Obedience (14 page)

Mary told Brian about the plagiarism issue. She told him all that she knew, about the note on Williams’s desk and her meeting with Troy Hardings, about the weird phone call she had received from the campus police that night, even how strong Leonard Williams had been blocking her at the classroom door. She could hear his labored, quick breath on the other end of the line following her through the story.

Brian said, “If you saw a note about her and this guy, his assistant-”

“Troy.”

“If you saw a note about her, then that must mean-”

“It’s true. I went through the EBSCOhost database and found an old article about her. Written by-I’ve got it printed out here. Written by a guy named Nicholas Bourdoix. August nineteen eighty-six.”

“My God, Mary,” Brian said. “Why would Williams do this?”

“I really hadn’t thought about it,” she told him. But that wasn’t true. She had given the question considerable thought ever since she’d found the Bourdoix article. Did Williams have something to do with Deanna Ward’s disappearance? She found herself thinking about Williams’s awful strength again, his tremendous weight pushing against her.

Stay.

“My question is why,” Brian said, snapping Mary out of her reverie. “Why is he still at Winchester? Don’t you think there’s something wrong with him, Mary?”

She didn’t answer. She thought of Dennis, for some reason, about when he had gone back with her to Kentucky for Thanksgiving two years ago. Her father had found her late that first night, watching television alone. Don’t you think there’s something wrong with him, Mary? he’d asked. When she had castigated him for saying it, turned her face so that he couldn’t see that she was crying, he had softly apologized. A month later Dennis was with Savannah Kleppers.

“I mean, he’s mysterious,” Brian went on. “The way he talks. The way he acts. There’s something forced about him, Mary. Scripted. I know it. I’ve seen it before. My brother-”

“What?” Mary asked. Something was holding Brian back, some internal boundary he was afraid to cross.

“My brother was an actor. He did Shakespeare, mostly. Some local stuff up in the Hudson Valley. He was brilliant. He’d just landed a commercial when he shot himself.”

Neither of them spoke for a few moments. Their silence was broken when some girls screamed with delight out on the quad in front of Brown. It was Friday night, and Mary suddenly had a great urge to be back in Kentucky, at home. It came up on her so quickly she had to choke it down. She was into something, she thought, for the first time, something larger than herself.

“Anyway,” said Brian, “I’m not going back to his class.”

“You’re not?”

“Hell no. That class scares the shit out of me. I made up my mind as the good
detective
was giving his spiel. They can have it. I’ll take the F. Polly is just a game anyway, deception on a mass scale.”

It’s just a game, he’d said. But she’d known that. Hadn’t they known that all along? Williams had admitted that it was a logic puzzle on the first day, designed to teach them rational thinking skills. What had changed? A fake detective, a false story? A story about another girl who had gone missing? It was possible that the real world had encroached too far into the ruse and scared them both away. Mary thought of Quinn in City of Glass. The mystery had become his life, had turned into something as tangible as a red notebook that he held in his lap and scribbled wild entries into. Ceaselessly, confoundingly, those entries went into the notebook until they made up a record of his obsession and his fall.

“Brian,” Mary whispered. And when he didn’t answer, she said it louder.

“Yeah,” he said. “I’m still here.”

“I think Williams is…” She closed her eyes, unable to find the word.

“I know what you mean,” Brian said.

Mary showed up at Professor Williams’s house early on Sunday. It was a warm night, and she had walked across the Great Lawn, in front of the Orman Library, and cut back onto Pride Street. It was only a block up. Mary had passed his house many times on her jogs around campus. An unassuming house, nothing really, just some dark brick and a gravel driveway with a pickup truck parked in the front. A dog barking out back, running along a clothesline. It was all normal, quaint even-not in the least what she had expected.

Dennis had called and asked Mary to meet him there. He had spoken to Professor Williams, he told Mary, and there were going to be surprises at the party. Mary imagined it as extra credit, a leg up on the rest of the class. Williams was worried that no one would come, Dennis told Mary, and so he had lined up an exciting evening pertaining to Polly.

