Dominance (21 page)

“Our encyclopedia salesman whose picture is on the books.”

“Right. I was just looking around at some of the streets, trying to get a sense of what Aldiss might be talking about when he tells us that to find Fallows we have to begin with Rutherford. And I found—”

“Liquid Gold Street.”

Keller smiled. “Close, smart-ass.” He turned the map and put his beer bottle on one corner. They both stood and stared down into Iowa. It was an old map, photocopied and smeared, the sweep of a river blurring into the grid of streets. All of it framed by the expanse of a pixelated disc that was labeled in a giant dark font:
HAMLET
.

What she wanted was on the south end. She followed Keller's finger along the grid, into the grid, and for a frantic moment she imagined herself there, in this town, walking these very streets. Then she came out of it to the flurry of guitars in the room behind her and saw that he was pointing to a jutting river road that curtained off the southern edge of town. Her breath caught.

Olive Street.

“It was where Rutherford lived,” she said, getting caught up in the rhythm of their conversation now. Each signpost, each connection seemed so clear now, so elemental. Her heart banged in her chest.

“Exactly. This is why Aldiss mentioned the town that first night,
Alex. There's no question now. He's trying to tell us something about Hamlet.”

They both fell silent, thinking about what it could mean.

“But what does he want us to find here on Olive Street that he never could?”

Keller downed his beer and slid the bottle away, picked up the novel and studied the cover image. The black heart, the woman standing before her maze. Unlike Alex's earlier, his appraisal of the book had a coldness to it. A kind of suspicion.

Finally he said, “I think I found the answer to that one, too.”

“You're on fire today, Keller.”

He removed another object from the satchel. It was a photograph.

He held it out, but as soon as she reached it he yanked it away from her. She thought it was another one of his games. Thought that maybe another kiss was coming. But when she looked at him she saw how serious he was and her own smile fell away.

“You can't ask me where I got this picture,” he said.

“I—”

“Promise me, Alex. The person who gave it to me swore me to secrecy. He believes, as I do, that the night class is something bigger than it looks to be on the surface. But he wants to help me. To help us. Just please, don't ask me his name.”

“Okay. I promise.”

He handed the photo across the table to her. It was of a man standing in front of a small clapboard house. She had seen him before, but he looked different. Much different. Aged, yes, but somehow darker. Darker eyed. Somber. A lot like Richard Aldiss.

But the man in the photo was not Aldiss. Not even close.

“What the hell?” Alex said. It came out in a choke.

“It's him, Alex. There's no doubt it's him. Look at the date.”

She did. On the bottom right-hand corner was a date stamp: 1/11/94.

The man was Charles Rutherford. He had been photographed just four days ago.

Lewis Prine was already running late for Michael Tanner's memorial service when his Saab's engine began to whine. For miles he ignored the sound by thinking instead of coldblooded murder. How death carved a line from past to present, ripped out the seams and blurred everything painfully together. On the Burlington border, tears cooling on his cheeks, he rolled down the window and let the wind destroy what hair he had left.

Soon the vehicle began to shimmy and a gray scrim of smoke broke across the windshield. He pulled over on some Vermont back road and tried to call Alex Shipley on his cell. But there was no service out here in the middle of nowhere, and anyway he was past the point of no return now: the memorial procession would be starting soon, the mourners gathering on the Jasper quad. (Lewis knew from his work with violent, damaged men that the killer would likely be among them.)

Maybe it was better this way, he thought. A psych minor, a failed psychologist, and then the warden of a hospital for the criminally insane, he'd never truly been one of them anyway.

It took half an hour to flag down a passing car, another forty-five minutes to make it into a town called Orwell, where a mechanic patched up the engine with a stoic warning:
She won't last long
. Soon he was back on Route 2. As he passed into Jasper and saw the winking tops
of the campus buildings in the distance, Lewis wondered if all this—his lateness, the car trouble—would somehow make the rest of them suspicious. They had always been like that, discerning and cold toward him.
A busted radiator?
they'd scoff.
How just like Lewis this is.

