Nothing. He stepped back, looked around the side of the house. The trees ruffled in the wind. The grass, dead and torn and uprooted here and there, its black underbelly exposed, tickled. Beneath him were the skeletons of flowers in an old trellis.
“Professor Aldiss!” Rice called again, louder this time. “I really need to talk to you. It’s urgent. Michael Tanner has been dead for three days now and now Lewis Prine has been—”
Something moved inside. A tiny shift of light, silver against his cheek.
“Professor Aldiss?”
He waited. Five seconds, ten. Fear pricked up in the back of his mind and he swallowed it down. Nothing to be afraid of here, Rice said to himself. Nothing but an old man who has chosen to live with the locals. Nothing but a has-been, a relic. Gathering strength, he knocked again. The screen door bumped, revealing a fraction of space next to the jamb. That was it. That fraction, that slice of interior. He could if he wanted to, Rice told himself. He could. He should.
His heart hammering now, he opened the screen door and went inside.
31
“Why?” someone asked when Detective Black had escorted Sally out of the room. It was Matthew Owen, still standing behind Dean Fisk. The nurse looked stricken. “Why would Aldiss think that one of you—”
“Because he hates us,” Christian said. “He always did.”
“Christian,” Alex said.
“It’s true, Alex. You didn’t see it, but the rest of us did. He hated it that we were free and he lost most of his life in that prison. He wanted to punish us for that. He wanted to create this, this—dominion over us, even when the class was over. And he did just that.”
“Crazy,” Frank muttered. The others agreed.
“Maybe he’s right.”
Everyone turned to stare at Lucy Wiggins, the outsider in their group.
“I mean, the detective said that someone in this house must have shot that guy downstairs. Maybe this professor of yours knows something that we don’t.” Her eyes seemed to sparkle with the mystery, as if this were a TV movie and she the unlikely heroine.
“Or maybe this is his way of manipulating us,” Keller said.
“Go on, Mr. Keller.” Dean Fisk’s voice crept up from the shadows of the room.
“It would be just like Aldiss to turn this into one of his games. He might have been trying to turn us all against one another, to cause exactly what’s happened, just so he could sit back and watch from afar. That’s the kind of person he is.”
Alex felt a pain in her chest as Keller spoke. No, she thought. Please, not you. She wanted to say to him: Iowa was not a mistake, what we did there was not part of one of Aldiss’s games. But she could say nothing. She was frozen in fear, the locked room and the people inside churning chaotically around her like the dust that raged down from the high, dark shelves.
“But the question still remains,” Lucy went on, gaining confidence in the part of the drama she was playing. Her eyes wide, she pulled herself up to full height and intoned, “Who killed your two friends?”
They all looked at one another. For the longest time no one spoke, and when a voice did come, it belonged to Dean Fisk himself.
“I believe,” he said, “that I know the answer to that question.”
32
Rice walked among the city of books. There were so many of them here that they had become part of the house, fused themselves into the walls. It was as if, he thought, the little house were made of paper and glue. There was no delineation of where the walls began and the books ended, no crease of space between—
He turned. His senses pricked up. He stared into the dark.
“Hello?” he asked. “Who’s there?”
But no. It was his imagination. There was no one here. The house was small enough to see every room from this vantage, and yet there was something deceptive about it. It was like a maze—one could get lost inside here. Rice ran his eyes over the great room and the three rooms off the main hallway. A room like a study with an old ratty chair that looked out on the lake, a tiny nook of a bathroom, and wedged between those rooms was another. A bedroom, he presumed. And how strange, Rice thought, approaching not of his own accord now but moved by something not of his volition, getting close to the room and smelling it, smelling the air and knowing, knowing inside him that he had found something based on this and this alone.
It was feminine. He smelled the scent of a woman in the air.
Fuck, he said to himself. Fuck, fuck, holy fuck.
He backed out into the hallway, the tiny house pulsing now around him, the air and light and everything else congealing around him and making it difficult to move. To stand. To breathe. He had to get out of here. He had to get back to Jasper.
Rice went for the nearest door, broke out into the daylight.
Gulping for air, he took a few steps. Fell down, his knees digging into the wet earth, then pushed himself up and took another step. He looked up, his vision swimming clear, and realized that he had come out the wrong way. He had gone out the back, had gotten lost inside the maze of books and found himself here, on the opposite side of the house, right in front of the lake. Now he would have to—
The lake. Rice looked at it, watched as it burbled and gulped in the wind. It was black as sludge, the banks having shed over the years and deposited themselves inside the water. He was on the north bank, looking over the water to the opposite edge. Nothing but Vermont over there, fluttering blue in the afternoon sun. And here, where he was, he smelled the rancid water. The disuse of it, the crazy way it curled and flowed like a black quilt being swept off a bed. In the middle was a swimming raft, and Rice watched the thing spin in the water. Overhead, a flock of winter wrens turned upward in the sky, the sound like the pages of a thick book being thumbed.
When he looked down again, he saw something just beneath the surface.
It wasn’t far from where he stood. It was there, just beneath the skin of the water, flicking in the light like the signal of a dying television. There, not there; there, not there. The sun refused to stay still.