Oh, she had fought the urge. With everything in her she had fought it. She thought about Brian House, how distraught he had sounded on the phone. She knew better. As she walked across the lawn that evening, she knew she was wrong and he was right. She was like the girl in the horror movie, opening the door although no one was home. She was
exactly
like that girl. But still she walked, her heels digging in to the moist grass, the leaves above her rattling and dropping into her hair.

Dennis met her at the door and took her jacket. In that one action she knew: he had been speaking with Professor Williams. How else to explain his ease in Williams’s home? It was really undeniable. He took the jacket away toward the back of the house, into some dark bedroom. There were a few people buzzing around, drinking beer out of plastic cups. Some Mary recognized from the class and some were unfamiliar. Troy was there. He was talking to one of the girls from the class, and when he saw her he nodded. She gave a little half wave back. A slightly older woman was standing in the kitchen, leaning against the bar, drinking wine. Williams’s wife, Mary figured. A little boy, maybe five years old, screeched through the room, the bowl of his yellow hair bouncing on his head like a helmet.

She saw Williams outside on the patio, talking to someone and smoking a cigarette. They were both laughing, heads thrown back, as if nothing in the world were wrong.

“Della Williams,” someone behind her said.

Mary turned and the woman from the kitchen was right in front of her. Heavy mauve lipstick, a low-cut blouse-she was beautiful. Too beautiful for Williams. She was younger than the professor by ten or fifteen years, which explained the age of the boy. The dark ringlets of her hair fell gracefully on her shoulders and caught the light. The wineglass, Mary noticed, was mauve all around its circumference, as if the woman had been rotating the glass with each sip.

Mary introduced herself to the woman.

“That’s Jacob,” Della said, as the screaming boy ran back through the living room at their knees. She smiled as if to say, What can you do?

An awkward silence came between them. Mary looked at the floor and noted the vacuum lines were still fresh.

“So, do you have Leonard this semester?” the woman asked.

“Yes,” replied Mary. “Logic.”

“Ah. The girl.”

“Exactly. The girl.”

There seemed to be nothing else between them, and just as Mary was planning her escape, he was right there, with his arm around his wife. Williams was wearing a Hawaiian shirt and cargo pants. She smelled bug spray on him and the heavy odor of beer.

“Thanks for coming,” he said gently, and she tried to read those words for something deeper. Had he thought she wouldn’t come? Perhaps he knew about her discussion with Brian House. But how? Again, there was that lingering gaze he always gave her. Those enchanted, almost astonished eyes.

And then Dennis was at her arm and leading her outside. He drew her a beer out of the keg and she accepted it, and for the first time in many months she drank alcohol. The night was fresh, mystical, the sky high and starless. The dog ran back and forth on its line. She stood close to Dennis, swayed against him in the light breeze. “How have you been?” he asked, and Mary told him. Stressed from school. Fighting with Paul Auster’s City of Glass mostly. Dennis brought out something in her, an urge to confide, and if he would have given her a few more minutes she would have unquestionably told him about Brian and Detective Thurman.

But the professor called them all inside, and they crowded around him in his living room. He sat on a rolling stool with his boy on his knee. The boy had a toy truck and was wheeling it across Leonard’s thigh. The mother, Della, stood back in the kitchen, drinking the last of her wine. It was all very domestic and placid. Mary was suddenly glad she had come.

“There’s been an event,” Williams said. The word was underscored, stressed, and uppercased.
Event.
“But first, let me ask all of you a question.” The boy rolled the truck off Williams’s leg and onto the floor and made a crashing sound, then puffed his cheeks out and blew in a little explosion. “Are any of you disturbed by me?”

“Terrified.” It was Troy. He laughed and hummed the theme from
The Twilight Zone.

“Well,” Williams went on, “there have been some complaints. Some uneasy conversations with people up there.” He jabbed a thumb toward Carnegie, where all the decisions were made at Winchester.

“They’re intimidated by you,” Troy said. He had a stern look, and when he drank he kept his eyes rigidly on Williams. Williams was Troy’s man, Mary saw then. There was something deep and long-standing between them.

