She scanned the words. Read the paragraphs, then traced her eye back and reread them. As she did a sickening feeling swept through her.
“No,” she said.
She knew what Aldiss wanted her to see. The reason he’d asked her to visit him before she left Vermont. It was a paragraph in the middle of the page:
She called the man she had once loved. He was a simple man now. He lived in an old farmhouse. Divorced, he was able to cultivate his disguise. It was the night when he prowled. He was best in the dark, when nobody could see him for who he was. A large man, hulking and strong, he had always protected her. Had almost died for her. But what she did not know was that he was part of the game just like the rest of them. He had always been part of the game, and that night he planned to show her who he really was. “When can we see each other?” she asked him. “Soon,” he said. “Promise.”
Letting the towel drop, Alex stood. She backed into the corner, fear roiling through her. She tried to remember what Christian had said to her that night at the Fisk mansion. What he’d said about his work, his latest book.
I plagiarized from Fallows. In my last novel, Barker in the Storm. Not word for word, nothing like that. I simply stole his style, his rhythm. Maybe I had this crazy notion that people would be playing the Procedure to my novels, I don’t know.
She took a step toward the door but stopped. Something moved outside, shifted against her bedroom window. She thought of Aldiss, of her first meeting with him. Of how adamant he had been that someone from the night class had turned. That one of her friends was responsible for what had happened.
Playing the Procedure to my novels . . .
The page trembled in her hand. Alex stepped back. She was against the wall now. Her blood ran cold.
The doorbell rang.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you again to my wonderful agent, Laney Katz Becker, who stayed with me through the tough times as this idea was taking shape. Thanks to my editor, Sarah Knight. Sarah saw this book through and helped me when I needed her most, and for that I will always be grateful. A true professional. Thank you to all the folks at Simon & Schuster, especially Jessica Abell, Molly Lindley, and Kelly Welsh. Thanks to my family in Louisville, Burnside, and Whitley City—Granny, Mom, Dad, Emily, Riley and Isabella, Donna, Jason and Mindy C., Bill and Jennifer S., Pap, Stephanie, Beth and John, Karen, Ann, Jo Ann, Carolyn, Randy, Cherie, Gary, Cindy, Bruce, Jill, and (Super)Joe. Thanks to the folks at LRC—Robert, Katie, Laura, Andrew, Charles. Thanks to Drew Trimble, who listened as I talked about early drafts, and gave some wonderful feedback. Major thanks to the folks who operate Joseph-Beth Booksellers in Lexington, Kentucky. I can honestly say that without Joseph-Beth, you would not be holding this book. A good part of my education happened inside that wonderful store. Thanks to all those who worked the Louisville coffee shops and bookstores where this novel was almost entirely written—the Borders on Hurstbourne, the Barnes & Noble on Hurstbourne, the Carmichael’s on Bardstown, and the free public library in Fern Creek. And thanks above all to my family—my children, Jonathan and Jenna, and the love of my life, Sharon Faye. I couldn’t even begin to count the suns . . .
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Will Lavender is the New York Times bestselling author of Obedience. A former literature professor, he is a graduate of the MFA program at Bard College and lives with his wife and two children in Louisville, Kentucky. He is currently at work on his next novel, The Descartes Circle.
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COVER DESIGN BY JAE SONG • COVER PHOTOGRAPHS: WOMAN SILHOUETTE © JANOS HAJNALKA / SHUTTERSTOCK; RORSCHACH BLOT © HERMANN RORSCHACH / WIKIPEDIA; PAPER TEXTURE © SUSAN DUBROFSKY (~TACKON) / DEVIANT ART; AUTHOR PHOTO © JERRY BAUER
ALSO BY WILL LAVENDER
Obedience
Keep reading for an excerpt from Will Lavender’s heart-pounding puzzle thriller
The Descartes Circle
coming soon from Simon & Schuster
1
I hear on the eleven o’clock news that my twin brother is not a murderer. A battery of psychological tests has been run, an expert on torture has given his own verdict on national television, and finally they are letting him come home. I watch it all unfold through a news feed, stay glued to my television at night, waiting for the truth about Henry Malcolm.
