Obedience (7 page)

“Are guys with military tattoos normally Letterman fans?”

“No.”

“So what was Polly’s father doing watching television late that night? Of course, he had to be waiting on her. Which means that Mike may have been-
may have been
-up to his old tricks.”

Williams wrote one more word on the board: retroduction.

“This is a type of logic that suggests that we can account for a truth based on an observed set of facts. It has been proven, or
observed,
that Polly watched television with her father. It has been observed that Mike and Polly’s father had had run-ins in the past, and that, according to a police report, the two men ‘hated’ each other. It has been observed that Mike physically abused Polly in the past. So we know retroductively, based on Letterman and her father taking Polly to bed, that perhaps he was waiting for her to come in. And thus Mike becomes more of a suspect.”

“It doesn’t fit,” said Dennis then. The familiar light was moving forward, almost to the podium now.

“Mr. Flaherty has an objection!” said Professor Williams. He was still smiling, playing with them, seeing how far they could go with these theories.

“Mike was at the party,” Dennis said.

“He was at the party, yes,” agreed the professor. “Many people saw him that night. That’s what you call a rock-solid alibi. Go on.”

Dennis did not know how to go on. Mary could see the doodles and shapes all over his legal pad, boxes and stars and squares. Dennis had the habit-or perhaps the gift-of listening and not listening at the same time, of being there in spirit and off somewhere simultaneously. Whenever they had been at a restaurant eating, Dennis could look off, his eyes darting here and there, while she spoke. When she questioned him about it, saying, “If you were listening to me, what was I just saying?” he could repeat what she’d said word for word.

“Well,” he finally said, “this means that Mike could not have abducted Polly.”

Another phrase went up on the board: tainted data.

“And why was the data tainted?” the professor asked the class.

“Because everybody at that party was drunk,” Brian said.

“That’s one reason. But there’s something else, something that you don’t know about yet. What was Polly doing that night? Where was she that night?”

“Place,” the girl beside Mary said.

“That’s right, Ms. Bell. Place. And tonight you will find out just a bit more of this intricate puzzle. Be sure to check your e-mail.”

With that, he was through the open door and out of their lives once again.

It was not that Dennis Flaherty regretted doing it. Quite the opposite-he wished that he could do it again. All day he had been craving her, starving for her as if the woman were some kind of sustenance. The only respite had been Dr. Williams’s creepy logic class, but now that he was back in his room at the Tau house, he was feeling it again.

Elizabeth. Somehow her name was more powerful than her body, a body he had roved across for an entire afternoon in the inner sanctum of the old man’s yacht. The old man sleeping above deck, the creek and whisper of the river below them, and Elizabeth teaching him things about himself that he had never dreamed could be true.

The day after the fund-raiser she had called him to ask if he would like to go out with her and the dean to the Thatch River. Her voice was even, almost businesslike, yet it was hiding something. “Sure,” he said. And then, “What is this, Elizabeth?” But she had already hung up on him. It was done. No turning back now.

They had taken out the old man’s cruiser yacht, named
The Dante,
which he kept in a slip at the Rowe County Marina. Because townies would often break into the marina and damage the boats, Dean Orman had been forced to hire his own man, a retired cop called Pig who circled the parking lot and beamed a spotlight down on the slips every couple of hours or so.

It was one of the last hot-weather weekends, and the lake had been crowded with kids on speedboats. The giant wake of pontoons jarred the old man as he fought with the wheel. They had sailed out toward Little Fork, where you could see Winchester University high up in the trees. “This is where we go,” Dean Orman explained. “It’s quiet here.” They took the yacht back in a cove and anchored it there in the shade.

