“Alex. Alex, I’m here.”
She opened her eyes. Found that she was clutching Keller, sweat pasting down her hair and the sheet balled in her fists. She sat up, wiping sleep from her eyes. The bedside clock read 3:12 a.m. It was Saturday.
Keller sat up in bed and put his arms around her. She slumped against him.
“Nightmare,” she said. “About him.”
Smoothing her hair with his massive hand, the boy said, “We should go back. We’ll just go back to Jasper and forget this. All of this—this class, Aldiss, Fallows. It isn’t worth it.”
“No.” Her voice was a slight whisper. “Not now.”
Keller began to speak, to protest, but then he fell silent. She curled into his chest.
“We’ve found something huge,” she said. “We’re too close. With Charlie and Dr. Morrow in The Golden Silence . . . we can’t stop now. The night class is almost over. We almost have Fallows.”
He leaned his head back and closed his eyes. A car whispered past out on the Iowa highway, a grid of light sweeping over the wall.
“Tomorrow,” he said. “Where do we start?”
She wiggled closer to him. To be here, alone with him . . . under different circumstances it would have been pure pleasure. But now, given the task they had in front of them—Alex was unsure if this was something true or if it was just a product of the night class. If she and Keller had been brought together not by destiny but by the whims of Aldiss himself. Maybe their pairing, like everything else, was another twist in his plan.
“He was famous,” Alex said at last.
Keller sat up. She could feel his gaze on her. “Slow down for us simpletons, Alex. I’m not following you.”
“Paul Fallows. He would have to be the most famous thing to ever come out of little old Hamlet.” She stared at him, at his dark shape. “In every small town in America, the locals keep up with their prodigal sons.”
“So, what,” Keller said, “we take a trip to the Hamlet Historical Society?”
“Not at all.” She leaned up and kissed him, the sting of the Aldiss dream finally dissolving behind her eyes. “We tap into the town gossip mill.”
* * *
The next day, just after the noon whistle pealed in the distance and a cold, muted sun finally broke through the clouds, they returned to downtown Hamlet and found a bar called Easy Living. A skin of blue smoke clung to the ceiling. Billiard balls cracked behind them, and now and then laughter echoed out. Keller, clearly out of place here, held everyone’s gaze in the room. He took up two stools and drank a Tab with his arms draped across the bar.
“Where’s home?” someone asked.
Alex turned. The bartender was a skinny man with yellowed teeth and a rumpled, splotchy apron. She was used to lonely bars; she did her best studying at Rebecca’s. “Jasper College,” she said. “Vermont.”
“A long way from home, honey.”
“It’s a sordid tale.”
“I’ve got time.” The man smiled crookedly. There was a pack of cigarettes and a lighter on the bar, a community gift, and she reached over and took one. A sometimes thing, a thing she did when she was nervous or studying for an exam or thinking about grad school. She lit a cigarette and held it like she knew what she was doing. Go for it.
“We’re looking for someone,” she said.
“Oh yeah?” The bartender leaned closer and put his elbows on the bar. “And who would that be?”
“Paul Fallows.”
Something changed in the man’s eyes. “The writer.”
“That’s right. Know him?”
“Honey, there isn’t anybody who knows him. That guy is a figment of somebody’s weird imagination. A ghost.”
Alex exhaled toward the ceiling. “Surely you must know somebody who can tell us something. We’ve come a long way and would hate to leave this beautiful town empty-handed.”
The man eyed her. Was he suspicious? Did he see what she was doing? “What is this?” he asked cautiously. “A school project or something?”
“You could call it that.”
He hesitated, then said, “I guess I can tell you one thing.”
Alex wiggled forward on the stool, her heart kicking into gear. “What’s that?”