“Maybe so,” the professor sighed. “But still, I want to know right now. Do any of you feel threatened by my class? It’s been said that I’m conducting…experiments. The administration used that word in a letter to me yesterday. Told me to-what was it?-
be careful.
It was written by Dean Orman himself. Winchester letterhead and everything. I detected the faint aroma of horseshit wafting from the envelope slit.” Williams chuckled slightly under his breath. “Orman wrote, Be careful. Your experiments are causing some concern. I don’t know if any of you are concerned about this Polly stuff. Because if you are, we can stop and go to the textbook.”

“No, no,” they grumbled, fearing the other version of Logic and Reasoning 204 they had heard about, the one Dr. Weston taught, where the students memorized Plato and were quizzed every week on the fallacies.

“What about Polly?” Williams asked.

“What about her?” Dennis responded.

“Well, do you think that she is false enough?”

Mary turned away. She felt everyone’s eyes on her. He was talking about the photograph of Summer again, of course, and suddenly she was ashamed. Thankfully, Dennis picked her up, just as he had done a few times during Williams’s class.

“There have been times,” he admitted, “when it was as if she was real.”

“But mostly you are able to separate what is fake from the rest of your studies?” Williams asked.

No, Mary wanted to say. Not when a false detective comes into the room and tells a story about a missing girl. Not when the world begins to take on your story’s characters. It was a play within a play, like
Hamlet,
but figuring out which drama was most palpable was the trick.

“Good,” he said when no one objected. “Let’s get on with it, then.” The boy was at his feet now, rolling the truck around through the deep nap of the carpet. Della Williams was in the kitchen washing dishes. Mary felt Dennis beside her, tasted his sweet smell in her drink. “Something’s happened,” Williams said. “There’s been a new development.” He stopped, made them wait for it.
“Wooo woooo woooo,”
went the little boy, rolling off toward the kitchen with his truck. “Do you all remember Trippy?”

“Trippy?” someone said from behind Mary.

“Nicole’s boyfriend,” someone else answered.

“Trippy has been arrested on possession,” Williams said.

There were a few ironic hoots and whistles. Someone said, “Shocking,” and everyone laughed.

“So Trippy is in jail,” the professor told them. “And he has told the detectives something. He has admitted that he knows where Polly is.”

Everyone was silent. Pensively, with the trees outside swaying in the wind and making a sound like moving water, they waited.

When it was apparent that Williams wasn’t going to continue, someone said, “And?”

“To be continued,” he said, and they all groaned.

“So Trippy kidnapped her,” Mary said.

“Not necessarily,” Williams said. He stood up from the stool, grunting at the sound of his popping knees, and gestured that they could resume whatever they had been doing. The boy appeared again, this time in Della’s arms, and Williams ran his hands through his son’s fine hair. Mary wanted to approach him, to talk to him about Polly and her dad and all that she had been thinking about, but the professor was suddenly surrounded by a few boys. They were talking Winchester football.

Dennis was at her arm again. “Hey,” he said easily. There was something in his eyes, that old gleam. He led her downstairs, where Zero 7 was playing on an old, dusty stereo. There was a spread down here. A vegetable tray, some sandwiches. She and Dennis ate together, sitting side by side on an old couch that smelled of storage. A few people drifted here and there, but they were mostly alone.

“I’ve been meaning to call you,” he said.

Mary wasn’t sure where she wanted the conversation to go. There was something in her that still loved Dennis, but he had broken her heart in such an abrupt way that the act had almost been violent. She still thought about him now and then, of course, but when she did she always caught herself, forced herself to acknowledge that he was never coming back to her.

Yet here he was, in the flesh, in this damp and strange basement. Here he was. Mary almost couldn’t believe it. She would not have believed it, probably, were the heat of his body not on her skin.

“It’s just that I was crazy,” he went on. “That’s it. Crazy, Mary. What we had scared me. It was a frightening thing. I had never been in love. You know that. I fought it. Like an idiot, I stifled it until I was the one in control.”