Alex began to see the picture forming in her mind. Shawna and Abigail had been here, but, like her, Shawna had wanted to come back. Alone. To dig deeper. To win. Had she even told Abigail what she’d found?
“I regret my haste, of course,” Lydia went on. “I didn’t realize until we’d returned home that Shawna had stolen something from us. Something private. For years I’ve waited for that book to come to light. For someone like you . . . well, it’s no matter now.”
Another step, the woman drawing closer in the tiny, packed room. Alex thought, Move now. She tried to push herself back, away from Lydia. Tried to move, but she was up against a box. She felt the sharp edge cutting into her leg.
Lydia looked down. She frowned as if Alex had ruined things, as if Alex had stepped into the plot and discovered exactly where it was going. As if the end had come upon her too fast and too soon.
“Charlie,” she said, her voice clipped and mean. “Come here, please. It’s time.”
Alex
Present Day
53
Breathe, Alex.
Owen had taken his hands off her, but the phantom pressure of his touch remained like a wound, an incision. He had been growing more and more animated as he spun his tale, regaling her with his dominance of the Procedure. His years of plotting, planning, scheming for his chance at the grand stage. He’d taken the last Fallows and twisted it into his own personal chessboard, brought them together only to kill them off one by one.
“I began to see that I didn’t need Fallows,” he said. “I didn’t need Benjamin Locke and his old-fashioned ideas of literary theory.”
Sensing her confusion, Owen smiled.
“You’re not the only one to have paid him a visit, Alex. Where do you think I finished my studies after I left Rock Mountain?”
Of course: Owen was the failed protégé Locke had mentioned to her and Keller. Alex scolded herself for not seeing it earlier.
“At first Dr. Locke was impressed with my obsession for Fallows. We spent nights discussing those old, tired theories about his identity. But something changed. I began to see that Locke would never go far enough. He refused to see the Procedure as legitimate scholarship, and of course he had no idea where the third manuscript was hidden. I moved on and came to this campus, and it was here that my plan took full shape.”
She shivered at the thought. But he was slipping, Alex knew. Because if he killed her and Keller, there were still others. Christian at the house. Sally. He’d never finish the game, clear the board.
Use it against him, Alex. Convince him to let you go.
“You’ll never win,” she said. “There are others, others who will know what you—”
Owen dismissed her with a shake of his head. “Good try, Professor. But I’ve come this far, what’s to stop me now? After all, the madman Aldiss is here, right here in this room.” Owen’s voice rose in pitch, became almost demure as he acted out the role of the victim. “That evil man, Detective Black. You should have seen what he did to her. You should have seen how ghastly it was. And I tried to stop him. I tried so hard . . .”
He shook his head, his shoulders slumping just slightly. And as they did, when he dropped the light a fraction of an inch, Alex glanced over the nurse’s shoulder at Aldiss and saw two things.
First, the professor’s eyes were open.
And he had freed his right hand.
Iowa
1994
54
Charlie came toward her. Alex knew there was nowhere to move in the small room. She was at the end.
Then he was standing over her, twisting the axe.
“Not here, boy,” said Lydia Rutherford. “In back.”
Charlie picked Alex up by the shoulders and began to carry her. He muscled her out of the storage room and to a bedroom door and shoved her inside, where she fell to the floor. Then she scrambled backward to the wall, pressed herself there, shivering uncontrollably. Waiting to die.
“Those two girls could be erased,” Lydia Rutherford was saying. “That’s the way I explained it to Charlie. We couldn’t take the chance that little whore Shawna hadn’t bragged to her girlfriend after all. It would be so easy to pass it off on one of the scholars. Everything his father and I had done could be protected.”
“How?” Alex gasped, hugging herself against the shaking. “How did you frame Aldiss?”
“When you are studious,” she said, “you learn things. I remembered him. He came here years ago with his mentor. He’d had the girls in class, he was distrusted by many in the faculty. One call. One call was all it took for the seed of doubt about him to start to grow and our tracks to be erased. I put a book over those girls’ faces just like Charles did, just to make it perfect. And then we returned to Iowa.”
Alex pulled her knees up. Fear ricocheted through her. Her mind spun madly.
The woman’s face changed. She regarded Alex now with a look of motherly concern. A look of compassion. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry it had to be this way.”
Then she stepped out of the way. Charlie came forward, his lace-less boots approaching her. Alex saw the axe go up. She flinched at the way it hummed in the light, at the sight of it above her. Her body shut down.
The axe came.
Alex closed her eyes.
The next thing she saw was the body of Lydia Rutherford being ripped open like a seam.
The woman was there and then she was not. She was destroyed in one arcing blow, removed from the world, flayed and bloodied on the floor as the man stood above her and twisted the axe from his mother’s flesh.
Then Charlie brought the weapon up again and then down. The sound was like a melon being cut, wet and thick and viscous. Alex tried to close her mind against it but couldn’t, could do nothing but turn away and feel the warm blood fleck against her face.
When she looked back at Charlie, he was as composed as ever. He looked at her and shrugged. Then he came forward.