“It isn’t much, like I said. But there is somebody who lives way out on Deacon Road who knows more about this than anyone. He’s an older man, but he was still kicking last time I checked. An old professor who claims he knows who Fallows is. He used to come around sometimes, but you don’t see him much anymore. That whole Fallows thing—nobody talks about it that much now. It’s gone the way of the cuckoo clock and the cross-country drive. It’s 1994 now and folks have moved on.”
Alex took another drag on the cigarette. The room seemed to have gone quiet, the music and the motion behind her and Keller totally fallen away. “This old man,” she said. “What’s his name?”
The bartender leaned close. His tongue darted out, crept slowly over cracked lips. She smelled his awful breath. “Benjamin Locke,” he said.
* * *
They went. Across the flat tarpaulin of the landscape and into more flatness, the fields breaking up and becoming dirt at the edges of town, the afternoon pulling down like a drape over the western edge of the sky. They drove into the sun, following the directions the bartender had given them.
“There,” said Keller, pointing with the edge of their napkin map.
A house just ahead, a small clapboard on the corner of Highway 281 and Deacon Road. Alex pulled in the driveway and they sat looking at the simple, black-shuttered house.
Keller parked the car and got out. He climbed the porch, glancing back at her once, and then he knocked. Someone answered, someone she couldn’t see, and for a moment Keller slipped inside. She imagined him there, broken and bloodied on the floor. She thought of the two girls, the two Dumant grad students, of their last days—
A knock on her window. Alex jumped.
She rolled it down and stared out at Keller, blinked into the midday sun.
“Dr. Locke wants to speak to us,” he said. “He says he’s been waiting for us since he heard about the night class.”
* * *
Benjamin Locke served them nothing. He sat across from the two students and stared with an intense precision, as if he was deciding whether or not he could trust them.
“Lydia Rutherford is one of the world’s great liars,” he said finally. He had an academic’s voice that had gone sour down the line, deep and thick but affected in the way of a final defense against the geography. His face was windburned and chafed but he was dressed like the famous professor he had been at Dumant. “I knew that the first time I met her. What she has done is simple, yet it is quite remarkable: she has hidden her husband’s secret for years and years without telling anyone.”
Alex stared at the man. “His secret,” she said. “I’m afraid I don’t understand.”
“Charles Rutherford is Paul Fallows.”
Alex didn’t move, only nodded slightly. Her hands had begun to tremble. Locke didn’t know about Morrow, she thought. Didn’t know as much about the timeline and the texts as they did. Yet, he sounded so sure of himself. So convinced. “But Richard Aldiss has his own theories about Fallows’s identity,” she heard Keller say.
“Richard always had a lot of theories,” said Locke. The room was lit by a simple lamp, and on a table beside the professor Alex saw photographs of what she knew was the Dumant campus. On the wall was a framed photo from Life magazine with the heading WORLD-RENOWNED LITERATURE PROFESSOR MAKES WAVES WITH RESEARCH ON RECLUSIVE NOVELIST.
“Do you still speak to him?”
“Not since the murders,” said Locke. “Richard changed in a lot of ways after the summer we came to Iowa. When I heard about what had happened up at Dumant . . . well, I have to say I was not surprised.”
“How did he change?”
Locke searched for the right words. “Richard,” he said finally, “was different than my other
pupils. He was brighter, for one thing—but he was also darker. More brooding. He began to obsess over Fallows. When we traveled here together that summer, I began to see this side of him more and more. And I came to be afraid of him.”
“What was he like back then?” asked Keller. “What kind of student was he?”
“Richard was always eager to hunt Fallows, but I held back. You know about my phone call, I presume.” Locke glared darkly at them. “It was . . . disturbing to say the least. But then The Golden Silence appeared in January of ’75. A copy was sent to me anonymously at the university. Of course, Richard believed it was Fallows reaching out again, and this time I couldn’t deny him—us—the hunt. When we finally made it to Iowa after the term ended, Charles Rutherford had been dead for six months.” Locke looked away, something almost grave in his countenance. “We spent many days with his widow—talking to her, learning about Charles’s encyclopedia jobs. When we brought up Paul Fallows, she seemed appalled. Almost shocked. She swore her husband had nothing to do with it, that he was not the writer and that the photograph of him on the books was some kind of trick . . .” Locke trailed off, looking out the front window at the fields that stretched away beyond his small house. “Richard believed Lydia. This woman, this widow who was raising her sick son on her own—to Richard it was heroic. He saw something of that in his own history. His fugues, you know, and his own father had died young. He began to protect her.”
