Dominance

by Will Lavender

  There was a sound from behind them, the sound like the coo of a small child.

  “There’s Charlie now,” Lydia Rutherford said softly. “I’ll tell him he has company.”

  The woman left the kitchen. The two students sat around a small dinner table, neither of them saying a word. In the next room Alex heard muffled talk, the widow’s feminine trill, and then a long silence.

  “They’re going to find out about us,” Alex whispered. “She’s going to catch on. It’s only a matter of time.”

  “You lied to her,” Keller hissed. “You got us into this.”

  “I didn’t know that she would actually—”

  Footsteps approaching. Alex sat up and folded her hands on her lap.

  “He’s ready to see you now,” came the woman’s voice at her back.

  They went into the living room. It was semidark, just a small lamp spilling light into the room. A man sat in a recliner, rocking gently, his eyes straight ahead.

  “Charlie hates the light,” Lydia Rutherford whispered. “Always has.” Then to her son, in a voice that suggested the man may be hard of hearing: “Charlie, here are your guests. They’ve come all the way from Vermont. They read about you at their school. About you and Dr. Morrow.” She looked expectant.

  The son turned to face them, and Alex drew in a sharp breath.

  She was looking at the photograph on the back of the Fallows novels. She had finally found the man in the dark suit.

  Alex

  Present Day

  36

  Richard Aldiss had disappeared, and they were all in danger.

  Word spread through the Fisk mansion like a fire. At first there was shock—at hearing Melissa Lee had been the third victim, at the knowledge that Aldiss was on the run and could be on his way to campus. Then realization set in, and Alex felt the others staring at her. Accusing her. He tricked you, Alex. He deceived you, and you let him.

  Black locked them inside the house and put his men outside to watch for any sign of the professor. Alex heard the words “armed and dangerous”; she knew that if Aldiss showed his face at Jasper he would be shot on sight.

  How? she wondered. How did it come to this?

  Keller stayed beside her. The others went off to their own rooms but she didn’t move. She couldn’t. She had been wrong about everything.

  “Say it,” she said.

  “What?” Keller asked. He rubbed a hand exhaustedly over his scalp.

  “Say what you’re thinking, Keller. That I dropped the ball. That I fucked up.”

  “You didn’t . . .” But there was no use; to go on would only be to patronize her, and Keller knew better than to do that. “This is what he does, Alex. It’s what he’s always done. These puzzles—he lives for them.”

  “But everyone told me, Keller. They tried to warn me.” And now three people are dead, and I could have stopped him.

  He shook his head. “You can’t blame yourself, Alex.”

  Anger rushed to the surface. How dare he tell her how to feel! Did he think they were in Iowa again? Did he think they were kids, running around trying to find some crazy writer? She looked at him, her jaw working and red throbbing behind her eyes.

  “Where is it?”

  His eyes narrowed. “What are you talking about?”

  “You stole it last night. You saw the manuscript on the shelf and when I came back from Aldiss’s it was gone. What did you do with it?”

  A look of pure confusion. He had no idea what she was talking about.

  Don’t let him do what Aldiss did, Alex. Don’t let him fool you.

  “Where is it, Keller?” she asked again, leaning closer.

  The look remained, that boyish bewilderment, and then slowly he broke. Piece by piece his face returned to the one she knew.

  “In my room,” he said. “I’ll let you see it.”

  “Then let’s go.”

  “Not now. There are too many people around. Later.”

  She looked at him. “Is it real, Keller?”

  At first he simply looked at her. Then he nodded.

  “The only unpublished Fallows,” he said. “Come by at ten o’clock and we’ll look at it together.”

  Then he left the room and she was alone with her guilt.

  * * *

  Just before nightfall, with the reporters down on the quad dwindling or retreating to better shelter on the west campus, Alex drifted off. A swatch of a dream: she felt herself walking, following the footsteps of a man down a corridor. The man was Richard Aldiss. She did not know how she knew this, because she could not see his face.

  Where are we going, Professor? she asked.

  You’ll see, said the man. Do you trust me?

  In the dream she didn’t hesitate: Yes, Professor. I trust you.

  And Alex followed him, realizing that he was a much younger version of himself. His hair was fuller, darker. And he wore the suit she had seen him in years ago, the suit he had worn during his trial.

  “Dr. Shipley,” someone called. “Dr. Shipley, wake up.”

  She did. She sat bolt upright and focused on the face of Detective Black.

  “It’s me,” he said. “Relax.”

  “Is he . . .”

  “No,” Black said. “Aldiss is still missing. You need to get back to your room.”

  “But—”

  “No,” he cut her off firmly. “No objections, Alex. If Richard Aldiss is still out there, then we need everyone in the house protected. This man is incredibly dangerous.”

  She wanted to protest, but there was nothing to say. Black was right.

  She stood up and walked out of the room. His voice came up behind her.

  “There will be more questions if Aldiss is found. When he is found. You must understand that if you hear anything from him, anything at all, then we will get it first. If you are protecting him or lying for him in any way—”

  “I’m not.”