It should be too horrible to watch. I should turn it off, get on with my life. When I see myself in one of the stock photos on 48 Hours, smiling goofily on a ski slope, my arm draped around Henry’s shoulders, I don’t feel shame or regret or sadness. Maybe I should. Maybe I should seclude myself inside my house, take on some kind of monastic presence, run off the few reporters who show up at my front door looking for a sound bite.
But I do none of these things. I watch, just like you do.
* * *
Today there’s a telephone message waiting for me when I get home.
I’ve been out, walking with my notebook and thinking about my brother’s homecoming. What it could mean—what it must mean. I have ink on my left hand, one of the most annoying side effects of the disease. A word snaking across, disappearing over the wrist and then appearing again on the delta of a vein: Who?
What’s crazy is I don’t even remember writing it. This isn’t uncommon with the disease. Sometimes a stray word will appear from nowhere, written across a newspaper page or in the margin of a book. I’ve even been known to write on other people’s bodies as they sleep. Creepy, I know. I wish I could do something about it.
Now I approach the blinking answering machine light. The tabloids still call, promising me everything under the sun if I agree to talk about Henry and his lost week. Just a few days ago someone from TMZ called, offering me six figures for an interview about my brother. It would have been a chance to start over, to move somewhere else. Reinvent my life. I told them to go to hell. When I tell Henry’s story, it will be on my own terms.
The red light throbs, and I stand in the dark kitchen and let it hypnotize me. A collage of Post-its hangs over the phone, bubbled black with heavy ink, the missives incomprehensible, as they almost always are. Nothing but a reaction, an impulse to WRITE, to move my hand in a way that forms a word, a sentence, a thought. I curl my fingers around an imaginary pen, scribble air on the wall beside the telephone. My mouth waters.
Finally I reach up, hit Play.
“Jonathan Malcolm, this is Anthony Schroeder.” The voice is tight, serious. Not a reporter. I let the message run. “I’m a homicide detective with the Oldham Town Police Department. We spoke once before, after your sister-in-law . . . after the incident. I wondered if you might give me a call back. I want you to know that this has nothing to do with the fact that your brother is getting out of the hospital tomorrow. This is about Laura Malcolm. I know you had a history with her, that you were one of her closest friends, and I called to ask you—”
I erase the message.
It’s her name, just the sound of her name, that cuts me the deepest.
And anyway, I know what the detective wants. He’s been here before, sat right there in my living room, and told me about his grand plan. It will never work, I want to tell him. Not ever. It won’t work because my brother is smarter than us all.
2
Henry was a professor of philosophy at Oldham College in upstate New York. His vitals were revealed to the public slowly, incrementally, like a photograph taken through Vaseline: his age (thirty-four and already a rising star in academia), his famous academic father (Thomas Malcolm, professor emeritus at Oldham), his identical twin (Jonathan Malcolm, the disgraced author), even his dissertation from Yale (“True Deception: A Philosophical Inquiry of René Descartes”). He was accused of killing his wife, Laura Malcolm, bludgeoning her on the stairs of the home they shared at 22 Woodlawn Lane on the Oldham campus. The murder weapon was never found, and for days one question, so horrible in its simplicity,
screamed across the ticker at the bottom of my TV screen: MURDER OR ACCIDENT? Even now, I’m certain I know the answer.
Laura was the perfect victim. A famous professor’s wife, five years Henry’s junior, and strikingly beautiful, she was a fixture at Oldham charity galas and campus functions. Henry claimed to have returned home from a faculty meeting one night to find her at the bottom of the spiral staircase, crumpled and broken like a rag doll. She’d been waiting up for him; they were supposed to watch a movie together, the empty DVD box casually placed on the television, a foreign film Henry had rented from the college video store that afternoon. Henry’s frantic 911 call was replayed a thousand times by the celebrity dish shows—scripted, they said, playing it back again and again, focusing on every stutter, every pause and nuance.