Orman took the
Times
up front, where there was some sun cutting a jagged line across the bow. Dennis and Elizabeth went swimming together. They both knew what was going to happen, had been communicating it silently all morning. When the old man’s mouth gaped open, his head tilted back at a strange angle and the
Times
slack on his chest, they climbed back onto the yacht and crept below deck. There was a little room down there. A bed. Satin sheets that were stiff from weeks of disuse. A musty, stained pillow without a pillowcase. Dennis could barely fit on the bed-he lay on his back with his feet flat on the cold plastic of the boat wall. He was naked and soft. He waited. He told himself that he was doing this for a reason, to finish things with her. It was going to be hard and driving and severe. The boat rocked in the current, and with each rock Dennis’s heart nearly cracked. The old man must surely be waking, coming downstairs to find them.

She stripped off the wet bathing suit and left it in a heap at her jeweled feet. Suddenly, she was transformed. She had shaved her pussy into a little fine arrow of fuzz. Dennis saw in her nakedness a sort of youth, a kind of playfulness he had never seen in their library meetings. How old was Elizabeth? Thirty-five? Forty? He still didn’t know, but she now looked ten years younger than that. She was suddenly achingly beautiful to him, and without really registering what he was doing he was reaching out toward her, touching her, and pulling her down onto him.

But that was the extent of Dennis’s power over Elizabeth Orman. His plan, as Jeremy Price had suggested, had been to pin her down, thrust into her a few times, make it as awful as anything she could imagine so that anything between them after today would be moot. But she would have none of that.
She
straddled him. And then she began to ride him, her hips matching the sliding, glassy rhythm of the Thatch below them. Dennis wondered: What kind of a woman shaves her pussy? Before he knew it he was coming, losing himself in the frenzied wake, the sloshing sound of the cove now a roar, Elizabeth with her head thrown back on top of him and her tits cupped in her own hands.

Afterward she lay on top of him, both of them bundled together like piles of rope, and listened to the lick of the river. “What about…?” he asked. She put one finger over his lips to hush him. “Don’t worry,” she breathed, and for some reason he didn’t.

Sometime much later Dennis was awakened by the old man yelling his wife’s name. Dennis tried to leap up and grab his clothes, but Elizabeth held him to the bed. She mouthed, “Shhh,” and slid back into her bathing suit. She paused a moment before she opened the door, gathering herself. And then she went up to her husband, saying-too cheerfully for Dennis’s taste-“Yes, darling.” Dennis heard him say, “Where’s Dennis?” and Elizabeth replied, “Taking a nap.” Dennis had his shoulder against the door at that point, fearing that the old man was going to rush below deck in a rage and beat him senseless.

Instead, Dennis heard a splash-someone diving in. And then a second. He put on his trunks and returned to the world. The sun had moved while he slept, and now the cove was almost completely in shadow. When the old man saw him he playfully called, “Jump in!” So Dennis did, and the three of them swam together into the evening, as if nothing had happened.

Now Dennis could not get her off his mind. Her body, her name, her-
rhythm.
She was so different from the unlearned, clumsy Savannah Kleppers. Savannah wanted the lights off and the stereo on, so that others in the house wouldn’t hear them. She wanted Dennis on top or else it
burned.
She cried after sex, whether it was good or bad, and her tears would run in streams down his shoulders and chest and he was always afraid to ask her what was wrong, why was she crying, because he was afraid that her answer would somehow have to do with him.

With Elizabeth Orman, though, there was nothing of the sort. Nothing private, nothing emotional, nothing of substance except the raw thrust of pleasure. And so here he was, looking up at his ceiling in the Tau house, thinking of nothing else.

When he couldn’t take it anymore, he called her at home, on her private line that she had slipped him on their way back to campus Sunday. At the sound of her voice Dennis almost sank to the floor, his knees weak and his gut hollowed.

“I have to come over,” he sighed.

Then he was out on campus, late on a Monday night, walking Montgomery Street. He knew he should have been studying for an economics quiz, but what was done was done. He could no more dam this feeling than he could stop time.