It was crazy, as insane as something one of his prisoners would say, but he began to concoct a story in the rearview. A lie about why he was running late. A kind of careful alibi.

*   *   *

He parked and ran up the hill to the Fisk mansion. If he could catch the others before they left for the service, then he could convince them that he really cared. That he had always respected Michael and what had happened to him was such a mindless tragedy. By the time he made it to the front door, his shirt was stuck to him with sweat and his breath was coming in sharp, heavy gasps.

He knocked but got no answer. Lewis remembered the house well from his undergrad days: Fisk would often entertain the English majors, the nine who'd been chosen for Aldiss's night class. It had always given Lewis a pathetic sort of pleasure to be here in this house with the others. It was as if, on those evenings as they sipped crazy-expensive wine and talked of great literature, he truly belonged. Until he received the manuscript, those times were few and far between.

The manuscript.

He thought of it now. Of how it had come to him, that one brittle page, the promise of more. The anonymous guarantee that the unpublished Fallows was here, in the very house that loomed before him. Lewis wanted to speak to Alex, to see if she'd found the rest. If he could somehow resurrect Fallows, he thought, bring him back from the dead, then maybe the others would change their minds about him. Respect him as an equal.

He went around the side of the house and peered in. The window, dark with grime, barely permitted a view inside. Still, it was unmistakable: a figure moved behind the glass.

“Hey!” he shouted, rapping on the casement. “It's Lewis! I'm here! I've made it!”

He went quickly around to the rear of the house, checking his watch
again. The seconds bore down on him, chipped away and made him break into a sprint, bound up a cobbled porch and to a back door only to find it—

Open. Standing wide, inviting him in. His first break today.

He stepped into a foyer. Jagged slats of sunlight curved down onto the hardwood floor. He smelled it: must and decay and disuse. The passing of time. The fact of his age, of Daniel's suicide. Of Michael's senseless murder. Strangely, he recalled one of his patients, a man who'd strangled his three-year-old daughter and then set her body on fire, saying, “You think bad thoughts too, Dr. Prine. This is how you and me are alike. This is how we're the same.” Lewis pinched his eyes closed and went deeper into the house.

His footsteps echoed. A lamp was on here in the great room, scattering light—but there was something else. They'd been here recently. A blanket was twisted on the couch, black embers stacked in the fireplace.

“I made it,” Lewis said into the room, aiming it in the direction of the figure he'd seen from outside, his voice resonating hollowly back to him. Now the alibi: “One of my patients. There was a situation back at the hospital. But I'm finally here. Is anyone there?”

He turned to leave but heard it again. The soft whisper of footsteps. The groan of a board. He waited.

Then the shadows unclenched and someone stepped into the room with him. A familiar face.

“I didn't think anyone was still here,” Lewis said. “Are you—are you going to the service?”

“No hello for an old friend, Lewis?”

The figure materialized fully, hands out as if to say,
There's nothing to be afraid of. It's just me
. Regardless, Lewis was uncomfortable. He was already late, the service was about to start, and they hadn't even been that close. Not as close as he was to the others, anyway.

He tried to regain his composure. “God, it's been years.”

“Too long. Friends should make it a habit to talk from time to time.”

Lewis looked down, checked his watch again. Heat bloomed beneath his arms. Why were they both standing here? It was time to go; they could catch up later.

“Michael was one of the true elite, wasn't he?” his companion mused. “Maybe the best. Better than you, Lewis. Even better than Shipley.”

Lewis blinked at the undisguised vitriol.

“You know what comes next, Lewis.” A step closer. “What have you done with the manuscript?”

This was insane. Lewis reached out, as if he might physically ward off the accusation.
How could you know? Does everyone know?
It was only a page, he wanted to say, one page he'd been sent four years ago—but nothing would come. His throat was constricted, raw. The time banged painfully against his wrist, and all he could think was,
You think bad thoughts too, Dr. Prine. You think bad thoughts . . .