  “—then you will be buried along with him. Did you hear me?”

  She swallowed. “I understand.”

  “Good. All-night surveillance tonight. If Aldiss comes anywhere near this campus, we will have him. And my men have been told to shoot to kill.”

  Alex said nothing. The dream stung her eyes: Do you trust me?

  “And Dr. Shipley?”

  She turned, waiting.

  “What you discovered in Iowa?”

  “Yes, Detective?”

  “You need to think long and hard about it now, because it looks like Richard Aldiss may have been playing his game for a very long time.”

  Iowa

  1994

  37

  “I got the idea from Lydia Rutherford,” Keller explained.

  They were in a lonely Main Street diner, a few suspicious regulars bellied up to the bar, waxing poetic about the cold. A waitress whisked by and refilled their drinks, hovered there for a moment. “Studying on a Friday night?” she asked.

  Alex looked up at the woman. Said, “If we don’t finish this lesson, then a man in prison for murder is going to be really disappointed with us.”

  The waitress shook her head disapprovingly. Then she was gone and Alex turned back to Keller.

  They had come from Lydia Rutherford’s to the diner, hunger having been temporarily eclipsed by the shocking image of a Charlie Rutherford who was identical to the photo Keller had received. Someone had been pointing them toward Charlie even then. “It’s him, Alex,” Keller had said breathlessly as she drove them away from the house. “Holyfuckingcrap it’s him.”

  Now they ate burnt cheeseburgers and sucked at chocolate milkshakes, and Keller reached into his pack and removed a book. It was Fallows’s The Golden Silence. As Alex finished off her burger, he went through the pages, making tick marks in the margins.

  “It was something she said back there,” he said. “Something about Charlie.”

  Then he was flipping through the text. The Golden Silence was the second of Fallows’s novels, the book that had r
eally begun the search. He gestured for Alex and she scooted into the booth with him. It had been hours since she’d been this close to him, and she wanted to stop, slow the scene down so she could just be with him. Alone, relaxed. But there was no time—in less than two days they would be on their way back to Vermont, and what they’d found in that house had changed everything. The two leaned over the book, looking down into the page as if it were a well.

  “The Golden Silence is about many things,” Keller explained to her. “We never got to it in the night class, but I did.”

  “You what?”

  “I cheated, Alex. I read on.”

  “Show-off.” Alex nudged him with an elbow. “What’s it about?”

  “Well, it’s a story about Iowa, for one. The Coil was a New York novel, but this book is about here. Where we’re sitting now.”

  “Page’s Diner?” asked Alex playfully.

  Keller made a face. “You can tell Fallows loved his home. Even if Rutherford is not Fallows, I still think we’re dealing with an Iowan.”

  “Go on.”

  “The Golden Silence is a story about a man in prison.”

  Alex broke away from the text and craned her neck to look at Keller. “A what?”

  “Yeah, I know. Right up Aldiss’s alley. But this guy escapes.” He paused, looking down at the book as if its very existence troubled him. “He’s in there because of something. Something happened a long time ago. A crime. But it’s never explained what this crime is. It’s something awful. A murder, maybe—I don’t know. Fallows is intentionally trying to throw the reader off. This thing is like Finnegans Wake on steroids.”

  “And the main character is put in prison,” Alex said, guiding him back.

  “Yes. But, like I said, he escapes. He pretends to be someone else and then—this is strange, Alex. Really damn strange. People start believing him.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He tells them he’s another man. He starts using this alias. First on his cellmate, and then on the guards. And slowly . . . well, it’s like he hypnotizes them. They just start believing that he’s a different man. Surrealism, of course—but Fallows was after something else with this. The Golden Silence has all these trapdoors, these broken passageways. In a lot of ways the book is this house of mirrors. But it’s also poetic and, in its own way, sad.”

  “What happens to him when he gets out?”

  “Not much,” Keller said. “He lives the rest of his life. He writes and reads poetry. That part is nonessential. What is essential, and what made me think about the book tonight when we were at that house on Olive Street, is this.”

  And then he moved his arm and showed her the page he had marked. Alex saw his notations at the edges of the text. But she could make sense of none of it—at least not yet.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s the connection,” said Keller, as if it were all right there, on that ink-heavy page under his heavy right arm. “In this scene he’s talking to someone in the prison. Telling them this false story about his identity, this lie about who he is. A throwaway conversation, you think. But . . .”

  “What is it, Keller?” Alex urged.

  “See for yourself.”

  He turned the book around, and Alex scooted out of the booth so that she could get right above the page. She began to read the lines Keller had highlighted.

  The prisoner looked into the shadows. The guard stood outside his cell, looking in at him. The guard’s eyes glowed. Everything was dark. These, the prisoner thought, these feral beasts who kept him here. He couldn’t wait to spring himself, to free himself from this . . .

  “Where did you grow up, prisoner?” the guard asked.

  “Iowa,” he said. “In its very heart.”

  “And your youth?”

  “Troubled.”

  The guard nodded. He had expected this, was used to being around torn and broken men. Somewhere deep in the prison a man screamed.