“No,” Rice said, the moisture in his mouth totally gone. “No. No.”
Then he was bending. Bending down, his knees in the slickness, his body sliding down into that muck, his hands reaching, his face just inches from the seal that broke his world from the water’s, the taste of the lake there, the cloying metal sharpness of it, but he was down in the cold, his arm immersed in its glass, and he was reaching, trying to touch the thing he’d seen shimmering, half of him disappearing into the blackness and then finally, finally, he touched it. And the feel of it strangely set him right, set the world on its axis, made everything okay again. The feel—it felt exactly how he thought it would feel. It was exactly what he thought it would be.
It was a hand.
33
“Who did this?” Keller asked. “Who killed our friends, Dean Fisk?”
The dean looked ahead, his eyes pausing for a moment. “Isn’t it clear by now, Mr. Keller?”
There was something in that empty gaze. Something insistent. Pleading.
“No,” Alex said.
“Isn’t it clear?” the man repeated, his dead eyes wandering over them all, moving from face to face. “What’s happening to each of you? Isn’t it obvious what he’s doing?”
34
Rice sat on the bank. The wind had stopped. The water was quiet.
He had his cell out. His hands were shaking, palms smeared with black mud. He squeezed the phone just to feel something. Just to calm himself. His stomach flashed with heat and he turned and spit onto the earth.
Rice dialed a number.
“Yeah?”
“Black,” he said. “You’ve got to get over here. It’s Aldiss. Melissa Lee . . . she’s dead. She’s in the lake behind his house. I found—I found her. I found her and it’s all over. Did you hear me, Black, it’s all over.”
“I heard you,” the detective was saying. The man was running. Rice heard the rus
h of wind on his end, the snap of a car door, the sound being dragged out of the reception like a bag closing up and taking it away. Then he started the engine of his car and the phone jostled with the movement of him fighting the wheel.
“Get over here,” Rice was saying, his voice ruined and weak. “She’s here, Black. The woman is in the water. The son of a bitch hid her in the water and I’ve found her. I felt her hand. I . . . my God, I smelled her in his house.”
“Ten minutes,” Black was saying. “Ten minutes and I’ll be there. But you have to stay away from that house, Dean. He might still be there.”
“No,” Rice said. His voice was desperate now, breathless.
Black said nothing. He waited. He seemed even then to know.
“Richard Aldiss is gone,” Rice said. “He’s running.”
Then the call was cut and Dean Rice lay back and looked up at the sky, thinking about that hand. The way it had felt. The way it had seemed to grab on to him when he touched it, tried to pull him back. To pull him closer. To pull him under.
Iowa
1994
35
The two students drove into Hamlet, Iowa, at twilight.
Keller had taken the wheel of the Mazda because he was afraid that Alex would wreck it. But she didn’t mind. She wanted to see the landscape. Wanted to experience the place as Richard Aldiss had years ago, to know it as he had.
Hamlet was a two-stoplight town. The boundaries of the place were flat, the frameless geography running away into the pink sky like the top of a table. An ordinary downtown, sections of cubes abutting one another, fissured pavement and a group of old men sitting on a bench outside an abandoned building. Cars edged down Main Street on their way to the end of town, where better things must have been going on.
“Fucking Iowa,” Keller said.
“Yeah,” she agreed.
They crept on. Their plan was that they didn’t have a plan. At least not yet. Keller had agreed with her that Aldiss had indeed sent them here. The clue inside The Coil, the strange photograph Keller had been given, and the fact that the two Dumant victims had been here not long before they were murdered—all of it suggested this was the heart of the professor’s literary mystery. “Let’s go,” Keller had said that morning. “Let’s go find Fallows.”
Now he drove them past the cubes and they were at the fringe of town, dead brown cornfields stretching away into the distance on either side of the rental car. The sky at this hour seemed to be on fire. Alex thought, That? That was it? She looked out the car’s window to hide her disappointment.
But what had she expected? What had she really hoped to find in this place?
Don’t give up, she reminded herself. They were here. The Dumant killer’s two victims drove down this same street.
This was where the two mysteries had to come together. In Hamlet they would discover Fallows’s identity and exonerate Aldiss for the crimes he did not commit. It was what she had been preparing for since finding the book in the Fisk Library. This was the end.
“Turn around,” she said to Keller now. “I want to go back through.”
“You what?”
“I want to see the town again.”
So he spun the car around right in the middle of the barren highway, and again Alex studied the downtown. The buildings, split and cleaved, and the old men, who stared at them a little longer this time. She marveled at the emptiness of the place, the absolute deadness of it.
“Where now?” asked Keller. There was fatigue in his voice.
“Now we go find him,” Alex said. “We go to Olive Street.”
* * *
It didn’t take them long to find the Rutherford house.
Olive Street ran parallel to Main. The drive there took them four minutes. It was a picket-fence neighborhood, clumps of melting snow pushed off the road, two cars in each driveway. A pack of boys rode past them on bicycles, staring suspiciously inside the car.
“Where the hell is it?” Keller asked, scanning the addresses on the eaves of the houses.