“No,” she said. “No, Charlie. No.”
For a moment he stopped. He stared down at the girl before him. And then he said, “The end.”
55
A blur of movement in Alex’s periphery.
The door burst open and Keller stood there, panting and frantic. He saw the torn body on the floor; he saw Alex. Alex reached for him, her mind still moving slowly, weakly. She tried to touch him but he was too far, too distant. He said one word: “No.”
Charlie turned on him, tried to bring the axe up. But Keller was too fast. He charged against the man and drove him back. The axe spun away, clattered on the bedroom floor. Alex watched it all unfold.
“End!” Charlie said again, and there was another crash.
“Alex,” Keller said. “Get. The. Axe.”
She stood and picked up the weapon. Took a step toward the men, who struggled on the floor. Keller turned and saw her, reaching out with his hand.
The end, she thought. The end.
She saw Keller lock eyes with Charlie and then bend him backward, as if they were fighting on the line of scrimmage, the other man stumbling for just a moment. Enough. Keller took the axe from her and stood with it above his head.
Charlie could only watch. He was wild-eyed, breathing hard. He did not reach out. He did not try to stop Keller. In fact he did nothing at all.
“Yes,” he said, smiling. “Please.”
And Keller brought the axe down.
Alex
Present Day
56
Now.
It was a matter of getting Owen closer to Aldiss and his chair. But how? Owen was just inside the door, at least ten feet from the professor. Alex squinted into the darkness, looking for something, anything she could use as a weapon. As she was doing this a memory descended. Another dark room, another desperate situation. She knew how to beat him.
“I understand, Matthew,” Alex rasped, her throat searing with pain.
He looked at her. He was so close she could taste his breath.
“Do you?”
“Yes, I do,” she said, trying to move him, to gently steer him toward Aldiss. “I know how it is, to be great at something. To be dominant. I know how good you are at the Procedure. How expert. And I also know what you want.”
This confused him. His shoulders dropped, the beam swinging wildly onto the concrete wall. “And what do I want?”
“To win.”
His eyes flashed. She’d been right.
“You want to be the best to ever play the Procedure. Better than any of Benjamin Locke’s Iowans, better than Aldiss or any of us who took the night class.” She paused, tried another step. Another inch toward Aldiss. “Everything that’s happened on this campus—it’s all about the game. Ending it. Finishing it forever.”
“You know nothing,” he said. But she knew this wasn’t true. Knew she had struck something, found a hidden part of him. Just a little farther now.
She strained against him. Pushed him so that he tripped over her feet, grabbed at her and yanked her back against him. “Bad girl,” he said, smiling—but then he saw where he was in the room. Saw how close he was to Aldiss. He froze. The light tipped up on her, washed over her face. Blinded her.
Owen was unmovable now. He had her in his grasp, was pulling her to him as if they were in a cruel and brutal dance. Again he began to squeeze the life out of her.
How long? How long until everything went black?
She opened her mouth but the pressure was too much, the air winding out of her, the light bouncing in her periphery like a bad reception.
“And I liked you, Alex,” Owen was saying, his voice muffled, fuzzy. “I liked your company in the house. You were different from the others. Sharper.” She closed her eyes.
No. It doesn’t end like this. It can’t.
She screamed. She wrenched her body to the left, and Owen released some pressure. Enough for her to put in one quick, short breath. And her eyes opened. When they did she saw the classroom door. She saw the man walking through it.
Keller.
Owen tried to turn, but he was too late. Keller planted and drove, and just as he did Alex jumped out of the way. Keller hit Owen full-on, a lineman’s block square in the chest, knocking him back. Just a foot or two, just enough.
Just enough for Alex to remove the gun. She had tucked it in the waistband of her pants earlier, before leaving the room. Before Frank Marsden and any of this.
“You bitch,” Owen shouted. “You fucking whore.”
She fired. One shot. The sound of it surprised her: it wasn’t loud, wasn’t deafening, more of a small pop that elicited only a simple reaction. Owen’s eyes widened. He looked down, saw the bloom of black blood on his shirt. His eyes were angry now, his jaw fierce and set, and he stepped forward—
But he was stuck. Trapped.
Aldiss had him.
Owen tried to pull himself free but it was no use. The professor had a clump of his shirt, and when he pulled, Owen came down on the chair, toppling it. Both Owen and Aldiss went to the floor, then, but Aldiss was on top, his free hand grabbing at Owen’s face. Alex looked away as Owen screamed.
Then Keller was leading her away, into the hallway and up the stairs.
57
Later, after the badly injured Matthew Owen was removed from the building and Aldiss was taken for questioning, she and Keller sat together in a hospital room and held each other.
They did not speak at first. There was no need. Everything they might have said had been spoken.
Keller’s head was bandaged and his eyes were black, but otherwise he would be fine. For Alex there would be no lasting injuries. Frank Marsden had lost his battle in the last couple of hours, and a group of entertainment reporters scrambled up and down the hallway. Everything that had happened in the last two days at Jasper College would heal—but it would not go away. It would never go away.
