began her dissertation. Under the tutelage of her favorite professor, she has begun to read books in ways she never imagined. “Dr. Aldiss has taught me so much,” she said. “He wants me to go to Iowa for research, just like he did when he was a student here. If I can find someone to go with me, I might just make that trip.”

  Trembling, Alex stared at the screen. The girl had fallen away; all the texture in the small, cramped room had dissolved. She was alone. Completely alone. Someone walked past the door, heels clicking. She barely heard it.

  Someone to go with me . . .

  Alex reached forward and turned off the machine and the room fell dark.

  * * *

  At just after one in the morning she knocked on Keller’s door. The football dorm smelled of pizza and vomit and aerosol deodorant. Someone had hung a jockstrap on the fire spigot. She waited, her mind racing with unanswered questions.

  Keller pulled the door open, blinked into the harsh corridor light. His eyes were glazed with sleep, his hair spiked into tufts. He was shirtless and Alex made herself focus on his face, his bloodshot eyes.

  “Alex, if this is about the Procedure, then—”

  “The photograph you found,” she said. “The one of Rutherford. I think I know what it means.”

  “What are you talking about, Alex?”

  She told him in one breathless rush. She told him everything she had learned about Shawna Wheatley that night.

  When she was finished, Keller asked, “What do we do now?”

  She didn’t have to think. The answer was obvious, right there on the tip of her tongue. It had been obvious the moment she’d found the article on the microfiche reader, maybe even earlier than that—when she’d seen that strange photograph of Charles Rutherford in the bar, or when she’d read those time-withered newspaper articles in Fisk’s treasure room. All she’d needed was Daniel Hayden to push her in the right direction.

  “It means,” Alex said finally, “that we have to go to Iowa. Aldiss is leading us there.”

  Alex

  Present Day

  25

  After the murder of Lewis Prine, the remaining classmates had been locked in an upstairs room of the Fisk mansion.

  It was early afternoon and the sun knifed in through curtains the color of feathered pages. There was another fireplace here, two massive shelves flanking the hearth, and a wooden clock hanging above it all that had stopped on some long-passed 3:38. Christian Kane was mumbling frantically about his innocence; yes, it was a book—his book—that had been placed over the dead man’s eyes, but what did that really mean, what did it mean when everyone in this house had a copy, what did it mean when—

  “That’s enough, Christian,” Keller said, and the writer fell quiet like a scolded puppy. The nurse, Matthew Owen, stood to the side, hands kneading the handles of Dean Fisk’s wheelchair. Sally Tanner and Lucy Wiggins stood on opposite sides of the room, the widow frighteningly composed and the actress tracing nervous ellipses across the furred dust on the mantelpiece while Frank Marsden watched her unblinkingly, a shadow of disbelief on his face. And inside a clot of shadows Alex observed them all as Aldiss had instructed, wondering which of her classmates had turned.

  A young cop guarded the door, his arms crossed and a look of vigilance on his face.

  “Look at him,” Keller whispered to her. “The kid’s scared shitless. No wonder they didn’t send him out to talk to Aldiss.”

  She would have laughed under different circumstances.

  “Why hasn’t Melissa returned?” Fisk asked. Behind the old man, Owen continued to massage the handles of the chair, his movements almost hypnotic. Alex tried to shake off the lurid memory of Melissa’s head in his lap, of the way he—

  Owen turned his gaze on her and she looked away.

  “No one knows,” Keller said. The woman still hadn’t returned from the memorial service.

  “Melissa didn’t have anything to do with that . . . thing downstairs,” Christian said, his voice on the edge of panic. “She couldn’t have.”

  “She talked a lot about Daniel,” Frank said. Lucy stopped moving her finger through the dust and stepped away from the dead, blackened fireplace. “She seemed a little obsessed with his death.”

  “What do you mean?” Keller asked.

  “I mean she seemed convinced that his death wasn’t a suicide. She talked to me a little last night, before bed. I wasn’t thinking clearly. We had some drinks on the plane and then again when Sally visited and my mind . . . you know. I didn’t think much of it. But now, given what happened to Michael and Lewis— My God, do you think she might have been right and Daniel was the first one?”

  “Daniel killed himself,” Sally said flatly. She was standing alone in a corner, lips pursed and eyes hot as coals; grief had untethered her from the rest of the group. “He was upset about a case he was working on. He put his service revolver in his mouth. He was a detective in New York City, under enormous stress—let’s not complicate Daniel’s death just because of this.”

  “Melissa says Daniel was happy,” Frank put in, his voice soft and even. “She says—”

  “Melissa says a lot of things,” Sally said, glaring at the man. “Let me ask you this: did you trust her when we were students?”