After a weekend with temperatures that topped eighty degrees, the first hint of fall was now descending on Winchester. The wind was sharp, autumn cool, and the autumnalis trees were turning a fierce pink. The first leaves were falling, drifting down in front of the statue, The Scientist, which had been dedicated in honor of Dean Orman’s lifelong friendship with Stanley Milgram. Dennis walked by the fountain outside Carnegie, which was choked with fallen leaves. A few students were around, their words blasted away by the harsh wind, but none of it registered with Dennis. Not a thing. He could see the lights of the Ormans’ from here, their cottage-style home on Grace Hill. Normally he would have driven, but she had told him to come in the side door and cut his headlights in the drive. Screw it, he’d thought,
I’ll walk.
He didn’t trust himself to make it up their steep drive with no light. He imagined himself losing control of the wheel, veering onto the grass, crashing through the old man’s front window. What a scandal! It sort of intrigued him, the danger of it all. Dennis the Menace was finally living up to his name.

She let him in the side door. The house was dark; Dennis assumed that the old man had an early bedtime. They tiptoed through the kitchen and stood for a moment kissing in the living room. She was wearing a robe, and she smelled like bathwater and fingernail polish. He felt under the robe, groped her feverishly as if he were in junior high, but she turned away and led him up the stairs. They made their way through a hall, and halfway down she jabbed her red fingernail at a closed door. The old man.

Into the guest bedroom then. Another cramped bed. Another solitary, lonely pillow. She didn’t so much toss him on the bed as she
unfolded him
there, and again she disrobed. She was glistening in the moonlight that came in through the curtains. He would have come immediately, had she just touched him. It was the same routine: Elizabeth straddling him, pressing down on him, her head thrown back, those red-nailed hands cupping her tits. Too quickly Dennis felt the roil of his body. And then everything was crashing forward and she softly covered his mouth so that he could not cry out.

Later, when she was asleep, he dressed and left the room. The house was creaking, still. He went downstairs, into the dark of the living room. He made his way back the same way he had come, down the stairs and toward the kitchen, and when he turned the corner by the wood burning stove he saw it: a light. Dennis froze, crouched, tried to find another way out, another door.

And then: “Who’s there?” It was the old man’s voice.

Dennis stayed still, low to the ground, below the light. Strangely, he was calm. It must have been the calm of a soldier, the ease before battle. He did not move until he saw the man’s head peeking out at him. “What are you doing there, son?” Dean Orman asked.

“I’m trying to figure out how to escape your house, sir,” Dennis answered. He had found that the most brutal honesty worked in these situations much better than embarrassing, fantastical lies. Not that he had ever been in a situation quite like
this
before.

“Come in here.”

Dennis went into the kitchen. The old man was eating a sandwich in the nook. He had pulled out a bar stool and had a magazine open on the counter before him. “Know this,” he said almost dismissively, his eyes down on the magazine. “You’re not the first.”

Dennis didn’t say anything. He could only stand there, shamefully, and listen. The old man was wearing boxer shorts and a dingy T-shirt, what the Taus might call a “wife beater.” He was just an old man; he was supposed to be vulnerable, weak, maybe even halfcocked-but here he was interrogating Dennis.

“There was the boy from England,” Dean Orman said ruefully. “The soccer player. There was the kid from California that she was taken with last year. There have been lecturers and such. And now you.” He took a bite of the sandwich, licked his fingers, and turned a page in the magazine. “It’s just something we do. We agreed on it a long time ago. There is no love in this marriage. There never is at our age. My age. Do you think that those vows are still
applicable?”

“I don’t…,” Dennis began.

“Of course not,” Dean Orman cut him off. “That’s absurd. You get to the point where you can’t stand the way she walks, the way she sits on the toilet, the way she mismatches your goddamned socks. This is the way of the world, son. Get used to it.” Another bite of the sandwich, another turned page. Dennis wondered if he was done, if that was all there was. But the old man went on: “Of course I have my own…debilitas. There are two young secretaries that come over on occasion, and Elizabeth watches us although she doesn’t like it. She says it’s unbecoming. What she really means, of course, is that it’s unbecoming of a man my age in the same space, in the same
vicinity,
as two young beauties. Ah yes. Ah well.”

Dennis went to the door. He opened it onto the night, and the sharp wind hit him in the face, chilling him to the bone. “Do you love her?” the dean asked.