  “And your first crime?” the guard said, tapping a finger on the cold steel bar. “Your baptism?”

  “Theft,” the prisoner said slowly. “I stole books.”

  The guard smiled, teeth parting slightly. He was interested now. This man, this prisoner—he wasn’t like the rest.

  “And what did you say your name was?” the guard asked.

  The prisoner looked at him. Gauged him. Readied himself for the lie, the tale. As always, his heart grew and the golden silence descended. He was ready. “My name,” he said, “is Morrow. Dr. Isaac Morrow.”

  She read the section twice, then sat back, slumped down beside Keller in the booth, and turned it over in her mind. What’s happening? she thought. What’s he doing to us?

  “I don’t understand it, Keller.”

  “Lydia Rutherford,” he said. “She used that name tonight. Dr. Morrow. She said it plain as day, Alex. We both heard it.”

  Alex stared forward. The diner had fallen away. “Why would she do that?”

  “I have no idea. My only thought is Lydia Rutherford is in on it somehow. She’s trying to tell us something without telling us.”

  The last stragglers were leaving the restaurant, looking at the two college kids as if they were beings from another planet. Alex felt unmoored, rattled loose—again she wanted to move closer to Keller. Take comfort in his warmth, his strength. She moved her arm so that it touched his.

  “The timing,” she said finally.

  Keller looked up. “What about it?”

  She reached across and took his pencil, made a notation on a napkin. “Fallows wrote The Golden Silence in what year?”

  Keller turned hurriedly to the front of the book, found the copyright date. “Seventy-five,” he said. She scribbled the year.

  “Charlie Rutherford Jr. would have to be how old?”

  “Wait, I remember. Lydia said he was nine in ’74, when his father died.”

  “That means he was born in the midsixties. And she told us Dr. Morrow cured him after her husband died. If Charles Rutherford is Fallows, how could he have known about Morrow?”

  Keller said nothing. He kept his eyes down, staring at the napkin Alex had just written on as if it might tell him a secret. Reveal something. Then he sat up, his eyes opening wide. He closed the book with a heavy thump.

  “Maybe it doesn’t have anything to do with any of that.”

  Alex blinked. “What are you talking about?”

  “Maybe,” Keller said, “Lydia Rutherford is Paul Fallows.”

  Alex

  Present Day

  38

  Where are you, Aldiss?

  It was just after eight o’clock now. Alex looked out the window of her room, down at the twinkling Jasper campus. Everything was still, still and silent. Black’s men would be waiting and Aldiss—would he come back here? Would he return to the campus to finish off the class? They were all here, after all, all in one place and so easy to find.

  Once again she reached beneath her mattress and felt for the false Fallows book. She removed the book and opened it, saw the gun gleaming inside. Had Aldiss given her a way to save herself from him? Did he want Alex to end his life? She thought about Iowa again, about the awful person she’d met there, the true Dumant killer.

  Unless that too was a lie.

  Unless all they had found there had been put in place by Aldiss.

  Jesus, Alex, get ahold of yourself. That’s impossible.

  She returned to the window, wondered how long until something happened—

  There was a knock, and she turned around quickly.

  “Who is it?”

  “It’s me,” said a familiar voice. “May I come in?”

  “Please do, Dean Fisk.”

  The door opened and the dean was there. He waved Matthew Owen away, and the nurse—his eyes fearful and quick—disappeared down the hall.

  Fisk pushed his chair into the room and Alex sat at the foot of the bed, looking at the frail old man. A spike of regret for what had happened tore th
rough her.

  “I’m so sorry, Dean Fisk. I thought Professor Aldiss was—”

  “Shhh,” the man said. “Now is not the time or the place for apologies.”

  She nodded.

  “I came up here to speak to you in confidence.”

  She looked at him. “Please, go on.”

  The dean began, and then stopped himself. This hesitancy was so unusual for Fisk that Alex was taken aback. She waited for the man to continue.

  “It seems,” he said, “that I have not been completely honest with you, Alex.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that I have lied,” the dean said. He stared blankly at her, his eyes wet and pleading. “What happened to you in Iowa—I feel partly responsible for that. I lied to you on your visits during the night class and I live with those lies every day of my life.”

  Iowa

  1994

  39

  Alex awoke to find that someone else was in the hotel room with them. It was a man. He leaned back in the shadows, his face distorted by darkness, watching her. She didn’t like his gaze. Not at all. It was as if he was learning her, studying her and teasing out her secrets. She sat up in bed, feeling Keller’s body beside her, and stared deeper into the room. The darkness tingled like static. And sitting there in the room’s lone chair, his face bathed in the swath of light that fell through the parted curtain, was Richard Aldiss.

  Alex tried to scream. Tried to stand up, to do something—but her body was frozen. Her mind locked. She reached for Keller, thinking, Please, please wake up.

  Then Aldiss wavered, just a slight flicker like the interference in a television image, and stood up. He took a step toward her, his boots (they were so dirty, she saw, and thought, He’s escaped) sighing on the carpet. A second step, and then—