  The man shifted uncomfortably.

  “Well?”

  “No,” Frank said softly. “No one did.”

  “The woman has a psychological problem. Michael told me that himself.”

  Alex sat forward. “Sally, do you think Melissa committed these murders?”

  The woman regarded Alex coolly. Her arms dropped to her sides and she looked at Alex as if to say, How dare you ask me that question. You of all people . . .

>   “It’s a good question,” Dean Fisk said quietly from his chair. “Do you suspect her, Sally?”

  The woman straightened. She was turning something over in her mind, trying to get her words exactly right. Finally, her voice measured and cool, she said, “Michael told me that Melissa called him sometimes. She was having problems in her marriage. I—well, of course I got jealous. I remembered her reputation when we were in college. I mean who doesn’t? But she kept calling, and Michael kept taking her calls. He would disappear to his library to talk, and I would put my ear to the door to listen. They would talk for hours sometimes. We got into these terrible fights about it.” Sally shuddered, whether at this memory or at what had happened in the last seventy-two hours, it was unclear.

  “What did he say about her?” Christian asked. He had suddenly brightened, glad perhaps that the group’s focus was shifting now to Melissa and off the horrible sight of Lewis Prine.

  “He thought the woman needed professional help,” Sally said. “He’d called Lewis about her, and Lewis shared the same thoughts: they believed she struggled with reality. That she was a compulsive liar.”

  “You can’t be serious,” Frank protested.

  “She isn’t right, Frank. Melissa wasn’t like the rest of us, and you know that’s the first thing Aldiss—”

  “Aldiss?” Alex couldn’t help herself.

  Sally glared. “You asked me if she could have done this, Alex. The answer to that is no. I do not think Melissa did this. I think—and have thought since I saw . . . what I saw in my husband’s library three days ago—that Richard Aldiss killed my husband. But Aldiss couldn’t do it alone, so he got one of his ‘protégés’ to help him.” She looked at them all in turn, jabbing a finger at each person in the locked room. “The professor has put things in motion and now we’re all dying, one by one.”

  “Enough.” They turned to Fisk again. Powder ran in streaks down the man’s face as he perspired, and his milky eyes roamed the room blindly. He clasped a bony fist around the sunglasses in his lap. “You need to stay together now. To believe in one another. To fall apart and blame each other for what has happened—that will not help anyone.”

  Alex turned away and looked out the window. Reporters were milling down there, watching the windows of the mansion for movement.

  “Crazy, isn’t it?”

  Keller moved beside her. All the anger she had felt about the missing manuscript suddenly dissipated. If she had an ally here, she knew it was him.

  “Maybe we screwed up,” he went on. “Back in Iowa.”

  “We didn’t, Keller. You know that as well as I do.”

  “I know that this looks like something Aldiss would dream up,” the man said. “Some kind of human puzzle.”

  Alex looked at him. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore,” she said weakly. “I want to get my mind off all of this. Aldiss, Michael, what we saw down there. Let’s talk about something else.”

  “Not books,” Keller said.

  Alex smiled weakly. “Okay, not books.”

  “What about history?”

  Alex turned back to the pane, saying nothing.

  “Me first, then,” Keller said. “Her name was Jessica. My ex-wife. She taught math at the high school. We liked the same things, we showed up at the same places—it seemed natural. Right.”

  She didn’t look at him. Couldn’t. “What happened?”

  “She thought I was too secretive,” he said. “She wanted to know too much about Jasper, about the class. Of course that wasn’t it. There were other things. Her toenails, for instance.”

  Alex laughed.

  “Since we split up,” he said, “I’ve been living in an old restored farmhouse and coaching football. We’ve got a good team. You should come down and see us sometime.”

  Maybe I will, she thought. Then she remembered Peter and—

  Someone screamed.

  Alex turned quickly and saw Lucy. She was attacking Frank, punching him and scratching at his eyes, her face contorted into a mask of rage.

  “Liar!” she screamed. “This man is a fucking liar!”

  The young cop rushed over and pulled the woman off, and she relented, kicking and thrashing, blond hair wild and teeth bared. Alex watched as Frank sat up, his ears red, a claw mark dotted with blood on his cheek. He smiled the charming smile that must have won him roles in so many auditions and said, “It’s nothing. Ms. Wiggins is just having a bad morning. She’s far away from home, and with all that’s happened in this house—”

  “Liar,” the woman said again. “Don’t believe him. Don’t believe anything he says.”