There was much talk about how Laura had once been a philosophy major at Oldham. She had met Henry in her senior seminar, had fallen in love with her suave professor, been swept away by him. I knew a different story, and here is the way I would tell it: Laura got pregnant, she and Henry were forced to marry because of Oldham’s morality clause, the child was stillborn, and Henry spent a semester drinking and calling me at night and rambling, “John, Jonathan, listen to me—I can hear our son crying. He’s just downstairs . . .”
But the media’s narrative was different. In fact it was an outright lie.
A constellation of blood undid him. The way her blood streaked and slashed, how it had dried in odd places near the eighteen-foot-high ceiling of the couple’s campus mansion. Places where no blood should have been. There was a question about her fall, the plausibility of the killing wounds. The fatal crack in her skull was inconsistent with the shape of the steps. Before this discovery, my brother was merely a person of interest; now he became the prime suspect. Piers Morgan interviewed a colleague who said that Henry had never shown any emotion about Laura’s death, Anderson Cooper ominously suggested that Henry had been a member of a secret society (“Yes,” I remember shouting at my television screen, “yes, there, focus on that!”), and my brother became a villain almost overnight. Ivy League educated, too handsome, too elusive—he embodied everything the rest of us distrusted.
And yet there was no forensic evidence to link Henry to the murder. No physical clues. No sign of a struggle, no bloody clothes, and of course no murder weapon. (On 60 Minutes I watched blue-jacketed, goggled investigators test objects in a lab: a fire poker, a pool cue, the claw of one of our father’s old hammers that was found in the basement of the murder house. But in the end nothing fit, that scribble-like fissure in Laura’s skull being too wide or too narrow, and the missing weapon became Henry’s greatest coup.) There was even an eyewitness from the college who saw Laura with another man on the evening she was murdered. A different man.
Henry remained free. He staged a press conference, stood before a makeshift podium, our father and stepmother flanking him. He pleaded with the media to leave him alone so that he could get back to his students. My father spoke, choking back tears, his beefy hand clenched into a fist. He pointed at his son, his favorite son, and said, “Henry Malcolm loved Laura, and she loved him. Why would he want to ruin something so perfect?”—and at that he lifted the photo of them, the famous one, the stunning shot of the couple standing on a cliff overlooking the sea on their honeymoon, Laura’s sunglasses pushed up into unruly hair, freckles sprayed across her bare and peeling shoulders, Henry smiling wickedly, the Mediterranean black as glass behind them.
We waited, then, for the other shoe to drop. For Henry to be charged with the murder of his wife, for the puzzle of the evidence to reveal something new, or for the shadowy man with whom she had been seen on her last day to come forward.
Instead, something else happened.
My brother disappeared.
3
I am often asked if I felt anything. If I could somehow have seen my brother in my mind, could have used the sixth sense that twins sometimes have to find Henry out in the ether during the time he was missing. I always lie, say that I felt a current of pain, that at night a cold sweat overtook me and I awoke saying his name. But really I felt nothing. I never have. Henry and I are absolutely identical on the outside. Inside, we might as well be strangers.
He was gone for seven days—what the media began to call his “lost week.” During those endless days, two schools of thought emerged. There were those who believed Henry had slipped away to elude his inevitable arrest. During the investigation he had remained a fixture at the grieving college, even though his course load had been lightened. And it was at Oldham that he disappeared. Henry was seen walking across campus one moment by a literature professor and then, just like that, he vanished into thin air.
There were also those few allies of my brother, most of them pernicious academics who appeared shocked and disheveled on MSNBC asking, “Where are the forensics? If Professor Malcolm is a murderer, where is the evidence to prove it?”