She said, “I’ve always wanted to tell you something.”
Keller turned to her. He was leaning over her hospital bed, and a deep memory came to her: Iowa, morning light falling through the curtains, both of them so uncertain of what was outside those hotel walls.
“What?” he said.
“I found something. It was a message in an old book. It said that Aldiss was—”
“I know,” Keller said. “I mean I figured it out. It took me a few years, but I got there.” He smiled. “Dean Fisk—he was working with me as well.”
Alex sat back, stunned.
“Don’t look so surprised, Alex. You’re not the only hero in this room.”
She laughed, reaching out for his hand. Their easy silence descended again.
“I’m sorry,” Keller said finally. “For the manuscript. For not reaching out to you after Iowa. For—”
“Shhh. It doesn’t matter now.” She leaned against him.
“I think,” he said, “I should probably plan a road trip to Cambridge now.”
Alex nodded. “I think you should.”
Then someone knocked on the hospital door, and she turned. It was a nurse; the woman was holding an envelope.
“Professor Alex Shipley?” she asked.
“That’s me.”
The nurse gave Alex the envelope and left.
“You going to open it?” Keller asked.
Alex shrugged and tore out the note inside.
It was from Richard Aldiss. As Keller breathed softly beside her, she read.
Dearest Alexandra,
That blank space, the last piece of the puzzle, was what she did when she returned to Dumant.
I punished myself for not going to her that morning. There had been a snow, a whiteout—the roads were impassable. She and Abigail Murray returned to campus, and I waited. I had sent her, you see; had given her the information she needed. Everything—all that I had discovered on my own trip to Iowa with Benjamin Locke, all that I had learned as a scholar. Shawna Wheatley’s mind was afire. Like you, I knew that she would go.
And when she returned to Vermont she spent the night finishing her thesis. The last chapter, the identity of Paul Fallows, was so easy now. She’d discovered everything. She finished and brought the manuscript she had stolen from the house on Olive Street and dropped it off at the campus copy center. This would be her last act as a Dumant student.
The next time I saw her was in a photograph. Her face had been masked with a book. On the wall above her was a Rorschach stain. One hand grasped at nothing.
I always feared that Fallows was never really dead. It’s a fear you live with when you have come that close to evil.
Eleven years. Eleven years I waited, biding my time in that animal’s cell. I had nearly given up. Then one day a visitor arrived. A man I knew then only as a fellow scholar. Stanley Fisk brought with him a box inscribed with my name. It had been brought to Fisk by a graduate student who’d gone through my things at Dumant. The box must have arrived at my office the day I was arrested. Inside were documents, sheaves of dusty paper, detritus—and at the bottom, wrapped in brown paper, was Shawna Wheatley’s thesis. Two copies, neatly bound, with a prepaid invoice. A model of efficiency, the copy center shipped them off to the address on Shawna’s cover letter: mine.
I destroyed one copy immediately. It was exquisite, scattering pieces of Fallows over the prison yard, sending his words up in smoke, plotting my next move. The other I kept very close.
For it contained Charlie Rutherford’s confession.
And a lost Fallows.
This was my new information. My reason for teaching the night class.
Now we are here again, past and present having collided, and yet you are alive. If you don’t mind, I have a simple request for you: I would like to see you, Alex, one last time. I have something important to show you before you leave. Please.
Richard
58
Instead she returned to Harvard and picked up the pieces of her life. Peter was gone, and the rumors were that he was seeing one of his grad students now. Alex wished him the be
st. She too had moved on.
Keller called on a Friday. “Summer break,” he said.
“When are you taking your road trip?”
“The last day of your term. I’ll be there then. Promise.”
She almost screamed with joy. She had missed him terribly.
* * *
The package arrived that Monday. It came in a simple manila envelope. Her name had been written on the front in Aldiss’s tight, careful hand.
The note inside read, simply, You should have come, Alexandra.
There was something else. A page from a book. Thin, grayed—it was a simple paperback page. Aldiss had X-Acto’d it out, and she stood in her bedroom holding it, her fingers visible on the other side. A name in the top right corner—Christian Kane. It was from Barker in the Storm.
There was nothing else.
“Not this time, Professor,” she said aloud. “I’m not going to play along.” She dropped the page on her bedside table.
* * *
Two days later she graded the last of her semester exams in her office and then rushed home, feeling as if she were walking on air. Just a few hours until Keller arrived.
Back home, she showered and toweled off. Afterward she walked through her cool apartment, trying to decide what to wear. Today was a fresh start, a new life. After what had happened at Jasper, after all the horrors of Matthew Owen—
No. She wouldn’t think of that madman. She sat down on the bed, let her hair down, and began to dry her roots. As she did she glanced over at the bedside table. At the page Aldiss had sent her. That mysterious page . . .
Despite herself she picked it up. Scanned it. It was nothing. Just another one of Aldiss’s games.
Barker in the Storm.
Alex read the title and as she did a memory came to her. There was something about it. Something she remembered from the Fisk mansion.
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