  When Alex looked back at Frank, the man held her gaze. He was still smiling but his eyes said, Help me, Alex. I’ve done something awful.

  Before Frank could say anything aloud, the oak-paneled door opened and someone called Alex’s name. Detective Black wanted to see her alone.

  “Good luck,” Fisk said as she left the room. “And remember: you do not have to protect him now.”

  * * *

  Black was waiting for her in the dean’s study, the lights on and every volume on the shelf starkly lit. Instinctively, her eyes ran across the books.

  “Sit, Dr. Shipley.”

  She did.

  Black cleared his throat and said, “I will ask you what I am going to ask the others. Where were you this morning just before the memorial service?”

  “I went out.”

  The detective cocked an eyebrow.

  “Nothing to do with Aldiss,” she said. “I just wanted to see my old campus again. I hadn’t seen much of it since I came back. I needed to clear my mind. For my eulogy, of course.”

  “And what do you think of the place?”

  “It’s changed,” she said. “All is evolution.”

  “And that was it. You just went out.”

  “Yes.”

  He looked down at the desk, made a show of shuffling papers. “Lewis Prine . . . had you spoken to him recently?”

  She didn’t have to think. “I spoke to him briefly a few months ago. The last meaningful conversation we had was four years ago. I remember it well.”

  “What did the two of you discuss?”

  “Lewis thought he’d found a page from an unpublished Fallows and he wanted me to check the writing. To make sure he was correct.”

  “And was he?”

  Alex said nothing at first. She was thinking of the empty space, her hand clutching at the darkness, Keller’s innocent smile when she saw him later.

  “Dr. Shipley?”

  She raised her eyes to the detective. “Yes. I think so.”

  “And did you talk with Lewis about anything else?”

  “We spoke about a lot of things, Detective. We were old friends, after all.”

  “Did you speak about a game that Lewis Prine had been playing?”

  So he was involved in the Procedure. Shit.

  “No,” she said. “I stayed out of that.”

  “But you have played the game before.”

  She held his eyes. “I have. When I was in the night class.”

  “And were you good at it?”

  “Good?”

  The man waved his hands. “Games are supposed to have winners and losers, Professor. Did you win?”

  She looked at the cluttered desk, at the row of Fisk’s pill bottles there. Then she sat up and said, “Not at first. At first I was terrible. But in time, yes, I became very good.”

  Black scratched a note to himself. “Let’s talk about this morning. What time did you leave?”

  “Around eight.”

  “And was anyone else awake?”

  She thought of the house, the smoldering fire in the empty great room, the darkness of the kitchen. “Not that I could see,” she said. “It’s a huge house, Detective.”

  Black nodded. “I believe Lewis Prine arrived around nine a.m., just as everyone in the house was leaving for the memorial service. He was running late. A witness tells us th
at his car had broken down, and out here it’s common for cell service to be out. So he arrived possibly just as the last people were leaving the house and—”

  “We were all at the service,” Alex said, a memory stopping her short: Frank and Keller were late. She scolded herself for going there, for allowing her mind to turn on itself. Suddenly she was breathless, reaching for something that she knew was just out of her grasp. “We were already gone by the time Lewis got here.”

  “Someone might have returned,” Black explained. “Someone might have stepped back into the house just long enough to commit the murder and still make it to the service. For that reason we must keep you all under surveillance until we exhaust the possibilities and rule out everyone who is inside this house.”

  Someone in the night class did this, she thought, remembering Aldiss’s words. Someone who was there.

  “But this murder,” she managed to say. “Nothing adds up. If the killer is the same man who killed Michael Tanner, then he’s changed his methods. Everything is different except the book.”

  “Sometimes,” Black said, “that means nothing.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

  “The killer might not have had enough time. He might have needed to move quickly, and a gun could have been his—or her—only option.” The detective paused, breathed in deeply. “Do you know of anyone who might be carrying a firearm in this house, Dr. Shipley?”

  “No,” she said. “Of course not.” Could he tell she was lying?

  A second passed, then two. Black finally nodded and said, “Let’s talk about Richard Aldiss.”

  “What about him?”

  “You returned to his house last night.”

  She nodded.

  “And?”

  “And he offered nothing about Michael Tanner. He claims he is innocent.”

  “Of course he does,” Black said. “Aldiss’s problem is that he lives so close to campus. It would have been easy for him to come here, murder Lewis Prine, and then get back to his house before the memorial service broke up.”

  “He didn’t do it.”

  Again Black arched that eyebrow. “So sure, Professor?”

  She shrugged. She wished she could go on, give the detective something that would convince him, but there was nothing. Nothing but her gut.