“Did you hear from him again when you returned to Dumant after that summer?”
Locke said nothing at first. His eyes drifted away again, a blue vein throbbing at his temple. “I banned him from my classes,” he said flatly. “I told the dean that I couldn’t look him in the eye again, not after I had seen what he was on our trip to Iowa. It became so difficult for me to even be around Richard that I left Dumant to teach at another university. Some years later I would find another protégé, but he was not the same as Richard.”
“Is there any way Aldiss is innocent of the Dumant murders, Dr. Locke?”
Locke laughed. “Impossible,” he said. “That man killed those two girls.” He hesitated, stared out the window. Rain had begun to fall, spitting against the glass. Then he turned his eyes back on the two students as if something had just occurred to him and said, “If he has made you feel sorry for him in this class of his, if you are here to absolve him, stop now. Letting Richard Aldiss free would be the absolute worst thing anyone could ever do.”
Alex
Present Day
40
“I don’t understand, Dean Fisk. What did you lie about?”
The dean shifted his weight. His eyes searched her, slid across the small bedroom’s only window. The Fallows book with the object hidden inside was on the nightstand, but she made no move to hide it now.
“I wanted Fallows,” the old man said. “I wanted him so badly . . .”
Colder now: “What did you do?”
“I was never sure about Richard.”
Alex sat back on the bed, the dean’s words tearing through her.
“I always had reservations about his involvement in the Dumant murders. Always.”
“But when I visited you during the class you said—”
“I know what I told you,” Fisk said curtly. “But I went along with Richard’s scheme because I needed his information. I wanted Fallows found and the mystery solved. I needed it to end.” Fisk’s eyes closed, as if he was reliving an awful memory. “I went to visit him once at Rock Mountain. He told me about a class he’d been thinking about, and I paid off the board of trustees at Jasper to make it happen. I had so much power at this college that no one challenged me. The next time I returned to the prison Richard told me about a book, about writing a message there . . .”
“Christ.”
“The part about his innocence in the book you found, Alex—that was my doing. I wanted to believe it was true, but Richard never flatly denied the murders. Not really. He told me how to do my part, told me that one student would be ‘chosen’—that’s the word he used—from the class to be our eyes and ears, but he never talked about his innocence. It was all about the search for Fallows. In fact he never mentioned Dumant University or those two dead graduate students. Not ever.”
Alex shivered. She looked again to the window, saw the spires of the college in the hazy distance. “Do you think he’s coming after us, Dean Fisk?”
The old man looked at her, seemed to focus on her for the first time. Then he said, “I do. I’m sorry, Alex, but I think I may have led you right into his trap.”
* * *
At 10:00 p.m., Alex’s phone rang. She removed it from her bag and looked at the display. Peter. Damn it. She looked at it, considering. She didn’t answer.
Instead she went out to find Keller.
The house was dark, the only sound the indistinct patter of Black and his men on the bottom level of the mansion. She wondered where Lewis Prine’s body had been taken, wondered what he had seen in his last moments. If Aldiss had surprised him or if the two had spoken before Lewis was killed.
Trust me, she thought. Don’t you trust me?
She shook the thought and went on.
When she got to Keller’s door she stopped. Someone moved off to her right.
She looked up and saw Frank Marsden approaching her.
“Frank.”
“They can’t trap us here, Alex,” the man said urgently, a waver in his voice that suggested he might be cracking. “We aren’t fucking animals.”