“Here,” Alex answered. She pointed to a woman walking down the street, her head down to stave the wind. Keller pulled over and Alex rolled down the window.
“Excuse me,” she called. The woman stopped, warily, her eyes jumping from face to face. “We were wondering if you could tell us where Charles Rutherford lived.”
The woman relaxed. Clearly this was a question she was used to being asked. She removed a mittened hand from a pocket. “There,” she said, pointing to a redbrick house on the corner. “His widow still lives there. But . . .”
“What is it?” Alex asked.
“You look like students.”
“We are.”
The woman made a face. “Lydia doesn’t care for students.”
“Why not?” asked Alex.
“It’s the house. They believe . . . the students think something happened in that house a long time ago.”
Alex waited.
“But you two look sweet. Maybe she’ll talk to you if you don’t bring him up.”
“Him?”
“The writer. That Paul Fallows. That’s why she distrusts students—that’s all they want to talk about. They’re never interested in her life or how Charlie is doing.”
“Charlie,” Alex said. “You mean her husband?”
“No, of course not. Mr. Rutherford has been dead for years. I’m talking about her son.”
* * *
The house was tiny. It was a throwback even on the block, an antique. The brick had faded, the shutters were cracked, and a ragged American flag snapped in the wind. A fence of tall hedges loomed up outside the front door, perhaps to keep the Fallows scholars at a distance. Alex looked at the place and once again felt nothing; no tinge of knowledge, no whine of electricity. For the first time she wondered if this was truly where Aldiss wanted them to be.
“Doesn’t look the least bit spooky,” Keller said.
“What’d you expect?” she asked. “A haunted house?”
“Obviously.”
They watched from the curb. Nothing moved inside, no one passed across the wide front window. The house was the very same one Charles Rutherford had died in, the same one Aldiss and his mentor, Benjamin Locke, had come to when they’d made this same trip. Thinking of Aldiss, she felt the first spark. He was here.
They approached the front door. Alex stopped and let Keller walk up the steps of the porch between the hedges; she felt that he should be the one to greet the widow. He was better at this sort of thing than she was.
Keller knocked and the two waited, listening. Movement from inside, and then the door dragged open and a woman stood before them. She was at least fifty-five, her face wrinkled and sagging. Yet there was something alive about her, something that suggested a former beauty.
“Mrs. Rutherford?” Keller asked.
“Yes?”
“We’re . . . we just wanted to, um . . .”
The woman eyed the boy, leaning against the frame of the door.
“We wanted to . . .”
“What my friend is saying,” Alex said, stepping forward, “is that we wanted to speak to you about your son.”
Something changed in the woman’s eyes. “Charlie?”
She and Rutherford had a son, a young boy who was very ill.
“That’s right,” Alex went on, so perfect with her lie that she surprised even herself. But she knew these lines, this script—Aldiss had given it to her in an early lecture. “We heard about his illness in an article we read in school and we wanted to see how he was doing. He still lives here with you, doesn’t he?”
“Yes,” the woman said. “He has his own room upstairs. Where did you say you were from?”
“Vermont,” Alex said.
“And you’ve come all this way to . . .”
“We really do think Charlie has an amazing story.”
What are you doing, Alex? This is something Aldiss would do. We shouldn’t be—
But Ly
dia Rutherford was moving out of the way, and Keller was pushing inside the small house. Alex had no choice but to follow.
* * *
“My husband died in 1974,” the woman said when they were all in the kitchen. “Charles Jr. was nine. He grew up without a father. His condition made it that much more difficult. But we made it—somehow we made it.”
“Your husband,” Keller said. “What did he do?”
“A salesman,” Lydia said. “He sold encyclopedias door to door. We think that’s what killed him. He exhausted himself. He wanted to work up to the main office one day, get up there with the suits. He just ignored the symptoms. Died right there on the front porch. I never remarried.”
The woman’s eyes drifted away.
“Sometimes people like you come here,” she went on.
“Like us?” Keller asked.
“University students. They call themselves scholars. They think . . . this is going to sound crazy.”
“Not at all.”
“They think my Charles was a famous writer. That he wrote these novels under a different name. That he was this—what is it called? A ghostwriter. It’s all this crazy game to them. But some of them are so adamant. They used to take pictures of our house from the street. There was even a couple who got married on our lawn once. We were going to move—my sister lives in Des Moines. But we never did. Charlie loves it here, and the neighborhood has always been so forgiving of his problems.”
His problems, Alex thought. What’s wrong with her son? What kept this woman here, alone, all this time?
“He used to be much worse,” Lydia went on. “He used to be so angry. Some people in the neighborhood think he still is. But I know the truth. I know how much better Charlie is than before.” The woman paused and Alex studied her. What happened to her? What is she protecting? “Charlie’s father wanted to institutionalize him. He knew there was something . . . different about our son. And, well, I’m not proud of this, but we sent him to a home.” The woman blanched. “I was weak, and Charles was very firm about these things. Then, when he died . . .” She trailed off. “It was a miracle. Dr. Morrow changed Charlie into the man he is today. He saved my son.”
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