The search for Henry Malcolm began. It was unlike anything New York State had ever seen. An unmarked car sat outside my front door that week; they thought I had harbored him, I suppose. But I had only seen Henry a few times since Laura died. In the media I was the Identical Twin, the brother who was a constant in Henry’s life, but the reality was that I didn’t care about Henry. I couldn’t. He had done too much, burned too many bridges, for me to come to his defense now. If I thought of him I thought of poor, sweet Laura, who didn’t deserve any of this, who once told me she loved Henry despite his problems, and when I pushed her, asking, “Laura, what problems? What do you—” she slipped away into a crowded party.
I grieved for her, not Henry. Henry would come out of this unscathed. He always did.
* * *
A hiker found him four miles from campus. He was lashed to an oak tree, drenched in his own blood, beaten and bruised. Henry was alive, barely, and mumbling incoherently when they brought him back to St. Mark’s Hospital in Oldham Town.
Police urged him to tell them what happened, but he gave them nothing. He was in shock, and for a month he has remained in the trauma ward, silently recovering, unable to remember—or, perhaps, unwilling to remember—what happened to him in those woods.
When he finally gave his statement, he talked about being taken to a cabin. Being held in a drab, empty room with only a stained mattress and a slot for food. He spoke of a solitary man holding him prisoner. Did he see this man’s face? No, he did not. Did he hear a voice? No. Henry had been drugged; toxicology proved this. He had been out of it. Nearly comatose. The only thing that woke him was the man torturing him, the hot prick of a knife digging into his arms, his chest. The copper smell of welling blood.
That was all. Everything else was lost in the fog.
Only one thing about Henry’s ordeal was indisputable: his wounds were real. On NBC, he lifted his shirt for Brian Williams to see the twisted, serrated mouth of a gash running from his clavicle to his ribs. His face was bruise-black, his arms dotted with cigarette burns, his ankles and wrists red as flame where he had writhed against the ropes. Even his eyes were different, somehow not-Henry: dimmed, hollow, lacking their previous fury.
Just like that, my brother went from suspect to victim. The suggestion of foul play, the missing murder weapon, the faceless man Laura was seen with on her last day—all of it suggested something too horrible to contemplate. The headlines changed, morphed almost overnight: IS THERE A KILLER LOOSE AT OLDHAM COLLEGE?
Henry Malcolm, it seemed, had been exonerated.
4
The day after the phone message from the detective, I drive the forty miles to Oldham Town and sit outside my brother’s estate. I keep my car idling and watch the morbid tourists who have come here on Henry’s homecoming day—a few students, a townie or two dressed in rumpled orange slickers, passersby who stare at the windows for any sign of the man. Since he was cleared, Henry hasn’t said anything new about the lost week or the man in the cabin, nor will he; I know this as well as I know my own face in the mi
rror. He will tease them, play with them, punish them for their suspicion of him after Laura’s death. And in the end he will reveal something, something only he knows, and the puzzle will fall wickedly into place.
I’ve seen it all before.
It’s raining, one of those cold, bending squalls that central New York is famous for. My windshield is fogged, and I smear a space away with my palm and stare into the distance, where a photographer stands beside a tree, camera slung around his neck, screwing a kerchief across the lenses of his eyeglasses. Just up the street from me is a long dark sedan, two cops inside craning their necks to see if anyone suspicious is watching from a safe distance. Anyone like me.
I have my notebook with me, as I always do, and I sit in the cramped front seat making notes. I’ve been working on the New Book for months now, and it still isn’t clear to me. Just fragments, disparate shards, meaningless pieces of a narrative that has thus far escaped me.
To write is like a hit of morphine, and a relaxing feeling settles over me as soon as I hear the pen’s nibble against the paper. I write, Are you a good person, Jonathan Malcolm?
I think about that, turn it over in my mind, finally responding, my hand shaking a little, I am a good person most of the time.
Is your twin brother a good person?
I look out the windshield again. The onlookers are leaving, ducking into the scrub behind the garden Laura once kept, which is now choked with black snaking weeds.
No, I write, my hand quavering more, the ink smearing on the soft padding of my palm. Henry Malcolm is not a good person.
Why do you say that?
His moods.
What do you mean, “his moods”?
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