“Do you believe Michael died because of Fallows, Lewis?” The voice sharp now as a piece of cut steel. “Do you really think you should have entrusted the manuscript to Alex Shipley, of all people?”

Lewis looked away. The room seemed to have gotten smaller, tightened in on him. His back was toward a wall. There was no door, just the scorched maw of the fireplace he'd seen earlier. He tasted ash in his throat.

“And then the house turned, became a hall of mirrors.”

Lewis didn't understand the shift in conversation, the blank look behind his friend's eyes. But there was something about the line, something familiar . . .

“The house engulfed the man, turned inward and began to chew him, windows like teeth approaching—”

“No,” Lewis said weakly, finally recognizing the lines from the unpublished Fallows. From the page Lewis had been sent. “Please don't do this.”

“—and chairs upturned so that their arms reached out and caught him. Pulled him down, drove him under—”

There was nowhere to go now. He stumbled, fell heavily into the chair that had appeared from nowhere, cutting him off at the knees. He was trapped.

“I'm not one of you!” Lewis shouted, looking up in terror. “I'm different from everybody else in the night class and I always was! I'm different, goddamn it!”

But as Lewis Prine said these words, all he saw was a familiar face from years ago bearing down on him, and a great and deep truth roared through him. The knowledge was hard and fast and incontrovertible.

They had never been friends at all.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” said Dean Rice from the podium, “scholars and distinguished guests of Jasper College, we are gathered here today to remember the life of Dr. Michael Tanner.”

A cold, ugly morning. On the walkways a few students made their way to class, craning their necks to watch the service with morbid curiosity. One of Tanner's former students sobbed; a reporter snapped a photograph. Alex had spent the morning thinking of what to say about her murdered friend, and the more she thought, the more ill she became. There was no question now: they were gathered here because of her. Because of what she had discovered in Iowa; because she had finished the night class and put all of this in motion.

She wriggled at the thought. Her stomach churned.

As the dean continued with his introduction, Alex scanned the faces on the makeshift stage beside her. Christian Kane sat in his chair looking nervous, fidgeting like a child in church. Melissa Lee was beside him, her posture prim and straight, girlish ovoid sunglasses hiding her thoughts. Next was Frank Marsden, who had arrived late and now looked lost without his lady friend. Alex glanced out at the crowd but she could not see Lucy Wiggins anywhere. She forgot about the actress and focused again on the stage. Sally Tanner was dressed in black, a lace
veil hanging over her eyes and her jaw tight with sorrow. Last was Jacob Keller, who had just slipped into his seat and was trying to look as if he'd been right on time. He appeared solemn and calm now, his head canted as if in prayer. Finally, at the end of the stage were two more chairs. The first was Lewis Prine's; the other was meant for Dr. Richard Aldiss. Both remained empty.

Dean Rice said her name, and Alex stepped up to the microphone and gazed out at the quad. The people there had pressed in, reporters flashing a volley of photos from the back row. She opened her mouth but nothing came out.
Come on, Alex,
she told herself.
You do this every day at Harvard.

It was then that she felt a heavy arm around her. Keller had joined her at the podium. “It's all right,” he whispered. “I'm here.”

This emboldened her.

Alex leaned close to the mic and said, “A good friend of mine told me once that death allows us to focus more deeply on life. If we focus on Dr. Michael Tanner's life, we see a man who was indebted to scholarship. We see a family man”—she cast a look at Sally, who glanced away—“who truly loved his wife and daughter. We see a professor who believed in the theories and the practice of good literature. A man who'd given up years of his life for this college, and who died here trying to make a difference.”

She paused. Keller pulled her closer.

“I met Michael Tanner fifteen years ago. We took a class together, a class that would change all of us forever. Even then, I knew Michael was a brilliant man, but it was more than that: he was kind. He believed in righteousness and . . .” The crowd shifted. They were not paying attention to her as much as they were
searching
her: looking at her as if they might tease something out of her. A group of students stood in the front row, their faces wolfish in the patchy sunlight.
We know who you are,
they said silently.
We know, we know, we—