“Aldiss will be found soon and—”
“No, to hell with that. I’m leaving as soon as I can. Lucy and I have to get back to a shoot. We don’t have time for this bullshit. If I stay in this house much longer I’m going to go insane and . . .” The man shook his head as if to clear a horrible image and continued up the hall. Alex entered Keller’s room.
He was perched on a stool on the far side of the room, his wide back to the door. Even here, at this late hour, Alex could sense how awake he was, how ready.
“Do you remember when we found Fallows?” she asked. Her eyes were getting heavy and the silence of the house was weighing on her.
“I remember,” he said. “We shouldn’t have even been in Iowa.”
“But we went, and we found what we were looking for. We found out who he really was.”
“A lot of good it did us.”
She stared at the man, at the night table beside him. No sign of the manuscript there.
“What does it feel like?” she asked.
“It . . .”
“Killing someone?”
He stared at her. “You don’t want to know.”
“I do, Keller. I want to know if I could do it. If I had to.”
“You won’t have to.”
He sat down at the foot of the bed, box springs groaning beneath him. An image flashed: the boy in the hotel room the night before everything happened in Iowa, she lying beside him, the shape of her body tucked into his.
There was a quick snap. Alex’s eyes jumped to the window, where one of the beech limbs nicked against the pane. When she refocused, she heard Keller’s voice in the closed room.
“I burned it,” he said.
“You what?”
“I burned the manuscript, Alex. Tossed it in one of the fireplaces and watched it go up in smoke. But I kept one page. I wanted you to see. I wanted you to . . . to know that I was right. That destroying it was the only way. That manuscript would have done nothing but harm. It would have pulled you under.”
She glared at him. Again she thought of the boy he had been, of what he had done in Iowa. For her; everything he had done, all those irrational decisions he’d made during at the end of the night class, had been to protect her. But Alex felt as if this act erased all of that. Obliterated it. She hated him now with a precision she had never known. Standing there, in that cold room with him, a thought rushed through her. It came black and complete, like a door slammed shut: I could kill him.
>
“Four years,” she growled. “Four years I’ve searched for that manuscript and you destroy it? This is just like you, Keller. Take what we did in Iowa, all we accomplished in the night class, and throw it away. Is this what you did with me? With us? Did you just toss us into some old fireplace too and move on with your life?”
“Maybe I did. And maybe it was best for both of us.”
There was a feeling inside her of something coming loose, of the tether unraveling. She moved toward him. Keller reacted fast, catching her by the arms and restraining her. They were inches away from each other; she could taste his breath, could see the flare and hold of his pupils. You bastard. You coward.
“I was protecting you,” he said, his voice like a lash. “Trust me: you didn’t want to read it. Didn’t want to know what Fallows was doing with that book.”
She looked at him. “And did you?” she asked. “Read it?”
Almost imperceptibly, he nodded.
“Was it a Fallows?”
“Yes.”
Rage. She felt it again, tasted it like acid on her tongue. She heard herself scream, the sound somehow not of her but primal, terrible. Again she pushed against him, dug her nails deep into the skin of his palms. When she spoke, her voice was tight, ugly. “What was it about, Keller? Or is that another of your secrets?”
At first he said nothing. The branch scratched against the glass beside them; his heart fluttered in his wrists like a thread being unwound. They stood there, locked together in a kind of frozen dance. When he spoke, his voice was full of pity. She had heard it before: it was the voice Keller used when they were students to talk about Aldiss.
“It was about us,” he said.
She blinked. “I don’t know what you’re saying, Keller.”
“It was about what’s happening here, Alex. About this house, these murders. The novel was . . . it was a kind of locked-room mystery. It was about a group of old friends who come together, and each of them gets plucked off the wire. One by one by one.”
She stared into his face, trying to find the words. To understand what it was he was telling her.
I’m sorry, Alex, but I think I may have led you right into his trap.
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